The long list of outposts followed for fifteen closely-spaced pages. The message was signed Taylor, General, New United Nations World Space Force, Commanding.
Steele suddenly felt himself struggling to keep order for full-scale attack bottled in his throat.
Then he fought to keep from simply cursing.
He fought to keep the hot, quick panic in him from boiling into some unthinkable suicide.
The sergeant still stood before him, the thing of awful fear deep in his eyes.
“Get Major Zukow at once, sergeant.”
“Yes, sir. But sir—”
“What is it?” His jaws hurt, and he could feel the words hissing from between his teeth.
“The list, sir. We’re the smallest and newest unit there is, so we’d be right at the bottom, page fifteen. But we’re not there. We’re not listed at all, sir.”
He looked. Grady was right. And OK’d and signed by Taylor himself, no mistaking that.
“Get Major Zukow, sergeant. On the double!”
“Yes, sir!” The communications non-com stumbled awkardly; acclimatization to lesser gravities came quickly only with long experience. He recovered, and then in a curious loping fashion began to run.
FOR terse seconds Steele spoke clipped words into a unit-communicator. And then he waited for Zukow.
It would be a moment or so yet. He looked at the message again, re-read it, tried to glean information from it that it didn’t contain. It told what, but it didn’t tell why. Nor even how. It was just a command, to be obeyed like any other command. No, it wasn’t the soldier’s place to question. Never the soldier’s place to question.
Here is an ideal, they would say. Here is the thing you must work or fight for. Here is what is worth believing in. And the soldier believed. If he did not he was fortunate, for then he just had a job to do. But if he believed, he was the most hapless creature in the Universe. For sooner or later, the ideal wore thin as a facade for the more practical expediencies which moved behind it. What true ideal there was with the soldier, yet, his was not the freedom to serve it . . . And when the ideal was suddenly scrapped; when they said now, now it is all over, now this is what you must do—here is a new thing to believe . . .
Forty years, from the bogs of Venus to the wastes of Pluto . . .
He looked again at the list headed ALL UNITS: and checked them, one by one.
Grady had been right. Experimental simply wasn’t there. Maybe an experimental Light Space Brigade on a dark little world like Callisto could get lost in the shuffle.
But he knew better. With Earth at stake, Taylor would allow no such error. Taylor knew every one of his units by heart, he must . . .
He thought about Taylor. He thought about him the way he had known him as both soldier and individual, as general and as a man. Character. Principle. Guts. The three biggest things about Taylor. A man who followed orders to the letter—a man who would surrender of his own volition, no matter what price to pay the piper . . . that was where the principle came in; the character, the guts.
He looked at Taylor’s facsimile-signature again. Signed by force? By threat? Obviously. The message itself said as much. But if somehow there’d been a mistake, a record overlooked, Taylor would know, and would—
But who else would know? At a glance, who else would know? And then how much would Taylor dare?
For one of the rare times in his life, Steele was frightened to his core.
“Colonel Steele, sir!” Major Zukow snapped a perfunctory salute, put himself at rest and lowered his towering square-cut body into a laxerchair. The healthy pink in his broad face and the purposefulness in the set of his clean-cut features made him look younger than he was, and the close-cropped black hair was like an added insigne of his profession to his perfectly-fitted uniform.
“You’d better take a look at this, Georgi. And then we’ve got to get things moving.” Steele handed the order across his desk.
He waited while Zukow read. He watched Zukow’s face. It seemed to gradually coagulate.
And when he was finished, Steele said, “Now find us on there!”
“But I don’t—anything else, any other details? Is this—?”
“Tt’s as true as the leaves on your shoulders, Major. And that’s all there is, so far. Grady will be in with anything else when and if it should come. Well? What are you thinking?”
“Thinking? If this damned thing isn’t some criminal joke, there’s no thinking to it. Colonel. We just go, period. I’ll get—”
“Just a minute. Did you try to find us on there? What do you make of that?”
“A mistake. Some clerical mistake, that’s all. What else could be made of it? On an order like this?”
Steele shifted in his swivel-seat, and a neglected spring squawked its protest. “Suppose,” he began slowly, “it was a mistake. Major. But Taylor put his name to it anyway, just the way it is. Now, do you think he’d be likely to miss such an error?”
ZUKOW hesitated, a scowl corrugating his wide forehead. “No I don’t think so, but whether he was likely to or not hasn’t anything to do with it. The mistake was made—he didn’t catch it, but he signed it, sent it, and it means us like all the rest of ’em, period!”
“I think he caught it, Major.”
“What do you—”
“I mean just that. He caught it. And still signed it!”
“Colonel, don’t be crazy! With a gun in his back—”
“Just the point. The people holding the gun would of course have grabbed the records as a check against Taylor’s written command. It’s the only way they’d have of knowing what was what. They’d do all they could to make sure they were given the complete works, of course, but ultimately, they’d have to trust Taylor—trust his fear of their terrible power and staggering advantage. Only—let’s say there was a mistake. One way for it to be caught. Taylor—he’d know at a glance—the one man who would. And he still signed it!”
“Nuts, Colonel, nuts! What you are suggesting is absolute nonsense. With the lives of billions of people in the balance, you mean he’d—”
“Leave it up to us.”
“With only twenty J-88s? With a planetful of people in the balance. Sir, do you think Taylor’s a lunatic or something?”
Steele groped for an answer that would take the cold logic out of Zukow’s questions. The exec had to be wrong. There must be an answer.
“Zukow,” he heard himself saying at last, “there were only three of our craft out today—all behind the Big Boy, and I’ve ordered them in—damped, and clammed up. I’ve grounded the rest. And if we don’t get anything from communications within the next couple of hours, like a Notification of Error and Correction—”
“You must be out of your head, Colonel.” Zukow stood up, towered over the big desk. Veins in his wide forehead stood out redly, accentuating the growing color in his stiffened face. “In a couple of hours we go into eclipse! Not for long, but while we are, we won’t be able to pick up anything. Suppose then the notification comes? While we’re working out some crazy plan still thinking Taylor was trying to pull a cute one? Do you think we can take a gamble like that? Do you think we have the right to take a gamble like that?”
“As it is,” Steele replied slowly, “our people are to be slaves. For all we know, forever.”
“A little dramatic, aren’t you?”
“Would you call it a situation to be taken lightly?”
The other straightened, said nothing.
“Major, Taylor was taking a shot in the dark. “We’re a fantastically slim hope—but we’re the only one he’s got!”
“And I think that right now you are a greater enemy to Earth than all her Invaders!”
“ ‘Liberty or death,’ Major, that’s what Taylor was saying to us when he knowingly put his signature to a fluke error!”
“Oh for God’s sake Colonel, come off it! It sounds just jim-dandy but you haven’t even got a plan! Infinity to zero, those are your odds! An
d if I thought you were seriously considering not going in, I’d—”
“Yes, Major, you’d what?”
The door opened. It was Grady. There was a communication folder in his hand.
Silently, Steele took the folder. There was an expectant look on Zukow’s flushed face as his superior read the brief message. Then Steele looked up.
“No,” he said. “It’s not a Notification of Error and Correction. Simply a follow-up directive ordering all recalled craft to navigate the final ten thousand miles of their Earth-approaches in intervals of not less than twenty minutes each. Seems the Invaders have their entire headquarters and supply set-up in a mother-ship circling Earth—and they aren’t taking any chances.”
“Under these conditions, then—”
“As far as we are concerned, Major, the conditions are the same!”
For a moment Zukow stood immobile, his dark eyes snapping down to lock with Steele’s. But the colonel’s did not flinch. And then the Major pivoted, and left Steele suddenly alone in the small office.
HE had hardly completed the all-units bulletin when the call-buzzer from Operations sounded. Within the next hour his six hundred men, his twenty small J-88 Lancers would be loaded to the fins with all the arms they could carry, and then . . .
Fleetingly, the thought nagged at him. Was Zukow a coward—or right? Twenty tiny J-88s balanced against the lives of four billion people . . . Yet there would be surprise, and the over-confidence of a powerful victor after an easy conquest. And more, there would be the will of a small band of men.
He flipped up the buzzer-switch, and the Operations lieutenant appeared on his small desk viewer.
“Yes, lieutenant? Did your group have some difficulty in understanding my bulletin?”
“No, sir. We’re getting things Space-shape at our end right now. But, sir—you said that twenty craft were to be prepared.”
“Yes, that’s correct. All of them.”
“But there will be only nineteen, sir. Major Zukow blasted off nearly a half-hour before your announcement, in a completely unarmed J-88 and—he said—on your authorization.”
For a moment Steele said nothing. His mind seethed, yet he understood.
“Very well, lieutenant. You will stand by for a second bulletin.”
The young officer’s face faded from the screen, and Steele tried to think. Obvious, of course, but he wondered how much Zukow could be blamed. A frightened man. A coward, perhaps, doing what he thought was right.
But it was not right!
And they must now act swiftly. For if the enemy were warned in sufficient time . . .
Infinity to zero, Zukow had said, were his odds. Perhaps.
But there would be nineteen J-88s, armed to the fins . . .
THEY had kept Zukow waiting three hours after he landed. He had immediately been placed under guard upon setting the unarmed Lancer down at National Spaceport, and they had not believed him until his shouts of protest had been overheard by one of their officers. It had almost been for nothing—
But now they were taking him to the Pentagon; into Taylor’s own suite of offices.
And Taylor was there. A different-looking Taylor than Zukow remembered—no longer the bulky, solid-looking figure. Wan, drawn, as were those few of his staff working with him under the orders of the alien commander.
It was the alien who spoke. Taylor sat white and silent.
“My officers inform me that you have attempted to convince them of an impossible story, Earthman,” he said. He was man-like, only taller. His head was bald and like a fleshless skull, and there was the glitter of a strong intelligence behind the widely-spaced double-lidded red eyes.
And Zukow repeated his story. Shamefully, fearfully, he told it. And as he did, new color flushed Taylor’s lined face, then subsided to the whiteness of helpless anger.
“Your story will be checked carefully,” the alien commander said in a slurred, yet fluent English. “If it is true—”
And that was all he said. There was a sudden flurry of movement, and General Taylor had wrested a weapon from the alien’s belt. He squeezed its trigger in quick, desperate spasms, squeezed, squeezed . . .
Zukow lay headless on the floor. Zukow—the alien commander, and his guards.
“Hide them! We’ve got to hide them!” Taylor was yelling at his paralyzed aides. “If Steele can pull it off—can wreck that hellish mother-ship of theirs, they’ll be cut off down here—done for! Come on for God’s sake help me!”
They sprang into action then.
And with the weapons from the slain aliens, waited silently behind the bolted office door.
Taylor’s wasted frame was tensed. Minutes . . . hours . . . or death in seconds, perhaps. They could only wait.
THEY came out of the Sun. Nineteen flat, finned, streamlined shapes, orange flame gouting from them as from the lips of Hell itself, hurtling headlong with some terrible vengeance glowing in their overheated tubes.
Then Space was suddenly gaping holes of searing color, bursting soundlessly as the nineteen became seventeen, fourteen, twelve.
The twelve became ten, and it was as though the bowels of the Sun itself had erupted to the right and to the left of them, and everywhere before and behind them.
Eight of them completed the first pass, and already there were yawning holes in the gleaming hide of their enemy.
They turned, came on again. Their torpedo-tubes sparkled, and five full salvos struck. The alien mother-ship spilled white flame from a gaping rupture in her flank, and three ships were left to close a second time.
Then two flat, finned, stream-lined shapes did not pull from their pass. They hurtled, instead, headlong into the wounded juggernaut’s very heart.
Drunkenly, and with almost deliberate slowness, it split in two, a slain thing, spewing its broken structure and shattered creatures with crazy abandon toward the great blue seas of Earth beneath.
One now there was, its flagship insigne half-scorched from its twisted, battered hull. Yet it hurtled through the blackness of Space toward the planet, below it, the flush of victory shimmering in its overheated tubes.
THERE was little to be said.
General Taylor stood at the side of the white hospital bed, and Colonel Geofferey Steele, his head swathed in bandages, looked questioningly up at him.
“General, did Major Zukow—” Taylor’s mouth was grim. “He reached us—and the aliens. But we . . . managed to take care of the situation . . . to give you time.” The General’s features softened. “You and your crew—a magnificent job. Earth is proud—”
“We were lucky, sir,” Steele attempted a grin. “Tried hard not to make any mistakes . . .” Taylor smiled then, his laughter an emotional release they had both been seeking. “I—occasionally overlook mistakes!” he said.
And then the two men laughed together. For a long time.
The End
The Women-Stealers of Thrayx
“And that is why you will take us to Earth, Lieutenant,” barked the Ihelian warrior. “We do not want your arms or your men. What we must ask for is—ten thousand women.”
MASON was nervous. It was the nervousness of cold apprehension, not simply that which had become indigenous to his high-strung make-up. He was, in his way, afraid; afraid that he’d again come up with a wrong answer.
He’d brought the tiny Scout too close to the Rim. Facing the facts squarely, he knew, even as he fingered the stud that would wrench them out of their R-curve, that he’d not just come too close. He’d overshot entirely. Pardonable, perhaps, from the view-point of the corps of scientists safely ensconced in their ponderous Mark VII Explorer some fifteen light-days behind. But not according to the g-n manual. According to it, he’d placed the Scout and her small crew in a “situation of avoidable risk,” and it would make a doubtful record look that much worse.
The next time he’d out-argue Cain with his rank if he had to. Cain was big enough to grab things with his brawny fists and twist them into w
hatever shape he wanted when the things were tangible, solid, resisting. But R-Space was something else again. Nobody knew what it did beyond the Rim.
He materialized the Scout into E-Space, listened for trouble from her computers, but they chuckled softly on, keeping track of where they were, where they’d been, and how they’d get home.
It was as though nothing had happened. But Lieutenant Lansing Mason was still nervous, his slender fingers steady enough, but as cold as the alien dark outside the ship they controlled.
“You look a little shot again, skipper!” Cain said, grinning like a Martian desert cat. “What’s the matter, Space goblins got you again?”
A retort started at Mason’s taut lips, but his third officer was already speaking.
“Here’s a dope sheet from the comps, if anybody’s interested in knowing just where outside the Rim we are,” she said. “I make it just a shade inside the outermost fringes of the Large Magellanic Cloud.” Sergeant Judith Kent’s voice had its almost habitually preoccupied tone, as though the words she said were hardly more than incidental to a host of more important thoughts running swiftly behind her wide-set, deep gray eyes. They were serious eyes, and in their way matched the solemn set of her small features and the crisp, military cut of her black hair and severe uniform.
“Our little boss-man knows where we are, all right!” Cain said.
Mason gave Cain’s six-feet-two a quick glance, wondering as he always wondered why the big redhead’s shoulders always seemed too broad for the Warrant Officer’s stripes on them. “Sergeant Kent’s right,” he said. “Here’s her comp-sheet. You can look for yourself. Fringe, Magellanic. And look at that while you can—” he jabbed a forefinger at the main scanner, its screen studded with unfamiliarly close constellations—“because we’re on our way back. Set up a return on the comps, will you, Sergeant?” For all his tenseness his voice was low, and the words it formed were even and swift.
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