Collected Short Fiction, page 55
“Okay, skip it,” Paul said roughly. “Let’s eat.”
Mrs. Robinson had made a lavish breakfast, all the things she remembered Paul loved, but they ate in stony silence. Paul kept his eyes on his plate and she brought him the food without saying anything. After the meal was over he quietly picked up the dishes and put them in the washer, and sat down again.
Abruptly he got up and went to his old room. He wandered around in it, getting acquainted again with the things he had loved years before, playing one of his favorite records, sitting in his favorite chair. Then he came back down.
She was puttering around, dusting and cleaning, while Jim sat quietly in a corner.
“Why don’t you have an electronic duster?” he asked.
“This gives me something to do when I’m bored,” she said, continuing to wipe. “What time is your bunkmate getting here?”
“Fenner? Oh, I don’t know. He was in Wilmette visiting his family, and he’ll probably get through here pretty soon. Blastoff is tomorrow morning at 8, but we have to be on board ship tonight, at 22 sharp.”
“That means you’ll have to leave here about half-past-twenty to get to the spaceport on time,” she said. She continued dusting for a while. When she considered the job finished, she put the dustcloth away.
“My room looked wonderful,” Paul said. “Just the way it always did.”
“I thought you’d like it,” she said. “Sleep well?”
“The best. Nothing like sleeping at home after six years of spaceship cots.”
“No,” she said. “Nothing like it.”
They were silent. The doorbell finally ended the silence when it had grown almost too tight to bear. Paul opened the door and Jack Fenner burst through.
He was a short, wiry man, smiling broadly, with thin space-tanned features and a keen-pointed nose. He wore a pair of rumpled Space Greys.
“You must be Mrs. Robinson,” he said. “Gunner’s always talking about you.”
“Gunner?”
“Didn’t he tell you? That’s what we nicknamed him after the Deneb business.”
“He didn’t tell us much about Deneb,” Jim said.
Fenner glanced at Jim. “Oh, hello. You must be Gunner’s brother Jim. The one who taught him how to use a gun.”
“That’s right,” Jim said proudly. Paul frowned.
“You mean he didn’t tell you about Deneb?” Fenner said in amazement. “First man in our ship to win a Space Cross and he didn’t tell you? Why, when those Denebians came at us he held them off single-handed with two handguns until his ammo ran out, and then he used the guns I as clubs till we got out to help him.”
“You didn’t tell me, Paul,” said Mrs. Robinson accusingly.
“I didn’t want to upset you.”
“You mean you didn’t know your son was a hero? Hell, Gunner, you weren’t so modest on ship. Every time we—”
“Jack—” Paul protested.
“But you told that story from one end of space to the other—and I don’t think you ever took that medal off. I’ll bet you took showers with it pinned to your skin, you were so proud of it.”
“So you’re a hero, Paul? You didn’t say much about it.”
Paul deliberately ignored Jim’s question and turned to Fenner. “How’s your family, Jack?”
“Well, there’s not very much of it, you know. Just my aunt and my kid brother. But my brother just passed his Number One and he’ll be shipping out for Centauri next month, and my aunt’s going to be all alone. It’s rough when you have someone in space like that, and you’re all alone at home, like my aunt. Except for her cats, that is. She’s got two big Persians and they’re going to be like children for her now that my brother’s leaving. Say, Mrs. Robinson, why don’t you ring up my aunt and get together sometime? I think you’ll like her.”
Hastily he scribbled something on a slip of paper. “Here’s her number. Mrs. Grace Fenner, over in Wilmette. Call her up sometime. She loves having guests, and she’ll love having Gunner’s mother especially.”
“Thank you, Jack,” Mrs. Robinson said. She took the slip of paper. “I’ll get in touch with her. But you must be awfully hungry, Jack. Let’s have dinner now and talk later.”
“Fine,” Fenner said. “I’ve been hearing about your cooking all the way from Deneb back.” He followed her into the kitchen, and Paul and his brother walked in together. Jim gave Paul a light tap on the shoulder as they entered, almost playful, almost as if it were years ago.
After the meal, with the sun well below the horizon, Fenner stood up, stretched contentedly, and said, “I hate to rush off like this, but I have one more stop before I get back to the ship. Thanks for everything, Mrs. Robinson. I sure intend to take you up on that repeat invitation next time we’re down Earth. So long, Jim.” He turned to Paul. “Guess I’ll be seeing you at 22 aboard ship, Gunner. See you then.”
“No, you won’t,” Paul said slowly.
“What?” Fenner whirled in amazement. “You’re not transferring, are you?”
“No. I’m pensioning out. I’ve decided to stay here at home. I’ve had my fling in space,” he said deliberately, “and now I’m going to settle down.”
“You’re kidding,” Fenner said in a hushed voice.
Mrs. Robinson stared at Paul. “You’re not going back.”
“No.”
“Yes,” said Jim, almost in the same moment. “It’s all a little joke. Paul just wanted to see what your reaction would be. He told me about this before. He’s going.” He kicked Paul in the leg surreptitiously, hard, and Paul barely managed to conceal a wince. He flicked a glance at Jim. Jim was shaking his head in a way Paul understood.
“Just a little joke,” Paul said thinly. “Of course I’m going back.” But I’m to stay, he thought.
“Of course you’re going back,” said his mother. “Heroes never quit, do they? You’ll have to finish the job on Deneb, and then stop by here for another couple of meals. I’ll be waiting.” She laughed, and Fenner was caught up by the laughter and started to chuckle.
“You’d better start packing your things,” she said. “You wouldn’t want to be late for blastoff.” An undercurrent of mirth seemed to ripple from her, and finally Paul broke his grim mask and smiled in relief. He felt as if a weight had been lifted.
Sunup came and the ships in the far-off spaceport gleamed bright against the cloudless blue sky. Mrs. Robinson stared through the open window, squinting a little because the spaceport was so far away and hard to see in the morning light. She watched carefully, and, as the hand of the clock reached eight, one of the ships slowly began to rise, stood for a moment on a tail of fire, and shot up out of sight.
She turned. Jim was standing behind her. She looked past him at the empty apartment, at Paul’s deserted room with the pajamas lying crumpled on the bed.
“Our little game is over,” she said. “I’m glad.”
“I’m glad too,” Jim said. “It was interesting, watching him react. His face dropped a mile when his double answered the door. But he’s not the same old selfish Paul anymore. He’s grown up. I thought he was at first, but he meant it when he said he was quitting. He had me worried for a minute; suppose he had kept to it and actually stayed here? With us?” He winced at the thought.
“It would have complicated things terribly,” she said. “It would have destroyed our nice routine completely. Well, suppose we go downstairs and get the poor robot working again. He’ll be awfully stiff after two days of being shut off.”
They went downstairs, mother and son, and Jim took out the key and activated the Paul-robot. The robot finished the word he had to say, and stretched his limbs.
“The family is complete again,” Jim said.
“It’s good to be moving,” said the Paul-robot.
Mrs. Robinson turned to her son. “You’d better renew my charge too, Jim,” she said. “I’ll be running down any day now.”
He opened the panel in her back and touched the key to the charging-stud.
“There. Enough energy to keep you going for weeks, mother.” He put his arms around his mother and his brother. “Now we can get back into our regular family routine again, until the next time Paul has a furlough. Then we can play the game again.”
He looked at the Paul-robot and the mother-robot, and at the cozy four walls that bounded his little world. It was good to have the mother and brother and the home he loved, all the rest of his life. He smiled warmly, and thought of poor Paul fighting for his life on those hot, uncomfortable planets.
He drew them closer to him. “I can’t tell you how much you mean to me,” he said. “Both of you.” His voice was heavy with emotion.
THE END
Calling Captain Flint
An alien life form with all the arts of makeup and camouflage at its command, is required to walk among human beings and not be suspected. A tough problem. What manner of impersonation should the alien attempt! Why, the obvious one, of course.
IN THE communications room of the Interstellar Police Cruiser Skyfire, a thin sheet of pale green plastic slid out of the lightwriter. Lieutenant Summers waited until the message was finished, then ripped the sheet out of the reproducer.
He raised an eyebrow as he read the communication. “Trouble on Delgon III, eh?” he muttered to himself. “Looks like a rough time will be had by all.” He reached over and punched a button on the intercom panel. “Captain Flint? Orders from Main Base just came in.”
“Send them up,” said the voice at the other end.
Summers dropped the sheet of plastic into a slot marked “Captain’s Quarters,” and it vanished. Less than a minute later, orders were crackling over the communication lines in the great vessel. The Skyfire had been merely cruising along on a routine flight through the vast, starry reaches of the Galaxy, but now it changed its direction of flight, and the mighty super-atomic engines of the great battle cruiser hurled it through space at the highest velocity they could obtain.
Light-year after light-year of space were eaten up as the ship drove toward a star called Delgon—or, more precisely, toward the third planet of that sun, Delgon III.
At a broad table somewhere in the fortress-capitol of the world of Delgon III, sat a man. There were other men around him, but to even the most casual observer, there was something so different about this one man that he overshadowed the others as a skyscraper overshadows a pup tent. He had a hard, broad jaw, iron-gray hair, and a heavy, muscular body. He smiled coldly at the others, and behind his jet-black eyes there glittered something malignantly evil.
“Gentlemen,” he said, “the so-called ‘underground’ tried to send a message from here to the Interstellar Police. We don’t know whether or not it got through, but we must take no chances. Have you any suggestions?” He looked around the room, finally allowing his eyes directly to come to rest on one man. “Admiral Gorvos?”
“Our defenses are more than adequate for any Police ship, sir,” he said. His voice was almost sneering. “Their puny armaments are not now, nor will they ever be, a match for ours.”
“You, Admiral, are a fool,” said the other. “At this point in the game, overconfidence is our greatest enemy. As long as the Interstellar Police know nothing of our operations, we are relatively safe. But if—and when—that call is answered, we must be prepared to wipe out that ship before a call for help can be sent to their Main Base.”
“Sir, no single ship could outmaneuver our defenses,” the Admiral said stubbornly. “We have detector screens in multiple layers, covering every volume of space for three light years away. We have a screen of a thousand battleships covering that volume of space. No object bigger than a basketball could approach us without being discovered, and, once discovered, it will be annihilated.”
“I hope, for your own sake, you are right,” the leader said. His cold eyes moved a bit, to the next man. “Derwyn, you were supposed to have stamped all opposition out, yet there remained enough of a nucleus to enable them to build and operate a sub-space radio and call the Interstellar Police. What have you to say?”
Derwyn’s face was white, but his voice was even. “As soon as the radio began to operate, my men smashed into their hideout, destroyed the radio, and captured those rebels who were not killed outright. We were there within fifteen seconds after the instrument was turned on.”
“There was time for them to make the call,” said the leader. “And your job was to prevent such things, not to stop them after it’s too late.”
“Perhaps the call didn’t get through,” Derwyn said.
“So? Another’s failure does not atone for your own.” He had been holding one hand beneath the edge of the table. Now he lifted it, and it came up holding a Kedwin 50 blaster. His finger touched the activator, and the subordinate crumpled to the floor as the ravening energy beam tore through his head.
“Remove it,” the leader signalled. “Baltek, I trust you can do a better job with the Secret Police than your former superior.”
As the guards dragged away the body, the man addressed as Baltek nodded. “I have already taken steps to nail down those rebels who are left,” he said, glancing once at his dead superior with callous indifference.
“Excellent,” said the leader. “Then let us proceed. There are other things to attend to.”
He looked at all of them, one by one. “We must deal, somehow, with Jaim Umek, the former President. He is still alive, and he has sworn to kill himself if he’s ever captured. We must decide on a way to capture him alive; in his mind are certain valuable secrets that we must have. Are there any suggestions?”
Baltek smiled craftily. “I think I may have one, sir.”
Six months later, an old man sat in his apartment, looking at the three people that were seated in various chairs around the room. He sighed, and felt, somehow, very old indeed. Jaim Umek, at seventy, did not feel at all like leading a subtle revolt that might at any time break into violence.
He surveyed the others carefully. Smed Hober, a barrel-chested, heavy-bearded, heavy-set man, whose rough manner concealed an intelligent brain; Bety Cardill, a girl in her middle twenties, with closely-cropped red hair and wide-set green eyes; and Jay Denner, tall, blond, handsome, and much too young. He didn’t look a day over eighteen.
A girl, a boy, and an old man. Only Smed Hober was really the type for this kind of work. But, Jaim Umek thought to himself, it was work that had to be done—by whoever was available to do it.
“It has been six months,” he said, in his soft, old voice. “Six months since we contacted the Police. And nothing has come of it. None of you were with me at that time; the original group was wiped out—except for myself. I am small, and I was able to hide. But the others were killed, some right on the spot, others later, in prison.
“Since then, my men have been killed, one by one, here and there, until there are only the four of us left. And still the Police do not come.”
Smed Hober snorted, and his deep voice came rumbling out of his chest. “How the hell do you know you even contacted them?”
Umek smiled faintly. “I may as well tell you. We got an answer from the Main Base of the Interstellar Police. They said they were sending one ship: the Sky fire, commanded by Captain Jason Flint.”
Bety Cardill’s green eyes narrowed. “One ship? How did they ever expect to get through the defenses around this planet? Admiral Gorvos has enough power out there to smash any single ship.”
“True, my dear,” said Umek sadly. “You see, the Police had no notion that this was as important as it is. They didn’t know how closely guarded and viciously defended Delgon III is. The Skyfire was probably blasted out of space months ago.”
Jay Denner ran a muscular hand over his blond hair. “Then we can’t expect help from that quarter. What do we do? Give up?”
Jaim Umek’s gray eyes looked steadily into Denner’s blue ones. “Give up? No! No, young man, we most emphatically do not! Leader Mordegg and his crew of cutthroats are planning the biggest interstellar war this Galaxy has ever seen. If it is not nipped in the bud now, millions—nay, billions—of innocent people will die.
“No, we must not give up; we must somehow get word to the Interstellar Police again. And this time, we must tell them to send a fleet, not just a single cruiser.”
“How do you propose to do that, Umek?” Hober said, in a deep bass voice. “It takes expensive equipment to build a subspace radio, and Leader Mordegg has seen to it that all sources of supply have been cut off. Frankly, I don’t think we can build another radio, and, even if we did, we’d be spotted before we could get a message out. This new Secret Police Chief, Baltek, is no fool; he’s been wiping out our men wholesale these last six months.”
“True,” nodded Jaim Umek slowly. “If it were not for the spy ray block around this room he would probably even now be watching us. Except for us four, Mordegg and Baltek control the whole planet.
“But, nonetheless, I have a plan.”
“Let’s hear it,” said Bety.
Umek shook his head. “Not now. We must proceed slowly. You see, I happen to have one bit of vital information that Mordegg does not have. I have reason to believe that Captain Jason Flint, alone of all his crew, survived the wrecking of the Skyfire and is, at this moment, somewhere in Delgon City!”
Leader Mordegg pressed a switch on the visiphone at his desk, and the screen lit up to reveal the features of a hard-faced young man.
“Baltek, how about Jaim Umek?”
Baltek smiled sardonically. “We are slowly driving him to desperate measures, sir. One by one, we have bottled him up and picked off his colleagues. And now, sir, we are ready. We have set a trap for him that can’t fail. We will have him within our suppressor fields so that the bomb he carries in that hollow tooth can’t go off. It will be simple to nab him then.”
Mordegg’s black eyes glittered. “Excellent! I’ll let you attend to the whole thing, then.”
