“I have something to show you, Major Luverduk. Come here.” Kram gestured toward the outside door of the large office which led through a space-cruiser hangar and out to the experimental detonation range where new weapons received their first tests in the half-scale stage.
“Show me! Good Lord, Gaylord! Hoskins read it right there in front of me! He said for you to get to his headquarters as fast as you can double-time it! Sore! It was more or less nice knowing you, Lance-corporal Kram!”
“I knew he’d be a little silly about it at first.”
“He said if you’re not in his office in 15 minutes, he’s coming to yours with his whole damned guard!”
“Might, come to think of it. Come here, Luverduk.”
“But—”
“See this?” Kram held a shiny new needle-ray pistol in his hand. It was strictly an anti-personnel weapon, and good only for close-in combat. A hand weapon of limited powers, and nothing more.
“I see it. But as one skeleton in the museum told the other, if we had any guts we’d get out of here . . .”
“Follow me.”
Since it sounded like an order, Luverduk obeyed it. Kram was not a lance-corporal yet. Luverduk followed his superior to one of the firing ranges for atomic cannon. Kram pointed to a dismantled space-cruiser hull, used regularly by cannoneer cadets for target practice. Its molybdenum hide was scarred with many accurately-directed blasts. It was nearly a quarter-mile from where Kram stood.
“Watch,” he said. Luverduk sensed an order in that word also.
Kram pointed the pistol, potent up to 50 yards. Slowly, his long right arm came up. The streamlined weapon glinted in the afternoon sunlight. Carefully, Kram aimed—aimed impossibly—at the distant cruiser-hull! Then his finger constricted on the trigger. Hiss it went.
And the hull was blasted to atoms! „
“You—” That was all Luverduk could utter. He gaped, pudgy mouth hanging open, first at the pistol, then at the rising column of white smoke where the scarred hull had been. He knew at the same time that had it not been for the shock-wave absorbers covering the range with their radiations, he would at present be flat on his face, or its reasonable facsimile.
“I,” Kram said, “am a weapons expert as well as an Intelligence officer. You know that. Correct?”
“Gurgle.”
“Confronted with the facts, Luverduk, which you yourself have just witnessed, what would you say?”
“That pistol is better than the—the G-ray! You—”
“I have. Xenthl’s skin, I expect, should crawl. Agreed?”
Luverduk nodded slowly.
“Good. Because we are now going to see him. A ship is parked in the hangar.”
“Not about that truce business—” Luverduk’s voice rose in horror.
“Precisely.”
“Hoskins?” Luverduk’s voice was a challenge to all soprano mice.
“Umm,” Kram said. Luverduk followed him.
* * *
From Karz, Commander, Sector Patrol III: For Kuul, Patrol Coordinator. Urgent. Subject: enemy flight. At 16:12, western hemisphere Earth time, single ship seen to be directed Moonside, no armament, but beyond restrictive boundary. Following, three smaller craft, likewise unarmed, towing six apparently unmanned cruisers of obsolete design. Single craft continues Moonside. Towing craft leave unmanned cruisers adrift after deceleration approximately 1,500 miles outside boundary. Speed of abandoned ships, less than 300 miles per hour. Adrift in loose line formation. Single ship, now radiating truce signal, continues course. Am holding fire pending your advisory.
From Kuul, Patrol Coordinator, Sirian Expeditionary Forces: For Karz, Commander, Sector Patrol III. Subject: communication 18Z. Continue holding fire pending my command.
From Karz, Commander, Sector Patrol III: For Kuul, P.C. Subject: armed enemy cruisers. Enemy fleet of military destroyer-units hovering in formation at edge of restrictive boundary. Armed, but have not fired into restrictive zone. Appear to be in command of General Flagship. No communications intercepted, no actual violation as yet of restrictive boundary. Twenty-one craft counted. Requesting further advice, to avert any possible breach of strategic diplomacy.
From Kuul, P. C., SEF: For Karz, Cmmdr., Sector Patrol III. Subject: communication 18Z1. Stand by. Deliberate disregard of ultimatum stipulations on our part would tend to lessen prestige and introduce possibility of unsatisfactory psychological reactions. It is to be remembered that Terrestrials are highly unpredictable when abruptly angered. Alert your command this headquarters.
* * *
“What did they say?” Kram asked. The Moon leered at him through the thick quartz conning-port like a pitted, rotted rubber ball that had once been painted with a diluted silver gilt.
Luverduk still shook, but not as much. “About those skeletons—”
“You’ll be one if you don’t cut your jets. What was their reply?”
“Xenthl will give us an audience upon our landing, but we have been emphatically warned that the slightest move we make which may be interpreted as a breach of truce will be our last. And they added that any move made by anybody else in the neighborhood which may be so interpreted will be their last, too . . .”
“Told you things would work out.”
“Work out? We’re only-flying a white flag with no authorization from anybody. We’ve only gone AWOL. And Hoskins is gunning right behind. We often leave without saying good-bye—”
“Parts of that statement are inaccurate. Hoskins is waiting at the boundary, not daring to fire into the Sirian zone—not gunning right behind. And he knows that one ship-length of an armed cruiser over the boundary will mean the G-ray for the whole shooting-match. He also knows we’ll come back, so is just standing by until we do. However, to something of far more importance. Did you bring the blast-rifle?”
“I did. I assume it is like the pistol, only more so.”
“It certainly is supposed to be.”
“Your answer is only more or less perfect. I say again, is the rifle like a super G-ray?”
“No.”
“Like a super atomic cannon, then.”
“No. The rifle, as well as the pistol I showed you, are, to put it vulgarly, fakes. They wouldn’t squirt water.”
“I asked you a straight question, you should therefore give me at least the semblance of a straight answer. Come again.”
“You heard me. Fakes.”
“You mean they will not work? It will not work?”
Silence.
“Good Lord, you mean we’re actually going to see Xenthl with truce in our white little hearts and not blow his headquarters to pieces? This is a real, honest-to-God truce mission?”
“In a manner of speaking, sort of.”
“Then the explosion of the space cruiser hull . . .?”
“Was faked.”
“You tricked me!”
“I did. But you believed me until I told you.”
Luverduk was starting to hop up and down, although his feet never quite left the deck. “I will admit that, but only because it’s true!”
“It’s true, all right. In addition to being an Intelligence and weapons expert, I am likewise rather clever in the field of psychology. Your foreknowledge of my expertness with weapon design had you half-convinced I could do something fantastic before you even saw me apparently do it. And when you saw it in what looked like actuality, it was all you needed.”
“But we are surrendering anyhow! You are a mad fellow—”
“Let us not, Luverduk, confuse the term ‘truce’ with ‘surrender.’ What I told Hoskins and what I am actually doing are horses, one might say, of variable hues . . .”
“You see a way out of this, Kram?”
“Prepare to man the decelerators at 3.8 G on my signal.”
As the roar of the forward jets cut in and Kram’s vision grew momentarily blurred, the suspicion grew in his mind that Luverduk was mumbling something about northbound horses . . .
&nbs
p; THE MILITARY headquarters of Xenthl, Commander-In-Chief of the Sirian Expeditionary Forces and Grand Protector of the Universe were, as Kram would have put it, somewhat stupendous. Simplicity was the keynote of its other-wordly architecture; the huge hemisphere of eerily glimmering alloy was first viewed by Luverduk with anything but a narroweyed, analytical gaze. And its interior, although not resplendent in the sense of the courts of ancient kings, was a breathstopping spectacle of geometry as could only have been conceived by minds of Other Space. The involutions of its eye-defying curves were as gracefully simple as they were dimensionally complex; the very straightness of the corridor down which the procession of heavily armed guards and the men from earth proceeded was a masterpiece of structural design in itself.
Xenthl’s sanctum sanctorum was an even greater achievement in the architecturally impossible. Kram made a mental note to make a requisition for a replastering job in his own office immediately upon his return to Earth.
Luverduk was impressed, but more with Xenthl’s bearded, rotund, pinkskinned majesty than with his surroundings.
“Without the beaver, he’d look just like me, Kram!”
“So he would, Major!”
The seated Xenthl signalled his guards to halt, and the envoys of truce to step forward. His oversized cranium, typical of his race, seemed to nod gently from its own weight.
“You come,” he mouthed the Terrestrian language awkwardly, “as couriers of surrender?”
“You are crazier than Luverduk, here, if you think so!” Kram casually folded his arms. “As a personal representative of his Most Excellent Sovereign Worthiness, the Guardian of all Universes in Space and Time, the President of Terra, and also the Bronx, I appear before you to recognize and return the civility displayed by your forces in not attacking an Earth ship radiating a signal of truce. In short, I am here to offer you your life, and the lives of your people, with the alternative of instantaneous annihilation.”
“I am amused,” purred Xenthl. “But at your expense. For this impertinence, your government shall be given but one month more, instead of six months more, to prepare itself for my rule. And in addition, from this moment forward, it will be tinder the direct surveillance of my own armed forces. I have, it would seem, grossly overestimated the intelligence of you Earthmen. It had been my thought that, as you say, you knew what was good for you. I have erred.”
“That,” said Kram, allowing the flicker of a self-indulgent grin to play at the corners of his long mouth, “is something of an understatement, Mr. Xenthl.
And to prove what I say—and a man of your intellect would require proof of any statement—I ask that the only armament aboard the ship in which I came, a blast-rifle, be brought here, to be fired as I direct by one of your own marksmen. By directing his aim telescopically, he should have no trouble in sighting on the abandoned cruiser hulls which I have had towed into position for target purposes . . .”
Xenthl’s mouth worked. “This is a trick of some sort,” he said icily. “At the very least, across misuse of the purposes of truce.”
“I offer you your lives,” Kram said almost nonchalantly.
“As a man of my intellect—” Xenthl declared after a breath-take of hesitation, “I require whatever attempt at proof you may have for your childish statements. Guard!”
WITHIN MOMENTS, the rifle was in the hands of one of Xenthl’s marksmen, and, sighting with a headquarters electrono-telescope, the soldier from Sirius drew a bead on the drifting cruiser hulls, and pressed the curved trigger at Xenthl’s order.
In a visiplate, Xenthl himself witnessed an incredible white flash as first one of the space-cruiser hulls was blown to atoms, and then in rapid succession, the second, third, fourth, and fifth.
“You will observe,” Kram said, “that only one hull was hit. But all were destroyed. A little chain-reaction gadget I developed last week—” A gasp at Kram’s elbow; but Kram had not finished—“You have observed also,” he continued matter-of-factly, “that with one blast of only a rifle, to say nothing of the cannon I have also developed, a myriad of targets may at once be destroyed. Your G-ray,” Kram adopted a tone dripping with respect, “is capable, after all, of destroying but one target at a time.”
Xenthl’s features had lost their healthy pink tinge. “You have mastered,” he said, “a practical application of the chain-reaction principle. It is impossible, but I have seen you do it with my own eyes.”
“That was the object in my having come,” Kram said in his most courteous tone. “And it is the proof which I knew your excellency would demand. In addition to which, I might inform you that I am Gaylord Kram!”
Silence. Then:
“This is indeed a matter for some consideration,” Xenthl said.
And even the mask-like face of the arrogant Sirian was not able to disguise the look of utter incredulity which was shadowed beneath its still-white-tinged surface.
* * *
“Kram, you’ll hang for this!”
Gaylord Kram stood at rigid attention before Sectors-General Hoskins on the flight-deck of the General Flagship. He had drawn his own craft alongside and boarded with Major Luverduk at the General’s command, and under the ugly snouts of the General’s artillery.
“I trust,” he said, “that you will accept my apology for having issued you a false communication. But I theorized that only in anger would I be followed so promptly and with such a show of strength. Only the thought of surrender could make you angry, sir!”
“You impudent puppy! You—” Hoskins was livid. He did not shake. He vibrated.
“It was necessary, sir. I was bluffing, but I needed at least the appearance of armed might to give credence to my strategy. I readily admit having rescued our planet by means of what may unappreciatively be termed trickery. As I tricked Luverduk, here, by simply using a mined target on the detonation range, so I also attempted to trick Xenthl with five unmanned space-cruisers, loaded to the seams with atomic detonators timed to produce the effect of chain-reaction and set off by remote control. There was a miniature radar transmitter of my own design within the blast-rifle which I had Xenthl’s marksman use. Quite simple, really.”
“Simple is hardly the word!” Hoskins thundered. “With the Sirian G-ray staring us in the face, you try your hand at strategy! I hope there is time to hang you before Earth is blown to Kingdom Come!”
“Never fear, sir! Xenthl had merely used an innovation of the Q-type light-bender to produce a mirage at the desert location of his supposed ‘abandoned laboratories.’ First the buildings were ‘seen’ then, at the instant his weapon was supposedly ‘fired,’ they were not. A mirage had been turned on and off at will. That was all! Putting it simply, sir—I theorized that the G-ray was, in the first place, no more than a colossal bluff itself!”
“Theorized, the man says!” The General’s complexion blended nicely with his lavender tunic. “To him, politics is five-card stud! To him—”
The tirade was interrupted by a wide-eyed orderly who bore a signal-technician’s insignia on his sleeve. “Sir! Sirian ships are leaving the Moon, driving hard past Pluto! By the minute, sir, larger and larger flights are going up-ship for Deep Space! And at full drive! Sir!”
“Of course,” murmured Kram. “I gave them twenty-four hours to clear out!” Deftly mounting a portable G-gun which he had confiscated from Xenthl’s personal arsenal, Kram pointed it directly at his own ship, drifting under robot control a few miles to the Flagship’s starboard.
“They cleared out,” he declared quietly, “because Gaylord Kram had called their bluff, gentlemen!” and triumphantly punched a firing-button.
A soft hiss, and Kram’s cruiser was blown to smithereens!
The Builders
They rummaged in the ruins of Earth’s cities, looking for plans to restore vital machinery. But what they finally constructed got up and ran away!
MARKTEN flew low over the sun-lit ruins, and wondered idly if he would find any more in them than he had found
elsewhere on the planet.
“Looks as completely dead as all the rest,” he said to his companion. “New City has a big enough population anyhow, as far as I’m concerned. Not that it’s important, I suppose. There’s always plenty of space in which to expand, but you know what I mean.”
The younger occupant of the low-circling aircraft nodded his understanding. “There’d be enough room on either side of the Big Mountains to take care of millions more of us, I guess. But I think you’re right. Anyway, there isn’t another nomad or ruin-dweller on the planet. New City is as complete as it’s going to be—and as you say, twelve million is enough. But do you think we’ll find any more plans down there?”
“Hard to say,” Markten answered, levelling off the aircraft for a landing. “But if there are traces of anything, I hope you’ll keep your attention on what’s of technical value and not waste time again on all that other stuff. None of us have ever bothered reading it—you can’t build anything from it—no diagrams. To build is the only purpose of New City’s civilization—how could anything else be of importance?”
“I’ve wondered off and on about that. But then, there is so little of anything left that it doesn’t make much difference. Important thing is to find more diagrams.”
“Glad you realize it. I’ve been a citizen of New City ever since the first few of us on this continent started building it forty years ago, and I can tell you, building things is all that’s important. You’d realize that soon enough if you’d wandered around alone and useless, as I and a lot of Other Elders did for years.” Markten brought the fast, twin-engined aircraft in to a perfect landing, cut the power, and set the brakes. The two left their seats and started getting field equipment together.
“They told us at the academy that you Elders wandered so far and for so long that you had permanently lost all memory of the past. Is that really true, Markten?”
“It is, not that it ever mattered. We all had forgotten from where we’d come, or how we got where we were. I guess all we remembered was how to build. But then——”
Complete Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Page 3