The SF Hall of Fame Volume Two B (33 page)

There were no torches here. The great hall stood in half
darkness, its only illumination the pale moonlight that streamed down through
the arching skylight that formed the central ceiling. He stood for a moment in
awe, impressed in spite of himself by the strange unfamiliar shapes that loomed
before him in the half-darkness. He was suddenly brought back to reality by the
sound of voices in the anteroom.

"Hey! The armory door's open!"

"So what? That place is off limits to everybody but the
CO."

"Blick won't care. Let's fight in there. There should
be more room."

Kurt quickly scanned the hall for a safe hiding place. At
the far end stood what looked like a great bronze statue, its burnished surface
gleaming dimly in the moonlight. As the door swung open behind him, he slipped
cautiously through the shadows until he reached it. It looked like a coffin
with feet, but to one side of it there was a dark pool of shadow. He slipped
into it and pressed himself close against the cold metal. As he did so his
hipbone pressed against a slight protrusion and with a slight clicking sound, a
hinged middle section of the metallic figure swung open, exposing a dark
cavity. The thing was hollow!

Kurt had a sudden idea. "Even if they do come down
here," he thought, "they'd never think of looking inside this
thing!" With some difficulty he wiggled inside and pulled the hatch shut
after him. There were legs to the thing—his own fit snugly into them—but no
arms.

The two officers strode out of the shadows at the other end
of the hall. They stopped in the center of the armory and faced each other like
fighting cocks. Kurt gave a sigh of relief. It looked as if he were safe for
the moment.

There was a sudden wicked glitter of moonlight on ax-heads
as their weapons leaped into their hands. They stood frozen for a moment in a
murderous tableau and then the captain's ax hummed toward his opponent's head
in a vicious slash. There was a shower of sparks as the major parried and then
with a quick wrist twist sent his own weapon looping down toward the captain's
midriff. The other pulled his ax down to ward the blow, but he was only
partially successful. The keen obsidian edge raked his ribs and blood dripped
darkly in the moonlight.

As Kurt watched intently, he began to feel the first faint
stirrings of claustrophobia. The Imperial designers had planned their battle
armor for efficiency rather than comfort and Kurt felt as if he were locked
away in a cramped dark closet. His malaise wasn't helped by a sudden
realization that when the men left they might very well lock the door behind
them. His decision to change his hiding place was hastened when a bank of dark
clouds swept across the face of the moon. The flood of light poured down
through the skylight suddenly dimmed until Kurt could barely make out the
pirouetting forms of the two officers who were fighting in the center of the
hall.

This was his chance. If he could slip down the darkened side
of the hall before the moon lighted up the hall again, he might be able to slip
out of the hall unobserved. He pushed against the closed hatch through which he
entered. It refused to open. A feeling of trapped panic started to roll over
him, but he fought it back. "There must be some way to open this from the
inside," he thought.

As his fingers wandered over the dark interior of the suit
looking for a release lever, they encountered a bank of keys set just below his
midriff. He pressed one experimentally. A quiet hum filled the armor and
suddenly a feeling of weightlessness came over him. He stiffened in fright. As
he did so one of his steel shod feet pushed lightly backwards against the
floor. That was enough. Slowly, like a child's balloon caught in a light draft,
he drifted toward the center of the hall. He struggled violently, but since he
was now several inches above the floor and rising slowly it did him no good.

The fight was progressing splendidly. Both men were master
ax-men, and in spite of being slightly drunk, were putting on a brilliant
exhibition. Each was bleeding from a dozen minor slashes, but neither had been
seriously axed as yet. Their flashing strokes and counters were masterful, so
masterful that Kurt slowly forgot his increasingly awkward situation as he
became more and more absorbed in the fight before him. The blond captain was
slightly the better axman, but the major compensated for it by occasionally
whistling in cuts that to Kurt's experienced eye seemed perilously close to
fouls. He grew steadily more partisan in his feelings until one particularly
unscrupulous attempt broke down his restraint altogether.

"Pull down your guard!" he screamed to the
captain. "He's trying to cut you below the belt!" His voice
reverberated within the battle suit and boomed out with strange metallic
overtones.

Both men whirled in the direction of the sound. They could
see nothing for a moment and then the major caught sight of the strange
menacing figure looming above him in the murky darkness.

Dropping his ax he dashed frantically toward the exit
shrieking: "It's the Inspector General!"

The captain's reflexes were a second slower. Before he could
take off, Kurt poked his head out of the open faceport and shouted down,
"It's only me, Dixon! Get me out of here, will you?"

The captain stared up at him goggle-eyed. "What kind of
a contraption is that?" he demanded. "And what are you doing in
it?"

Kurt by now was floating a good ten feet off the floor. He
had visions of spending the night on the ceiling and he wasn't happy about it.
"Get me down now," he pleaded. "We can talk after I get out of
this thing."

The captain gave a leap upwards and tried to grab Kurt's
ankles. His jump was short and his outstretched fingers gave the weightless
armor a slight shove that sent it bobbing up another three feet.

He cocked his head back and called up to Kurt. "Can't
reach you now. We'll have to try something else. How did you get into that
thing in the first place?"

"The middle section is hinged," said Kurt.
"When I pulled it shut, it clicked."

"Well, unclick it!"

"I tried that. That's why I'm up here now."

"Try again," said the man on the floor. "If you
can open the hatch, you can drop down and I'll catch you."

"Here I come!" said Kurt, his fingers selecting a
stud at random. He pushed. There was a terrible blast of flame from the
shoulder jets and he screamed skywards on a pillar of fire. A microsecond
later, he reached the skylight. Something had to give. It did!

At fifteen thousand feet the air pressure dropped to the
point where the automatics took over and the face plate clicked shut. Kurt
didn't notice that. He was out like a light. At thirty thousand feet the
heaters cut in. Forty seconds later he was in free space. Things could have
been worse though; he still had air for two hours.

Flight Officer Ozaki was taking a catnap when the alarm on
the radiation detector went off. Dashing the sleep out of his eyes, he slipped
rapidly into the control seat and cut off the gong. His fingers danced over the
controls in a blur of movement. Swiftly the vision screen shifted until the
little green dot that indicated a source of radiant energy was firmly centered.
Next he switched on the pulse analyzer and watched carefully as it broke down
the incoming signal into components and sent them surging across the scope in
the form of sharp-toothed sine waves. There was an odd peak to them, a strength
and sharpness that he hadn't seen before.

"Doesn't look familiar," he muttered to himself,
"but I'd better check to make sure."

He punched the comparison button and while the analyzer
methodically began to check the incoming trace against the known patterns
stored up in its compact little memory bank, he turned back to the vision
screen. He switched on high magnification and the system rushed toward him. It
expanded from a single pinpoint of light into a distinct planetary system. At
its center a giant dying sun expanded on the plate like a malignant red eye. As
he watched, the green dot moved appreciably, a thin red line stretching out
behind it to indicate its course from point of first detection. Ozaki's fingers
moved over the controls and a broken line of white light came into being on the
screen. With careful adjustments he moved it up toward the green track left by
the crawling red dot When he had an exact overlay, he carefully moved the line
back along the course that the energy emitter had followed prior to detection.

Ozaki was tense. It looked as if he might have something. He
gave a sudden whoop of excitement as the broken white line intersected the
orange dot of a planetary mass. A vision of the promised thirty-day leave and
six months' extra pay danced before his eyes as he waited for the pulse
analyzer to clear.

"Home!" he thought ecstatically. "Home and
unplugged plumbing!"

With a final whir of relays the analyzer clucked like a
contented chicken and dropped an identity card out of its emission slot. Ozaki grabbed
it and scanned it eagerly. At the top was printed in red, "Identity.
Unknown," and below in smaller letters, "Suggest check of trace
pattern on base analyzer." He gave a sudden whistle as his eyes caught the
energy utilization index. 927! That was fifty points higher than it had any
right to be. The best tech in the Protectorate considered himself lucky if he
could tune a propulsion unit so that it delivered a thrust of forty-five per
cent of rated maximum. Whatever was out there was hot! Too hot for one man to
handle alone. With quick decision he punched the transmission key of his space
communicator and sent a call winging back to War Base Three.

Commander Krogson stormed up and down his office in a frenzy
of impatience.

"It shouldn't be more than another fifteen minutes,
sir," said Schninkle.

Krogson snorted. "That's what you said an hour ago!
What's the matter with those people down there? I want the identity of that
ship and I want it now."

"It's not Identification's fault," explained the
other. "The big analyzer is in pretty bad shape and it keeps jamming.
They're afraid that if they take it apart they won't be able to get it back
together again."

The next two hours saw Krogson's blood pressure steadily
rising toward the explosion point. Twice he ordered the whole identification
section transferred to a labor battalion and twice he had to rescind the
command when Schninkle pointed out that scrapings from the bottom of the barrel
were better than nothing at all. His fingernails were chewed down to the quick
when word finally came through.

"Identification, sir," said a hesitant voice on
the intercom.

"Well?" demanded the commander.

"The analyzer says—" The voice hesitated again.

"The analyzer says what?" shouted Krogson in a
fury of impatience.

"The analyzer says that the trace pattern is that of
one of the old Imperial drive units."

"That's impossible!" sputtered the commander.
"The last Imperial base was smashed five hundred years ago. What of their
equipment was salvaged has long since been worn out and tossed on the scrap
heap. The machine must be wrong!"

"Not this time," said the voice. "We checked
the memory bank manually and there's no mistake. It's an Imperial all right.
Nobody can produce a drive unit like that these days."

Commander Krogson leaned back in his chair, his eyes veiled
in deep thought. "Schninkle," he said finally, thinking out loud,
"I've got a hunch that maybe we've stumbled on something big. Maybe the
Lord Protector is right about there being a plot to knock him over, but maybe
he's wrong about who's trying to do it. What if all these centuries since the
Empire collapsed a group of Imperials have been hiding out waiting for their
chance?"

Schninkle digested the idea for a moment. "It could
be," he said slowly. "If there is such a group, they couldn't pick a
better time than now to strike; the Protectorate is so wobbly that it wouldn't
take much of a shove to topple it over."

The more he thought about it, the more sense the idea made
to Krogson. Once he felt a fleeting temptation to hush up the whole thing. If
there were Imperials and they did take over, maybe they would put an end to the
frenzied rat race that was slowly ruining the galaxy—a race that sooner or
later entangled every competent man in the great web of intrigue and power
politics that stretched through the Protectorate and forced him in self-defense
to keep clawing his way toward the top of the heap.

Regretfully he dismissed the idea. This was a matter of his
own neck, here and now!

"It's a big IF, Schninkle," he said, "but if
Fve guessed right, we've bailed ourselves out. Get hold of that scout and find
out his position."

Schninkle scooted out of the door. A few minutes later he
dashed back in. "I've just contacted the scout!" he said excitedly.
"He's closed in on the power source and it isn't a ship after all. It's a
man in space armor! The drive unit is cut off, and it's heading out of the
system at fifteen hundred per. The pilot is standing by for instructions."

"Tell him to intercept and capture!" Schninkle
started out of the office. "Wait a second; what's the scout's
position?"

Schninkle's face fell. "He doesn't quite know,
sir."

"He
what?'*
demanded the commander.

"He doesn't quite know," repeated the little man.
"His astrocom-puter went haywire six hours out of base."

"Just our luck!" swore Krogson. "Well, tell
him to leave his transmitter on. We'll ride in on his beam. Better call the
sector commander while you're at it and tell him what's happened."

"Beg pardon, commander," said Schninkle, "but
I wouldn't advise it."

"Why not?" asked Krogson.