The Mammoth Book of Golden Age SF (36 page)

Silently, and attracting as little attention as possible, Caquer sprinted around the fringe of the crowd and reached the side door of the Regency building.

There was a guard on duty there.

“Sorry, sir, but no one’s allowed—”

Then he tried to duck, too late. The flat of Police Lieutenant Rod Caquer’s short sword thudded against his head.

The inside of the building seemed deserted. Caquer ran up the three flights of stairs that would take him to the level of the higher balcony, and down the hall toward the balcony door.

He burst through it, and Regent Maxon turned. Maxon now, no longer wore the helmet on his head. Caquer had lost the goggles, but whether he could see it or not, Caquer knew the helmet and the wheel were still in place and working, and that this was his one chance.

Maxon turned and saw Lieutenant Caquer’s face, and his drawn sword.

Then abruptly, Maxon’s figure vanished. It seemed to Caquer – although he knew that it was not – that the figure before him was that of Jane Gordon. Jane, looking at him pleadingly, and spoke in melting tones.

“Rod, don’t—” she began to say.

But it was not Jane, he knew. A thought, in self-preservation, had been directed at him by the manipulator of the Vargas Wheel.

Caquer raised his sword, and he brought it down hard.

Glass shattered and there was the ring of metal on metal, as his sword cut through and split the helmet.

Of course it was not Jane now – just a dead man lying there with blood oozing out of the split in a strange and complicated, but utterly shattered, helmet. A helmet that could now be seen by everyone there, and by Lieutenant Caquer himself.

Just as everyone, including Caquer himself, could recognize the man who had worn it.

He was a small, wiry man, and there was an unsightly wart on the side of his nose.

Yes, it was Willem Deem. And this time, Rod Caquer knew, it
was
Willem Deem. . . .

“I thought,” Jane Gordon said, “that you were going to leave for Callisto City without saying goodbye to us.”

Rod Caquer threw his hat in the general direction of a hook.

“Oh, that,” he said. “I’m not even sure I’m going to take the promotion to a job as police coordinator there. I have a week to decide, and I’ll be around town at least that long. How you been doing, Icicle?”

“Fine, Rod. Sit down. Father will be home soon, and I know he has a lot of things to ask you. Why we haven’t seen you since the big mass meeting.”

Funny how dumb a smart man can be, at times.

But then again, he had proposed so often and been refused, that it was not all his fault.

He just looked at her.

“Rod, all the story never came out in the newscasts,” she said. “I know you’ll have to tell it all over again for my father, but while we’re waiting for him, won’t you give me some information?”

Rod grinned.

“Nothing to it, really, Icicle,” he said. “Willem Deem got hold of a Blackdex book, and found out how to make a Vargas Wheel. So he made one, and it gave him ideas.

“His first idea was to kill Barr Maxon and take over as Regent, setting the helmet so he would appear to be Maxon. He put Maxon’s body in his own shop, and then had a lot of fun with his own murder. He had a warped sense of humor, and got a kick out of chasing us in circles.”

“But just how did he do all the rest?” asked the girl.

“He was there as Brager, and pretended to discover his own body. He gave one description of the method of death, and caused Skidder and me and the clearance men to see the body of Maxon each in a different way. No wonder we nearly went nuts.”

“But Brager remembered being there too,” she objected.

“Brager was in the hospital at the time, but Deem saw him afterward and impressed on his mind the memory pattern of having discovered Deem’s body,” explained Caquer. “So naturally, Brager thought he had been there.”

“Then he killed Maxon’s confidential secretary, because being so close to the Regent, the secretary must have suspected something was wrong even though she couldn’t guess what. That was the second corpse of Willim Deem, who was beginning to enjoy himself in earnest when he pulled that on us.

“And of course he never sent to Callisto City for a special investigator at all. He just had fun with me, by making me seem to meet one and having the guy turn out to be Willem Deem again. I nearly did go nuts then, I guess.”

“But why, Rod, weren’t you as deeply in as the others – I mean on the business of conquering Callisto and all of that?” she inquired. “You were free of that part of the hypnosis.”

Caquer shrugged.

“Maybe it was because I missed Skidder’s talk on the televis,” he suggested. “Of course it wasn’t Skidder at all, it was Deem in another guise and wearing the helmet. And maybe he deliberately left me out, because he was having a psychopatic kind of fun out of my trying to investigate the murders of two Willem Deems. It’s hard to figure. Perhaps I was slightly cracked from the strain, and it might have been that for that reason I was partially resistant to the group hypnosis.”

“You think he really intended to try to rule all of Callisto, Rod?” asked the girl.

“We’ll never know, for sure, just how far he wanted, or expected to go later. At first, he was just experimenting with the powers of hypnosis, through the wheel. That first night, he sent people out of their houses into the streets, and then sent them back and made them forget it. Just a test, undoubtedly.”

Caquer paused and frowned thoughtfully.

“He was undoubtedly psychopathic, though, and we don’t dare even guess what all his plans were,” he continued. “You understand how the goggles worked to neutralize the wheel, don’t you, Icicle?”

“I think so. That was brilliant, Rod. It’s like when you take a moving picture of a turning wheel, isn’t it? If the camera synchronizes with the turning of the wheel, so that each successive picture shows it after a complete revolution, then it looks like it’s standing still when you show the movie.”

Caquer nodded.

“That’s it on the head,” he said. “Just luck I had access to those goggles, though. For just a second I could see a man wearing a helmet up there on the balcony – but that was all I had to know.”

“But Rod, when you rushed out on the balcony, you didn’t have the goggles on any more. Couldn’t he have stopped you, by hypnosis?”

“Well, he didn’t. I guess there wasn’t time for him to take over control of me. He did flash an illusion at me. It wasn’t either Barr Maxon or Willem Deem I saw standing there at the last minute. It was you, Jane.”

“I?”

“Yep, you. I guess he knew I’m in love with you, and that’s the first thing that flashed into his mind; that I wouldn’t dare use the sword if I thought it was you standing there. But I knew it wasn’t you, in spite of the evidence of my eyes, so I swung it.”

He shuddered slightly, remembering the will power he had needed to bring that sword down.

“The worst of it was that I saw you standing there like I’ve always wanted to see you – with your arms out toward me, and looking at me like you loved me.”

“Like this, Rod?”

And he was not too dumb to get the idea, that time.

Before the race was the deluge, and before the deluge another race, whose nature it is not for mankind to understand. Not unearthly, not alien, for this was their earth and their home
.

There was a war between this race, which was a great one, and another. The other was truly alien, a sentient cloudform, an intelligent grouping of tangible electrons. It was spawned in mighty machines by some accident of a science beyond our aboriginal conception of technology. And then the machines, servants of the people, became the people’s masters, and great were the battles that followed. The electron-beings had the power to wrap the delicate balances of atom-structure, and their life-medium was mental, which they permeated and used to their own ends. Each weapon the people developed was possessed and turned against them, until a time when the remnants of that vast civilization found a defence—

An insulator. The terminal product or by-product of all energy research – neutronium
.

In its shelter they developed a weapon. What it was we shall never know, and our race will live – or we shall know, and our race will perish as theirs perished. Sent to destroy the enemy, it got out of hand and its measureless power destroyed them with it, and their cities, and their possessed machines. The very earth dissolved in flame, the crust writhed and shook and the oceans boiled. Nothing escaped it, nothing that we know as life, and nothing of the pseudolife that had evolved within the mysterious force-fields of their incomprehensible machines, save one hardy mutant
.

Mutant it was, and ironically this one alone could have been killed by the first simple measures used against its kind – but it was past time for simple expediences. It was an organized electron-field possessing intelligence and mobility and a will to destroy, and little else. Stunned by the holocaust, it drifted over the grumbling globe, and in a lull in the violence of the forces gone wild on Earth, sank to the steaming ground in its half-conscious exhaustion. There it found shelter – shelter built by and for its dead enemies. An envelope of neutronium. It drifted in, and its consciousness at last fell to its lowest ebb. And there it lay while the neutronium, with its strange constant flux, its interminable striving for perfect balance, extended itself and closed the opening. And thereafter in the turbulent eons that followed, the envelope tossed like a grey bubble on the surface of the roiling sphere, for no substance on Earth would have it or combine with it
.

The ages came and went, and chemical action and reaction did their mysterious work, and once again there was life and evolution. And a tribe found the mass of neutronium, which is not a substance but a static force, and were awed by its aura of indescribable chill, and they worshipped it and built a temple around it and made sacrifices to it. And ice and fire and the seas came and went, and the land rose and fell as the years went by, until the ruined temple was on a knoll, and the knoll was an island. Islanders came and went, lived and built and died, and races forgot. So now, somewhere in the Pacific to the west of the archipelago called Islas Revillagigedas, there was an uninhabited island. And one day—

Chub Horton and Tom Jaeger stood watching the
Sprite
and her squat tow of three cargo lighters dwindle over the glassy sea. The big ocean-going towboat and her charges seemed to be moving out of focus rather than travelling away. Chub spat cleanly around the cigar that grew out of the corner of his mouth.

“That’s that for three weeks. How’s it feel to be a guinea pig?”

“We’ll get it done.” Tom had little crinkles all around the outer ends of his eyes. He was a head taller than Chub and rangy, and not so tough, and he was a real operator. Choosing him as a foreman for the experiment had been wise, for he was competent and he commanded respect. The theory of airfield construction that they were testing appealed vastly to him, for here were no officers-in-charge, no government inspectors, no time-keeping or reports. The government had allowed the company a temporary land grant, and the idea was to put production-line techniques into the layout and grading of the project. There were six operators and two mechanics and more than a million dollars’ worth of the best equipment that money could buy. Government acceptance was to be on a partially completed basis, and contingent on government standards. The theory obviated both gold-bricking and graft, and neatly side-stepped the man-power problem. “When that black-topping crew gets here, I reckon we’ll be ready for ’em,” said Tom.

He turned and scanned the island with an operator’s vision and saw it as it was, and in all the stages it would pass through, and as it would look when they had finished, with five thousand feet of clean-draining runway, hard-packed shoulders, four acres of plane-park, the access road and the short taxiway. He saw the lay of each lift that the power shovel would cut as it brought down the marl bluff, and the ruins on top of it that would give them stone to haul down the salt-flat to the little swamp at the other end, there to be walked in by the dozers.

“We got time to run the shovel up there to the bluff before dark.”

They walked down the beach towards the outcropping where the equipment stood surrounded by crates and drums of supplies. The three tractors were ticking over quietly, the two-cycle Diesel chuckling through their mufflers and the big D-7 whacking away its metronomic compression knock on every easy revolution. The Dumptors were lined up and silent, for they would not be ready to work until the shovel was ready to load them. They looked like a mechanical interpretation of Dr. Dolittle’s “Pushme-pullyou,” the fantastic animal with two front ends. They had two large driving wheels and two small steerable wheels. The motor and the driver’s seat were side by side over the front – or smaller – wheels; but the driver faced the dump body between the big rear wheels, exactly the opposite of the way he would sit in a dump truck. Hence, in travelling from shovel to dumping-ground, the operator drove backwards, looking over his shoulder, and in dumping he backed the machine up but he himself travelled forward – quite a trick for fourteen hours a day! The shovel squatted in the midst of all the others, its great hulk looming over them, humped there with its boom low and its iron chin on the ground, like some great tired dinosaur.