Ben took an automatic step backward and tripped on the desk chair behind him. He dropped into the chair to keep from falling and ducked down behind the desk, reaching into the open drawer for the revolver there.
The lashing discharge roared above him, hammering on the surface of the desk as he ducked below it. Ben had his hand on the revolver in the drawer now. He tilted its barrel up,shooting through the wooden desk at Walt The revolver bucked in his hand. He kept pulling the trigger, aiming by guess and instinct through the desk.
He checked his finger with one round still left in the gun. The room seemed full of smoke. The alien weapon was silent. Walt must be waiting for a clear shot at him. Ben thought—I’ll stand up for one clear shot anyway. If he kills me, I’ve got to take him with me. Lee can figure out how to get the tapes out of the safe without blowing them up. He thumbed back the hammer and stood up.
The office was not full of smoke. It had been only dust from the bullet-hammered wood of the desk, though there was a black burn from the alien weapon directly across the desk top. Walt was fallen beside" the door, which was now open—all the doors were open, with people pushing into the room.
Ben laid the revolver numbly on the desk top. The surface there was warm against the side of his hand as he laid the gun down. Nora was among those coming into the room.
“Nora,” he said, hoarsely, “help me get him to the dispensary.”
He came around the desk, and with more hands than was necessary helping, they carried the still figure of Walt into the dispensary and laid him down on the white table on which Polly Neigh’s leg had been amputated. Ben closed the door upon all but Nora and bent to examine Walt.
But Walt was dead.
Ben was surprised at himself. He felt remote, untouched. He had expected some strong reaction, but the body on the table could have been a wax showman’s figure for all the emotion it evoked in him.
“Take care of things here,” he said to Nora.
He went back to the office and got the tape deck out of the safe. He handed them over to Lee. He was aware of Lee’s strained, white face staring at him, but the sight did not affect him. It was as if he saw Lee through glass. He felt strangely outside himself watching himself move and act He got out the official ship’s log, and sat down to the blackened desk top to write up a full account of what had happened.
He was just about finished with this—there would be statements to be taken from the crew members who had come in to find him standing gun in hand over Walt’s body,but impartial authorities could take care of it once they were down on Earth—when Coop came in to tell him that the original tape deck was in. It turned out they were less than eight hundred light-years from home. They would be shifting down to surface in six hours. Ben hardly heard him.
Shortly after that Nora came into the office—for what reason was not exactly clear to Ben. He had finished the log by that time and he found himself, surprisingly, talking volubly to Nora about Walt, almost babbling.
“Even in college, as an undergraduate,” he found himself saying, “they knew Walt had great talent . . He noticed a pile of things on top of a filing cabinet. “What’s that?”
“Walt’s personal things,” said Nora. “You told Coop to get them.”
“Did I?” said Ben. He could not remember. He went to look through the pile, and found something unusual. “Walt’s personal log,” he said. “It shouldn’t have been in his room. It ought to have been in its locker with the others in the Special Stores room.”
He took the personal logbook and carried it back to sit down with it at his desk. Nora followed him. He could feel her standing at his left elbow, looking down over his shoulder at the book as he opened it. He riffled through the pages. They were all blank. That would be like Walt—contemptuous of any need to put a record of his days down on paper in order to remember them. Nothing written anywhere in all that barren expanse of white paper—no, wait.
On one of the pages near the front, there were three inked lines in Walt’s neat, up-and-down handwriting. Ben read the lines but his mind seemed to slide over them without understanding. He frowned and tried again—they were poetry, he even recognized them. They were from Tennyson’s Idylls of the King. The last part, titled The Passing of Arthur—there, now the words made sense to Ben’s blurring eyes. He could almost hear Walt’s voice, deep in the empty silence of his stateroom, murmuring them over as Walt’s fingers wrote them down. . .
"I found Him in the shining of the stars,
"I marked Him in the flowering of His fields,
“But in His ways with men I find Him not—”
The book began to shake in Ben’s hand, uncontrollably. To stop the shaking, he closed the book and laid it away on the desk. He rose to his feet, trying to make his voice light.
“Di I tell you," he said, turning to Nora, "we were in high school together—" His voice suddenly stuck in his throat. He moved his lips, but not a sound came out of his straining throat The world was breaking up around him—the universe was breaking up around him. Nora was in front of him. He reached out panic-stricken, and felt his arms close around her.
“Nora—” he croaked. Her arms were holding him, and somehow her lips were against his. Her hands were touching him, stroking him, patting him gently.
“Dear Ben,” she was saying now in his ear. “Dear Ben . . .” He clung to her, drowning in darkness, as if she was the one plank of safety in an ocean of fear and loss. Walt was dead—dead—and he, Ben, had killed him. That unquenchable torch of a mind, that one brother-light burning far off but clear above the smoky, guttering lamps of lesser minds. He had killed it, because he was too limited, too stupid, to figure out a way to save it from itself. Guilt clutched at him with giant hands, striving to drag him down, and he clung for his life to Nora.
But then he was not simply clinging to her. With the breaking of his self-control, rampaged forth all the damned-up emotion and instinct held back through months of loneliness and celibacy. His lips were searching hers hungrily—and then, like the invention of a bad playwright, came the sound of a knock and the opening of a door.
“Sir,” said the sound of Coop’s voice, “ready on the first shift to Earth—oh!”
It was ridiculous. It was unbearable. It was melodrama and buffoonery in the face of life and death. Coop was already starting to duck back out of the room, but the damage had been done. Ben and Nora had already, automatically, let go of each other.
“Wait I’ll come,” said Ben, harshly. He turned and walked around the other end of the desk, unable to look Nora in the eye, and followed Coop into the Control Section.
When he came back after the shift Nora of course was gone. The room seemed unnatural and empty. He sat down behind his desk and abruptly realized that he had nothing to do any more, but wait for the next shift After all these months he sat with nothing to do but wait for the descent onto Earth and the arrest waiting for him there. Arrest—judgment—retribution. And he had killed his oldest if not his only friend, and had not even been able to retain a little human dignity afterwards.
Ben began to laugh bitterly. It was too much—he had had everything stripped away from him. But as he laughed the bitterness drained away as he began to imagine how it must have looked to Coop, and all at once he was simply laughing at himself with no bitterness left He continued to laugh, but silently, until he was laughed out. Finally, he sobered.
Astonishingly, he felt empty and greatly relieved. Somehow the laughter had drained him of everything—embarrassment guilt, even the apprehension that had been growing inside him ever since he had decided on the Golden People’s world that they must return now to Earth and—in his case—to the justice that could be expected there.
He felt strangely indifferent now to the fate waiting for him, and almost content.
Chapter 12
They moved the phase ship into matching orbit above the installation they had left, nearly nine months before, and a hundred arid fifty miles up. Ben, lis
tening over the ship’s phone on his office desk, heard Coop put in a coded call, using the recognition signal they had used between ship and installation back when they all had been on the ground, making preliminary tests of communications.
There was no answer. Coop signaled again. The receiver hummed and broke into a scrambled voice signal from below.
“Will you quit it, Charlie?” whined a voice out of the scrambler unit’s slightly tinny voicebox. “I told you to stop fooling around and playing games on this frequency. I’m on duty, you want to get me hung up?”
“This is Phase Ship Mark III!” snarled the voice of Coop—there seemed to be something oddly familiar about that snarl to Ben’s ears, but at the moment he could not place it. “Do you read me, Ground One? This is Phase Ship Mark III in stationary orbit—”
“Come on, Charlie—”
“Let me talk to him!” snapped Ben, momentarily roused out of his mood of empty resignation. He punched to connect his phone to the Communications circuit. “This is Brigadier General Benjamin Shore! Who is that down there?”
“T5 Gerald Hopkins, sir, Station—” the voice broke off. “Who?” It had gone up in pitch. “Who did you say you were?”
“Take over, Coop,” said Ben, and broke the connection. From here to ground, the procedure would be routine.
—But it was not. After some confusion, the ground station informed Coop that the phase ship was not to land at the installation from which it had taken off, but to proceed to a similar matching orbit above Oldroyd Space Base, an entirely new installation unfamiliar to those aboard the ship and located south of Philadelphia. There they would wait for the signal to land.
The signal did not come for another two hours. Evidently Oldroyd Space Base, whatever that was, was in no hurry to get them down, thought Ben. Well, he was in no hurry himself. When they were finally signaled down, Oldroyd Space Base turned out to be a large bare expanse of concrete with buildings off to one side and a good deal of mobile weaponry in place around the edges of the concrete.
As the phase ship settled on the ground, the mobile weaponry closed in on her, visible in the screen on Ben’s desk. Ben heard the airlock doors opening and the rush of the crew to the outside, but he himself stayed where he was. He had put back on the same clothes he had worn nine months before when the ship had first lifted—heavy shirt, slacks, and leather jacket. He had the ship’s official log ready on his desk to be handed over when they came for him. Now would be the time to don his uniform—if he had a uniform. But he had none, and anyway, back here on earth with the voyage over, a General’s stars would look ridiculous on him. He had never really been a General; and only for the months in space had he been a ship’s commander.
He had half-hoped that Nora would show up before leaving the ship with the rest. She had not, however; and in his new indifference to his future, he did not know if he was truly sorry she had not come, or not. At best, a last meeting with her could only, in the long run, be uncomfortable for both of them. It was unlikely that they would be seeing each other again, though Nora could not know that. And anything she might say, she would probably remember with distaste and discomfort later on, when the publicity about his trial would leave her in no doubt about his sins and his true character. Ben sat waiting, and after a while the door nearest the airlock corridor was opened and a thickset middle-aged Major in an Air Force blue uniform, but with a golden circle on the jacket’s right breast pocket, put his head into the office.
“General Shore?” the Major asked, hesitantly.
“Yes,” said Ben. The Major looked relieved and came in,followed by a young Lieutenant and two enlisted men with sidearms and half-guns. The Major and the Lieutenant were also wearing sidearms.
“You’re to come with us, sir,” said the Major. “I’m Major Green. This is Lieutenant Wheald.” Ben stood up behind the desk and the Lieutenant held the door open for Ben to pass through first.
“The ship’s log,” said Ben, indicating the heavy black-bound volume on the desk.
“Oh, yes—I’ll take that” said the Major, scooping it up. “Go ahead, sir.”
hemmed him in. As they emerged from the airlock, Ben saw that a tarpaulin-like cover was being hastily stretched over the phase ship, and that enough weaponry was in position already around it to fight a small war. The Major led Ben through the tanks and rocket-launchers and across the concrete to a small military plane with strangely massive jets in the trailing edges of the short wings.
“Inside, sir,” said the Major. They boarded the plane, leaving the bright April morning outside; and Ben, in spite of his feeling of detachment, felt a slight pang. There was no telling if he would get a chance to breath the open air on Earth, again. There were only six seats in the passenger compartment of the plane and one was occupied. Ben took the window one of a pair of seats on the right and the Major sat down next to him.
Ben had expected the plane to taxi away from the weapon-crowded area to get room to take off. But outside the window next to him, the heavy jet motor set in the wing there rotated solemnly until it hung facing the ground, and began to operate. They went straight up like a balloon. The plane must be one of the newer models of VTOL—Vertical Takeoff and Landing craft.
The Major moved beside him and the Major’s sidearm dug into Ben’s side. He shifted and the Major muttered something, loosening the belt holding the weapon and hauling the holstered sidearm across his thick waist to his other side.
“No danger up here, of course,” the Major said, with a half-apologetic smile to Ben.
“Of course,” said Ben, dryly. With two half-guns and three revolvers at his back, there could hardly be any danger of his doing anything contrary to the wishes of the Major and his group.
“Cigarette, sir?” said the Major, proffering an open pack.
“Thanks,” said Ben. “I don’t smoke.”
“Do you mind if I—”
“Go ahead, go ahead,” said Ben, almost testily. It was rather overdoing it, catering to the prisoner’s wishes this way. Ben wanted to snap out that he had not been condemned, yet.
“Thank you, General. —It’s been a scramble,” said the Major, lighting up with obvious relief. “With so many private industry satellites up, some company’s radar was bound to pick you up before we could get you down and out of sight. But we’ll have you safely under wraps, now, before the news hits the streets.”
“Yes,” said Ben, bleakly. Of course, the news services would have a holiday with a notorious criminal like himself. He wanted to ask the Major if the phase ship’s lifting had actually set nuclear bombs to falling around the world, but he could imagine the major staring at him and answering something like—“You should know!” The landscape reeling by a few thousand feet below the plane showed no scars of destruction.
“Somebody said—” Ben turned to see the Major looking at him with an incalculable expression that could be either ghoulish horror or hero worship, “you lost a third of your personnel aboard the phase ship?”
“Robert Scott lost all of his party in 1912 trying to reach the South Pole!” snapped Ben. Snubbed, the Major fell silent.
They slid in over Washington at perhaps five thousand feet, rotated the jets in the wings once more and began to descend vertically toward the five-sided, horizontally layered shape of the Pentagon. They were dropping toward the central courtyard. Amazingly, as they came close, a good-sized area of the courtyard surface sank down and slid aside, revealing a dark opening into which the plane descended. The thunder of the jets, even through the shell of the plane, in the confined space of the shaft below ground level, was deafening. Eventually they touched surface, and the noise ceased.
“This way, sir.”
The Major and the rest of the armed escort took Ben off along echoing underground corridors, onto a small railway car for a short tunnel ride and through other corridors into a suite of rooms where three-dimensional photographic murals behind curving glass windows gave an illusion of being above
ground. The floors were carpeted and the furniture was solidly comfortable, including a small kitchen area with refrigerator and electric stove. Meals, however, turned out to be sent in, in the more orthodox fashion of keeping prisoners. A tech sergeant wheeled in a table with breakfast almost as soon as Ben was inside the suite.
“There’ll be a lot of people coming to see you as soon as things are scheduled,” said the Major, leaving Ben alone with the breakfast table and the tech sergeant. But for the first half day, no one came. Ben spent the time reading the magazines on the coffee table in the living room of the suite—he was astonished to find himself literally hungry for the printed word. He read articles on the proper training for preschool children and kitchen tile ads with the absorption of someone, who had been away for twenty years. However, by midafternoon the Major’s prophecy began to come true.
The first visitor was another tech sergeant with an officer’s dress uniform, which he proceeded to fit with a tailor’s skill to Ben’s tall, lean body. They were making him pretty for the trial, thought Ben with distaste. Then came two officers with a stenographer to ask questions about the trip of the phase ship. These had barely gone when a short, slim, young-looking Major with somewhat the same incisive tone and manner Kirk Walish had possessed showed up, identifying himself as Ben’s defense counsel. Ben was required to go over the whole story of the voyage again with him. The defense counsel—his name was Jameson, Major Alan Jameson—listened with a hard, incredulous stare that made Ben wonder whether perhaps Jameson would not have been more at home in the prosecutor’s role than on the prisoner’s side.
“My God!” Jameson interrupted, when Ben got to the part about his decision to go and look at the worlds the Golden People had taken from the Gray-furs. “You mean you decided to go close to those planets, after what you’d learned from the Gray-furs?”
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