Part 13 (1/2)

”You're so right. Actually, we owe her a vote of thanks for what she's done for us.”

”We certainly do. I'd tell her so myself, too, if it wouldn't... but say... s'pose she's reading us right now?”

The man stiffened momentarily, then said, ”We haven't said a word I wouldn't want her to hear. If you are on us, Bobby, I say this-thanks; and you can put it down in your book that we're both with you until the last clang of the gong. Check, Cecily?”

”How I check!” She kissed him fervently. ”You were right; I should have talked to you before. I didn't have a leg to stand on.”

”That allegation I deny.” He laughed, put his right hand on her well-exposed left leg, and squeezed. ”This, in case n.o.body ever told you before-I thought I had-is one of the only perfect pair of such ever produced.”

She put her hand over his, pressed it even tighter against her leg, and grinned up at him; and for a time action took place of words. Then she pulled her mouth away from his and leaned back far enough to ask, ”You don't suppose she's watching us now, do you?”

”No. Definitely not. She's no Peeping Thomasina. But even if she were-now that you're you again, my redheaded bundle of joy, we have unfinished business on the agenda. And anyway, you're not exactly a shrinking violet.”

”Why, I am too!” She widened her eyes at him in outraged innocence. ”That's a vile and base canard, sir. I'm just as much of a Timid Soul as you are, you Fraidy Freddie, you-why, I'm absodamlutely the shrinkingest little violet you ever laid your cotton-pickin' eyes on!”

”Okay, Little Vi, let's jet.” He got up and helped her to her feet; then, arms tightly around each other and savoring each moment, they moved slowly toward a closed door.

The cold-war stalemate that had begun sometime early in the twentieth century had become a way of life. Contrary to the belief of each side over the years, the other had not collapsed. Dictators.h.i.+p and so-called democracy still coexisted; both were vastly stronger than they had ever been before. Each had enough superpowerful weapons to destroy all life on Earth, but neither wanted a lifeless and barren world; each wanted to rule the Earth as it was. Therefore the Big Bangs had not been launched; each side was doing its subtle best to outwit, to undermine, and/or to overthrow the other.

WestHem was expanding into s.p.a.ce; EastHem, as far as WestHem's Intelligence could find out, was waiting, with characteristic Oriental patience, for the capitalistic and imperialistic government of the West to fall apart because of its own innate weaknesses.

This situation existed when the Galactic Federation was formed; specifically to give all the peoples of all the planets a unified, honest, and just government;, when Secretary of Labor Deissner, acting through Antonio Grimes, called all the milk-truck drivers of Metropolitan New York out on strike.

At three forty five of the designated morning all the milk-delivery trucks of Depot Eight-taking one station for example; the same thing was happening at all were in the garage and the heavy steel doors were closed and locked. The gates of the yard were locked and barricaded. The eight-man-deep picket line was composed one-tenth of drivers, nine-tenths of heavily-armed, heavy-muscled hoodlums and plug-uglies. They were ready, they thought, for anything.

At three fifty a fleet of armored half-tracks lumbered up and began to disgorge armored men. Their armor, while somewhat reminiscent of that worn by the chivalry of old, was not at all like it in detail. Built of leybyrdite, it was somewhat lighter, immensely stronger, and very much more efficient. Its wide-angle visors, for instance, were made of bullet-proof, crack-proof, scratch-proof neo-gla.s.s. Formation was made and from one of the trucks an eighty-decibel voice roared out: ”Strikers, attention! We are coming through; the regular deliveries are going to be made. We don't want to kill any more of you than we have to, so those of you with only clubs, bra.s.s knucks, knives, lead pipes, and such stuff, we'll try to only knock out as cold as frozen beef. You guys with the guns, every one of you who lets go one burst will get shot. Non-fatally, we hope, but we can't guarantee it. Now, you d.a.m.n fool bystanders” -it is remarkable how quickly a New York crowd can gather, even at four o'clock in the morning= keep right on crowding up, as close as you can get. Anybody G.o.d d.a.m.ned fool enough to stand gawking in the line of fire of fifty machine guns ought to get killed-so just keep on standing there and save some other fool-killer the trouble of sending you to the morgue in baskets. Okay, men, give 'em h.e.l.l!”

To give credit to the crowd's intelligence, most of it did depart-and at speed-before the shooting began. New Yorkers were used to being chivvied away from scenes of interest; they were not used to being invited, in such a loud tone of such savage contempt, to stay and be slaughtered. Of the few who stayed, the still fewer survivors wished fervently, later, that they had taken off as fast as they could run.

Armored men strode forward, swinging alloy-sheathed fists, and men by the dozens went down flat. Then guns went into action and the armored warriors fell down and rolled hap-hazardly on the pavement; for no man, however strong, can stand up against the kinetic energy of a stream of heavy bullets. Except for a few bruises, however, they were not injured. They were not even deafened by the boiler-shop clangor within their horribly resounding sh.e.l.ls of metal-highly efficient earplugs had seen to that.

Those steel-jacketed bullets, instead of penetrating that armor, ricocheted off in all directions-and it was only then that the obdurately persistent bystanders-those of them that could, that is-ran away.

The machine-gun phase of the battle didn't last very long, either. In the a.s.sault-proof half-tracks expert riflemen peered through telescopic sights and .30-caliber rifles barked viciously. The strikers' guns went silent.

Leybyrdite-s.h.i.+elded mobile torchers clanked forward and the ma.s.sed pickets fled: no man in his right mind is ever going to face willingly the sixty-three-hundred degree heat of the oxy-acetylene flame. The gates vanished. The barriers disappeared. The locked doors opened. Then, with an armored driver aboard, each delivery truck was loaded as usual and went calmly away along its usual route; while ambulances and meat-wagons brought stretchers and baskets and carried away the wounded and the dead.

Nor were those trucks attacked, or even interfered with. It had been made abundantly clear that it would be the attackers who would suffer.

But what of the source of New York's milk? The s.p.a.ceport and Way Nineteen? Pickets went there, too, of course; but what they saw there stopped them in their tracks. Just inside the entrance, one on each side of the Way, sat those two tremendous, invulnerable, enigmatic super-tanks. They did not do anything. Nothing at all. They merely sat there; but that was enough. No one there knew what those things could or would do; and no one there wanted to find out. Not, that is, the hard way.

Nor did the Metropolitan Police do anything. There was nothing they could do. This was, most definitely, not their dish. This was war. War between the Galaxians on one side and Labor, backed by WestHem's servile government, on the other. The government's armed forces, however, did not take part in the action. At the first move of the day, Maynard had taken care of that.

”Get the army in on this if you like,” he had told Deissner, flatly. ”Anything and everything you care to, up to and including the heaviest nuclear devices you have.

We are three long subs.p.a.ce jumps ahead of anything you can do, and the rougher you want to play it the more of a shambles New York will be when it's over.”

Therefore, after that one brief but vicious battle, everything remained-on the surface-peaceful and serene. Milk-deliveries were regular and punctual, undisturbed by any overt incident. The only difference-on the surface-was that the milk-truck drivers wore leybyrdite instead of white duck.

Beneath that untroubled surface, however, everything seethed and boiled. Grimes and his lieutenants raved and swore. Deissner gritted his teeth in quiet, futile desperation. The Nameless One of EastHem, completely unaccustomed to frustration and highly allergic to it, went almost mad. He now knew that the Galaxians had the most powerful planet in the galaxy and he could not find it.

This situation was, of course, much too unstable to endure, and Nameless was the first to crack. He probably went completely mad. At any rate, his first move was to liquidate both Secretary of Labor Deissner and Chief Mediator Wilson. Nor was there anything of finesse about these a.s.sa.s.sinations. Two multi-ton blockbusters were detonated, one in each of two apartment hotels, and the fact that over three thousand persons died meant nothing to EastHem's tyrant. His second move was to make Antonio Grimes the boss of all WestHem. Whereupon Grimes called a general strike; every union man of the Western Hemisphere walked out; and all h.e.l.l was out for noon.

The union people, however, were not the only ones who walked out. Executives, supervisors, engineers, and top bracket technicians did too, in droves, and disappeared from Earth; and they did not go empty-handed. For instance, the top technical experts of Communications Incorporated (a wholly-owned subsidiary of InStell) worked for an hour or so apiece in the recesses of their switch-banks and packed big carrying-cases before they left.

Grimes knew and counted upon the fact that WestHem's economy, half automated though it was, could not function without his union men and women at work. He must also have known the obverse; that it could not function, either, without the brains that had brought automation into being in the first place and that kept it running-the only brains that understood what those piled-up ma.s.ses of electronic gear were doing. He must also have known that in any fight to the finish Labor would suffer with the rest; hence he did not expect a finish fight. He was superbly confident that Capital, this time as always before, would surrender. He was wrong.

When Grimes found every one of his own communications channels dead, he tried frantically to restore enough service to handle Labor's campaign, but there was nothing he or his union operators could do. (They were still called ”operators”, although there were no longer any routine manual operations to be performed).

These operators, although highly skilled in the techniques of keeping the millions of calls flowing smoothly through the fantastically complex mazes of their central exchanges, were limited by their own unions' rules to their own extremely narrow field of work. An operator reported trouble, but she must not, under any conditions, try to fix it. Nor could if she tried. No operator knew even the instrumentation necessary to locate any particular failure, to say nothing of being able to interpret the esoteric signals of that instrumentation.

There were independent experts, of course, and Grimes found them and put them to work. These experts, however, could find nothing with which to work. The key codes, the master diagrams, and the all-important frequency manuals had vanished. They could not even find out what, or how much, of sabotage had been done. It would be quicker, they reported, to jury-rig a few channels for Labor's own use. They could do that in a day or so; in just a little longer than it would take to fly technicians to the various cities he wanted in his network. Grimes told them to go ahead; but before the Labor leaders could accomplish much of anything, EastHem launched every intercontinental ballistic missile it had.

WestHem's warning systems and defenses were very good indeed. The Department of Defense had its own communications system, which of course was not affected by the strike. In seconds, then, after the first Eastern missile left the ground, the retaliatory monsters of the West began to climb their ladders.

And in minutes the Nameless One and hundreds of the hard core of the Party died; and thousands of his lesser minions were in vehicles hurtling toward subs.p.a.cers which had for many months been ready to go and fully programmed for flight.

Chapter 15 THE UNIVERSITY OF PSIONICS.

EARTH As such did not have a s.p.a.ce navy; there was no danger of attack from s.p.a.ce and, as far as Earth was concerned, the outplanets could take care of themselves. Nor did either WestHem or EastHem; with their ICBM's they did not need or want any subs.p.a.ce-going battles.h.i.+ps. Nor did any of the planets. Newmars and Galmetia were heavily armed, but their armament was strictly defensive.

Thus InStell had been forced, over the years, to develop a navy of its own, to protect its far-flung network of merchant traffic lines against piracy; which had of course moved into s.p.a.ce along with the richly-laden merchantmen. As traffic increased, piracy increased; so protection had to increase, too. Thus, over the years and gradually, there came about a very peculiar situation: The only real navy in all the reaches of explored s.p.a.ce-the only law-enforcement agency of all that s.p.a.ce -was a private police force not responsible to any government!

It hunted down and destroyed pirate s.h.i.+ps in s.p.a.ce. It sought out and destroyed pirate bases. Since no planetary court had jurisdiction, InStell set up a s.p.a.ce-court, in which such few marauders as were captured alive were tried, convicted, and sentenced to death. For over a century there had been bitter criticism of these ”highhanded tactics,” particularly on Earth. However, InStell didn't like it, either-it was expensive. Wherefore, for the same hundred years or so, InStell had been trying to get rid of it; but no planet-particularly Earth-or no Planetary League or whatever-would take it over. Every- body wanted to run it, but n.o.body would pick up the tab. So InStell kept on being the only Law in s.p.a.ce.

This navy was small, numbering only a hundred capital s.h.i.+ps; but each of those s.h.i.+ps was an up-to-the-minute and terribly efficient engine of destruction, bristling with the most modem, most powerful weapons known to man.

High above Earth's surface, precisely s.p.a.ced both vertically and horizontally, hung poised the weirdest, the motleyest fleet ever a.s.sembled. InStell's entire navy was there, clear down to tenders, scouts, and gigs; but they were scarcely a drop in the proverbial bucket. InStell's every liner, freighter, lofter, and shuttle that could be there was there; MetEnge's every ore-boat, tanker, scout and scow that could possibly be spared; all the Galaxians every available vessel of every type and kind, from Hatfield's palatial subs.p.a.ce-going private yacht down to Maynard's grandsons' four-boy flit about. More, every s.p.a.ceyard of the planets had been combed; every clunker, and every junker not yet cut completely up, was taken over. Drives and controls had been repaired or re- placed. Hulls had been made air-tight. Many of these derelicts, however, were in such bad shape that they could not be depended upon to stay air-tight; hence many of those skeleton crews worked, ate, and slept in s.p.a.cesuits complete except for helmets-and with those helmets at belts at the ready.

But each unit of that vast and ridiculously nondescript fleet could carry men, missile-killers, computer-coupled! locators, and launchers, and that was all that was necessary. Since there was so much area to cover, it was the number of control stations that was important, not their size or quality. The Galaxians had had to use every craft whose absence from its usual place would not point too directly at Maynard's plan.

The fleet was not evenly distributed, of course. Admiral Dann knew the location of every missile-launching base on Earth, and his coverage varied accordingly. Having made formation, he waited. His flags.h.i.+p covered EastHem's main base; he personally saw EastHem's first Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile streak upward. ”This is it, boys, go to work,” he said quietly into his microphone, and the counter-action began. A computer whirred briefly and a leybyrdite missile-killer erupted from a launcher. Erupted, and flashed away on collision course at an acceleration so appallingly high that it could not be tracked effectively even by the radar of that age. That acceleration can be stated in Tellurian gravities; but the figure, by itself, would be completely meaningless to the mind. Everyone knows all about one Earthly gravity. Everyone has seen a full-color tri-di of hard trained men undergoing ten and fifteen gees; has seen what it does to them. But ten thousand gravs? Or a hundred thousand? Or two hundred thousand? Such figures are entirely meaningless.

Consider instead the bullet in the barrel of a magnum rifle at, and immediately after, the instant of ignition of the propellant charge. This concept is much more informative. Starting from rest, in a time of a little over one millisecond and in a distance of less than three feet, that bullet attains a velocity of more than four thousand feet per second. Those missile-killers moved like that, except more so and continuously. They were the highest acceleration things ever put into production by man.

The first killer struck its target and both killer and target vanished into nothingness; a nothingness so inconceivably hot that the first thing to become visible was a fire-ball some ten miles in diameter. But there was nothing of fission about that frightfulness; GalFed's warheads operated on the utterly incomprehensible heat generated by dead-shorted Chaytor engines during the fractional microsecond each engine lasted before being whiffed into subatomic vapor by the stark ferocity of its own performance.

Missiles by the hundreds were launched; from EastHem, from WestHem, from the poles and from the oceans and from the air; and in their hundreds they were blown into submolecular and subatomic vapor. Thus it made no difference what kind of a warhead any missile had carried. Fission, fusion, chemical, or biological; all one: no a.n.a.lysis, however precise and thorough, could ever reveal what any of those cargoes had originally been. Nor did any missile reach its destination. Admiral Dann had s.h.i.+ps enough, and missile-killers in thousands to spare.

Meanwhile hundreds of small, highly-specialized vessels had been flying hither and yon above certain areas of the various oceans. They were hunting, with ultrasensitive instrumentation, all Earth's missile-carrying submarines. They didn't bother about the missiles launched by the subs-the boys and girls upstairs would take care of them-they were after the pig-boats themselves. Their torpedoes were hunters, too. Once a torpedo's finders locked on, the sub had no chance whatever of escape. There was a world-jarring concussion where each submarine had been, and a huge column of water and vapor drove upward into and through the stratosphere.

This furious first phase of the ”police action” lasted except for the sub-hunt-only minutes. Then every missile-launching site on Earth was blasted out of existence. So also were a few subs.p.a.cers attempting to leave EastHem-all Earth had been warned once and had been told that the warning would not be given twice.

Then the immense fleet re-formed, held position, and waited a few hours; after which time Dann ordered all civilian s.h.i.+ps to return to their various ports. The navy stayed on 'in its entirety. It would continue to destroy all s.h.i.+ps attempting to leave Earth.