Collected short fiction, p.472
Collected Short Fiction, page 472
Rick felt relieved. Trying not to wonder if Karen had been one of the wires to the chief commissioner, he obeyed a friendly impulse. “What do you want to know?”
“I remember something you said about the first and the last.” Anders was leaning forward, and his self-control seemed almost desperate. “Tell me, Drake—” He hesitated, steel eyes searching. “There on the rock, when we fought that other cruiser—were we fighting ourselves?”
“I’m afraid you were,” Rick said. “It seems that time on the rock was negative, and we all made a circle. Seems you failed to recognize yourself when you met yourself coming back.” Helpfully, he added, “There’s a book on nonterrene types of matter—”
With quizzical brows lifted, Anders pointed his good arm at a copy of that ponderous work—on the stand beside Karen’s flowers. Rick felt an unexpected liking. Kay might be very happy with him.
“Thanks,” Anders said. “That accounts for all my evidence against you—and I regret your arrest and the damage to your vessel. But I think anybody might have been confused.”
Rick nodded, gratefully, and sternly reminded himself that Anders still belonged to an enemy world. He mustn’t talk too much. The lean Earthman stared out into the blue-black sky above the dazzle of the toppling landscape, frowning.
“Circles,” he said at last, perplexingly. “Eddies in causation.” He turned back to Rick with a slow, apologetic smile. “Scuse me, Drake. Seems you won the game. And the medicos are sending me back home on six months’ leave. How’s your drink?”
Rick took up his neglected glass. “Your health, captain!”
Anders poured himself another drink. “Here’s Drake, McGee & Drake,” he proposed cordially. Then, with a quiet in the careless-seeming voice, he added: “Case you’re interested, I’m taking that leave alone.”
Rick was interested—but he wouldn’t admit it.
That afternoon Rick was offering another parcel of tuning diamonds to Interplanet. An office boy showed him into the luxurious hush of an expensive private room to wait for the buyer. Sitting at an exquisite silver table too small for a giant, he spread the diamonds on a square of black velvet. Twenty perfect crystals, weighing nearly thirteen grams. He determined not to be talked below a hundred thousand Mandate dollars.
“Hello, Rick.” Karen Hood came through the glass-curtained doorway. Emotion flushed her high-cheeked face, and her hair was vivid flame. She came slowly toward him, soundless on the deep rug, carrying a blue envelope. Her eyes were dark and repentant and shining.
“Nice to see you, Kay.” But he hadn’t meant to see her and the sight was a stabbing blade. Still it wasn’t easy to leave her world behind—or her. He rose beside the toylike silver table, awkward and uncertain.
“But you weren’t going to.” Hurt silence for half a minute. He saw her red lip quiver—and tried not to want so much to take her in his arms. Her velvet voice was crushed, pleading. “Please, won’t you forgive me for calling you a traitor?”
“Of course, Kay.” The weakness was a throbbing ache in him. He caught his breath and towered like a bronze and mighty giant above her. His voice turned deep with purpose. “But still I’m leaving Interplanet.”
Her flame head nodded, meekly unprotesting.
“I know you are.” Her voice was low and grave. “That’s why I’ve come to ask you for a job—with Drake, McGee & Drake.”
Rick stared at her. His bronze head made a little disbelieving jerk. But his heart was suddenly pounding so that he couldn’t speak.
“I mean it,” she said. “I’m leaving Interplanet, too. Because I think you need a business manager for your new metallurgy lab—whatever that is going to be. Here’s my letter of introduction.” With a breathless little smile she laid the blue envelope beside the row of diamonds on the silver table. Rick leaned down to touch it stupidly.
“It’s the transcripts of all your photophone conversations with your father and McGee from the secret files of Interplanet.” Her voice had an odd catch, half gay and half alarmed. “You’ll have to hire me, Rick—to keep you and all your friends out of Pallas IV.”
“Honest, Kay?” He gulped, incoherent. “I mean . . . would you . . . really—”
“I really would.” Her smiling eyes were wet. “I’ve been thinking while you were gone.” The flash of anger came back in her voice. “You said some cruel things—but we’ll have plenty of time to quarrel over that. You know I came to space because I didn’t like what Interplanet had made of Earth, and now you’ve made me see that the Mandate is only a temporary makeshift. If you really think you and your asterites can start something better, Rick, I’m willing to help you try.” Her clear voice turned as husky as his own. “That is—if you still want me—”
He did. He shook away his awkwardness and came around the table. They didn’t see the diamond buyer, standing in the glass-curtained doorway. But that dealer’s shrewd face smiled. His agate eyes turned soft again, perhaps with some forgotten memory of the green Earth and youth. He left them alone.
THE END.
1943
Opposites—React!
First of Two Parts
Sequel to “Collision Orbit” and “Minus Sign,” this novel tells of men against men—and against the strange and deadly problem of minus matter, contraterrene matter. Men against men—for the men who learned the trick of fixing a tool to work “seetee” in a baseplate of normal matter, could wrest control of the System!
“Captain Paul Anders!”
Announcing him, the aid’s curt, impersonal voice made a hollow echo in the enormous metal room ahead. Lean and spare in the black of the High Space Guard, he came to straight attention. He knew the man before him in the glittering official room, and he was prepared for a trying interview.
“At ease, old man!” Austin Hood, Chief Commissioner of the High Space Mandate, returned his crisp salute with a genial, unmilitary gesture. Beyond the shimmer of the famous iridium desk, Hood was red and bulky, loud with a bluff assurance. “Glad to see you back here on the rocks. Sit down and tell me all about your leave.” Hood’s red fat face was smiling, with a politician’s ready smile. But his small eyes remained shrewd and cold—they were used to judging men, Anders thought, like pawns to be played. His hearty, booming voice gave Anders no time to tell about the leave.
“Five years since I’ve been back to Earth. How’d you find the sea food at Panama City? Go down to the Ocean Room? What I miss the most, out on these damned dry rocks. Sick of canned and dried and frozen food. For just one oyster plate, with old Armand’s sauce, down under the dome of the Ocean Room—”
His fat shoulders heaved to a gigantic sigh.
Anders sat down on a hard metal chair. He saw his application for retired status, lying alone on that bright expanse of costly metal, and caught his breath to speak about it. But Hood’s loud public voice boomed on:
“Glad to see you reporting so fit for duty, captain. Must have been quite an ordeal you went through, on that runaway asteroid. Ametine shock, internal injuries, fractured arm.” His small, watchful eyes studied the tall man in black. “See the Earth has bleached a little of the spaceburn out of you. But you spatial engineers are a hearty lot—and damned lucky for Interplanet. Because I’ve got a new job waiting for you.”
“Moment, commissioner.” Anders nodded gravely, at the paper on the desk. “See you have my application for retirement. I want to leave the Guard and Interplanet.”
Hood swung forward heavily in his big metal chair. His eyes were hard and calculating. “Our doctors report you fit as ever.” Now his voice was eloquent with scorn. “Did you lose your nerve along with your ship on that peculiar rock?”
Anders tried not to get angry, because he knew that was what Hood wanted.
“No.” He shook his dark head slowly. “But I’ve had six months of nothing much to do but think. S’pose my viewpoint changed. I’ve worked ten years for Interplanet. Now I want to open an office of my own, as an independent consulting engineer.”
“You can’t quit Interplanet.” That was a loud assertion. Hood rocked back on the springs of his noiseless chair and smiled his red, genial smile again. “Because it’s in your blood. I know your people, captain. Spatial engineers, for three generations.”
Anders tried to interrupt, but Hood ignored him.
“Your family has been loyal to Interplanet. And Interplanet has repaid you with the wealth of space. Maybe some of the old space families have gone to seed, but you haven’t, captain. You have served us ably, from Venus to Callisto. One of our top-flight spatial engineers. We can’t let you go.”
Anders hesitated, frowning.
“Interplanet used to be a sort of shining religion to me,” he said slowly. “But now I’m not so sure of things.”
“Nonsense!” Hood’s red face turned redder, and his red fist banged the bright iridium desk. “You’ve just been mooning around the hospitals too long. A tour of active duty will snap you out of it. Your record shows that you are neither a coward nor an idealistic fool. And, remember, you’re still under my command.”
“Yes, sir,” Anders said.
“But you must realize that Interplanet is now in grave danger, captain.” Hood’s pliant voice turned back to conciliation. “You know the Mandate is only a makeshift crutch, invented after the war to prop up peace among the planets. You can see that it’s already beginning to totter. When it falls we’ll have Mars and Venus and the Jovian Union at our throats again. I’m on the inside, here at Pallasport, and I can see things getting blacker for Earth and Interplanet every day. You’re an Earthman, first, captain. You can’t desert your native planet in the middle of this emergency. You don’t mean that?”
“No.” Anders sat straighter, lean and ready in the black. “Not when you put it that way, commissioner. I don’t much like the Mandate, but I can see it’s better than war. Consider my application withdrawn.
“And what are my orders?”
“Knew you’d see your duty, captain.” Beaming genially, Hood opened a platinum humidor. “Have a cigar. Handmade, and fresh from Cuba. Get them duty-free, y’know, in the diplomatic mail.”
Anders held the blond cigar unlit, waiting.
“Your job’s a simple one.” Exhaling blue smoke, Hood waved his cigar expansively. “You can guess what it is, because you’re the only competent contraterrene engineer we’ve got in the service. All you have to do is—get seetee for Interplanet.”
Anders didn’t move. He knew about the contraterrene drift. He knew that seetee was a key to illimitable power, both physical and political. Because a pebble of it, in contact with any normal matter, reacted with the energy of a ton of detonating tritonite. He also knew why spacemen called it hell in chunks.
“Don’t you think it can’t be done!” Hood peered shrewdly at his stiff brown face. “Because somebody is going to get seetee—soon. Biggest thing since paragravity. Whoever gets it can smash the Mandate like a seetee meteor colliding with a ship. It had better be us!”
Anders nodded gravely. If the flood of flaming power from that matter-annihilating reaction could be tamed and controlled, he knew what it would mean for the arts of war and peace. But he also knew the heartbreaking difficulties still in the way.
“You’ve got to win the race.” Hood’s voice was a throbbing, oratoric drum. “Because it means another hundred years for Interplanet. It means a new empire that can reach out to Pluto and Persephone. It means more billions than you can imagine—and Interplanet can be generous, captain.”
The spare black shoulders merely shrugged. Anders intended to try his best to complete one more job for Interplanet, but he found no inspiration in the commissioner’s dream of a reborn interplanetary empire. As for himself, he had already made money enough.
“You’ll have competition.” Hood’s loud voice boomed on. “The Venusians and the Jovians are in the race, as well as these damned asterites. Nobody can find exactly what the Martians are up to, but here’s one clue you may find interesting.
He opened a locked drawer in the huge bright desk and took out a small stereo-viewer. Snapping a reel of film into place he slid it across the shimmering metal. Anders picked it up, wondering.
“That film came out of the vaults of the Martian commissioner.” Hood made a red, hearty grin. “It lost me forty thousand Mandate dollars, but I imagine old Muhlbacher would give a million to have it back. Go ahead and run it off.”
Anders put the little instrument to his face and pressed the stud to start the quiet mechanism. The film showed a view of space with the stars magnified to tiny, colored halation disks on a field of frosty black. A meteor was tumbling across the field, with the Sun glinting on it. As it came hurtling nearer the camera, he saw that its shape was peculiar.
“What’s this?” he whispered suddenly. “Looks like a needle—a golden needle!”
The mechanism hummed with a muted vibration, and the spinning object came nearer in the lenses. Glancing in the sunlight, it was hard and real against the gulf of infinite night. The larger end was jagged, as if it were the broken tip of something longer.
“Eh!” Anders caught his breath. For a tiny human figure swam before the camera, disguised in bulky, silver-painted, dirigible armor. Its nearness brought the other object into startling stereoscopic perspective.
The needle was huge. It must be a hundred meters long, Anders estimated, from glittering point to jagged base. Probably five meters thick, through the base.
The man in space armor flew to the large end, and the camera followed him. The needle was hollow, Anders saw. The Sun swept in as it spun. He glimpsed a spiral ramp, winding up inside the hollow shaft, with a silver-colored hand rail above it.
Something was queerly wrong about that ramp and railing. For a moment Anders felt a dull oppression of bewilderment. Then, with a sharp little start almost of apprehension, he realized what was the matter. The sloping ramp was too narrow. The railing, in proportion, was far too high.
He put down the instrument to stare into Hood’s shrewd eyes. His clipped Earthman’s voice held a tremor of controlled excitement. “That’s a non-terrestial artifact. That footway wasn’t intended for men!”
“But you haven’t seen the half—look again!”
He started the film again. Now the camera and that bright-armored man had retreated a full kilometer from the golden needle. The man was aiming a spatial automatic. After one puzzled moment, Anders understood.
“Couldn’t be!”
He gasped that stunned protest. For he knew that contact was the only test to distinguish the contraterrene type of matter, and a shot was the routine testing procedure. If the annihilated bullet exploded like a hundred kilograms of steel-cased tritonite, it would mean—something impossible!
The gun jerked back against the armored hand. It made a tiny spurt of yellow against the black of space. Watching desperately, Anders must have forgotten where he was, for the silent, incandescent blast made him duck. The short film ended.
“Well?” Hood demanded. “What do you make of that?”
“ ’Stounding!” Anders stared at the mirrorlike desk top, trying to organize his thoughts. “I know the theories, that the drift was formed when a wandering seetee body collided with the old trans-Martian planet. But I never imagined—beings! That needle would seem to be an artifact—think of it—of contraterrene life!”
“Our Martian rivals evidently made the same inference.” Regarding his visible excitement with a sly twinkle, Hood commented triumphantly, “Now, captain, you don’t seem quite so anxious to open an office of your own!”
“Seems you always win, commissioner.” Anders grinned, and started asking eager questions. “But who took this film? Where? What was the orbit of that object? What became—”
“Hold on, captain.” Hood held up his huge red hand. “Your other questions will be part of your job. But the sources from which I bought the film informed me that it was taken by a Martian-German agent, who uses the name of Franz von Falkenberg.”
“Von Falkenberg?” Anders frowned. “I almost remember—”
“Maybe you heard his name at the treason trials.” The commissioner leaned forward gravely. “He was back of that plot, you know, to steal our range finder for the Martian Reich. All the others were sentenced to life on Pallas IV, but von Falkenberg was smart enough to get away. We don’t even have a good description of him.”
“I remember now.” Anders nodded suddenly. “That happened while I was on special leave, building a uranium refinery for the Jovians, on Callisto. And I’ve seen a book of von Falkenberg’s—a mathematical analysis of the orbits, to find the origin point of the drift.”
“Top-drawer spatial engineer,” Hood said. “Besides which, he’s a trained soldier and a fanatic Aryanist—waiting for the first chance to rewrite the Treaty of Space in blood. Preferably Earthman’s blood. Better keep him in mind.”
“Done, commissioner.” Anders grinned. “Now what?”
“Your tour of duty will begin at once.” Hood returned the little viewer and its film to the locked drawer. “You will retain your nominal status as a captain in the Guard, because that will attract the least attention.”
Anders nodded.
“Our inside organization is behind you,” Hood went on. “Of course you can expect some trouble from the alien elements in the Guard. But we’ve already made arrangements for a ship—the cruiser Challenge, just commissioned at the yards on Pallas II—with a crew we can trust to be loyal.” Anders made another brown grin. “Traitors, you mean.”
Hood’s red face showed pain.
“Loyalty to Interplanet is no fit cause for levity,” he said stiffly. “Not even when it does involve technical treason to the Mandate. You know the Guard.”
