The horror of this situation strikes home to Blair when he realizes that he (as the “other” Blair) is responsible for this terrible child slaughter. He realizes he must find a way out of this world before it is too late—and he worries about what the “other” Blair is doing in his own world . . .
The “other” Douglas Blair has adapted quickly to our time-world; he is superior to most men mentally, and because of his high government position as a Congressman, decides to make our world a duplicate of his own—with him in command. With skillful maneuvering (strangely opposed by his wife, Lisa who now in this new world seems to hate the things her own world stood for) the “other” Blair introduces a bill into Congress calling for lowering the draft age. Step by step he is convincing government leaders he has a panacea for the World’s ills. He is waiting now for the psychological moment to introduce the Games as the only workable solution to impending war. Tragically, his deft experience as a world leader is assuring him of success . . .
In the parallel time-world, Douglas Blair, masquerading as the Senior Quadrate Blair, has tried to requisition a power-pack for his time machine. He is nearly caught, because it is an illegal request. He realizes now that his only chance is to steal one. But he doesn’t have time to try, for he is ordered to Venus to supervise the Games, (not realizing his own sons are participants) under the watchful eye of the Director himself.
Blair cautions his wife, Dot, to do nothing while he is gone, and that he will allay suspicion by boarding his private space ship and leaving Earth. Once in space he plans to overpower the crew in the control room, steal a power-pack from the communications system, and return to Earth. If his timing is right, he feels he will be able to finish the machine before the Secret Police can catch him, and return to his own world.
Grimly, he enters the space ship and blasts off from Earth.
Now go on with the story . . .
PART II
CHAPTER XI
ACCELERATION had left Doug at the brink of unconsciousness despite the hammock in which they’d secured him, but gradually the roar in his ears subsided and the words took shape, as though they were being spoken from the bottom of an empty well.
“. . . SQ check one . . . speed five-three thousand one two oh, acceleration two point one, steady . . . trajectory minus two point oh five seconds at eight thousand two hundred, three hundred, four, five, compensate please . . . plus point oh three seconds at nine thousand, seven, eight, nine, compensate please . . . SQ at stand-by, over.”
“Three-dimensional plot-check, sir. Reconciled, and steady as she blasts . . .”
“SQ to control, SQ check one, trajectory secure. Out.”
He fumbled with the wide straps across his chest and hips, and his arms were awkward as though he had lost at least half of his coordination. He could taste blood at the corners of his mouth, but it was already caking to his flesh.
“Old Man had a tough time this trip, sir . . .”
“Yes. When they’re desk passengers for six months running and then try to get aboard a space-deck they find it isn’t as easy as when they wore an ack harness every day. The price of being eager, sergeant.”
“Yes, sir. He ought to be coming out of it soon.”
“We’ll be locked tight on the curve when he does. Off a half-second and he’ll holler like a Conservative—especially after final compensation. How close did we come to the C-limit this time, anyway?”
“Had almost a minute to spare, sir.”
“Nicely done, sergea—I think I hear him trying to get the deck under him. Better get over to the trackers.”
The words Doug heard still weren’t making sense, but he was on his feet and had his balance. He had slid oddly down to the metal deck from the bulkhead on which the hammock was built, and he had the peculiar feeling that up was no longer up, nor down exactly where it was supposed to be. His body did not feel as though it were all of lead as he’d half-expected, although it didn’t feel its usual hundred and sixty pounds, either.
He was still focusing his eyes when they saw the weird blur of color on the bulkhead above the crewman’s head. Teleview screen of course—and the middle blur—Earth.
In moments he was able to see it plainly as it receded—a tan and blue mass dotted with white, shadowed to the shape of a football, hanging in what seemed direct contradiction to all the laws of physics in a great, black void.
For minutes he stood without moving, oblivious to the immaculately polished masterpiece of engineering which surrounded him.
As a video-image, what he saw could have been nothing more than a cleverly-done stage prop, an ingenious painting by some futuristic artist. But the realization that it was real held him fascinated. Of all the human emotions, here was one that could only flounder helplessly for expression, for it had no precedent for comparison. The awe and the strangely-placid fear were intermingled with a sense of brute power; the sudden loneliness and strange humility were woven inextricably with an irrepressible consciousness of godliness, of unbounded omnipotence. And Doug knew that the first airmen had but touched a tiny edge of the sky, for here was the sky in her entirety—the infinite woman, at once belonging to man, yet an unending mystery to him, and granting of her uncountable secrets but slowly, enticingly, stubbornly.
As he watched, the tan-and-blue shape shrank gradually as though Space were tauntingly erasing it from existence.
THE interior of the compartment in which he stood had been designed with the same simplicity of line as had the ship itself, and with so smooth a compactness that it seemed to occupy more of the ship’s long interior than a bare third. The two crewmen had evidently not seen him as yet; they stood with their backs to him, their eyes intent on the long, curving banks of dials which ran the gamut of geometrical shapes. Oddly, their hands hung idle at their sides. Doug wondered if they constituted the entire crew, and if they did not, how many more of them there were.
He would let them speak first. He walked over to a panel of dials, gave them a studied scrutiny. The officer turned immediately.
“Ablast thirteen minutes, sir, at fourteen thousand miles. I believe you’ll find our track with zero variation. C-limit was passed four minutes ago. Glad to have you aboard again, sir.”
Doug returned the salute, nodded his head in acknowledgement of information he had no way of understanding.
“Communications effective?”
“Why—yes sir. Sergeant, prepare space-radio for message—”
“No, no.” Doug waved the sergeant back to his post. “Just checking, captain. How long since the last overhaul of your unit?”
“Why, at the prescribed overhaul date for the entire ship, sir. I believe about four months ago, sir.”
“Don’t you know, captain?”
“Four months ago, sir.”
“I see. If I may inspect the unit, captain.”
“Sergeant! Prepare communications for inspection!”
He had no way of knowing how unorthodox his procedure was, only that while aboard the ship, at least, his rank was the final law, and that they would never land on Venus. Yet, these were intelligent men, of the same high caliber as those Earth-bound in the headquarters units. He must be cautious.
Within minutes, the complex communications assembly had been bared, and its circuits were halfmystery to him. Yet the fundamentals would be the same, as they had been with the equipment he had ordered to build the second Contraption. Only the shapes, the sizes, the juxtapositions different.
“Your transmission power supply, captain—”
“The power-pack, sir?” Inadvertently, the officer glanced at the unit and Doug followed the glance. Smaller, more compact than the best he’d seen in his own time, yet obviously evolved on identical principles. But now he had to carry the farce out, had to wring some of the freshman stuff from his memory.
“Sergeant—” He gestured toward the unit as he removed his gauntlets. “What is the v—Kempage on the plates of the final amplifier?”
> “Eleven hundred Kemps at 300 milliamperes, sir.”
“Very well. Suppose you give me the final power supply nomenclature!”
“Yes, sir. Genemotor, type A-26-F modified. Two hundred fifty Kemp input, eleven hundred Kemp output, at three hundred milliamperes. Two filter condensers, type L-73 new departure, one filter choke, L-12, one bleeder resistor—”
“That’s enough, sergeant. Captain, upon perfunctory inspection at least, your communications unit seems to be in excellent condition. However, I suggest that after this you commit each successive overhaul date to memory.”
“Yes, sir.”
SO far, so good, Doug thought.
Yet it was a thing of mocking irony. He was actually perfecting the act so well that one day the risk of impersonation would vanish entirely—yet now, now he must use it to its utmost to carry through a desperate plan to escape, rather than to stay. Worse, it was even a double irony, for had he sought escape at first rather than a lifetime of imposture in this next-door world, they would have helped him. Of course there were the games—he might never have learned enough in so short a time to have gone undetected through them. It was a strangely reassuring thought; it eliminated choice. But at the same time it heightened his desperation. There was only one mark at which to aim, but it was a bull’s-eye with no margin for error.
The captain was speaking to him, “. . . care to check the flight-pattern coordinates? Sergeant Zukar here is quite justifiably proud, I think, of his ability to delay terminal compensation until the last fraction of a minute before C-limit is reached . . .”
“No—no thank you, captain. I am quite satisfied. I would like, however, a routine check of the remaining crew.”
“Remaining crew, sir?” The captain’s face was suddenly a mask of perplexity, and his features were again taut. “I’m afraid I fail to understand, sir. Unless there were last-minute orders which I failed to receive assigning two additional—”
He had discovered what he wanted, but he had been awkward . . .
“Yes, yes of course, captain. The orders for Tayne’s ship. For some reason I—”
“Of course, sir.”
Not a natural, but he’d made the point. But he couldn’t let the dice get cold now. Only the two of them aboard; that made it simpler. And the sergeant had said the power-pack used a 250 Kemp input, the same as the wall current at the house. Usable, then, and he had to get it back . . .
He walked slowly over to a bulkhead seat, sat down.
He groped uncertainly for the brief-tube he’d brought, let it fall with a clatter to the deck.
The captain was scooping it up in a trice, and Doug twisted the muscles of his face into a grimace of discomfort.
“Sir,—sir”, is there something wrong?”
“I—no I don’t think so, captain. Nervous strain, I’m afraid. I—” Another grimace.
“Sergeant. Three neuro tablets at once—”
“No, no—” Doug said. “Like poison to me.” He doubled over. “Captain . . .”
“Yes sir, what Can I get—”
“Nothing, I’m afraid . . . Back to Earth as quickly as possible—”
“Back to Earth, sir? But that’s impossible! We’re at least thirty minutes past C-limit, sir . . . the trajectory’s locked. We must continue, of course.”
“Must—must continue?”
“Why, yes of course, sir.”
Doug straightened his body, but kept his arms locked around his middle, kept the grimace on his face and feigned shortness of breath.
“Of course what, captain?”
A LOOK of comprehension came suddenly to the captain’s face. He straightened, stood again at attention. “According to Constitutional Commandments Four, Part 3, Subsection 12 as amended July 9, 1949, part A: ‘All space craft shall be robot-controlled and shall fly predetermined trajectories, save (1) when bearing members of the Science Council and/or their certified representatives, to whom manual operation and navigation at will is singularly permissible, or (2) when insurmountable emergency shall occur. All other craft shall be launched on the predetermined trajectory as hereinbefore stipulated, and shall be compensated to their true course by remote control from Earth for so long as radio impulses between ship and Earth shall be for all practical purposes instantaneous. Beyond this limit, to be hereinafter described as Compensation Limit, whereafter distance shall create a time-lag of communications and corresponding control impulses so as to make further remote control an impracticability the ship shall continue on the trajectory as last corrected under control of its own self-directing, or autorobot, units. These units will the constructed so as to be inaccessible to all passengers, including instrument and communications technicians.”
For a moment Doug said nothing, let the captain remain at attention, struggling to regain his breath and composure. The man had thought the feigned sickness was simply a device to get him off guard so that his alertness might be tried with some disguised test of his knowledge of regulations. Of course that was it. . . unthinkable that any officer, any rank, should give such an order as he had given for actual execution.
Funny, how the twists saved you when there was no longer any point in being saved. He was trapped here—trapped, and on Venus the trap would tighten and finally close when Tayne found some opening in his guard and plunged through it.
“Well done, captain. As you were. Your qualifications seem quite adequate. See to it that they are continually maintained.”
“Yes, sir.”
With what nonchalance he could muster, Doug dropped the sickness act as though it had been a trick the captain might have expected, and opened the brief-tube. He would have to memorize every word of its contents, every direction on the plastic sheets it contained. If he wanted to see his own home again—for that matter, if he ever wanted to see Dot again, he would have to run a bluff that would, he mused, even amaze the United States Bureau of Internal Revenue.
And that, he knew, would be damn near impossible.
CHAPTER XII
AFTER Doug had gone, Dot tried to make herself forget why he had gone, where he was going, She wanted the old conviction to come back; she wanted to be smugly sure again that it was impossible for him to fly to another planet, and that what he had said was just a great joke.
She twisted a dial on the luxurious radio console, sat for a moment beside it and wished that she could as easily twist fact away from belief, so that the awful fear would go. Yet blindness to fact was no answer to fear of it.
It seemed long ago that space flight had been something for light dinner-table conversation, something for fanciful conjecture in an idle moment, something to discuss politely when the overimaginative person became serious with his day-after-tomorrow talk.
But now suddenly it was none of those things. Now suddenly it was a thing of life or death to her; it was real, and she was afraid. The science-fiction stories she had leafed through in an idle moment—what had their writers said? What had they, in their irrepressible way, so logically theorized about the balance of life in the impossibly deep reaches of Space—about the precocious ships that men would some day build when they were at last free of their age-old fear of infinity?
The soft music from the radio had stopped, and the newscaster’s voice disturbed her reverie.
“. . . this afternoon, the Prelatinate announced eight new amendments to the Constitutional Commandments, making the total for the day so far a slightly-under-average twelve. This afternoon’s amendments deal specifically with Commandment Ninety-three, Section 189, Chapter 914, paragraph 382, sub-rovision 2103-K. The first stipulates . . .”
She tried to find another program of music, but the daily amendment announcements were everywhere. With a fleeting smile she remembered what Doug had said—that at last the commercial had met its match as an instrument for ruining radio listening. Yet logical enough, for here the dollar was secondary, and Government was God.
She turned the console off, and again the house w
as quiet, and the chill mantle of worry drew closer about her brain, grew steadily into a stifling strait-jacket of helpless fear. Lord, there was nothing she could do . . .
Then of a sudden her pulse was racing as the large helicopter landed at the side of the house. She looked out the window.
But it was not Doug. The word ELECTROSUPPLY was stenciled in large letters above the craft’s opening freight-door, and she watched as a dolly was lowered from it. There were four men, and they were unloading a large crate. It went on the dolly, and then the dolly with its load was being pushed by the four to the side of the house.
The door-signal sounded.
“Yes?”
“Madame Blair, would you please sign for the shipment?”
“Yes, of course. But what is it that I—”
“Sorry, Madame. Only the Order Division knows the nature of the consignment—policy, you know. There, that’ll do it. Thank you.”
HE left with her permission to leave the crate in the cellar, and after a few minutes the ’copter and its efficient crew was gone.
She knew intuitively that it was the equipment he needed so desperately—ironically enough it must be that. She had to fight back the impulse to rush to the cellar and rip the crate open. For if in some way she should slip, do something wrong, damage what was inside . . .
Quite suddenly her thoughts were marshaled from their uninhibited adventuring and became sharp hard-edged instruments. Even the tiniest error now could mean the difference between winning and losing, and it was still not too late to win.
Complete Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Page 27