C. M. Kornbluth, page 52
The few papers who played up the pits were soundly spanked in very dignified editorials printed by other sheets which played down the pits.
At World Wireless, we sent out a memo to all stringers: “File no more enterpriser dispatches on black pit story. Mail queries should be sent to regional desk if a new angle breaks in your territory.” We got about ten mail queries, mostly from journalism students acting as string men, and we turned them all down. All the older hands got the pitch, and didn’t bother to file it to us when the town drunk or the village old maid loudly reported that she saw a pit open up on High Street across from the drug store. They knew it was probably untrue, and that furthermore nobody cared.
I wrote Benson about all this, and humbly asked him what his prediction for next summer was. He replied, obviously having the time of his life, that there would be at least one more summer phenomenon like the last three, and possibly two more—but none after that.
It’s so easy now to reconstruct, with our bitterly earned knowledge!
Any youngster could whisper now of Benson: “Why, the damned fool!
Couldn’t anybody with the brains of a louse see that they wouldn’t keep it up for two years?” One did whisper that to me the other day, when I told this story to him. And I whispered back that, far from being a damned fool, Benson was the one person on the face of the earth, as far as I know, who had bridged with logic the widely separated phenomena with which this reminiscence deals.
Another year passed. I gained three pounds, drank too much, rowed incessantly with my staff, and got a tidy raise. A telegrapher took a swing at me midway through the office Christmas party, and I fired him. My wife and the kids didn’t arrive in April when I expected them.
I phoned Florida, and she gave me some excuse or other about missing the plane. After a few more missed planes and a few more phone calls, she got around to telling me that she didn’t want to come back. That was okay with me. In my own intuitive way, I knew that the upcoming silly season was more important than who stayed married to whom.
In July, a dispatch arrived by wire while a new man was working the night desk. It was from Hood River, Oregon. Our stringer there reported that more than one hundred “green capsules” about fifty yards long had appeared in and around an apple orchard. The new desk man was not so new that he did not recall the downhold policy on silly-season items.
He killed it, but left it on the spike for my amused inspection in the morning. I suppose exactly the same thing happened in every wire service newsroom in the region. I rolled in at 10:30 and riffled through the stuff on the spike. When I saw the “green capsules” dispatch I tried to phone Portland, but couldn’t get a connection. Then the phone buzzed and a correspondent of ours in Seattle began to yell at me, but the line went dead.
I shrugged and phoned Benson, in Fort Hicks. He was at the police station, and asked me: “Is this it?”
“It is,” I told him. I read him the telegram from Hood River and told him about the line trouble to Seattle.
“So,” he said wonderingly, “I called the turn, didn’t I?”
“Called what turn?”
“On the invaders. I don’t know who they are—but it’s the story of the boy who cried wolf. Only this time, the wolves realized—” Then the phone went dead.
But he was right.
The people of the world were the sheep.
We newsmen—radio, TV, press, and wire services—were the boy, who should have been ready to sound the alarm.
But the cunning wolves had tricked us into sounding the alarm so many times that the villagers were weary, and would not come when there was real peril.
The wolves who then were burning their way through the Ozarks, utterly without opposition, the wolves were the Martians under whose yoke and lash we now endure our miserable existences.
Fire-Power [Cosmic Stories - July 1941 as by S. D. Gottesman]
1
Tiny, trim Babe MacNeice descended the very secret staircase that led into the very private office of Intelligence Wing Commander Bartok.
“Hello!” he gasped as the wall panel slid aside. “You’re on Magdeburg’s 83— or aren’t you?”
“There was very little doing there,” she smiled, seating herself. “Except a bustle and roiling about as I left. It seems that someone had kidnapped their HQ secretary and sweated him for some information relative to their new interceptors.”
“Have they any idea,” asked Bartok anxiously, “who that someone was?”
Babe laughed. “They have the finger on him. From some confidential instructions he dropped while making a getaway, they learned that he was a secret agent for some Venusian colony or other. He was described as a thin old man of effeminate carriage and manner.”
Bartok smiled, relieved. “Your number twelve. Report, please.” He started a phonograph turning and pointed the mike at Babe.
The girl said chattily: “MacNeice went per orders to Magdeburg’s 83 for confirmation or denial of rumors concerning a planned uprising against Terrestrial authority. There she found widespread reports of similar character; the entire planet was flooded with propaganda.
“Information was conclusively—ah—secured—from an official to the effect that the colonial governor, Allison by name, was fomenting an insurrection by means of which he would be able to assume supreme authority over the planet and defend it against terrestrial forces. That is all.” She lit a cigarette and stared dully at the floor as the wing commander sealed and labeled the report record.
“That,” said Bartok, “sews up Allison in a very uncomfortable sack. We’ll send a cruiser tonight.”
“Sure,” said the girl. “He hasn’t got a chance. None of them have against the insidious Commander Bartok and his creatures of evil. That’s me.”
“And don’t tell me you don’t love it,” he grinned. “I know better. In the blood, that’s where it is—the congenital urge to pry into other people’s affairs and never be suspected. It gives us a kick like two ounces of novadyne.”
“Speaking of which,” said Babe, “are you dining alone tonight?”
“Nope. I have a standing date with my favorite little voyeur whenever she comes back to Earth. Scamper along to get dressed; I’ll meet you in two hours at the living statues.”
The show-place of New Metropole, capital of the All Earth Union and Colonies, was the Square of Living Statues. Bathed in ever-changing lights, the groups of three men and three women, molded from the purest gold and silver and assembled with every artifice of the year A.D.
3880, changed steps and partners, moving through the hours of the day in a stately dance that was never twice the same in even the smallest step.
Grouped on a lofty platform, the heroically proportioned figures were the focus of every visitor to the wonder-city of all time and space. There was absolutely nothing like them in the universe, nothing like their marvelous grace that would balance a three-ton male on his toes while whirling a two-ton female partner in a vast arc, all to the most subtly exquisite music that could be evolved from supertheramins and electroviolas. The music too was completely automatic. The divine harmonies came from nothing more than a revolving drum which selected at random sequences of tones and the companion coloring of the lights that flooded the statues in their dance.
In a glassed restaurant Bartok and Babe were dining. Through the walls filtered enough of the music to furnish a subdued background to lovers’
talk. But when these two got together it was business. As the wing commander had said, it was something in the blood.
“MacNeice,” snapped Bartok, “I am not arguing with you, I’m telling you. You are not going to do any such damfool thing as walk in on our piratical friends and confront them with what you doubtless think of as
‘The Papers.’ I’m going to get this melodrama out of your head if I have to beat it out.”
The girl’s face was flushed and angry. “Try that and you’ll get yours with an Orban,” she snapped. “I say that if you bring it right home to them that we’re on their tails they’ll give up without a struggle, and we’ve saved so many lives and so much fuel that a medal for me will be in order.”
“The cruiser,” said Bartok, “leaves tonight. And that settles everything.
Forget, child, that this wing of the service was once its brains instead of its eyes and ears. We are now officially an appendage devoted to snooping, and the glorious history of the Intelligence Division is behind us.”
“Fitzjames,” she muttered, gritting her teeth. “I’d like to take that Admiral of the Fleet by his beard and tear his head off. And don’t tell me you aren’t in the project body and soul.” Mocking his tones she said:
“I know better.”
“Off the record,” admitted Bartok, “I may opine that our tiny suite of offices has more brains in its charladies’ little fingers than the entire fighting forces have in all the heads of all the commanders of all their mile-long battlewagons.
That is, naturally, gross overstatement and pure sentimentality on my part. Eat your Marsapples and shut up.”
She bit viciously into one of the huge fruit and swallowed convulsively, her eyes drifting through the glass wall to the living statues. They were performing a sort of minuet, graceful beyond words, to an accompaniment from the theremins in the manner of Mozart.
“And what’s more,” barked the wing commander in an angry afterthought, “the body of the space navy could dispense with us at will, whereas without them we’d be lost. You can’t exist for the purpose of making reports to nobody. What good would your spying have done if there hadn’t been any cruiser to be sent off to bomb Allison’s capital city?”
“None at all,” she snapped at him. “Only I don’t like the job if it has to mean taking guff from every halfwitted ensign who graduated because he knows how to work an Auto-Crammer. Barty, you know and I know that they hate us and check up on everything we send in. The—the sneaks!” Abruptly she was weeping. The wing commander, indecisively, passed her a handkerchief. Women! he was thinking. Sometimes they could be thoroughly opaque to reason. Any man could see through his sardonic recital of rules. The wing commander detested the well-set-up officers and gentlemen who would not and could not move until he had charted the course. The wing commander had a healthy contempt for any and all formality and routine, with which the naval service was weighed down as with tons of lead. But the wing commander was, first, last and always, of that unalterable cast of mind which makes the superb, chilled-steel military spy.
In all the records of the All Earth Union and Colonies-navy, there had probably been no such man as Bartok. Back to the days of the Herkimer scandal there had been a succession of brilliantly proved men in his office, but for resourcefulness and the spy’s temperament he had had no equal.
He would have gone far in the old days; further than any intelligence man now could. Many years ago, when Earth had only a few hundred colonial planets, the news suddenly broke that there was a virtual dictatorship over the navy by the Intelligence Wing. Herkimer, since painted as a scoundrel of the deepest dye, had been merely an exceptionally enthusiastic officer.
The course his enthusiasm ran included incidentally the elimination of much red tape in the form of unfriendly fleet officers; that he regretted as unfortunate and even tragic. But his mission of expanding Earth’s culture and civilization to the stars would not brook interference.
Classic scholars could scarcely avoid a comparison with the Roman emperor Trajan, who pushed the bounds of the Empire to the absolute limits of the Western world, and created a situation which hastened the fall of Rome by centuries.
Since the Herkimer affair they had been very careful with the Intelligence Wing. Once it was almost abolished for good; a few years of operation of the fleet practically blind, with no ground laid for them or information of enemy movements, proved that to be impractical. But they did what they could to keep the spies within bounds. It was an actually heartbreaking situation to the executives of the Wing. But you can’t keep the voyeur instinct down; that was what they were chosen for and that was how they operated.
Take this affair on Magdeburg’s 83. It was an insignificant outer planet very far away from New Metropole. Yet the filtering of rumors brought it into the brilliant limelight of the Wing. The body of the fleet could not move less than a mile-long battlewagon at one time; the Wing—
personified by Commander Bartok —dispatched tiny, trim Babe MacNeice. She returned with the information that a hitherto trusted colonial officer had decided to play Napoleon and was secretly fortifying the planet.
In the last analysis, lives were saved. The single cruiser could send a landing party and take the trusted colonial officer back to Earth for trial; surely a preferable alternative to a minor war with the propaganda-inflamed ophidians that were native to the planet.
Wing executives did not speak—in private—of their love for the body of the fleet. They held to the stubborn conviction that there was nothing dumber than a flagship commander, nothing less beautiful than a flagship.
2
At about that time, things were popping on the lineship Stupendous, two million miles off the orbit of Venus. On it was jammed the entire Headquarters Wing of the All Earth and Colonies navy. In the very heart of the ship, inside almost a cubic mile of defensive and offensive power, was Wing Commander Fitzjames, by virtue of his command Admiral of the Fleet.
“Not a murmur,” he said to his confidential secretary, a man named Voss. “Not a murmur from the crew.” He lolled back in his chair and breathed easier under his chestful of medals.
“They don’t know,” said Voss. “When they find out—!”
“Stick to your shorthand, son,” snapped the Admiral. “When they find out, they’ll keep on carrying out orders very much the way they always have. They’re picked men on this ship. Now take this down: General Order to all lineship Commanders. By authority of the Admiral you are empowered to govern any and all citizens and subjects of All Earth. An emergency has arisen which makes it absolutely necessary to eliminate opposition to this program. Your direct superior is your Wing Commander, who is responsible only to ranking members of the Headquarters Wing. A list of proscribed persons will follow.”
The Admiral lit a cigar with an unsteady hand. “Code that,” he said.
“Send it in twenty minutes.”
“Anything else?” asked the secretary. “How about the Wing Commanders? Are you coming clean with them?”.
Fitzjames stared at the metal ceiling. “Take this: Confidential Memorandum to Wing Commanders. From Admiral of the Fleet Fitzjames. You are hereby notified that the Headquarters Wing of the.
fleet has voted to take over power from the hands of the Executive Committee of All Earth. You are on your honor as officers and gentlemen to support this move by your brothers in arms. You will continue to patrol your regular sectors, having dispatched details to attend to the physical acts of taking power. No planet must be left under a Colonial Governor acting by right of a charter from the Exec All Earth. Details follow. Report to Stupendous immediately in code. We are seizing Venus as a base.”
“Right,” said. Voss. “So go ahead and seize it.”
“We’re on our way,” said the Admiral heavily.
Depending on where you were to see the affair, the seizing of Venus was either a trivial or a Jovian episode. From space, for example, all there was to see was the bulk of the lineship slipping its length into the clouds above the dawnstar and vanishing from sight. But from the city of Astarte, principal freight port of the planet, it was vastly impressive.
Above the towers and loading peaks of the yards there appeared the most gigantic of all the spaceships in the universe, covering the town like a roof over its roofs.
There were a couple of smoke-bombs dropped into the streets and a few old-fashioned radios exploded under the power of the monster ship’s sending tubes that announced that the city was taken and would be hostage for the rest of the planet’s good behavior. Landing parties went down by lighter ships to establish order and arrange several necktie parties in which the Colonial Governor had the stellar role, minor parts being taken by his subordinates and clerks. Venusian natives were warned off the streets; henceforth none but the Earthborn could show their faces by daylight. Plans were announced to transport the verminous natives to the Darkside District. All this took exactly six hours, Earth time.
A brief resume of the life of Alexander Hertford III, Captain of the Fleet and Commander of Patrol Wing Twenty-Three, would include many revealing facts relative to the situation of the moment.
As he lay comfortably sprawled on a divan aboard his lineship Excalibur, a capital fighting vessel of standard offensive and defensive equipment, he was a fine figure of a man in his uniform of purple and gold. The collar was open, which, with his tumbled curls hanging over his brow in the manner of an ancient Irish glib, gave him a dashing, devil-may-care expression. At least Miss Beverly deWinder thought so, for she was smoothing those tumbled curls and smiling maternally.
Leaving the commander’s ship—which was stationed off Rigel—for a moment, we take a brief survey of his career. He was thirty years old, and his grandfather, the first of his name, was also in the Navy. His father was not as bright as his grandfather, but appointments were easily got from the sentimental All Earth Exec, which wished to breed a race of fighting men, true, loyal and hard as nails. Alexander Hertford II just got through Prep Wing and Training Wing by the skin of his teeth, lived on a lineship and died at his post quelling an uprising among the outer planets of Alpha Centauri.
The third of the name was definitely dull. However, by virtue of the anonymous genius who invented the Auto-Cram and peddled them to students, he got through with what could easily be mistaken for flying colors, won his commission, saw service and was promoted to a Wing Command.
Life in Prep Wing and Training Wing was Spartan in the extreme.
