Earth's Last Fortress

by A. E. van Vogt

  VOLUNTEERS FOR THE TOMORROW FRONT

  It looked like a perfectly innocent store front, a volunteer enrollment office for young idealists who wanted to help the desperate forces of a young democracy overseas win their civil war. The young girl who sat at the desk inside was attractive, sympathetic, and would see that you got your passage safely.

  But it was all a trap. It was indeed a recruiting station, but the war for which it brainwashed its deluded cannon fodder was out of this world—remote in time, remote in space, and nobody would ever return alive. As for the girl—she was as much a slave of that monstrous future-world machine as if she were chained to the desk.

  Except for one thing that even the inhuman superscience of EARTH’S LAST FORTRESS did not suspect —that Norma was the secret lever that could shatter their universe!

  * * *

  A. E. VAN VOGT is rightfully regarded as one of the great masters of modern science-fiction. Establishing a new pace for brilliancy of narration and a new high mark for originality of concept, each of his books has achieved recognition as an imaginative classic. Van Vogt was born in Canada, but now is a resident of Los Angeles, where he has been active in the exploration of new fields of thought.

  * * *

  Ace Books have published many of his novels, of which THE PAWNS OF NULL-A (D-187), EMPIRE OF THE ATOM (D-242), and SIEGE OF THE UNSEEN (D-391) are still available.

  EARTH’S LAST FORTRESS

  by

  A. E. VAN VOGT

  ACE BOOKS, INC.

  23 West 47th Street, New York 36, N. Y.

  Earth’s Last Fortress

  Copyright ©, 1960, by Ace Books, Inc.

  All Rights Reserved

  Magazine version entitled Recruiting Station appeared in Astounding Science-Fiction and is copyright, 1942, by Street & Smith Publications, Inc.

  Printed in U.S.A.

  1

  She didn’t dare! Suddenly, the night was a cold, enveloping thing. The edge of the broad, black river gurgled evilly at her feet as if, now that she had changed her mind, it hungered for her.

  Her foot slipped on the wet, sloping ground, and her thoughts grew blurred with the terrible, senseless fear that things were reaching out of the night, trying to drown her now against her will. She fought her way up the bank and slumped, breathlessly, onto the nearest park bench. Dully, she watched the gaunt man come along the pathway past the light standard. So sluggish was her mind that she was not aware of surprise when she realized he was coining straight toward her.

  The purulent yellowish light made a crazy patch of his shadow across her where she sat. His voice, when he spoke, was vaguely foreign in tone, yet modulated, cultured. He said, “Are you interested in the Calonian cause?”

  Norma stared. There was no quickening in her brain, but suddenly she began to laugh. It was funny, horribly, hysterically funny. To be sitting here, trying to get up the nerve for another attempt at those deadly waters, and then to have some crack-brain come along and—

  “You’re deluding yourself, Miss Matheson,” the man went on coolly. “You’re not the suicide type.”

  “Nor the pickup type!” She answered automatically. “Beat it before—”

  Abruptly, it penetrated that the man had called her by name. She looked up sharply at the dark blank that was his face. His head against the background of distant light nodded as if in reply to the question that quivered in her thought.

  “Yes, I know your name. I also know your history and your fear.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that a young scientist named Garson arrived in the city tonight to deliver a series of lectures. Ten years ago, when you and he graduated from the same university, he asked you to marry him, but you wanted a career. And now you’re terrified that in your extremity you might turn to him for assistance.”

  “Stop!”

  The man seemed to watch her as she sat there breathing heavily. He said at last, quietly, “I think I have proved that I am not simply a casual philanderer.”

  “What other kind of philanderer is there?” Norma asked, sluggish again. But she made no objection as he sank down on the far end of the bench. His back was still to the light, his features night-enveloped.

  “Ah,” he said, “you joke. You are bitter. But that is an improvement. You feel now, perhaps, that if somebody has taken an interest in you, all is not lost.”

  Norma said dully, “People who are acquainted with the basic laws of psychology are cursed with the memory of them, even when disaster strikes into their lives. All I’ve done the last ten years is—” She stopped, then: “You’re very clever. Without more than arousing a mild suspicion, you’ve insinuated yourself into the company of an hysterical woman. What’s your purpose?”

  “I intend to offer you a job.”

  Norma’s laugh sounded so harsh in her own ears that she thought, startled, I am hysterical! Aloud, she said, “An apartment, jewels, a car of my own, I suppose?”

  His reply was cool. “No. To put it frankly, if I were looking for a mistress, I’d pass you by. You are not pretty enough as you are right now. Too angular, mentally and physically. That’s been one of your troubles the last ten years: developing introversion of the mind which has influenced the shape of your body unfavorably.”

  The words shivered through the suddenly stiffened muscles of her body. With an enormous effort, she forced herself to relax. She said, “I had that coming to me. Insults are good for hysteria. So now what?”

  “Are you interested in the Calonian cause?”

  “There you go again,” she complained. “But, yes, I’m for it. Birds of a feather, you know.”

  “I know very well indeed. In fact, in those words you named the reason why I am here tonight, hiring a young woman who is up against it. Calonia, too, is up against it and—” He stopped. In the darkness, he spread his shadowlike hands. “You see: good publicity for our recruiting centers.”

  Norma nodded. It seemed to her that she did see, and suddenly she didn’t trust herself to speak. Her hand trembled as she took the key he held out.

  “This key,” he said, “will fit the lock of the front door leading to the apartment above the center. The apartment is yours while you have the job. You can go there tonight if you wish, or wait until morning if you fear this is merely a device. Now, I must give you a warning.”

  “Warning?”

  “Yes. The work we are doing is illegal. Actually, only the American government can enlist American citizens and operate recruiting stations. We exist on sufferance and sympathy, but at any time someone may lay a charge and the police will have to act.”

  Norma nodded rapidly. “That’s no risk,” she said. “No judge would ever—”

  “The address is 322 Carlton Street,” he cut in smoothly. “And for your information, my name is Dr. Lell.”

  Norma had the distinct sense of being pushed along too swiftly for caution. She hesitated, her mind on the street address. “Is that near Bessemer?”

  It was his turn to hesitate. “I’m afraid,” he confessed, “I don’t know this city very well, at least not in its twentieth century. You see,” he finished suavely, “I was here many years ago, around the mid-century.”

  Norma wondered vaguely why he bothered to explain. She said half-accusingly, “You’re not a Calonian. You sound—French, maybe.”

  “You’re not a Calonian either,” he said, and stood up abruptly. She watched his great gloom-wrapped figure walk off into the night and vanish.

  2

  She stopped short in the deserted night street. The sound that came was like a whisper touching her brain; a machine whirring somewhere with a soft humming sound. For a moment, her mind concentrated on the shadow vibrations;
and then, somehow, they seemed to fade like figments of her imagination. Suddenly, there was only the street and the silent night. The street was dimly lighted, and that brought doubt, sharp and tinged with fear. She strained her eyes and traced the numbers on the doors until she came to 322. That was it! The place was in darkness. She peered at the signs that made up the window display:

  FIGHT FOR THE BRAVE CALONIANS!

  THE CALONIANS ARE FIGHTING FREEDOM’S FIGHT—YOUR FIGHT!

  IF YOU CAN PAY YOUR OWN WAY, IT WOULD BE APPRECIATED.

  OTHERWISE WE’LL GET YOU OVER!

  There were other signs, but they were essentially the same, all terribly honest and appealing if you really thought about the desperate things that made up their grim background. Illegal, of course. But the man had admitted that, too. With sudden end of doubt, she took the key from her purse.

  There were two doorways, one on either side of the window. The one to the right led into the recruiting station. The one on the left led up dimly lighted stairs. The apartment at the top was uninhabited. The door had a bolt. She clicked it home, and then, wearily, headed for the bedroom. It was as she lay in the bed that she grew aware again of the faint whirring of a machine. It was a mere whisper of sound, and, queerly, it seemed to reach into her brain. The very last second before she drifted into sleep, the pulse of the vibration, remote as the park bench, was a steady beat inside her.

  All through the night that faint whirring was there. Only occasionally did it seem to be in her head. She was aware of turning, twisting, curling, straightening and, in the fractional wakefulness that accompanied each move, the tiniest vibrational tremors would sweep down along her nerves like infinitesimal currents of energy.

  Spears of sunlight, piercingly brilliant through the small window, brought her awake at last. She lay taut and strained for a moment and then relaxed, puzzled. There was not a sound from the maddening machine, only the raucous noises of the awakening street. She found food in the refrigerator and in the little pantry. The weariness of the night vanished swiftly before the revivifying power of breakfast. She thought with gathering interest, What did he look like, that strange-voiced man of night?

  Relief flooded her when the key unlocked the door to the recruiting room, for there had been in her mind a fear that this was all quite mad. She shuddered the darkness out of her system. The world was sunlit and cheerful, not the black and gloomy abode of people with angular introversion of the mind.

  She flushed at the memory of the words. There was no pleasure in knowing that the man’s clever analysis of her was true. Still stinging, she examined the little room. There were four chairs, a bench, a long wooden counter; newspaper clippings of the Calonian War were tacked up on the otherwise bare walls. There was a back door to the place. Curious, she tried the knob—once! It was locked, but there was something about the feel of it that shocked her. The door, in spite of its wooden appearance, was solid metal.

  The chill of that discovery finally left her. She thought, None of my business. And then, before she could turn away, the door opened and a gaunt man loomed on the threshold. He snapped harshly, almost into her face, “Oh, yes, it is your business!”

  It was not fear that made her back away. The deeps of her mind registered the cold voice, so different from that of the previous night. She was aware of the ugly sneer on his face. But there was no real emotion in her, nothing but a blurred blankness. It wasn’t fear. It couldn’t be fear because all she had to do was run a few yards and she’d be out on a busy street. And besides, she had never before been afraid of people who had the misfortune of not looking quite human, and she wasn’t now.

  That first impression that he wasn’t quite human was so sharp, so immensely surprising, that the fast-following second impression seemed like a trick of her eyes. For the man was actually just foreign looking. She shook her head, trying to shake that trickiness out of her vision. But the picture remained steady now. He wasn’t colored, he wasn’t white, but he was a combination of types and races. Slowly, her brain adjusted itself to his alienness. She saw that he had slant eyes like a Chinese. His skin, though dark, was’ fine in texture, but it was not a young face. The nose was sheer chiseled beauty, the most handsome, most normal part of his face. His mouth was thin-lipped, commanding; his bold chin gave strength and power to the insolence of his steel-gray eyes. His sneer deepened.

  “Oh, no,” he said softly, “you’re not afraid of me, are you? Let me inform you that my purpose is to make you afraid. Last night I had the purpose of bringing you here. That required tact, understanding. My new purpose requires, among other things, the realization on your part that you are in my power beyond the control of your will or wish. I could have allowed you to discover gradually that this is not a Calonian recruiting station. But I prefer to get these early squirmings of the slaves over as soon as possible. The reaction to the power of the machine is always so similar and unutterably boring.”

  “I—I don’t understand!”

  He answered coldly, “Let me be brief. You have been vaguely aware of a machine. That machine has attuned the rhythm of your body to itself, and through its actions I can control you against your desire. Naturally, I don’t expect you to believe me. Like other women, you will test its mind-destroying power. Notice that I said women! We always hire women. For purely psychological reasons, they are safer than men. You will discover what I mean if you should attempt to warn any applicant on the basis of what I have told you.” He finished swiftly, “Your duties are simple. There is a pad on the table made up of sheets with simple questions printed on them. Ask those questions, note the answers, then direct the applicants to me in the back room. I- have—er—a medical examination to give them.”

  Of all the things he had said, the one that searingly dominated her whole mind had no connection with her personal fate. “But,” she gasped, “if these men are not being sent to Calonia, where—”

  His hiss of caution cut her words short. “Here comes a man. Now, remember!”

  He stepped back to one side, out of sight in the dimness of the back room. Behind her there was the dismaying sound of the front door opening. A man’s baritone voice blurred a greeting into her ears.

  Her fingers shook as she wrote down the man’s answers to the dozen questions. Name, address, next of kin…His face was a ruddy-cheeked blur against the shapeless, shifting pattern of her racing thoughts. “You can see,” she heard herself mumbling, “that these questions are only a matter of identification. Now, if you’ll go into the back room—”

  The sentence shattered into silence. She’d said it! The uncertainty of her mind, the unwillingness to take a definite stand until she had thought of some way out, had made her say the very thing she had intended to avoid.

  The man said, “What do I go in there for?”

  She stared at him numbly. Her mind felt sick, useless. She needed time, calm. She said at last, “It’s a simple medical exam, entirely for your own protection.”

  Sickly, Norma watched his stocky form head briskly toward the rear door. He knocked, and the door opened. Surprisingly, it stayed open. Surprisingly, because it was then, as the man disappeared from her line of vision, that she saw the machine. The immense and darkly gleaming end of it that she could see reared up halfway to the ceiling, partially hiding a door that seemed to be a rear exit from the building.

  She forgot the door,’ forgot the man. Her mind fastened on the great machine as swift realization came that this was the machine. Involuntarily, her body, her ears, her mind strained for the whirring sound that she had heard in the night. But there was nothing, not a whisper, not the tiniest of tiny noises, not the vaguest stir of vibration. The machine crouched there, hugging the floor with its solidness, its clinging metal strength; and it was dead, motionless.

  The doctor’s smooth, persuasive voice came to her, “I hope you don’t mind going out the back door, Mr. Barton. We ask applicants to use it because—well, our recruiting station is illegal. As you probab
ly know, we exist on sufferance and sympathy, but we don’t want to be too blatant about the success we’re having in getting young men to fight for our cause.”

  Norma waited. As soon as the man was gone she would force a showdown on this whole fantastic affair. If this was some distorted scheme of Calonia’s enemies, she would go to the police immediately. The thought twisted into a swirling chaos of wonder.

  The machine was coming swiftly, monstrously alive. It glowed with a soft, swelling white light, and then seemed to burst into an enormous flame. A breaker of writhing tongues of blue and green and red and yellow fire stormed over that first glow, blotting it from view instantaneously. The fire sprayed and flashed like an intricately designed fountain, with a wild and violent beauty, a glittering blaze of unearthly glory.

  And then—just like that—the flame faded. Briefly, stubborn in its fight for life, the swarming, sparkling energy clung to the metal. It was gone. The machine lay there a mass of metallic deadness, inert, motionless. The doctor appeared in the doorway.

  “Sound chap,” he said, satisfaction in his tone. “Heart requires a bit of glandular adjustment to eradicate the effects of bad diet. Lungs will react swiftly to gas-immunization injections, and our surgeons should be able to patch that body up from almost anything except an atomic storm.”

  Norma licked dry lips. “What are you talking about?” she asked wildly. “W—what happened to that man?”

  She was aware of him staring at her blandly. His voice was cool, amused. “Why, he went out the back door.”

  “He did not! He—”

  She realized the uselessness of words. Cold with the confusion of her thought, she emerged from behind the counter. She brushed past him, and then, as she reached the threshold of the door leading into the rear room, her knees wobbled. She grabbed at the doorjamb for support, and knew that she didn’t dare go near that machine. With an effort she said, “Will you go over there and open it?”