Complete Short Fiction, page 115
WS-CENTAURUS-719.
The ship was not far away, but low down. It skimmed by less than half a mile up; and it was gone over the horizon to the east as Neelan fired frantically with his energy gun.
Exhausted, Neelan sank down on the soft earth, to be prodded at last by Kershaw’s urgent voice:
“Get busy, man. Keep feeding the disks to the skies. Did you notice that was the seven hundred nineteenth Weapon Shop interstellar liner? It must be packed with colonists.”
Neelan nodded gloomily. “It may be years before another one passes overhead. They could be colonizing the other planets first, and meanwhile we’ve got to stay right here. We could wander over a planet as big as this the rest of our lives without ever seeing a colonist.”
“Yes,” said Kershaw, “we’ve got to stay here.”
The slow months passed.
XVIII.
It was Del Curtin who got Hedrock into the palace on the final day. “We’ve got to,” the prince had whispered, “get somebody near her. She must listen to reason. My friends are going to advise that new doctor of hers, Telinger, that you’re in. Just stick to your rooms until you’re called.”
Waiting was dreary. Hedrock paced the thickly carpeted floor, thinking of the months since he had been banished from the palace.
Actually, it was the last few days that had been worst.
Somehow, the whisper had spread abroad. Hedrock heard it far and wide. It didn’t come over the telestats; no official word was given out; just how it became known definitely was impossible to say.
He had heard it sitting in the restaurants he sometimes frequented. He heard it walking along quiet streets. It drifted on thin breezes, and rose in briefly heard words above the clamor of conversation on carplanes.
It had not been evil in intent, or in actuality. It was simply, there was going to be an Isher heir any day, and the excited world of Isher was waiting for the announcement.
They didn’t know it, but the day was—now.
The crisis came at ten o’clock at night. A message from Dr. Telinger brought Hedrock out of the study, and up into the Imperial apartments.
Telinger, Hedrock found, was a middle-aged medico with a thin face, which was wrinkled with dismay as he greeted his visitor.
The poor fellow, Hedrock knew, was guilty of nothing but weakness. He had been dragooned into the Imperial service as a replacement for Dr. Neel, who had been summarily dismissed after being court physician for thirty years. Hedrock could still remember one day at the dinner table when Innelda had inveighed against Dr. Neel, calling him “an outdated practitioner who’s still palming himself off as a doctor on the strength of having delivered me into the world.”
There was no doubt at all that the old man had told her the exact situation; and Innelda hadn’t liked it.
And there was also no doubt, Hedrock realized as he listened to Dr. Telinger, that the new doctor had never been granted the privilege of a too thorough examination. She had picked well. He looked the kind of man who would be too awed to override the resistance of his Imperial patient. Only—
“I’ve just discovered the truth,” he almost babbled at Hedrock. “She’s under antipain, but I’ve left a communication gap. Prince Hedrock, you must persuade her. It’s the baby or she; and her conviction that she will live is utterly unfounded.
“She has threatened me,” he finished whitely, “with death if the baby does not survive.”
Hedrock said: “Let me talk to her.”
She lay in the bed, calm and still. There was not a fraction of color in her cheeks; and the rise and fall of her chest was so infinitesimal that she seemed already dead.
Hedrock was conscious of distinct relief when the doctor placed the communicator mask gently over that quiet yet intense face. Poor tyrant, he thought, poor, wretched, unhappy tyrant, caught up by inner forces too great for her to command or think through.
He picked up his end of the communicator. “Innelda,” he said tenderly.
“It’s—you—Robert.” The answer was slow in coming and yet fierce. “I—told them—not—to—let—you—come.”
“Your friends love you. They want to keep you.”
“They—hate—me. They—think—I’m a—fool. But I shall show them. I will myself to live, but the child must live.”
“Prince del Curtin has married a lovely and wonderful woman. They will have beautiful children worthy of the succession.”
“No child but mine—and yours—will rule in Isher’s name. Don’t you see, it is the direct line that matters. There has never been a break. There will not be now. Don’t you see?”
Hedrock stood sad. He saw only too well. In the old days when, under various aliases, he had persuaded dozens of Isher emperors to marry women to whom family mattered, it had not seemed possible that the trait could ever become too strong.
Here was proof that it could be tragic.
“Robert—will you stay—and hold my hand?”
He stayed, and watched the life force ebb; waited till death lay heavily on the chilling body, and the baby was a thing whose raucous yowling made him sick with anger against all babies and the wretched immortality they represented.
A light year away, a hundred-mile-long ship got slowly under way. Great thoughts bounded and roared through its length:
“. . . The second general examination is almost as futile as the first in its basic results. We know some of the laws—but why did this ruler, who possessed a world, give her life for her child, when her whole being shrank from personal death? Her reasons, that she personally must carry on her line, logically inadequate. It is only a matter of a slight atomic rearrangement. Many men and women are alive who could carry forward her tribal progression.
“It remains but to bring her back to life, and make a record of the emotional reactions of those around her to the resuscitation.
“We need not return by way of Centaurus. Our prisoner—Neelan—has by an ingenious method nullified the logic that required destruction. Only accident that he has not yet been rescued. Any hour. We can leave the galaxy within one—period.
“This much we have learned; here is the race that shall rule the sevagram.”
THE END.
THE GREAT ENGINE
There are times when—even in peacetime—science serves better in silence and by stealth. The man who found the mighty engine, dropped from a spaceship, had a chance to do that.
The blue-gray engine lay half buried in a green hillside.
It lay there in that summer of 1948, a soulless thing of metal and of forces more potent than life itself. Rain washed its senseless form. A July, then an August sun blazed down upon it. In the night the stars looked down wanly, caring nothing for its destiny.
The ship it drove had been nosing down into Earth’s atmosphere when the meteorite plowed through the metal that held it in place. Instantly, in the irresistibletiess of its terrible strength, the engine tore to shreds what remained of the framework and plunged through the gaping meteorite hole, down, down.
For all the weeks since then it had lain in the hillside seemingly lifeless but, actually, in its great fashion, utterly alive.
There was dirt in its force field, so tightly packed that it would have taken eagle eyes to see how swiftly it was spinning. Not even the boys who sat one day on a flange of the engine noticed the convulsions of the dirt.
If one of them had poked a grimy hand into the inferno of energy that was the force field, muscles, bones, blood would have spurted like gas exploding.
But the boys went away; and the engine lay there until the day the searchers passed along the bottom of the hill. Discovery was as close as that. There were two of them, two alert, trained observers who anxiously scanned the hillside. But a cloud was veiling the brightness of the sun, and they passed on unseeing.
It was more than a week later, late in the afternoon, when a horse climbing the hill straddled the protruding bulge of the engine. The horse’s rider proceeded to dismount in an astounding fashion.
With his one hand he grasped the saddlehorn and lifted himself clear of the saddle. Casually, easily, he brought his left leg over, held himself poised in midair, and then dropped to the ground.
The display of strength seemed all the more effortless because the action was entirely automatic; his attention was concentrated the whole while on the thing in the ground.
His lean face twisted as he examined the machine. He glanced around, eyes suddenly narrowed; then he smiled sardonically as he realized the thought in his mind.
Finally, he shrugged. Fat chance of anybody seeing him out here. The town of Crescentville was more than a mile away; and there was no sign of life around the big white house which stood among trees a third of a mile to the northwest.
He was alone with his horse and the machine; and, after a moment, his voice echoed with cool irony on the twilight air:
“Well, Dandy, here’s a job for us. This scrap should buy you quite a bit of feed. We’ll haul it to the junk dealer after dark. That way she won’t find out and we’ll save some remnant of our pride. She—”
He stopped. Involuntarily, he turned to stare at the gardenlike estate whose width stretched for nearly a mile between himself and the town. A white fence, misty and halo-ish in the twilight, made a vast circuit around a green, verdant land of trees and pasture. The fence kept disappearing down gullies and into brush. It vanished finally in the north beyond the stately white house.
The man shook himself impatiently. “What a fool I’ve been, hanging around Crescentville waiting for her to—” He cut the words with a mental effort and turned to stare down at the engine. “Have to get some idea of its weight—wonder what it is.”
He climbed to the top of the hill and came down again carrying a piece of deadwood about four feet long and three inches in diameter. He began to pry the engine loose from the ground.
It was awkward work with only a left arm; and so, when he noticed the dirt-plugged hole in the center, he jabbed the wood into it to get better leverage.
His shout, of surprise and pain echoed hoarsely on the evening air.
For the wood jerked. Like a shot twisted by the rifled barrel of a gun, like a churning knife, it wrenched in his hand, tearing like a shredder, burning like fire.
He was lifted up, up—and flung twenty feet down the hill. Groaning, clutching his tattered hand to his body, he stumbled to his feet.
The sound died on his lips, then, as his gaze fastened on the throbbing, whirling thing that had been a dead branch of tree.
He stared. Then he climbed, trembling, onto the black horse. Nursing his bloodied hand, blinking from sheer agony, he raced the animal down the hill and toward the highway that led to the town.
A stone boat and harness for Dandy rented from a farmer—rope and tackle—a hand stiff with bandages, still numb with pain—a trek through darkness with a thrumming thing on the stone boat—for three hours Pendrake felt himself a creature in a nightmare, running madly in all directions.
But here was the engine now, on the floor of his stable, safe front discovery except for the sound that was pouring forth from the wood in its force field.
It was funny how his mind had worked. The determination to transport the engine secretly to his own cottage had been like choosing life instead of death, like swiftly picking up a hundred-dollar bill lying on a deserted street: so automatic as to be beyond the need of logic.
It still seemed as natural as living.
The yellow glow from the lantern filled the interior of what had once been a large private garage and workshop. In one corner Dandy stood, black hide aglint, eyes glistening, as he turned his head to stare at the thing that shared his quarters.
The not unpleasant smell of horse was thick now that the door was closed.
The engine lay on its side near the door; and the main trouble was that the wood in it wasn’t straight. It slogged away against the air like some caricature of a propeller, beating a sound out of the atmosphere by the sheer violence and velocity of its rotation.
About eight thousand revolutions a minute, Pendrake estimated and stood stunned, striving to grasp the kind of machine that could snatch a piece of wood, and—
His mind sagged before the mystery; and he gave it up. But a black frown creased his face as he stared down at the speed-blurred wood.
He couldn’t just grab it. And, while undoubtedly there were a number of tools in the world that could grip a whirling bar and pull on it, they were not available here in this lantern-lighted stable.
He thought: “There must be a control, something to switch off the power.”
But the bluish-gray, doughnut-shaped outer shell was glass smooth. Even the flanges that projected from four ends, and in which were the holes for bed bolts, seemed to grow out of the shell, as if they had been molded from the same block of metal, as if there had been a flowing, original design that spurned anything less than oneness.
Baffled, Pendrake walked around the machine. He had the empty conviction that the problem was beyond the solution of a man who had as his working equipment one badly maimed and bandaged hand.
He noticed something. The machine lay solidly, heavily, on the floor. It neither jogged nor jumped. It made not the slightest effort to begin a sedate, reactionary creep in opposition to the insanely whirling thing that bristled from its middle.
The engine was ignoring the law that action and reaction are equal and opposite.
With abrupt realization of the possibilities, Pendrake bent down and heaved at the engine. Instantly, knives of pain hacked at his hand. Tears shocked into his eyes. But when he finally let go the engine was standing on one of its four sets of flanges; and the crooked wood was spinning, no longer vertically, but roughly horizontal to the floor.
The pulse of agony in Pendrake’s hand slowed. He wiped the tears from his eyes and proceeded to the next step in the plan that had occurred to him.
Nails! He drove them into the bed bolt holes, and bent them over the metal. That was just to make sure the narrow-based engine wouldn’t topple over in the event that he bumped too hard against the outer shell.
An apple box came next. Laid lengthwise on its side, it reached up to within half an inch of the exact center of the large hole, from the opposite side of which the wood projected. Two books held steady a piece of one-inch piping about a foot long. It was painful holding the small sledge hammer in that lame hand of his, but he struck true.
The piece of piping recoiled from the hammer, banged into the wood where it was held inside the hole of the engine, knocked it out.
There was a crash that shook the garage. After a dazed moment, Pendrake grew aware of a long, splintered slash in the ceiling, through which the four-foot piece of deadwood had bounced after striking the floor.
Slowly, his reverberating mind gravitated into a rhythm with the silence that was settling. Pendrake drew a deep breath. There were still things to discover, a whole, new machine world to explore. But one thing was clear:
He had conquered the engine.
At midnight he was still awake. He kept getting up, dropping the magazine he was reading, and going into the dark kitchen of the cottage to peer out at the darker garage.
But the night was quiet. No marauders disturbed the peace of the town. Occasionally, a car motor sounded faraway.
The dozenth time he found himself pressing his face against the cool pane of the kitchen window, Pendrake cursed aloud and went back into the living room muttering invective.
What was he trying to do! He couldn’t hope to keep that engine. It must be a new invention, a radical post-war development—lying on that hillside because of an accident that a silly ass who never read papers, or listened to the radio, wouldn’t know anything about.
Somewhere in the house, he remembered, was a New York Times he’d bought not so long ago. He found the paper on his magazine rack with all the other old and unread papers and magazines he’d bought from time to time.
The date at the top was June 7, 1947; and this was August 16th. Not too great a difference. It—
But this wasn’t 1947. This was 1948! With a cry Pendrake leaped to his feet, then slowly sank back into his chair. It was an ironic picture that came then, a kaleidoscope of the existence of a man so untouched by the friction of time that fourteen months had glided by like so many days.
Lazy, miserable hound, Pendrake thought in a blaze of fury, using his lost arm and an unforgiving woman as an excuse for lying down on life. That was over. All of it. He’d start again—He grew aware of the paper in his hand; and all the irony went out of him as in a gathering excitement he began to glance at the headlines:
PRESIDENT CALLS ON NATION
FOR NEW INDUSTRIAL EFFORT
Two Hundred Billion Dollar National In-
come Only Beginning, He Says.
GERMANY RECOVERING
SWIFTLY UNDER
UNITED NATIONS PLAN
Shaposhenko Punishment for Leaders
Having Rejuvenating Effect on People,
Occupation Authorities State.
350,000 FAMILY PLANES SOLD
FIRST FIVE MONTHS OF 1947
IS THERE LIFE ON
OTHER PLANETS?
Expect 200 Inch Telescope To Provide
New Evidence—To Be Completed Next Year.
Pendrake’s mind froze at that point, froze so hard on the thought that came that a pain stabbed through his head. He shook himself. He thought: “It was impossible! An engine that merely turned an axle in however wonderful a fashion wasn’t a spaceship drive whatever else it might be.”
No, no—The situation was really simple. He had crept away into this little cottage of his, almost right out of the world. Life had gone on dynamically; and somewhere not so long ago a tremendous invention had spawned out of that surging tide of will and ambition and creative genius.
Tomorrow he would try to get a mortgage on this cottage; that would provide him with a little cash, and break forever the thrall of the place. Dandy he’d send over to Eleanor in the same fashion that she had sent him three years ago—without a word. The green pastures of the estate would be like heaven for an animal that had starved too long now on an ex-airman’s pension. As for the engine—
