COMPLEAT Collected SFF Works, page 151
The slightest possible flicker of a smile twitched the corner of Fenton's lip. He swung his pistol higher and sent a bullet exploding straight into Bryne's face.
The gaunt moved like lightning.
He must have had his farther hand on a gun for some seconds now, because the two explosions came almost as one. In the same instant he sent his chair clattering backward as he sprang to his feet.
He moved too fast. His aim was faulty because of his speed. The bullet whined past Fenton's ear and smacked into the pillar behind him. Fenton's shot struck Bryne an invisible blow in the shoulder that spun him half around, knocked him three-quarters off his feet. He scrambled desperately backward to regain his balance. His foot caught in a tangle of ripped-up wiring beside the water bath, and he went over backward in slow motion, his pale stare fixed with a strange illusion of calmness on Fenton's face as he fell.
For an instant he tottered on the brink of the bath. Then Torren chuckled a vast, deep, terrible chuckle and with tremendous effort lifted a hand far enough to seize Bryne by the wrist.
Still expressionless, still with that pale, intent stare fixed upon Fenton, Bryne went backward into the tank. There was a surge of heaving water. Bryne's suddenly convulsed limbs splashed a blinding spray and his hand groped out of nowhere for Torren's throat.
Fenton found himself running, without intending to or—he knew—needing to run. It was pure impulse to finish a job that needed finishing, though it was in better hands than his, now. He put his good hand on the rim of the huge tank, the revolver still gripped in it, leaning forward.
Bryne vanished under the oily, opaque surface. The incalculable weight of Torren's arm was like a millstone pressing him down, merciless, insensate as stone. After a while the thick, slow bubbles began to rise.
Fenton did not even see the motion Torren made. But when he tried to spring backward, it was too late. A vast, cold, slippery hand closed like iron over his. They wrestled unequally for several slow seconds. Then Torren's grip relaxed and Fenton stumbled back, swinging his half-crushed fingers, seeing his revolver all but swallowed up in Torren's enormous grasp.
Torren grinned at him.
Slowly, reluctantly, Fenton grinned back.
"You knew he was lying," Torren said. "About the bombs."
"Yes, I knew."
"So it's all settled, then," Torren said. "No more quarreling, eh, son? You've come back." But he still held the revolver watchfully, his eyes alert.
Fenton shook his head.
"Oh, no. I came back, yes. I don't know why. I don't owe you a thing. But when the bombs fell I knew you were in trouble. I knew he'd never dare bomb me in sight of the 'visor screens as long as you had any power on Ganymede. I had to find out what was happening. I'll go now."
Torren hefted the revolver thoughtfully. "Back to your Ganymedans?" he asked. "Ben, my boy, I brought you up a fool. Be reasonable! What can you do for them? How can you fight me?" He rumbled with a sudden deep chuckle. "Bryne thought I was helpless! Step over there, Ben. Switch on the 'visor."
Watching him carefully, Fenton obeyed. The snowy hills outside sprang into view. Far off above them, tiny specks upon the blue-lit clouds, a formation of planes was just visible, humming nearer.
"About ten minutes more at the outside, I'd say," Torren estimated. "There are a lot of things about this set-up nobody even guesses except me. I wonder if Bryne really imagined I hadn't thought of every possibility. I allowed for this years and years ago. When my regular signals stopped going out an alarm went off—out there." The huge head nodded. "My guards would have got here in another ten minutes whether you came or not. Still, son, I'm obliged. You spared me that much time of feeling—helpless. You know how I hate it. Bryne could have killed me, but he could never have held me helpless very long. I owe you something, Ben. I don't like being obligated. Within reason, I'm willing to give you—"
"Nothing I want," Fenton cut in. "Only freedom for the Ganymedans, and that I'll have to take. You won't give it. I can take it, Torren. I think I know the way, now. I'm going back to them, Torren."
The huge hand floating at the surface of the water turned the pistol toward Fenton.
"Maybe you are, son. Maybe not. I haven't decided yet. Want to tell me just how you plan to stop me on Ganymede?"
"There's only one way." Fenton regarded the pistol with a grim smile. "I can't fight you. I haven't any money or any influence. Nobody on Ganymede has except you. But the Ganymedans can fight you, Torren. I'll teach them. I learned guerrilla warfare in a hard school. I know all there is to know about fighting against odds. Go on and put your new towers up, Torren. But—try and keep them up! We'll blow them apart as fast as you can put them together. You can bomb us, but you can't kill us all—not soon enough, you can't."
"Not soon enough—for what?" Torren demanded, the small eyes burning upon Fenton's. "Who's going to stop me, son? I've got all the time there is. Ganymede belongs to me!"
Fenton laughed, almost lightly.
"Oh, no it doesn't. You lease it. But Ganymede belongs to the solar system. It belongs to the worlds and the people of the worlds. It belongs to your own people, Torren—the Thresholders who are going to inherit the planets. You can't keep the news of what's happening quiet here on Ganymede. The Earth government owns the towers. When we blow them over the government will step in to find out what goes on. The scandal will get out, Torren. You can't keep it quiet!"
"Nobody will care," Torren grunted. But there was a new, strange, almost hopeful glint in his eyes. "Nobody's going to war over a little satellite like Ganymede. Nobody has any stake here but me. Don't be childish, Ben. People don't start wars over an ideal."
"It's more than an ideal with the Thresholders," Fenton said. "It's their lives. It's their future. And they're the people with power, Torren—not the Earth-bred men like me. The Thresholders are the future of the human race, and they know it, and Earth knows it. The new race on Mars with the three-yard chest expansions, and the new people on Venus with gills and fins may not look much like the Ganymedans, but they're the same species, Torren. They'll go to war for the Ganymedans if they have to. It's their own hides at stake. Ideals don't come into it. It's survival, for the Thresholders. Attack one world and you attack all worlds where Thresholders live. No man's an island, Torren—not even you."
Torren's breath came heavily in his tremendous chest.
"Not even me, Ben?"
Fenton laughed and stepped backward toward the open pillar. On the screen the planes were larger now, nearer and louder.
"Do you know why I was so sure you hadn't ordered those bombs to kill me?" he asked, reaching with his good hand for the open door. "For the same reason you won't shoot me now. You're crazy, Torren. You know you're crazy. You're two men, not one. And the other man is me. You hate society because of the debt it owes you. Half of you hates all men, and the Ganymedans most of all, because they're big like you, but they can walk like men. Their experiment worked and yours failed. So you hate them. You'll destroy them if you can."
He found the door, pushed it open wide. On the threshold he said:
"You didn't adopt me on a whim, Torren. Part of your mind knew exactly what it was doing. You brought me up the hard way. My life was spent in a symbolic Centrifuge, just like yours. I am you. I'm the half that doesn't hate the Ganymedans at all. I'm the half that knows they're your people, the children you might have had, walking a free world as yours would have walked if your experiment had come out right, like theirs. I'll fight for them, Torren. In a respirator and mask, but I'll fight. That's why you'll never kill me."
Sighing, Torren tilted the pistol. His thick finger squeezed itself inside the guard, began slowly to tighten upon the trigger. Slowly.
"Sorry, son," he said, "but I can't let you get away with it."
Fenton smiled. "I said you were crazy. You won't kill me, Torren. There's been a fight going on inside you ever since you left the Centrifuge—until now. Now it's going on outside, in the open. That's a better place. As long as I'm alive, I'm your enemy and yourself. Keep it on the outside, Torren, or you will go mad. As long as I'm alive I'll fight you. But as long as I'm alive, you're not an island. It's your battle I'm fighting. You'll do your best to defeat me, Torren, but you won't kill me. You won't dare."
He stepped back into the pillar, groping for the spring to close the door. His eyes met Torren's confidently.
Torren's teeth showed under grimacing lips.
"You know how I hate you, Ben," he said in a thick, fierce voice. "You've always known!"
"I know," Fenton said, and touched the spring. The door slid shut before him. He was gone.
Torren emptied the revolver with a sort of wild deliberation at the unmarred surface of the pillar, watching the bullets strike and richochet off it one by one until the hall was full of their whining and the loud explosions of the gun. The pillar stood blank and impervious where Fenton's face had been.
When the last echo struck the ceiling Torren dropped the gun and fell back into his enormous tank, caught his breath and laughed, tentatively at first and then with increasing volume until great billows of sound rolled up the walls and poured between the pillars toward the stars. Enormous hands flailed the water, sending spray high. The vast bulk wallowed monstrously, convulsed and helpless with its laughter.
On the screen the roar of the coming planes grew until their noise swallowed up even Torren's roaring mirth.
The End
HEIR APPARENT
Thresholders 02
Astounding Science Fiction – July 1950
Harding stepped from the pier to the little submersible's deck and moved instantly into the shadow, black velvet on moon-white steel. He could hear nothing except water lapping softly, the distant thud and throb of machinery, and very far away, the hollow bellowing of riven air, either a jet plane passing over from Java, or a spaceship blasting off from one of the nearer islands. Phosphorescent waves rippled in the moon-track and the strong tropic stars regarded Earth dispassionately. On the deck there was no sound at all.
Harding glanced once at the white jagged dazzle that was Venus near the skyline. That diamond dot represented sixty-one thousand troubled human beings—if you could call them human—whose relations with the mother-planet had once been Edward Harding's responsibility. Or a seventh of his responsibility.
He shook his head at the bright world in the sky. He would have to get over the habit of regarding the heavens as a chart with a glittering pinhead for each planet, and so many thousand Thresholders, ex-Earth-born, bred for the ecology of alien worlds, pinned up there upon the black velvet back drop for study and control. It wasn't his problem any more. Forget the Thresholders on Mars and the Secessionists of Ganymede and the whole tangled, insoluble mess that confronted the Integration Teams. Think about this current job, which was very simple now. Harding moved quietly toward the open companionway. Either the submersible wasn't guarded at all, or Harding was expected.
He was expected.
The big man in the tiny cabin below sat back in his chair and looked up to meet Harding's gaze squarely, the china-blue eyes watchful but calm. Billy Turner was a Buddha, solidly fat, solidly placid, the heavy face turned to Harding with an oddly innocent look of surprise.
"Something?" Turner asked mildly.
"You could call it that," Harding said. "Lay off, or I'll have to kill you, Turner."
The fat man waited a minute, his gaze holding Harding's. Then he took the pipe out of his mouth, squinted at it, clucked a little and struck an old-fashioned kitchen match on the edge of the table. He sucked the flame downward into the bowl and exhaled a cloud of pungent violet smoke that smelled of the Martian deserts in full sunlight.
"Seems like I don't quite place you," he said calmly to Harding. "We met before?"
"We didn't need to," Harding said. "Wait a minute." He stood perfectly motionless by the table, listening, his eyes going unfocused with the completeness of his concentration. It was a totality almost machine-like, both more and less than human. Then he grinned a tight, confident grin and pulled out a chair, sat down across the table from Turner.
Harding was a strongly built man with an incongruously academic look about him in spite of his stained and somewhat ragged clothing. He looked younger than his real years, and he looked ageless.
"No crew aboard," he said to Turner confidently. "Just the one Kanaka up forward. No guard. But you were expecting me, Turner."
Turner blew out a cloud of aromatic smoke from a tobacco that hadn't grown on Earth. His china-blue eyes were watchful and expectant.
"Today," Harding went on, "I was fired. Incompetence. I'm not incompetent to handle a radar fish-location unit. If I were, it wouldn't have taken the fishery a month to find it out. O.K. You assume I'll try for other jobs and lose them—through your interference. I'll end up combing beaches with a home-made Geiger counter, you figure. Then you'll buy me for whatever dirty job you have in mind. It's your usual method, they tell me. It generally works. It won't work with me, because I'm one man in the Archipelagic who could figure out a fool-proof way to kill you."
"Oh, you think so?" Turner asked, opening his blue eyes wide.
"You know what my job used to be," Harding said gently.
Turner blew out smoke, gazed thoughtfully at it.
"You were with an Integrator Team," he said.
Immediately, in the most curious way, Edward Harding's mind withdrew quietly into the middle of his head, pulling down blinds and closing doors as it went, receded along a lengthy corridor into the past that led by many closed episodes and half-forgotten things, until it came at the far end to a door. This was the door to a little square black-steel room called the Round Table. It was an entirely empty room, except for a tri-di screen, a chair and a table with a flat metal plate let into its surface.
Edward Harding in his mind's chamber sat down in the chair and put his palms flat on the plate. Instantly, as always, the tingling activation began. At first it was like wind under his hands, then water, then soft sand gently embedding his palms. He moved his fingers. Soundlessly his mind's image spoke. "Ready, boys. Come in."
Then in the chamber of memory the Composite Image moved slowly into being in the depths of the tri-di screen. Now the Round Table was open and the Integrator Team sat together at one table, no matter where the accident of their bodies placed them. Seven men made up the Team. Seven blended minds and bodies stood composite and whole in the screen of Harding's memory, as they stood perhaps at the very moment in the same screen, three thousand miles away before somebody else's watching face. Perhaps the Image spoke to somebody else as it had spoken to Edward Harding when he was … before he … well, in the old days. He wondered what the Image looked like now, with no Edward Harding in its make-up.
In the memory which Turner's careless words evoked, Edward Harding was in the make-up of the Composite Image. And as always, facing it anew, he looked for some trace of his own features in the blended synthesis of the seven Team-members. And as always, he failed.
Seven faces, seven minds—but you never could filter out the separate features of the men you knew so well. Always they blended into that one Image you knew even better than your own face in the mirror. The Round Table was open when you sat across the board from the Composite Image with the specialized knowledge of six other picked and long-trained Teammates literally at your fingertips, each man sitting in a chair like your own, each idly molding the test-pattern under his palms.
Doctor, lawyer, merchant, chief—biochemist, physicist, radio-astronomer—the needs of each Team met at the Round Table in the carefully chosen attributes of each member. And the needs could never have been fulfilled if all the men involved were actually in the same room, face to face. For knowledge had grown too complex. They talked a technical language made incomprehensible to one another by ultimate specialization. It took the Composite Image to integrate and co-ordinate the knowledge each member brought with the knowledge of each other member, and with the great Integrator itself.
But you could never find your own face in the Image, and you could never see the Image without your face blended into it. Harding thought of the Image as it had looked after George Mayall—left. By request. The first time the Team gathered at the Round Table with a new man in Mayall's place, how curiously flat and strange the intimate, composite features seemed with the new face incorporated. He had wondered then how Mayall felt, wherever he was, out in the cold, strange world after such a long time in the warm, intricately interlocking closeness of the Integration Team.
Well, Harding knew, now.
He thought as he had so often thought before, What does it look like without me? And he pictured the Composite Image cold and strange in the tri-di screen of the room no longer his, Doc Valley's face, and Joe Mall's, and the others, blending with the faces of strangers, linking with the minds of strangers, working on the old, complex, fascinating problems that weren't Edward Harding's any longer.
