Collected Short Fiction, page 274
We plunged through the entrance into the control building itself, Myra half-dragged behind me. My hand encircled her wrist tightly; there was no time to lose.
“He must be in his little control-center room,” I said. “Lord knows what he’s doing in there.”
The first three lift tubes we tried had been shut down for the night—and I had no idea how to get them started again. The thought of running wildly upstairs through the darkened tower was hardly appetizing; instead we circled the level we were on until we found a functioning lift.
We took it. We emerged outside my defense-screen lab; down the hall was Ben Thurdan’s control room, the nerve center of Starhaven.
And the light was on in there.
I left Myra behind, and dashed down the hall. Thurdan was in there, and he had the door locked and the small room-screen turned on, so it was impossible to enter. It was possible to hear what he was saying, though. The visionscreen was on; he was talking to a gray-faced man in the uniform of the Space Patrol. And Thurdan was in the process of saying—
“I’m Ben Thurdan, Commander. Thurdan. You know me. I’m calling direct from Starhaven.” He looked wild, half-mad almost. The iron reserve of poise was gone.
The SP man looked skeptical. “Is this some kind of joke, Thurdan? Your foolishness doesn’t interest me. One of these days you’ll find we’ve broken through your defenses and—”
“Shut up and let me talk!” Thurdan roared. “I’m offering you Starhaven on a plutonium platter, Commander Whitestone! All right, send your damned fleet—I’m dropping the screens! I’m surrendering! Can you understand that, Whitestone?”
The figure in the screen peered curiously out at the wild-eyed, sweating Thurdan. “Surrendering, Thurdan? I find it hard to believe that—”
“Damn you, I mean it! Send a fleet!”
I heard Myra approach behind me. “What’s going on?” she asked.
“Thurdan’s cracked up. He’s busy surrending Starhaven to Whitestone of the SP. He’s inviting them to send out a fleet, and he’s going to drop the screens when they get here.”
“No! He can’t be serious!”
“I think he is,” I said. “He would never be able to understand why you tried to kill him tonight. He thinks it’s the ultimate betrayal of all he’s worked for—and it threw him off his trolley.”
“We have to stop him,” Myra said. “If the SP gets in here they’ll carry us all off for brainwashing. People who’ve been law-abiding citizens for twenty years are going to suffer. The place will be destroyed—”
“He’s got a screen around the room.”
“Screens can be turned off. You’re a defense-screen expert, Johnny. Can’t you think of something?”
“No,” I said. “Yes. Yes. I can. Wait here, will you? And scream good and loud if Thurdan comes out of that room.”
“What are you—”
“Never mind. Just wait.”
I RACED DOWN the hall to my lab, punched my thumb savagely into the doorplate, and kicked the door open. The light switched on automatically. I began to rummage through my workbench for that pilot model—
Ah. There it was.
I snatched it up. Glancing around, I found a pocket welding torch, the only weapon I could see handy. I gathered these things up, turned, ran back up the corridor to where Myra waited.
“Anything happen while I was gone?”
“He’s still talking to that SP man. I think Whitestone finally believes Ben’s serious.”
“Okay. Watch out.” I hammered on the plexiplate door with my fists, as the screen within went dead. “Ben!”
I yelled. “Ben Thurdan!” He turned and blinked at me. I called his name again, and yet again.
“What do you want?” he growled. “Liar! Betrayer! You’ll die with all the rest of them!”
“You don’t understand, Ben! I’m with you. I’m on your side! It’s all some mistake. Look! I’ve brought you the personal defense screen.” I held up the model—the useless, unworkable model. “I finished it tonight,” I said desperately. “I was working on it all evening. Then I ran the final tests. It’s a success! You can strap it around your waist and no weapon can touch you.”
“Eh?” he grunted suspiciously. “I thought it would take a week to finish it.”
“I thought so too. But it’s finished now. That’s why I came to see you.”
He was staring through the thick plastic of the door, shielded both by that and by the bubble of force around his room. There was no way I could get inside—but if I could get him to come out—
I seized Myra roughly and ripped her robe off. She stood naked, arms outstretched to Thurdan.
“I brought her too,” I said. “She’s yours. She wants to explain. There never was anything between her and me, Ben. Come on out of there. Don’t give up Starhaven now. Don’t give up everything you’ve built, all you’ve planned, just for this!”
I was getting through to him. His lips were fumbling for words; his deep hard eyes flicked back and forth, bewilderedly. Poor Ben, I thought. It was a sad thing to see a man like that crack open like a moldy melon.
His hand wavered on the switch; then in a quick convulsive gesture he yanked downward, shutting off the screen-field around the room. I heard him jiggling with the lock; then the door swung open.
He came out, walking unsteadily, swaying like a mighty oak about to fall. In a surprisingly quiet voice he said, “All right, Johnny. Give me the screen.”
I tossed my model to him. “There. Go ahead. Strap it to your waist.”
Myra was sobbing gently behind me. For once I felt no fear, only a cold icy calmness inside me. I watched Thurdan as he strapped the rig around himself.
“Come here, Myra,” he said crooningly. “Here to me.”
“Just a second, Ben.” I got between him and the girl. “We have to test the thing first. Don’t you want to test it?”
His eyes flashed. “What the hell is this?”
I pulled out the welding torch. “You can trust me, Ben. Can’t you?”
“Sure, Johnny. I trust you. About as far as I can throw you!” Suddenly sane, realizing he had been tricked into coming out of his sanctum, he came lumbering toward me, murder in his eyes.
I turned the welding torch on.
There was a momentary hiss as the arc formed; then the globe of light spurted out and cascaded down over him. He took one difficult last step, like a man slogging forward through a sea of molasses. He was dead then, but he didn’t know it.
I heard a whimper. Then he fell.
I clicked off the torch. Ben Thurdan was dead at last.
I looked away from the thing on the floor. It wasn’t pretty.
“Sorry, Ben,” I said softly. “And you’ll never understand why we had to do it.”
INSIDE THE ROOM, a quick glance at the meters told me that the defense screens were down all over Starhaven. For the first time in decades, the sanctuary-world lay utterly open to SP attack.
I jabbed down on the communicator stud and told the operator, “This is Johnny Mantell. Get me the call that was on this line a minute ago—to SP headquarters on Earth, Commander Whitestone.”
The ten-second delay of sub-radio communication followed, while arcs leaped across hyperspace, meshed, returned. The vision screen brightened. The face of Whitestone reappeared on the screen.
“The fleet’s on its way, Thurdan. Don’t tell me you’ve changed your mind, or—”
He stopped. I said, “Thurdan’s dead. There’s been a revolution of a sort here on Starhaven, and I’m in charge. My name is—”
“Mantell?” The SP commander burst in suddenly, interrupting. “You’re still alive, Mantell? Why didn’t you report to us? What’s been going on?”
Stunned, I looked up at the image in the screen. When I spoke, my voice came out as a harsh whisper.
“What did you say? How do you know me?”
“Know you? I picked you for this job myself, Mantell!
We probed every member of the Patrol until we found one who could adapt well enough.”
I took a hesitant step backward and sank into what had been Thurdan’s chair. “You say I’m in the Patrol?”
“A member of the Fourteenth Earth Platoon, Mantell. And we chose you to enter Starhaven bearing a false set of memories. It was a new technique our espionage department developed; it was necessary to get you past Thurdan’s psychprobing. We invented a wholly fictitious background for you and instilled it sub-hypnotically, with a post-hypnotic command that you’d revert to your true self twenty-four hours after entering Starhaven.”
“Johnny, what’s he talking about?” Myra asked in a wondering voice.
“I wish I knew.”
“What’s that, Mantell? You’re in complete charge of Starhaven, now? Fine work, boy! The fleet will arrive in less than an hour to tend to the mopping up.”
“You don’t seem to understand,” I said in a flat, dead voice. “I never recovered my—my true identity. I don’t know anything about this business of my being an SP man. So far as I know I was a beachcomber on the planet Mulciber, and before that a defense-screen technician.”
“Yes, yes, of course that’s so—that’s the identity pattern we established—though you were a defense-screen man originally, of course. But—”
“But I don’t remember anything about the SP. My own memories are real!”
The SP man was silent a long moment. Finally he said, “They assured me the treatment would be a success—that you’d recover your original identity once you were past Thurdan’s psychprobes. But that’s easily fixed; we’ll have our psychosurgeons restore your original identity just as soon as you’re back on Earth.” I shook my head dizzily; I seemed to be shrouded with cobwebs. The room, Myra, the image of Whitestone, Starhaven itself, finally the universe—all took on a strange semblance of utter unreality, like the purplish glow objects get when you stare at them just the right way through a prism. I seemed to be moving in a dream.
Myra was very close to me. “Is all this true?” she asked. “Or is it just some SP trick?”
“I don’t know,” I murmured. “Right now I don’t know anything at all.”
Whitestone said, “It seems the project was a success, at any rate. Whether you’re in full possession of your self-awareness or not, the fact remains that your mission has been a success. Starhaven’s screens are down. Within an hour an SP squadron will be cleaning out the universe’s sorriest hellhole, thanks to you, Mantell.”
“I’m not so sure of that,” I said heavily, weighing each word and releasing it individually.
“What?”
I sank back tiredly in the chair, and a torrent of images flooded through my mind. The days at Klingsan Defense; the long weary years on Mulciber, scrabbling for crusts of bread and cadging drinks. Now this faded little man in an SP uniform was telling me that all this was unreal, that those were artificially-planted memories, placed in my mind solely to get an SP man through the defenses of Ben Thurdan’s fortress Starhaven.
Well, perhaps they were.
Perhaps.
But to me they were real. To me, this was the life I had lived. That suffering was real.
Starhaven was real.
The SP—that was a vague dream, a shining bubble of unreality, a hated enemy.
A moment of choice faced me. I could go back to Earth, have Mulciber and all its attendant bitterness peeled from my mind like the skin of an onion, and emerge fresh, clean, an honored member of the Space Patrol once again.
Or I could stay here. With Myra.
“Mantell, are you all right?” Whitestone asked from the screen. “You’ve turned utterly white.”
“I’m thinking,” I said.
I WAS THINKING of Ben Thurdan’s dream, and of what the SP would do to Starhaven once they penetrated its defenses. Twenty million fugitives carted off to justice at last; honor and decency restored to the galaxy.
But was that the only way? What if Starhaven were to continue as it was, as a sanctuary for criminals . . . but run by Myra and me, neither of whom was a lawbreaker? Suppose . . . suppose we gradually transformed Ben Thurdan’s metal fortress into a planet for rehabilitation . . . without the knowledge of those being rehabilitated?
That seemed like a better idea to me. Much better.
Very quietly I said, “You’d better tell that fleet of yours to turn around and head for home, Whitestone.”
“Eh? What’s that?”
“You might as well save the government a lot of lost time. Because when that fleet gets here, they’ll discover that Starhaven’s just as impregnable as ever. I’ve decided to stay here, Whitestone. I’m putting the screens back up again. And we don’t want anything to do with the galaxy from now on.”
“Mantell, this is madness! You’re an SP man, a native of Earth! Where’s your loyalty? Where’s your sense of honor, Mantell?”
I smiled at him. “Honor? Loyalty? I’m Johnny Mantell of Starhaven, late of the planet Mulciber, before that a drunk and disorderly employee of Klingsan Defense Screens. That’s my biography, and that’s who I am. I’m not letting Starhaven fall into SP hands.”
I moistened my dry lips and managed a grin. Whitestone stared incredulously at me. I reached up and broke the contact; his face dissolved into an electronic swirl of colors.
I felt very tired, suddenly. It had been a busy day. Thunder boomed in the sky outside. That meant it was nearly two in the morning—for, at two, thunder sounded over Starhaven, and then the nightly rains came, refreshing the planet, sweeping away the staleness of the day and leaving everything clean and bright.
Myra was smiling at me. I reached forward and tugged down the master switch; instantly, meters and dials leaped into jiggling life. Once again, Starhaven was surrounded by an impassable network of force-shields; once again, we were protected from the outside.
The rain started to fall, pattering lightly down. I pulled Myra close against me.
Then I released her; there was time for that later. “You’d better get in touch with the rest of the provisional government of the Republic of Starhaven,” I told her. “There’ll be some changes made by morning.”
The Android Kill
If you like a man you don’t question how he was born. But on Deneb City there was a deep hatred for synthetics, so rioters went out on—
I WAS CRAZY TO LEAVE Laura here alone for a minute, I was thinking, as the space-liner roared through the atmosphere toward the spaceport at Rigel City. Even though the mighty ship was travelling at a thousand miles an hour, I kept urging it onward, down toward the port. I had to get there on time. Had to.
I kept picturing the way the riot-torn city must look, now that the long-festering hatred for synthetic android men had burst loose into a full-scale android kill. Clay Armistead had finally stirred up the riot his sick mind craved. And I had picked this week to make a business trip and leave my wife alone—alone, in the heart of the riot.
I counted the seconds until the spaceship would land. I had cut short my business trip the second I had heard of the riots, had caught the first liner back to Rigel City to find Laura and get her out of danger’s path.
The ship landed. “Unfasten deceleration cradles,” came the impersonal order from the loudspeakers, but I had already done that. I raced down the companionway, past a startled stewardess, shoved my way through a little knot of uniformed baggage-androids and grabbed my suitcase. There wasn’t any time to waste.
Quickly, the moment the catwalk for passengers was open, I dashed through the hatch and out into the bright, warm air of Rigel City. The giant sun was high above; it was a pleasant spring day.
And then all the pleasantness vanished. I saw the mob, pushing and shouting and shoving, at the far end of the landing field. It was an ugly sight. They looked like so many buzzing bees, each of them inflamed with killing-lust and brutality.
I passed through the checkout-desk in record time and on through the Administration Building, listening to the sounds of the mob. Somehow, they had smelled out the fact that there were androids aboard the starship that had just arrived, and they were determined to get them.
Well, that wasn’t my worry. I was concerned only with Laura.
A sleek taxi pulled up in front of me and waited, its turboelectric engine throbbing quietly. The driver was a human; I was startled not to see the familiar red star on his forehead. He looked at me coldly, without the politeness of the android cabby.
“Where to, fellow?”
“Twenty-fourth and Coolidge,” I said, and started to get in. “On the double.”
“Sorry, Mac. Coolidge is out of bounds. I’d be crazy to take my hack through there. I’ll drop you at Winchester. Okay?”
I frowned, then nodded. It meant a ten-minute walk, but it was better than nothing. “Good enough,” I said, and started for a second time to enter.
I got one leg inside the cab. Then a hand grabbed me from behind, pulled me out, and I was swung around.
“Where the hell you think you’re going—you damned android?”
FOR A SECOND, I was too startled even to get angry. There were three men facing me—cold-eyed, hard-faced men with hatred naked in their features. I recognized them, contorted though their faces were.
Clay Armistead—the chief rabble-rouser, a burly, squat, ugly man who had been spreading lies about the synthetic men for years.
Roger Dubrow, tall, athletic, Armistead’s partner in their food-store business and his partner in villainy as well, it seemed.
Dave Hawks, a local tough just riding along for the fun.
“Android?” I said. “Is this a game, Armistead? You’ve known me for ten years. I’m no more of an android than you are. Let go of me!”
I wrenched my arm free and turned to my taxi—but the driver shook his head nervously and stepped on the accelerator. He wasn’t looking for trouble.
“Come here, android,” Hawks said. “C’mere and lemme rough you up.” He snatched at my suitcase, grabbed it away, tossed it to one side.
