The Early Pohl (28 page)

Abruptly the grin returned. "The whole damned System, that's all," Nolan said a little proudly. "Well . . . go ahead with your story."

Petersen shrugged. He looked a little relieved as he spoke. "You know most of it. Oh—one part you don't know. Woller's daughter—her name's Ailse—knew about what he was doing. She just found out about it. We had a maid working in her home in Aylette—she didn't generally stay with Woller; they didn't get along."

Nolan's brows lifted. "Oh?"

"Yep. Ailse was worried silly. She even talked to the maid—not much, just enough that we could figure out what was happening. It seemed she was going to confront Woller with what she knew, try to talk him out of treason."

"A real good idea," Nolan remarked. "Knowing Woller—"

"That's how we knew where this base was. She told the maid. Oh, you do know where you are, don't you? On Pluto. The wildest section there is, north of Annihilation Range."

"How about this cockeyed disguise of yours? Who is this Chief you were supposed to be?"

Petersen frowned. "Don't know, exactly," he admitted. "There are three men it could be—they're all connected with the Junta, we're pretty sure. They're all on Saturn, and we got word that they were rendezvousing here. We knew the boss kept his identity hidden by wearing this get-up, so I was detailed to cut in."

Nolan nodded. Then, his thoughts reverting, he said, "Where's the—Where's Ailse now?"

Petersen looked unhappy. "Uh—I don't know. After you left we sent for her, just to see what she knew that might help. The maid went after her—and couldn't find her. She'd gone out of town, wasn't expected back for some time. We couldn't wait. All the leaders of the Junta meeting here—it was too big a chance."

Nolan said, "Well, what are we doing about it? They're all there, and they're warned. And we're out here, parked on the edge of nowhere, waiting for them to get up a scout party and grab us."

Petersen turned to look out the window in the direction of the dome. He scanned the skies carefully, then pursed his lips.

"Well, no, Steve," he said, pointing. "Take a look."

Arrowing lines of fire were swooping down from far into the blackness. Three trails of white flame showed where three ships were plummeting to the surface. Nolan turned to Petersen with a startled question in his eyes.

"Watch," Petersen advised. "This'll be worth seeing!"

Down and down they drove, faster than meteor ever fell. A mile above the ground the jets behind died, and yellow flame burst ahead of them, flaring quickly to white. They slowed, poised, and then, in perfect unison, spun off to one side. They came around in a great circle and dived at the ground again. And repeated the operation, over and over.

And abruptly Nolan saw what was happening. He was witnessing the systematic annihilation of the domed settlement! Immense bursts of fire from ship-sized pyros were blazing into the ground. The hummocks prevented a clear view, but Nolan could see from the reflected glare on the mountainsides behind that the destruction was frightful.

"I called them," Petersen said softly. "You saw me call them. That black box—it's a telesonde."

Nolan didn't turn, fascinated by the sight. "What's a telesonde?" he asked absently.

"A radio that carries neither voice nor vision. Only one note short or long depending on how long the key is held down. Your great-great-grandfather knew about it. It was the first method of wireless communication. Now it's so completely forgotten that when TPL researchers dug it up it was adopted as the most secret method of communication available."

Nolan nodded his head. The ships came around again, and down. This time the forward jets were delayed. When they flared out they persisted, while the ships dropped gently out of sight. They were landing.

The destruction of the dome was complete.

Nolan turned away. "Quite a sight," he said slowly. "They deserve to die, of course. . . ."

"Steve."

Nolan's eyes narrowed suddenly. He looked at Petersen. "Yes?"

Petersen, for once, seemed almost at a loss for words. He licked his lips before he spoke. "Steve—there are one or two other things. Did you know that Ailse wasn't Woller's daughter by blood?"

Nolan looked at him unbelievingly. "Not his daughter?"

Petersen shook his head. "Woller married a widow. A wealthy one, with a daughter. They didn't get along too well. The woman died. Some people thought it might be suicide."

The quick joy flooded up in Nolan. Petersen saw it and his face grew somber. "That's one of the things, Steve," he said. "The other one—Hell, this is hard to say."

Nolan stood up and the joy was gone from his face. "Damn you, Pete," he said emotionlessly. "Don't break things gently to me."

Petersen shrugged. "Ailse wasn't anywhere we could find her—and we know a lot of places to look in. The ship left to come here. She was at Woller's home till just before then. Woller sent men to bring something from his apartment to the ship. I thought it was papers at the time—but it could have been a girl. So—where does that leave Ailse?"

Where? Nolan stood rocklike as the thought trickled through the automatic barrier his mind had set up. Where did it leave Ailse?

A charred fragment of what had once been beauty. A castoff target for TPL's searching pyros.

"I'll say it again, Steve. You know what was at stake. If the Junta had time—Well, we didn't know what kind of weapons they had there. That was one reason why I was sent ahead in that crazy disguise. If I had had time to scout around it might have been possible to do things less bloodily. I didn't have time. We couldn't take chances."

There was no anger in Nolan, no room for it. He sat there, waiting for Petersen to start the jets and send them back to the dome. He knew how he would scour the ashes, hoping against hope. And he knew what he would find.

It would have been better, he thought, almost to have died under Woller's pyro, or the TPL ships'. If he'd stayed behind—if Woller had put him in the sleep-box as Vincennes had suggested, and he had shared obliteration with her. . . . The sleep-box! The casket!

It took Petersen a full second to recover from his surprise when the frozen face of Nolan suddenly glowed with hope, when he leaped up and dashed into the cargo hatch. It took him minutes to follow him. Minutes spent in making the difficult decision of whether or not he should prevent a man from taking his own life.

The decision was wasted, he found. Behind the scattered boxes of pyro shells, wedged into a corner of the hold, Nolan knelt beside a long, narrow casket. Fiber shock-wrapping was scattered about. Nolan's fumbling fingers were working the latch of the casket, lifting the lid. . . .

The shout that left his lips was deafening in the small hold. Petersen looked closer, tiptoed up—

And all the way back to the waiting ships of the TPL Petersen was grinning to himself. Though his hands guided the ship skillfully as ever, though his gaze was outward at the flowing terrain beneath, he saw but one thing.

The tableau as he had approached the casket and seen Nolan, face indescribably tender, shutting off the sleep currents, reaching for the ampoule of stimulant that would revive the unconscious dark-haired girl within.

The trouble with Enid was that once again I was beginning to feel guilty about being safe and warm in Oklahoma, while people I knew were getting killed in Italy, North Africa and the Pacific. When the final battle came along, I wanted to be in it. My 201 file bulged with letters requesting reassignment overseas. My CO kept forwarding them with approving endorsements, and higher echelons kept ignoring them.

So in the early part of 1944, when a circular came through asking for volunteers for Arctic service, I signed up instantly. Shortly thereafter I was on my way to Buckley Field, Colorado, for training.

Buckley Field was just outside of Denver, the home of a science-fiction writer named Willard E. Hawkins. Denver was also where the Colorado Writers' Association was about to have their annual dinner, and Willard was pleased to invite me to be their featured speaker. I accepted with pleasure.

Unfortunately the Air Force had other plans. I was a non-com by then, but Buckley Field was thick with non-coms. Stripes carried no exemption from shit details, and I was put on KP for the night I was supposed to speak.

It seemed to me that there was a way out of that. I went hunting for the base Public Relations Officer, in order to let him know what bad public relations it would be to disappoint the Colorado Writers because their featured speaker was pushing tin trays through the steam jets.

He saw the argument at once and got me off. However, he could not do that until I found him, and that took all day. By the time I had got off KP I had just seconds to change into ODs and catch the bus to Denver. By the time I reached the banquet hall dinner was over and Willard Hawkins was just rising to introduce me. He said a few gracious words. I got up in front of all those friendly, expectant faces. And it occurred to me right then, for the very first time, that in all the turmoil I hadn't got around to thinking of anything to say to them.

I don't know how long I stood there in silence, stolid and stunned, brother to the ox. It may have been a week. It felt longer. At some point Willard perceived I was in trouble, so he rose to ask me a question. I answered that easily enough, and then I was going.

But those first endless minutes are burned into my brain. I've talked to a lot of audiences in the thirty-odd years since and there have been disasters now and then—but, after that, nothing ever seemed really bad again.

A nice thing about Buckley Field was that it was easy to get a weekend pass to Denver. I used the weekends mostly for writing. I checked into a hotel with my lavender Remington #5 portable that I carried all through the war.* I would get up in the morning, call for coffee and orange juice from room service, set up the typewriter and start banging away. It didn't always work out. In one hotel I was kept awake all night by raucous noises from the other rooms. It wasn't until dawn that I got to sleep, and not until I got back to the base that I discovered the hotel was a full-scale whorehouse. God knows what the desk clerk thought I was there for, with my lavender typewriter and my innocent face.

Double-Cross
was written in one of those hotel rooms. It appeared in
Planet Stones
for Winter 1944.

The Colorado interlude didn't last very long. What I remember most about it was interminable discussions with Air Force shrinks about the perils of isolation on the icecaps. That, and one long, evil day in a dentist's chair, while they pulled out all the old fillings in my teeth and replaced them with new ones, scientifically designed to be proof against the Arctic cold.

Then they sent me to Italy.

* It was a twelfth-birthday present from my mother and I didn't retire it until I was in my thirties. Whatever became of typewriters like that?

Double-Cross

JAMES MacCREIGH

The Officer of the Deck was pleased as he returned to the main lock. There was no reason why everything shouldn't have been functioning perfectly, of course, but he was pleased to have it confirmed, all the same. The Executive Officer was moodily smoking a cigarette in the open lock, staring out over the dank Venusian terrain at the native town. He turned.

"Everything shipshape, I take it!" he commented.

The OD nodded. "I'll have a blank log if this keeps up," he said. "Every man accounted for except the delegation, cargo stowed, drivers ready to lift as soon as they come back."

The Exec tossed away his cigarette. "
If
they come back."

"Is there any question?"

The Exec shrugged. "I don't know, Lowry," he said. "This is a funny place. I don't trust the natives."

Lowry lifted his eyebrows. "Oh? But after all, they're human beings, just like us—"

"Not any more. Four or five generations ago they were. Lord, they don't even look human any more. Those white, flabby skins—I don't like them."

"Acclimation," Lowry said scientifically. "They had to acclimate themselves to Venus's climate. They're friendly enough."

The Exec shrugged again. He stared at the wooden shacks that were the outskirts of the native city, dimly visible through the ever-present Venusian mist. The native guard of honor, posted a hundred yards from the Earth ship, stood stolidly at attention with their old-fashioned proton-rifles slung over their backs. A few natives were gazing wonderingly at the great ship, but made no move to pass the line of guards.

"Of course," Lowry said suddenly, "there's a minority who are afraid of us. I was in town yesterday, and I talked with some of the natives. They think there will be hordes of immigrants from Earth, now that we know Venus is habitable. And there's some sort of a paltry underground group that is spreading the word that the immigrants will drive the native Venusians—the descendants of the first expedition, that is—right down into the mud. Well—" he laughed—"maybe they will. After all, the fittest survive. That's a basic law of—"

The annunciator over the open lock clanged vigorously, and a metallic voice rasped: "Officer of the Deck! Post Number One! Instruments reports a spy ray focused on the main lock!"

Lowry, interrupted in the middle of a word, jerked his head back and stared unbelievingly at the tell-tale next to the annunciator. Sure enough, it was glowing red—might have been glowing for minutes. He snatched at the hand-phone dangling from the wall, shouted into it. "Set up a screen! Notify the delegation! Alert a landing party!" But even while he was giving orders, the warning light flickered suddenly and went out. Stricken, Lowry turned to the Exec.

The Executive Officer nodded gloomily. He said, "You see!"

"You see?"

Svan clicked off the listening-machine and turned around. The five others in the room looked apprehensive. "You see?" Svan repeated. "From their own mouths you have heard it. The Council was right."