Collected Short Fiction, page 444
The old Russian’s voice seemed dull and remote:
“Nadya isn’t here.” He made a slow, confused shrug. “Don’t you remember? Nadya never got here.”
His scarred fingers gripped Challis’ arm. “It is just us two.”
Challis jerked away.
“Nadya—I’ve got to find her!” For Nadya was life in this empty world where dreadful death had conquered. He flung up the copper door and ran down the metal stair. The laboratory was dark and musty and cold. He called Nadya’s name in a voice turned thin and sharp. Only emptiness answered.
“Nadya isn’t here—remember?” It was her father’s voice, croaking down the stair. “But perhaps we can bring her back. See if you can fix the generator while I check the components we observed. We’ve got a job to do—remember?”
The bitter memory came back. No wonder he had tried to forget. Of course Nadiya wasn’t here. She had been lost, with Vic Dent and the rest, nine years ago. The red-dust virus must have got into the rocket before they left America.
The elevator wasn’t working, and even the battery-powered emergency lights had almost failed. Already shivering, Challis felt his way hastily down the winding stairs to the generator vaults.
The dead machine was suddenly familiar. For nine years he and old Stanislav had been alone here, the only men alive. For nine years he had tended this generator. Now the last uranium-cathode element was almost burned out, and there were no more spares. Carefully he reset and realigned the thin, pitted fragment of the plate, sealed the safety door and tripped the ignition bomb.
The lights came on again. Challis hurried back to the time cell. Stanislav was hunched over the control pillar, making swift calculations and setting the keys. He looked up quickly, with a silent question in his haunted eyes.
“A few minutes,” Challis said. “Maybe an hour, if we don’t overload it.” His hands spread in a helpless gesture. “The end of the last plate. When it’s gone, we are.” He peered at Stanislav’s scrawled notations. “Have you got anything?”
“The analysis proves my point.” Hunched over the keyboard, the bearded Russian muttered abstractedly. “Violence results only in violence. The red dust was a violent result of the violent suppression of Eurasian nationalism by the white races.”
His blunt fingers tapped the keys.
“However, to find the node of probability, we must go farther back. I found the creator of the virus. He was once a village clergyman. He saw a small boy shot down by a frontier guard. It was that last bit of ruthless violence that made him change his vocation, to become a military biologist.
“That boy’s death is the factor we must alter.”
“We haven’t much power left,” Challis reminded him, “to alter anything.”
ANTARTIC COLD was already deadly in the crystal cell. But Challis dropped the copper door, and Stanislav started the whining converter. A milky glow once more veiled the black cliffs and the triumphant night. It cleared again, and Challis saw a winter dawn.
Snow lay on wooded hills. A low gray concrete pillbox stood near a border fence with a stamping guard beside it. Stanislav tapped his keys to drop them toward the oblivious guard. He pointed to a donkey cart creeping out of a straw-thatched village.
“You know,” Challis murmured, “I’ve got the queerest feeling we’ve done this before.”
“Nonsense,” muttered the Russian. “Common illusion—there’s a word for it.” He brought them down beside the guard. “Get ready to push if the power holds.”
A man and a boy jumped out of the cart. They floundered toward the fence. The guard fired deliberately, and the man dropped in the snow. He spat and reloaded and aimed at the running boy.
“Three seconds!” rapped Stanislav. “Two, one—now!”
Challis flung his strength against the rifle barrel. But the inertia of a whole dead world held it firm, and he was a feeble ghost. A needle flickered on the post and his hands slipped through the steel.
“The power—” gasped Stanislav. “Try again—we’ve got to save that boy!”
The needle came back, and Challis clutched the gun. It seemed queer the guard didn’t see them. For the gun was real again, and he thrust with all his strength. The rifle jerked. Three hundred yards away, the boy dropped limply.
“He was hit,” Stanislav whispered brokenly. “Perhaps only wounded, but they will capture him.” He stared at the dials. “Now the field is failing. We can’t try again.”
“But—look!” Challis glimpsed a slender figure vanishing among the trees. “That was just to confuse the guard. He wasn’t even wounded. He’s already safe, beyond the fence.” The old Russian whispered faintly:
“I wonder what that boy will do.”
“Let’s look ahead,” urged Challis. “Let’s find out.”
But Stanislav had stiffened with alarm.
“The field’s too weak already,” he said. “We must get back to the Pantechnicon before it collapses.”
His tense hands fell on the keys. Milky light flooded the crystal walls again and died. Challis saw the crater’s black and cragged rim. The Southern Cross was pale and cold above. Deep snow buried all the buildings of the Pantechnicon, as if they had never been. Frozen drifts covered the tower, even, to the level of the time cell.
THE time cell—what was that? Challis, sitting cramped and stiff in the pilot seat, shook his head against the numbing lethargy of cold. He listened again to the hoarse, droning voice of old Stanislav at the klystron-beam communicator:
“Experimental Rocket Venus III calling Space Station A. Please relay to Captain Dent, Antarctica Station. We are down in Liberator Crater. Generator burned out. Main communicator dead. Please rush relief.”
Stanislav stopped and listened to the phones.”
Challis turned stiffly. Cold and concussion had him groggy. Lucky he had been able to drop the crippled rocket into this deep snow, or they wouldn’t be alive at all. They wouldn’t be, much longer, unless somebody answered.
“What has become of the Pantechnicon?”
The question sounded strange, as if somebody else had asked it. Stanislav blinked in a dull, bewildered way. He made a weary shrug and laid aside the phones.
“Probably wasting the battery,” he muttered. “No way to tell whether Station A is above the cliffs.” His dark, hollow eyes were puzzled. “What did you say about a pantechnicon? Isn’t that a sort of moving van?”
“I don’t know.” The cold was a kind narcotic, and Challis murmured sleepily, “I don’t remember.”
The old Russian made a troubled frown.
“There’s a name I’ve been trying to think of—L-something.” Slow, numbed hands tugged at his beard.
“Levin—that’s it!” His sunken eyes were worried. “But I don’t know what it means. Have you ever heard the name of Levin?”
Challis stared at him.
“Isn’t that an old word for lightning?” Then he started against the clutching cold, and his stiff face smiled. “Now I remember! I used to know the Liberator—we were in the same semantics classes at Tech. His childhood had been rather terrible, you know, before he escaped to America. Violence had left a mark on him. He used to write some pretty savage articles for the collectivist press under the pen name of Levin. It’s fortunate for the world that American democracy soon cured him of that bitterness.
“But what did you want to know?”
“I’ve forgotten.” Stanislav shrugged, and his stiff hands picked up the phones again. He repeated the call for aid, while Challis pounded his knees to fight the creeping cold. Suddenly Stanislav begged for quiet. Challis tried to keep awake.
At last the old Russian dropped the phones.
“That was Nadya!” Hope burned again in his hollow eyes. “Relayed back from Antarctic Station. She says her husband has already blasted off in the relief rocket. He’ll be here soon.”
“Good old Vic!”
But the cold was a heavy narcotic, and Challis let his mind drift again. In spite of all her Russian gloom, Nadya Dent was very beautiful. If Vic Dent hadn’t met her first, he thought sleepily, things might have been different.
THE END.
1942
Breakdown
It was a stable society, based on interplanetary ships and interplanetary shipping. And its stability doomed it! Breakdown was inevitable unless—
Officially, Boss Kellon was merely executive secretary of the Union of Spacemen, Managers & Engineers. But boss, now in 2145, was equivalent to caesar. From the unitron convertors on Mercury to the lonely mining outposts scattered across the Jovian moons, the Union dominated mankind. And Harvey Kellon was the Union.
He was a big man. His shrewd, deep-set, deliberate eyes could be chill as blue Callistonian fire diamonds, but a bland professional smile warmed his cragged red face. He wore a flowing white toupee, and few of Sunport’s millions suspected that the boss was bald as the first caesar of old Rome.
Sunport was his capital. For a hundred years the monopoly of interplanetary commerce had fed its power, until even New York was now only a quaint provincial suburb. The towers of the megalopolis stood like a forest of bright monoliths for a hundred miles about the high Colorado mesa that had become the port of space. Forever the tiny moonlet of the Outstation rode at the city’s meridian, a man-made star of its fortune.
Boss Kellon lived in the crown of the lofty Union Tower. The huge, luxurious halls of his penthouse suite were named for the worlds of the Sun. Tonight there was a ball in the Neptune Room, and he was dancing with Selene du Mars.
The boss was short of breath, and dark perspiration spotted the shoulders of his purple dress pajamas. His feet ached. Perhaps, at sixty, he was too old to be dancing; certainly he had too much weight about the middle. But Selene du Mars could make men seek to banish such uncomfortable thoughts.
She was tall and supple and green-eyed. She had been a famous teleview dancer. He thought she was the most costly and glittering thing in all Sunport. Tonight her hair was platinum, and she was dazzling with fire diamonds. He thought those favorite stones were like herself—cold and bright and hard. But he could admire even her calculating ambition, because it was so akin to his own.
Selene claimed a hereditary degree in militechnic engineering. Once Kellon had ordered a quiet investigation, and the Goon Department reported evidence of forgery. Her father had been merely the servant of a militechnic officer, on Jupiter Station. But Kellon suppressed the report, with not a word to Selene. He knew how hard was the climb up from the gray.
Now, and not for the first time, she was wheedling him to crown himself. Her voice was cool and perfect as her long body, and she used the flattering address that she herself had first suggested:
“Your genius, can we have the coronation soon? Everything is planned. Your historian friend Melkart has dug out the old ceremonials for me. My jewelers are working on a fire-diamond crown.”
“For me to pay for,” Kellon chuckled, and drew her pantherine body close against him. “Darling, I know you want to be Empress of the Sun, but your pretty head is in danger enough, without a coronet.”
Kellon frowned, sobered by the thought. He had climbed to the perilous apex of a human pyramid. He was first of the million hereditary engineers, who, with their families and the various grades of their retainers, occupied nearly all the upper-level towers of Sunport.
But, here in Sunport alone, nearly eighty million more wore the gray of labor. They dwelt and toiled in the subsurface levels, and the Goon Department bound their lives with iron restrictions. Kellon knew how they lived—because he had been one of them.
Most of them hated the technician nobility of the Union. That was the dangerous flaw in the pyramid. Kellon had once tried to mend it, with reforms and concessions. But Melkart warned that he was three generations too late. Yielding to that hatred, he was merely paying out the rope to hang himself.
“We’re dancing on a volcano, darling,” he told Selene. “Better not poke the fire!”
Selene’s bare shoulders tossed, and her eyes flashed dark as her emerald-sequined gown. But she curbed her displeasure. She knew that a hundred other women in the long, green-lit hall would have murdered gladly for her place in Kellon’s arms. Her frown turned to a pretty pout.
“Please, your genius.” Her perfect face winced slightly. Kellon knew that he had stepped on her silver slipper. But she smiled again, shrugging off his apology. “It wasn’t caution that conquered the planets for you,” she chided. “Your genius isn’t getting old?”
That was his vulnerable point, and Selene knew it. Perhaps he was. The details of administration were increasingly burdensome. It was hard to find trustworthy subordinates. Sometimes he felt that the Union itself was slipping into decadence, as he grew older.
“The coronation—” her coaxing voice went on.
But Kellon stopped listening. He let her dance out of his arms. He watched the thin man threading toward him through the press of bright-clad engineering aristocracy wheeling about the dance floor.
The thin man was Chief Marquard of the Goon Department. He wore wine-colored formal pajamas and a jeweled Union star. But he had no partner, and his harassed expression meant bad news. Kellon braced himself for trouble.
“Your genius, it’s the Preacher!” The whisper was hoarse with strain. “He’s here in Sunport.” Marquard gulped and wet his lips. “Still in hiding—somewhere down in the drainage levels.”
This was more than merely trouble. Kellon swayed. The lofty shining murals blurred. He saw instead the dark, dripping tunnels, a thousand feet beneath the pavements of Sunport. Once he had hidden there himself, a hunted man in gray. The syncopated drone of the orchestra was suddenly the throb of drainage pumps.
Kellon’s thick, pink hands made a desperate clutching gesture. He had watched the spread of the Gray Crusade, a poison that attacked the Union and rotted the very fabric of civilization. For years the Goon Department had sought the Preacher, in vain. But it was hard to believe that the fanatic had dared to enter Sunport.
He was getting old, indeed. Old and alone. He felt helpless against the demands of this grim moment. Suddenly he was almost ill with a desperate regret for the quarrel with his son. Family loyalty, in this cynical metropolis, was almost the only dependable bond. Now he needed Roy, terribly.
Dazed by the impact of this emergency, his mind slipped back into the past. To Roy, and Roy’s mother. It had been Melkart who first introduced the slender, gray-eyed girl. They were at a secret meeting, down in the drainage ways. Melkart said proudly, “Ruth is going to be the Joan d’Arc of the New Commonwealth.”
Perhaps Ruth had loved Melkart. Kellon was never sure. For the secret police of the Corporation raided the party headquarters, a few months later. Melkart was captured and transported to Mars. It was only after she had received a false report of Melkart’s death, that she would marry Kellon.
Kellon was responsible for that report. He had tried to atone for it, however, with the parole he secured for Melkart as soon as he had sufficient influence.
Ruth had never abandoned her dream of the New Commonwealth. She had not approved the methods of Kellon’s rise to power, and she was deeply hurt when he ordered the Union Goons to hunt down the few surviving members of the party. Roy was twelve years old when she died.
Roy was like his mother—lean, intense, idealistic. Kellon was delighted when the boy wanted to take practical degrees in unitronic engineering—it helped him forget that his own hereditary titles were forgeries.
But Roy had been a bitter disappointment. He failed to show any interest in Union politics. He refused to enter the Militechnic College, to prepare for command and promotion in the Fleet. Instead, at twenty, he had gone to waste a year with some meaningless research at the solar power plants on Mercury.
The quarrel happened after Roy returned—five years ago. Roy didn’t like Selene du Mars. She made matters worse by trying to flirt with him. He called her an unpleasant name, and stalked out of the penthouse suite. He had never come back.
But Kellon had followed him, next day, to the great unitronics laboratory on the mesa. A silent crystal egg, his unitron glider sloped down toward the long, low, white-roofed building that stood between the commercial port and the militechnic reservation.
Like an elongated silver bubble, a freighter was lifting from the Venus Docks, bright and strange in the shimmer of its drive field. Gray stevedores were trucking away the gleaming metal ingots and squared hardwood logs it had unloaded. A Martian liner lay in her cradle, spilling dark ore concentrate down a chute. A space-battered Jovian relief ship was loading mountains of crates and bales and drums—food and equipment and power for the miners on Callisto. The Mercury Docks were stacked with crated dynode batteries, freshly charged in the Sun plants. All the commerce of an interplanetary empire!
But Kellon’s pride had a bitter taste. He could remember when the port was far busier, back in the days of the Corporation. Now half the yards were weed grown and abandoned. Dismantled ships were turning red with rust in the cradles at the disused Saturn Docks.
His pilot landed the glider on the white roof.
Kellon asked for his son, and a startled watchman guided him down through the laboratory. Space had really been conquered in this building, Kellon knew; all the great advances in unitronic flight had been made here. But most of the halls were deserted now, the old equipment dismantled or ruined.
Kellon found Roy in a long, clean shop whose plastic walls were softly radiant with a clear blue-white. Huge windows looked out across the militechnic reservation, where the unitron cruisers of the Fleet lay like immense dead-black arrows.
Roy was bronzed with spaceburn from his year on Mercury. He looked up, with his mother’s nervous quickness, from some gadget on a bench. Kellon was a little shocked to see the screwdriver in his hands—for an engineer of the higher ranks, any sort of manual work was considered degrading.
Roy seemed glad to see him.
