Selected Stories (2 page)

“What are you looking at, Sonny? Didn’t you ever see it before?”

“Oh, sure. Sure. I was just—” He shut the razor, opened it, flashed light from its blade, shut it again. “I’m tired of using this, Pete. I’m going to get rid of it. Want it?”

Want it? In his foot locker, maybe. Under his pillow. “Thanks no, Sonny. Couldn’t use it.”

“I like safety razors,” Sonny mumbled. “Electrics, even better. What are we going to do with it?”

“Throw it in the … no.” Pete pictured the razor turning end over end in the air, half open, gleaming in the maw of the catchall. “Throw it out the—” No. Curving out into the long grass. You might want it. You might crawl around in the moonlight looking for it. You might find it.

“I guess maybe I’ll break it up.”

“No,” Pete said. “The pieces—” Sharp little pieces. Hollow-ground fragments. “I’ll think of something. Wait’ll I get dressed.”

He washed briskly, toweled, while Sonny stood looking at the razor. It was a blade now, and if you broke it, there would be shards and glittering splinters, still razor sharp. You could slap its edge into an emery wheel and grind it away, and somebody could find it and put another edge on it because it was so obviously a razor, a fine steel razor, one that would slice so—“I know. The laboratory. We’ll get rid of it,” Pete said confidently.

He stepped into his clothes, and together they went to the laboratory wing. It was very quiet there. Their voices echoed.

“One of the ovens,” said Pete, reaching for the razor.

“Bake ovens? You’re crazy!”

Pete chuckled. “You don’t know this place, do you? Like everything else on the base, there was a lot more went on here than most people knew about. They kept calling it the bake shop. Well, it
was
research headquarters for new high-nutrient flours. But there’s lots else here. We tested utensils and designed beet peelers and all sorts of things like that. There’s an electric furnace in here that—” He pushed open a door.

They crossed a long, quiet, cluttered room to the thermal equipment. “We can do everything here from annealing glass, through glazing ceramics, to finding the melting point of frying pans.” He clicked a switch tentatively. A pilot light glowed. He swung open a small, heavy door and set the razor inside. “Kiss it good-bye. In twenty minutes it’ll be a puddle.”

“I want to see that,” said Sonny. “Can I look around until it’s cooked?”

“Why not?”

(Everybody around here always said “Why not?”)

They walked through the laboratories. Beautifully equipped, they were, and too quiet. Once they passed a major who was bent over a complex electronic hook-up on one of the benches. He was watching a little amber light flicker, and he did not return their salute. They tiptoed past him, feeling awed at his absorption, envying it. They saw the models of the automatic kneaders, the vitaminizers, the remote-signal thermostats and timers and controls.

“What’s in there?”

“I dunno. I’m over the edge of my territory. I don’t think there’s anybody left for this section. They were mostly mechanical and electronic theoreticians. The only thing I know about them is that if we ever needed anything in the way of tools, meters, or equipment, they had it or something better, and if we ever got real bright and figured out a startling new idea, they’d already built it and junked it a month ago. Hey!”

Sonny followed the pointing hand. “What?”

“That wall section. It’s loose, or … well, what do you know?”

He pushed at the section of wall, which was very slightly out of line. There was a dark space beyond.

“What’s in there?”

“Nothing, or some semiprivate hush-hush job. These guys used to get away with murder.”

Sonny said, with an uncharacteristic flash of irony, “Isn’t that the Army theoretician’s business?”

Cautiously they peered in, then entered.

“Wh
… hey!
The door!”

It swung swiftly and quietly shut. The soft click of the latch was accompanied by a blaze of light.

The room was small and windowless. It contained machinery—a “trickle” charger, a bank of storage batteries, an electric-powered dynamo, two small self-starting gas-driven light plants and a Diesel complete with sealed compressed-air starting cylinders. In the corner was a relay rack with its panel-bolts spot-welded. Protruding from it was a red-top lever. Nothing was labeled.

They looked at the equipment wordlessly for a time and then Sonny said, “Somebody wanted to make awful sure he had power for something.”

“Now, I wonder what—” Pete walked over to the relay rack. He looked at the lever without touching it. It was wired up; behind the handle, on the wire, was a folded tag. He opened it cautiously. “To be used only on specific orders of the Commanding Officer.”

“Give it a yank and see what happens.”

Something clicked behind them. They whirled. “What was that?”

“Seemed to come from that rig by the door.”

They approached it cautiously. There was a spring-loaded solenoid attached to a bar which was hinged to drop across the inside of the secret door, where it would fit into steel gudgeons on the panel.

It clicked again. “A Geiger,” said Pete disgustedly.

“Now why,” mused Sonny, “would they design a door to stay locked unless the general radioactivity went beyond a certain point? That’s what it is. See the relays? And the overload switch there? And this?”

“It has a manual lock, too,” Pete pointed out. The counter clicked again. “Let’s get out of here. I got one of those things built into my head these days.”

The door opened easily. They went out, closing it behind them. The keyhole was cleverly concealed in the crack between two boards.

They were silent as they made their way back to the QM labs. The small thrill of violation was gone and, for Pete Mawser at least, the hate was back, that and the shame. A few short weeks before, this base had been a part of the finest country on earth. There was a lot of work here that was secret, and a lot that was such purely progressive and unapplied research that it would be in the way anywhere else but in this quiet wilderness.

Sweat stood out on his forehead. They hadn’t struck back at their murderers! It was quite well known that there were launching sites all over the country, in secret caches far from any base or murdered city. Why must they sit here waiting to die, only to let the enemy—“enemies” was more like it—take over the continent when it was safe again?

He smiled grimly. One small consolation. They’d hit too hard: that was a certainty. Probably each of the attackers underestimated what the other would throw. The result—a spreading transmutation of nitrogen into deadly Carbon Fourteen. The effects would not be limited to the continent. What ghastly long-range effect the muted radioactivity would have on the overseas enemies was something that no one alive today could know.

Back at the furnace, Pete glanced at the temperature dial, then kicked at the latch control. The pilot winked out and then the door swung open. They blinked and started back from the raging heat within, then bent and peered. The razor was gone. A pool of brilliance lay on the floor of the compartment.

“Ain’t much left. Most of it oxidized away,” Pete grunted.

They stood together for a time with their faces lit by that small shimmering ruin. Later, as they walked back to the barracks, Sonny broke his long silence with a sigh. “I’m glad we did that, Pete. I’m awful glad we did that.”

At a quarter to eight they were waiting before the combination console in the barracks. All hands except Pete and Sonny and a wiry-haired, thick-set corporal named Bonze had elected to see the show on the big screen in the mess hall. The reception was better there, of course, but, as Bonze put it, “you don’t get close enough in a big place like that.”

“I hope she’s the same,” said Sonny, half to himself.

Why should she be? thought Pete morosely as he turned on the set and watched the screen begin to glow. There were many more of the golden speckles that had killed reception for the past two weeks. Why should anything be the same, ever again?

He fought a sudden temptation to kick the set to pieces. It, and Starr Anthim, were part of something that was dead. The country was dead, a real country—prosperous, sprawling, laughing, grabbing, growing and changing, leprous in spots with poverty and injustice, but healthy enough to overcome any ill. He wondered how the murderers would like it. They were welcome to it, now. Nowhere to go. No one to fight. That was true for every soul on earth now.

“You hope she’s the same,” he muttered.

“The show, I mean,” said Sonny mildly. “I’d like to just sit here and have it like … like—”

Oh, thought Pete mistily. Oh—that. Somewhere to go, that’s what it is, for a few minutes. “I know,” he said, all the harshness gone from his voice.

Noise receded from the audio as the carrier swept in. The light on the screen swirled and steadied into a diamond pattern. Pete adjusted the focus, chromic balance, and intensity. “Turn out the lights, Bonze. I don’t want to see anything but Starr Anthim.”

It
was
the same, at first. Starr Anthim had never used the usual fanfares, fade-ins, color, and clamor of her contemporaries. A black screen, then
click,
a blaze of gold. It was all there, in focus; tremendously intense, it did not change. Rather, the eye changed to take it in. She never moved for seconds after she came on; she was there, a portrait, a still face and a white throat. Her eyes were open and sleeping. Her face was alive and still.

Then, in the eyes which seemed green but were blue flecked with gold, an awareness seemed to gather, and they came awake. Only then was it noticeable that her lips were parted. Something in the eyes made the lips be seen, though nothing moved yet. Not until she bent her head slowly, so that some of the gold flecks seemed captured in the golden brows. The eyes were not, then, looking out at an audience. They were looking at me, and at
me,
and at ME.

“Hello—you,” she said. She was a dream, with a kid sister’s slightly irregular teeth.

Bonze shuddered. The cot on which he lay began to squeak rapidly. Sonny shifted in annoyance. Pete reached out in the dark and caught the leg of the cot. The squeaking subsided.

“May I sing a song?” Starr asked. There was music, very faint. “It’s an old one, and one of the best. It’s an easy song, a deep song, one that comes from the part of men and women that is mankind—the part that has in it no greed, no hate, no fear. This song is about joyousness and strength. It’s—my favorite. Isn’t it yours?”

The music swelled. Pete recognized the first two notes of the introduction and swore quietly. This was wrong. This song was not for … this song was part of—

Sonny sat raptly. Bonze lay still.

Starr Anthim began to sing. Her voice was deep and powerful, but soft, with the merest touch of vibrato at the ends of the phrases. The song flowed from her without noticeable effort, seeming to come from her face, her long hair, her wide-set eyes. Her voice, like her face, was shadowed and clean, round, blue and green but mostly gold:

“When you gave me your heart, you gave me the world,

You gave me the night and the day,

And thunder, and roses, and sweet green grass,

The sea, and soft wet clay.

“I drank the dawn from a golden cup,

From a silver one, the dark,

The steed I rode was the wild west wind,

My song was the brook and the lark.”

The music spiraled, caroled, slid into a somber cry of muted, hungry sixths and ninths; rose, blared, and cut, leaving her voice full and alone:

“With thunder I smote the evil of earth,

With roses I won the right,

With the sea I washed, and with clay I built,

And the world was a place of light!”

The last note left a face perfectly composed again, and there was no movement in it; it was sleeping and vital while the music curved off and away to the places where music rests when it is not heard.

Starr smiled.

“It’s so easy,” she said. “So simple. All that is fresh and clean and strong about mankind is in that song, and I think that’s all that need concern us about mankind.” She leaned forward. “Don’t you see?”

The smile faded and was replaced with a gentle wonder. A tiny furrow appeared between brows; she drew back quickly. “I can’t seem to talk to you tonight,” she said, her voice small. “You hate something.”

Hate was shaped like a monstrous mushroom. Hate was the random speckling of a video plate.

“What has happened to us,” said Starr abruptly, impersonally, “is simple, too. It doesn’t matter who did it—do you understand that?
It doesn’t matter.
We were attacked. We were struck from the east and from the west. Most of the bombs were atomic—there were blast bombs and there were dust bombs. We were hit by about five hundred and thirty bombs altogether, and it has killed us.”

She waited.

Sonny’s fist smacked into his palm. Bonze lay with his eyes open, quiet. Pete’s jaw hurt.

“We have more bombs than both of them put together. We
have
them. We are not going to use them.
Wait!
” She raised her hands suddenly, as if she could see into each man’s face. They sank back, tense.

“So saturated is the atmosphere with Carbon Fourteen that all of us in this hemisphere are going to die. Don’t be afraid to say it. Don’t be afraid to think it. It is a truth, and it must be faced. As the transmutation effect spreads from the ruins of our cities, the air will become increasingly radioactive, and then we must die. In months, in a year or so, the effects will be strong overseas. Most of the people there will die, too. None will escape completely. A worse thing will come to them than anything they gave us, because there will be a wave of horror and madness which is impossible to us. We are merely going to die. They will live and burn and sicken, and the children that will be born to them—” She shook her head, and her lower lip grew full. She visibly pulled herself together.

“Five hundred and thirty bombs—I don’t think either of our attackers knew just how strong the other was. There has been so much secrecy.” Her voice was sad. She shrugged slightly. “They have killed us, and they have ruined themselves. As for us—we are not blameless, either. Neither are we helpless to do anything—yet. But what we must do is hard. We must die—without striking back.”