Collected Short Fiction, page 534
“I was on Freedonia when that shot struck,” Jenkins told him hoarsely. “Worringer gives me about a week.” He lifted the cylinder. “Now do you want to shake this—just to see if it’s tomatoes?”
Brand stepped quickly back.
“No.” He stood wiping the palms of his hands and his sweat-filmed face with the gaudy handkerchief. “Steady, Nicky,” he urged suddenly. “Careful with it!”
“Will you load the condulloy?”
Brand’s fine gray eyes narrowed with a righteous indignation.
“We’ll load it,” he agreed at last, “if you’re so vast a fool. But I warn you that you won’t get far with your loot—or with the Fifth Freedom either, if you should start the plant.”
“That’s my problem,” Jenkins said. “Call your men.”
Brand turned deliberately, to beckon at the gold-and-purple mansion. Three short brown men carrying automatic rifles emerged instantly, and he called to them in melodious Spanish.
“English, please,” Jenkins rapped.
“There’s no trouble men,” Brand said easily. “I’m just shipping eighty tons of condulloy, in my nephew’s charge. Call Manrique and his squad, and have Vidal drag out the automatic loader. Move along—Mr. Jenkins is in a hurry.”
Jenkins hacked warily against the ground gear, carefully clutching that small can. He watched two small swarthy men drag the thick, weightless serpent of the loading tube from a side door of the mansion, pulling out the collapsed metal segments to bring it to the valves of the tug. He saw it writhe and shudder like a live thing as the first heavy ingots came through, moved by pulsating paragravitic fields. The two dark asterites stacked the emerging ingots in the hold, and Martin Brand stood beside a transparent window in the tube. watching the automatic counter. He seemed to Jenkins oddly unconcerned.
“Take it, Nicky,” he murmured genially, when the last silver-gray bar had clicked into place in the hold and his Latin followers had retracted the tube. “I always intended to set you up in life—though I’m sorry to see you involved in this fantastic scheme.”
His lean head shrink regretfully.
“The metal doesn’t matter. I lost ten times as much when the market broke today, and I intend to make it back tomorrow. But I’m sorry for you, Nicky.” His vibrant voice turned solemn. “That attacking fleet, you know, is operating somewhere in the space between here and Freedonia. I imagine you’ll be running into more and better seetee weapons.”
Brand waved his hand, in a wide, sardonic gesture.
“So long, Nicky!”
Still grasping that small cylinder gingerly, Jenkins climbed back up the accommodation steps. Jane Hardin was waiting for him in the tiny wardroom, and she watched him set the bright can back on the galley shelves. Her blue eyes held admiration and a veiled amusement.
“So you bought a few hundreds of millions in metal with an unlabeled can of tomatoes?” Laughter tinkled in her voice. “I doubt that Mr. Brand himself ever pulled anything quite so slick. I’d like to see his face when he hears about it.”
Jenkins paused a moment, frowning at her.
“I’m not sure I won.” Seeing her puzzlement, he explained. “My uncle has had a great many such victories as that, and he really only defeated himself.”
Her admiration almost angered him, for he wanted to despise such slick ingenuity. His goal was the vaster and more generous victory of the Fifth Freedom, and that was still remote.
He climbed on to the pilothouse, and lifted the tug at full acceleration. Busy plotting a course for Freedonia, he had no time for less immediate puzzles. But the girl stood watching him, and the cool amusement in her blue eyes began to trouble him as much as Martin Brand’s seeming unconcern.
XVI
The Good-by Jane was six hours from Freedonia, decelerating, when a gray pip showed on the radar-scope. A bit of seetee drift, Jenkins first thought, “Strayed somehow from the deadly swarms about the rock. He was swinging the tug to avoid it, when a metallic voice crashed from the photophone:
“Craft ahoy! Identify yourself.”
Consternation froze him. Adjusting the tug’s transmitter with numbed fingers, he tried to decide what to answer. The ship ahead, he knew, must be one of the unidentified attackers—and the brittle-toned command told him nothing, for English was the lingua franca of the spaceways.
“Tug Good-by Jane,” he rasped into the microphone. “Bound from Pallasport to Obania.” For it would be suicidal, he knew, to admit Freedonia as his destination. He tried to swallow the sudden dryness in his throat, adding huskily, “Who are you?”
Waiting for an answer, he read the distance pip. The stranger was only twelve hundred kilometers ahead—point blank range for spatial guns. No seetee missiles would be required to smash the unarmed tug. A ten centimeter spatial rifle would be enough.
“Warcraft Seetee Invader,” came the brisk reply. “Of the Free Space Republic.”
“What?” Jenkins gasped. “What republic?”
“The Free Space Republic was proclaimed yesterday, by the people of the asteroids,” that crisp voice informed him. “Obania is the temporary capital, until Pallasport surrenders. Seetee Invader is flagship of the Free Space fleet.”
Hope began to brighten the dark dismay of Jenkins. For the people of the rocks ought to be his friends. He recalled asking old Jim Drake about the outlawed Free Space Party.
“I don’t meddle with them,” the lean old asterite had told him. “I’ve suspected that Bruce O’Banion is involved in some of their intrigues, but I’m an engineer, not a politician.”
“But you asterites get such a raw deal, under the Mandate,” Jenkins remembered protesting. “I’d like to see something done.”
“I’d like to see the asteroids free.” A brief fire lit the old man’s faded eyes again. “But I still believe what I’ve always told O’Banion—that the Brand transmitter can do more to free the rocks than all his complicated plots and schemes.”
Now, turning eagerly from the radar to the hooded lenses of the periscope, Jenkins found the photophone light of the other vessel, a red point trembling among the steady stars. Breathless with hope, he whispered anxiously:
“Who is head of this new republic?”
“No permanent government has set been formed,” rapped the voice on the modulated beam. “The revolt is a spontaneous movement of the people, lead by the Free Space Party.”
“Who are the Party leaders?”
“You are asking for military secrets,” that brittle voice reprimanded him. “The Party leadership must be concealed from our interplanetary enemies until victory is assured. The provisional governor of Obania, however, is Mr. Bruce O’Banion.”
“Good,” Jenkins said. “I want to talk to him.”
“We are also bound for Obania,” came the other voice. “We shall escort you there.”
“I don’t need an escort—”
“But you do,” came the instant reply. “For a Mandate fleet is already moving this way, to break the rebellion on Obania. With your asterite connections, Mr. Jenkins, you are in danger of capture or destruction.”
Jenkins nodded—wondering uneasily when he had mentioned his name. He decided he hadn’t. But he couldn’t afford to meet the High Space Guard. The charges against him no doubt now included piracy in high space as well as treason against the Mandate.
“Besides,” that unidentified voice was adding, “we notice that you are dangerously off your true course, in the direction of a marked swarm of seetee meteors. Correct your course at once!”
Jenkins hesitated, fingering the control wheel uneasily. He didn’t like the coldly imperative tone of that voice, or understand how the speaker knew his name. Wistfully, he searched the dusty dark of space, beyond that shivering atom of red.
Freedonia hung there somewhere, still too far for his eyes to see or the scope to find, but only six hours distant. The ancient tug was faster than she looked. The drift itself, when he came a little nearer, would fog search scopes and intimidate pursuit. His hands were tightening decisively on the wheel, when Jane Hardin’s bright head came out of the ladder well.
“Nick!” Her eyes were violet with anxiety. “Is something wrong?”
“I don’t know.” He studied her taut, lean face, wondering uneasily how the people of that other craft knew his name. “But we’re landing on Obania.”
For it didn’t matter whether the warcraft ahead came really from Obania or from some vaster planet, or whether it carried seetee missiles or only spatial rifles. The unarmed tug had no chance at all. Perhaps old O’Banion could help him get to Freedonia—and he didn’t want the cool charm and the vital mystery of Jane Hardin canceled out by death.
He corrected the course for Obania.
The drift-pitted tug landed on that jagged planetoid three hours later, twenty minutes ahead of the escort. Jenkins had called Bruce O’Banion from space, and that aged asterite leader was waiting when he Stepped down from the valves.
The war had already wounded Obania. Jenkins paused at the bottom of the rusty steps, appalled. Behind him, he heard Jane Hardin utter a hushed little cry of shock and pain. Dismayed, he stared blankly around the convex field.
In the center of the spaceport had stood the great six-sided Mandate building, headquarters of the Guard detachment that had governed Obania. That once-impressive fortress was blackened wreckage now, with thin smoke still drifting from the rubble.
Beside the ruined fortress lay the burned hull of a tall Guard cruiser, fire-stained and flattened. Craters pocked the field beyond it. Fire had darkened the sagging sheet metal of shops and hangars and warehouses. A battle tank lay overturned and abandoned.
But the bright new Seetee warehouse, Jenkins saw, had somehow escaped destruction. Above the white gleam of its trim sheet metal, a new flag was flying. Green stars were patterned to make a larger star on a field of black—the colors, he supposed, of the new-born asterite nation.
“Welcome, Jenkins!” Old O’Banion’s voice was round and almost pompous with the habit of political oratory, but a fierce triumph rang in it now. “Welcome to the sacred soil of the Free Space Republic.”
Little soil clad the naked iron and stone of Obania, and the small group of soldiers behind the asterite politico showed an equal bareness. They still wore the ragged gray of miners, and their only uniform was a black arm band, sewn with a crude green star.
They were haggard, grimy, unshaven men. Several wore dark-stained bandages. But all of them were armed with automatic rifles, and they all wore a fierce elation.
“That’s what happened to our oppressors.” Gesturing widely toward the humbled fortress, O’Banion spoke with a careless slur. He looked intoxicated, with the dull glaze of his hollowed, bloodshot eyes and the clumsy sway of his massive body. But it wasn’t whiskey, Jenkins knew, that made him drunk. It was victory.
“We struck yesterday morning,” his tired voice rasped. “At nine, Mandate time. The party had supplied us four tons of maximite, and we had made four bombs. One planted under the cruiser and one under the fort, and two in reserve. We blew up the cruiser and stormed the arsenal.”
His white-maned head nodded toward the smoldering fortress.
“But some dirty spy must have tried to sell us out,” he rumbled bitterly, “because the bomb under the fort was discovered before it went off. Tanks came out, and tried to take the town. I thought we were done for.
“But we fought for freedom.” O’Banion’s weary shoulders lifted. “We had mortars from the arsenal, and we stopped the tanks with them. Finally two young men volunteered to make missiles of themselves, with the maximite bombs fastened to their dirigible armor. The guns of the fort got the first, but the second hit like a fission bomb.”
The paunchy man struck an orator’s pose.
“Those two humble rock rats sacrificed their lives.” His tired voice strove for eloquence. “But their act established the Free Space Republic. History will long remember the simple nobility—” Anxiously, Jenkins interrupted: “What about our engineers in the hospital?” He nodded urgently at the road toward the Worringer Clinic, secluded in its iron-walled canyon beyond the equator of Obania. “Can Worringer save any of them?”
“How should I know?”
“They weren’t hurt in the battle?”
“There was fighting around the hospital, but I don’t know.”
O’Banion shrugged his massive shoulders, with a tired impatience. “I’ve had no time for anything, except our hard battle for the freedom of the rocks. I’ve been busy at the photophone, since we won our little victory here, organizing and commanding asterite uprisings on a dozen other rocks.”
The eyes of Jenkins moved from the reeling old man to his squad of ragged, wounded followers with their crude, arm bands and their looted weapons awkwardly held. A sudden pity choked him.
“You don’t really hope to break the Mandate?”
“We’ve had reverses.” O’Banion sighed heavily. “Thousands of brave asterites have lost their lives for freedom. We failed, in Pallasport, to storm the government buildings. Our uprisings have been crushed everywhere, except here on Obania.”
His haggard eyes peered forebodingly at the violet darkness of the sky above the shattered fortress.
“Even now,” he added uneasily, “a Mandate fleet is reported on the way here, armed with the might of all the planets—with great spatial “guns and fission missiles—to snuff out our last tiny spark of freedom.” Defiantly, the aged leader stiffened, adding grimly:
“But we’re going to surprise our mighty enemies!”
Looking at the little squad of weary men behind him, Jenkins protested quickly:
“These miners can’t fight spatial rifles and atomic missiles.”
“We’ve better weapons now,” O’Banion told him triumphantly. “The party is sending us a fleet of our own, armed with seetee—”
“Huh!” Jenkins started, searching O’Banion’s gray heavy face with narrowed eyes. Did this revelation solve the riddle of the unidentified attackers, and explain the betrayal of Freedonia? Desperately he demanded:
“Where did you get seetee weapons?”
“That is a secret of the Party leadership.” O’Banion shook his shaggy white head. “But Brother Stone has promised me that our secret fleet will smash the Mandate forces with self-guided seetee missiles, and enable us to hold this first citadel of the Free Space Republic.”
Puzzled, Jenkins whispered: “Who’s Brother Stone?”
The big man blinked uncomfortably.
“Please forget that name,” he begged anxiously. “I shouldn’t have spoken it. But I trust you, Jenkins.” He lowered his husky voice! “Brother Stone is the Party designation of our supreme leader—and he still assures us victory, in spite of all our cruel defeats.”
Jenkins moved to clutch O’Banion’s heavy arm.
“You can trust me,” he agreed. “But our power plant on Freedonia can do more to free the people of the rocks than this Brother Stone and all his seetee missiles—if we can only get it going.”
His voice dropped urgently.
“I already have the condulloy we need. I’m going back to try to finish the plant—alone, if none of our engineers can help.” His fingers tightened desperately on O’Banion’s arm. “May I take off? Right now?”
O’Banion’s dull eyes looked evasively away into the dark sky.
“I’ve no authority to let you go,” he temporized at last. “Better Wait for the Invader. High Party men aboard—maybe even Brother Stone himself. I’ll take up your case with them.”
“But there isn’t time,” Jenkins protested sharply.
He didn’t speak of the ruthless plant of death rooted and sprouting in his own flesh, but there were enough other reasons for haste.
“Might be your Brother Stone is only bluffing,” he suggested desperately. “Maybe he really hasn’t any seetee weapons, after all—or why should he let the asterites be defeated anywhere?” He gripped O’Banion’s flabby arm again. “Won’t you let me go on now?”
“I can’t do that.” The big man shook his head, with a massive regret. “Personally, Jenkins, I’m all for you, hut Brother Stone demands Party discipline.” Placating, he added: “The Invader is due in ten minutes now.”
Looking at the ponderous stubbornness of his tired face, Jenkins yielded reluctantly.
“I’ll wait,” he agreed unwillingly. “Anyhow, I want to see my friends in the hospital.”
For he needed the calm wisdom of old Jim Drake and the skill of Drake’s mighty, red-haired son. Desperately he needed the strange abilities of the mutant spaceman, little Rob McGee, and the competence and courage of all the rest. The frantic hope came to him, that some of them might be awakening from the coma of ametine.
“Take my car.” O’Banion gestured at the low, electric vehicle parked at the edge of the crater-pocked field, beside the Seetee warehouse. “I must stay to meet the brothers on the warship.”
“Please arrange for me to go on,” Jenkins begged. “At once.”
“I don’t know.” O’Banion looked off at the sky again, his dull eyes veiled, somehow hostile. “I can’t promise.”
XVII
Jenkins climbed back to lock the valves of the tug. He saw O’Banion’s men stir and retreat with quick alarm when they saw the warning that the craft was ray-contaminated. That, he thought grimly, should protect the priceless cargo.
Jane Hardin came with him, oddly aloof and quiet. She had stood listening to all O’Banion told him, saying nothing. He could feel a veiled and somehow disturbing tension in her. What sort of game, lie wondered again, could she be playing?
O’Banion’s car took them over the near horizon, and down the one winding street of the town. The brief war, Jenkins saw, had struck hard. Red flags marked unfilled craters in the pavement. Windows were shattered, walls bullet-marked. The new Interplanet building was a fire-gutted ruin.
Yet the town had an air of fevered triumph.
Ragged children waved and cheered at sight of the green-starred flag flying from O’Banion’s car. A miner with a bandaged head shouted some cheery greeting and two men on new crutches saluted. Jenkins heard a peal of song from the Meteor Palace Bar.
Brand stepped quickly back.
“No.” He stood wiping the palms of his hands and his sweat-filmed face with the gaudy handkerchief. “Steady, Nicky,” he urged suddenly. “Careful with it!”
“Will you load the condulloy?”
Brand’s fine gray eyes narrowed with a righteous indignation.
“We’ll load it,” he agreed at last, “if you’re so vast a fool. But I warn you that you won’t get far with your loot—or with the Fifth Freedom either, if you should start the plant.”
“That’s my problem,” Jenkins said. “Call your men.”
Brand turned deliberately, to beckon at the gold-and-purple mansion. Three short brown men carrying automatic rifles emerged instantly, and he called to them in melodious Spanish.
“English, please,” Jenkins rapped.
“There’s no trouble men,” Brand said easily. “I’m just shipping eighty tons of condulloy, in my nephew’s charge. Call Manrique and his squad, and have Vidal drag out the automatic loader. Move along—Mr. Jenkins is in a hurry.”
Jenkins hacked warily against the ground gear, carefully clutching that small can. He watched two small swarthy men drag the thick, weightless serpent of the loading tube from a side door of the mansion, pulling out the collapsed metal segments to bring it to the valves of the tug. He saw it writhe and shudder like a live thing as the first heavy ingots came through, moved by pulsating paragravitic fields. The two dark asterites stacked the emerging ingots in the hold, and Martin Brand stood beside a transparent window in the tube. watching the automatic counter. He seemed to Jenkins oddly unconcerned.
“Take it, Nicky,” he murmured genially, when the last silver-gray bar had clicked into place in the hold and his Latin followers had retracted the tube. “I always intended to set you up in life—though I’m sorry to see you involved in this fantastic scheme.”
His lean head shrink regretfully.
“The metal doesn’t matter. I lost ten times as much when the market broke today, and I intend to make it back tomorrow. But I’m sorry for you, Nicky.” His vibrant voice turned solemn. “That attacking fleet, you know, is operating somewhere in the space between here and Freedonia. I imagine you’ll be running into more and better seetee weapons.”
Brand waved his hand, in a wide, sardonic gesture.
“So long, Nicky!”
Still grasping that small cylinder gingerly, Jenkins climbed back up the accommodation steps. Jane Hardin was waiting for him in the tiny wardroom, and she watched him set the bright can back on the galley shelves. Her blue eyes held admiration and a veiled amusement.
“So you bought a few hundreds of millions in metal with an unlabeled can of tomatoes?” Laughter tinkled in her voice. “I doubt that Mr. Brand himself ever pulled anything quite so slick. I’d like to see his face when he hears about it.”
Jenkins paused a moment, frowning at her.
“I’m not sure I won.” Seeing her puzzlement, he explained. “My uncle has had a great many such victories as that, and he really only defeated himself.”
Her admiration almost angered him, for he wanted to despise such slick ingenuity. His goal was the vaster and more generous victory of the Fifth Freedom, and that was still remote.
He climbed on to the pilothouse, and lifted the tug at full acceleration. Busy plotting a course for Freedonia, he had no time for less immediate puzzles. But the girl stood watching him, and the cool amusement in her blue eyes began to trouble him as much as Martin Brand’s seeming unconcern.
XVI
The Good-by Jane was six hours from Freedonia, decelerating, when a gray pip showed on the radar-scope. A bit of seetee drift, Jenkins first thought, “Strayed somehow from the deadly swarms about the rock. He was swinging the tug to avoid it, when a metallic voice crashed from the photophone:
“Craft ahoy! Identify yourself.”
Consternation froze him. Adjusting the tug’s transmitter with numbed fingers, he tried to decide what to answer. The ship ahead, he knew, must be one of the unidentified attackers—and the brittle-toned command told him nothing, for English was the lingua franca of the spaceways.
“Tug Good-by Jane,” he rasped into the microphone. “Bound from Pallasport to Obania.” For it would be suicidal, he knew, to admit Freedonia as his destination. He tried to swallow the sudden dryness in his throat, adding huskily, “Who are you?”
Waiting for an answer, he read the distance pip. The stranger was only twelve hundred kilometers ahead—point blank range for spatial guns. No seetee missiles would be required to smash the unarmed tug. A ten centimeter spatial rifle would be enough.
“Warcraft Seetee Invader,” came the brisk reply. “Of the Free Space Republic.”
“What?” Jenkins gasped. “What republic?”
“The Free Space Republic was proclaimed yesterday, by the people of the asteroids,” that crisp voice informed him. “Obania is the temporary capital, until Pallasport surrenders. Seetee Invader is flagship of the Free Space fleet.”
Hope began to brighten the dark dismay of Jenkins. For the people of the rocks ought to be his friends. He recalled asking old Jim Drake about the outlawed Free Space Party.
“I don’t meddle with them,” the lean old asterite had told him. “I’ve suspected that Bruce O’Banion is involved in some of their intrigues, but I’m an engineer, not a politician.”
“But you asterites get such a raw deal, under the Mandate,” Jenkins remembered protesting. “I’d like to see something done.”
“I’d like to see the asteroids free.” A brief fire lit the old man’s faded eyes again. “But I still believe what I’ve always told O’Banion—that the Brand transmitter can do more to free the rocks than all his complicated plots and schemes.”
Now, turning eagerly from the radar to the hooded lenses of the periscope, Jenkins found the photophone light of the other vessel, a red point trembling among the steady stars. Breathless with hope, he whispered anxiously:
“Who is head of this new republic?”
“No permanent government has set been formed,” rapped the voice on the modulated beam. “The revolt is a spontaneous movement of the people, lead by the Free Space Party.”
“Who are the Party leaders?”
“You are asking for military secrets,” that brittle voice reprimanded him. “The Party leadership must be concealed from our interplanetary enemies until victory is assured. The provisional governor of Obania, however, is Mr. Bruce O’Banion.”
“Good,” Jenkins said. “I want to talk to him.”
“We are also bound for Obania,” came the other voice. “We shall escort you there.”
“I don’t need an escort—”
“But you do,” came the instant reply. “For a Mandate fleet is already moving this way, to break the rebellion on Obania. With your asterite connections, Mr. Jenkins, you are in danger of capture or destruction.”
Jenkins nodded—wondering uneasily when he had mentioned his name. He decided he hadn’t. But he couldn’t afford to meet the High Space Guard. The charges against him no doubt now included piracy in high space as well as treason against the Mandate.
“Besides,” that unidentified voice was adding, “we notice that you are dangerously off your true course, in the direction of a marked swarm of seetee meteors. Correct your course at once!”
Jenkins hesitated, fingering the control wheel uneasily. He didn’t like the coldly imperative tone of that voice, or understand how the speaker knew his name. Wistfully, he searched the dusty dark of space, beyond that shivering atom of red.
Freedonia hung there somewhere, still too far for his eyes to see or the scope to find, but only six hours distant. The ancient tug was faster than she looked. The drift itself, when he came a little nearer, would fog search scopes and intimidate pursuit. His hands were tightening decisively on the wheel, when Jane Hardin’s bright head came out of the ladder well.
“Nick!” Her eyes were violet with anxiety. “Is something wrong?”
“I don’t know.” He studied her taut, lean face, wondering uneasily how the people of that other craft knew his name. “But we’re landing on Obania.”
For it didn’t matter whether the warcraft ahead came really from Obania or from some vaster planet, or whether it carried seetee missiles or only spatial rifles. The unarmed tug had no chance at all. Perhaps old O’Banion could help him get to Freedonia—and he didn’t want the cool charm and the vital mystery of Jane Hardin canceled out by death.
He corrected the course for Obania.
The drift-pitted tug landed on that jagged planetoid three hours later, twenty minutes ahead of the escort. Jenkins had called Bruce O’Banion from space, and that aged asterite leader was waiting when he Stepped down from the valves.
The war had already wounded Obania. Jenkins paused at the bottom of the rusty steps, appalled. Behind him, he heard Jane Hardin utter a hushed little cry of shock and pain. Dismayed, he stared blankly around the convex field.
In the center of the spaceport had stood the great six-sided Mandate building, headquarters of the Guard detachment that had governed Obania. That once-impressive fortress was blackened wreckage now, with thin smoke still drifting from the rubble.
Beside the ruined fortress lay the burned hull of a tall Guard cruiser, fire-stained and flattened. Craters pocked the field beyond it. Fire had darkened the sagging sheet metal of shops and hangars and warehouses. A battle tank lay overturned and abandoned.
But the bright new Seetee warehouse, Jenkins saw, had somehow escaped destruction. Above the white gleam of its trim sheet metal, a new flag was flying. Green stars were patterned to make a larger star on a field of black—the colors, he supposed, of the new-born asterite nation.
“Welcome, Jenkins!” Old O’Banion’s voice was round and almost pompous with the habit of political oratory, but a fierce triumph rang in it now. “Welcome to the sacred soil of the Free Space Republic.”
Little soil clad the naked iron and stone of Obania, and the small group of soldiers behind the asterite politico showed an equal bareness. They still wore the ragged gray of miners, and their only uniform was a black arm band, sewn with a crude green star.
They were haggard, grimy, unshaven men. Several wore dark-stained bandages. But all of them were armed with automatic rifles, and they all wore a fierce elation.
“That’s what happened to our oppressors.” Gesturing widely toward the humbled fortress, O’Banion spoke with a careless slur. He looked intoxicated, with the dull glaze of his hollowed, bloodshot eyes and the clumsy sway of his massive body. But it wasn’t whiskey, Jenkins knew, that made him drunk. It was victory.
“We struck yesterday morning,” his tired voice rasped. “At nine, Mandate time. The party had supplied us four tons of maximite, and we had made four bombs. One planted under the cruiser and one under the fort, and two in reserve. We blew up the cruiser and stormed the arsenal.”
His white-maned head nodded toward the smoldering fortress.
“But some dirty spy must have tried to sell us out,” he rumbled bitterly, “because the bomb under the fort was discovered before it went off. Tanks came out, and tried to take the town. I thought we were done for.
“But we fought for freedom.” O’Banion’s weary shoulders lifted. “We had mortars from the arsenal, and we stopped the tanks with them. Finally two young men volunteered to make missiles of themselves, with the maximite bombs fastened to their dirigible armor. The guns of the fort got the first, but the second hit like a fission bomb.”
The paunchy man struck an orator’s pose.
“Those two humble rock rats sacrificed their lives.” His tired voice strove for eloquence. “But their act established the Free Space Republic. History will long remember the simple nobility—” Anxiously, Jenkins interrupted: “What about our engineers in the hospital?” He nodded urgently at the road toward the Worringer Clinic, secluded in its iron-walled canyon beyond the equator of Obania. “Can Worringer save any of them?”
“How should I know?”
“They weren’t hurt in the battle?”
“There was fighting around the hospital, but I don’t know.”
O’Banion shrugged his massive shoulders, with a tired impatience. “I’ve had no time for anything, except our hard battle for the freedom of the rocks. I’ve been busy at the photophone, since we won our little victory here, organizing and commanding asterite uprisings on a dozen other rocks.”
The eyes of Jenkins moved from the reeling old man to his squad of ragged, wounded followers with their crude, arm bands and their looted weapons awkwardly held. A sudden pity choked him.
“You don’t really hope to break the Mandate?”
“We’ve had reverses.” O’Banion sighed heavily. “Thousands of brave asterites have lost their lives for freedom. We failed, in Pallasport, to storm the government buildings. Our uprisings have been crushed everywhere, except here on Obania.”
His haggard eyes peered forebodingly at the violet darkness of the sky above the shattered fortress.
“Even now,” he added uneasily, “a Mandate fleet is reported on the way here, armed with the might of all the planets—with great spatial “guns and fission missiles—to snuff out our last tiny spark of freedom.” Defiantly, the aged leader stiffened, adding grimly:
“But we’re going to surprise our mighty enemies!”
Looking at the little squad of weary men behind him, Jenkins protested quickly:
“These miners can’t fight spatial rifles and atomic missiles.”
“We’ve better weapons now,” O’Banion told him triumphantly. “The party is sending us a fleet of our own, armed with seetee—”
“Huh!” Jenkins started, searching O’Banion’s gray heavy face with narrowed eyes. Did this revelation solve the riddle of the unidentified attackers, and explain the betrayal of Freedonia? Desperately he demanded:
“Where did you get seetee weapons?”
“That is a secret of the Party leadership.” O’Banion shook his shaggy white head. “But Brother Stone has promised me that our secret fleet will smash the Mandate forces with self-guided seetee missiles, and enable us to hold this first citadel of the Free Space Republic.”
Puzzled, Jenkins whispered: “Who’s Brother Stone?”
The big man blinked uncomfortably.
“Please forget that name,” he begged anxiously. “I shouldn’t have spoken it. But I trust you, Jenkins.” He lowered his husky voice! “Brother Stone is the Party designation of our supreme leader—and he still assures us victory, in spite of all our cruel defeats.”
Jenkins moved to clutch O’Banion’s heavy arm.
“You can trust me,” he agreed. “But our power plant on Freedonia can do more to free the people of the rocks than this Brother Stone and all his seetee missiles—if we can only get it going.”
His voice dropped urgently.
“I already have the condulloy we need. I’m going back to try to finish the plant—alone, if none of our engineers can help.” His fingers tightened desperately on O’Banion’s arm. “May I take off? Right now?”
O’Banion’s dull eyes looked evasively away into the dark sky.
“I’ve no authority to let you go,” he temporized at last. “Better Wait for the Invader. High Party men aboard—maybe even Brother Stone himself. I’ll take up your case with them.”
“But there isn’t time,” Jenkins protested sharply.
He didn’t speak of the ruthless plant of death rooted and sprouting in his own flesh, but there were enough other reasons for haste.
“Might be your Brother Stone is only bluffing,” he suggested desperately. “Maybe he really hasn’t any seetee weapons, after all—or why should he let the asterites be defeated anywhere?” He gripped O’Banion’s flabby arm again. “Won’t you let me go on now?”
“I can’t do that.” The big man shook his head, with a massive regret. “Personally, Jenkins, I’m all for you, hut Brother Stone demands Party discipline.” Placating, he added: “The Invader is due in ten minutes now.”
Looking at the ponderous stubbornness of his tired face, Jenkins yielded reluctantly.
“I’ll wait,” he agreed unwillingly. “Anyhow, I want to see my friends in the hospital.”
For he needed the calm wisdom of old Jim Drake and the skill of Drake’s mighty, red-haired son. Desperately he needed the strange abilities of the mutant spaceman, little Rob McGee, and the competence and courage of all the rest. The frantic hope came to him, that some of them might be awakening from the coma of ametine.
“Take my car.” O’Banion gestured at the low, electric vehicle parked at the edge of the crater-pocked field, beside the Seetee warehouse. “I must stay to meet the brothers on the warship.”
“Please arrange for me to go on,” Jenkins begged. “At once.”
“I don’t know.” O’Banion looked off at the sky again, his dull eyes veiled, somehow hostile. “I can’t promise.”
XVII
Jenkins climbed back to lock the valves of the tug. He saw O’Banion’s men stir and retreat with quick alarm when they saw the warning that the craft was ray-contaminated. That, he thought grimly, should protect the priceless cargo.
Jane Hardin came with him, oddly aloof and quiet. She had stood listening to all O’Banion told him, saying nothing. He could feel a veiled and somehow disturbing tension in her. What sort of game, lie wondered again, could she be playing?
O’Banion’s car took them over the near horizon, and down the one winding street of the town. The brief war, Jenkins saw, had struck hard. Red flags marked unfilled craters in the pavement. Windows were shattered, walls bullet-marked. The new Interplanet building was a fire-gutted ruin.
Yet the town had an air of fevered triumph.
Ragged children waved and cheered at sight of the green-starred flag flying from O’Banion’s car. A miner with a bandaged head shouted some cheery greeting and two men on new crutches saluted. Jenkins heard a peal of song from the Meteor Palace Bar.
