Compleat collected sff w.., p.425
COMPLEAT Collected SFF Works, page 425
I jumped into action with the rest. I had it all back again, the happy confidence, the good luck. I couldn't miss. Even this was good. Because the things they salvaged were the important things. They were telling me plainer than words what to follow up.
I played it straight. Two women were struggling to rip the lid off a crate of rifles, and I grabbed the chisel out of their hands and levered the boards apart, nails shrieking. People at the antibiotics shelves were cramming their pockets with little boxes, and I dragged up a stool and handed down supplies off the higher shelves into their hands.
That was how I happened to see the box with the rings in it. Up on a top shelf, with DANGER—POISON in big red letters cross the front. I flipped the lid open while I was reaching for more packets of antibiotics, and two rows of neat gold finger rings looked up at me out of their nests, each with a round blue set like an innocent eye. They came in graduated sizes. Inside the lid of the box my quick glance had time to read the one matter-of-fact line of typed instruction pasted to the lining.
"Crush glass between teeth. Cyanide—Instantaneous Death."
I stood motionless for a moment, letting that information sink it. The rings looked up at me, blue-eyed and full of instantaneous death. My mind felt very still in the midst of all this hubbub as I thought about it. I closed the lid quietly.
Shoveling down the boxes with automatic motions, I tried to remember why the rings hadn't looked entirely strange to me. I'd seen one on somebody's hand here in this building in the last few minutes. Just a passing glance, hardly noticed. Who? Whoever it was, he had to be important. You don't wear a cyanide ring for fun. You have to know important things that you don't dare risk talking about, even under narcosynthesis. Who?
Then I had it. The gray-haired man with the scar.
I was standing there thinking it over when the uproar from outside slackened and ceased. My ears drummed with the silence for a moment. Then an enormous metal voice roared through an amplifier outside.
"On the count of ten," the great voice bellowed, "we fire sleep bombs. You have a ten-count to come out with your hands up. One! Two ...!"
I felt an instant of panic.
I'd never been on the receiving end of a sleep bomb, but I knew a percentage of the gassed victims just don't wake up. How big a percentage no two people ever agreed on.
If anybody else was scared, no one showed it. I heard rapid orders in half a dozen overlapping voices, confusing like crowd voices on stage.
"All ammunition carriers this way—meet Pedro at Eleven Eighty."
"All food carriers scatter and meet at the Olsens' after sundown."
"Diversion crews, work from the southeast corner. Cover the 'hopper getaway." This last time was from the gray-haired man, who got up on a table to make sure everybody heard him. I looked at his hand and saw a blue ring glint briefly. He was shouting over the hubbub, waving his arm for attention.
"Cover the 'hopper getaway!" he was repeating. "Pull attention away from the 'hopper! Have you all got that? Do it any way you can, but do it!"
From outside the vast metallic voice counted ominously, "Five! You have a five-count now to come out with your hands up. You inside there! Six! Seven!"
The man on the table glanced around the walls at the people standing ready by the gun slots. He lifted his hand ready to signal. "Here it comes," he called. "Brace yourselves, everybody. All right—fire!" And he dropped his hand.
All around the walls I heard the simultaneous crackle of the shots. The enormous noise from outside came so sudden and so loud I had the strange feeling I'd missed hearing how it began. One moment all was comparatively still. The next my head was reverberating like a gong and the whole room was solid with the crash of sound, and I had no memory of just when it started.
Some reeling element of reason told me the rebels must have set off some kind of buried mines in the area outside, around the building. Maybe by the simple expedient of firing a prearranged trigger spots. But all of us inside, even those who knew what to expect, were stunned for a moment by the noise.
Then the rumble of heavy doors sliding open sounded all around the walls of the building. Light gushed in blue with smoke and seething with dust, and out through the clouds of it the rebels went scattering. Everybody but me knew exactly what to do.
I had one brief second of hesitation. Then I found I too knew what I was going to head for. The 'hopper. Make for the 'hopper. Whatever they load into the 'hopper is the big thing. That's what you're here for. Don't miss it.
Outside, blinding in the sunlight, I saw the Comus helicopters sitting heavily in the flowery meadow a little way off. All around the building a ring of blackened grass and raw earth lay smoldering heavily. Bodies lay among the embers, and what Comus men were still on their feet looked dazed and unsteady. But they were recovering fast. Not quite as fast as the rebels scattered, but almost fast enough.
Now an outburst of yells and shots rang out noisily from the far corner of the building, and a series of minor explosions burst out toward the river. I wanted badly to turn and look, but I thought it was cover-up action from the diversion crews. I knew the 'hopper was the really important spot.
The scattering crowd ran like purposeful rabbits for the forest. They ran in all directions. But a few converged toward the tree where the 'hopper sat, and I was foremost among them. I was second on the spot. But in moments I was the center of a busy, silent throng loading boxes into the seat beside the driver's. Elaine Thomas was shoving packets this way and that to make room for a big, flat, square bundle about two feet across and wrapped tenderly in blankets like a baby susceptible to draughts. The way she handled it, and the way everybody here seemed to touch it with respect verging on awe, made me look at the thing with gathering excitement.
I wondered what it was. I wondered if this could be wishful thinking, or was it what I thought it was ...
The gray-haired man was giving orders in a quick, firm whisper. "All right, that's it," he said after a fast thirty seconds of work that seemed a lot longer. "In with you, Elaine. Don't argue. Quick! Keep to the high grass and try to cross the ridge at the gap. The rest of you, scatter out and run alongside through the grass. Thresh around. Make it wave. All right, get going. Good luck!"
We went. We spread out and ran blindly, I running with the rest, the reeds whipping my face, the marshy ground sucking at my shoes. Behind me scattered gunfire broke out as the Comus men began to get their wits back. All around me I heard feet thump, reeds lash, men breathing heavily as they ran, and to my right the beelike humming of the 'hopper carrying Elaine and the unknown treasure away from me faster than I could ever hope to run.
I wasn't getting anywhere this way. I'd had one glimpse and no more of something that might be, could be, just possibly was the biggest thing in California. Or a part of the biggest thing. But in minutes the 'hopper would take to the rising ground and go heaving up the slope and over into the woods. And after that I was finished. Somebody else would trace the 'hopper by its signal box still clinging to the metal. Somebody else would get the credit. Unless——
The gunfire from behind us picked up in volume. I heard the deep, heavy throb of a helicopter engine starting and realized that whatever I did I'd have to do fast. And anonymously. I was playing both sides against the middle and if either of them caught me at it I was done.
Underfoot the ground seemed firmer. It didn't cling to the feet any more and a slope was beginning to rise under the thick grass. I heard the 'hopper's buzz quicken as its wheels got better purchase and its laboring motor heaved it upward with a sudden burst of speed. Then the reeds thinned and through them I saw the little machine swaying and grinding up the slope, Elaine bent low over the wheel. She had outdistanced her escort already. In a moment or two she'd be over the ridge and out of my reach.
I stood still among the reeds, pulled the gun out of my pocket, and took careful aim. I waited for another burst of gunfire from behind us. When it came—and none too soon, for now the 'hopper was topping the ridge—I pulled the trigger steadily.
The 'hopper gave a violent lurch. Fire sprang out in brief, bright sparks from its underside where my bullet struck. I was glad they didn't ignite anything. That was pure luck, for an instant after a gush of heavy black oil burst out of its transmission chamber and poured sluggishly over the rocks. I had been holding my breath without realizing it, expecting an explosion. For one vivid moment it seemed to me I was looking into Elaine's bright black, expectant eyes that asked of me something I didn't have to give her. Protection? The thought that I should spare her from danger if she stood between me and what I wanted? I never spared myself. I knew now I never spared Miranda. No, if Elaine expected that from me then she expected too much.
But when I saw the black oil come panting out of the nervous little 'hopper's vitals in thick gushes I had a moment's foolish grief for the machine that I could not let myself feel for living creatures.
All this happened in a split second of action and response. The moment I pulled the trigger I had dropped flat on my face to the ground, and not a moment too soon. Three or four bullets whistled over my head among the reeds. I'll never know if they were Comus bullets or rebel. The threshing and thumping around me in the reeds paused suddenly, and then when nothing happened resumed its cautious advance. Voices called softly. I called too, asking with the rest what had happened. Nobody seemed to know.
Moments later, exchanging suspicious looks, we came out of the underbrush wiping mud and sweat off our faces. The helicopter was laboring to get off the ground back there in the meadow. Gunfire rattled sporadically around the building we had abandoned and now and then a stray bullet went wailing thinly over our heads. I looked up in time to see three or four men scramble to the disabled 'hopper and heave it over the ridge and out of sight.
I started up the slope after it. A bullet sang past my ear and smacked the rock six feet ahead of me, sending up splinters of stone in my face. Over to the left I heard a solid, thudding sound and didn't know it for what it was until a man beside me coughed and pitched forward and began to slide gently down the slope in a little avalanche of pebbles. I felt adrenalin pour fresh energy into every nerve and muscle I had as I hurled myself upward and dropped over the top of the ridge, landing on my bruised side. I slid a dozen feet before I could stop myself.
The gray-haired man was wrenching the 'hopper door open and I saw Elaine scrambling out backward, dragging the blanket-wrapped bundle across the seat. Even now, in all this stress, it seemed to me she handled it with awe, as if it might be the Grail. And maybe it was. Maybe it was a part of the biggest thing in California. Bigger than the biggest redwood. Bigger than San Francisco Bay. Bigger than Los Angeles. Bigger than the world, at least to Nye and to me and to all the rebels in the whole country. If it was what it might be ...
There was an outburst of gunfire from the slope I'd just left, echoed by firing from the canebrakes below. It was loud at first as the guns of the rebels sounded in full chorus, and then it got ragged, because the slope was in full sight from the reeds and there wasn't any shelter out there. We had only minutes more of safety here.
I saw the gray-haired man look around with fast, considering glances, sizing up the situation. I jumped to help Elaine. My hands itched to feel the outlines of what it was she had wrapped in the blanket. Not that in my ignorance I could tell anything, but at least there'd be that much to report to Nye even if this whole project fell through from this point on. More eagerly than a bridegroom reaching for the bride, or a father reaching for his first-born, I took the bundle in my hands. For one tantalizing instant I felt its irregular and mysterious form beneath the blanket, intricate, blurred, indescribable.
Then an outburst of shouts and the crack of firing exploded from the far side of the little clearing where the 'hopper sat. I was too absorbed to think what it meant. The gray-haired man was quicker. He grabbed my shoulder and spun me around, snatching the blanket-wrapped Grail away from me. He heaved it back onto the 'hopper seat. He seized Elaine's arm and whirled her away. "Stand back!" he said. "Elaine, get away from the 'hopper."
She knew what he meant if I didn't.
"Oh no!" she said with anguish. "Tony, we can make it somehow. This is almost the last unit. Tony, we can't——"
"We've got to!" he yelled at her. "We're surrounded. I have to do it. Stand back." He dragged the gun from his belt, shouting, "Scatter! Scatter!" to the nearer men. The firing grew stronger from both sides now, coming up the slope from the meadow and closing in on us from the trees beyond the clearing. The gray-haired man leveled his gun at the bundle on the 'hopper seat.
Elaine cried, "No, Tony, don't!" and tried desperately to throw herself between him and the bundle. He didn't speak, but he gave her a heavy backhanded blow across the face that sent her staggering. And then he pulled the trigger.
The explosion seemed enormous. The Grail itself must have had its own potential destruction built into it for just such an emergency as this. Flying bits of glass or metal hissed by us in the shaken air. The clearing was blinding-bright for an instant, then invisible as our eyes reacted to the flash. When I could see again there was nothing but smoke, the twisted wreckage of the 'hopper, and a blue-violet afterimage of the explosion that swam on the surface of my eyes and half obscured everything I looked at.
I heard a familiar voice still yelling, "Scatter, scatter!" from just behind me, and I turned blindly and stumbled toward it. The haze in the clearing seemed filling up with struggling figures and the flash and noise of gunfire. I saw the gray-haired man running through the trees away from me. Comus had caught up with us at last.
And everything was over. I had nothing to show for all my efforts, all my risks. I'd touched the precious mystery, but no more. Like Whats-His-Name and the Grail, I could feel it but never see it. It had to be a part of the Anti-Com. In my daze it seemed to me not only that it had to be, but that I'd been all but led here, guided by forces out of a dream and my own compulsive behavior. I had touched the precious thing, and then, like the Grail, it had vanished in a flash of light seven times brighter than day.
I looked around wildly. Elaine wasn't anywhere in sight. I saw rebels whose faces I recognized either down in the dust or running. I saw a gray-headed figure disappearing among the trees. And sudden blinding rage flooded through me at the sight of him. The man who had snatched success out of my hands in the instant I touched it. The man who had smashed the Grail.
In the midst of my anger I heard a still, small voice. Quite coolly it suggested, "If you can't take back the Grail itself, why not take back the man who knows about it?" I spun with the dust slipping under my feet and lurched after the running man ...
I remember a bullet sang by me and slit my shirt sleeve neatly as I turned. The next thing I remember is a man's running back just ahead of me, and hurling myself at him, almost missing, catching him around the knees so we crashed down together across the rocky slope. I heard the breath go out of him in a grunt of surprise and pain. I had a rock in my hand as I scrambled to my knees, and I hit him with it across the back of the head, praying as I struck that I wasn't hitting too hard. He grunted again and went slack.
I grabbed for his limp hand and wrenched at the blue cyanide ring. It wouldn't come off. He must have been Wearing it a long time, I thought, almost wonderingly. I looked at his gray head and marveled at the secrets he must have stored away in there that I'd give so much to know. So much, so much!
The blue glass set wasn't very hard. It couldn't be if the wearer had to bite through it when the time came. I tapped his hand on a rock until the glass broke and the colorless liquid ran out onto the stone, bitter-almond-smelling, deadly. I held my breath until the breeze blew it away.
Then I lay down beside him in the dust and waited. It seemed like a long time. The noise around us slowly died away. Finally somebody's foot against my shoulder turned me over and I looked up into the disciplined face of a stranger.
"Get up," he said. "You're under arrest."
I sat up stiffly. "I think I've got a rebel leader for you here," I said. "Take us to headquarters."
He gave me a skeptical look.
"That's a new one. Don't worry. Headquarters is where you're going."
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CHAPTER XX
NOBODY KNOWS HOW big a bite of the tax dollar Comus draws, but it isn't a small one. Comus doesn't stint itself. The local captain's office had thick carpeting with a rich, raised pattern and gold thread curling through it. The furniture was all glass. The captain himself looked green and yellow because of the stained-glass insets in the window behind him.
I sat in a black glass chair with gold fringe under it and argued fiercely across the gilt glass desk with the captain. He was a dapper ma who looked uncomfortable out of uniform, and he didn't like me.
