The Secret Galactics Page 13

  And he didn’t really ask now. Images sort of winked through his mind. The detectives he had hired to watch her during his … great … years, when sometimes she and he didn’t eat a meal at the same table for weeks. His insane suspicion, unwarranted distrust, outrageous accusations and false fury, which went on for years—the memories of that flickered past his mind’s eye, but made only a weak impression. Didn’t seem all that bad. An unfortunate game, he called it now.

  The awfulest irony of that game, of course, he didn’t know. For almost a decade and a half he had sardonically accepted that she was really living a blank virginal existence; and his thought had been that, if he persisted with his game, one of these years she would break down, and, rather than have nothing, agree to the limited relationship that he was prepared to offer. She must realize—that had been his thought—that something was better than a lifetime of nothing.

  And so he had made his wild threat that he would name Dr. Walter Drexel as his murderer—and as her lover (which would implicate her).

  At last, that finally broke the barriers inside Marie. To save herself, she became, unknown to Carl, the mistress of Dr. Angus MacKerrie.

  Although he had made occasional revolting remarks about MacKerrie to Marie, truth was that of the various men of his and Marie’s acquaintance, Carl had never devoted any real suspicion to MacKerrie. What the surgeon did with his personal life had not seriously crossed Carl’s mind. Presumably, MacKerrie had a woman—or women—out there in the great city. But Carl had never been curious.

  All in an instant that vagueness was penetrated. The prospect of MacKerrie coming along on the fifty-year journey brought an horrendous mental image of Marie and MacKerrie as the only human, body-possessing couple … For God’s sake, they’ll have no alternative but to seek each other’s companionship—

  The qualm was utterly convincing to an ex-sex maniac like Carl. After his initial enthusiasm for the trip, he had already had second thoughts. And third. And fourth. Yet, since there seemed no escape from these determined alienoids, he merely made his attempt to contact Marie more directly: by peering hopefully through the TV camera eye in his part of their house. And she had actually come into the room, but in her typical maddening fashion—never giving him a thought—had not noticed. But there was a second plan, another hope, earlier mentally put off until midnight.

  No putting off now. The Deeans, in capturing him, had also transported the specially built van in which he had made his two dangerous journeys. Swiftly, Carl interconnected with the van mechanism. And saw presently that the vehicle was parked inside a high fence besides a building (the Gannott house?) There were many other cars nosed in parallel to his.

  Carl made a swift, four-sided survey of the parking lot. Saw no movement. And acted without delay. He started the motor, waited half a minute for it to warm up, then eased it backward out of the parking space. He had intended, if necessary, to break forcibly through—the wooden fence and charge out onto the nearby street. But, as he completed his backing maneuver, he saw that there was a driveway leading through trees. Silently, his van rolled along it, and emerged onto a residential street. Carl turned it north. At the first comer, he paused, and backed up until he could read the street signs: Jolson Road and 18th Avenue.

  With that, he was off, his destination the valley home of Police Lieutenant Barry Turcott—the only man that he could think of that he could trust. What he could do with Turcott, or Turcott could do for him when he got him across the considerable distance from one end of a large city to the other, was not clear.

  But he had no other meaningful hope.

  He was still considering what he might do, still on a darkened street heading toward a still distant freeway on-ramp, when another car, a black sedan, emerged from a side avenue, and swerved in behind him.

  The very next instant, a thin beam of light reached out from the hood of the bigger car and bridged the distance to Carl’s van. Bright, oh, bright, but pencil thin, the beam. Carl could not see where it touched his vehicle. But the van tilted and began the developing wobble that sickeningly signaled a flat, rear tire.

  Mere moments later, the swaying and tendency to out-of-controllness convinced that normally cynical but persistent philosopher, Dr. Carl Hazzard, that the game was up.

  Appalled but resigned, he slowed even more, edged bumpily toward the curb, and stopped. Since he was curious, he maintained his connection with the disabled van while the sedan drew up alongside. The two men in the front seat of the car did not get out. Nor did they lower their windows.

  Pause. Then a spindle-shaped glinting device reared into view. It also came out of some recess in the hood, but this time from near the windshield. The brightness that flashed from it seemed to leap from the spindle into the driver of Carl’s van. Carl, deducing murder intent, allowed the dummy to sink back against the seat.

  Hastily, he now turned up the volume on the directional microphone system at that side of the van. What he picked up by this means was blurred. But he heard it. Inside the closed car, the man beside the driver said, ‘Brother Metnov.’

  The reply came from a speaker system somewhere in the front seat. ‘Metnov speaking, brother.’

  The voice that uttered these stereotypes was a muffled baritone. But it had a quality in it … different. Hearing that quality, Carl had the thought; who could be that confident?

  The first voice was speaking again; ‘An 8-P accomplished, brother.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Only one so far.’

  ‘Can’t do better than a hundred per cent,’ said the ‘great’ voice of ‘Brother’ Metnov.

  ‘Where are you now, brother?’

  ‘Code 8-A,’

  ‘Any developments?’

  ‘Not since 8-G.’ The voice added firmly, ‘Goodbye, brother.’

  ‘Goodbye, Brother Metnov.’

  There was the silence, evidently, of disconnection. Then the voice of the driver said matter-of-factly, ‘Better call Susan, Horace, and tell her you’ll be home late.’

  ‘What about you calling Muriel?’

  ‘Are you out of your mind? If she gets me on a line she’ll want me to prove where I am. I—’

  The fadeout was swift because the machine had started forward. Its taillights receded rapidly into the dark distance of the tree-lined street.

  Carl stayed connected—for a while. Until vague awareness began to come, then, of what was happening where his ‘body’ was. He finally let the impressions come through. And made his switch of attention from the useless van back to … himself.

  Barely in time to see the finale of the journey on a screen inside the lift. There, in the near distance, a long, dark shape was visible. The big vessel seemed in the manner of space objects to drift closer.

  At first, Carl merely watched dully, thinking all the time of Marie and MacKerrie. Then as, only seconds later, the thing out there took on the size of a small mountain, his scientific interest was finally, if briefly, stirred.

  The fascination, and absorption, came as the colossus became a curving metal wall at least a thousand feet high and some indeterminate but immensely greater length: half a mile, even two thirds, he guessed roughly.

  Before he could make a more precise estimate, the module drifted too close for an overall view. Because of the blank wall effect, then, it was not obvious at what point the outer wall merely loomed above and below and to every side, and when the module actually entered an equally dark and hard-to-make-out airlock.

  Chapter Seventeen

  WHITE HELLFIRE IN THE COMPUTER

  Marie followed Silver because there was nothing else to do.

  The younger woman had opened her eyes several minutes before. Looked around with darting gaze. Eyes widened as she evidently recognized where she was. She had sat up with a convulsive movement of her long, lean body.

  Swiftly, in a low voice, and without showing any antagonism over what had happened, she described the coming of the ship, Takeover. And what
that coming meant.

  Then she slid off the bed, and whispered to Marie, ‘I assume that now you’ve absolutely got to help me do what has to be done.’

  Marie was not yet at the speaking level with Silver. She merely mutely nodded.

  Amazing that none of her earlier feeling against this woman remained. The absolutely automatic reaction of firing the gas capsule discharger at Silver seemed exactly that to her now: Automatic. And of course irrational.

  The thought ended. Silver was running, heading toward the farthest away clothes closet. She literally jerked the door open. As swiftly turned a light on. And then fumbled forward past a slew of fluffy feminine clothes items, and did something else.

  Marie, who had followed her, involuntarily said, ‘Oooo.’

  A part of the rear of the closet had silently folded out of sight. Visible beyond was a dimly lighted passageway.

  Silver beckoned Marie, and as Marie entered and also gingerly pressed past the wall-to-wall clothing, Silver whispered, ‘I had this built one time when Paul went away. Used the same contractor as the one Carl used for that entrance to his She stopped. In the brilliant light that poured down from the clothes closet ceiling, her blue eyes widened at her indiscretion. Then she shrugged. ‘I guess I’m not fully alert yet. Where is Carl, anyway? We really need a man to do what has to be done here.’

  Marie parted her lips to explain Carl’s condition. And closed them again, shocked. The thought:—She doesn’t know about him …

  Confused thoughts about what a woman might feel, who had been a mistress to what was now a mechanized brain. Momentary impulse to hit Silver with the information as a punishment. But that feeling also faded quickly.

  She managed finally to gulp, ‘We’re on our own.’ A thought about the situation came into her mind. She hesitated, and then spoke it: ‘Two women,’ she said, ‘without a single knight errant. And of course,’ she added firmly, ‘for what we do tonight, we shall not have to pay the price in the time-honored way of a woman.’

  ‘I’ll have a comment on that in a moment,’ said the other woman. ‘Right now—’ She leaned back—‘will you go past me? I want to lock things up behind us.’

  Moments after Marie had done so, there was Silver; and the secret entrance was folded back into position. The younger woman whispered, ‘The closet side is covered with my sloppiest dresses. Men seldom poke around in swishy stuff like that unless there’s a woman inside it. Now—here.’

  She reached up to a shelf and lifted down a stick-like metallic object which she pushed into Marie’s reluctant hands. ‘That’s a Sleele plint,’ she said. ‘To get it I paid that time-honored price you just mentioned to the Sleele leader here on earth, a man named Metnov.’

  Marie noticed both implications of the remark: The Sleele leader on earth … There was nothing to think about that at the moment. So that passed her by, swiftly. But about the other part, the woman part—she had a series of peculiar thoughts. Very rapid. With an odd, startled feeling of being aware, literally for the first time in her life, that there was another attitude that a woman could have toward men. Other, that is, than being automatic.

  That second awareness also grew blurry. Yielded to the weight of the thing that had been placed in her hand.

  The object was heavier than Marie expected. It looked not precisely fluffy but gave the impression of something hollow and thin and therefore light. But it was at least as weighty as her purse. To hold it properly, she had to grasp it firmly—she realized. Which she continued to resist doing. The stick half-lay in her fingers, but was other-half held.

  ‘Point that like a gun,’ Silver said sotto voce, ‘and press the little button near your finger. It goes off with a plop. But it sure is effective for several hundred yards.’

  Marie had parted her lips to say rejectingly, ‘I still have my gas capsule discharger.’ But the words never issued forth. Because the meaning of ‘several hundred yards’ penetrated. Since the gas discharger was effective for less than fifty feet, at that point her fingers tightened on the … plint. ‘I’ve got it,’ said Marie.

  Silver made no immediate, further comment. Instead, she started along the passageway, and only after a while flung a question over her shoulder: ‘Can you incapacitate a computer?’

  ‘Depends,’ said Marie, ‘on what kind it is. ‘But—’ Pause—‘what good will that do? It’s the ship up there that’s dangerous.’

  ‘If we wreck this computer tonight,’ said Silver, ‘it will delay the attack until the people who are here in this house can get over to another computer on the east coast or to a third in Texas. All these machines interact with other machines. We can gain a day’s delay.’

  An enormous psychic weight was lifting from Marie. Silver awakening had brought a plan to find Carl, and a hope that she could reconnect him back into control of his mobile unit. That last was an even vaguer hope than the plan. During the entire year of Carl’s martyrdom she had never looked inside the mechanism that housed him. Had avoided knowing details about his insides. Had left that to MacKerrie and his Brain Foundation technicians. ‘

  Suddenly, now, she knew one thing she could do. The computer. A tiny restriction about that, also. She loved perfect machines; hated to see them not working, or damaged. Surely, that did not apply in this situation. She gulped, ‘Let’s go!’ in an overstimulated ‘go’ tone.

  Swift response. Silver grabbed her arm. ‘My God, you’re brave,’ she whispered. ‘I’m terrified that my husband will finally find out what I’m up to.’

  Marie was silent. Receptive in a vague way.

  Silver babbled on, sotto voce, ‘The poor guy—my husband—decided to level with me. Decided to treat me, as he called it, like a mature woman. I thought I had married a wealthy banker—which, of course, was and is true, too—but then he told me about his being a human-looking alienoid. About being a Deean. And that there were on earth six or seven groups from different galactic races that know each other. I haven’t the faintest notion what Paul really expected of me. I think he had some feeling—it was his analysis of earth women—that he was catering to some basic need in me to be married to a superior male. Out of his mind. I immediately got the feeling that I had to save earth at no matter what cost to me. For God’s sake, if I was going to marry an alienoid because he was better than human, why would I choose a Deean? There are at least three, or even four, advanced races here that are superior to the Deeans. So if I had a choice—and I was interested, which I’m not. I’d take a Sleele, or, better still, a Luind. They’re the tops, and apparently differ from each other in that Sleeles are rats and the Luinds have basically good intentions. The Luind leader is cute, and proved his integrity. When I offered myself to him, he turned me down. Said he didn’t play around with the wives of other Galactics. First time anybody ever rejected me. It piqued me, but it felt honest.’

  As the whispered confession concluded, they reached a stairway. Silver led the way down. Marie followed, thinking:—It’s not that I’m brave. It’s just, I don’t want to be made love to by that S.O.B. MacKerrie even one more time …

  The intense emotion of that reaction startled her. A minute scientific awareness was stirred in her brain … Just one moment, she thought, during the entire year that it was happening, I didn’t fight that hard, or fed that vindictive—

  She had an abrupt, incredible realization:—I’m trying to convince Philip Nicer somewhere inside me that the MacKerrie thing didn’t mean anything. No, no, worse, I’m trying to persuade him it didn’t happen.

  She was shocked because—fantastically—the underlying belief was that she belonged to Philip Nicer.

  For a reason fleetingly connected with the thought she had had earlier about Silver’s attitude … it took only seconds to argue herself out of that submissively feminine concept.

  Down two narrow flights of stairs they went—an amazing secret passageway, clandestinely constructed by a capable builder at Silver’s behest. By being a beautiful, available sex object, Si
lver had modified this enemy stronghold. Penetrated its security. Shattered its defenses.

  And so the two women presently stood in a long basement room at one end of the gleaming computer that Carl had seen that first night. The make of the machine was not immediately recognizable to Marie’s educated eyes. But her roving gaze swiftly located the fuse box.

  It was the work of a minute to remove the panel. A single sweeping glance established that the fuses were of varying resistances. Her fingers flashed. Removed high, and inserted low. Switched low to high.

  Even as she did so, the machine’s alarm system uttered a series of screeches. And lights blinked on. Flashing. Colored. Somewhere, a man’s voice yelled, ‘Good God, what’s that?’

  Across the room, two attendants entered from a door. By that time there was a rumbling sound from the computer, and a hissing. Abruptly, the room was warmer.

  A destruct system! … She had triggered it. Marie, pale, whispered, ‘Hurry! We’ve got to get out of here!’

  They had been backing away. Now, they crouched low, and, turning, ran for the secret entrance. As that metal door silently folded shut behind them, Marie had one last glimpse of what they were leaving in the basement. A long line of blue-white fire was showing through the metal of the computer. During that fleeting look at the total disaster she had caused, she heard a man’s hoarse scream.

  The door closed tight, and sealed away the basement. But it could not seal off her memory of what she had seen. Nor could it stop her continuing awareness of what must be happening back there, still.

  By that time they were climbing the narrow stairs, and they were both breathing hard. Silver gasped, ‘This thing has an exit in one of the guest cabins at the rear of the house. We’ll have to make our way from there to a car I’ve got hidden.’