The Perfect Host, page 9
The other three Outsider ships were Spy-Eyes, b.-e. field-equipped. The bombs were real bombs, however, they were supplied by Satellite 18, which, if examined, will be found inexplicably empty of its interceptors. I put guiding heads on them, and sent one to each of my “Outsider” Spy-Eyes.
I think that explains everything. If you question my motives, regard Earth as you deep-spacemen see it today—unified, powerful, secure within and without. Humanity is ready, now, to take the first steps toward greatness. Therefore:
Send my name—Simmons—in the old International Morse Code on 28.275 meters, from a distance of ten statute miles from any of the three Outsider ships, at one thousand watts power. Repeat the name four times. The field will break down; you may then locate the Spy-Eyes and pull them in. Dismantle them; inside you will find this recording and certain papers, which contain everything I know about the binding-energy field. Use it well.
Colonel Simmons leaned back in his chair. His face was gray. “Muscles—is this all true?”
“You know it is. You’ve seen it in action.”
“Now what have I done?” muttered the colonel.
“Jumped to conclusions,” said the doctor easily.
The colonel’s mouth opened and closed spasmodically. Then in violent reaction, he swore. “You couldn’t’ve done it!” he roared. “You set the timetable for this whole thing and built it into those Spy-Eyes. Well, what about all that was done here—the interceptors from White Sands, and the development of the satellites and all that?”
“Leroy, old horse, take it easy, will you? Who had charge of all that development? Who had the final say on design? Who outlined the exact use of each piece of equipment—by way, of course, of using it to its greatest efficiency?”
“You did. You did.” The colonel covered his face. “All that power. All that control. You could have had the whole world for the taking, if you’d wanted it. Instead—”
“Instead, everyone on Earth has a job, enough food, good quarters, and an equal chance at education. I have it on good authority that the next session of Congress will unify divorce laws and traffic laws in this country. Russia has not only a second party but a third one. Social legislation is beginning to follow the lines of the Postal Union, and already a movement has started to have the governments pay the people their full wages during a six-week vacation. No communism, no fascism; function is the law, and social security—lowercase—is function.”
“Shut up!” mouthed the colonel in a peculiar tone, half moan, half roar. He held his head and he rocked.
The doctor clasped his shoulder and laughed, “Listen to me, Leroy,” he said, “and I’ll tell you something funny. You know how little, stupid anecdotes will stick with you, like the limerick about the young lady from Wheeling, and the time you took the ball of tar to bed with you and we had to shave your head? Well, believe it or not, I honestly think that this job I have just done had its source in a couple—no, three—things that happened to me when I was young. When I think of them, and look at the world today—my!”
He took a turn around the floor. His brother sat still.
“Wells had something to do with it. Wells pointed out, mostly indirectly, that only a miracle could make humans work together. And sometimes his miracle was entertaining but untenable, because it constituted a common aim for mankind. That never did work. World peace is the finest aim a race could have, but it never tempted us much. Wells’ other miracle was a common enemy—the Martian invasion, for example. Now, that makes sense. It did then and it does now.
“And here are the silly little things that have stuck with me. Remember that summer when I got a job as a dirt-moving foreman on a canal job? Two of the muckers got into a fight out by one of the machines. I got up into a dragline and dumped a load of sand on the two of them. They stopped fighting, ganged up on me, and punched the daylights out of me.” He laughed.
“Then there was the other one. It was even sillier. It was in a restaurant, right after I started to teach at Drexel Tech. There were two bubble-headed little chicks sitting at a nearby table, verbally clawing each other’s eyes out over a young man. Just as I was about to get up and move back out of the combat area, they spotted the young man in question submitting to the wiles of a very cute redhead. Whereupon the combatants were suddenly allies, and on the spot”—he laughed again—“concocted a devilish scheme to squirt ink on the contents of the redhead’s clothesline!”
The colonel was looking at him dully.
“The common denominator,” continued the doctor, “in the analysis of Wells, the fight on the canal job, and the feline fiddle-faddle in the café, was surprisingly valid, considering the wide difference in the nature of the fields of combat. It boils down to this: that human conflicts cease to be of importance in the face of a common enemy. ‘Divide and rule’ has its obverse; ‘unite and conquer.’ That’s what the world has done during the Attack; except that instead of conquering the Outsider, it has conquered itself—still its common enemy.”
“Wells,” murmured the colonel. “I remember that. I was reading him and told you the miracle idea. I was in military prep, and you were a freshman in college.”
“Gosh yes,” said the doctor. “I remember, Leroy.”
The colonel seemed to be thinking hard, and slowly. He spoke slowly. “Muscles,” he said, “remember how I wore your freshman dinky when you came home for a weekend?”
“Do I!” chuckled the doctor. “You wouldn’t give it back, and I spend the next six weeks sweeping out seniors’ rooms because I showed up at school without it. Heh! Remember me strutting around in your gray cape when you were at the Point?”
“Yeh. We were always doing that. Your tie, my tie, our tie. Those were the days. You wouldn’t fit my clothes now, Fatso.”
“Is that so!” laughed the doctor, delighted to see his brother making some effort to come out of his doldrum. “Listen, son, you rate too much to be in shape. Too many flunkies to bend over for you when you want your shoes tied.”
The colonel whipped off the coat with all those shiny buttons. “You couldn’t button that around your fallen chest.”
In answer the grinning doctor shucked out of his laboratory smock and put his arms into the uniform jacket. With some difficulty and a certain amount of sucking in and holding back, he got it buttoned. “The hat,” he demanded. He put it on. It was too small.
Meanwhile the colonel slipped into the smock, with its solder-flux stains and its worn elbows. He flapped it in front of him. “What do you do with all this yardage? Smuggle stuff? Hey, Muscles; let’s have a look in the cheval glass in the office. I want to see what I’d look like as a Great Brain.”
They went into the office, through the door in the shower stall. The doctor, all aglitter in his brother’s jacket, went first. There was a man standing just by the outside door. He had a black cloth over his nose and mouth and a silenced automatic in his hand.
The colonel, his smock flapping, pushed past his brother and walked out into the room. The man shot him twice and disappeared through the door.
“Leroy! Who did it, kid?”
“I did,” said the colonel. “No! No doctor. Too late. Stay—”
“You … oh. Oh! That bullet was meant for me. The jacket switch! But why? Who was it?”
“Never mind … him,” said the colonel. “Hired. Psychoed. Whole thing planned. Foolproof escape. All witnesses called away. He doesn’t know you. Or me. My idea. Was very … careful.”
“Why? Why?”
“Found out you … work with … enemy—” His voice trailed off. He closed his eyes sleepily and lay still for a moment. Then, his face twisted with effort, he sat suddenly upright. His voice returned—his normal, heavy, crackling tone. “I had proof—proof enough that you were a traitor, Muscles. I was afraid you’d get clear if you got a chance to work on a court. But I couldn’t bring myself to kill you with my own hands. I figured it out this way.”
“So he’d be there, and shoot me when we came out of the office. But why didn’t you call him off?”
“Couldn’t. He had orders to shoot the civilian. You were an officer for the moment. He didn’t know us, I tell you. I radioed to a third party, who knows nothing. He gave this hood the starting gun.” He raised his left hand. On the wrist was the miniature transmitter. “I called him when you admitted you worked with the Outsiders … then you explained … and I couldn’t call back; he was on his way here.”
“Leroy, you fool! Why didn’t you let him go ahead? Why did you make that silly switch? My work’s done. Nothing can change it now.”
“Muscles … I’m … old-line Army. Can’t help it … don’t like this … brave new … never could. You’re fit for it. You made it; you live in it. Besides, you’ll … appreciate the joke better than … I would.”
“What do you mean, kid?”
“You underestimated … you thought you’d be dead when the … spacemen heard your recording.” He laughed weakly. “You won’t be, you know. Things’re moving too fast.”
There was a sudden, horrible spell of coughing.
And then Dr. Simmons was alone, holding his dead brother’s head in his arms, rocking back and forth, buffeted and drowning in an acid flood of grief.
And behind it—far, far behind it, his articulate mind said dazedly, Great day in the morning, he’s right! What’ll they make of me—a saint, or a blood-red Satan?
The Love of Heaven
WARNER STEPPED OUT over the moon-washed outcropping and cast about for the Danby Trail. Fellow trotted past him, stood and sniffed the hot, dark air, and looked up and back at Warner.
He leaned down and clapped the collie’s shoulder. “You know where it is, dogface,” he grinned. “Quit stalling. Let’s go!”
The dog waited, and when he took a step forward, ran ahead to the black mouth of the forest trail. “Half hound, half homing pigeon,” muttered Warner, and followed.
He stepped into the shadows and hesitated a moment, blinking, shifting the strap of his carbine to let his sticky shoulder breathe. “Fellow!”
Fellow’s rumbling growl answered him.
Warner was quite familiar with Fellow’s vocabulary; there were barks, yaps, whimpers and growls, and variations of all. He had heard this growl before—not often, but not to be ignored. Once it was a wildcat flattened on a limb above him. Once it was an impending ice slide. And once it was a man, crouched in the shadows of his porch, waiting for him after one of these night hunts. All three were killers. Warner was still very much alive.
Eyes wide, pupils round in the velvet dark, Warner stepped forward with the sliding, silent stride of the forester. His toe touched the dog. Slowly he half-knelt, and ran his hand over Fellow’s quivering back. The collie was tense, low on the ground. Warner’s hand felt the flattened ears, the curled lips.
“What is it, boy?”
Again there was the ominous rumble. Warner strained his eyes in the direction indicated by the dog’s straining, sensitive nose. There was nothing to be seen but blackness, and a faint oval of moonlight somewhere off the trail.
Fellow inched forward, then was still again. Warner looked uselessly down at him, and, because it was the only thing to look at, back at the patch of light.
It moved.
Warner’s back hair prickled. His tongue drove against his lower teeth, his nostrils flared, and a cold ball of terror nestled below his heart.
Moonlight has no face. Moonlight does not move toward you silently, taking shapes as it passes underbrush. Moonlight does not stand before you, looking like a naked man.
It stood looking at him, glowing softly. It was six and a half feet tall, too wide at the shoulder, too narrow at the hips, with arms and legs too thin and a head not too large, but too high.
But its face …
It wore an expression of indescribable grief. Its face spoke of loss too great to bear, of the incontrovertible end of some great, sustaining hope. The despair was lined and underlined by the strength of that face. It was the face of a conqueror and of a sage, molded of the clay of power and understanding. And it was utterly defeated.
Warner was not an imaginative man, and he was schooled to danger. His frozen mind broke free almost instantly and told him it’s a ghost!—for there was no time for any careful analysis, any testing of improbabilities.
“Control it,” said the ghost, and pointed at Fellow, who snarled.
Warner’s mind was more free than his tongue. His mind formed a demanding question, and his mouth managed only an interrogative grunt. And before he could lick his lips and reform them, Fellow was away from him and in midair, his long jaws hungry for the phantom’s throat.
The apparition turned easily, bent backwards from the hips, and Fellow hurtled by, his teeth castanetting together. He squirmed around and landed facing the ghost, which watched calmly. Fellow snarled softly—it was like a purr—and bunched his feet together. The ghost braced its legs, ready for another spring. But Fellow did not spring. Close to the ground, he charged at the long, slender legs. The ghost dodged the dog’s teeth, but could not move quite fast enough to avoid the furry flank, which thumped the calf of its leg.
Fellow spun to attack again—and kept spinning. He yelped and snapped viciously at his side. Close enough to the glowing figure to be visible by its strange light, Fellow bent like a caterpillar with a fire ant in its side, and crabbed away into the darkness, biting himself with teeth afroth in sudden foam; and he whimpered like a sick and pain-racked child.
“Fellow!”
The dog cried, somewhere in the darkness. Warner leapt toward the sound, caught his foot in a root and fell heavily. Oddly, his right hand turned under him and was driven into his solar plexus as he fell on it. The breath rushed out of him, and for seconds he lay helpless, frightened and furious, saying, “Uh! Uh!” through his knotted windpipe.
Then he could see again, because the specter had moved between him and the dog. Fellow was on his back, kicking feebly. The dog turned on his side once more, bit again at his quarter, and suddenly lay still. His eyes were open and rolled up, his tongue out, bloody, bitten half through.
Warner got to his knees.
“Do not touch it,” said the ghost warningly.
Warner looked up at it. “You killed him,” he whispered, and in one smooth motion shouldered out of the strap of his carbine and raised it.
The ghost disappeared.
I’ve gone blind, thought Warner. He stood up, knees flexed, head low, the carbine at the ready, prepared to snap a bullet at anything, or the sound of anything.
His chest began to hurt, and he remembered to breathe.
There was silence, and blackness, fear and fury, and the warm barrel on the heel of his left thumb, the formed grip of the stock embracing each of three right fingers. He turned his head slowly, turned from the waist, from the ankles, around and back, waiting, tense. The blackness was too much, too close. He raised his eyes up, and farther up, until he could see the ghostly second reflection of moonlight on the roof of leaves above. The dim, elusive light was good.
There was a faint sound to his right. The carbine breech came up to his cheek. Silence.
He blew from his nostrils. “Move, damn you!”
Something moved. Something whirred and thrashed in the underbrush. Warner fired three times, the gun snuggling more affectionately to shoulder and cheek each time.
Silence again. He lowered the gun to be free to turn his head. It was wrenched out of his unsuspecting fingers. He grabbed wildly at it, clutching nothing, and staggered. He whirled, whirled again, all but seeing the certain flash, feeling the inevitable thump of his own lead into his body. He dropped, then, and lay still, the way he had done at Tulagi.
There was light behind and above him. He cringed from it, gasping, dove for a dimly-seen trunk, and crouched behind it, not looking at the light until he had cover.
The ghost was standing twenty feet away, holding his carbine easily, watching him. He ducked back. Nothing happened. The light did not waver.
He peeped out again. The ghost stood there watching him with its tragic, wise eyes. It held the carbine at its hip, not aiming directly at him, certainly not aiming away. He knew it saw him, but it made no move. Looking at the strange, sad figure, Warner felt that it would wait there all night—all week. Time seemed to have nothing to do with that not-old, not-young, infinitely patient face.
Warner pressed his lips together, cleared his throat.
“Who are you?” he asked hoarsely.
The ghost answered, “I am—” It paused, searching Warner’s face, hesitating as if choosing exactly the right word. “I am—regret.”
“Regret?” Wild, extraneous references tumbled through Warner’s brain. “I am the ghost of Christmas Past”—the masks of Comedy and Tragedy painted on the proscenium of his college auditorium. Mister Coffee-Nerves. What mummery was this?
The ghost was trying again. Warner could sense the effort for accuracy. “Not regret. I am—sorry. I am sorry your dog is death. Your dog is dead.”
“Who are you?” barked Warner.
The ghost again searched his face. “I am you,” it said, and waited. “No,” it said, and muttered to itself, “I, you, he. It.” It looked at Warner. “It is I,” and it struck its chest with the carbine barrel.
Warner licked his lips. He could not know what this glowing thing was, but it was obviously demented. He asked: “Are you going to shoot me?”
