Complete Fiction (Jerry eBooks)

by Fox B. Holden

  “By their own right. Through methods of their own.”

  “That’s a hell of a scientific answer,” Cragin said.

  “It is no answer at all!” the girl said. She took a step forward toward the intruder, and there was high color in her cheeks. Only his cloak moved. “Perhaps you control your own destinies, if that is what you care to think. But not ours! For the use of your machinery, we will gladly repay you, in any medium that you desire that we are capable of supplying. But our role isn’t that of intruder or wrong doer; it is simply one of desperation. With your machines, our planet, its life, might be saved. If you know of life, you know of the high value men put upon it. If you believe in—”

  “Save your breath, honey. I think the bull of the woods here is trying to work up an angle. He’s a phony. All he’s got here are a bunch of damn good telescreens, and they’ve never moved anything yet. . . . Right, Buster?”

  The figure in scarlet mail moved then. There was no sound, and hardly a show of motion as his fingers played over a switch-studded panel. The telescreens came to life. In each were pictured solar systems, some binary’; one with three suns. All were circled about with planets turning in a precise geometry of motion. With barely a nod, the figure singled out the screen in which the binary and its brood of planets shown like so many pin-points of light rolling in eerie slow motion through Infinity. A finger flick that Cragin could not follow and—

  Three planets suddenly plunged headlong; in seconds there was a blinding flash. Even as he shielded his eyes. Cragin knew that he had been witness to the destruction of an entire system. Although it had been light-years distant, and the telescreen had relayed the coruscations of its destruction instantaneously, Cragin knew that there was no way to deny what he had seen.

  “Ours is the power,” the voice said, of life and of death.”

  He wanted desperately to convince himself that it was all part of the same colossal fake—that it was simply one of the most fabulous illusions ever devised behind which to direct a system or galaxy-wide bootlegging net. It had to be that.

  It had to be, he realized with uncomfortable suddenness, because if it were not, it represented a science which had no regard for the laws that impeded men; one that had risen to far greater heights than that of which men boasted so proudly. And that of course could not be. It was that knowledge alone which had made life worth the living for centuries. Perhaps, when she had refused to speak of what she had seen, Lin Griffin had been wiser than he thought. But she had said—

  Cragin felt himself becoming sickeningly mixed up.

  And whether he wanted to believe his own senses or not, he knew that here was no phony, no fake, no illusion. Realizing it hurt like hell.

  THE cockiness was gone from his voice; he tried, but he couldn’t keep it as lie spoke.

  “You are one of the Owners?” The girl said nothing. Her face was white, yet Cragin did not think her confidence was gone, just shaken for the moment. She had seen the hand of what seemed to be a man hurl a solar system to instantaneous destruction at will.

  “I am not,” the voice said. “I serve. I am of the second rank, as are all of my race, in the service of the Owners.”

  “You are here alone?”

  The hand touched another stud, and a smaller screen wavered into luminescence. Cragin saw a fleet of spaceships, hovering in a geometrically perfect formation, any one ship of which would have been, by itself, capable of searing to dust the entire Stellar Patrol in a single, brief engagement. The formation of sleek juggernauts extended as far as the eye could see. It was like looking into two opposed mirrors.

  “My guard,” the voice said. “Manned by a race of the third rank.”

  “I think I get it. The Owners sit home and quietly rule the universe while somebody else does the—” Cragin cut himself off. It was the wrong track entirely. It must be done differently. “The woman and I, he said evenly, “would be willing servants.

  For the briefest moment there was silence, save for the muffled gasp that Cragin heard at his shoulder. But the girl said nothing.

  Cragin watched as the hand of the red-mailed figure grazed other banks of relays. In quick succession all telescreens went dark.

  “On each screen,” the voice said, “you have seen a complete system of planets. In this control point there are exactly three hundred screens. Throughout the Owners’ domain there are perhaps slightly less than a full billion of such control points as these. And there have seldom been any which have not been so well concealed, in suitable relationship to the intelligence level of that system-group controlled, as to have yielded to discovery.

  “You have not answered my proposal, Cragin retorted. “You’re as aware as I am of what’s going on in my mind or you wouldn’t bother with all the gory details. You know we could serve, even on the—the 97th rank or so . . .”

  “Proceed.”

  “Don’t try to cover up your own slip. You talk slow, but you get a little ahead of yourself. This outfit is supposed to be cached away with such cleverness that an Earth-mind wouldn’t be up to locating it. Only we did. We’re not as dumb as we look, even to you. Your record would get a little smeared up if you did away with a couple of potential servants. The wheels might not like that. Tell me I’m wrong.”

  “You think quickly. You dare to offer a proposition to an emissary of the Owners.”

  ’‘It’s no proposition, it’s a statement of fact.”

  Cragin could feel the sweat behind his ears start to roll down his neck, and his clothes were beginning to stick to his back again. But he had been in jams before. When you couldn’t shoot, you had to talk. About anything that came into your head, but you had to talk.

  “Servants of the second rank do not err, Earthman. Upon reexamining my logic, I find it sound. Yet in the process of carrying it to its ultimate, I conclude that inasmuch as the mathematical possibility exists that you are capable of being tested successfully for a servant of the menial ranks, a final decision warrants the deferment of your destruction pending administration of such examination.”

  “You mean we live.”

  “Failure to qualify as a servant will mean your destruction.”

  There was near hysteria in Lin Griffin’s voice as it broke the spell Cragin’s argument had created.

  “Cragin, you can’t realize what you’re doing! You’re selling us into si—”

  “Service, Lin Griffin,” he cut her off. He knew he was bruising her arm with the quick pressure of his fingers. “Service to the Owners.”

  “Then follow me,” the voice said.

  IV

  CRAGIN had little idea of how long they had flown, and none of the number of continua through which they had warped. They had been allowed to sleep, and upon awakening, had received food. That they were under guard was only to be sensed.

  “They can afford to take us for granted,” he muttered. He felt for the butts of his guns; they were still at his hips.

  “Don’t—” the girl said.

  “Don’t give it a second thought. I know when I’ve had it, and they know I do.” “You’re convinced, then.”

  Cragin looked about the confines of the small metal cubicle in which they had been quartered as though trying to see through its walls for another glimpse of one of the flagship’s crew. The servants of grade three were as unlike men as their cloaked captor had been similar. But not less incredible than other creatures he had seen. Only—intelligent. That, if nothing more, Cragin mused with a grimace.

  “I could use a different word, kid, but it would come to the same thing. If IQ meant the social register around here, even the snottiest ancestors either of us ever had would look like only moderately successful bums. They got us where the gray matter’s short. Of that I am convinced.”

  “They didn’t have to fight very hard. Or should I be thanking you for my life?”

  “Up to you. I’m just stalling for what we can get out of it. Who wants to die? Oh, I forgot—”

 
; She turned away from him, and he fiddled with the controls of a small built-in telescreen. It was simple enough and he got it working easily, but it showed nothing. Just blackness. He left it on.

  “You’re thoroughly convinced of everything he told us, aren’t you?” she asked at last.

  “From a purely logical standpoint, what else—”

  “Purely logical! For a little while I thought there was a chance that—that you weren’t like all the rest.”

  “All what rest? I don’t get your range, kid,” Cragin answered.

  “First you thought they were fakes—”

  “At first that was logical, too. But old cloak-and-ray-gun there proved pretty damn conclusively that the crowd he works for are the bosses, the big bosses. That’s what gets me.”

  “And it’s the real reason, isn’t it, that you wanted to call them fakes? Couldn’t bear the idea of the precious culture of Earth taking a back seat to anything.”

  “That sounds good, coming from one of our top-notch scientists. The daughter and pupil of Fowler Griffin. One of our most respected . . .”

  “Did you think we weren’t human? Are scientists something to be worshipped?”

  Cragin looked at her for a long, steady moment. He was mixed up again, and she was doing it.

  “Without our science, Miss Griffin, we’d’ve all died five hundred years ago. Maybe that’s why it takes top rating back home. What our men of science say we can do, we do—what they say we can’t, we know we can’t. It’s that simple, only I don’t see why I’m telling you this. For five centuries men have known from the day they could talk what their lives would be from that day to their deaths, and from one end of the universe their forbears had mastered to the other. It’s all mapped out. It has to be, because the scientists tell us—they draw the maps. We follow them.”

  The girl was silent then for a long time, and Cragin fell to wandering exactly what she was getting at. Or maybe—maybe it was just the strain, or the shock of realizing that there were scientists who were of greater stature than Earth’s, and it was they who truly ruled.

  But the girl still had him mixed up.

  There was a sudden gasp from her and he turned his head. The blackness in the telescreen had suddenly become punctured with white-hot, burning dots of light. Dots of light, perfectly aligned, in long, straight rows—a gateway! A gateway of stars, forged by the hands of those who owned all Space and Time, put into position to notify the entire cosmos that here for all who might seek it was the entrance to the home of the Owners!

  For a moment Cragin could say nothing. He had seen their cloaked captor give a demonstration of raw power. And here was its counterpart at the other end of the ultimate in mastery—unvarnished, positive control.

  They owned a universe, and were its architects as well.

  “Ten million miles wide!” the girl breathed.

  “A light-year long if it’s a foot,” Cragin said in a low voice. “And at the end—”

  THEY watched as the pattern shifted; the dots grew larger until they were coruscating balls of white flame. And then, with a majestic slowness, the entrance to the gateway became a static, unchanging picture of unprecedented geometric symmetry.

  “It’s—we’ve stopped,” the girl said.

  “Cut our gun, that’s all. Probably waiting for clearance to enter. The whole damn fleet of us.”

  “It’s—it’s pompous ridiculousness!” Her voice was edged with frustrated anger and it mounted as she spoke. “A gate-way, a show-piece—a stupid affectation of the ultimate in egocentricity! With or without their little pathway, there’s all of Space from which to make an approach—”

  “I doubt it, princess. Outside this little welcome-mat I’ll bet my pilot’s papers there’s a destructive field of some kind that’d blast the dye out of your hair at ten light-years. One gets you a thousand that this is the only way you get to see the top brass. And. you don’t do that without an O.K. from a big somebody.”

  The minute hand on Cragin’s wristchron made seven complete circuits before the gateway again began expanding to receive them on the telescreen.

  And then they were past its opening, and hurtling headlong down its great length at what Cragin knew must be a speed which, although no longer requiring flight by comptometer, would have taxed his skill to the utmost.

  He and the girl watched the telescreen in silence for minutes, watching the pinpoints of light on either side grow from minute flecks in the blackness to great spheres of flame within so many seconds, and then pass. . . .

  “Look!”

  “Yeah, it’s a great show. But—hell! It couldn’t be a—”

  The scintillating point of light which lie dead ahead, in the exact center of the gateway and at its extreme end, could not, Cragin realized, be a planet. Unless it were a perfectly polished reflector, it could not show so much like the miniature stars at either side.

  It was a star, itself.

  “It must be just illusion,” he said evenly. “It’s got to be.”

  “Oh no,” Lin Griffin said. “Of course they live in the center of a star! They rule all, don’t they? They’re the great masters of all creation, aren’t they? Certainly you don’t think your great masters would live on anything so simple as a mere planet! But of course they live where the temperature is only several billion degrees—”

  She began laughing and Cragin slapped her across the face.

  “Cut it, kid, CUT IT!”

  There were tears coming from her eyes and her face remained in the twisted contortions of hysteria even after her voice had become soundless.

  She pulled away, and Cragin left her to herself. In a little while she began to cry and he could hear her sobbing above the even hum of the telescreen, but he left her alone.

  And he knew one thing. It had to be illusion. Damn it, Owners or not, no matter what the hell they were, it had to be illusion!

  Cragin had never felt shaken through to the inside of him before. Fear and awe had been banished from the minds of men for five centuries. Yet he felt as though he were staggering blindly, and he knew he was helpless.

  The pin-point had become a searing, blinding thing, and even as he shielded his eyes, it filled the screen. They were going into it.

  Into it.

  Into a live star.

  No, was the only word he could think. No.

  NO!

  He spun away, wrenching the telescreen off as he did so.

  But nothing changed, and he did not die. Somehow, there was no change at all.

  He sat upright, rigid, as though self-hypnotized for what could have been hours or minutes. And there was no change, no awful, searing wave of white heat, no last instant of torture before death.

  Simply, suddenly, a light jar.

  And Cragin wondered sardonically if his small rectangular bit of enamelite would be at all impressive on the planet the Owners called home.

  NEITHER Cragin nor the girl ever saw the planet as such. And it was a planet, Cragin learned, a planet little larger than Earth, honeycombed with subterranean tubes and chambers as had been the control point; a labrynth which contained a civilization of little more than twenty million members; a headquarters for those who ran and owned the universe.

  They were escorted to the testing place by two creatures of the fourth grade; bipeds, shorter than men, with hunched backs and splayed tentacles for arms and hands. Cragin noted that they carried armament of a sort; simple tube-like objects which were aimed at him while he was relieved of his Krells.

  Then he and Lin Griffin were placed in a bullet-shaped vehicle, one of the guards operating its controls and the other stationing himself behind them.

  Cragin was not prepared for the girl’s sudden outburst and jerked his hands vainly at the empty holsters at his hips.

  “Of course we can escape from these simpletons!” she cried. “We can easily overpower these dimwitted brutes—”

  There was no reaction from their guards; Cragin’s hands re
laxed slowly.

  “What—”

  “Don’t you understand? They’re fourth grade—two less than our cloaked friend. They are our guards, so of course our superiors in intelligence, but still not on a high enough plane to interpret the emanations of pure thought as he was.”

  “You’ll do, I guess. But I’ve still got a feeling that if either of us twitches an eyebrow—”

  She continued as though he had not spoken. “He took your guns; we’re now held prisoner under weapons. They have to rely on material means of power. Look, Cragin!”

  Highly-polished curved metal walls of an alloy comprised of ores that he could not begin to identify flashed past at such speed that all sensation of motion was negated. There was no sound.

  “I’m looking.”

  “It’s a safe bet the tests will be something devised by the Owners themselves. Something that will measure our total thought potential—something based on an extremely advanced function of psychometrics.”

  “You’re over my head again.”

  “If we’re acceptable, Cragin, we’re established in one grade or another—and will be constantly under the supervision of creatures of the next highest grade—that’s the way it’s been working so far, with the exception of the little excursion we’re taking now.”

  “In other words—”

  “In other words, we’ve got to think in the simplest patterns possible. Childish things. Anything that will belie our true intelligence level. What’s your I.Q.?”

  “I didn’t ask you how old you were, duchess, but I test out at an embarrassed 158 or so.”

  “We match within ten points. It’ll have to do. Because we’ve got to fake—test out at about 115.”

  “Like I say, you’ll do. Testing out at 115, our bosses on the next level shouldn’t be a shred above 130 or so. So—”

  “So we’ve got them by almost a 30-point margin. We’ll be in a position to out-think our immediate guards, and perhaps even those over them. It’s our only hope.”

  “Mental imposters. . . . You just forgot one little item, honey.”