Complete Fiction (Jerry eBooks)

by Fox B. Holden

  Doug stood at the side of the superhighway, the power pack at his feet, his shredded cloak in his hands to wave.

  The traffic seemed light for so late in the afternoon. The sun was hot, and he was breathing heavily from the stumbling, desperate run across the small, rutted field. The ship towered above what few trees there were, and it marked them for a target.

  A streamlined shape was racing toward him. It seemed to take all the strength he had left to wave the cape, and he wondered if he were waving it at searching S-men . . .

  The vehicle sped by, whipping the cape in its undertow. It was going nearly two hundred miles an hour, and there was no driver inside it. A robot carrier.

  Thirty seconds went by before the next one came. It was going slower, and it too was driverless.

  Doug glanced at the sky. To the west, high, tiny dots—

  It was a full minute before the next one came. With both hands, cloak dropped because it was too heavy, Doug waved, and the vehicle was slowing.

  “Ready, boys . . .” There was a slight rustle behind him as they came to their knees.

  The driver stopped his car almost abreast of him, and opened the passenger door.

  “What’s the trouble? You crack up? While we’re riding you can use the autophone—”

  Doug moved into the vehicle slowly, then lashed out at the man’s head with the smooth, heavy rock that was in his left hand. In his exhaustion he struck only a glancing blow, and there was barely time for a second, but the second connected, and the driver slumped, jammed behind his semicircular steering wheel.

  “Mike, Terry—”

  In a moment the helicopter would have him spotted, or an S-Council patrol car would be braking beside him.

  They hauled the driver out, left him at the road side. He was not dead, and Doug was curiously thankful for that. He had killed one man already . . .

  He wasted a second for another glance at the sky. Closer now, and it was obvious that they had spotted the ship. He had to get the vehicle in motion somehow. A robot sped by, its air wake rocking them slightly. He had the pack on the seat beside him, and Terry was slamming the door.

  No clutch or brake pedal. Only one pedal, and it could only be an accelerator. But pivoted in the middle. There was no sound to the engine, no way to tell if it were running because the only dash instrument was a speed indicator.

  He pressed the pedal forward. And they did not move. Backward, then . . .

  It moved. In five seconds the speed needle was climbing past eighty, going smoothly upward.

  He wondered if they had been seen.

  In a dash mirror he saw Terry and Mike turning their heads up, looking through the curved transparent metal top.

  “Must be a hunnerd of ’em—they’re starting to land I think!”

  “All of them?”

  “I guess so—wait! Yeah, he’s gonna land, too I guess. I can’t see ’em anymore. Gosh, we’re sure moving.”

  “Creepers, a hundred and eighty! Hey Dad, where are we going, anyway?”

  “To the headquarters hospital building. I think—I think that’s where your mother is.”

  “Is she hurt?”

  “I don’t know, Mike, I don’t know.”

  He pressed his heel to the floorboard. He was glad for Tayne’s sword at his side. Even for the ones the boys carried.

  THE sign said City of Washington, District of Columbia, Population 531,423. Speed Limit 55 MPH.

  Doug raised his heel, the car slowed. He frowned. No roadblocks, no pursuit! There had been plenty of time since the helicopters had landed—five, six minutes perhaps. They knew where he was going, and were going to let him walk right into it, some neatly conceived trap at the hospital. So they’d be sure to have him alive . . . alive, to be used as an example!

  Savagely, he heeled the pedal down. Let them be waiting—they were fools if they hadn’t figured on the swords! Or—or he was a fool, for counting on them.

  The car’s tires wailed as he rounded the long, curving turn that brought him onto St. Jefferson Way, past the Payne Monument, and within two blocks of the headquarters building hospital wing.

  The traffic was thickening, planned of course to make things look as natural as possible—not to arouse his suspicion at the last moment . . .

  “Get those swords ready, kids.”

  He heard them scrape from their scabbards.

  And without warning the form of a woman darted into his path. He swerved, jammed the pedal forward, and the car rocked sicken-

  And he had seen her face in that one awful second—it was Dot who had fallen in the street behind him!

  The boys were at his heels as he leapt from the car. There were white-clad men rushing toward them, and he had Dot’s form in his arms as the first of them closed in.

  There was the quick blink of sunlight on steel as Mike and Terry swung their weapons.

  And as though stunned, the men in white stopped short, suddenly silent, awkwardly-poised statues.

  Doug knew the spell would last for seconds at best. The half-naked boys stood grimly, feet wide apart, sword-hilts grasped in both hands.

  Doug, with Dot’s limp body in his arms, broke for the car.

  “Come on!”

  And Terry and Mike were at his heels. The men in white broke their frozen ranks then and swarmed over the small area of street that the two broadswords had commanded for the telling few seconds.

  Doug bolted the vehicle into motion. And then they were free.

  “What dopes,” Mike was saying. “Were they scared! I bet they didn’t figure we’d be ready to fight ’em! But who did we—?”

  “Boys, see what you can do for your mother. It is your mother, she just looks different, like we do . . .”

  “Mother—”

  “Hurry up. She’s just fainted, that’s all. We didn’t hit her.”

  DOT was conscious when they arrived at the house, and she was managing to speak.

  “Are they—”

  “The boys, yes Dot. Our boys. Now look, we’ve got to run for it. I’ll carry you, and you hang on to the pack . . . Mike, Terry—”

  “Ready, Dad. Will there be many?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe none, but if there aren’t, it’ll only be for a very few minutes. Let’s go!”

  They ran, and the boys burst through the front door with their swords lunging at emptiness.

  “The cellar!”

  He heard them clamber down the steel stairs.

  “It’s O.K. Dad—come on!”

  Dot’s face was white, and her eyes were open wide. He carried her as gently as. he could, but she had never been so terribly heavy in his arms.

  It happened at the cellar doorway, at the top of the stairs.

  He stumbled, fought for balance, fell to one knee, clutched hard and Dot screamed.

  But he held her, and her arms were choking at his neck.

  And there was a crashing, clanging noise as the power pack fell from her, caromed from step to step, and lay finally in a shattered ruin on the cellar floor.

  CHAPTER XX

  SLOWLY, Doug straightened, descended the stairs with Dot’s trembling body still in his arms. The boys stood motionless.

  There was only the sound of Dot’s quiet sobbing, and that of Doug’s boots as they struck hollow sounds from the steel stair treads, moved heavily as though fitted to the legs of an awkward robot to scatter the shattered bits of the power pack tubes and crush them as they came underfoot.

  Gently, he put her down. The boys knelt at either side of her, Doug himself before her.

  “Don’t, please don’t, Dot,” he said.

  “Oh, Doug—”

  And then she clung to him, and her face was wet against his own, but they were the last of her tears.

  “Afraid?”

  “No. Scared a little, but just scared. I don’t fear them, Doug . . . they’re not worth enough to fear.”

  Mike and Terry had gone over to where the Contraption was, had pulled o
ff its dust-cover, and stood looking at it as though puzzled, as though wondering why, so suddenly, it had become a worthless thing.

  “Nobody’s touched it, Dad,” Doug heard Mike saying. “I don’t think anybody’s done anything to it.”

  Doug didn’t answer, for he did not know how to tell them, how to make them know that there was no way.

  “I just—just dropped it, Doug.”

  He tried to smile, and his face felt old and tired. “We were overdue anyway,” he said. “Way overdue. I guess it’s against the rules to beat the odds forever.”

  “I just . . . just dropped it . . .”

  “Don’t, don’t my darling. It wasn’t you, don’t you understand? It wasn’t you, or me—the little fight we made just prolonged things for awhile. Sort of like living itself, I guess. The big system. You can let it sweep you along as it will or you can fight it if you’re fool enough . . .”

  “Doug! Doug, you don’t believe those things!”

  He felt the muscles of his face tighten, and he said nothing. No, no he did not believe them, but what difference did that make? It was the ways things were that mattered!

  He picked up the broadsword Terry had let fall.

  “How long—how long will it be, Doug?”

  Her voice was calm; there was even a faint flush of color in her face again.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “For awhile at least, this might seem the least logical place.”

  “Dad, what’s in this big box? Hey, Dad!”

  HE stood up, turned toward them. The kids—so full of life and the love of living, so full of the myriad curiosities that made living a colorful vibrant thing.

  “This one here. Over here—a big tall wooden one.”

  Doug heard her quick intake of breath, turned to her.

  “Before the telecall, Doug. Before they took me. A helicopter came, from the electronics place . . . they brought that box, and I—”

  In quick strides he was beside Mike and Terry, and everything inside him was suddenly churned up, cold, hot . . .

  Mike had wrenched a section of planking loose, had reached inside.

  “I got the label, Dad . . . High Speed Blower Rack, With Double Blower, Model 4-L532, two each?

  The final, hellish irony. As though it were not enough to fail, but to be mocked as he failed, as though Fate—or was it Providence?—could not close the incident without at least a gentle laugh at him, a cruel laugh to make light of all his confusion, his efforts and all that had driven him to make them. Doug wondered if there would be enough of the strength he would need, when he died, to laugh back.

  The planking squawked as Terry pried with Mike’s broadsword.

  “Maybe it can help, Dad . . . maybe it can,” Terry said, and he continued the prying. Mike pulled at it, and there were louder squawks as the nails protestingly surrendered.

  Doug wanted to stop them, to tell them, but there could be such a little time left, and if it kept them busy there might not be time for them to become afraid.

  He watched them as they ripped the top from the crate, eagerly began hauling out its contents.

  Four large, wide-bladed fans, each perhaps sixteen inches in diameter, and each driven by a compact electric motor. They were coaxially mounted on tall, slender chromium plated racks and could be adjusted on them to meet any conceivable experiment in ventilation engineering.

  Doug said nothing, let them continue. It might not even be necessary to tell them that their discovery was nothing more than two ingeniously designed air conditioning units.

  He wondered why they had come at all. The Prelatinate Attorney’s idea, perhaps, of a not-too-subtle jest. That, or even a veiled warning.

  There was more squawking of wood, and in a few moments Mike and Terry had each of the units placed beside each other on the cellar floor.

  “There’s other junk here too,” Terry was saying. “Pulleys and stuff, Dad. And a sheet of directions or something. Here, look Dad . . . maybe it’ll help.”

  Doug looked at the smudged sheet of plastisheet that Terry had thrust in his hand. Only simple diagrams, indicating the use and assembly of the pulleys for desired variations in blower speeds. Even the simple rheostat, Doug mused, was taboo . . .

  He crumpled the sheet, let it fall to the floor.

  And suddenly grabbed it up again, smoothed it, looked again at the last sentence! . . . each motor operates on regular household direct current of 250 Kemps, as authorized by . . .

  Two hundred fifty Kemps—and there were four of the motors!

  “Dot! Dot those tools by the Contraption! And any scrap wire there—hurry!”

  HE worked with inhuman swiftness of desperation. Dot knelt beside him, handed him tool by tool as he asked for it, as though she were a scrub nurse and he the surgeon, with a patient that might have but moments to live.

  And silently, Terry and Mike watched, eyes wide with wonderment. They watched as Doug equipped two of the motors with the large pulleys, the two others with pulleys of less than half their diameter. Then he linked them with the flat rubber belts.

  “See if you can get the insulation off the ends of those wires—the ones a couple feet long are all right.”

  He moved the racks next to the bench, brought them close together, and when Dot handed him the wire, he had the two motors on which he had placed the small pulleys denuded of their streamlined jackets. It was between those two that he made a simple connection in series.

  “Terry, Mike—while I’m making connections to the Contraption, see if you can get the fan blades off their shafts.”

  Two connections—two simple connections . . .

  He finished the second connection.

  “One more fan to go, Dad—” He plugged the two outer motors with the large pulleys into the wall outlets above the bench. Then his fingers waited on the switches.

  “But Doug the fan motors will only work on house current—”

  “Yes, that’s right, but Eve geared—pulleyed, I mean—two of them up, so that they’ll turn the other two at least twice their normal armature speed. And the simple electric motor works—”

  “—in reverse, too, doesn’t it! If you turn it by mechanical means, it generates electric current!”

  “That’s about it. I ought to get about five hundred volts from each, with the pulley ratio I’m using. And they’re both connected in series, so—a thousand volts, I hope. Childish, isn’t it—” There was sudden chaos above them.

  “Doug—”

  Terry dropped the last fan-blade to the floor.

  Doug pressed the switches, and the two electric motors spun into humming, whirring motion, driving the other two at a speed he knew might burn them out in minutes. Then he closed the Contraption’s main switch, and pulled Terry and Mike bodily to him with one arm as he held tightly to Dot with the other.

  S-men swarmed down the cellar stairs.

  CHAPTER XXI

  A DOZEN men clad in white uniforms of the S-Council surrounded them, and there were weapons in their hands.

  Senior Quadrate Blair understood. Partially, he understood. He had been reading a banner headline, and then suddenly—suddenly there had been an indescribable moment of utter dark, of awful timelessness—and cold. And there was still the cold, tangible and fluorescing in a green-blue flame about him. Through it he could see the white blurs—the men in white. S-men . . .

  “Lisa—” He felt her beside him, crushing their two sons to her trembling body. He could see their faces, then—upturned to his, pleading, afraid. “The change. Somehow my counterpart, my imposing alter-ego has succeeded, Lisa! He has found his way back, and in so doing he has returned the four of us . . .”

  And then the green glow and the cold was gone, and there was no more time to speak.

  “Stand where you are! You have only to move to—Madame Blair!”

  The leader of the white-uniformed band had half-succeeded in masking his initial amazement, but now the surprise on his heavy face was a naked
thing. The others stood as statues to each side of him.

  There was an awful moment of silence, and the weapon-muzzles held steady, even if the dozen hands that gripped them were momentarily incapable of flexing trigger-fingers.

  And then the Senior Quadrate had found his full voice.

  “There has of course been some error. S-men do not enter the home of a Senior Quadrate—”

  And Lisa’s voice cut across her husband’s.

  “They—Douglas, these aren’t—aren’t S-men! I recognize him—the leader! Mylor Kuun . . .”

  “Of course, Madame,” the heavy-faced one said rapidly. “The disguises—a desperate necessity, I assure you. There is very little time, however. Once informed of your escape from the hospital, and of the Senior Quadrate’s violation of arrest, it was necessary to act at once to find you. Genuine S-squads cannot be much behind us. We’re but one of a number of our groups in the search, and we came to your home only so no possibility might be overlooked. Yet I don’t understand—” For a moment a look of puzzled doubt flickered on the underground leader’s heavy features. His nervous gaze touched the strange array of forbidden equipment which but moments before had been bathed in the green-blue glow.

  “There will be time for explanations later!” Lisa said. She caught herself as she was about to add that what the agent was saying made little sense.

  She put a protective arm around each of her still, frightened children. There must be great trouble or the group would not have so brazenly exposed itself, and come here to her home. Something desperate enough so that added confusion might serve only to make a dangerous situation an impossible one.

  “But I don’t—you said violation of arrest,” her husband was saying stubbornly. “I demand a thorough—”

  “Your lives are in danger, sir. If we do not move immediately, it will very probably be not at all. Gundar Tayne is relentless, and is reported enroute from Venus to join this search himself.”

  “Tayne!” Blair’s face blanched, then reddened. “The Taynes, you mean! Gundar and Larsen, with Larsen behind it—”