“Never mind. There’s a better use for this fellow than killing him by inches. Perhaps he places little value on his own life, but when it comes to those of a few billion people. Yes. Haine, do you think you could wreck a Geejay?”
“Wreck a—” There was the sound of hoarse breathing from a half dozen men, and Jon felt something stir inside him, but it was as though he were a thing disconnected from his physical body; that he no longer had power of decision over it. “—sure, I guess so. A double-A in reverse! Haw! Where?”
“Canis Major, Proky system, if that’s where he’s from.”
“Don’t look like a Prokyman to me.”
“Never mind that. Could you do tire job so that the ITA couldn’t repair it? And I mean NOT AT ALL?”
“Hell, sir, one of our E-blasters would do that much—”
“I have a feeling that one very simple way to gain our end, Haine, would be through the use of our E-blasters against every ship the ITA possesses—and just what do you suppose that would leave us? This fellow here wasn’t so far wrong, you know, when he pointed out what would happen in the event the ITA were suddenly destroyed. We’d be left with a universe full of the screaming meemies. We’d be on top, but on top of the biggest booby hatch you ever saw! If we’re going to do ourselves any good, we leave the ITA in one piece. The only difference being, we tell them what to do!”
“Now ain’t that nice of us, to just walk in like that without firing a charge—”
“I’m doing the thinking around here, Johnson!”
“It’s a cinch you ain’t doing much of the shooting! Letting fancy-brains, here, tell you—”
Jon heard the sudden sound of bone crunching against bone; there was a choked yelp of pain, and the sound of a man falling heavily. Then Stine was talking again, softly.
“Anyone else here who prefers muscle to brain power?”
“Sir—Johnson’s—you—”
“Bury him later, and listen to me now!
I want the Gravity Justifier in Procyon smashed so that the Tinkers can’t do a thing with it—but so that he can! Do you understand, Haine?”
“I can smash it up so that we couldn’t put it back together in a million years.”
“You’ll be responsible. Let’s get this man aboard the New World and be ready to up-ship within an hour. We’re going to have our cake, gentlemen, and eat it, too! Unless, of course, our friend Kane, here, will be able to watch ten billion people die as an entire planetary system breaks up, and do nothing about it! All right, let’s get going!”
And then there was the sound of another man coming into the already crowded cubicle.
“Senator Stine, sir! Look what we found coming down the ladder! And in a shooting mood, too! I’ll need a new space rig—”
“JON!”
“Well! The IT A hasn’t lost much time! She looks a little bit white, doesn’t she, Thurston? And seems to know our friend, here! Gentlemen, I think things are going to work out rather well . . .”
And that was the moment that Jon Kane returned to full consciousness, and full pain.
But he kept his eyes shut, his voice silent.
THE banks of view-screens in the New World’s NIC room reflected a kaleidoscope of horror as no man had seen horror before, and as only a man of Kane’s century could understand it. To the uninitiated observer of an earlier time whose entire life experience had been within the narrow confines of a single planet, the softly glowing spheres in the screens would have seemed remote things; untouchable, and of only speculative interest. The interest may have been heightened slightly by the sudden rifts that appeared in the surfaces of some, or by the peculiarly undulating ocean masses that seemed bent on erasing the land masses of others.
But to Jon, securely shackled to an ack-seat as was Deanne beside him, the screens showed an impending wave of death and destruction on a scale that bordered on the unthinkable.
Procyon I and II were already torn near the point of total break-up; III, IV and V, because of their greater masses, were trembling with a slower rhythm, but the close-up screens showed their largest cities had already begun to crumble. Their streets were clogged with both dead and living, and the gaping mouths of panic stricken faces were eerily silent.
The six outer planets had not yet felt their first tremors, but they had begun to enter subtly-altered orbital paths, and whole continents were unnaturally bathed in the hellish light of twin suns that spewed great, flaming masses of their life-stuff with unchecked abandon into the infinite well of the void.
The largest screen showed a wide, wafer-thin disc floating with an inhuman serenity in the blackness, its flat plane tipped gently to the ecliptic, its surface crawling with tiny ant-like creatures that were men. Hovering above it was a glistening, pencil-shaped object from which more men came, their tiny forms followed by irregularly shaped masses, weightless on the invisible tow-lines.
“Not doing much good, are they, Kane?”
The big man hulked above him, beefy face florid but split with a relaxed, confident grin. Jon broke his long silence.
“Starn has told you he would surrender! Why can’t you accept it, and then I promise you I’ll—”
“You’ll do what? You’d pull everything in the book and you know it, Kane, and we’d end up having to kill you or be killed ourselves. And if you were to die.” Jon turned his glance toward Deanne, saw her shudder, then turn her eyes away from the screens, bitter defeat mingled tightly with the tears in them. “And anyway,” Stine was saying, “Starn’s not the boss anymore! And what good d’you think it’s going to do me to push over a has-been? B-Haaq is the one who’s calling their plays now, Kane. And B-Haaq is the boy who wants to fight! Too bad you didn’t kill him when you had the chance! Look at him out there! Trying to tell me he can fix it, or anything I can do to it! Telling me if I move this ship in a mile closer he’ll blow me out of Space! Oh, brother—”
“He could, Stine,” Jon said. And the big man whirled.
“With those antiquated pop guns he carries? Don’t try to make me angry, Kane. He’s going to sweat it out there until he and his whole damn crew drops. And then I’m sending you in! By that time things’ll be so bad I’ll know I can trust you. You’re the type, Kane! Fight like hell up to the last second, and then comes the noble, heroic sacrifice part. Oh, you’ll do the job, all sight after you’ve sat here watching long enough!”
Jon bit his lip, watched the big man stalk back and forth before the wide banks of screens.
“I could beat him in less time than it takes to tell it with E-blasters!” Stine was saying. “But they say there’s a better way of winning arguments than with guns, don’t they, Master Kane? Slaves are always more valuable than corpses, for one thing, and for another, I think people ought to know that Martin Stine has more to his string than guns alone! Yes . . .” His broad back was to both Jon and Deanne, now, and he was staring out through a wide port into the gem-studded blackness, and his words were for his own ears. “They will know who is a technician and who is not! The IT A is weak with age—and the weak become the slaves, and the strong become the masters! They shall see.”
“Stine, you’re a fool!”
The big man turned, faced Jon, and his big face blanched in sudden anger, and then the color flooded back to it and he laughed.
“Stine, do you know what B-Haaq will do when he realizes that he has failed? When he realizes that the woman who spurned him and the man who deserted his ranks are aboard this ship? Do you know what he’ll do rather than knuckle under to you? He’s the same kind of man you are, Stine. He’ll come gunning with everything he’s got! You’ll be a seive before you know what hit you . . . and for once I’ll be glad to see B-Haaq take a trick!”
He heard Deanne gasp, could almost feel the trembling of her body.
“That’s enough out of you, Kane, or there’ll be a couple dozen more bandages on that honest face of yours! If that puppy even turns his nose toward me, I’ll show him what real guns are!
And let him sweat out there without his engines for awhile!”
“You only think you will! You haven’t the faintest idea of what alloy the Tinkers build their ships, and you know it! And it’s going to be fun watching you find out.”
“If they use the tin they use to fix everything else.”
“They may be stupid, Stine, but they’ve been around quite awhile.”
“All right, so you know what alloy their hulls are built of! So my batteries of electrocannon will—
“Bounce off like a flashlantern beam, Stine. But I guess you’ll want to wait and see for yourself. And if I know B-Haaq, you’ll get the chance!”
And suddenly Stine was towering over him again. Jon winced at the vicious slap that landed squarely on his misshapen face.
“You’ll tell me the alloy! Do you hear me?” A slap harder than the first. “Do you understand, Kane?”
Jon felt blood trickle down his chin.
“I’ll not tell you a thing, Stine. Not about the alloy, or even how to rig your guns to beat it.”
The next blow was with Stine’s closed fist. Jon’s head snapped back viciously, and he held on by sheer will to consciousness. He tensed for another blow. It did not come. And suddenly, Stine’s voice was a calm, almost silky thing, barely loud enough for Jon to hear.
“A pity,” he was saying, “that your man is so defiant a fellow’, Lenantech. I almost imagine that even after the risk you took to save his hide, he’d watch your pretty face be beaten to a pulp rather than tell me the things I’d like to know! That’s the way with these noble fellows, you know. Of course, a girl’s face isn’t everything. But, I suppose that he’d even—”
“Stine, you wouldn’t dare!”
“Care to try me, Master Kane?”
“Damn you, Stine—”
The big man clenched his right fist, raised it, and Jon watched Deanne’s face whiten, saw the silent plea in her eyes in the quick glance she gave him. But her taut lips did not move.
“You had better speak, Kane—”
“All right! All right, I’ll rig your guns for you!”
“And you’d better hurry! Unless my screens are out of order, your precious ten billion Prokymen haven’t too much time left.”
Jon looked at the screens again, and he knew his horror was reflected in his swollen face. Something writhed sickeningly inside him and he looked at the screen in which the Geejay swung. B-Haaq and his men were at last leaving it! Leaving it, giving up.
But he said nothing as Stine summoned Haine from in-ship, and kept his silence as the squat, burly man unshackled him while Stine held a hand weapon at Deanne’s head.
“I’ll need her to help,” he bit out then. “On your guns, as well as on the Justifies She’s worked on double-A’s before.”
“She stays, Kane!”
“Very well, she stays. But if this outfit can’t get the Geejay fixed either, people won’t be too impressed, will they. I say I need her, Stine. That thing out there is too badly wrecked even for me, now, alone. But it’s up to you. I’ll rig your guns.”
“All right, Kane! All right. The woman goes with you. But she stays right here until you’ve done a job on my batteries!”
“You win, I’m not arguing. Let’s get it over with.”
Haine led him out of the NIC room, and he could feel Deanne’s accusing eyes at his back. She hated him now. He knew it.
XI
THE thin disc shown weirdly in the light of the tortured binary, and Jon guided Deanne’s suit-bloated figure up over its lip, then clambered to its sleek metal surface himself. It was a tricky business, without weight, and without sufficient handling knowledge of the alien-built power pack to attempt the delicate maneuvering required with it.
Together, wordlessly, they reeled in the cylindrical capsule which contained their tools.
A scant ten thousand miles off, B-Haaq waited in the Flagship. Waiting, Jon knew, for an element of Tinker ships to arrive and form about him in battle formation. And when they came. Yes, he knew what B-Haaq would do.
He looked bade, and could barely discern the dark mass of Stine’s great craft as it blotted out the myriad of stars behind it. Power against power. They would have to hurry.
He moved toward Deanne, and she moved away. He grabbed her wrist, nulled her to him, touched her helmet with his, and spoke rapidly.
“Keep your radio off, and we’ll talk this way! Now do just as I say, and before you put me down for a sellout, work like you’ve never worked before! We may have thirty minutes—an hour maybe, before this whole system goes to pieces! And less than that before the other fireworks start!”
Then he was busy getting at the tools, getting at the heart of the Justifier.
Stine’s men had messed it up pretty badly. B-Haaq’s men had not made matters any better. The operation itself was a simple one, but there was so much to be undone.
Wordlessly, Deanne worked with him in the awful silence. He thought as he worked how ridiculous it must seem to whoever watched—two pygmies on the face of a mechanism hardly a hundred yards across, pitting their wits against a Nature gone mad—two pygmies, attempting to come to grips with an entire solar system! Working alone, in the cold and the dark, with only their helmlanterns to guide their eyes and hands.
Deanne worked smoothly where she recognized the few standard procedures that Jon employed, fumbled a little as he took shortcuts that she had never imagined possible. Yet somehow, he noticed, she managed almost to keep up with him, seemed to be following his thinking almost by instinct.
And that was about all it was that differentiated him from the standard ITA technician. Instinct; imagination coupled with it, and the knowledge that could only be learned by an ever-inquiring mind. Jon Kane. Scientist.
Finally, he touched her helmet again. “That does it, girl. She’s going. Within twenty hours the storm’ll be over; within less than one, things will start taming down on the planets. And then we’ll get your uncle to take us back to Sol system, and do a real job on the one there.”
He saw her eyes widen. “My—uncle?”
“Yeah. Now keep quiet a minute. I—”
“Turn around, both of you! I want to see your faces just once more!”
Jon whirled. He saw Deanne shriek inside her helmet. At the lip of the great disc, B-Haaq stood, a hand-weapon in each gauntlet!
“I knew who they’d send, Master Kane! Did you think I would leave this little project all to you, and give away all the credit to boot? Stand still!”
“It’s Director Gentech Starn who gets the credit for this one, B-Haaq! And I’m pretty sure, after seeing you in action, that he’ll know, this time how to use it! Because he knows now that you can’t do today’s business with yesterday’s tools and be in business tomorrow!”
“Damn pretty, lover boy! Is that the way you take other men’s women, too?”
Damn him. Jon thought. Time’s running out now. Running out.
“Suit yourself on that! I think I trimmed you good!” And with that Jon kicked viciously against the ponderous mass of the tool cylinder, launched himself straight at B-Haaq!
Two guns flared!
The twin beams flashed straight into Jon’s flying figure, then bounced harmlessly into Space!
And then the two of them were drifting in the void, fighting silently and desperately for a death hold.
The universe wheeled crazily as Jon fended off the other’s gauntlets as they grabbed for his tank hoses, and then he struck with all the strength he could at the fragile face plate. And was parried.
Then for a moment their helmets touched.
“You’re a real jerk, Majtech! Why do you think I didn’t take any of those guns with me from the Flagship’s arsenal? Hell, there wasn’t one in there that worked!”
B-Haaq made a desperate grab for the side-dog on Jon’s helmet; caught it, began to twist!
Jon clamped the suited arm, held it . . . held it, twisted his body. Then fingered the suit pack into blazi
ng life, melting a horrible, gaping hole in the Majtech’s suit!
For the merest fraction of a second he saw the terror stricken grimace of hatred and disbelief on B-Haaq’s thin face, and then the interior of the helmet was a mass of exploding flesh and blood.
He whirled. Blasted recklessly back to the Justifier, almost missed; back-blasted, slid.
He grabbed Deanne about the waist of her suit, and then flicked on his space radio.
“This is Kane calling Stine! Kane, calling Stine! Do you hear me, Stine?”
His earphones crackled. “What the blue Jupiter is going on out there, Kane? Have you—”
“Stine, you’re a real dumbhead! A real Prokyman bat brain! You should have learned better who to trust by this time! The girl and I have done a job for you out here. You’ll never get it fixed now, not in ten million years! Sure, a system dies; it gives its life, but so that people like you can’t make other people think you’re God and enslave others like it! You’re through, Stine!”
“Kane, you’re going to die where you stand!” The earphones almost shook from their connections.
And Jon pulled at Deanne, pulled her prone beside him on the smooth metal of the nearly-flat disc!
“Shield your eyes!”
Every gun in Stine’s batteries blazed. Blazed, and smashed inward in a blinding, corruscating sea of blue-white flame that for a moment seemed to rival Procyon herself! For silent seconds, the great ship seemed to devour itself in the pent up energies suddenly unleashed in a single hell-spawned torrent of fire from its erupting bowels, then it was no longer matter but a great wraith of superhot gasses fast dissipating into the dark of Infinity.
“Jon! Jon, darling—”
“It’s O.K., princess. It’s O.K. now.”
“But you—”
“I fixed his guns for him. He made me do it, remember? Oh, I fixed ’em good!”
And then they both laughed. Laughed until the tears came, two pygmies in Space, two pygmies against a solar system of planets with a whole universe to hear them.
Then slowly, two fine trails of fire started toward a slender, streamlined shape that hovered ten thousand miles off.
Complete Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Page 48