The Second Murray Leinster Megapack (59 page)

The men who had been refugees moved forward eagerly.

Presently the five reached the place where the guards’ barracks stood. The guards on duty were dead. Killed as their comrade had been killed. By electrocution.

Steve turned his riflelike instrument on the barracks. Instantly the lines of electric lights flared white-hot and blew out. The dynamo for power was in the barracks. He had multiplied its voltage enormously, so that at the same time, every other bit of metal in the building spat charring electric sparks. Most of the guards seized weapons at the first alarm. They died. The rest snatched up weapons when Steve fired a shot in the air. They died, too.

Steve went through the gate beside the contorted figure of a man in uniform. The rifle which had killed him was still clutched fast in his charred fingers. Steve entered one of the hovels and spoke briefly and urgently to the unseen people within. He came out.

* * * *

Before the five were out of sight in the darkness, a stream of running figures had poured from the prison-camp gate and dispersed in the wilderness outside.

“
Hm
—slave labor,” said Steve thoughtfully. “That means there’ll be more such camps. They must’ve had some way to produce food. It may turn out handy!”

Before dawn came, the five occupied a neat, small lookout-building atop a hill. Its former occupants were no longer concerned with the affairs of this world, and a telephone instrument buzzed angrily.

“I’ll take the call,” said Steve.

He picked up the phone.

“Hello!” he said pleasantly. “I want to speak to the officer in command of this base…I’m the American in command of the forces which are going to wipe you all out if I don’t get what I want… I don’t speak your language… Speak English, please… We have your base under the threat of weapons you can’t possibly resist… No, I’m not crazy! Listen!”

He nodded to Lucky, who coddled his weapon. It was aimed where its probe-function had told him the heavy bombers were based. A pair of wires in a baking-powder bottle along its “barrel” glowed incandescent. There was a sudden spout of fire four miles away and then a series of racking explosions following each other with incredible rapidity.

“You probably heard that,” said Steve into the telephone as the echoes rolled. “You’d better connect me with your commanding officer. I suggest you have him waked up, if it’s necessary; I’ll hold the wire.”

He grinned at Lucky. Lucky was holding his weapon vaguely toward the horizon but above it.

“I got a hunch,” said Lucky happily. “I got a hunch there’s a plane comin’ in. Right on the line where they keep their atom bombs.”

“They’d be fools to keep them assembled,” said Steve. “Take a chance. There’ll not be more than one or two in firing condition, anyhow.”

Lucky aimed, chanting softly. “Will that plane crash the atom-bomb stores, if I knock it down now—now—now—now?”

The wires glowed.

“Mmmh!”
he said.

There was a long wait. Then, utterly without warning, there was a flash of such awful radiancy and such ghastly, overwhelming heat, that the five momentarily were blinded. There was the smell of hot paint in the little lookout-building. There was a sound which was beyond sound. The building rocked on its foundation.

Steve’s voice came out of a deathly stillness.

“Really,” he said into the telephone in a chiding tone. “We’re getting impatient! Will you connect your commanding officer or do you want more atom bombs?”

Chattering, disjointed buzzings came from the telephone instrument.

“You chaps look hungry for something to do,” Steve said to the three bearded men of his following. “Set fire to part of the town. Only part of it, though, mind you!”

If wires and nails and even kitchen utensils poured out arcs of electric fire, flames would follow. The three small hand-instruments did not have to furnish the energy for the arcs. That was already present in the metal objects which would emit them. The three men grimly used their weapons.

“Hello!” said Steve into the telephone. “You’re in command? Good! I suppose you’re a general?…Then, General, you will immediately order all your troops under arms, march them to the nearest prison-camps, have them stack arms and deposit all cartridge-belts with their small-arms, and release the prisoners and take their places.

“I am sure the prisoners will arm themselves. They may mount guard over your men. I wouldn’t know about that. But certainly if you haven’t started the carrying out of those orders in five minutes you’ll regret it.”

He looked inquiringly at Lucky, who spoke softly.

“The arsenal, where they stock their ammunition.”

“And just to urge you on,” said Steve gently. “Listen!”

Little wires glowed where four riflelike instruments pointed along the line Lucky indicated. Heavy detonating tumult began off in the night.

“Your high-explosive bombs will go next,” added Steve. “Or we can set the rest of the town ablaze, as part of it is burning now.”

Screaming, squealing sounds came out of the telephone.

“Very well,” said Steve pleasantly. “All your men in the prison camps, and all the prisoners out, or I’ll get quite provoked. I’m going to hang up now, General, and there’ll be no more arguments. Obey your orders or we will begin wiping you out.”

He hung up. His features were pinched and very tired, but he was smiling. There was a dim red light in the sky to the east.

“It’s queer that I don’t feel like a murderer,” he said softly. “We must have killed a lot of them in the last few minutes. But it doesn’t bother me at all. After all, we haven’t killed one in a hundred—no, not one in a thousand—of the murders they’ve done. We really ought to wipe them out. Only we can’t do that sort of thing.”

“Maybe you can’t,” said a bearded man grimly. “We can!”

“You’ll probably have to kill a few,” Steve told him. “But it will pall on you when they can’t fight back. That’s an odd thing about us Americans. We’re about finished here, I suspect. We’ll have to tip off the released prisoners what it’s all about, and let them organize themselves. I imagine they’ve been used to cultivating ground as well as for work in factories. They’ll put their former bosses at those jobs instead. Then we’ll go back home.

“No,” he now added reflectively. “We’ll have to leave one of our number here to knock off any plane from other bases that may turn up, and we’ll have to figure on taking over all the other bases there are. By plane, I guess, in time.”

Then he said, with an unconscious gesture of brushing off his fingers:

“Let’s go out and look at the sunrise.”

* * * *

It was three days before they started back. Five of them had started, and five men rode back, but one of the five was a stranger. They rode on splendidly-groomed horses from the general’s stables, and each of the five had, besides, a led horse trailing behind him with food for the journey and other items that would be welcome. Wire, for example, and seemingly more other parts for more duplications of the probe and thought-recorder and the generator-making combination that each of them carried, save one. But there was cloth, and some toys, and sugar, and pepper, and such items as conquering heroes may lawfully loot and take home to their womenfolk.

They made the trip back in five days. And when the horses emerged from the woods near the house and pushed on across weedy fields toward it, yells greeted them. Yells of purest triumph. And Frances ran and ran and ran to meet Steve, so that when he swung her up before him she could only pant and hold him close while she put up her face to be kissed.

“We did it,” he told her. “One base was smashed and taken over by the slave-labor they had there. Decent people, the captives were, most of them. The other kind were more useful outside, as guerillas. The released victims are planning an organized sweep to wipe out the other bases all over America, and then they’ll start on the rest of the world.”

She held fast to him and he could feel the beating of her heart.

“Where’s Lucky?” she said suddenly.

“He stayed,” Steve told her. “Somebody had to, and he stayed with a gadget to protect the place until we can send back some more stuff. He’s rather wonderful with the probe, Frances. He can find anything with It. So just before we left he told me to tell you, he’s using it for himself. He’s trying to find a girl he can like as much as he likes you. He says the probe says there’s one among the released prisoners.

“The probe says so. But he hasn’t caught up with her yet. She keeps moving around. He’s sticking to the job of finding her, though. And then, too, he wants to go on and help wipe out the other bases.”

Frances looked up at him in alarm.

“But you, won’t go, Steve! You’ll stay here, won’t you? If it—if it wasn’t so crowded, this house would be wonderful to live in!”

Steve smiled.

“It won’t stay crowded, I suspect. And anyhow I’ll remain right here and do some experimenting. We’ve started a new kind of science and I want to dig into it. That business of molecular motion, now—” Then he stopped. “I brought back what I told you I would. Found him among the released prisoners. He didn’t mind coming for the job on hand.”

Frances stared. She peered around Steve’s shoulder at the patient-faced man—thin as from long hunger—who had taken Lucky Connor’s place on the return journey.

She suddenly flushed crimson.

Steve reined his horse aside and beckoned to the thin man.

“Reverend, here’s the lady,” he said contentedly. “If it’s all right with you, we’ll have the wedding this afternoon.”

*

THE DAY OF THE DEEPIES

(Originally Published in 1947)

Kenie waked with all the shivering ecstasy one feels at the age of thirteen on a morning when excitement looms deliciously ahead. She lay still for a moment, listening to the noises that told her the house was awake. Her brother Tom, down the hall, was doggedly enduring the squawks and howls of the television set he’d put together from wreckage their father had brought back from what used to be Camden. Then there was the whooshing roar of the tractor, pulling past the front of the house with its monstrous wood-gas generator on the back and the squeak that Bub Taylor said was metal-fatigue setting in. But it couldn’t be dismantled, for youthening, until the fall wheat had been planted.

Her mother’s voice came out of what had been the air-conditioning duct when air conditioners still worked.

“Kenie! It’s late!”

“I’m up and practically dressed,” said Kenie, anticipating the fact by seconds. “Right down, Mother!”

She slid out of bed. She almost danced across the room to look at herself in the mirror.

The mirror was a trifle leprous, in spots, where the silver had tarnished through, but she found her own eyes bright and anticipating. She beamed at her reflection. She didn’t know how things would turn out, but excitement was sure.

Her very best boy friend, Bub, had told her in strict confidence that the neighbors were coming over today to warn her father that Tom had to stop fiddling with science. And that ghastly deepie, Mr. Wedderson, was coming to receive the family’s answer to his proposal for Aunt Sarah’s hand. And Kenie was practically certain that Roland—whom her sister Cissie used to be in love with—was hiding out somewhere in the woods. So it would be a full day.

She went blithely down the stairs in work-stained shorts and jumper. It was just as exciting to be thirteen in the year 2096 as it had been when Kenie’s great-great-grandmother watched soldiers march off to some war or other, back in the days when they had wars. Now, of course, war was just a word. There couldn’t be a war when there was nothing to fight with and you didn’t know whom to fight.

Anyhow, Kenie doubted that a war would be as exciting as knowing that Bub was secretly working on an electric generator in the cellar he’d dug under his father’s barn, or having a delicious suspicion that Roland was hiding nearby and that Cissie had seen him at least once.

Roland would be hung as a matter of public safety if he were discovered, because he was a scientist. And if she merely hinted her suspicion of his presence to her brother Tom, he’d go crazy trying to find Roland to pump scientific information out of him, because Tom meant to be a scientist, too.

She felt that she could burst, but she seemed completely demure as she went into the kitchen. The great electric range and storage cabinet, off to one side, was used as a cupboard and working space for the preparation of meals. Her mother said it was wonderful, before a bomb fell over at Westport and then there wasn’t any more electricity. Kenie’d always thought vaguely that it wasn’t scrapped because they hoped that some day there might be electricity again. But she was not sure.

“Stay close to the house, Kenie,” said her mother, as she put breakfast before her. “I may need you. Some of the neighbors are coming over to your father and we’ll have to offer refreshments.”

Kenie said mildly, “Does Tom know yet?”

Her mother looked at her sharply.

“What do you mean by that, Kenie?”

“Aren’t they coming over to tell father that Tom has to stop messing with science? I told him not to get so confidential with that revolting Mr. Wedderson. I’ll bet he’s the one who passed the word that Tom was experimenting.”