Three Worlds to Conquer Page 4

  Usually correction was gentler, of course. They took young Olson out of the chem lab one day, charged with distributing subversive pamphlets. He came back some weeks later, and his views were quite different. But he wasn’t much good as a chemist any more.

  And even that was exceptional. Mostly you heard and saw nothing, except praises of our far-sighter leader President Garward and his firm but benevolent administration. It got sticky after a while.

  Fraser shook himself. Suddenly he wasn’t tired. His body seemed to thrum. What had Lory said? “Make some quiet preparations for getting out of town.”

  Too late now. But—“Yes,” he said. His thought leaped ahead of the words. “They must need this place for some purpose. If the rebellion had been suppressed, they wouldn’t. So . . . Clem, Tom, Manuel, all technicians, potential troublemakers, could send a radio beam to Earth a few days from now, or sabotage operations. Uh-huh. A squad should be here any minute. Let’s go.”

  He surged from the. chair, two jumps to the exit. Strainingly cautious, he opened the door for a peek. The corridor lay empty and still. “Come on,” he said. “If we hurry, we can grab a cat and escape.” He started off to the right. “Not that way,” Mahoney objected.

  “I’ve got a family,” Fraser said. “Well . . . yeah, you do. Okay.” They got into a freight elevator. It hummed downward with Chinese torture slowness. Fraser became aware of his heart slamming blood through ears and throat, the reek of his own sweat and its wetness under his arms. It was incongruous how steadily his finger had pressed the button for ground level.

  The hall there was full of people. They wandered about in little huddled-together groups, not fast, bewilderment in their eyes and in the stiff pale faces. A mutter went among them. “Hey, Mark,” a man called, “what’s going on? You know? Somebody said—”

  Fraser ignored him. He wanted to run, you could move like a scorched comet in low-gee, but the crowd was too thick. He must elbow his way through the molasses of nightmare. Time approached forever before he reached his apartment.

  The door was locked. He beat on the panels. “Jesus,” Mahoney said, “if they aren’t here—”

  “Then you go on alone,” Fraser said. The saliva was thick in his mouth. “I can’t leave them here, can I?”

  The door opened. Fifteen-year-old Colin put down the chair he had raised over his head. “Dad!” he blurted.

  “Mother and Ann here?” Fraser went through with Mahoney and shut the door behind him. Colin made a jerky nod. “Suit up, everybody. Quick!”

  Eve came from the inner rooms. She was a small woman, dark as her husband, the eyes enormous in her delicate features. Ann, born ten Earth-years ago on Ganymede, followed close behind, cheeks streaked with tears. “I saw some Navy men go by carrying guns,” Eve husked. “They—I thought it was best we wait here for you. I couldn’t raise you on the phone. It’s dead.” Her hands closed on his. They might have been carved in ice. “What can we do?”

  “Leave town,” he answered.

  “We, we, might get killed!” Ann wailed.

  Fraser cuffed her. He was instantly sorry, but his voice said for him: “Shut up and get your suit on!”

  Numbed, they turned to the lockers. Fraser checked the spares and pointed at one. “That should fit you,” he told Mahoney. “Not like your personal one, of course, but I’m afraid you’ll have to make do.”

  Eve hesitated before the outsider. “No time for modesty,” Fraser said. “Take off that dress and put on your coverall.” Mahoney turned his back as Eve yanked the garment over her head. Fraser had an instant—not of desire, there was no chance for that, but a memory of desire and of shared years. She’d given up more than he to come here. Politics meant little to her; but there had been no complaints. “Good girl,” he said with overwhelming tenderness.

  He donned his own suit. The fabric was stiff around him, the outside gear—aircycle tank, water bottle, belt of foodbars, sanitary box, powerpack, repair kit—an unexpected weight. He left the helmet open and the gauntlets off. Being already in his Long John, and more practiced than the rest, he finished the clumsy process first and had a few second to look around. He might never see this place again.

  It was cramped and austere, like every dwelling in Aurora, but Eve and the kids and he had made it theirs. Booktapes crowded the shelves. A half-finished spacemodel of Colin’s overflowed a table. A chess set stood by a tobacco jar.

  He’d always liked chess and poker too much for his own good, he thought in the back of his brain; they could become a way of life if you didn’t watch them. His gaze went to a colorstat over the couch: a view of the Gulf Stream. The water was nearly violet, and the gulls made a white storm in the sky. But on some nights, the Sea would phosphoresce, he remembered; you dipped your hand into the waves that lapped against your boat and lifted it with fire streaming off . . .

  That was his boyhood, on a sea station, a floating village where they herded whales and harvested algae and had horizons unknown to the poor crowded billions ashore. And because the working staff included people from several countries, and the station had no secret police and was too close-knit a community for anyone to fear being informed on, it had been an ill preparation for his later life.

  When at last he came to Ganymede, he felt like a man emerging from a submarine whose air renewal was out of order, going topside into the wind.

  “All set, I guess,” Mahoney said.

  “Where are we headed, Dad?” Colin’s voice cracked ludicrously. But Fraser liked his expression. The frontier beyond Earth bred some damned fine kids, if they survived.

  “To one of the outlier stations,” Fraser said. “That battleship is seizing us on behalf of the Garwardists. But her crew can’t occupy more than Aurora, I’m sure. Once beyond the Glenns, we’ll see if anything can be done about them.”

  Ann squeezed her eyes shut, drew an uneven breath and said, “L-lead on, Macduff.”

  “Lay on,” Fraser corrected automatically. “Now stick close behind me. Pat, you bring up the rear. Watch for bluecoats, but if you see any, don’t run. They might shoot if you did.”

  He stepped back into the hall and started for the nearest garage, forcing himself to walk at an even tempo. The passageway had emptied. Doors lined it blank and strange. Boots hit the hard floor with a noise that rebounded from grotesquely pasted wall. What’s gone on while I was inside? he wondered.

  He turned a corner. A spaceman stood halfway down the other corridor.

  He was a thick man, the azure uniform and white belt snug around him. There was a firegun in his arms. He swung it up. “Halt!” His voice smashed at their eardrums. “Where do you think you’re going.”

  Fraser stumbled backward. “Home,” Eve said.

  “Huh?”

  “We just got in from the Mare. One of your people told us to go straight home and stay there, so that’s what we’re doing.”

  “Okay. Move!”

  Eve tugged at Fraser’s sleeve. He followed her blindly, the opposite way from the guard’s post. When they had made the next turn, Mar honey whistled. “Good work, lass! How’d you figure out what to tell him?”

  “If nobody was in the halls any more, they must have been ordered inside,” Eve said. She bit her lip to hold it firm.

  “Daddy?” Ann attempted, “maybe we better—”

  “Nuts to that,” Colin said.

  Mahoney opened the door on a downward ramp. Aurora had a basement level, for storage of whatever didn’t mind being cold. Dank air flowed around them. As Fraser closed the door again, he saw his breath smoke white under the fluor-panels.

  “Suppose they’ve put a watch on the garage already,” Mahoney muttered. “Then what do we do?”

  Fraser ducked into a toolroom. He came out with a hammer and a couple of pipe wrenches. “You, me and Colin,” he said.

  “Against a gun?” Eve protested. “If necessary, against a gun.” He didn’t quite know why. He certainly wasn’t any hero. He’d never even considered
joining the underground. To be sure, it was much smaller and weaker in his youth. Still, that was perhaps the reason why he had to fight now.

  “Ann,” he said, “you’re obviously harmless. Can you go ahead of us. If there’s a guard, talk to him. Draw his attention. Can’t be more than one, I’m certain.” He took her by the shoulders and looked down into the eyes that were so much Eve’s. “It’s a tough thing to ask of you, Nelly-boo,” he said harshly, through unshed tears. “But you’re a brave girl.” The short thin form crept close to hug him. Despite the spacesuits, he could feel how she shivered. “O-okay, Daddy,” she got out.

  Eve gripped Fraser’s hand as their daughter went before them. They walked in great silence, nearing the cross-corridor to the garage.

  Ann stopped at the turn. The shout from beyond seemed to push her back physically. “You, there! What’s the matter with you?”

  “I can’t find my daddy,” Ann wailed, and ran toward the voice, out of Fraser’s sight. “Please help me find my daddy!”

  Fraser gestured at Mahoney and Colin. They edged to the corner.

  Ann’s hysterics mingled with the guard’s orders, which began to take on a desperate note.

  “Now,” Fraser whispered. “Jump out and pitch!”

  He made a bound of his own, to the opposite wall, whirled on his heel and let the hammer fly. The wrenches came an instant later. They often played baseball on the field outside Aurora.

  The bluecoat went down, hit in face and stomach. He struggled to his knees, cursing in an astonished voice. His gun came up. But then the others were upon him. What followed was short and ugly.

  When he lay still—breathing yet, but Mahoney had smashed his head several times against the floor and the breathing was ragged—Ann fell into Fraser’s arms.

  He confronted her as well as he could. But half his mind was on the spaceman. A young fellow, as nearly as you could make out through the blood and the broken features. Decent by nature, no doubt; he hadn’t fired on the little girl—Colin snatched the laser gun and Mahoney the sidearm. “We’ll want these,” the boy said theatrically. His eyes glittered. Fraser tried not to remember the boys, scarcely older, who had destroyed Professor Hawthorne.

  “Quick,” Eve begged. “We may have been heard.”

  “Right.” Fraser gave her Ann to carry. They went through the door into the broad echoing garage.

  The gannycats stood in rows. Each was a big squarish machine, with a clear dome on top, alternately retractible wheels and treads below. The power accumulators were always kept charged, the supply lockers filled. Fraser opened the nearest and herded his party in.

  He took the controls himself. The cat glided up the ramp and into the airlock. While he waited for chamber exhaustion, Fraser began to shake. We can’t really have made it!

  “Here.” Eve offered him a pill from the vehicle’s medicine chest.

  He swallowed with difficulty. But the psychodrugs went to work fast. By the time the outer lock door opened, he felt like a storybook warrior. His senses were acutely aware of his entire universe—Mahoney and Colin crouched on their seats, Ann cuddled in Eve’s arms and Eve crooning to her, the cold air that puffed through his nostrils, the purr and forward thrust of the rumbling machine.

  The stars, as he rolled forth.

  Night had fallen, and space glittered with suns, uncountable in their multitudes, the Milky Way a chill cataract, Europa horned above the black spires of the Glenn peaks. The city shone bone-white. The battleship loomed over the safety wall like a monstrous fallen moon. And overhead Jupiter had entered third quarter.

  The planet glowed. Fifteen times the diameter of Luna seen from Earth and incomparably brighter, it dominated the sky, deep amber banded with copper and cobalt and malachite, the titanic roil of the South Tropical Disturbance invading a night side that had a dim glow of its own. And it filled the plain with light. Dark lava on Ganymede shimmered; a glacier edge peering over the eastern range seemed to dance beneath the stars. Why do I miss the ocean so much, when I have this?

  Fraser swung the cat toward the Glenns.

  Beyond Shepard Pass were a number of minor settlements, one family or a few, digging metals from the Uplands or ice from Berkeley Field. “It’s okay,” he said. “Everything’s under control now. We’ll have you safe in just a few hours.”

  “Nah,” Mahoney said. “Nobody’ll be safe till those sods yonder have been taken care of. But we’re better off out of town, sure.”

  No formal road had been built. Fluorescent lines drawn across the rock marked a negotiable route. Two miles would put Aurora under the horizon of a tall man. Even before then, Apache Crater would hide a cat from view. It bulked sheer ahead, ruined battlements shining under Jupiter but the foot in total shadow.

  The receiver, automatically tuned to the general band, cleared its throat: “You! In that car bound east! Halt in the name of the law!”

  Fraser twisted his neck around and peered backward. Credit the pill for any coolness I can show at this juncture. Slowly he identified the shape, a vehicle similar to his, a mile behind.

  He switched on his own transmitter. “What’s the trouble?”

  “You know damn well what! That sentry you attacked was found. We’ve got a squad of armed men in this car. Halt!”

  Pat Mahoney’s skin glistened wet in the Jupiter light that poured through the dome. But he made a rude noise. “Your cat’s no faster than ours, and we’re used to driving on this terrain,” he said. “Run along home, sonny.”

  “Can you travel faster than a bullet, traitor?”

  V

  The ships of Nyarr came down the Brantor and out into Timlan Bay, where they swung north. Standing on the after deck, Theor looked across long gray waves to the shore.

  There the land army moved, a red mass of ranchfolk with spearheads nodding and glittering above, banners snapping in the low wind. Forgar riders cruised overhead, zigzag beneath tawny clouds. The baggage train followed, a mile of loaded kanniks—vaguely like six-legged squamous tapirs—and some that pulled carriers. These were not wagons; roads were poor and wheels little used on the queasy Jovian surface. They were boxes slung beneath houk logs, whose interior expansion on heating turned them buoyant in the air. The sound of footfalls came to Theor as one remote drumroll, over the wave-noise and the splash and creak of the ship’s paddles. Beyond the army, the land sloped bush-covered until the plains of Medalon lost themselves in mist and distance.

  “Well,” he said needlessly, “we’re on our way.”

  He was desperate to forget the wife and demi-husband he had bidden good-by at sunrise. She had not spoken her thoughts, much, but she caressed him very often, as if to seal his memory fast in every sense. And she was carrying their first child.

  “We should be able to whip them,” he said. “Norlak, you must have finished reviewing the different estimates of their strength. How greatly do you think we outnumber them?”

  “Sixteen per sixty-four, at least,” his demi-father answered. “Still, they are fighters by trade and our folk are not.”

  Elkor’s eyes ran over the ten octad or so ships of his fleet. He waved at a forgar rider, who swooped low. “Go tell the captain of The Beak to close formation.”

  The black lozenge flitted off. “Why so fussy?” Norlak asked. “We won’t reach Orgover for days.”

  “When we do,” the Reeve said, “we will be glad to have had some practice in maintaining a line.” Down in the well that ran fore and aft, the watch was being changed. Crewfolk got wearily off the treadmill and climbed gangways to the deck, where they stood slumped.

  Briefly the ship wallowed before the seas; then the replacements began walking. The belt turned beneath them. The paddlewheels flanking the broad hull bit deep, the steersman trimmed his rudder, and the vessel plowed on.

  Given the long-barreled Jovian build, as well as the relatively small freeboard available in liquid ammonia, it was a more efficient system for a large galley than oars would have been: esp
ecially since the wheels served as outriggers, no mean advantage on a planet where waves travel some sixty per cent faster than they do on Earth. The Nyarrans were acquainted with sail, but did not use it much, winds being ordinarily slow in so dense and feebly insolated an atmosphere.

  “We’ve been peaceful too long,” Elkor said. “A few hundred border patrollers sufficed to hold back the barbarians. It would be better for us now if the Wilderwall did not exist, so that everyone in Medalon knew how to fight.”

  “That’s a bleak logic.” Norlak grimaced.

  Theor felt less taken aback. The Reeveship meant growing up in one kind of war that never stopped.

  Though there was a difference, he confessed to himself. The violence of a flood bursting a levee, a field suddenly turned into a volcanic pit, a landslip laying a village in wreck, was not the same thing as another mind actively seeking one’s death. He tried to strengthen his resolution with memories of hunting expeditions. There had been dangerous game to face with no more than a spear or ax for weapon . . . But nothing came back to him except the chase, the exuberant thrust of muscles under his skin, cloven air roaring around his head, bushes that gave way with a crack as he galloped over a plain. He hoped he would not be afraid when battle broke.

  His forebodings could not very well be put in human terms. A man carries half the sex of his race, Theor only a third.

  He was an individual, with his own personality, and he was selfaware, but both to a lesser degree than the typical Homo Sapiens. What troubled him was not so much fear of being hurt as a sense of wrongness. That which had happened and that which was going to happen should not, and shook him on a purely biological level.

  The treadmill gang struck up a chant, it lifted into the air together with the sharp smell of their labor and the throb in the deck—