Collected short fiction, p.490
Collected Short Fiction, page 490
We climbed again, up a black narrow shaft, to the launcher which Doyle had once commanded. Bright, satiny metal shimmered against our lights. The huge vertical barrel cast monstrous, leaping shadows. Doyle slipped into a familiar seat, and touched familiar buttons. An emergency engine began drumming. A huge periscope lens was suddenly bright with the broad crescent Earth—with thin black crosshairs intersecting upon it.
He flashed his light on a blank log sheet, and shook his head.
“It was never fired.”
Cameron was whistling through his teeth—a gay bit of melody that made a grotesque counterpoint to the themes of lifeless quiet and ghastly dark and deadly cold, and the whole inexplicable riddle of the abandoned fortress.
“Are these weapons still serviceable?” he asked.
“Not without some missing parts.” Doyle opened an inspection door, to show a dark cavity. “The computer has been removed, and the gyros are gone from the projectiles.”
“Too bad.” Cameron’s voice held the hint of irony. “I imagine Mr. Hudd is going to need them.”
“They can be repaired,” Doyle assured him soberly. “Our spares for the ships’ launchers are interchangeable.” And Doyle looked at his chronometer. “Now it’s time to report to Mr. Hudd—that our mission has failed.”
The stern simplicity of the lifecraft, when we were safely back aboard, seemed luxurious. We relaxed in the acceleration chairs; gulped hot soup against the chill of those abandoned tunnels, that lingered in our bones; and answered the peevish questions of Victor Lord.
The signal officer soon reported that he had contact with the Great Director, and we crowded into the narrow television signal room. Hudd’s heavy, blue-wattled face filled the big screen; the habitual smile of his thick lips failed to cover his anxious and weary concern.
“Let’s have it, Jim.” His loud, hearty voice was edged with tension. “What happened to the fort?”
“Evacuated, Mr. Hudd.”
“But why?”
“We failed to discover that,” Cameron reported. “The withdrawal was deliberate and orderly. The records were mostly removed or destroyed; the weapons were disabled without unnecessary destruction; the men took their personal belongings.
There’s no evidence whatever of trouble or violence.”
“When did it happen?”
“About two years, I think, after the Task Force left. The dates on calendar pads and inspection cards show that men were here that long. The lowered air pressure, the accumulated dust, and the low counter readings we got about the main power pile, all show that they weren’t here much longer.”
Hudd turned, on the screen, to rap a few questions at Doyle and Lord. Lord’s uneasy insolence had changed to a silky deference, now. He explained that acceleration sickness had kept him on the life-craft.
“A very puzzling situation.” Hudd’s hushed voice and his frown showed his bewildered apprehension. “The entire Task Force, I feel, is in danger, until we find out what has happened.”
He straightened, on the screen, and his voice took on a confident authority.
“Captain Doyle, you will proceed at once to Earth. You will land at Americania. Discover what happened to the Directorate—and what enemies we must destroy, to restore it. Take any precautions that you think necessary. But this time you must not fail.”
“Yes, Mr. Hudd.”
Hudd answered his smart salute, and turned on the screen.
“And you, Mr. Lord, had better get well.”
IV.
Our lifecraft, next day, spiraled slowly down over Americania—the splendid capital city which Tyler had founded, sentimentally, upon the poor, rocky farm where he was born. Peering down through the ports, we felt an increasing sense of fearful puzzlement.
Wide suburban areas had been devastated by explosion or fire, so long ago that lush green forest had now overspread the blackened, broken walls and the twisted frames of rust-red steel—but most of the city looked quite intact.
Avenue upon avenue, proud towers stood like monolithic memorials to history’s greatest empire. Tyler;—with what now seemed an excessive confidence—had ordered his architects to build for a thousand years. Americania was a city of granite—of gray colossal masses, pillared and towered with contrasting red granite, and purple, and black.
Far below us, those stately avenues looked strangely empty, now. Nothing moved. Tall stacks rose from power plants and industrial buildings, in the green-choked suburbs, but there was no smoke.
Was Americania all abandoned, like the Moon?
Fear of that sent an uncomfortable prickling up my spine. I looked hopefully at my companions. Little Victor Lord had turned a sallow gray, and-sweat made dark blots through his shirt. His two SBI men, in their ominous black, had turned away from the ports; they muttered together uneasily, and checked the action of their automatics.
Jim Cameron turned from his port, whistling in a way he had, softly through his teeth. The air was the light, lilting melody of an old love song. The dwarfish Squaredealer whirled on him, in a sudden, tight-lipped fury.
“Stop your impudent whistling!” Lord’s wrath had its real origin, no doubt, in his own frightened bafflement, but his heavy-lidded eyes looked dangerous. Even after Cameron stopped the whistling and turned back to the port, still he wasn’t appeased.
“Look at me, you smart civilian!” Lord’s sharp nasal voice was angrily insolent. “Frankly, I don’t approve the confidence that Mr. Hudd has placed in you. Now I’m warning you—watch your step!”
His small quick hand hovered suggestively over the heavy automatic that sagged at his hip.
“Whatever we find here,” he snarled, “my duty is to assure your continued loyalty to the Squaredeal Machine. Whatever happens, just remember that.”
“I’ll keep it in mind, Mr. Lord,” Cameron promised him evenly.
Captain Doyle set the lifecraft down at last on Tyler Field—the immense spaceport on the outskirts of the city. Once it had been the gateway to the planets. I could remember my childish awe at the rush and glitter and vastness of it, from twenty years ago—when we marched across it, bravely screeching out the Tyler Song, on our way out to Fort America and the Dark Star. Now, when I saw it again through the small ports of the lifecraft, the change made me almost ill.
Like Fort America, the spaceport seemed abandoned. Here, however, weather and decay had kept at work. Green life had kept on, overflowing every plot of soil, bursting from every crack in the neglected pavements, after all men were gone.
Long rows of shops and warehouses stood deserted. Doors yawned open. Neglected roofs were sagging. Ruined walls, here and there, were black from old fire. Every building was hedged with weeds and brush.
Far across the shattered pavements stood the saddest sight of all. A score of tall ships stood scattered across the blast aprons, where they had landed. Though small by comparison with such enormous interstellar cruisers as the Great Director, some of them towered many hundred feet above the broken concrete and the weeds. They stood like strange cenotaphs to the dead Directorate.
Once they had been proud vessels. They had carried the men and the metal to build Fort America. They had transported labor battalions to Mars, dived under the clouds of Venus, explored the cold moons of Jupiter and Saturn. They had been the long arm and the mighty fist of Tyler’s Directorate, and the iron heel upon the prostrate race of man.
Now they stood in clumps of weeds, pointing out at the empty sky they once had ruled. Red wounds marred their sleek skins, where here and there some small meteoric particle must have scratched the mirror-bright polish, letting steel go to rust. And the rust, in the rains of many years, had washed in long, ugly, crimson streaks down their shining sides.
One of them, the most distant, had fallen. The great hull was flattened from the impact, broken in two. Steel beams, forced through the red-stained skin, jutted like red broken bones. The apron was shattered beneath it, so that a thick jungle of brush and young trees had grown up all around it.
Captain Rory Doyle came silently down his ladder from the bridge. His square face was black with gloomy puzzlement—as any loyal spaceman’s should have been.
“A graveyard,” he muttered, “of line old ships—my first training voyage to Mars was on the old Paul Jones, yonder.” He turned sadly to us. “Gadgets ready, Mr. Cameron? Then let’s go out and see what unholy thing has happened to them.”
“Hold on, Doyle!” Lord’s nasal voice was sharp with dread. “Shouldn’t we test the air? Suppose something has happened to the atmosphere?”
Doyle turned to Cameron, red brows lifted.
“I don’t think it’s necessary, Mr. Lord,” Cameron said respectfully. “You can see a gray squirrel scolding at us from the tree growing out of the apron, yonder, and a buzzard circling, toward the city. I think the air’s all right.”
“I’ll do the thinking.” The little Squaredealer drew himself up stiffly, in the sweat-blotched uniform. “Test it.”
I found a test flask, and took it down to draw a sample through a tube in the inner valve. Cameron watchfully checked my reading of the colored indicators, and the counter.
“It’s safe enough, Mr. Lord,” he reported crisply. “Oxygen normal. A bit of secondary radioactivity—due to our jets. No detectable military toxins, chemical, biological, or radiological.”
“Then we’re going out.” Doyle looked thoughtfully at Cameron and me. “I don’t know what we’re running into. If you wish, I’ll issue you arms.”
“No, you won’t!” The little Squaredealer barked the sharp protest. “These men are suspected mutineers, Doyle. I’ll take no chances with them.”
Doyle’s square jaw slowly hardened.
“Mr. Lord,” he began, “I believe the SBI found nothing—”
“It doesn’t matter, captain, Cameron broke in. “We’ve gadgets enough to carry. Anyhow, I doubt that a pistol would be much use. where Fort America failed.”
Lord looked at him, with a puzzled alarm in his sleepy-seeming eyes, and then muttered something to his two gunmen. Their uneasy eyes went to Cameron.
Doyle led the way down the ladder well. Air hissed, and the valves clanged open. One by one, we stooped to follow him through the lock, and jumped out between the shining stabilizers to Earth.
We hurried away from the scorched concrete and smoking weeds about the little ship, where the ion-jet might have excited a dangerous secondary activity, and then stopped to catch our breath.
Earth! We had dreamed of it, for twenty years. Here in the northern hemisphere, it was early summer; the sky was a wondrous milky blue, flecked with cottony cumulus The forenoon sun struck with a hot, welcome force. The warm air was heady with a fragrance that stirred old memories—the rich strong smell of green life growing out of damp vegetal decay. I heard a heavy buzzing, half-remembered, and saw a bumblebee.
The warm Earth, alive—and a lone black bird, yonder, wheeling over an empty city.
Lord, running after us through the blackened weeds, let out a nasal yelp of horror. A white skull, which he had stumbled against, rattled and bounded before him. We found the rest of the skeleton, with a rust-caked revolver on the broken concrete beside it. Scraping about in the weeds, we discovered several shapeless lumps of gold and blackened silver, and a bent penny that still showed Tyler’s profile. Cameron found a handful of tarnished rings, several ruined watches, and a once-magnificent diamond bracelet with the links half-fused and the stones burned black. Doyle picked up a wicked-looking stainless steel blade, with its haft rotted away.
“A curious lot of loot.” Cameron stood up, puzzled. “All burned, the money melted down. Maybe he was struck by lightning. Or maybe looting just wasn’t cricket.”
Lord stood off and fired a bullet into the skull, perhaps just to relieve his frightened tension. It shattered into white dust. He holstered the big automatic with an air of uneasy satisfaction, and mopped the sweat of his narrow sallow face, and followed us watchfully.
We went on to the nearest ship. The bright curving hull towered three hundred feet, marred with long vertical streaks of red rust. It was a stubby freighter; Doyle said it had been in the Martian metal trade.
We followed Doyle up a rusty accommodation ladder, into the lock. The inner valve was closed, stiff with rust. We strained and hammered at the manual wheels, until it groaned reluctantly open. A breath of stale air came out, and we stumbled through the lock, into dusty dark.
There was no power for lights or elevators. The interphone system was dead. We probed the silent dark with flashlights, and Doyle led the way up the ladder shaft beside the elevator. Lord, with his two gunmen, decided to remain below.
Doyle climbed into a cargo hold, and cursed softly, in breath-taken astonishment.
“Plutonium!” A bewildered awe hushed his voice. “Hundreds of tons of refined plutonium in cadmium drums—enough to blow up half America—worth hundreds of millions.” His haunted eyes peered back at Cameron. “Why did they leave it?”
We climbed on, looking for the answer. Our feeble lights, as we passed, searched each dark compartment. Everything was left in order. The galley was clean. The power pile was discharged and secured. There were no other skeletons.
A hard climb brought us to the executive deck. We found dusty charts and orbit plots neatly folded, astrogation instruments safe in their racks. Doyle opened an unlocked safe, and uttered a shout of triumph. “Now we’ll know—here’s the log.” He fumbled with the yellowing pages. Eagerly, we leaned to read the brief, routine entries which described an uneventful voyage from Mars. The four-hourly observations and computed positions were neatly entered, and the hourly checks of apparent solar position and diameter. The date of the final entry corresponded with the dates on the calendar pads at Fort America. It was brief, neatly written, and completely exasperating:
“Routine landing at Tyler Field. Ship abandoned today, because of equalizer.”
That was all, and it meant nothing.
“I don’t get it.” Doyle shook his head, staring bleakly at that faded page. “A spaceworthy ship. Competent officers, evidently, and a loyal crew. They make a routine voyage and a routine landing. Not a hint of anything unusual.”
He peered up at Cameron.
“Then something happens,” he muttered. “Something makes them walk off and leave their jobs and their duty and a ship and cargo worth hundreds of millions. Equalizer, huh? I don’t get it.”
We went back to the lifecraft, and moved nearer the deserted city. We landed again, in a suburban area which had been seared and flattened by some tremendous blast. The Geiger-Müller counter showed a lingering trace of secondary activity in the blobs of fused debris.
“An atomic explosion,” Cameron decided.
“But not one of our standard robot missiles,” Doyle added. “One shot from my launcher at Fort America would have leveled a hundred times this space.”
We moved again, to a street in a still-standing suburb of detached, walled villas. Here, Doyle said, many prominent officials of the Directorate had lived, in an exclusive colony.
Doyle set down the lifecraft on a bit of unshattered pavement, that made a clearing in the brush. Frowning walls faced the street, overgrown with green vines now, and brilliant with blue morning-glories where the sun had not yet reached.
A tall gate of ornamental bronze sagged open, before the nearest building, and we pushed in through the tangle of long-untended shrubbery that had overgrown the lawns. An unlocked door let us into the mansion, and musty silence met us.
Here we found no hint of any popular uprising, against the ruling class. No bullet prints, no human bones, no smashed furniture, no looted safes and chests. The refrigerator in the great kitchen Had been emptied, but long shelves were filled with fine cut glass and ornamental china. The gloomy library held thousands of volumes—but empty spaces seemed to say that others had been taken. Closets were hung with moth-ravaged clothing. A wall safe stood open; and Doyle explored the papers in it, with a frown of dull bewilderment.
“They left a fortune,” he muttered incredulously. “This man—His Excellency, A. P. Watts, Director general of West Africa—must have been a lifetime piling up these stocks, annuities, bonds and shares, insurance policies, and deposit receipts. Then the thing happened—and he just walked off and left it all.”
His eyes appealed to Cameron.
“I don’t understand it.” His deep voice seemed haunted. “They weren’t killed—there would be more skeletons. They weren’t even frightened—they didn’t barricade their doors, or fire a gun, or even upset the furniture. They just set things in order, took a few useful items, evidently—and went away. ‘Because, of the equalizer.’ ”
His voice fell to a whisper of dull wonderment.
“But what does that mean—and where did they go?”
We moved the lifecraft again, this time into what had been an exclusive shopping district, where once, I fancied, the great men of the Directorate must have bought jewels and furs and perfumes for their mistresses, their secretaries, and perhaps even for their wives.
The street doors of these glittering shops were generally unlocked, or left wide open. Many shelves were bare, as if the goods had been simply carried out, but there was little evidence of vandalism or violent looting. Unbroken windows still held garish displays of tarnished costume jewelry, and abandoned cash registers were still stuffed with currency and coin—from which I saw Lord’s gunmen furtively filling their pockets.
We landed next in the middle of the city, in the wide empty canyon of Tyler Avenue. The massive granite walls were hushed and dead, but green weeds were pushing from every crevice in the hot pavements. A few sparrows were quarreling noisily about a window ledge.
“This was Squaredeal Square.” Doyle’s voice seemed too loud, in that sun-beaten silence. “If there was any fighting—war or rebellion—we ought to find the traces here.”
Peering up at those splendid dead facades. I remembered that I had been here once before—in a great jamboree of the Tyler Scouts, when I was seven. There was Squaredeal Hall. There was the purple granite balcony where Tyler—or perhaps it was one of his public doubles—had appeared as we marched by, waving his arm mechanically as we screamed out the Tyler Song.
