Collected Short Fiction, page 488
Julian Hudd rose to receive us, in the huge mahogany-and-chrome office beyond. At fifty, he was still handsome, he still bore a shaggy, dark-haired magnificence. Yet the enormous animal vitality of his heavy frame was visibly failing. He was paunchy; his blue cheeks sagged into jowls; dark pouches hung under his bloodshot eyes.
“Jim! And Chad!” We were not his friends—a Squaredealer had no friends; but he made a fetish of informality. He shook our hands, and seated us, and offered the first cigars I had seen in many years. “How are you?”
Cameron’s lean face turned sardonic.
“We have no scars or mutilations, thank you.”
Hudd nodded, beaming as genially as if he hadn’t heard the sarcasm. He sat behind his opulent desk, and began tapping its sleek top with a paperweight, a small gold bust of Tyler.
“You two men are pariahs.” He kept his smile of bland good nature, but his voice became taut, violent. “Civilian scientists! Your own mutinous indiscretions got you into the cells of the SBI. Except for this present emergency, I should gladly let you rot there. Now, however, I’m going to let you exonerate yourselves—if you can.”
The sagging, furrowed mask of his face gave me no hint about the nature or extent of this present emergency, and we had been incommunicado in the prison. By now, I thought, we must be near Earth. Perhaps, it occurred to me, he intended to take over the Directorate from Tyler or his heirs.
Hudd’s gray, bloodshot eyes looked at me, disconcertingly.
“I know you, Chad Barstow.” His fixed smile had no meaning, and his loud voice was a slashing denunciation. “Perhaps your own record is clean enough, but you are damned by a traitor’s name.”
I wanted to protest that my father had been no traitor, but a patriot. For Dr. Dane Barstow had been Secretary of Atomics, in Tyler’s first cabinet—when Tyler was only President of the United States. He had organized the Atomic Service, from the old Army and the Navy, to defend democracy. When he learned Tyler’s dreams of conquest and autocratic power, he angrily resigned. That was the beginning of his treason.
In political disgrace, my father returned to pure science. He went out, with his bride, to. found Letronne Observatory on tire Moon. They spent the war years there, and discovered the Dark Star—my father first inferred the existence of some massive nonluminous body from minute perturbations of Pluto’s orbit, and my mother aided him in the long task of determining its position and parallax with infrared photography.
Eagerly, Dane Barstow planned a voyage of his own to the Dark Star—he wanted, no doubt, to escape the oppressive intellectual atmosphere of the Directorate. He spent two years designing an improved ion drive, and then tried to find aid to launch his expedition.
Tyler, meantime, had betrayed democracy and destroyed his rival dictators. From Americania, his splendid new capital, he domineered mankind. He was pouring billions into Fort America, on the Moon, to secure his uneasy Directorate. He was not interested in the advancement of science.
Curtly, Tyler refused to finance or even to approve the Dark Star Expedition. He wanted the ion drive, however—for the robot-guided atomic missiles of Fort America. My father quarreled with him, unwisely, and vanished into the labor camps of the SBI. My mother died, in the care of a Squaredeal doctor.
Though I was only a little child, there are some things I shall never forget. The sadness of my father’s hollow-cheeked face, and the intense, electric vitality of his eves. The futile efforts of my mother, to hide her fear and grief from me. The terror of the SBI. that haunted my sleep.
Five years old, I was taken into the Tyler Scouts.
Task Force One, which put to space three years later, was not the supreme scientific effort of my father’s planning. The great expedition, as Jim Cameron once commented, was merely a moral equivalent of war.
“Dictators need an outside interest, to divert rebellion.” A tall man. brown and spare, Cameron had looked thoughtfully at me across his little induction furnace—we were working together, in his shipboard laboratory. “War’s die best thing—but Tyler had run out of enemies. That’s why he had to conquer interstellar space.”
I looked uneasily about for possible eavesdroppers, for such talk was not healthy.
“I wonder how it worked.” Cameron gave me his likable, quizzical grin. “Since we failed to meet any interstellar enemies, the essential factor was missing—there was no common danger, to make oppression seem the lesser evil. Perhaps it failed?”
Our arrest must have come from such reckless remarks as that. Cameron had always been unwisely free of speech, and it turned out that one of our laboratory assistants had been a Squaredealer, reporting every unguarded word to the SBI.
Now, in that richly paneled office, Julian Hudd kept drumming nervously on his sleek mahogany desk. Through that bland and masklike smile, he watched me with red, troubled eyes.
Hoarsely, I answered him.
“I know my father was a traitor, Mr. Hudd.” I had learned to utter those bitter words while I was still a child in the Tyler Scouts, for they had always been the great price of survival. “But I’ve been loyal,” I protested. “The SBI have nothing on me.”
“You’re lucky, Barstow.” His voice was flat and merciless. “One word of real evidence would have drummed you through the execution valve. Now, I’m giving you a chance to redeem your father’s evil name.”
Then he turned upon Jim Cameron, accusingly. And a sharp unease took hold of me, for Cameron had never been broken to mute obedience, as I had been. Now, emaciated and weary as he was front the prison, he still stood proud and straight. His fine blue eyes met Hudd’s—sardonic, amused, and unafraid.
Jim Cameron had always been that way—meeting the iron might of regimented society with a cool, critical intelligence; yielding, sometimes, an ironic show of respect, but never really giving up his proud independence.
He had been my best friend, since we came aboard the Great Director, among the thousands of Tyler Scouts who were sent to provide youthful replacements for the crews. He was twelve, then, the leader of our troop. He found me lying on my bunk, sick with acceleration pressure, homesick, too, dazed and hopeless.
“Hello, scout.” He put a friendly hand on my shoulder, and gave me his wry, invincible grin. “Let’s you and I get our gear policed up for inspection.”
We arranged our equipment. He sent me for a brush to sweep under our bunks. I showed him the toys in my pocket—three colored marbles, a broken gyroscope top, and a lead rocket bomb—and even let him see the contraband snapshot of my parents. We went to chow together. We were friends.
Now, under the provocation of Hudd’s shaggy-browed, glaring vehemence, I was afraid that Camereron’s stubborn self-respect would once again get the better of his judgment.
“As for you, Jim”—Hudd’s blue-jowled smile was genial, still, but his voice was harsh and violent—“your record is bad. You were broken from the Tyler Scouts, for insubordination. You were blackballed from the Machine, for doubtful loyalty. You were even rejected for the Atomic Service.”
“That’s true, Mr. Hudd.” Cameron remained cool and aloof.
“Civilian scientist!” Hudd’s red eyes glared through his mechanical smile. “The execution valve is waiting for you, Jim. Never forget that. I’ve saved your life a dozen times—just because you’ve been useful to me. Now I’m giving you a chance to earn one more reprieve. But the valve’s still waiting, if you fail. Understand?”
“Perfectly,” Cameron murmured. “What’s the job, this time?”
It was back on the worlds of the Dark Star, that Jim Cameron had first proved himself a useful man. There, under endless night, glaciers of frozen methane and ammonia hid the uranium ores we sought. Cold, near the absolute zero, hampered all our operations—and plutoniummaking is never exactly safe and simple.
But Jim Cameron, like my father, had the rare gift of scientific genius. He invented an exquisitely sensitive gamma ray detector, to locate the pitchblende veins beneath the glaciers. He designed much of the automatic equipment we, used for the difficult processes of mining, pile operation, and refining.
Thus, he earned an uncertain stay of execution.
“What’s the job?” he repeated, now.
“One question, first.” Behind the immense, shining mahogany desk, Hudd sat ponderous and impassive. His big mouth still smiled, but his red eyes were narrowed and dangerous. “What’s the truth about this so-called induction furnace?”
“That’s easy, Mr. Hudd.” Cameron’s low voice seemed relieved. “The last year, until our arrest, we were running routine assays of out-metallurgical specimens from the Dark Star system. I built that little furnace, for convenience in fusing samples.”
“So?” Hudd forgot to smile. His heavy, mottled face stiffened into a bleak mask of ruthless purpose. “The SBI reports that your assays were only a blind, to cover your experiments with that furnace.”
Hudd paused, but Cameron said nothing. He merely stood waiting, his lean face grave enough, but an alarming hint of impersonal amusement in his eyes. And Hudd went on:
“I believe it was a most peculiar furnace.” Hudd’s loud voice was harsh and scornful, savage with accusation. “The SBI reports show that it consumed no current. They show that it changed the metals fused in it—that buttons of pure iron, on spectrographic analysis, began to show the yellow sodium lines.”
Hudd’s great body heaved forward against the desk, ominously.
“What about that?”
Cameron nodded easily. Then fear dropped like a staggering burden upon me. For he grinned across the gleaming mahogany, and told Hudd more than he had ever admitted to the SBI, in all our months of intensive interrogation.
“I was looking for something,” he said.
For a moment, as he spoke, Cameron let down the shield of reserved and sardonic amusement that he carried against a world of totalitarian compulsion. For a moment his voice had a hard elation, terrible in its honesty.
“I was looking for—freedom.” His thin shoulders lifted, almost defiantly. “I thought I had found a new and simple technique for manipulating the cosmic stuff that sometimes we call matter and sometimes energy. I thought I had found the way out of the Atomic Age.”
His blue and deep-set eyes, for just that moment, held a stern radiance. Then his brief elation flowed away. His tall, emaciated frame bent to a burden of failure, and I saw the gray sickness of the prison on his haggard face.
“I was mistaken.” His voice went flat, with the dull admission of defeat. “The accidental contamination of pure specimens with spectroscopic traces of sodium is notoriously easy. I had already abandoned the experiment, before we were arrested.”
Hudd nodded his great shaggy head, unsurprised.
“You’re smart to tell the truth—and lucky that you failed.” His broad, blue-jowled face recovered its habitual political smile. “Now, I think you’ve had a lesson, Jim, and I’m going to give you another chance.” His voice turned savage again. “I don’t mean another chance at treason—for you’ll be watched, every minute.”
Erect again, Cameron stood waiting. The defeated look was gone. His lean face was properly grave, but his keen blue eyes had a glint of amused yet somewhat saturnine expectancy.
“What’s your trouble, Mr.Hudd?”
Hudd pushed the little golden head of Tyler away from him, across the opulent desk. Ponderously shifting his great bulk, he leaned back in his wide chair, knitting his fingers so that his huge, black-haired hands cradled his paunch. Under the dark thick brows, his small eyes were red with fatigue and trouble.
“T suppose you noticed when we went from acceleration thrust to centrifugal, three days ago?” His rasplike voice was nervous, now, dry and hurried. “Anyhow, we’re back—on a temporary orbit twenty thousand miles from the Moon.”
“And something’s wrong?” Cameron’s voice, it seemed to me, had some faint undertone of malicious anticipation. But Hudd didn’t notice, for he stated, with an apprehensive gravity:
“Something has happened to the Directorate!”
“Eh?” Cameron’s veiled amusement vanished. “What?”
“Here are the facts.” Heavily, Hudd lurched forward against the desk again; his voice had a little snap. “We began calling Fort America weeks ago, from millions of miles at space. Our signals weren’t answered. So far as we can determine, the Moon has been abandoned.”
His bloodshot eyes looked haunted.
“We haven’t tried to signal the Earth—I want to keep the advantage of surprise, until we know the situation. But things have happened, even there.”
He reached, with a huge and hairy paw, for the little golden bust of Tyler, and resumed his nervous drumming.
“But we’ve been listening, on every possible wave band. Of course, out here, we couldn’t expect to get much. But we are in range of the great television propaganda stations of the Applied Semantics Authority—and they are dead. All we have picked up are feeble clicks and squeals—scrambled radiophone signals, apparently, which the engineers have failed to unscramble.”
His lowered voice echoed a baffled unease.
“The telescopes give us several puzzling hints,” he went on soberly. “The forests have grown, since we left—the spread of green into the deserts might almost indicate a general climatic change. The haze of smoke is gone from the old industrial areas. Where several cities used to be, in the tropics, we can find only green jungle.”
“Very interesting,” Cameron murmured gently.
“Two landing parties were sent to Earth in lifecraft,” Hudd plowed grimly on. “One was to land in Europe and the other in North America. Nothing has been heard from either, since they entered the ionosphere. They are twenty-four hours overdue.”
The solemn, baffled hush of his voice gave me an uncomfortable chill of strange mystery. It would be a terrible and ironic thing I thought, if we had come back from our long exile to find our own humankind somehow vanished—but of course that couldn’t be.
Hudd blinked at Cameron, with shrewd weary eyes.
“Now, I’m sending out another party.” His loud voice turned crisp and decisive. “Captain Rory Doyle will be in command—under the advice of my liaison man. of course—and Doyle wants you two with him. You are taking off in two hours. Your first objective is to learn what happened to Fort America.”
Hudd put his great hands flat on the desk, and came laboriously to his feet, puffing with the effort. For all his gross bulk, however, he made a towering figure, dynamic and impressive still. Shrewd and imperious, his small eyes flashed from Cameron to me, and back again.
“You had better find out.” His rasping voice turned violent. “Your mission is important. I believe the Directorate has been overthrown, and I intend to restore it. I’ve got plutonium enough to smash half the Earth. The first necessity, however, is to learn what has happened. I believe you can anticipate the consequence to yourselves of failure.”
“I think we can, Mr. Hudd,” said Cameron.
My heart began to thump, with an excited and somewhat apprehensive expectation.
II.
Lifecraft 18 was a trim steel missile, lying snug in its berth tube amidships of the Great Director. Eighty feet long and slim as a pencil, it had its own ion drive, a regular crew of six, and plenty of additional space for our party.
Captain Rory Doyle met us at the valves. He was a big man, red-haired, straight and handsome in the gray of the Atomic Service. We knew him, for we had been with him on several prospecting flights to the planets of the Dark Star. He was capable, fearless, and loyal to the Directorate. With a tanned, open smile, he welcomed us aboard his swift little craft.
His crew of able spacemen helped us stow our space armor, and the rest of our hastily requisitioned equipment. Our takeoff time went by, but Doyle scowled at his wrist chronometer and kept the valves open.
“Waiting for Victor Lord,” he muttered, “the Squaredealer.”
Only his impatient tone suggested any dislike for Squaredealers—and even that was indiscreet.
Lord came swaggering insolently aboard, twenty minutes late. He was a tiny man, very erect and precise in his gray uniform—with the gold squares of the Machine instead of the Atomic Service insignia. He had tight brown skin over a hard, narrow face, and heavy, sleepy lids drooping over pale yellow eyes. His long black hair had a varnished slickness. Strutting between his two tall, black-clad SBI bodyguards, he looked like a peevish dwarf.
He didn’t bother to return Doyle’s correct salute.
“You know my status, Doyle.” His high, nasal voice was deliberately overbearing. “My duty here is to oversee your performance of this important mission. We’ll have no trouble—if you just keep in mind that my report can break you.”
He paused to blink at Doyle, with a sleepy-lidded, supercilious arrogance. Success in the Squaredeal Machine required a ruthless, cunning brutality; and Lord, I knew, stood second only to Julian Hudd. Haughtily, he added:
“You may take off, now.”
“Yes, Mr. Lord,” Doyle said stiffly.
The Squaredealer’s petulant insolence may have been nothing more than a compensation for his insignificant size, but still I didn’t like him. His yellow eyes were shifty and suspicious; his narrow forehead sloped and his nose was too big; his whole expression was one of alert and vicious cunning.’
Doyle turned away quickly, perhaps to conceal his own resentment. He ordered the valves closed, and climbed the central ladder well to his bridge. A warning horn beeped, a few minutes later, and we cast off.
In the acceleration lounge, we hung weightless for a few seconds, as we dropped away from the flagship; then the thrust of our own ion drive forced us back into the cushions, with a two-gravity acceleration.
I turned, in the padded, reclining seat, to look back through a small observation port. Against the dead black of space, I glimpsed the enormous bright projectile shapes of the Great Director and the Valley Forge—coupled nose-to-nose with a long cable, and spinning slowly, like a tiny binary star, to create a comfortable centrifugal force.
