Complete Short Fiction, page 30
“However, Dr. Lann later discovered that by intensification of the human baby’s education, it was possible for the latter to catch up to, and remain reasonably level with, the slan, particularly in quickness of infold. The slan’s great advantage was the ability to read minds, which gave him an unsurpassable insight into psychology and readier access to the education which the human child could learn only through the medium of ears and eyes—
JOHN PETTY interrupted in a voice that was thick and harsh: “What you’re saying is only what I’ve known all along, and is the main reason why we can’t begin to consider peace negotiations with these . . . these damned artificial beings. In order for a human being to equal a slan, he must strain for years to acquire what conies with the greatest of ease to the slan. In other words, all except the minutest fraction of humanity is incapable of ever being anything more than a slave in comparison to a slan. Gentlemen, there can be no peace but rather an intensification of extermination methods. We can’t even risk one of the Machiavellian plans already discussed, because the danger of something going wrong is too great.”
“By heaven,” said a councilor, “he’s right!”
Several voices firmly echoed the conviction: and there was suddenly no doubt which way the verdict would go. Kathleen saw Kier Gray glance keenly from face to face. He said:
“if that is to be our decision, then I should consider it a grave mistake for any one of us at the present time to take this slan as mistress. It might give a wrong impression.”
The silence that followed was the silence of agreement; and Kathleen’s gaze leaped to Jem Lorry’s face. He met her eyes coolly, rising languidly to his feet as she stood up and made for the door. As she passed him he fell into step at her side.
As he opened the door for her he spoke in a low voice: “It won’t be for long, my lady. So don’t build up false hopes.” And he smiled confidently.
But it was not of his threat that Kathleen was thinking as she walked slowly along the corridor. She was remembering the thunderstruck expression that had come into Kier Gray’s face at the moment John Petty had asked for her death.
And it didn’t fit. It didn’t fit at all with his suave words of a minute later, when he had informed the others that the slan ship was robot propelled and had been brought down in the marshes. If that was so then why had he been startled? And if it wasn’t so—then Kier Gray had taken the terrific risk of lying for her; and was probably even now worrying about it.
VIII.
JOMMY CROSS stared urgently yet thoughtfully down at the pale, wrecked spectacle that was Granny. There was no rage in him at her betrayal of him, rather a melancholy sense of the inevitability of what had happened. The result was disaster, his future abruptly a vast blank, unplanned, homeless; yet the whole desperate business was simply the product of the rigid forces of Granny’s disintegrating character combining with the world-wide slan-human tensions to produce what seemed suddenly a foregone conclusion.
But now the problem was: what to do with the old fool?
She sat almost blithely in a chair, an extravagantly rich and colorful dressing gown swaddled jauntily around her ungainly form. She giggled up at him:
“Granny knows something, yes, Granny knows—” Her words trailed into nonsense, then: “—money, oh, good lord, yes. Granny’s got plenty of money for her old age, see!”
With the trusting innocence of a well-stewed old soak, she slid a bulging black bag from inside her dressing gown, then with ostrichlike common sense, jerked it back into hiding.
Jommy Cross was conscious of shock. It was the first time he had actually seen her money, although he had always known her various hiding places. But to have the stuff out here now, with a raid actually in progress—such stupidity deserved the farthest limits of retribution.
Hut still he stood there, undecided, becoming tenser as the first faint pressure of men’s thoughts from outside the shack made an almost impalpable weight against his brain. Dozens of men, edging closer, the snub noses of their submachine guns protruding ahead of them.
He frowned blackly. By all rights, he should leave the betrayer to face the rage of the baffled hunters, to face the law which said that every human being, without exception, who was convicted of harboring a slan, must be hanged by the neck until dead.
Through his mind ran the nightmarish picture of Granny on the way to the gallows, Granny shrieking for mercy, Granny fighting to prevent the rope from being placed around her neck, kicking, scratching, slobbering at her captors—ugh!”
He reached down and grabbed her clammy, naked shoulders where the dressing gown was loosely drawn. He shook her with a cold, deadly violence till her teeth rallied, till she sobbed with a dry, horrible pain; and a modicum of sanity came into her eyes. He grated harshly:
“It’s death for you if you stay here. Don’t you know the law?”
“Huh!” She sat up, briefly startled, then abruptly slipped off again into the cesspools of her mind.
Hurry, hurry, he thought, and forced his brain into that nightmare of squalor to see if his words had brought any basic balance. Just as he was about to give up he found a startled, dismayed, alert little section of sanity, almost buried in the dissolving, incoherent mass that was her thoughts.
“Sail right,” she mumbled, “Granny’s got plenty of money. Rich people don’t get hung. Stand to reason.”
JOMMY stepped back from her indecisive. The weight of the men’s minds was a heavy, dragging thing on his brain. They were nearer now, drawing an ever lighter circle. Their numbers appalled him. Even the great weapon in his pocket might be helpless if a hail of bullets swept the resistless walls of the shack. And only one bullet was needed to destroy all his lather’s dreams—
“By God,” he said aloud furiously, “I’m a fool! What will f do with you, even if I get you out? All highways out of the city will be blocked. There’s only one real hope, and that’ll be almost, hopelessly hard even without a drunken old woman to hinder me. I don’t fancy climbing a thirty-story building with you on my back—”
Logic said to hell with her. He half turned away; and then, once more, thought of Granny being strung up came in all its horror. Damn it! Whatever her faults, her very existence had made it possible for him to continue alive. That was a debt which must be paid.
With a single snatching movement he tore the black bag from its hiding place under Granny’s dressing gown. She grunted drunkenly, and then awareness seeped into her as he held the bag tantalizingly before her eyes.
“Look,” he taunted, “all your money, your whole future. You’ll starve; they’ll have you scrubbing floors in the poorhouse. They’ll whip you.
In fifteen seconds she was sober—a hot, burning soberness that grasped essentials with all the swift, cunning clarity of the hardened criminal.
“Granny’ll hang!” she gasped.
“Now were getting somewhere,” Jommy Cross snapped. “Here, take your money.” he smiled grimly as she grabbed it from him. “We’ve got a tunnel to go through. It leads from my bedroom to a private garage at the corner of 170th Street. I’ve got a key to the car. We’ll drive down near the Air Center and steal one of—”
He stopped, conscious of the unutterable flimsiness of that final part of his plan. It seemed completely incredible that the tendrilless slans would be so hopelessly organized that he would actually be able to get one of those marvelous spaceships which nightly launched into the sky.
True, he had escaped from them once with absurd ease, but that seemed strangely unreal and unbelievable.
WITH a gasp, Jommy set the old woman down on the flat roof of the spaceship building. He sank down beside her heavily, his six slim feet of body collapsed onto the roof. For the first time in his life he was conscious of sheer muscular weariness, contracted from exertion at the full of vibrant health.
“Good heavens,” he breathed, “who’ll have thought an old woman would weigh so much?”
The old woman was snarling in retrospect terror from that frightful climb. His brain caught the first, warning of the burst of fury vituperations that was rising to her lips. His weary muscles galvanized instantly: One swift hand clamped over her mouth.
“Shut up,” he hissed, “or I’ll drop you over the edge like a sack of potatoes. You’re the cause of this horrible situation, and you’d better mind your manners.”
His words acted like a dash of cold water. He had to admire the way she recuperated from the desperate terror that had racked her. The old devil certainly had staying powers. She pulled his hand from her mouth and asked sullenly:
“What now?”
“We’ve got to find a way into the building in as short a time as possible and—”
Time! He glanced at his wrist watch; and, dismayed, leaped to his feet. Twelve minutes to ten!
Twelve minutes before the rocketship took off for Mars! Twelve minutes to take control of that ship!
He snatched Granny up, flung her lightly over his shoulder, and raced off toward the center of the roof. Not only was there no time to search for doors, but such doors would obviously be wired and there was even less time to study and nullify the alarm system. There was only one way. Somewhere here must be the runway up which the ships were projected when they launched toward the remote regions of interplanetary space, and—
Abruptly he felt a difference beneath his feet, a vague rise, a gentle bulbousness. He stopped short, teetering on his toes, unbalanced by the violent ending of his racing flight. Carefully he felt his way back to the beginning of the bulbous section. That would be the edge of the runway.
The atomic gun he literally tore from his pocket. Its intolerable disintegrating fire flamed downward.
He peered through the four-foot-in-diameter hole into a great, shining tunnel that sloped into depths at an angle that must have been a tight sixty-five degrees. A hundred, two hundred, three hundred yards of glistening metal tunnel wall; and at the very bottom—
THE SHIP that lay there gradually took on outline as Jommy’s eyes grew accustomed to the dim light. There was a torpedo-pointed nose, with dimly visible forward blast tubes distorting the smooth, streamlined effect. A queer, deadly thing, silent and moveless, yet somehow strangely, abnormally menacing.
It was as if he was staring down the barrel of a vast gun, at the shell that was about to be fired. The comparison struck him so sharply that for a long, terrible moment his mind refused to hold the thought of what he must do.
Doubt came in waves as he stood there, a mad stream of discordant thought. Could he dare slide down that glass-smooth slipway when any second a rocketship in all the fury and power of irresistible motion could come smashing up toward the sky?
His body felt tense and cold. With a distinct effort, he lifted his gaze from that paralyzing depth of tunnel and fixed his eyes, at first unseeing, then with gathering fascination, on the distant, looming splendor of the palace, his thought paused abruptly, slowly his body lost tension; for long seconds he just stood there drinking in the glory of the immense, the exquisite jewel that was the palace by night.
It was plainly visible from this height between and beyond two great skyscrapers; and it glowed divinely. There was no mind-staggering, eve-dazzling glare to it. It glowed with a soft, living, wonderful flame that was never the same color for more than a single instant. Glorious, lambent fire that flickered and flashed a thousand combinations; and each combination was subtly, sometimes startlingly, different. Not once was there an exact repetition!
On and on it sparkled, and lived! Once, for a long, splendid moment, wild chance turned the tower, that translucent five-hundred-foot fairy tower, a glowing, turquoise blue. And for that amazing instant the visible part of the palace below was nearly all deep, deep red. For one moment—and then the combination shattered into a million bursting fragments of color: blue, red, green yellow. No color, no possible shade of color, was missing from that silent, flaming explosion.
A thousand nights he had fed his soul on its flowing, gorgeous beauty; and now he felt again the sheer, wonderful power. Strength poured from it into him: his courage came back like the unbreakable, indestructible force it was. His teeth clenched; grimly he stared down into the depths, so sharply angled, so smooth in the promise of madly swift passage to the distant, steel-hard bottom.
The very unalloyed danger of it was like a symbol of his future. Blank future, more unpredictable now than it had ever been. It simply couldn’t be that the tendrilless slans could not be aware that he was here on this roof. There must be superb alarm systems—there must be!
“What do you keep staring down that hole for?” Granny whined. “Where’s the door we want? Time is—”
Thought of time nearly knocked him down. His watch said four minutes to ten, and that seemed to shock even his bones. Eight minutes actually gone, four minutes to conquer a fortress.
He caught Granny’s thought then, her abrupt awareness of his intention. Just in time his hand slapped at her mouth; and her shriek of dismay stifled against his palm. The next second they were falling, committed irrevocably.
THEY STRUCK the tunnel surface almost gently, as if they had suddenly entered a world of slow motion. The slipway felt, not hard, but yielding beneath his body; and there was only the vaguest sense of motion.
But his eyes and mind were not fooled for an instant. The blunt nose of the spaceship so many hundreds of yards away, in one short moment plunged up at them. The illusion of the ship roaring toward them in full blast was so real that he had to hold the emotional part of his brain in leash, so great was the impulse to panic.
“Quick!” he hissed at Granny. “Use the fiat of your hands—slow down!”
The old woman needed no urging. Of all the instincts in her misused body, that of survival was immeasurably the strongest. She couldn’t have screamed now to save her soul, but her lips blubbered with fear even as she fought for life. Her beadlike eyes glistened with a horrible, moist terror—but she fought! She clung at the gleaming metal, bony hands spread out flat and hard, her legs squeezed against the metal surface; and pitiful though the result was—it helped.
Abruptly, the nose of the ship loomed above Jommy Cross, higher than he had thought; with a desperate strength, he reached up, up at the first thick ring of rocket chambers. His fingers touched the corded, seared metal, skidded—and instantly lost their holds.
He fell back, and only then did he realize that he had risen to the full, stretched-out height of his body. He fell hard, almost stunningly; but instantly, with the desperate, special strength of slan muscles, was up again. His fingers caught one of the big tubes of the second ring of fire chambers with such unbreakable hold that the uncontrollable part of the journey ended at that very moment.
Sick from the strain of too much effort, he let go; and it was as he half sat there, shaking the dizziness out of his head, that he grew aware of the patch of light farther under the immense body of the machine.
The ship was curving so sharply now toward the tunnel floor on which it rested that he had to bend double as tie made his way toward it painfully. He was thinking: An open door, here, now, a few short seconds before the great ship is due to leave?
It. was a door! A two-foot-in-diameter opening in a foot-thick metal hull, with the hinged door leaning inward. He pushed up into the opening unhesitating, his terrible gun alert for the slightest movement. There was nothing, no one.
In that one swift first glance he saw that this was the control room. There were sonic chairs, an intricate-looking instrument board, and some great curved, glowing plates on either side of it—and there was an open door leading to the second section of the ship.
It took but a moment to leap inside and to pull the panicky old woman after him; and then, lightly, he jumped for the connecting door.
Al the threshold he paused cautiously and peered in. This second room was partly furnished with chairs, the same deep, comfortable chairs as in the control room—but more than half the space was filled with chained-down packing cases.
There were two doors; one led to what was obviously a third section of the long ship, partly open, with more packing cases visible beyond, and. vaguely, a door leading into a fourth compartment. But it was the second door in the second compartment that made Jommy Cross freeze moveless where he was.
It was on the side beyond the chairs and led outside. A blaze of light poured from the great room there into the ship, and there were figures of men. He opened his mind wide. Instantly a thought wash from many brains came to him, so many of them that I he combined leakage from behind their defective shields brought dozens of half thoughts, curiously, menacingly, alert thoughts, as if out there scores of tendrilless slans were waiting—for what?
He cut the thought off, whirled toward the instrument board that dominated the whole front part of the control room. The board itself was about a yard wide, two yards long, a metal-mounted bank of glowing tubes and shining mechanisms. There were more than a dozen control levers of various kinds, all within reach of the finely built chair facing them.
On either side of the instrument board were the great, curved, glossy, semimetallic plates he had already noticed. The concave surface of each towering section glowed with a subdued light of its own.
Utterly strange mechanism! Impossible to solve this alien control system in the few moments at his disposal. Tight-lipped, he sprang forward into the control chair. With swift, deliberately crude purpose he activated every switch and lever in sight.
A DOOR clanged metallically. There was an abrupt, wonderful sense of extraordinary lightness; swift, almost body-crushing forward movement, and then a faint, throbbing bass roar.
Instantly the purpose of the great curved metallike plates became apparent. On the one to the right appeared a picture of the sky ahead. Jommy could see lights and land far below, but the ship was mounting too steeply for the Earth to be more than a distortion at the bottom of the plate.
