Collected Short Fiction, page 256
He sat.
The trigger in his mind was touched off.
In a sudden overwhelming burst of revelation his mind was cleared; fog rolled back. He heard his father’s words again, reverberating loudly around him:
“The day you take your seat as High Priest of the Temple, my son, will be the day all this will return to your mind—
“The Hammer is for you to wield. It will be for you to break apart the Empire and bring freedom to Aldryne and the worlds of the galaxy.”
Suddenly, as of the moment he had touched the throne, he knew. He knew where the Hammer was, how it operated, when it would be needed. He knew now that Lugaur Holsp could not possibly have had the Hammer—that its location was a secret old Vail Duyair had planted in his son’s mind alone, so deeply that not even Ras had known it was buried there.
He rose again.
“The Hammer is ours. It will soon be brought into play.”
CHAPTER VI
AGAINST the sharp blackness of the night sky, eight colored shapes could be seen, illuminated by the brightness of the Cluster.
They were spaceships of the Empire—massive hundred-man vessels whose heavy-cycle guns were capable of destroying a world within hours. Their yellow and red-violet hulls glittered in the night sky. They ringed themselves in a solid orbit around Aldryne. They waited.
Duyair made contact with them from the communications rig he had improvised in the Temple.
“This is Commander Nolgar Millo, of the Imperial Flagship Peerless. I’m instructed to contact Lugaur Holsp, High Priest of the Temple of the Suns.”
“Hello, Commander Millo. This is Ras Duyair, successor to Lugaur Holsp, High Priest.”
“Duyair, you know why we’re here?”
“Tell me.”
The Imperial Commander sounded irritated. “To pick up the consignment of conspirators your predecessor was planning to turn over to us. Or don’t you know anything about the arrangement?”
“I do,” Duyair said. “Be informed that there will be no ‘consignment’ for you to pick up—and that I order you to return to your base at once and leave the Aldryne system.”
“You order us? By whose grace?”
“By grace of my power,” Duyair said. “Leave at once—or feel the Hammer of Al-Aldryne!”
There was silence at the other end. Duyair paced tensely in his room, waiting. But he knew the tension aboard those ships must be infinitely greater.
Time passed—just enough time for Commander Millo to have contacted the Emperor and receive a reply.
Millo said, “We are landing. Any attempts at hostile action will result in complete destruction of this planet, by direct order of the Emperor.”
“You will not land,” Duyair said. He stepped to the Temple parapet and lightly touched a stud on the newly-rehabilitated cannon. A bright, white-hot energy flare streaked across the heavens, was deflected by the screens of the Peerless and splashed harmlessly away.
Duyair waited. There came angry sputtering—then Commander Millo said, “Well enough, Duyair of Aldryne. That shot has killed your world.”
The ships of the Imperial fleet swung into battle formation; the heavy-cycle guns ground forward on their gimbals, readied for fighting.
Smiling, Duyair nudged a switch on the big gun’s control panel.
A moment later, the sky went bright red with energy pouring from the Imperial guns.
The high-voltage barrage rained down. A thousand megawatts assaulted Aldryne.
And ten thousand feet above the planet’s surface, an invisible screen turned them back.
“YOU CAN’T HAVE the whole planet shielded!” Commander Millo shouted. “Keep up the barrage!”
The Imperial ships continued. Duyair, head inclined upward, watched the spouting guns. Energy-glare lit the sky; flares of brightness speared downward, to be turned away inevitably by the ten-thousand-foot shield.
“Your eighth ship,” Duyair radioed. “Watch it, Commander Millo.”
He touched a switch. The atomic cannon thrummed for a moment—and a bolt of force creased the sky, leaping upward toward the ship Duyair had designated. For an instant the ship was bathed in brightness as its screens strained to hold off the energy-assault. Then the screens, terribly overloaded, collapsed.
Duyair’s bolt seared right through the ship, gutting it in one long thundering flash. It split; by the illumination of the continuing bombardment, it was possible to see tiny figures tumbling outward.
“One ship had been destroyed,” Duyair said. “The other seven will follow. This is the Hammer of Aldryne, Commander Millo.”
Duyair glanced out at the Temple grounds. They were filled with kneeling townsfolk—people who, seeing the armada in the skies, had come to pray, and remained to cheer. He heard them shouting now:
“The Hammer! The Hammer!”
The sub-radio brought in Millo’s puzzled words: “A one-way screen that shields you from our guns and lets you fire at our ships? Impossible!”
“Impossible? Your seventh ship, Commander.”
Again Duyair’s fingers touched the firing switch. Again a bolt of force leaped skyward—and again a ship’s screens dissolved under the pressure, and a ship died. Two of the eight Imperial ships now spun slowly, gutted wrecks drifting sunward.
“This is fantastic!” Millo said. “Double the charge! Destroy them!”
Duyair chuckled. Lightly he depressed the switch; a third ship died, and a fourth.
“The Hammer!” the people cried. “It destroys the ships of the Empire!”
The Hammer descended again, and the fifth ship blazed fitfully. And the sixth.
“An unstoppable gun, Commander Millo, coupled with an impregnable planet-wide force-screen. This is the Hammer of Aldryne,” Duyair said. “This we have held in reserve, waiting for the day we could use it—waiting until the time was ripe to crush the Empire!”
He jabbed down again. Lightning flashed—and when the sky cleared, only the Imperial flagship Peerless remained still intact in the skies.
“We surrender! We surrender!” cried Commander Millo over the sub-radio. “No more, Aldryne! Surrender!”
“Surrender accepted,” Duyair said. “I order you to return to the Emperor, Millo. Tell him of what happened this day on Aldryne. Go; I spare you.” Commander Millo did not need any further commands. The hulking flagship blasted jets rapidly; it spun, turned over, headed outward, slinking away toward Dervonar, sole survivor of the proud Imperial fleet.
Duyair waited until the ship was out of sight, then turned to the priests at his sides.
“Man those radio sets,” he ordered. “News of this victory is to be relayed to every planet in the Empire. Tonight is the night we rise against Dervon!”
He paused to swab his forehead. He grinned; the Hammer had worked, the installation had been correct. The old gun, idle all these years, had been an ideal channel for the mighty force the Hammer held.
The screen—and the gun. It was a combination with which Duyair could rule the galaxy, if he so chose. But he had no desire to found a new Empire.
“Word from Dykran,” said a priest. “From one Bluir Marsh. He sends his congratulations, and reports that three thousand worlds are striking against the Emperor tonight.”
“Send him an acknowledgment,” Duyair said. He stepped out on the parapet once again. By now, several thousand citizens had gathered there.
“In a short while,” he said loudly, “a ship armed with the Hammer of Aldryne shall leave this planet—and, since it is unstoppable, it will destroy the Imperial fleet single-handedly. Tonight an Empire falls—and ten thousand independent worlds will take its place!”
“Duyair!” they roared. “Hammer! Duyair! Hammer!”
The time had come, Duyair thought. Tonight the Empire died—felled by the Hammer of Aldryne!
CHAPTER VII
TO WITNESS the death of on Empire that had endured three thousand years is not pleasant—but to be the final Emperor of your line is agony.
Dervon XIV sat alone in his throne-room on that final night. His ministers were long since dead, dead by their own hands. The capital was in chaos. The revolt had struck even here—here, at Dervonar itself!
He eyed the map that told of the spreading of the rebellion—out of the Aldryne system into the Cluster of which it was a part, then through the Cluster like a raging blaze.
And then across the skies.
Dervon shook his head sadly. The Empire had been foredoomed—but that it should end this way, at this time! He realized that his own attempts to preserve it had been the mainspring of the Empire’s destruction.
He had known of the rebellion on Dykran. A stronger Emperor might have obliterated those two worlds at once, while he had the chance. But Dervon had been devious. He had feared losing the support of the rest of the galaxy by such a terrible action. And thus he had given Aldryne time to loose its Hammer.
Now they all rebelled, all fell away. He saw coldly and clearly that nothing he could have done would have saved the Empire. It had crumbled of its own weight, died of its own extreme age.
Gloomily he peered at the gyrotoy in his hand. From far away came the sound of pounding, a constant reiterated boom . . . boom. . . .
The Hammer, he thought. Coming ever closer, here on the last night of the Empire. Smiling bitterly, the dying Emperor of the dead Empire stared at the delicate patterns shaped within the gyrotoy. Sighing, he waited for the end, while the blows of the Hammer sounded ever louder, ever closer, in his ears.
The Winds of Siros
A cove on unknown Siros with the wind moaning by . . . A skinny, scared kid, a tough adventurer, and two women held prisoner by hostile aliens. And hate building up—hate more dangerous than the aliens . . .
THE COLONIST-FERRY Gegenschein sounded its final warning honk and Mart Devers got off into the safe zone along with the other colonists and watched the ship go.
It was almost like dying, like finishing a life hardly begun. After the ship had vanished in the cloud-muddied sky, Mart Devers realized for the first time how dreamlike and unimportant his past was becoming, how immediate and uncertain his future loomed.
He stood by himself, nervously, looking at the seared place where the Gegenschein had been. The colonists had been deposited in a sandy clearing at the shore of a glittering lake; not far away there was a dark, ominous-looking forest, and high beyond rose arching cliffs. The forest either was or was not inhabited by humanoid alien beings, depending on whether you believed Dave Matthews’ interpretation of what he claimed to have seen lurking there five minutes after the landing—or the survey teams tentative report that this continent of Siros had no intelligent life.
Chill winds swept down on Devers and the others as they waited for the Colony Director to organize things, to take charge.
They were a motley, ill-assorted bunch, as any batch of forced colonists had a right to be. The hundred of them had been grabbed up by the lottery, thrown together roughly by the untender mercies of a giant analog computer, and packed off like cattle on a tenth-class ship to colonize Siros.
Devers wasn’t happy about it. A doctor in embryo only—a shivering skinny twenty-year-old college pre-med who would never have to worry about medical-school applications now. A flip of the wheel, a random twitch . . .
. . . and they threw you onto a planet like Siros. They ripped you out of your old life and told you to build a new one, on a cold windswept planet where shadowy alien shapes skulked through the dark forest.
A hand grabbed Devers’ shoulder firmly. He turned.
“You look lousy,” Ky Morgan said to him.
“I feel lousy. Mind?”
Morgan shrugged. “Your privilege, kid. But you better stop brooding about Earth. Earth doesn’t exist any more as far as you and me are concerned. There’s just Siros.”
“I know. But it takes a while to get used to it,” Devers said.
“We been here three hours, and we’ll be here a little longer . . . Well, I’ll see you. Time for wifepicking’s coming up—think I’ll go look over the merchandise.”
Morgan strode springily away toward a nearby clump of women. Devers’ eyes followed him, and he wondered again what made the big man tick.
Morgan was a Volunteer.
He was something special, a broad, big man who had put his name on the line for voluntary selection, and who hadn’t cared what world he was sent to. Aboard the Gegenschein, men got out of his way when he came by. His skin was tanned till it looked like expensive morocco or cordovan, and his voice was a heavy growling rumble. He wore his Volunteer’s status like a badge of merit—which it was.
Devers wasn’t any Volunteer. He looked round the group at the others. Neither was Lora Hallinan, the wide-eyed, innocent-looking girl down there, and neither was Sherry Leon, who didn’t look so innocent. And neither were any of the other ninety-six, for that matter.
Down in the clearing, Phil Haas, the Colony Director, was standing on a packing-crate, blowing his whistle. Time to get things set up. Devers joined the gathering group.
“We’re on our own now,” Haas said, speaking loudly to fight the whistling wind. “That ship isn’t coming back. And we’ve got plenty to do. Let’s set up the stockade and inflate the domes.”
A voice from the back—Dave Matthews’ voice—said, “Phil, what about those aliens I saw? You think we ought to have a permanent patrol?”
Haas frowned. “I’m still not so sure those were aliens you saw, Dave. The survey team didn’t find any such things here—”
“So they didn’t look!”
“Dave, if you want to discuss this further, take it up with me in private. We can’t spare men for a patrol until the stockade’s been built. Besides which, your aliens are probably more afraid of us than we are of them.” Haas chuckled. “Let’s get busy. Plenty of things to do by nightfall—including the marrying. Today’s June 30, 2342. If we get set up by midnight, we can all still have June weddings.”
Mart Devers hadn’t figured on getting married quite so soon. He had been supposed to graduate from Ohio State the following year, and he had planned on medical school, interning, a good practice and then—not before—a wife.
He drew his jacket tighter around himself. Like most thin people he had little use for cold weather and that damned nor’wester that seemed to rip down on them constantly.
Haas was talking to Morgan and three or four of the strongest men of the group working out the set-up plans. There was a fixed procedure for setting up a new colony—a procedure that had worked well on the hundreds of worlds to which humanity had spread. First you established a stockade, marking the original boundaries of the colony. Then you inflated the bubble-houses that would be the homes of the colony. And then you expanded. You built outward into the alien wilds, you went forth and multiplied. And, one by one, new Earths were brought into being across space by grumbling, miserable pioneers.
Devers stole a look at the little group of women. Most of them, through a fluke in the lottery, were older than he—twenty-five, twenty-six at least. Lora Hallinan, at twenty-two, was closest to his age.
She was slim, full-breasted, with brown hair, black eyes. Pretty. Too pretty, Devers thought ruefully. When the time came for the picking, she’d be taken early.
He wondered about the other girls. Sherry Leon, for instance—tall, brassy, a little overblown. About thirty, and she looked as if she’d been through a lot. The impartial scoop of the lottery seized all kinds.
Well, one of them was going to be his wife on this bitter world. Turning, Devers peered at the wind-tossed forest, feeling a strange uneasiness.
It took seven hours of backbreaking work to get the preliminary layout of the colony off the improvised charts and into actuality. Devers joined one of the work gangs; while the men erected a stockade, the women unpacked the sealed packages of provisions and tools and other vital belongings.
It was nearly nightfall, and giant Vega had dipped far below the horizon, when the job was done. Phil Haas blew a quick blast on his whistle.
“Okay. We’re all set up.” He looked at the fifty small bubbles that would house fifty couples that night, at the fifty-first bubble, the big one that would be the central gathering-place of the colony.
“Good job,” Haas said. “Let’s finish it off, now. Wives.”
“Yeah. Wives,” grunted Ky Morgan. He dropped his axe and strolled to the center of the clearing.
Devers tensed. His stomach felt strange, and his hands were cold.
Wives. In a few hours, he was going to have a woman for the first time . . .
Haas organized the women into a group. Sherry Leon was smiling, openly expectant. But some of the others—those who had dreamed of a different sort of wedding-night—they were apprehensive, worried, pale.
Haas unfolded a sheet of paper. He looked a little apprehensive himself. “The time has come to couple off,” he said, “as arranged by the terms of the colonial charter. You know the system. As a Volunteer, Ky Morgan has die right to choose first. I get second pick, as Colony Director. After that, we proceed in order of Wheel Number—an order known only to me . . .
“Morgan, name your choice.”
Morgan stepped forward, smiling calmly. He was the biggest, most aggressive male in the group, and knew it. He ran his eyes carelessly down the row of females; a strange mixture of emotions appeared on fifty feminine faces.
After a moment of silence, he grinned and said, “Okay. I pick Sherry Leon.”
Devers realized he had been holding his breath, praying for Morgan to bypass Lora Hallman.
Haas said, “Miss Leon, is his choice agreeable?”
Sherry Leon stared levelly at Morgan. There were wrinkles creasing the skin around her eyes, and her smile looked artificial. “I guess so,” she said. “If he wants me, I’ll go.”
Devers heard people snickering. A little testily Haas said, “This is marriage, Miss Leon. Ids not just for tonight.”
“None of your damned piousness!” Sherry snapped. Then, shaking her head, she said, “I guess I earned that. Okay. HI take Morgan.”
