The Best of Planet Stories, No. 1 (21 page)

An exulting yell burst behind them. Hague saw Sewell stare over his shoulder, face contorted, then the big medical technician sprang to his feet. Hague rolled hard, pulling his belt knife, and saw Sewell and a grey man-shape locked in combat above him, saw leathery grey claws drive a bronze knife into the medic's unarmored throat; and then the gunnery officer was on his feet, knife slashing, and the lizard-man fell across the prone Sewell. An almost audible silence fell over the forest, and Hague saw Rocketeers filtering back onto the cart trail, rifles cautiously extended at ready.

"Where's Clark?" he asked Lenkranz. The grey-haired metals man gazed back dully.

"I haven't seen him since we left the trail. I was with Swenson."

The others moved in, and Hague listed the casualties. Sewell, Bormann, and Lieutenant Clark. Gunnery Officer Clarence Hague was now in command. That the Junior Lieutenant now commanded Ground Expeditionary Patrol Number One trickled into his still numb brain; and he wondered for a moment what the Base Commander would think of their chances if he knew. Then he took stock of his little command.

There was young Crosse, his face twitching nervously. There was Blake, the tall, quiet bacteriologist; Lenkranz, the metals man; Hirooka, the Nisei; Balistierri; Whitcomb, the photographer, with a battered Hasselbladt still dangling by its neck cord against his armored chest. Swenson was still there, the big Swede crewman; and imperturable Sergeant Brian, who was now calmly cleaning the pneumatic gun's loading mechanism. And Helen, Bormann's skin bird, fluttering over the ration cart, beneath which Bormann and Sewell lay in the mud.. "Crosse, Lenkranz, burial detail. Get going." It was Hague's first order as Commander. He thought the two looked most woebegone of the party, and figured digging might loosen their nerves.

Crosse stared at him, and then sat suddenly against a tree bole.

"I'm not going to dig. I'm not going to march. This is crazy. We're going to get killed. I'll wait for it right here. Why do we keep walking and walking when we're going to die anyway?" His rising voice cracked, and he burst into hysterical laughter. Sergeant Brian rose quietly from his gun-cleaning, jerked Crosse to his feet, and slapped him into quiet. Then he turned to Hague.

"Shall I take charge of the burial detail, sir?"

Hague nodded; and suddenly his long dislike of the iron-hard Sergeant melted into warm liking and admiration. Brian was the man who'd get them all through.

The Sergeant knotted his dark brows truculently at Hague. "And I don't believe Crosse meant what he said. He's a very brave man. We all get a little jumpy. But he's a good man, a good Rocketeer."

* * * *

Three markers beside the trail, and a pile of dumped equipment marked the battleground when the cart swung forward again. Hague had dropped all the recording instruments, saving only Whitcomb's exposed films, the rations, rifle ammunition, and logbooks that had been kept, by different members of the science section. At his command, Sergeant Brian reluctantly smashed the pneumatic gun's firing mechanism, and left the gun squatting on its tripod beside charger and shell belts. With the lightened load, Hague figured three men could handle the cart, and he took his place with Brian and Crosse in the harness. The others no longer walked in the trail, but filtered between great root-flanges and tree boles on either side, guiding themselves by the Sonar's hum.

They left no more trail markers, and Hague cautioned them against making any unnecessary noise.

"No trail markers behind us. This mud is watery enough to hide footprints in a few minutes. We're making no noise, and we'll drop no more refuse. All they can hear will be the Sonar, and that won't carry far."

On the seventy-first day of the march, Hague squatted, fell almost to the ground, and grunted, "Take ten."

He stared at the stained, ragged scarecrows hunkered about him in forest mud.

"Why do we do it?" he asked no one in particular. "Why do we keep going, and going, and going? Why don't we just lie down and die? That would be the easiest thing I could think of right now." He knew that Rocket Service officers didn't talk that way, but he didn't feel like an officer, just a tired, feverish, bone-weary man.

"Have we got a great glowing tradition to inspire us?" he snarled. "No, we're just the lousy Rocketeers that every other service arm plans to absorb. We haven't a Grant or a John Paul Jones to provide an example in a tough spot. The U.S. Rocket Service has nothing but the memory of some ships that went out and never came back and you can't make a legend out of men who just plain vanish."

There was silence, and it looked as if the muddy figures were too exhausted to reply. Then Sergeant Brian spoke.

"The Rocketeers have a legend, sir."

"What legend, Brian?" Hague snorted.

"Here is the legend, sir. ‘George Easy Peter One'."

Hague laughed hollowly, but the Sergeant continued as if he hadn't heard.

"Ground Expeditionary Patrol One — the outfit a plant couldn't lick. Venus threw her grab bag at us, animals, swamps, poison plants, starvation, fever, and we kept right on coming. She just made us smarter, and tougher, and harder to beat. And we'll blast through these lizard-men and the jungle, and march into Base like the whole U.S. Armed Forces on review."

"Let's go," Hague called, and they staggered up again, nine gaunt bundles of sodden, muddy rags, capped in trim black steel helmets with cheek guards down. The others slipped off the trail and Hague, Brian, and Crosse pulled on the cart harness and lurched forward. The cart wheel-hub jammed against a tree bole, and as they strained blindly ahead to free it, a horn note drifted from afar.

"Here they come again," Crosse groaned.

"They-won't be-up-with us-for days." Hague grunted, while he threw his weight in jerks against the tow line. The cart lurched free with a lunge, and all three shot forward and sprawled raging in the muddy trail.

They sat wiping mud from their faces, when Brian stopped suddenly, ripped off his helmet and threw it aside, then sat tensely forward in an attitude of strained listening. Hague had time to wonder dully if the man's brain had snapped, before he crawled to his feet.

"Shut up, and listen" Brian was snarling. "Hear it! Hear it! It's a klaxon! Way off, about every two seconds!"

Hague tugged off his heavy helmet, and strained every nerve to listen. Over the forest silence it came with pulse-like regularity, a tiny whisper of sound.

He and Brian stared bright-eyed at each other, not quiet daring to say what they were thinking. Crosse got up and leaned like an empty sack against the cartwheel with an inane questioning look.

"What is it?" They stared at him without speaking, still listening intently. "It's the Base. That's it, it's the Base!"

Something choked Hague's throat, then he was yelling and firing his rifle. The rest came scuttling out of the forest shadow, faces breaking into wild grins, and they joined Hague, the forest rocking with gunfire. They moved forward, and Hirooka took up a thin chant:

"Oooooooh, the Rocketeers

have shaggy ears.

They're dirty-"

The rest of their lyrics wouldn't look well in print; but where the Rocketeers have gone, on every frontier of space, the ribald song is sung. The little file moved down the trail toward the klaxon sound. Behind them, something moved in the gloom, resolved itself into a reptile-headed, man-like thing that reared a small wood trumpet to fit its mouth; a soft horn note floated clear; and other shapes became visible, sprinting forward, flitting through the gloom...

* * * *

When a red light flashed over Chapman's desk, he flung down a sheaf of papers and hurried down steel-walled corridors to the number one shaft. A tiny elevator swept him to Odysseus’ upper side, where a shallow pit had been set in the ship's scarred skin, and a pneumatic gun installed. Chapman hurried past the gun and crew to stand beside a listening device. The four huge cones loomed dark against the clouds, the operator in their center was a blob of shadow in the dawn-light, where he huddled listening to a chanting murmur that came from his headset. Blake came running onto the gundeck; Bjornson and the staff officers were all there.

"Cut it into the Address system," Chapman told the Listener operator excitedly; and the faint sounds were amplified through the whole ship. From humming Address amplifiers, the ribald words, broke in a hoarse melody.

"The rocketeers have shaggy ears,

They're dirty-"

The rest described in vivid detail the prowess of racketeers in general.

"How far are they?" Chapman demanded.

The operator pointed at a dial, fingered a knob that altered his receiving cones split-seconds of angle. "They're about twenty-five miles, sir."

Chapman turned to the officers gathered in an exultant circle behind him.

"Branch, here's your chance for action. Take thirty men, our whippet tank, and go out to them. Bjornson, get the ‘copters aloft for air cover."

Twenty minutes later, Chapman watched a column assemble beneath the Odysseus’ gleaming side and march into the jungle, with the ‘copters buzzing west a moment later, like vindictive dragon flies.

Breakfast was brought to the men clustered at Warnings equipment, and to Chapman at his post on the gundeck. The day ticked away, the parade ground vanished in thickening clots of night; and a second dawn found the watchers still at their posts, listening to queer sounds that trickled from the speakers. The singing had stopped; but once they heard a note that a horn might make, and several times gobbling yells that didn't sound human. George One was fighting, they knew now. The listeners picked up crackling of rifle fire, and when that died there was silence.

The watchers heard a short cheer that died suddenly, as the relief column and George One met; and they waited and watched. Branch, who headed the relief column, communicated with the mother ship by the simple expedient of yelling, the sound being picked up by the listeners.

"They're coming in, Chapman. I'm coming behind to guard their rear. They've been attacked by some kind of lizard-men. I'm not saying a thing — see for yourself when they arrive."

Hours rolled past, while they speculated in low tones, the hush that held the ship growing taut and strained.

"Surely Branch would have told us if anything was wrong, or if the records were lost," Chapman barked angrily. "Why did he have to be so damned melodramatic?"

"Look, there — through the trees. A helmet glinted!"

The laconic Bjornson had thrown dignity to the winds, and capered like a drunken goat, as Rindell described it later.

Chapman stared down at the jungle edging the parade ground and caught a movement.

A man with a rifle came through the fringe and stood eyeing the ship in silence, and then came walking forward across the long, cindered expanse. From this height, he looked to Chapman like a child's lead soldier, a ragged, muddy, midget scarecrow. Another stir in the trees, and one more man, skulking like an infantry Ranker with rifle at ready. He, too, straightened and came walking quietly forward, A file of three men came next, leaning into the harness of a little metal cart that bumped drunkenly as they dragged it forward. An instant of waiting, and two more men stole from the jungle, more like attacking infantry than returning heroes. Chapman waited, and no more came. This was all.

"My God, no wonder Branch wouldn't tell us. There were thirty-two of them." Rindell's voice was choked.

"Yes, only seven." Chapman remembered his field glasses and focused them on the seven approaching men. "Lieutenant Hague is the only officer. And they're handing us the future of the U.S. Rocket Service on that little metal cart."

The quiet shattered and a yelling horde of men poured from Odysseus’ hull and engulfed the tattered seven, sweeping around them, yelling, cheering, and carrying them toward the mother ship.

Chapman looked a little awed as he turned to the officers behind him. "Well, they did it. We forward these records, and we've proven that we can do the job." He broke into a grin. "What am I talking about? Of course we did the job. We'll always do the job. We're the Rocketeers, aren't we?"

---

Side by side they would live, year after year, hating each other more fiercely each day. And in the end, if their mission succeeded, the creature would die and the man would find insanity.

"No," said the shadowy man who sat high above the floor on the chair of the time-machine, "you can't do that."

"Can't, eh?"

"No!"

"Sorry."

For a second, Bryan was shaken with indecision. This is intolerable, he thought. I'll turn the doorknob. After all, he has no real jurisdiction over any actions. Nor has he, in spite of the stakes involved, any right to meddle in my life the way he has.

His rebel thoughts endured for only that second. His grip loosened on the doorknob, his gloved hand fell away. He actually took a few steps backward, as if he would negate that action which led toward disaster. Then he turned quickly, urged his undernourished body back up the threadbare hall, into his equally threadbare room. Off came his shapeless hat, and overcoat which was ripped at seams and pockets, and he sat down, brain numb, the sensations of his stomach forgotten in the greater hunger.

Where is she? Who is she!

He did not have the courage to meet the cold eyes of the man who sat in shadowy outline amongst nebulous, self-suspended machinery, although that being watched him with merciless inflexibility of purpose. He had only the courage to speak, while his eyes fixed dully on the gingerbreaded metal bed with its sagging mattress.

"The Alpha Group?"

"The Alpha Group," the shadowy man spoke coldly, in agreement, "Punctus four. You would have met her."

"I thought so. I felt it."

"You felt nothing of the sort. You have an exaggerated notion of the perceptive qualities of your psyche."

"I named the Alpha Group," said Bryan wearily.

"Because for the first three or four years of our association, the Alpha Group will predominate. And because you have come to associate certain of my facial expressions and tonal qualities with the group. There was no telepathic pick-up from the girl. She is not aware that you exist. Nor will she ever be aware, as long as you choose to work in close collaboration with me-and as a humanitarian yourself, you will not refuse to collaborate."

Bryan leaned back in the worn armchair, grinning twistedly, though his heart was lead in his breast. He held the long-lashed eyes of the god-like creature with a flickering sidewise glance. "Perhaps you will choose to stop collaborating with me."

The nostrils of the being flared. "No. Never. We will continue-we must continue to work together until the Alpha, Delta, and Gamma groups are exhausted-"

"Or until-"

"Or until I commit suicide as you suggested."

"Yes."

Bryan lost his fear that he could not bear it, might disobey a command from this creature. Suddenly, he was amused. Bryan was chained to this creature, but no less than this creature was chained to him; chained to him for ten long years, or until he might take his own life.

Creature? Yes'. For certainly any animal that is not homo sapien is a creature. Even if he be homo superior, of the year Eight-hundred thousand A.D., and has invented a time-machine, and has but one powerful, compelling thought in mind-to save the human race. Or that race of creatures which had stemmed from the human race. That was it. After fighting and imagining, aspiring and succeeding, for a good many millions of years, man was about to be snuffed out. So the shadowy being-homo superior-had told Bryan on that day a week ago when he had appeared in this room. The human race, far in the future, would destroy itself unless-unless Bryan Barret did not do something that he had done; did not become something that he had become.

The thoughts of the creature had impinged on his brain clearly after the first moments of fright. Bryan had listened, and believed.

"So I'm a diversifal," he had muttered. "Bryan Barret, liberal, radical, diversifal."

"You are a diversifal. I can coin no other word for it."

"And she is a diversifal."

"Yes!"

"And, our child would be a mutant."

"Yes.

"I, thought," Bryan had said, his thoughts sinking heavily into a morass of intangibles, "I thought, if one wants to follow the theory to its logical conclusion, that there are an infinite number of probable worlds."

"Are there?" The depthless eyes of the being, looking down at Bryan from his shadowy height above the floor, had been contemptuous with disinterest. "I know of only two. They are the only two with which I am concerned. A thousand years in my future they warred-and humanity destroyed itself. This I know. This I must prevent. From your unborn mutant child my race stems."

"Your race?" Bryan had exclaimed.

"Yes."

"You are seeking to prevent your own world of probability?'

"Yes." The long-lashed eyes flickered. The being leaned forward a little, staring down at Bryan. "Why not, Bryan Barret? Does it matter? It is my world of probability which discovered the manner of traveling to the other world. It is my world which waged the war. It is my world, your world, which is-will be at fault. I am selfless. You know what it is to be selfless. You can understand. And, after all, you are the diversifal — the splitting factor."

Bryan was inwardly shaken. The selfless superman. Or, and this was more likely, the selfless scientist. The picture, in its entirety, had come quite clearly to Bryan Barrett. He was a diversifal, because in him impinged events any of which might lead to the creation of a certain time-branch; a time-branch which must not be created if humanity in a far distant era were to survive. The concept of worlds of if was not new to Bryan, nor was the idea of the, future of man outside his thoughts. He dealt with the future, with the liberation of man from his bondage to tyranny. He was fighting for a future wherein man would know no poverty, no social backwardness; for a time when man could come into his own, blossom forth and make true use of the boundless resources that were possible. Small wonder, then, that he could accept the idea of a man from the far future without trouble, and could decide to give ten years of his life to the cause for which this man from the future was fighting.

But already the first week of that ten years had become a nightmare.

"You've kept me here," he now told the being, "three days, without any food except some stale cakes. Why?"

"Because the events of the Alpha Group are worked around your every probable action like a net. If you left this house before morning, you would meet her." His sharp-pointed face turned hard. "The psychological data I have on her is sketchy. I can control your actions. I cannot control hers, nor guess what they would be. And also, had you left here at any time during the last three days, you would have made an acquaintance whom you would not see again for eight, perhaps nine years."

"The Gamma Group!"

"The Gamma Group. That acquaintance would show up as a probable event in the Gamma Group which would lead to tickets to a musical comedy in a New York-" He stopped speaking, but Bryan Barret, without knowing it, was watching him with cunning expression. The man from the future sneered. "Your obvious, unconscious desire to trick me would sicken even you, Bryan. Every word I speak is to your unconscious merely a clue to her identity. You must fight that."

Sweat started on Bryan's square, thinning face. He bowed forward, feeling as if he were about to burst. "I can leave here tomorrow morning?" His voice was muffled.

"Yes. And your way of life must change. You will go to Hannicut, editor of The Daily News-Star, and tell him you'd like to take that job he offered you last year."

Bryan came to his feet in a blaze of anger. "No! You know why I didn't take that job!"

"I know why. But it is still necessary for you to lose your integrity if we are to succeed. Go to Hannicut and tell him you're willing to falsify the news either by commission or omission. Also you -will cancel your membership in the so-called radical organization, Freedom For All. And in any other liberal organization you may belong to."

He looked calmly down into Bryan's stricken, agonized face. "I know what those associations mean to you-and to freedom-loving men everywhere. I am truly sorry. I conceive the future to be more important than this present, however. This, Bryan Barrett, is your first step to wealth and power. A financial gulf must be created as an additional precaution between you and her. A gulf that a poverty-stricken person can never cross. She is poor. She will always be poor..."

It was strange the way that nightmarish week turned into a month, that month into a year. Hannicut, editor of The Daily News-Star, performed a blunder from the viewpoint of the man who owned that newspaper and a hundred others throughout the world: He printed a story which told the truth about a recent labor-big business dispute. Hannicut's boss fired him, and in elevating Bryan Barret to the post warned him never to give labor a break, else he'd go the way of Hannicut.

"Take the job," came the cold thoughts of the man from the future.

Bryan got the first damp issue back from the pressroom the next day, and looked at it with sickened eyes. He left the office with his hat pulled low over his eyes. Newsboys were hawking the edition — big scare heads which told of another strike in the coal mines, and never mentioned one word about the strike a certain big business corporation was pulling against the government. Which never said a thing about the filibuster a certain senator had pulled in Congress to defeat a pro-minority bill.

In the second week of Bryan's editorship, he started to leave the office. Back in Bryan's hotel suite, Entore, man from the future, sent another wordless command.

"Do not leave the office now."

"No?" Bryan muttered the word from the graying mustache he now wore.

"No. Two men are waiting downstairs-two rowdies front the Freedom For All League. They are intending to throw bricks."

Bryan's fists clenched. "There are no rowdies in the Freedom For All League. No matter what the newspapers claim."

"These men once knew you, when you fought tyranny together. They are law-abiding men. But something has snapped in them. In their eyes, you are a traitor. They could never punish you by law. They are willing to sacrifice their own lives if they can kill you."

"Thanks."

Bryan sank into a chair in the corner of his office. His head bowed, and he knew there was gray in his hair, gray that the last year had put there. Later Entore spoke again. Bryan left.

He had no sooner reached the street and signaled a taxi than Entore spoke again. "Do not take that taxi. Walk one block left. The Alpha Group. That taxi will have a minor street accident. Among those who gather in the crowd will be she."

Bryan stood with his hand upraised. The taxi was sloping in toward him. His heart thudded. He felt a voiceless, impassioned longing, as if a mind, a human mind, were reaching across distances and touching his without saying anything. Her mind. Then he turned and walked one block left and took another taxi. He sat in the taxi, cold and graying, a man who was rising in power and wealth as the editor of a great metropolitan daily. A man who by all the rules of human conduct was a quisling of the worst sort. Yet, could they, his former friends and fellow fighters, know what hell he was going through now because he was looking farther into the future than they could ever hope to look? They were fighting against the corruptness of present civilization. Someday their fight would bear fruit in a nationwide, and later on a worldwide, Utopia. Bryan Barret had been forced to look farther ahead than that. To and beyond the year 800,000 A.D. They would never understand.

"Turn your head to the right," came the command.

Automatically Bryan turned his head. "Why?" he asked dully.

"The Gamma Group, seven years from now. Had you kept your eyes on the left side of the street, Punchis nineteen of the Gamma group would have occurred. You would have seen a woman who resembled your mother so strongly that later on, this week you would write a letter to her in your hometown, wondering if she had been in New York. She would have answered quickly, wondering why you wrote so seldom, and telling you she hadn't been in New York, but that, come to think of it, she would make the trip to see you. You would have met her in Penn Station, and in the excitement would have lost your billfold. A traveler would have found the billfold, taken the money, and dropped the billfold in a drawer at his home. Seven years later, his wife, cleaning house, would have found the billfold and returned it to you. You would have rewarded the woman. A few days later, you would meet her on the street; with her, a friend-"

"She!" Bryan interposed huskily.

"Yes," Entore said. "The possibilities of meeting her through the Gamma Group of events are the shadowy ones. One by one I am destroying the possibility of events both in the Delta and the Gamma Groups. But both will be relatively strong long after the Alpha Group no longer exists."

Bryan went back to his hotel suite without eating. Entore was there, staring at him with impersonal, cold glance.

Bryan said, his hand still on the closed door, "I won't be able to stand much more of this."

Entore leaned forward on the console of his machine. "I, too, am sacrificing," he pointed out.

"Are you?" Bryan's eyes and voice tore across at him with sarcasm. "You can disappear back to your own time for an hour, a week, a year, if you choose, and return back to this same second of time without my being aware that you had gone. You have relief from the vigil. I have none. Ten years?" His laugh was brittle. "I'll go crazy!"

Entore said nothing.

Bryan ground out, "You'd want me confined in a sanitarium, Entore. That would be similar to death, as far as destroying the Groups goes. No, thanks. I'll hang on."

He looked back at Entore, as impersonally as Entore was looking at him. Bryan thought, as he looked at the assemblage of machinery. He's shadowy, vague. He has-no real substance in this world. I can see through him and his machinery, a little. But he's partly solid. I've touched the machine. I've had to push hard to get my hand through. Maybe a bullet...