Complete Fiction (Jerry eBooks)

by Fox B. Holden

  The leader’s eyes flashed: Damn you and your infernal artistic integrity! but it was his mouth which, fortunately for him under the circumstances, did the talking.

  “Very well. As I said, both Sides are in perfect technological and therefore military balance—”

  “Balance is so important,” interrupted Angelo. Behind him, Ojar, the Orator was having a difficult time repressing a yelp of pure mirth. It was unfair, of course, to bait these stumble-witted fellows like this, but it was amusing—especially when Angelo did it, who, though a Painter, was well up on his word-play. “. . . Perhaps you have already noticed,” Angelo was going on, quite oblivious to the perspiration on the leader’s high forehead, and exactly as Ojar had expected, “how well we of Ste. Catherine observe the Fundamental Laws of Order. The Rhythm of our very way of life, for example—but excuse me! You were outlining your request . . .”

  The leader had reddened helplessly, and his subordinates had both stolen quick glances at him. It was as though images of the man himself, reflected from mirrors at either side, had suddenly taken on a volition of movement of their own. But quite quickly they became well-behaved images again.

  “Both sides have equally effective weapons and defenses,” the leader went on, “and so it has become a disastrous war of attrition. To win, we must have something they do not have, obviously.”

  “To bring your Side into Dominance, of course,” said Angelo sagely. “To prevent your Subordination, as it were . . .” Ojar had a sudden, violent fit of coughing.

  “Yes,” the leader said. There was a momentary blankness in his eyes, and Angelo decided that enough was enough. Unfairness was unfairness, after all. They must hear the man out.

  “We have looked back over history,” the leader said. “It was an unprecedented step, to be sure, but we were desperate! At any rate, we discovered that one time, it was possible to make an enemy believe he was wrong, and that you, his enemy, were right, through a rather obscure verbal art called, I believe it was, propaganda?”

  “Yes,” said Angelo. “The province in Art of writers and orators. As a painter or sculptor will create illusion with paints or stone, just so did the writer create illusion with letters.”

  “So we came to understand,” the leader said, trying a little note of sarcasm of his own. “Our present difficulty is this: we of course have no such peop—er, Artists—at our disposal. We of course tried our own hand at it but nobody ever seemed quite able to agree on just what it was we were trying to talk about, so—well—We have come to you. Will you do this for us? A few words, for the sake of humanity?”

  Clever, thought Maler, at that. An intended appeal to the philosophical side of the artistic mind. Maybe the poor wretch really meant it, even if he wasn’t aware that “humanity” meant both Sides.

  “To answer you,” Angelo was replying, “I’ll of course have to summon our Master of Letters. It may not be easy to win his assent, I warn you. He can trace his own ancestry all the way back to newspaper reporters, advertising copywriters and trade-journal writers—and so has naturally inherited their bitterness toward all such prostitutions of the Art of Writing, and artistic integrity in general. And you will admit that hacking out propaganda to order is of course just that, to say nothing of the moral aspects involved! However—”

  Magnanimously, Angelo lifted his right arm and beckoned, and a Student was at once at his side.

  “Fetch Master Forsyth at once. And tell him I said to leave his new Quarto behind; this is urgent.”

  The young woman left, and they waited.

  “A cigarette?” Angelo proffered the leader.

  There was surprise on the man’s face. “You mean you can make—”

  “Just crude paper and tobacco grown in the soil,” Angelo said apologetically. “Untouched by any rays but the sun’s, I’m afraid, and our few medicine-men—we have all kinds of hobbies here of course—just won’t comment. Here . . . and a light . . .”

  The leader had almost finished his cigarette when the Master of Letters arrived.

  “Angelo, you churl, sir! Do you know how long I’ve been working on that line? You know how difficult it is for me to get a decent trochee when I’m—oh, company? Capital! ‘Come fill the Cup, and in the Fire of Spring—’ ”

  “Please, Forsyth. These men are here on business. They want you to do them a favor.”

  Resignedly, Forsyth kept quiet. And listened for good measure.

  He listened for ten minutes. And then the leader was finished and Forsyth said “A pox on’t!”

  “Please, Forsyth—”

  “He’s right!” came Tharn’s voice. “I told you I didn’t like it, and I don’t, and—”

  “He doesn’t like it?” bellowed Forsyth. “Then by Heaven, I’ll do it! Teach you, sire, to make charcoal caricatures of me on a day when I’m not lampooning you! Very well, but I don’t think I’ve got too many apprentices that aren’t engaged right at the moment. Nonetheless, if—”

  The leader was beyond control. “Apprentices, did you say?” he croaked hoarsely. “Why, you—”

  “What in Dante did you think, man-child?” shot back Forsyth. “You don’t suppose I’d give you finished, creative writers for the job of a trained ape, do you? Some apprentices I’ve got, and some apprentices you’ll get—and only because Dean Angelo here says so.”

  THE THREE MEN from Earth strode with military precision back toward their ship. The leader was in the center, and his subordinates, each with bulging briefcases in both hands, were on either side. A large group from the colony walked at a slower pace behind. Angelo, as usual, was at their head, and flanking him were Tharn and Forsyth.

  “Another whole week wasted!” lamented Forsyth. “Not that the time means anything, but those sensitive young boys and girls of mine will never be the same! One of them, just this morning, told me she was thinking of taking up politics as a hobby! The tortures I go through for you, Angelo—”

  “I still don’t like it!” Tharn cut him off. “And I don’t like them! And, Forsyth, I saw what you had your precious little apprentices doing! You had them writing exactly the same tripe they wrote for that other crowd that landed two weeks ago!”

  “Tharn, you certainly aren’t the only one who has no use for that barbaric breed. So—as long as they remain equally matched, they’ll eventually, uh—”

  “But that means—”

  “A Fundamental Law of Order, of course, my dear Tharn. Balance, as I think I may already have pointed out . . .”

  Forsyth quoted something from on obscure source about the importance of artistic integrity, and then they watched together as the ship from Earth blasted homeward.

  Dearest Enemy

  Well trained actors are taught the old tradition that the show must go on. But what’s the point of it all when your audience is very, very dead?

  FROM SOMEWHERE there was a buzzing sound. It kept repeating. The gentle throb of it vibrated his eardrums; the vibrations registered somewhere at the bottom edges of his brain. Buzzzz. Insistently, like a wasp. Like a trapped wasp . . . But there were no wasps in the streamlined metal shell of Vanguard-I.

  Better answer another part of his brain whispered. Better answer . . . they want to tell you what to do . . . God!

  Some sweat oozed from the dark bunches of his eyebrows, fogged the binocular eye-piece of the orbit-synchronized refractor, but he kept watching, he could not stop watching. Buzzz! Buzzzz!

  Red gouts of flame, as big as a pin-head, as big as a shirt-button, as big as—damn the fogging-up! No, no it was the mushrooms, not the fogging; you could count them, like puffs of gunsmoke along a firing-line stippling the Atlantic seaboard, now branching, riddling westward—others drifting eastward from the Pacific as though groping toward a pre-planned rendezvous. Buzzzz! Buzzzz!

  He would answer. There would be the sound of another man’s voice and that would make it all real. If he silenced the buzzer and listened to the voice it would be real and not a final training-fi
lm; the films would be over, the lectures over, the flight-tests over, the eliminations over and he and Streeter chosen and Streeter dead and buried at Space and now he was alone up in Vanguard-I . . . Vanguard-I was “up” and Earth was “down” and both were real. Beyond the buzzing, both would be real.

  The strong young voice was an old voice as it answered the buzzing, as it gave sound to words for the UHF’s panel-mike.

  “Home Plate, Home Plate, this is Mrs. Grundy, over . . .”

  “Mrs. Grundy this is Home Plate. Are you reading? Are you ready for a circus or is all your money gone? Over . . .”

  “Ready for a circus. Regret delay in acknowledging. I—was in Observation, over.”

  “Mrs. Grundy, your Daddy-o wants to talk to you so bye bye baby . . .”

  General Knight himself. Knight himself to talk to him . . . so it was that bad.

  Of course it was that bad!

  “Mrs. Grundy can you read, over . . .” Knight’s voice. It sounded calm. It sounded unruffled. You had to know Knight, you had to have heard him often to know that it was not calm, that it was not at all unruffled . . .

  “Even the small print Daddy-o, over . . .”

  “No words twice so baby make marks—” Thorn’s hand flashed to the card-punch and magnetic-tape unit switches, flicked them to ON-RECORD. “—been surprised, but not taken completely off balance; retaliation now in progress as you have probably already observed or will observe in course of orbital passage. Plan Able Zebra effective immediately . . .” The words were coming so fast they were slurred, and Knight was exaggerating his own Alabama accent: “Expect report once each turn . . .”

  He would not have needed the recording or even words twice. Each of Knight’s directions was graven into him as it was spoken.

  To cease all scientific observation and recording at once; to begin military observation of the Enemy and his puppet-states, and all possibly-discernible activities, immediately. To remember that as the coast of California appeared on his horizon he was to begin transmitting in code, and that he would finish transmitting before the Atlantic coast disappeared over the horizon behind him. To remember that his stores of fuel were for orbit-correction only, to be used for effecting an Earthside landing only upon explicit and properly-coded order, or upon threat of otherwise unavoidable destruction. To calculate present stores of food concentrate and air to the hour if possible, not forgetting that with Streeter gone the time-lapse between rendezvous with the supply rocket should be at least doubled. To remember a thousand things; things he already knew by rote . . . but the tape and card-punch units clicked softly away, recording, recording . . .

  “. . . and Mrs. Grundy here’s a morsel for you—you may have a new neighbor in your block but not like you at all—there’s probably a world between you—don’t take any wooden nickels baby. Say good-bye to Daddy-o baby, over . . .”

  “Home Plate this is Mrs. Grundy sees all and heard everything, out.” The whole transmission had taken less than two minutes. Now the UHF was off and there was one break, anyway. If, somehow, the Enemy had succeeded in getting up a satellite of his own, he had at least—according to Knight—sacrificed the ability to directly monitor Thorn’s radio for invisibility. Vanguard-I was aloft for geophysical purposes only, according to the propaganda-pitch back home. But as far as Big Red knew, it was loaded to the locks with as much armament as a thing of its comparatively tiny size could carry.

  And as far as Thorn himself knew, nobody making geophysical observations had ever needed to do it through the tubes of missile-launchers like the ones that were cuddled snugly in Vanguard-I’s blunt forehull . . .

  Such little thoughts whipped quickly through his mind as he tried to make it regain balance for the immediate tasks besetting him, because they were little and simple and easy to grasp and discard. They could keep him from going crazy. It was the bigger thoughts—the bigger ones that might come later—they were the kind he had to keep out of his head.

  Major Joshua Thorn began his work with the equipment, to modify it for use as Daddy-o had told him.

  He could do it automatically, do it in his sleep, do it blind. Couldn’t watch and do it, though. Watch later. Think of the little things now that were easy while the equipment got automatically modified. Little things to keep the big ones like what was happening down there from tipping him over into the whirlpool of madness that was trying so hard to pull at him.

  Little things . . .

  “PLEASE BE seated, Major Thorn.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “This will be your Final Security interrogation. To be followed, upon its favorable completion, by Final Briefing. Before we begin, do you have any questions, Major?”

  The thick lenses of the glasses reflected the interrogation cubicle’s harsh lighting and would not let him see accurately into the pale eyes that blinked behind them. But it was almost as though he and Brigadier Robert McQuine, USAF, Intelligence, were old friends. And the sweating faces of the three G-2 psychiatrists that gleamed at McQuine’s left on the opposite end of the big oval-shaped conference-table—they were more than familiar. They had never thought he, Thorn, was really sane. What really sane man who had flown twice too many missions in one war would volunteer to fly in the next that followed? What sane man would go begging for military flight-test assignments in weird ships that had never been flown anywhere but in a wind-tunnel and on computer-tapes. And what sane man—God help him—what man in his senses would ask to be fired a thousand miles off the Earth with only the knowledge that a thing the size of a basketball had circled the planet successfully for almost a year before it fell back and burned up?

  Had the Major ever had thoughts of—well, of doing away with himself? Had the Major hated his father when he was young? Been afraid of girls? (Oh, is that a fact, Major? Well! Well, now . . .)

  Only the faces of the three Senate Committee members were different. But they usually were.

  “Yes sir, one question. It was my understanding—and Captain Streeter’s, I’m sure—that Final Security and Briefing had been scheduled for about nine weeks from now. There has been no acceleration in the final phases of our program, so—”

  “I, ah—” McQuine interrupted smoothly “think that question might best be answered by your Final Briefing officers, Major. Now, any other questions?”

  “No sir.” So that was it, all right. The rumors, as usual, had a germ of truth in them. All rumors did. And these had been more persistent than most. Cold war not so cold anymore. General Adams transferring. That last note from Big Red—didn’t all get to the papers! Cold war not so cold anymore . . .

  “Now, Major, when you were a sophomore in high-school—the book entitled A World United not on your required English or Political Science reading lists, was it?”

  “No sir, not as I recall, but—”

  “Then why did you read it? You have admitted before that you did read it—”

  Pause. All up to him. Every single word, every single inflection, up to him . . .

  “I took quite an interest in my studies, both in high-school and in college, sir, as I believe my records will show you. They’ll show that I also read books relating to other courses that weren’t a regular part of the curriculum . . .”

  Nodding. But looking him squarely in the face, hesitating just the right length of time. Then suddenly “Major Thorn do you swear here and now in the presence of witnesses that your allegiance to your country comes first above all with the sole possible exception of Almighty God?”

  “I do so swear . . .”

  And on and on . . .

  “. . . why did you major in the Fine Arts in high-school, switch to Engineering in college, then switch again to take your degrees in World History and Political Science . . . were you ever heard to say, or reported to have said, or did you in fact say . . . Major, I have here the records of . . .”

  The Senators had their questions. The psychiatrists had theirs.

  “. . . hesitation, Major,
in firing upon an Enemy aircraft, even though disabled . . . guilt-feeling at destroying a city containing almost one million people . . . Major you told us that . . . training for five years, now, and you realize . . .”

  More and more and more, but it was not so difficult to keep his nerves straightened out as it had been the first time or the next time after that. He had told the absolute truth as far as he could possibly know it. So it was just a matter of giving the same answers he had always given. Let ’em make what they could of the truth . . .

  “Yes, Senator, I readily admit having written my senior essay on the basis of the book A World United. Yes sir, I studied philosophy and some foreign languages in college . . . No sir—no sir, nothing like that. No. Never . . .”

  And then hardly an hour after it was all over, less than an hour to relax for Streeter and himself, cooped up in a single room with cigarettes and magazines and nothing else and nobody else to talk to, hardly an hour, and then Final Briefing was underway.

  General Groton: Typical Orders of Procedure.

  General Simms: Technical Details.

  General Orton: Estimate of the Present Situation. Rumors, hell . . .

  And then the Secretary of Defense himself.

  “Major Thorn, Captain Streeter . . . There is probably little I can add to all that has been so thoroughly ingrained in you in your five years of training for this experiment, or learned by both of you, the hard way, in war. But there are certain points I feel I ought to emphasize personally . . . even though I know you’ve heard them many, many times before.

  “First, this is your country. In the adventure—in the duty, that you are about to undertake, there must be no mistake that your nation comes above all other considerations! Now, I don’t question your devotion, I merely re-impress . . .

  Pause. The man was good, all right.

  “Second, despite what you may have heard from—from any of various sources in recent months, our cold-war Enemy is hard-pressed; he is desperate, and he is likewise determined. Determined as even you may not guess. Our Intelligence has learned that he has trained women to bear arms as well as children for his armies. He has trained them to march, to bivouac, to fly intercontinental bombers, to fly rocket interceptors, to go to the attack with men—and on an equal basis, and in almost equal numbers. A point to remember, even from where you shall soon sit! Don’t forget it.