C. M. Kornbluth, page 55
Bartok looked sidewise at her. “That’s the way I felt,” he observed sagely. “I know what you mean. Question is, what do we do now?”
“I don’t know. Let’s hear the transcript from the communications outfit.” Silently he turned on the rewind and replay. It said mechanically: “Office of Commander Bartok, Intelligence Wing, Fleet Command. Go ahead.” That was a sort of letterhead.
Immediately there was the agitated voice of some man or other: “Barty?
This is Hogan, of the Aries Hogans. I jammed this through to you—
personal report. It’s going to panic them if it gets out. Be very careful.”
Bartok’s voice: “I remember you—patrol duty for the Arided section.
Give me the facts in a hurry, son.”
Hogan’s voice: “Ships coming at us from everywhere, it seems. A big lineship was blown to pieces before it could report. I’m the only intelligence man in the district, I guess. I don’t know whose the ships are—I don’t know how they work. I’m speaking from the fourth planet of Arided—polyp-like natives, oxygenous atmosphere. They’re systematically bombing the cities.”
Bartok’s voice: “Stop beating yourself over the head, Hogan. You’re crazy!”
Hogan’s voice: “If that’s the way you feel. They’re laying a line barrage along the planet, letting it rotate under their fire. We can’t get a thing into the air—it’s jammed up bad. I don’t know, Barty, honest I don’t know—” What Hogan didn’t know remained a mystery, for the transcript ended right there with a strangled wail and a deafening report.
“Oho,” said Babe MacNeice in a long exhalation. “He wasn’t kidding.”
Bartok was at the phone: “Get me Fitzjames,” he said. “Yes—the all-highest Admiral of the Fleet, the slave-minded or windjammer in person.” In a rapid aside to Babe he snapped: “I can’t handle this. I’ll leave it to the Navy—it’s their baby.”
Again at the phone. “Admiral? Shoot some patrollers out to Cygnus Arided. Don’t be surprised if they don’t come back. Invasion, Admiral. I wouldn’t kid you.” He hung up sharply.
“That,” he said absentmindedly, “is that. Whether their tactics are capable of defensive war remains to be seen. There is room for doubt.”
The patrollers did not come back. However, one managed to keep unbroken contact with the flagship until it was blown out of the ether, and the story it told was plenty nasty. No description of the invading ships was given except what the patroller got over in the customary strangled wail just before it broke off sending. It could be assumed that they weren’t reaction-type vessels. They moved faster than light, which meant knowledge of the unified field theory’s most abstract implication. They had, without a doubt, bombed or rayed out of existence, the populations of about three score planets. This meant that either their science was something infinitely beyond the Terrestrial grasp, so far beyond it that it could not be called classified knowledge at all but must, necessarily, be lumped together as a divine attribute, or their ships were big.
The Fleet had successfully colonized a great deal of space and in the course of wiping out unsuitable native populations and encouraging others, battling moderately advanced peoples and races, suppressing the mutinies inevitable in a large, loose organization, and smacking down the romantic imbeciles who had a few tons of hard cash to throw away on what was considered a career of piracy, had developed an extraordinary amount of offensive technique and armament.
Their ships were marvelous things. They were so big that they were built at special dry-docks. When they took to the ether from these, they would never touch land again until they were scrapped. There simply wasn’t anything firm enough to bear their weight. You could explore a lineship like a city; wander through its halls for a year and never cross the same point. When the big guns were fired they generally tore a hole in space; when the gunshells exploded they smashed asteroids to powder.
But the Fleet had nothing to show that could match the achievement of the as-yet-nameless invaders, who had rayed the life out of a major planet as it revolved beneath them. According to the reports the job had been done in the course of the planet’s day. One ship could not send a ray powerful enough to do that; possibly twenty might, but they would inevitably foul one another if they got within a million miles nearness.
And a million miles clearance between each ship would meant that they’d separately be about eight million miles from the planet. And from that distance you can’t work rays or bombs. From that distance you can just barely think unpleasantly of the planet, which doesn’t do either good or harm.
From all accounts and from the terrified deductions, these invaders packed solid jack, and plenty of it.
It wasn’t very long before the invaders were in complete control of the sector they had first arrived at, and had won that control without a real fight or even once tipping their hands as to what they had and what they could do if they were hard-pressed.
There had begun a general exodus back to Earth; one would have thought that there was already a major space war on from the scrambling and confusion. Any planet that boasted a graving-dock for minor ships of the line was thrice overloaded with a charge of human beings, for the mere presence of dismantled destroyers was a guarantee of temporary security. After three weeks of the senseless scrambling the Admiral was forced to declare that there would be no more admissions to planets and whole systems having vital bearing on the welfare of the Fleet. He quietly began a program of evacuation so that if there should be a raid on a Fleet base there would be no deaths save those in the service. Things were confused; public temper was generally timid. The prospect of a defensive had scared the living daylights out of them. It was utterly unthinkable that Earth, the great invader, should get a taste of her own medicine.
Where they came from nobody knew, where they were going nobody dared to say. But it was perfectly obvious that the All Earth and Colonies culture stood in their way, and that they were bound to stamp them flat. The invaders must have been awfully foul creatures in their psychological make-up to do what they did, for they gave no hint of their moves, which is the dirtiest trick that you can play on anyone.
They simply moved up slowly and surely from their obscure base on the outermost planets of the Earth culture.
And they kept moving. There were no survivors; that was the most appalling part of their technique. Everybody who could run, ran.
Everybody who was left, died. Communication was cut off simply and efficiently by scrambling techniques which must have meant the expenditure of trillions of kilowatts per hour. Or did the invaders have some unsuspected source of energy? Nobody knew; that was the hell of it.
Bartok was good and ready to blow his brains out. It, was his specialty, as commander of the Intelligence Wing, to relay information as to the whereabouts and plans of whatever enemy might be at hand. It was his misfortune that this enemy simply refused to let him know.
He was brilliant, brilliant as a flawless diamond, and just as hard. Give the man a problem in smuggling or in colonial subjugation and he’d have it cracked in jig-time. But this—! It was impossible.
Babe MacNeice, assistant extraordinary, consoled him with: “Barty, you’ve done all you can—all anybody can to stop them. It isn’t your fault that they’ve got more on the ball than we have or could hope to have.” A philosophical shrug of the shoulders. “It’s a question of making room for our mysterious friends. They may not even strike at Earth. They may even turn back.”
“They may even,” said Bartok sourly, “turn into packages of Rinso. But don’t count on it. Babe, this is a spot.” There were dark circles under his eyes big enough to make barrels with.
“Then how about a joy-ride?” asked the girl. She looked absentmindedly at her fingernails.
Bartok was studying her closely. “Yeah,” he said. “How about it?” He dropped into a chair. “Shoot,” he said. “I know that mysterious air of yours.”
In cloyingly sweet tones she replied: “Barry, darling, don’t be an old silly. Aintcha gonna take itsy-bitsy Babesy for a ride?”
He stiffened as if he had been shot. “Sure,” he said. “Why didn’t you say it that way before?” They shot up to the roof on Bartok’s private elevator and got into the commander’s very private plane. As they took off he growled: “All right—spill it.”
“I’m sorry I had to be sickening before you got the idea through your skull that I wanted absolute and complete privacy,” she said, again her own brisk self. “But I have a notion.”
“She has a notion,” said Bartok expectantly.
“Take it easy. Only a hunch—still—where do you suppose there’s enough room for a complete invasion-culture to develop without once coming into contact with the Earth culture till now, when it’s at its height?”
“Space is plenty big, Babe. There’s room for a thousand colonial systems as big as ours that we’d never even known of.”
“Okay. That establishes the very first postulate. Those things are real.
Therefore one doesn’t have to be a psychic to investigate them. I am not psychic; ergo I can and will investigate them—in person.” The girl avoided Bartok’s eyes, and rattled on: “May be that my logic doesn’t hold water, but I think I can handle the job. You wouldn’t send me out there, and I know you’re on the verge of saying that you’ll go yourself.
“Well, you’ll do no such damned thing, because they need you here as a relay center and someone whose statements to the public have some degree of authenticity. You’re the only one in the whole blasted Navy that’s worth a whoop in hell, and our benighted citizens know that as well as that yellow-bellied Admiral of the Fleet Fitzjames. Now that it’s settled that you can’t be spared we’ll get around to the reasons why I, rather than any other agent from the Wing, should be assigned to this job.”
“We can dispense with that,” said Bartok wearily. “The fact is that next to me you’re the best worker we have. So go, my child, with the blessings of this old hand.”
“Cut the kidding,” she snapped. “I mean business. Instead of the blessing of that old hand I’d like some advice from that old head.”
“You can have my biography,” said Bartok. “Twenty Years a Spy, or, The Tale of a Voyeur Who Made Good” He took from his pocket a small package. “This,” he said, “I have been carrying for the moment when you’d pop your kind proposition. It’s lightly sealed. In a moment of supreme danger you are to open it and be guided accordingly.”
“Thanks,” she said grimly. “Whatever it is, I believe I’ll need it.”
2
Bartok had never thought he could forget Babe, but that was just what he did in the next two months. It was the healthiest thing to do after she had hopped off in the big, fast one-seater that had been built especially for her jaunt. And Bartok was busy. Bartok was so busy that sometimes he thought he must be mad and living in a world of hallucinations on the reasonable grounds that nobody could be as overworked as he was and survive it.
Quietly and persistently the invaders kept moving in, establishing bases as far as anyone could see. The personnel of the Intelligence Wing were dispersed throughout the colonial system to restore order and prevent hampering of the Fleet as it was making ready to attack.
It was, of course, somewhat problematical as to just when that attack would come. The yellow-bellied Admiral Fitzjames was cowering in his flagship behind miles of steel and chewing his nails with sheer terror.
For the ships he sent out—cruiser, destroyer, patroller, interceptor or miles-long battlewagon of the line—simply didn’t come back. If they got within sighting distance of the invaders, they never survived to tell of it.
And the ether was still jammed thick as apparently unlimited power could make it. Or was their power unlimited? Nobody knew.
It was bidding fair to be the most successful invasion of all times; just as the successful exploration is the one without adventure to mark its high points so this invasion was completely unchronicled by those invaded. They simply didn’t know.
The galactic state of jitters is not easy to describe, but that’s what it was.
Tap a person on the shoulder and he’d turn with a shriek, fainting dead away. Suicide was on the upcurve, psychoses were increasing, messiahs popped up like mushrooms to lead the saved to glory and life everlasting. Bartok’s men arrested these as fast as they could and even formed a few rival cults on the premise that a few million fanatic followers would be not at all bad things to have about, thus capitalizing on the stressful times.
Production and distribution of commodities bade fair to break down; it was Bartok’s men who saved them. Acting on an old-time tradition, Intelligence men stood with drawn guns at the doors of factories, offering to blow the guts out of the man who stopped working.
The commander, on the fly between the stars of the colonial system, hadn’t time to change his socks, let alone receive reports, notions and nostrums from cranks. Therefore it was natural that he refused to see the sailor from the flagship of the Fleet who said he had something awfully important to tell him, but that it wasn’t official. It would have been better if Bartok had listened, for the sailor was going to tell him what the Admiral had said to his secretary while passing through the sailor’s corridor. It had been: “By God, Hackenshaw, if something doesn’t happen I sail for parts unknown and that beastly Bartok can fight his own war!” But the sailor never saw Bartok, in spite of deserting from the flagship and commandeering a lifeboat to make the trek from Venus to Algol. Instead he was shot for desertion when they picked him up in a math parlor where he was spending his last hours of life in the popular diversion of the day, capping formulas.
Hence it came as a staggering blow to Bartok to learn that the Fleet—all the lineships, that is—had simply taken off into space after raiding all the cities near at hand for women. They were headed, when he heard the news, for a minor star-cluster near the edge of the universe, and in the opposite direction of that from which the invaders were coming.
“Akh!” screamed Bartok when the news was broken to him. “The—the—
the—” Words failed him. For hours afterwards he was in a daze. When he snapped out of it his first words were: “How about their commissariat?”
A subaltern tactfully informed him that they had made no provisions of any sort for food and supplies. A couple of hours after, Bartok was heard to observe: “They’re going to starve to death.” Which was the exact truth.
When the Fleet was eliminated from the scheme of things, Bartok found himself in more or less complete command of the colonial system.
What vestiges of an executive committee there had been on Earth were quite shriveled away. Most of the committee had died of fright when they learned that the Fleet had left them high and dry.
The Intelligence Wing took unto itself all authority of life and death, officially, at last. They had been shooting leaders for quite a while, but it hadn’t been with sanction and consent from above. The Wing expanded legally to cover with its charter all those tenders, lighters and graving-ships which had been left behind by the backbone of the Fleet. It made them the most powerful unit then in the colonial system, with fire-power to match any that sporadic rebellions might bring up.
Meanwhile the invaders progressed amazingly, almost forgotten as the cause of the system-wide crisis. They would have been totally lost from the public eye in the confusion had not reports come in about once a week that there was no further communication with such-and-such a sector. A few retired sailors moved forward pins on their star-maps and wondered how they managed it without once showing their hand.
And Bartok, who had once wished at least six times a day that he might have a free hand to remake the colonial system “—and obstacles be damned!”—was wondering if a really sound case could be made out against his willfully inhibiting—by means of an overdose of cyanide—
his metabolic process.
It became apparent after four months of horrid confusion and blood-letting that things were quieting down, partly due to the able handling of the situation by the Intelligence Wing, which managed to keep the lid on practically everywhere and save the system from a complete premature smashup, mostly because the populace had got used to the idea of being invaded, and successfully.
The ordinary round of living began again, with perhaps a little more feverish gaiety in the math parlors and a little less solemn conviction in the houses of worship. When Systemic Coordinator Bartok (the title had been hung on him while his back was turned; he still swore that he was nothing more than the Wing Commander acting under emergency powers) was able to take a vacation, the last of the internal trouble was officially over and done with. It had been ugly, certainly, but there had been episodes in the system’s history even less attractive, as when the docks broke down during the days of the old Nine Planet Federation and there had actually been people starving to death and homeless.
It had occurred to Bartok as he lounged in his birthday suit with the other convalescents at Venus Springs, at the South Pole, that it would be touching and entirely appropriate to the spirit of the service to pay tribute to that deceased but magnificent female, Babe MacNeice.
He had arranged in his mind’s eye a procession of notables to lay wreaths on a simple block of tungsten. He had just begun to work out the details of the speech he would make when there came a faint blatting noise from his wrist, the only part of him that was dressed, and that purely for utility. From the tiny transceiver came: “Barry, this is Central in New Metropole. The recorder in your private office has just begun to squawk. Who’s it hooked up to?”
Bartok thought, furrowed his brow like a plowed field. “MacNeice,” he said at last. “She’s the only one hooked up to G7. I’m coming right up.”
In about the time it took him to dress he had called a plane, one of the very special racer models that he had fallen into using during the quick-moving past months when a second clipped was a score of lives saved.
