Complete Short Fiction, page 340
It was morning when he awakened. He went to Madelina’s and his apartment, and at his request the baby was shown to him. He examined it carefully for indications that his own mutational characteristics had been passed on, but there was no sign of anything out of the normal. It baffled him. Not for the first time, he had a sense of frustration. He knew so little in a world where there was so much to know.
He wondered if there might be neural similarities between the child and himself. He hoped so. For he did not doubt his own greatness. His history proved that he was perceptive as few men had ever been. And he was just beginning to suspect that he was also supernormally stable.
He’d have to watch the child for indications that the two of them were—different.
Except for its structural normalcy, the appearance of the baby gave him no aesthetic satisfaction. It was about as ugly a child as he had ever had the misfortune to look upon, and he was startled when the head nurse crooned: “Such a beautiful child.”
He supposed that it might turn into one since Madelina was an extremely good-looking girl. And he presumed that the child’s normalcy proved that her side of the family would dominate it physically.
Looking down at the child as it was being clothed again after its bath, he grew sad. He had been worried about the possibility of mutational changes and he was happy that there were none. But he could already imagine the boy being ashamed of his father.
That thought ended when a nurse came out of the bedroom and told him that Madelina was awake and was asking for him. He found her cheerful and full of plans.
“You know,” she said, “I never before realized what wonderfully considerate people we have with us. The women have been just marvelous to me.”
He gazed thoughtfully at her as she talked. During the long voyage, Madelina had undergone profound psychological adjustments. There had been an incident involving an assassin of Lilidel’s who had somehow got aboard in the guise of a soldier. The would-be killer never guessed how hopeless his purpose was. On approaching their apartment he set off alarms; and so Clane had deliberately invited Madelina to be in at the death. The man’s desperate will to live had affected her tremendously. From that moment, she ceased to talk of death as something she could take or leave alone.
He. listened now, happy in the change that had taken place, as she praised several of the servants individually. She broke off abruptly. “Oh, I almost forgot. You know how hard it’s been for us to decide on his name—well, I dreamed it: Braden. Just think that over for a minute. Braden Linn.”
Clane accepted the name after a moment’s hesitation. A child’s first name should be individual, to distinguish him from other’s of his line. There would have to be a string of second names, of course, to honor the famous men of both families. It was an old custom, and one of which he approved, this giving of many family names. It reminded the bearer of the past history of his line. It brought a sense of continuity of life, and gave the proud possessor a feeling of belonging; a will to do as well as, or better, than his namesake. Even he, who had so many physical reasons for not having that sense of belonging, had felt the pressure of the many names that had been bestowed upon him at the hour of his christening.
The full name finally given to the new baby was Braden Jerrin Garlan Joquin Dold Corgay Linn.
It was two weeks after the birth that the Solar Star came to its second destination in space.
Clane entered the conference room briskly. Now, at last there was no reason for inner Conflicts. An enemy planet was already bright in the darkness ahead of them.
It was time to prepare for action.
First, he made his prepared speech, stressing the value of courage. His eyes studied the faces of the men as he talked, watching for signs of cynicism. He didn’t expect too much of that. These were earnest men, conscious of the reality of their mission.
Some of them, he saw, appeared puzzled by the tenor of his talk. There was j time when he would have yielded to that gathering impatience. No more. In every great objective the leader must start from the beginning, first evoking the emotional attitude necessary to success. In the past he’d assumed automatically that soldiers took courage for granted. They did, but only if they were reminded. And even then, on the general staff level, there was resistance from individuals.
Having completed his diatribe on courage, he launched into the explanation of his purpose. He hadn’t gone far before he began to notice the reactions.
The officers, barbarians as well as Linnans, were almost uniformly pale. Only Czinczar was frowning with a sudden thoughtful air, his eyes narrowed with calculation.
“But, your excellency,” one of the Linnans protested, “this is a major Riss planet. They’ll have hundreds of ships to our one.”
Clane held himself cool. It was an old experience with him now to realize that only he had reasoned out the situation as a whole. He said gently: “Gentlemen, I hope we are all agreed that this ship and those aboard must take risks to the limits of good sense.”
“Yes, but this is madness.” It was General Marik, now Clane’s private secretary. “As soon as they discover us—” He paused, as if he had been struck by a new thought. He said, “Or do you expect that we will not be discovered?”
Clane smiled. “We’ll make sure that we are. My plan is to land most of the”—he hesitated, and bit his lip; he’d almost said “barbarian”, then he went on—“European army, and establish a bridgehead.”
The faces of the barbarian officers took on a sick expression, and almost everyone in the room looked appalled. Once more, the exception was Czinczar. Clane was aware of the barbarian leader watching him with bright eyes, in which the light of understanding was beginning to dawn. Clane stood up.
“Gentlemen,” he chided, “you will refrain from frightening” the troops with your all too obvious dismay. Our approach to this problem is soundly based. Spaceships are not destroyed in space. They cannot even maintain contact with each other when those aboard are friendly to each other, and make every effort to keep together. So you may be sure that the Riss will not contact us as long as we keep moving.
“As for the landing, it is the oldest reality of military history that a bridgehead can always be established and held for a time. And no one has ever figured out a method of preventing an enemy from landing somewhere on a planet.”
He broke off. “But now, enough of argument. We have our purpose.
Now, we come to what is far more important, the intricate details of carrying out that purpose.”
He explained his own ideas, and then, before throwing the meeting open to general discussion, finished, “In everything, we must follow the rule of the calculated risk. We must be aware at all times that there will be sacrifices. But in my opinion, no plan can be acceptable which does not offer some hope of saving a fairly large percentage of the bridgehead army.”
Czinczar was the first to get up. “What,” he asked, “is the exact purpose of the landing?”
“To see what reaction it brings, how strong the reaction is, how they attack, with what weapons? In short, how do the Riss plan to defend their planet?”
“Isn’t it possible,” Czinczar asked, “that this information-was known to the ancient humans who fought the great Riss-human war?”
“Perhaps.” Clane hesitated, not sure whether this was the moment to offer his own estimate of that past war, and its conduct. He decided finally that it wasn’t. He said: “I found no books on the war itself, so I can’t answer your question.” Czinczar looked at him steadily for several seconds, and then finished: “Naturally, I am in favor of the landing. Here are my ideas on your plan—”
The discussion continued on that practical level. There were no further objections to the landing itself.
TO BE CONCLUDED.
THE WIZARD OF LINN
Once, thousands of years before, two mighty empires fought. Now, Clane of Linn, with a captured ship, a barbarian army, and a civilization returned to peasantry had to stop the resurgence of the alien Empire.
Lord Clane Linn, the “child of the gods” had made progress. Born a despised mutation into the ruling family of the half-barbarous, decadent Linnan empire about 12,000 A.D., he had grown up almost unnoticed by those in the family and government who schemed endlessly for power. Contemptuously relegated to the temples for training, he learned something of the inner nature of matter from a few wise men who had guessed the secret behind the atom gods. By the time his potential enemies realized that he might be dangerous to their plans he was too powerful to be destroyed.
He explored the gigantic pits—where the atom gods were believed to dwell—and found remnants of many destroyed cities. From these husks of what had once been megalopolitan centers, he gathered odds and ends of machinery and weapons, including a sphere of energy that absorbed or disintegrated all energy and matter it touched.
The sphere reacted to the thought of the person who knew the cues to which it responded.
His discoveries explained many things. They explained the half-mythical stories about a long-dead, wonderful civilization that had apparently existed some thousands of years before. They gave a clearer picture of how a bozo and arrow culture could exist side by side with simple-type spaceships that any skilled metal worker could build. But the mystery of the forgotten disaster remained unexplained.
With the help of the sphere of energy, Clane defeated the invasion of Czinczar and his barbarian army from Euro pa j one of the moons of Jupiter. The captured Czinczar, a remarkable man, convinced him that the vague stories of an alien being called the Riss—ancient books referred to such a creature—were true. The barbarian leader showed the mutation the dead body of a large nonhuman creature. To him, its presence indicated that the Riss were back in the solar system.
Within a few months his prophecy was borne out. A gigantic Riss battleship arrived on Earth. The invader destroyed all human beings who came near it, and rejected attempts at communication. Two Riss patrol craft were captured, however, and in one of these, Clane and his sphere of energy successfully boarded the invader. The Riss patrol ship automatically enters its mother ship during the height of a Linnan naval attack. Half the Linnan fleet is destroyed in this assault, and Clane discovers afterwards that every Linnan crewman has been destroyed by an irresistible antiorganic resonator aboard the battleship.
Clane and his small group are protected from this fate by a device aboard the captured Riss liftboat. Once aboard the main Riss vessel, Clane uses the sphere to kill the Riss and capture their ship.
Meanwhile at Linnan headquarters, Lilidel, the wife of Lord Adviser Jerrin—Clone’s brother—poisons her husband when she discovers that he plans to make Clane his heir instead of their son Calaj. Clane’s advisers urge him to seize power, but he decides against. He intends to take the captured Riss battleship, renamed the Solar Star, and fly to a star sixty-five light-years from Earth. His hope is that other human beings survived the Riss-human war of five thousand years earlier, and that they will be able to help in the struggle against an enemy who refuses even to communicate with men.
He expects the journey to take more than a year. As it happens, just about the time that the Solar Star arrives at the twin planets of (Jutland and Inland, a Riss invasion feet lands on Earth. Fortunately, for the incompetent Calaj government, before leaving Earth Clane compelled the psychoneurotic Calaj to sign a document ordering a vast system of refugee villages to be set up on farms. By the time Lilidel finds out what is going on, it is too late to stop the process. And besides she discovers that Calaj is being widely praised for the action. A mental case, he needs all the credit he can get. He has already murdered hundreds of people on impulse, and has alienated many of his supporters.
Clane more than a year out from Earth is disappointed to find that, though there are human beings on the Twin planets, they have an agricultural civilization. Quickly, however, the Outlanders show unusual qualities. They have an instantaneous mental transportation system. They trade with the Riss, and the Riss apparently dare not disturb them. There are other things, and it is only gradually that Clane realizes that they are actually primitives. Their science is a remnant science, and they don’t even think of it as science. To them, their knowledge is a part of the nature of things, simple, ordinary, without any unusual features.
Ostensibly, their method of holding off the Riss is very simple. A pink flower called the chlorodel which grows everywhere constantly discharges chlorine into the atmosphere. This very active gas is poisonous to the Riss even in minute quantifies.
Clone rejects the chlorodel as a general solution against the Riss. In his opinion, the Riss-human problem will not be solved by a purely defensive weapon, since the Riss could easily develop a gas that would poison the atmosphere of a planet for human beings. He has no desire to start any such suicidal war.
Since the Out landers cannot teach him their system of mental transportation, he realizes that the Solar Star must visit still another star system. This time he decides to go to a Riss-inhabited planet. However, before leaving, he makes an attack on a Riss battleship that has been collecting annual tribute from the Outlanders. He skillfully uses the Outlander transportation methods to get his men aboard the Riss battleship. Once aboard, they set off the booby traps which the Riss have set up on all their instruments and machines. The enemy ship is successfully destroyed.
By means of captured maps, the Solar Star heads for the nearest Riss system. Just before they arrive, Clane’s wife, Made Una, bears him a baby boy, whom they name Braden.
When they reach the Riss planet, Clane announces that a landing will be made. It must be held, he states grimly, against any and all assaults the Riss may make against it.
Part 3
XIX.
They came down on the dried-out, uneven hillside of what might have been a dead sea. Rock formations tangled that unpleasant and desolate terrain. The air was thin and cold in the morning, but by noon the heat had become a blistering thing.
The men were grumbling even as they set up their tents. Clane was aware of many a scowl sent in his direction as he flew slowly along within a few feet of the ground. And a dozen times when his ship came silently over a rock formation before dipping down into the next valley, he overheard fearful comments from big men whose courage in battle could be counted on.
Periodically, he landed to inspect the protector and molecular energy devices he had ordered set up. The protectors were the same instruments that had killed every man of the skeleton crews aboard the Linnan warships in the attack that had originally enabled him to seize the Solar Star. The molecular weapons had burned great gashes in the second Riss ship. Pie made sure that the destructive limit of each weapon was set at extreme range, and then he flew on.
He stood finally beside Czinczar, gazing out toward the bleak horizon. The barbarian was silent. Clane turned and gave his final instructions:
“Send out raiding parties. If you get any prisoners, report to me immediately.”
Czinczar rubbed his chin. “Suppose they drop atomic bombs on us?”
Clane did not answer at once. From the hillside, he could see some of the tents. Most of them were hidden in the hollows behind crooked rock formations. But here and there he could see the thin, unsteady lines. They reached to the horizon and beyond—over thirty miles in each direction from where they stood.
An atomic bomb would kill everybody in its immediate vicinity. The titan wind would tear down every tent. The radiation, that deadly stuff, would bounce from the hard, glittering rock, and kill only the few men who were directly exposed.
That was for a bomb exploding at ground level. If it exploded in the air, if for instance the automatic controls of the molecular weapons forced it to explode at a height of twenty miles, the effect would be compressive. But at twenty miles the air pressure would not be too deadly, particularly for men who had orders to burrow into the rock under their tents, and orders that two of the four men assigned to each tent must always be in the rock burrow. The other two men of each unit were expected to be alert. It was presumed that they would hastily take cover if a Riss ship appeared overhead.
Clane explained his picture, and finished, “If they drop a bomb on us, why, we’ll drop one or two on their cities.”
His surface coldness yielded to his inner exultation. He laughed softly, and said, “No, no, my friend. I’m beginning to grasp the problem of two hostile civilizations in this vast universe. There’s never been anything like it, before human and Riss collided. No planet can be defended. All planets can be attacked; everybody is vulnerable—and this time, here on one of their home planets, we have the least to lose.”
He held out his hand. “Good luck to you, Great Czinczar. I’m sure you will do your usual thorough job.”
Czinczar gazed down at the proffered hand for several seconds, and finally took it. “You can count on me, sir,” he said.
He hesitated. “I’m sorry,” he said slowly, “that I didn’t give you the sphere.”
The frank admission shocked Clane. The loss of the sphere had been a major disaster, and only the terrible will power of the barbarian leader had restrained him finally from forcing the issue to a conclusion. Even then he had realized his need for such a man as Czinczar. I le could not bring himself to say that it didn’t matter. But since the confession implied that the sphere would be available on Earth, he said nothing.
Back on the Solar Star, he guided the ship from the weapon control room. A dozen men stood behind him, watching the various screens, ready to call his attention to any point that he himself might miss.
