The company fleet hung off Keegark, at fifteen thousand feet, in a
belt of calm air just below the seesawing currents from the warming
Antarctic and the cooling deserts of the Arctic. There was the
_Procyon_, from the bridge of which von Schlichten watched the
movements of the other ships and airboats and the distant horizon. The
_Aldebaran_ was ten miles off, to the west, her metal sheathing
glinting in the red light of the evening sun. There was the _Northern
Star_, down from Skilk, a smaller and more distant twinkle of
reflected light to the north of _Aldebaran_. The _Northern Lights_ was
off to the east, and between her and _Procyon_ was a fifth ship;
turning the arm-mounted binoculars around, he could just make out, on
her bow, the figurehead bust of a man in an ancient tophat and a
fringe of chin-beard. She was the _Oom Paul Kruger_, captured by the
_Procyon_ after a chase across the mountains northeast of Keegark the
day before. And, remote from the other ships, to the south, a tiny
speck of blue-gray, almost invisible against the sky, and a smaller
twinkle of reflected sunlight--a garbage-scow, unflatteringly but
somewhat aptly rechristened _Hildegarde Hernandez_, which had been
altered as a bomb-carrier, and the gun-cutter _Elmoran_. With the
glasses, he could see a bulky cylinder being handled off the scow and
loaded onto the improvised bomb-catapult on the _Elmoran_'s stern.
Shortly thereafter, the gun-cutter broke loose from the tender and
began to approach the fleet.
"General, I must protest against your doing this," Air-Commodore
Hargreaves said. "There's simply no sense in it. That bomb can be
dropped without your personal supervision aboard, sir, and you're
endangering yourself unnecessarily. That infernal machine hasn't been
tested or anything; it might even let go on the catapult when you try
to drop it. And we simply can't afford to lose you, now."
"No, what would become of us, if you go out there and blow yourself up
with that contraption?" Buhrmann supported him. "My God, I thought Don
Quixote was a Spaniard, instead of a German!"
"Argentino," von Schlichten corrected. "And don't try to sell me that
Irreplaceable Man line, either. Them M'zangwe can replace me, Hid
O'Leary can replace him, Barney Mordkovitz can replace him, and so on
down to where you make a second lieutenant out of some sergeant. We've
been all over this last evening. Admitted we can't take time for a
long string of test-shots, and admitted we have to use an untested
weapon; I'm not sending men out under those circumstances and staying
here on this ship and watch them blow themselves up. If that bomb's
our only hope, it's got to be dropped right, and I'm not going to take
a chance on having it dropped by a crew who think they've been sent
out on a suicide mission. What happened to the _Gaucho_ when she blew
the _Smuts_ up is too fresh in everybody's mind. But if I, who ordered
the mission, accompany it, they'll know I have some confidence that
they'll come back alive."
"Well I'm coming along, too, general," Kent Pickering spoke up. "I
made the damned thing, and I ought to be along when it's dropped, on
the principle that a restaurant-proprietor ought to be seen eating his
own food once in a while."
"I still don't see why we couldn't have made at least one test shot,
first," Hans Meyerstein, the Banking Cartel man, objected.
"Well, I'll tell you why," Paula Quinton spoke up. "There's a good
chance that the geeks don't know we have a bomb of our own. They may
believe that it was something invented on Niflheim for mining
purposes, and that we haven't realized its military application.
There's more than a good chance that the loss of the _Jan Smuts_ has
temporarily demoralized them. Personally, I believe that both King
Orgzild and Prince Gorkrink were aboard her when she blew up. That's
something we'll never know, positively, of course. That ship and
everything and everybody in her were simply vaporized, and the
particles are registering on our geigers now. But I'm as sure as I am
of anything about these geeks that one or both of them accompanied
her."
"Paula knows what she's talking about," King Kankad jabbered in the
Takkad Sea language which they all understood. "Just like Von saying
that he has to go on our cutter, to encourage the crew. They always
insist that their kings and generals go into battle, particularly if
something important is to be done. They think the gods get angry if
they don't."
"And we have to hit them now," von Schlichten said. "They still have a
couple of bombs left. We haven't been able to locate them with
detectors, but those geeks Kankad's men caught on that commando-raid,
last night, say that there were at least three of them made. We can't
take a chance that some fanatic may load one into an aircar and make
a kamikaze-raid on Gongonk Island."
The _Elmoran_ ran alongside, with her Masai-warrior figurehead and the
black cylinder on her catapult aft. Somebody had painted, on the bomb:
DIRE DAWN _by Hildegarde Hernandez. Compliments of the author to H.M.
King Orgzild of Keegark._ A canvas-entubed gangway was run out to
connect the ship with the cutter. Von Schlichten and Kent Pickering
went down the ladder from the bridge, the others accompanying them. As
he stepped into the gangway, Paula Quinton fell in behind him.
"Where do you think you're going?" he demanded.
"Along with you," she replied. "I'm your adjutant, I believe."
"You definitely are not going along. Personally, I don't believe
there's any danger, but I'm not having you run any unnecessary
risks...."
"Von, I don't know much about the way Terrans think, except about
fighting and about making things," Kankad told him. "And I don't know
anything at all about the kind of Terrans who have young. But I
believe this is something important to Paula. Let her go with you,
because if you go alone and don't come back, I don't think she will
ever be happy again."
He looked at Kankad curiously, wondering, as he had so often before,
just what went on inside that lizard-skull. Then he looked at Paula,
and, after a moment, he nodded.
"All right, colonel, objection withdrawn," he said.
Aboard the _Elmoran_, they gave the bomb a last-minute inspection and
checked the catapult and the bomb-sight, and then went up on the
bridge.
"Ready for the bombing mission, sir?" the skipper, a Lieutenant
(j.g.) Morrison, asked.
"Ready if you are, lieutenant. Carry on; we're just passengers."
"Thank you, sir. We'd thought of going in over the city at about five
thousand for a target-check, turning when we're half-way back to the
mountains, and coming back for our bombing-run at fifteen thousand. Is
that all right, sir?"
Von Schlichten nodded. "You're the skipper, lieutenant. You'd better
make sure, though, that as soon as the bomb-off signal is flashed,
your engineer hits his auxiliary rocket-propulsion button. We want to
be about fifteen miles from where that thing goes off."
The lieutenant (j.g.) muttered something that sounded unmilitarily
like, "You ain't foolin', brother!"
"No, I'm not," von Schlichten agreed. "I saw the _Jan Smuts_ on the
TV-screen."
The _Elmoran_ pointed her bow, and the long blade of the figurehead
warrior's spear, toward Keegark. The city grew out of the ground-mist,
a particolored blur at the delta of the dry Hoork River, and then a
color-splashed triangle between the river and the bay and the hills on
the landward side, and then it took shape, cross-ruled with streets
and granulated with buildings. As they came in, von Schlichten, who
had approached it from the air many times before, could distinguish
the landmarks--the site of King Orgzild's nitroglycerin plant, now a
crater surrounded by a quarter-mile radius of ruins; the Residency,
another crater since Rodolfo MacKinnon had blown it up under him; the
smashed _Christiaan De Wett_ at the Company docks; King Orgzild's
Palace, fire-stained and with a hole blown in one corner by the
_Aldebaran_'s bombs.... Then they were past the city and over open
country.
"I wish we had some idea where the rest of those bombs are stored,
sir," Lieutenant Morrison said. "We don't seem to have gotten anything
significant when we flew reconnaissance with the radiation detectors."
"No, about all that was picked up was the main power-plant, and the
radiation-escape from there was normal," Pickering agreed. "The bombs
themselves wouldn't be detectable, except to the extent that, say, a
nuclear-conversion engine for an airboat would be. They probably have
them underground, somewhere, well shielded."
"Those prisoners Kankad's commandos dragged in only knew that they
were in the city somewhere," von Schlichten considered. "How about
midway between the Palace and the Residency for our ground-zero,
lieutenant? That looks like the center of the city."
The cutter turned and started back, having risen another ten thousand
feet. Morrison passed the word to the bombardier. The city, with the
sea beyond it now, came rushing at them, and von Schlichten, standing
at the front of the bridge, discovered that he had his arm around
Paula's waist and was holding her a little more closely than was
military. He made no attempt to release her, however.
"There's nothing to worry about, really," he was assuring her.
"Pickering's boys built this thing according to the best principles of
engineering, and the stuff they got out of that big-economy-size
shilling-shocker all checked mathematically...."
The red light on the bridge flashed, and the intercom shouted, "_Bomb
off!_" He forced Paula down on the bridge deck and crouched beside
her.
"Cover your eyes," he warned. "You remember what the flash was like in
the screen when the _Jan Smuts_ blew up. And we didn't get the worst
of it; the pickup on the _Gaucho_ was knocked out too soon."
He kept on lecturing her about gamma-rays and ultra-violet rays and
X-rays and cosmic rays, trying to keep making some sort of intelligent
sounds while they clung together and waited, and, with the other half
of his mind, trying not to think of everything that could go wrong
with that jerry-built improvisation they had just dumped onto Keegark.
If it didn't blow, and the geeks found it, they'd know that another
one would be along shortly, and....
An invisible hand caught the gun-cutter and hurled her end-over-end,
sending von Schlichten and Paula sprawling at full length on the deck,
still clinging to one another. There was a blast of almost palpable
sound, and a sensation of heat that penetrated even the airtight
superstructure of the _Elmoran_. An instant later, there was another,
and another, similar shock. Two more bombs had gone off behind them,
in Keegark; that meant that they had found King Orgzild's remaining
nuclear armament. There were shattering sounds of breaking glass, and
heavy thumps that told of structural damage to the cutter, and hoarse
shouts, and lurid cursing as Morrison and his airmen struggled with
the controls. The cutter began losing altitude, but she was back on a
reasonably even keel. Von Schlichten rose, helping Paula to her feet,
and found that they had been kissing one another passionately. They
were still in each other's arms when the pitching and rolling of the
cutter ceased and somebody tapped him on the shoulder.
He came out of the embrace and looked around. It was Lieutenant (j.g.)
Morrison.
"What the devil, lieutenant?" he demanded.
"Sorry to interrupt, sir, but we're starting back to _Procyon_. And
here, you'll want this, I suppose." He held out a glass disc. "I
never expected to see it, but at that it took three A-bombs to blow
you loose from your monocle."
"Oh, that?" Von Schlichten took his trademark and set it in his eye.
"I didn't lose it," he lied. "I just jettisoned it. Don't you know,
lieutenant, that no gentleman ever wears a monocle while he's kissing
a lady?"
He looked around. They were at about eight hundred to a thousand feet
above the water, with a stiff following wind away from the explosion
area. The 90-mm gun, forward, must have been knocked loose and carried
away; it was gone, and so was the TV-pickup and the radar. Something,
probably the gun, had slammed against the front of the bridge--the
metal skeleton was bent in, and the armor-glass had been knocked out.
The cutter was vibrating properly, so the contragravity-field had not
been disturbed, and her jets were firing.
"It was the second and third bombs that did the damage, sir," Morrison
was saying. "We'd have gone through the effects of our own bomb with
nothing more than a bad shaking--of course, on contragravity, we're
weightless relative to the air-mass, but she was built to stand the
winds in the high latitudes. But the two geek bombs caught us off
balance...."
"You don't need to apologize, lieutenant. You and your crew behaved
splendidly, lieutenant-commander, best traditions, and all that sort
of thing. It was a pleasure, commander, hope to be aboard with you
again, captain."
They found Kent Pickering at the rear of the bridge, and joined him
looking astern. Even von Schlichten, who had seen H-bombs and
Bethe-cycle bombs, was impressed. Keegark was completely obliterated
under an outward-rolling cloud of smoke and dust that spread out for
five miles at the bottom of the towering column.
There had been a hundred and fifty thousand people in that city, even
if their faces were the faces of lizards and they had four arms and
quartz-speckled skins. What fraction of them were now alive, he could
not guess. He had to remind himself that they were the people who had
burned Eric Blount and Hendrik Lemoyne alive; that two of the three
bombs that had contributed to that column of boiling smoke had been
made in Keegark, by Keegarkans, and that, with a few causal factors
altered, he was seeing what would have happened to Konkrook. Perhaps
every Terran felt a superstitious dread of nuclear energy turned to
the purposes of war; small wonder, after what they had done on their
own world.
For one thing, he thought grimly, the next geek who picks up the idea
of soaking a Terran in thermoconcentrate and setting fire to him will
drop it again like a hot potato. And the next geek potentate who tries
to organize an anti-Terran conspiracy, or the next crazy
caravan-driver who preached _znidd suddabit_, will be lynched on the
spot. But this must be the last nuclear bomb used on Uller....
Drunkard's morning-after resolution! he told himself contemptuously.
The next time, it will come easier, and easier still the time after
that. After you drop the first bomb, there is no turning back, any
more than there had been after Hiroshima, four-hundred-and-fifty-odd
years ago. Why, he had even been considering just where, against the
mountains back of Bwork, he would drop a demonstration bomb as a
prelude to a surrender demand.
You either went on to the inevitable catastrophe, or you realized, in
time, that nuclear armament and nationalism cannot exist together on
the same planet, and it is easier to banish a habit of thought than a
piece of knowledge. Uller was not ready for membership in the Terran
Federation; then its people must bow to the Terran Pax. The Kragans
would help--as proconsuls, administrators, now, instead of
mercenaries. And there must be manned orbital stations, and the
Residencies must be moved outside the cities, away from possible
blast-areas. And Sid Harrington's idea of encouraging the natives to
own their own contragravity-ships must be shelved, for a long time to
come. Maybe, in a century or so....
Kankad had a good idea, at that, a most meritorious idea. He was sold
on it, already, and he doubted if it would take much salesmanship with
Paula, either. Already, she was clinging to his arm with obvious
possessiveness. Maybe their grandchildren, and the Kankad of that
time, would see Uller a civilized member of the Federation....
They paused, as the gun-cutter nuzzled up to the _Procyon_ and the
canvas-entubed gangway was run out and made fast, looking back at the
fearful thing that had sprouted from where Keegark had been.
"You know," Paula was saying, echoing his earlier thought, "but for
that female pornographer, that would have been Konkrook."
He nodded. "Yes. I hope you won't mind, but there will always be a
place in my heart for Hildegarde."
Then they turned their backs upon the abomination of Keegark's
desolation and went up the gangway together, looking very little like
a general and his adjutant.
* * * * *
With a broadsword in his hand, von Schlichten fought his way
toward the throne. There Firkked waited, a sword in one of
his upper hands, his Spear of State in the other, and a
dagger in each lower hand. Von Schlichten fought on, trying
not to think of the absurdity of a man of the Sixth Century
A.E., the representative of a civilized Chartered Company,
dueling to the death with a barbarian king for a throne he
had promised to another barbarian ... or of what could
happen on Uller if he allowed this four-armed monstrosity to
kill him!
_Ace Science Fiction Books by H. Beam Piper_
EMPIRE
FEDERATION
FIRST CYCLE
FOUR-DAY PLANET/LONE STAR PLANET
FUZZY PAPERS
FUZZY SAPIENS
LITTLE FUZZY
LORD KALVAN OF OTHERWHEN
PARATIME!
SPACE VIKING
ULLER UPRISING
THE WORLDS OF H. BEAM PIPER
* * * * *