Complete Short Fiction, page 102
Whoever was at the other end of the telestat-tie wouldn’t be able to see that no one was at the control board, or even that this was the control center.
A faint wheezing sound made Neelan turn completely. The doors were closing.
He had timed his pace well. Except for Greer, he was alone in the ship, safe except for a damnable telestat-tie that carried an atomic bomb.
If only he had known yesterday what he knew now. If he hadn’t been so blindly obsessed, so remote from the greater realities that had, he could see now hopelessly, clamored for his attention, literally thrust themselves at him.
All the universe to feed man’s vaulting spirit, Gil’s life—his to give and his to save; and he had been like some mindless fanatic, almost willfully heedless of the power that was his for the taking.
Silence.
He thought: What would they be wondering? The empress, of course, would be there before her bank of telestats, keeping her in touch with the men on the battleships and the man beside the invisible cannon. And all of them would be waiting.
So far, his pause would seem natural. Why shouldn’t he wait for Greer to show himself, and speak?
His own plan hadn’t exactly included a halt here. But then that plan itself was a vague hodgepodge, dependent on unfolding opportunity and will to endure, and overwhelmingly upon grim determination to win.
Nothing mattered but that. Nothing.
He began to walk toward the stairway to the extreme right; and he was halfway down the first leg of steps when a voice whispered under his neck. He was so intent that he jumped, and it was a moment before he recognized that it was she.
“What’s the matter? Where’s Greer?”
Neelan whispered furiously: “How should I know? For Heaven’s sake, your majesty, he may be listening.”
She was cool. “That’s impossible. All these ships are built to standard specifications. There are no sound devices on stairways. But proceed! You are heading for the engine room?”
“Yes,” Neelan whispered. “Yes.”
In spite of the fact that the situation hadn’t really changed, Neelan felt shaken by the interruption. For it showed that the remarkable woman had now nerved herself to take risks.
The words had brought with them, too, something of the deadly will that was out there, lusting to break into this ship, the masses of men and machines waiting like destroying juggernauts, like armies of old poised to plunge into bloody battle.
For a moment it seemed incredible that one woman could set so much power into motion, could by her slightest act influence the entire future of the world.
If Gil was right, there would be no repetition of this invention. Here was the end or the beginning of life. Here was—
He had been descending steadily; and now he saw that he was in the repair shop above the engine room. Instantly, all thought except his own immediate purpose washed from his mind as if it had never been.
Get a cutter, an atomic hand-cutter for himself—while seeming to concentrate on lowering a great cable-cutter down to the engine room.
There was a hand-cutter, he saw after a frantic visual search, on the bench near the great, fenced-in well that looked down on the pack of engines below.
It was the work of a few minutes to maneuver the mobile crane, so that it rolled weightily up to the bench, and from that position lowered the ten-foot cable-cutter down the well directly over the mound of metal that concealed the main drive.
The big cutter safely set down, Neelan leaned against the bench, took out his handkerchief, and wiped the sweat off his face.
He was shocked to discover that his face was wet with perspiration. It took several seconds to clear off the cold dampness; and every instant his fingers were fumbling on the bench behind him.
He gasped with relief as his hand closed convulsively over the priceless tool. It was at that tremendous moment that the empress hissed at him:
“What are you doing? Why the delay?” She paused; then: “Something is wrong. Did you kill Greer yesterday? Is that what you were hiding?”
She had, Neelan realized grayly, at this penultimate hour struck fire.
He could almost see pictorially how she had inevitably arrived at the conclusion. Everything fitted: the way the doors had opened—and shut behind him—automatically; the non-appearance of Greer, the way he, Neelan, had worded his promises of the night before, and his refusal to go beyond them.
A single reaching of the mind, a mental flash of comprehension. She would need nothing more.
But she couldn’t be sure. Therefore—
“Sssshh!” Neelan whispered huskily. “I think I hear something.”
The wretched thing, then, was that he stood there. Now that the time had come, his muscles seemed immovable, his mind lost in funk. The final action, and what lay beyond, seemed suddenly too great an obstacle for a single human being to overcome.
The empress was speaking again, in an intense whisper:
“Dan Neelan, at this final hour, I make you another appeal. No matter what you are hiding, it doesn’t matter. No matter what you want, I shall accede to it, provided it leaves me in full control of the ship and the invention. If there is any truth in what I have just said about Greer being dead, yield verification, and you shall have one billion credits within the hour. Do you realize how much money that is? Can your imagination conceive the wealth that will be yours?”
And still there was nothing he could say. Her one proviso—“Leave me the ship”—put their two purposes as far apart as the two poles of the galaxy.
It was that opposition, so fundamental as to make all argument meaningless that released Neelan from the thrall that held him. Like mechanical springs, suddenly set free, his arms jerked up behind him. With one hand, he caught the metal of the tie, where it came around the back of his neck under his collar.
At that last instant, it struck him that he ought to speak, to say something—hold off for fractional seconds the demoniac woman out there, who must be on the very verge of decisive action.
“Your majesty,” Neelan gasped. “You’re quite mistaken. Greer is alive. He—”
“Then what are you waiting for? Hurry! Cut the drive cable. Are you mad to stand there? What are you doing?”
It was, Neelan reflected grimly, a good question. He had brought up his right hand, which held the small cutter, and adjusted the power edge over the metal band of the tie. There was a tiny physical blow, as he pressed the control; and then—
“Break in!” the empress was crying, her voice like a deep violin note. “All forces act. Break in!”
Convulsively, Neelan snatched the tie, flung it down the well into the engine room, and threw himself flat on the floor.
There was a red, billowing flare of fire.
Instantly, he was on his feet, racing for the stairs, exultant because—because the first cannon blow had yet to come. Surely, oh, surely, he could muster the physical strength for three hundred and sixty feet of stairway, and do it in less than a hundred and eighty seconds of sustained climbing.
Three minutes, the empress had said, three—
The first shot struck then. It shook the ship. It was violent beyond his wildest preconception. It brought a moment of horrible daze, and a mind-racking thought:
He had forgotten concussion.
He raced on up, up, the appalling fear already in his heart. The second titanic shot sent him reeling back. But he recovered, and plunged on, conscious of lassitude.
The third shot raged; and blood spurted from his nose; a warm stream trickled out of his ears. The fourth shot—he was dimly aware that he was nearly halfway up those endless stairs—crumpled him in a heap. He half rolled down a whole section of stairway; and the fifth shot caught him as he was staggering erect.
He knew his defeat now, a sick and deadly knowledge, but he kept moving his legs, and felt amazed when he reached the next level. The sixth intolerable explosion caught him there at the head of that long stair; and sent him spinning down like a leaf engulfed in a storm.
There was a door at the bottom; and he closed it with pure automatic intention, mindlessly. He stared dully as the great door lifted off its hinges, grazed him as it fell, and clanged to the floor. That was the seventh shot.
Like an animal now, he retreated from pain, down the next line of steps, instinctively locking the lower door. He was standing there, infinitely weary, half leaning against the door when the shouts of men roused his stunned mind.
Voices, he thought then, inside the ship. He shook his head, unbelievingly. The voices came nearer; and then abruptly the truth penetrated.
They were in. It had taken only seven shots.
A man shouted arrogantly from the other side of the door, where he was standing: “Quick, break it down. Kill Neelan on sight. That’s orders.”
The empress had the ship.
IX.
Neelan began to retreat. It was a slow business, because his mind wouldn’t gather around any one thought, and his reflexes were all shot to pieces.
And that, he thought in a paroxysm of coherence was almost literally true. He had been reduced to an inchoate nervous organism by the greatest concentration of energy fire ever leveled at a machine containing a man.
His knees trembled, as he kept on going down the stairs. Down, down—the clumsy feeling came that he was climbing deeper into his grave.
Not, he realized grayly, that there was much farther to go now. The storerooms were past. Next was the insulation room, then the repair room, then the engine room, then the drive chamber; and then—
And then—
Neelan’s brain skittered there like a crazy thing. The pressure of the thought was so great that his whole being convulsed; and he was himself, complete with purpose, will—and hope.
Hope! It surged through him, a tidal wave that burned along his tortured nerves, warming his body. Hope because—
There was a way. A way so simple that it seemed incredible that he hadn’t even thought of it before. Although that, too, was explicable, actually. Every drop of blood and energy in him had been concentrated on getting the ship, a very drumbeat of determination, of co-ordinated action, and of courage so great that it was almost impossible to realize that he had been the one to display it.
The ship was lost, of course; and Gil, and those other poor devils four and a third light-years away were lost. And all the billions of human beings who might have carried the torch of civilization to the farthest stars of the universe—their chance, too, their destiny, their hope of greater happiness was gone, unless—
Neelan smiled bleakly at the impossibility, but the thought stayed with him, and gradually formed a remote spur to his weary muscles: Everything that mattered was lost unless the empress, at this moment of her victory, gave up the secret willingly or by compulsion.
He reached the engine room, and forgot all else but the work that had to be done. It took a precious minute to discover which of the motors was working, so slight was the drain of power that went into the ship’s lighting system and other power functions. During that minute the floors shuddered as another of the doors he had locked went down with a distant clang before the hissing roar of a mobile unit. Instantly, the shouting of men came nearer.
With a grim patience, Neelan began to pull switches. First, went the telestat control. At least he would no longer be watched from hidden ’stats. All the upper lights went next. It should take them several minutes to get more lights. Meanwhile—
With a swift, thrusting motion, he reached under his shirt, and switched on his invisibility belt. Nothing happened, but—he smiled grimly—he had expected them to shut his power off. The answer was to tune in on this engine.
He grasped the essential dial, twirled it. His belt tugged like a motor, and the whole scene changed subtly. Colors blurred, transformed curiously; metal-gray became darker, white shaded.
There was a rule that a person going invisible should pause for sanity’s sake to let the body adjust. But he had no time for that. With frantic fingers, Neelan jerked the switch that locked the tuning dial in place, then hastily unscrewed the switch and put it in his pocket. The screw hole of the switch he seared with an atomic solder beyond all immediate use.
He simply stuck the solder iron into the socket of the engine control, and left it there, burning away, making it utterly impossible for anyone to shut off the engine in the near future.
He had already visually located the six-foot drill he wanted; he floated it out on its anti-gravity base, pushing it urgently down the two flights of stairs from the repair room, where it had been, down past the engine room, into the great drive chamber that was the final room of the big spaceship.
And there, in spite of himself, in spite of the desperate urgency, Neelan paused and stared like a sick man at what must be the stellar drive itself.
Here was the treasure that all the fighting was about. And the mere idea of passing it without striving even now to snatch a clue that would enable the Weapon Shop scientists to re-invent, was impossible.
Yesterday—how long ago that seemed—he hadn’t so much as come down to this room. Instead, he had wandered about like an egotistical idiot, gawking knowingly at all the things that didn’t matter.
Trembling, Neelan snatched the transparency bar of the giant drill, and focused its penetrating light at that thirty-foot-thick drive shaft.
He saw dark mist—and groaned with his failure. The metal was too hard, too thick. There were too many interlayers and reflectors. No known transparency would ever so much as approach the core of that drive.
Defeated, Neelan whirled and began to run, pushing the drill which, weightless though it was, nevertheless offered a “mass” resistance to his straining muscles.
He got through the first door of the bottom lock, then the second, then the third—and then he stood there gulping in wild surmise.
He had been gathering his reserves of strength and will for the job of drilling a six-foot hole through the earth on a steep slanting thrust for the surface.
He didn’t have to. The hole, the passageway, was there. A line of dim ceiling lights made a straight but upward slanting path into the distance.
And there was not a second, not an instant, to think of explanations. In a single twist of synchronized movement, Neelan grabbed the transparency bar, squeezed past the now unnecessary drill, and raced along the tunnel.
It was much longer than he would have had time to drill. The angle of ascent was only about twenty degrees. But actually the greater distance was all to the good. The farther he got away from the ship before emerging into the open, the better.
He reached the end suddenly. It was a metal door; and, using the transparency, he could see that beyond it was an empty cellar. The door had a simple latch, that opened at his touch and closed behind him like amorphous metal sinking tracelessly into a solid wall.
It was the perfection of workmanship that startled him. Neelan paused, tensely, inside the cellar, and studied the door. There was an implication here that Greer had been back from Centaurus for a long time. So much preparation for his negotiations with the empress, this outlet, and that secret address at the Trellis Minor Building, must have taken weeks to arrange for. Or was it possibly—
Neelan’s face cleared. Of course. That was it. Not Greer, but Kershaw and the others, had built this. They, too, had been cautious about their contacts with the outside world.
It was possible that Greer had not even known of this passageway. In fact—Neelan felt suddenly positive—the man would never have left him alone in the engine room yesterday morning, so near an exit, if he had known.
The other, the telestat contacts with the outside world had probably been handed into Greer’s control as general handy man by those brilliant nitwits, Kershaw and Gil, who thought of every precaution against outside interference, but never once cleaned their inner house against back-stabbing schemers.
The thought, now that all was lost, was too bitter to hold even for a second. Depressed, Neelan headed for a set of stairs to his left. Halfway up, the stairs branched. The left way led up to a rather ornate door, beyond which his transparency showed a vacant kitchen; the right way—
Very carefully Neelan laid the transparency down on the steps. He wouldn’t be needing it any more. He straightened then like a man bracing himself. Finally he opened the second door and stepped into bright sunlight.
He was in the back yard of a large, vacant house. There was the usual green wonder of lawn, the perpetually flowering garden, the carplane garage, and a high fence with a gate.
The gate opened easily from inside onto a back-alley boulevard, the kind where the sidewalks hug the sides of the street. Farther along, Neelan could see a broad thoroughfare.
He hurried toward it, anxious to identify it so that he could judge how far he was from the spaceship. Knowing where he was would give him a better idea of what he must do, could do, next.
There would be a cordon of guards. But just how far they extended from the center of operations, and what degree of watchfulness they were exercising, was another matter. If they had invisibility viewers—
They did. There was a uniformed guard at the corner, and he wore the glittering viewer headpiece. He waved at Neelan from a distance.
“How’re things going?”
“We’re in!” Neelan called. “Keep your eyes peeled.”
“Don’t worry. There’s a solid line of us out here.”
Neelan turned away, shuddering, and walked hastily back the way he had come. Trapped. The streets would be covered for blocks: and, in minutes, a yelling crew would smash the last of the hard doors that barred their way in the spaceship, realize what had happened and the search with its certainty of capture would be on.
Or worse still, perhaps they were already by the final barrier, and in minutes would break from the house, where the tunnel ended; and, seeing him, swoop for the kill.
