Collected Short Fiction, page 587
We rechecked everything. The magnetometers showed the reaction field at full intensity. The pumps were injecting a full stream of the lithium solution. But there was no nuclear reaction that we could detect, even with a Geiger counter.
“A flat failure!” Zerlinger muttered at last. “I can’t imagine why—”
“I can!” rapped the general, who had come down from the nose compartment to watch our frantic search for the trouble. “Come along, and we’ll find out!”
We followed him off the Lightyear. He was shouting for his car, when a jeep came lurching into the floodlights. It screeched to a halt beside us. I saw Colonel Fearing at the wheel. He sat staring at the general, woodenly silent.
“Well, Fearing!” the general barked. “Where’s your prisoner?”
“I can’t say, sir.”
“What’s that?”
“I came to report that he’s—uh—gone, sir.”
“Gone?” The little general stiffened incredulously. “We can’t have that. He somehow sabotaged the reactor. I want the truth sweated out of him. That hex business was just an act, to cover up whatever he really did to the ship.”
“I don’t know, sir.”
“You don’t know what?”
“About that hex business, sir.” The colonel cringed from the general’s outraged stare. “When we were locking him up, you see, he told me that he was going to hex his way out. We left him alone in a cell, for not more than ten minutes. Guards were watching the corridor outside, all the time. They didn’t notice anything. When I came back to interrogate the prisoner, the cell door was still locked. But Hunter wasn’t there.”
“How’d he get away?”
“I don’t know. sir. I searched the cell myself. It appears to be intact. I couldn’t get out of it.”
“Didn’t you find any clue?”
“There was—uh—something, sir. I’m not sure you’ll want to call it a clue. But Hunter had found a piece of soap. He had used it to mark a sort of star on the floor of his cell. I don’t know why. But I can’t help—uh—wondering—”
The air raid sirens interrupted him.
The floodlights flickered once and went off. Fearing bent mechanically to snap off the headlights of his jeep. We stood blind in the unexpected blackout. I tried to hope that it was only an ill-timed practise alert—until a parachute flare blazed overhead, drenching us in a ghastly blue glare.
“The bastards!” General Barlow gasped. “Must have launched their aircraft off submarine carriers! Sneaked in over Mexico—or we’d have picked them up. Caught us with our pants down.” His ragged voice lifted. “Take cover men I Wherever you can!”
We staggered off the concrete apron where the dead ship stood, and started digging futile little hollows in the cold desert sand, with only our hands. We were naked. The whole nation was. The Lightyear had been our last hope—till Eon came.
Crouching there, I heard a few of our fighters taking off and saw the bright yellow jets of our interceptor missiles rising, but they were nearly all too late. That blue flare kept burning in the sky, and soon I heard the scream of falling bombs.
The enemy, I thought disjointedly, could hardly know that Eon had hexed the project. We were still Target Number One, and the dead hull standing on the apron was the bull’s-eye. I buried myself as deep as I could, waiting for the atomic explosions.
The bombs thudded all around us—and somehow I was still alive to hear them. One plunged down so near that it scattered a spray of sand over me, but the only explosion was a great burst of yellow flame from a bomber that crashed a mile south on the mesa.
“Delayed action bombs!” Or maybe only duds!” The man next to me stood up abruptly under that cruel blue light, and I saw that he was General Barlow. “Maybe we’ve still got a chance!”
He shouted for Colonel Fearing. They ran to the staff car and roared away. As the flare died at last, in the frosty dawn, the bomb disposal squads came out to begin digging gingerly into the new craters around us.
The sirens hooted out the all clear signal. Zerlinger and I climbed shivering out of our shallow pits and limped stiffly back toward the Light-year. The tall hull stood untouched—except for the smear of blue chalk on the fin, where I had tried to erase Eon’s hex mark—but it had been neatly bracketed by the bombs, and the disposal officer ordered us away.
Numbed from shock and cold, we plodded heavily back across the field toward the shops. I could hear Zerlinger cursing under his breath. We both stopped once to look back at the Lightyear. She was beautiful in the first glancing sunlight, lean with the atomic might that we had given her to save America, but somehow she was dead.
Colonel Fearing overtook us in a jeep, before we reached the shops. His face was gray and twitching with strain. With only a curt nod at me, he told Zerlinger to get in with him. They went back to where the disposal crews were digging, and I walked on alone.
The mess hall was buzzing with the first wild rumors of the war, when I stopped aimlessly there. The sneak raiders had struck at all our greatest cities and most vital defenses. An H-bomb had blotted out Chicago. Our stockpiles of atomic weapons had all been destroyed on the ground. A Russian space ship had crashed in the Pacific and set off a thermonuclear reaction. The oceans were already boiling. All coastal areas were being evacuated.
Most of that was obvious nonsense—thermonuclear reactions don’t stop with boiling water. But I didn’t know what to believe. I wandered back to my desk in the shops and waited there, trying to read a paperbacked novel and listening to each new rumor and longing for something useful to do.
By afternoon, the reports had taken an optimistic turn. Chicago had escaped, after all. Though falling missiles and crashing planes had caused casualties and damage, the enemy atomic weapons had all been duds. Our own air force was hitting back, hard. Moscow had been obliterated. The enemy was already begging for peace.
The facts were stranger than the rumors. I learned them late that night, when General Barlow called me to his office at headquarters. From the bleak set of his jaw, I could see that the war wasn’t over, at all. He looked up across his desk with reddened, haggard eyes.
“Well, Guilborn,” he snapped. “What do you think of Hunter and his hexes?”
“I don’t understand what he could have done to the Lightyear,” I answered uncertainly. But, as a physicist, I can’t believe his silly witchcraft did any harm—”
“You may have to,” he broke in harshly. “Because I have just received top secret information that Hunter and his gang of traitors have somehow sabotaged our whole stockpile of nuclear weapons.”
“Huh!”
“Our strategic aircraft have gone out on retaliatory missions. They are reporting back that all their A-bombs and H-bombs have failed to explode. And now this!”
His hard fingers crumpled a strip of yellow teletype paper.
“Saboteurs have been arrested inside all the secret depots where our nuclear materials are stored. None of these men was caught with any weapons or explosives. Just pieces of chalk. They were scratching what they referred to as hex marks on the doors and walls of the depot buildings. They all admit that they belong to Hunter’s crazy cult. They claim they’ve put the hex on the atom!”
His sick eyes glared at me.
“They succeeded in doing something. The officers in charge have begun to make some preliminary investigations. They report that the stored materials still look intact. There is no evidence of any tampering—except for those chalk marks. But Geiger counter checks show that the stocks of uranium and plutonium and deuterium have completely lost their radio activity—”
“Impossible!”
“That’s what Zerlinger said, when he heard about it.” The general grinned bleakly. “I’ve sent him over to the nearest depot, to look around for himself.”
“May I go—”
“Zerlinger will head the scientific inquiry into how this sabotage was carried out,” his brittle voice cut me off. “I’ve another job for you.”
He paused, shuffling papers on his desk without looking down at them. His narrowed eyes studied me, uncomfortable as a surgeon’s probe.
“You know the traitor,” he rapped at last. “You know his girl. You know, as well as anybody, what he has done to us. I want you to run him down. I’ll arrange for you to receive every possible aid. But methods don’t matter. Get Hunter!”
I began the search that same night, when Colonel Fearing let me question one of the captured saboteurs. The prisoner was an inoffensive little brown man named Diego Tamayo, who said he owned a curio shop in Santa Fe. There was no evidence that he had any expert knowledge about the handling of nuclear materials—which were dangerous enough, even to experts. But he had been arrested in a natural cavern near Valdes, where a large stock of unassembled components for plutonium bombs had been stored.
“Sure, mister, I’m a Mutationist,” he told me. “I joined to save my wife and our baby and the little shop in Santa Fe. And I came to put a hex on the atom bombs in the cave, because Mr. Hunter sent me. I didn’t wish to damage government property, because I know the punishments are cruel. But Mr. Hunter said it must be done, to preserve the Earth.”
“What equipment did you bring?”
“Nothing.” He shrugged, and showed his empty hands. “Except a piece of chalk.”
“How did you get inside the cave?”
“With that same chalk.”
“I think you’re lying,” I told him. “But I’ll overlook it, if you’ll tell me where to find Hunter.”
“You will never find Mr. Hunter.” Diego Tamayo drew himself up straight. “He has gone to Russia.”
“Another lie!” I tried to stare him down. “It’s only last night that he escaped from the guardhouse here. The frontiers are all closed. He couldn’t have got out of the country.”
“I beg your pardon, sir.” His mild brown eyes met mine steadily. “It is your misfortune to be mistaken. No frontiers are closed to Mr. Hunter. He can go anywhere he wishes.”
“Awywhere?”
“Even to the stars,” the curio dealer answered soberly. “With only a piece of chalk.”
That was about all we got out of Diego Tamayo, but some of the former federal agents who had joined the Mutationists were still loyal enough to be more helpful. They convinced me that Eon had somehow actually escaped to Russia, but one of them told me that he was coming back to keep a date with Carol Wakeman.
I was waiting when he came.
I had been sworn in as a special agent of the FBI, and trained to shoot an automatic. I was hiding with a county sheriff, in a Kansas cornfield, near a brush-grown prehistoric mound that Eon’s followers had used for their queer new rites. Summer had come, by then. The war hadn’t touched the farm, and a fine stand of growing corn screened us from the unpaved road.
“Listen!” Sheriff Blackacre pressed his leathery ear to the soil. “Here comes your spy!”
For all the fantastic things I had been hearing about Eon’s way of travel, it was only a very ordinary gray Ford sedan that came jolting along the road. The driver was the former federal agent who had told us where to wait. He stopped near us just long enough to let Eon out, and then drove on hastily, as if ashamed of what he had done.
Eon waved at him, and waited by the road until the car turned out of sight. He wasn’t armed, so far as I could see. Not even with a piece of chalk.
“That him?” The sheriff cocked his worn revolver. He was a stolid old keeper of the peace, with a tobacco-yellowed moustache and only a massive scorn for the newfangled notions of Eon’s Mutationists. “Want me to wing him?”
“Not yet,” I whispered. “Wait for the girl.”
Eon was now striding toward the mound with an air of bright expectancy, as if he expected to find Carol there. But when we stood up in the corn behind him, all I could see was the wide circle of wooden posts that the cultists had set around the crown of the little hill, and the flat stone inside, blackened where they must have burned some ritual fire.
“Ain’t no girl,” the sheriff muttered. “Nowhere.”
“Eon Hunter!” I stepped out of the corn. “We’ve got a federal warrant for you.”
My voice came out too high, and my hands were sweating on the automatic, but Eon turned and grinned almost as if he had been expecting me to hail him.
“Hullo, Guilborn.” His grin faded, as he looked at me. “What has happened to you?”
Those last months must have left their mark on me. The Mutationists had stalled the war completely, but how they had done it was still a monstrous mystery. Seemingly, they had somehow sabotaged the whole universe. The Russian nuclear weapons had failed along with our own. The spectral lines of distant stars had shifted, indicating changes in the atomic fires that kept them burning—impossible changes that must have taken place before the light left them, long before Eon was born. Even the luminous dial of my own wrist-watch had dimmed, as its trace of radium atoms ceased to disintegrate. I felt that the whole world I knew had crumbled down around me, and Eon must have seen my dazed desperation. But I nodded to the sheriff, and we moved toward him watchfully.
“We’ll talk about you,” I told him. “And Carol. Where’s she?”
“Waiting for me.” His dark eyes had a strange sardonic glint. “On the second planet of Altair.”
“What?”
“Your dead pile of iron, back there at Valdes, wasn’t the only road to space. We’ve found a better one. We’ve side-tracked all the old problems of fuel and mass and escape velocity that you rocketeers could never really solve. Even the speed of light is no limit now.”
I stood gaping speechlessly.
“And I’m on my way to Carol.” No longer sardonic, his eyes had lifted toward something far beyond me. “She’s waiting on a world I used to dream about, when I was just a boy. A place like the Earth must have been, before it was spoiled with science and machines.” He looked abruptly back at me, and his thin face hardened with an old resentment. “But you saw it, when my father showed you my painting of her.”
For a moment I could only hate him.
“Are you claiming you can create planets?” I managed to gasp. “Just by thinking them into existence?”
“Not yet.” He shook his head regretfully, as if that had been an actual goal. “I doubt that human minds ever can. The truth is less extravagant. It turns out my dreams had been clairvoyant visions. All I had to do was find the planet.”
“I don’t know what your game is.”
My incredulous annoyance was exploding into anger. “But I’m looking for Carol—right here on Earth. If you expect me to believe—”
“I don’t,” he said. “Because I know you’re still convinced that two and two must always equal four. But I can’t help feeling sorry for you. You’re the same sort of misfit now, that I used to be.”
“Never mind that.” I tightened my sweaty grasp on the automatic. “But before we let you go riding off into interstellar space on any sort of broomstick, you’ve got a number of things to explain. First, we want to know how you and your fanatics managed to sabotage our atomic weapons.”
“I explained all that a long time ago if you had only understood.” He paused to made an odd little gesture at my gun, with his thumb and middle finger formed into a circle. “I didn’t like the universe that you physical scientists had hammered together. A lot of other people didn’t. So now we’ve changed it very slightly. If you want me to use your own mumbo-jumbo, we’ve simply removed the factors of mathematical probability that used to make certain elements unstable.”
“How?”
“It’s no use, Guilborn.” His voice had softened strangely, almost as if with pity. “You won’t find any scientific gimmicks. Because there aren’t any. All we have done is begin using the spiritual powers of man—powers that you physical scientists always did your best to ignore or deny.”
His quickened voice had a ring of awe.
“But they’re tremendous, Guilborn! Men like Rhine, and even the older mystics, were only children groping in the dark. Even now, we’ve just begun to reach the other minds that are re-creating other worlds out through the galaxies. We’re still only hoping to work toward communion with the first Mind, that was in the beginning—”
“That’s enough mystical bunk!” Perhaps I was afraid to let him go on. “If all you’ve done is so noble, why did you have to run away to Russia?”
Anger flashed across his face, but then he shrugged tolerantly.
“I didn’t run away,” he said. “When our work was done in America, I went on to Russia to lead the Mutationist movement there. The materialists in the Kremlin had been as tough to convert as you physicists, but I found enough simple people willing to believe. You’ll soon find that the Iron Curtain is being lifted, by liberated men.”
“Huh?” I stood blinking at him, half convinced in spite of myself. “I can’t understand—”
“You never will, until you unlearn your antiquated ways of thinking. Space and time are different now. You’re out of date, Guilborn. Imagine a voodoo priest in your labs at Valdes—back when atomic fusion and fission were still facts of nature!”
“But I haven’t time to help you now.” He glanced restlessly up at that empty circle of posts on the mound. “So long, Guilborn!” He waved his hand, in a hurried little gesture of farewell. “Carol’s waiting—”
“Hold on!” I muttered. “We’ve got to take you back—”
But he was running toward the mound.
“Now?” Sheriff Blackacre leveled his revolver. “Wing him?”
I caught the sheriff’s arm. “Let him go.”
“Ain’t we gonna take him in?”
“No, sheriff.” I shook my head painfully; the old ways of thinking weren’t easy to unlearn. “Because I guess he’s right. He was right, all along. He has been the real hero of everything that happened. I guess I was always the villain. But it’s not too late to let him go.”
The sheriff holstered his gun reluctantly.
“It’s your say-so,” he grumbled. “It’s no rat-killing of mine.”
He stayed behind, but I followed Eon up the mound. My knees were weak, and a cold sweat had come out on my face, but if he had found a new way to reach the stars, I had to see it.
