Anywhen (22 page)

“No,” she said.

“Whadd’ya mean, no?” he said, feeling the ugliness rise again. “Listen, chick—”

He caught himself, but with an awful feeling that it was too late. She watched him damping himself down with sober amusement, and then said:

“Go on. That was the true hyena laugh.”

He clenched his fists, and again fought himself back to normal, aware that she was observing every step of the process. He said:

“I’m sorry. I’m tired and hungry. I’ll try not to snarl at you again. O.K.?”

“O.K.” But she said nothing more.

“So what about this crump effect?”

“Sorry. I won’t answer any more questions until you’ve answered one of mine. It’s very simple. Once you’ve really got control of the ship—and you can’t get it without me—what do you plan to do with it? You keep telling me you’ll tell me ‘in a minute.’ Tell me now.”

“All right,” he said, his teeth on edge. “All right. Just remember that you asked me for it. If you don’t like it, tough tibby—it’s not my fault. I’m going to use this ship and everybody in it to set things straight. The warmongers, the bluenoses, the fuzz, the snobs, the squares, the bureaucrats, the Uncle Toms, the Birchers, the Fascists, the … everybody who’s ever been
against
anything is going to get it now, right in the neck. I’m going to tear down all the vested interests, from here to Tokyo. If they go along with me, O.K. If they don’t blooey! If I can’t put ‘em to sleep, I can blow ‘em up. I’m going to strike out for freedom for
everybody
in all directions, and all at once. There’ll never be a better chance. There’ll never be a better weapon than this ship. And there’ll never a better man than me to do it.”

His voice sank slightly. The dream was catching hold. “You know damn well what’d happen if I let this ship get taken over by the Pentagon or the fuzz. They’d suppress it—hide it—make a weapon out of it. It’d make the cold war worse. And the sleep gadget—they’d run all our lives with it. Sneak up on us. Jump in and out of our pads. Spy. All the rest. Right now’s our chance to do justice With it. And that is what I’m going to do with it!”

“Why you?” Jeanette said. Her voice sounded very remote.

“Because I know what the underdog goes through. I’ve gone through it all. I’ve been put down by every kind of slob that walks the Earth. And I’ve got a long memory. I remember every one of them. Every one. In my mind, every one of them has a front name, a hind name, and an address. With a thing like this ship, I can track every man jack of them down and pay them off. No exceptions. No hiding. No mercy. Just Justice. The real, pure, simple thing.”

“Sounds good.”

“You bet it’s good.”

“What about the Soviets? I missed them on your list, somehow.”

“Oh sure; I hate Communists. And also the militarists—it was the Pentagon that sucked us into this mess up here to begin with, you know that. Freedom for everybody—at one stroke!”

She seemed to consider that. “Women, too?”

“Of course, women! The hell with the double standard!
On
both
sides!”

“I don’t quite follow you,” she said. “I thought the double standard only had one side—the men could and the women couldn’t.”

“You know that’s not so. It’s the women who control the situation—they always can, they’re the ones who get to say
no.
The real freedom is all on their side.”

“How’d you fix that?” she said, in a voice almost sleepy.

“I … well, I haven’t had much of a chance to think about it—”

“I think you’ve thought about it quite a lot.”

Her shredded dress trailing streamers, Jeanette walked steadily away from the control board toward the corridor.
Carl
put
his
finger
over
her
button.

“Stop!”

She stopped and turned, shielding her thighs with one hand in a peculiarly modest gesture, considering everything.

“Well?”

“I don’t care what you think. If you don’t dig it, that’s your nuisance—sorry about that, Chief. But I need you; I’ll have you.”

“No you won’t. You can put me to sleeps, but you won’t have me.”

“Yes I will. I can wake you up. And I won’t feed you. You’ll spend all the rest of your time in your cage—hungry and wide awake. In the meantime,
I’ll
fool with the boards. Maybe I’ll wake somebody else who’ll be willing to help. Maybe even one of the crew. Or maybe I’ll make a mistake and blow everything up—if you weren’t putting me on about that. Think about
that
for a while. Cooperate, or blooey! How about that?”

“I’ll think about it,” she said. But she went right on walking.

Carl bit his tongue savagely and turned back to the main boards. These do-gooders. In the pinch, they were all alike. Give them a chance to
do
something, and they chicken out.

Now it was up to him. It would be nice to know where to find Lavelle. But it was nicer to be sure that Jeanette had him dead wrong. He had a mission now and was above that stuff, at least for the time being. Once he’d reduced the world, he could do better than either of them.

Raging with hunger, he scraped his fingernails at the powerful little lights.

But he had at last to admit that much of his threat had been simple bravado. The instruments and controls on the board were in obviously related groups, but without technical training he could not even figure out the general categories; and though everything was labeled, the very script the labels were written in was as unbreakable to him as an oscilloscope trace—which it strongly resembled.

Besides, his thinking was obviously not being improved by his having been without a meal for more than a whole day. He decided that he had better be reasonable. The only other course was to wake some crew member, on thechance that a random choice would net him a slave rather than an officer, and try to force him to read the inscriptions; but the risks in that were obvious and frightening. Unless he really wanted to blow up the joint—which in fact he had no intention of chancing—he had to make another try with Jeanette.

She didn’t look nearly as haggard as he had hoped, but after all she had both eaten and slept a good deal more recently than he had. Realizing at the same time that he was not only haggard, but: untrimmed and dirty, he made an extra effort to be plausible.

“Look, I’m sorry I frightened you. I’m tired, I’m hungry, and I’m on edge. Let’s try to talk it all over again sensibly, like civilized people.”

“I don’t talk to jailers,” she said coldly.

“I don’t blame you. On the other hand, as long as you’re bucking me, I have to keep some sort of control over you. You’re the only other prisoner who knows as much as I know. Hell, you know
more
than I know about some things.”

“The last I heard, you weren’t just going to keep me locked up. You were going to torture me.”

“What? I said no such—”

“No sleep, no food—what do you call it? Punishment? Persuasion?”

“All right,” he said. “I was wrong about that. Why don’t we start there? You tell me how to turn the food deliveries back on, and I’ll do it. There’s no harm in that. We’d both benefit.”

“That’s right, you’re hungry, too. Well, it’s controlled by that knob on the side of the sleep-board, as I told you. I’m not sure, but I think it’s the third setting to the left—counterclockwise, that is.”

“Good. I’ll see to it that you get fed, and then maybe we can yak again.”

At the door, he turned back suddenly. “This had better not be a gag. If that third setting wakes everybody up or something like that—”

“I don’t guarantee a thing,” Jeanette said calmly. “It’s only my best guess. But I don’t want the slavers awake again any more than you do. You’re no picnic, but I like them even less.”

The point was all the more penetrating for its bluntness.Back in the control room, he set the dial as per instructions, and then raced back to his own cage to try it out. The ship promptly delivered the meal he ordered, and he stuffed himself gorgeously. As an afterthought, he ordered and got a bottle of brandy. He was still determined to puzzle out the control boards as far as possible by himself, and in his present stage of exhaustion a little lubricant might make all the difference.

He knocked on Jeanette’s door in passing, but there was no answer.

“Jeanette!” he shouted. “Jeanette, the food’s on!”

Still no response. He wondered if the metal door would pass sound. Then, very faintly, he heard something like a whimper. After a long pause, there was another.

He went on, satisfied. He was a little surprised to find that she was able to cry—up to now she had seemed as hard as nails except in her sleep—but it would probably do her good. Besides, it was satisfying to know that she had a breaking point; it would make his persuasions all the more effective, in the long run. And in the meantime, she had heard him announce that there was food available, so she should have a little better opinion of his good faith.

He went on up the corridor, cheerfully whistling “Fallout Blues” in two keys at once.

The control room window showed deep night, and had for a long time, when he decided to call himself defeated—temporarily, of course. The brandy had calmed some of his jumpiness and done wonders for his self-confidence, but it hadn’t brought into his head any technical knowledge, or any safe inspirations, either. And suddenly he was reelingly sleepy. The headache was worse, too.

There should be no danger in catching a little sack time. Everybody else was already out except Jeanette, and she was locked in. Of course, she was a sharp apple, and might figure some way of getting out. It would be better to crump her. She’d probably appreciate it, too. It would give him two pluses to start the next conversation with.

He pressed the button that controlled her, and then, avoiding the strip-tease chairs, rolled himself comfortably under the big board.

He awoke slowly and naturally; he had almost forgottenhow it felt, after the popped-out-of-nothingness effect that the ship’s imposed awakenings produced, and for a little while he simply luxuriated in it. After all, there was no danger. The ship was his.

But it was unusually noisy this morning: a distant snarling of engines, an occasional even more distant murmur of voices—

Voices! He shot upright in alarm.

He was no longer aboard the ship.

Around him was the sunlit interior of a small room, unmistakably barracks-like, with a barred window, furnished only by the narrow single bed in which he had been lying. He himself was clad in gray military-hospital pajamas, and touching his face, he found that he was clean-shaven—his beard was gone—and had been given a GI haircut. A standard maroon military-hospital robe was folded neatly over the foot of the bed.

An aircraft engine thrummed again outside. Swearing, he ran to the window.

He was indeed locked up—beside a military airfield—which one, he had no way of telling, but at least it was American. It was also huge. There was a lot of traffic.

And there was the alien spaceship, right in front of him, grounded. It was probably as much as three miles away, but it was still so enormous as to cut off most of the horizon.

It had been captured—and Carl Wade with it.

He wasted no time wondering how it had been done, or lamenting the collapse of his fantasies, in which, he realized, he had never really believed. The only essential thing now was—
to get away!

He spun to the door, and finding it locked, rattled it furiously.

“Hey!” he shouted furiously. “Let me out of here! You’ve got no right … I’m a civilian … a citizen …”

The lock clicked under his hand, and as he jumped back, there was the hard sound of a bolt being shot. The door opened and Jeanette came in, followed by two large, impassive, alert Air Force policemen. The girl looked fresh and beautiful; but she, too, had had a close haircut, all on one side; and there was a surgical compress taped under that ear.

“Good morning,” she said.

He continued to back away until he found himself sitting on the bed.

“I might have guessed,” he said. “So you got the upper hand and sold out.”

“Sold out?” she said, her eyes flashing. “I had nothing to sell. I couldn’t use the ship properly. I turned it over to people who could. My own people—who else?”

“All right, then you chickened out,” Carl said. “It’s the same thing. What are you going to do with me?”

“They tell me you’ll be questioned and let go. In your circles, nobody’d be likely to believe anything you say. Just in case any reporter looks you up, the Pentagon’s arranged an interview with
Time.
They’ll treat your remarks as science fiction and that’ll be the end of you as any sort of witness.”

“And that’s all?” he said, amazed.

“That’s enough. You’re not accused of any crime. Of course, I suspect you committed one against me—but considering that it didn’t even wake me up, it can’t have been much more than a token; just kid stuff.”

This blow to his pride was almost more than he could take, but he was not going to try to set her straight with those two huge flics standing there. He said dully:

“How did you do it?”

“I figured out how the metal people induced sleep in us without our having to wear the metal suits. When they first took us on board, they installed a little broadcaster of the sleep-waves, surgically, right next to our skulls—under the right mastoid process. That was what the headache was.”

Carl caressed his neck automatically. The headache was gone; all that was left was a neat and painless scar.

“But what did you do?”

“I took it out, with your help. When you turned the food service back on, I ordered a tough steak, and I got a sharp knife along with it. Awake, the metal people probably wouldn’t have allowed that, but computers are brainless. So I cut the gadget out. As soon as I got the bleeding stopped, I went forward, found you asleep under the control board, and pressed
your
button. The rest was very simple.”

He remembered the faint whimpers he had heard whenhe had passed her door that night. And he had thought she was softening up!