Complete Fiction (Jerry eBooks)

by Fox B. Holden

  Then Kriijorl spoke. “I do not understand, Lieutenant. I know only that it would be almost certain death. Intrusion near the vault would bring a flight of guard ships within minutes.”

  “I know that,” Mason said. “But perhaps not down upon us! And we must have that Book. I’ve been thinking about it, comparing it with similar writings in Earth’s own past. Such books are not new, such motives, such methods. Your Book is priceless in a way that even you don’t know, Kriijorl. I’m certain of it. For it must contain the reason that you fight.”

  “And that reason?”

  “A reason, if I’m right, that would end your feud once and for all. A nasty bit of logic which the people of Ihelos and Thrayx were quite deliberately kept from knowing from the beginning. I’d make book on it that at one time both planets were very hungry places—”

  “But if you are wrong, Lieutenant?”

  Mason fastened his gaze straight before him on the diamond-studded scanner, and saw that some of the smaller diamonds were moving in a tiny echelon.

  “Then I guess we die young,” he answered the Ihelian. “Want to try?”

  The Ihelian’s face loosened into a wry smile. “Sometimes you ask rather foolish questions, Lieutenant! I’ve been bred to such business, and not given my life so much thought before this! But—”

  “Yes. Judith.”

  And then they heard a woman’s voice speaking behind them. “Thrayxite acceleration hammocks could stand improvement,” it said. “And when we leave the Forest of Saarl, I think I’ll just lie on the deck instead.”

  KRIIJORL’S knowledge of the spot’s location in the great forest was far more accurate than he had given Mason reason to hope. And with a deftness that matched that with which he had eluded the screens of the Thrayxite fleet hurtling to protect its breeder planetoid, he brought the ship to rest at Mason’s direction, little more than a quarter-mile from where the Book of the Saints lay entombed.

  It was marked by two spires. One was of hewn stone, as Kriijorl had said, immobile, with ancient symbols carven from its base to its pinnacle.

  And the other was smooth, and of metal; its gaping airlock testimony to the haste with which it had been landed, unhidden by the natural camouflage of the soaring trees with which the grass-carpeted clearing was surrounded.

  “Who—”

  “Muscles,” Mason answered her. The three were crouched at the clearing’s edge, waiting. “Thought he’d made it some way. Must’ve ducked in before their fleet got into Space. Gambling that our signal that he picked up wouldn’t bring out a special reception committee ready and waiting to meet him.”

  “But he has preceded us by many minutes,” Kriijorl said. “I do not see—”

  “Not so many. He was in flight two full hours before you mentacommed Ihelos. And if I know him, it was straight out of this galaxy at full blast! So he had to back-track all that time and distance. He had to risk a trap down here, as well as the Thrayxite fleet which he knew would be rushing to protect its breeders.”

  “You had counted on those factors, Lieutenant?”

  “Two birds with one blast, like I told you before,” Mason said. “Ask Judith, here. She’ll tell you how well I know him.” The girl was silent, but her eyes voiced her thoughts more eloquently than her tongue might have.

  “Some will do anything to obtain the ‘priceless’—” Kriijorl said softly.

  “Cain, any time!”

  “You have laid a clever trap, Lieutenant.”

  “If it springs, sure. But where are those guard ships you were so worried about? I was counting on them, too. They should be all over the place by now.”

  And he was interrupted by the high-pitched scream of the flat, finned shapes that hurtled suddenly over the tree tops, circled, slid quickly downward.

  “FLAT!” Mason yelled. And as they stretched prone, they saw Cain running toward the ship from a great open shaft in the ground, a round, shiny thing beneath one arm.

  A probing needle of white hot flame stabbed out from one of the descending ships, and there was a scream, and then Cain fell, a charred skeleton, to the ground. The shiny thing he had carried rolled lazily along the grass, teetered on edge, plopped silently over.

  Mason was poised like a runner awaiting the starting gun. For a split second he hesitated as the guard ships touched down, their weapons momentarily screened by the lush foliage at the clearing’s edge.

  And then Mason was running, Judith and Kriijorl only steps behind him.

  There were perhaps seconds before the armed women of the Thrayxite guard detail would break from the forest’s edge.

  He stumbled, fell, and his outstretched hands touched the round, shiny thing, and he could smell the reek of Cain’s smouldering skeleton.

  Kriijorl and Judith hesitated.

  “Damn it, run!” and he felt his scream tear at his dry throat, and then clutched the metal disk to him and regained his feet in a single whip-like motion, and bolted after them toward the gaping air lock of the ship that Cain had never reached.

  There was a hissing sound and a wave of heat crackled behind him, seared his flesh beneath his tattered tunic. And there was another, inches before him, scorching smoking scars in the soft green turf, and shouted orders filled the air scant yards behind him.

  Then somehow he was at the air lock, and strong hands were pulling him over its edge, and it swung to, glowed red as a bolt of raw energy spent itself harmlessly against it.

  “Now Ihelos!” Mason said as he fought for new breath.

  MT WAS white, all white around him.

  He tried to sit up but there was the touch of gentle hands that stayed him, lowered him back upon the bed.

  There were two of them—tall, like Vikings, and memory returned slowly. There was a smaller one, too, standing straight and erect beside him, like a proud queen from the pages of Earth’s colorful history.

  Judith. And Kriijorl. And another. And in his hands there was the silver disk. The can.

  The can of records. The Book of the Saints.

  He tried again to straighten, and then heard the voice of the one whom he did not know.

  “I am Yhevvak, Grand Liege of Ihelos,” the voice said. “And I hold in my hands, Earthman, the Book of the Saints. I have read it, and I have broadcast to all of Thrayx what I have read. A truce delegation has already departed from that planet to meet us here in Space.”

  “But—” the word stuck in his throat, and it was hard to think.

  “Commander Kriijorl said that you suspected it was the key to our great trouble. You were right.

  “For it tells of a conference among the leaders of our two worlds many millenia ago; a conference held in secret, because of the nature of its subject—the very people of our worlds themselves. Secret, because of the decision concerning them and their staggering number. Too staggering for either planet any longer to feed. And the record itself was then committed to this single microtape, and itself, kept in secrecy since the day it was recorded.

  “At first shrouded in deliberate mysticism, it was at length remembered only as the Last Word of the Saints in the sudden wars which so quickly followed its creation, the true cause of which was skillfully falsified to the people of the time, and truly known only to those who made the microtape I hold here.

  “They were our greatest leaders; in them was invested the responsibility for the welfare and livelihood of our two planets, both materially and spiritually.

  “When they lived, those records say, travel in Space beyond the speed of light had not been accomplished; they believed such a feat an impossibility imposed by a condescending Nature that could be challenged too far. And they therefore knew no way of reaching beyond the planets of Ihelos and Thrayx for the food and resources that became so sorely depleted as both planets became, at length, stripped nearly bare as their populations swelled beyond saturation point.

  “Medical science had permitted the old to grow older; granted the new-born an almost certain purchase on
life once first breath had been drawn. Yet its greatest offering was rejected by the people; there were indignant cries at the merest suggestion that they intelligently regulate their number, so that their posterity might live in greater plenty than had they.

  “There was but one solution for our desperate leaders. For although warfare had long since vanished from our civilization as it had matured, it took with it Nature’s own unpleasant balance for her overgenerous fecundity.

  “The new balance, then, had to be of Man’s making. And so it was made.

  “Our leaders, our Saints, as we have come through the years to know them, were of course adept masters at the many subtle arts of propaganda, and they used those arts to the very limits of their skill. They deliberately fomented, as their ancient record shows, the wars, small at first and then ever larger, between Ihelos and Thrayx.

  “They could not have foreseen that one day there would be conflict for existence between the sexes; logically calculating intellect against intuitive, wily cunning in a battle to determine the most fit, who would then enjoy the right to survive.

  “Nor could they have foreseen that one day, because of the very conflict they fomented, the science of controlled genetics would at last be recognized as a necessity of survival to both factions.

  “Today we have our answer to the age old problem of keeping our consumption within the limits of our ability to produce for it; we have used it to survive. But to survive war, not peace.

  “And that, as you apparently suspected, Earthman, is the key.

  “We know now why we fought. And with the knowledge of the life forces with which we insured our continued existence during our years of battle, we may now become united worlds of peace again. For we shall use that knowledge to take more advisedly of Nature’s fruits than we took before.

  “Well done, Earthmen. And with our thanks, know that we shall be always in your debt.”

  Then Yhevvak bowed low, and left just the three of them together in the white hospital bay of his flagship.

  Kriijorl was smiling, and there was a shininess in Judith’s eyes.

  Mason grinned. “I hope those Thrayxite babes get a wiggle on,” he said. “Those Earth gals gotta get ‘em home! Their mothers’ll be frantic. Hey, girl, not in front of company!”

  The Man the Tech-Men Made

  He was a man of a hundred planets, drawn from the blackness of space to save a tech-galaxy from disintegration. He was Kane, the warrior-mechanic . . . memory-king of knowledgeless worlds . . . savior to millions . . . maniac to the ruling few—so they threw a dragnet over the stars to stop the heretic.

  THE relentless heat of yellow-white twin suns boiled the thin desert air and it seared his laboring lungs, and he knew why this was called the Desert of One Thousand Mirages. The Desert of One Thousand Hells would have been a better name.

  They said a man could go mad here. If not from the crazily twisting, undulating heat shapes themselves, then from the pain-tortured vagaries of his own brain. But mad or not, Jonny Kane knew he must somehow stay in the saddle that was net fashioned for human buttocks; stay astride the silver skinned, hairless beast never bred for human transportation, and ride.

  They could be all around him, of course, and he might never know until it was too late to wheel his fleet qharaak and dash again for freedom in yet another direction across the shifting, low-duned wastes. They could be but yards behind him but there was not the strength to look back, only to grip the thick reins twined about his bleeding wrists, to keep his cramped legs stiff about the qharaak’s sloping flanks. And ride, and choke on the smoking sand.

  His brain bubbled inside his head, and he shut his eyes.

  He would tire and lose his grip, and so lose his mount, and fry to death on the blinding whiteness of the sand. Or he would go crashing into them, and they would lead him back to the outpost village, and his death would be of their making. What chance, after all, had an Earth-descendant against the copper skinned native police of a Procyon planet, who rode its deserts as if they were the cool, green fields of the mother world of which his father had so often spoken? What chance?

  There was flame in his lungs, and fire was burning the insides of his half naked, once strong young body into crumbling, blackened ash. Ride—

  “Hold! Hold, or there’s a barb through your evil heart!”

  The booming command was from the left. And he wheeled the qharaak so sharply it reared and nearly lost its sextuple footing in the shifting sand. A sudden thrummm went past one ear. He tried to loose his legs enough for a kick in the lunging animal’s flanks, but the muscles in them were like steel clamps. They would not move.

  The reins about his wrists were slippery and stinging with sweat and sand as both mixed with his blood, and were pulled easily enough from his grasp by the vicious, sudden tug from one side.

  And then the overpowering odor of the other lathered qharaaks flooded his nostrils as the Dep-Troopers closed in upon him. He retched with it, and was sick.

  “Come on, you! You’re lucky our orders were dead or alive! Straighten up in that saddle or you’ll go back dragged from it!”

  A uyja-wood quirt split the skin across his back and somehow brought him nearly erect in the saddle. He let his eyes open a little at a time against the searing blaze of the desert. They had him ringed with their bows and barb shafts, already had his qharaak tethered to one of their own.

  And then they were taking him back. Back to the shimmering thing at the horizon that was the outpost village; back to the place where the gear box of his track car ad stalled for want of proper lubricant, and where the chase had begun.

  But he would not think about that. He knew about that, knew about the crime of it, and now he must try to think about the answers for the Dep-Court magistrate. They would be the same answers he had given the other times. There could be no new answers. New or old, none would be understood, or believed, for that matter. But he must think about something, or the half-visions in his mind would bring certain insanity now; the half-visions, the things to see that did not exist to be seen, the glaring white-yellow eyes of Procyon herself and her satellite star, the cruel black-gold eyes of the bearded, iron muscled Dep-Troopers that had caught him.

  “MAKE the prisoner stand straight before this court, Trooper!”

  The flesh splitting lash of pain wrenched him into a sort of pseudo-consciousness. He struggled to rise from the rough wooden floor on which he’d been thrown, and brought sound back to his ears, fuzzy sight to his eyes. The sound was of the crowd. A muffled crowd sound; they would still be outside, still struggling for a look at his broken down track despite the heavy trooper cordons that were around it, awaiting a qharaak team of sufficient size to haul it away.

  And the sight was of a windowless, thin-walled cubicle, sole court of this narrow, desert fringe Department, and of the Prokyman judge, and the Troopers standing idly with their stinging quirts at either side and just behind him.

  But he had been before Prokyman judges before. Once, even, there had been a jury of the local peasantry, and he had won an easy acquittal then because of his youth—it had been a full five Terrayears ago, when he had been barely 12 years old.

  He struggled unaided to his feet, faced the wooden throne like structure upon which the magistrate, girdled in coarse ruuk hide, sat toying with his polished mace of office. Beside him stood his Stenosmith. The Stenosmith held a slender scroll in one hand, but for the moment his legal superior let it go unnoticed, and fixed the Court’s prisoner with a gaze as hard as Terrestrial diamonds.

  “Jon Kane, aged 17 Sol III years, second generation Sol III descendant, renegade colonial resident of the Sol III agricultural Department of J’iira-IX: do you understand the charges against you?”

  He struggled to make his tongue move to form the clipped syllables of the Interplanetary. It was an old language, but he had never spoken it as easily as the one which his father had taught him, the one which he said had come from Terra. But he must learn the
Interplanetary, his father had said for some day, he might venture beyond the blue fields of the Department where he lived; someday, perhaps, even use it to speak with the starmen of the great ITA, who landed on Procyon V every seven cycles. Some day, perhaps, and the work of the language tutors would not have gone in vain.

  “Charges? These men have uttered no charges, Senior. They have pursued and threatened—”

  “Silence! Civil use of your tongue, or no tongue at all! The law prescribes trial even for heretics under the age of eleven cycles, or you would not be so fortunate as to be standing where you are! Stenosmith, your scroll!”

  In a quick motion the slender scroll was in die magistrate’s hands, and in another it was spread before him.

  “You are accused of entering this Department in a tracked vehicle being driven by its own power. The vehicle is of a type no longer receiving maintenance by the Intergalactic Technical Alliance, and therefore could no longer function.”

  “But, Senior, my vehicle is one which had, by chance, been so well constructed that it never suffered breakdown until—”

  “Prisoner, you are lying, and you know the penalty for perjury! Stenosmith, make note of the prisoner’s falsehood to the Court.

  The charges continue: You, Jon Kane, have been apprehended in neighboring Departments within the last two and one-half cycles, on various occasions, at the practice of making tools, and on one occasion at least, of using such tools in the attempted repair of malfunctioning facilities awaiting the legally prescribed maintenance of the ITA. Do you deny this?”

  “I—”

  “It is therefore the conclusion of this Court that the vehicle in which you rode into this Department was repaired and set into motion by yourself! Do you deny that?” And suddenly Kane felt something stir inside him; felt it through the fatigue, through the pain, through the torture that threatened to be all-consuming. He stood straight.