ARMAGEDDON, 1970
By Geoff St. Reynard
As atomic weapons from space laid waste to
Earth's cities, Alan Rackham searched for the
traitors. Was it possible he sought himself?
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Imagination Stories of Science and Fantasy
October 1952
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
They tried to kill Alan Rackham about an hour after he had seen the
accident. They bungled the job. They shot at him from ambush--with
an ordinary automatic pistol--as he was walking up to his house; and
Brave, who had a sixth sense for danger which never failed him, knocked
Alan over at the very instant of the shot and sprawled across him, a
great solid shield holding him down and protecting him despite his
angry wrigglings. Brave's grenade pistol was in his hand before the
two of them hit ground, and he sent four quick shots at the bushes,
spaced so that the tiny hot fragments tore hell out of thirty yards of
shrubbery. Nobody yelled or groaned. Brave waited a full minute, and
then he rose cautiously, so that Alan could sit up and brush himself
off and swear as he spat out dirt. They went into the house and Alan
reported the assassination attempt to his immediate superior, Dr.
Getty. After that they didn't try again to kill Alan for a long time.
The accident had been uncanny. It happened in the room where the shells
of the silver-colored disks were fitted together and welded, before
they were sent to the gargantuan baths that half-melted them again to
rechill them into solid masses of metal which nothing short of a direct
hit by a blockbuster would crack.
A welder, using one of the newly-developed torches that made the old
ones seem like match-flares by comparison, dropped it accidentally. Its
flame licked up and sprayed across the man's right hand. It melted the
protective glove like ice cream on a stove; crisped away the skin and
liquefied the flesh, charred the bones black and left the welder no
more than half a palm and two fingers before he could jerk his hand out
of the terrible blast of fire.
Alan and Brave were standing about twelve feet off, and there could be
no mistake as to what they saw then.
* * * * *
The welder turned off his torch with his left hand; he held the remains
of his right before his face, turned it and stared at it (the blood
coursing in little sluggish streams down the forearm, the charcoal
that had been bone sifting off into the air, the flesh a greasy
yellow-red mass like candle drippings), and he shook his head slowly,
an expression of annoyed mortification on his face. It was as though he
had cut himself while shaving, no more. He was simply piqued, when he
should have been shrieking with horror and unendurable pain.
Alan and Brave ran to him. "My God, man," said Alan, shaken, "let me
get you to infirmary."
The welder stood up. "That's all right, Dr. Rackham. I can go myself.
This don't hurt." And then a curious look spread over his face, as if
he had just recollected a lesson taught him long ago. "It don't hurt
_much_," he amended. "I guess it's cauterized so bad I can't feel it
yet. Don't you worry, sir, I can make it."
He walked away, perfectly steady, carrying the almost destroyed hand
in front of his chest; and Alan was so dumbfounded he let him go.
The welder never reached the infirmary. No man saw him again, alive or
dead.
So an hour thereafter someone took a shot at Alan Rackham. Since
Brave had witnessed the accident too, and because neither of them
could account for the shooting except in connection with that strange
accident, it seemed stupid and pointless for an attempt to be made
on Alan's life alone; especially when a grenade pistol, one of those
lean evil handguns developed in 1959, would with one shot have cut an
eight-yard-wide swath in everything before it and eliminated both of
them. But there it was. They shot at Alan with an automatic--the bullet
nicked across his chest and spoiled a blue coat that was practically
new--and then they disappeared.
Alan's house, which he shared with Brave, was a four-room brick atop
a knoll on the outskirts of the colony. It was a perfect bachelor
establishment; the precipitron kept it free of dust and Brave's innate
neatness overcame Alan's careless disregard of surroundings to the
extent that dirty socks and unpressed trousers were not often to be met
with lying in corners or hanging over the backs of chairs. Brave was a
good everyday cook and Alan occasionally took a couple of hours off to
chef up a New Orleans style banquet for two. The living room was lined
with books and the plastiglassed-in lounging quarters in the rear
held racks of pipes and a well-stocked bar. They were very comfortable
there. It was only a ten-minute walk from Alan's laboratory, and four
minutes' ride from the center of the colony.
The colony was called Project Star. It was located on Long Island,
protected much as Oak Ridge had been in the '40s and '50s, and Project
Bellona in the early '60s; with electrified fences, and soldiers
carrying the latest weapons, and a ring of grotesque machinery all
around it, comprised of radar detectors and great ack-ack guns
and a number of generators that threw up a kind of primitive,
partly-effective force field. The force field would stop any aircraft
or at least cause it enough trouble to slow it down for the ack-ack.
Of course the artificial satellite, Albertus (named in honor of Dr.
Einstein), kept a watchful telescope on Project Star. But in that
year of 1970 it seemed to most men that all the caution and secrecy
was overly dramatic. After the collapse of Soviet Russia a decade
before, from internal causes precipitated by the successful fixing
of the American-controlled satellite Albertus in the heavens, and
after the almost Carthaginian peace imposed on Argentina when its
dictator A-bombed London, the world had quieted down considerably.
America was top dog in the nations and her supervision of the science
of other countries left little possibility of successful attack or
even of effective sabotage within the many colonies which worked on
advancements in weapons and other civilized phenomena, and on space
flight.
* * * * *
Nearly everyone believed that the purpose of Project Star was to
construct "flying saucers" (the inadequate name had stuck through the
years) for use in reaching out to the other planets. Only the men who
were working there, and a few others in government and in the military
forces, knew that the disks were not intended for extra-terrestrial
flight--there were rocket projects galore for that--but for journeys in
the atmosphere or slightly above it, at speeds incredible even in 1970.
The name Project Star had not been chosen to mislead anyone, but it
had done so and nobody bothered to correct the impression. Secrecy had
become an ingrained national habit in the past thirty-odd years.
Dr. Alan Rackham was one of the scientists who worked on the problem of
fuel for the disks. He was not a member of the vastly important handful
who headed the colony and came equipped with everything sacred and
untouchable except halos, but he was considered of enough consequence
to rate a house of his own and an assistant who was also an efficient
bodyguard. This was Brave, whose proper name was John Kiwanawatiwa.
Brave sat down in his own chair, a sturdy specially-built job, while
Alan called Dr. Getty on the visiphone to report the shooting. Brave
never sprawled out or slouched as his superior did. He sat straight,
a red-copper-colored man built to the scale of a Greek statue, about
half again life size. His arms and legs were tough as cable steel,
his chest a brawny barrel. He was a Navajo Indian, but his features
were more nearly those of a Sioux: a great finely-formed crag of a
nose, thin straight lips over white teeth, dark eyes that a hawk might
envy their piercing power, a wolf-trap jaw. His speech was that of an
M.S. of Carlisle and Oxford, except when he spoke with people he did
not know or like; then it became a parody of the nineteenth-century
storybook red man's gutteral discourse. At times, when he went with
Alan to meetings of the hierarchy (a few of whom, including Dr. Getty,
he cordially detested for their bland self-importance), he even wore a
bedraggled chicken feather sticking upright in his black hair, stood
behind Alan with folded arms and a fierce expression and confined his
remarks to "Ugh" and "Waugh." This gave both Alan and himself a great
deal of innocent pleasure.
For Alan Rackham was also a rebel against stuffiness and conceit.
He was a perfectly normal-looking man, of slightly more than middle
height, thirty-one years old, handsome enough if you liked lean bony
features and unruly brown hair; his muscular development was so
unobtrusive that no one ever guessed he had been a Marine and won
himself a DSC in Argentina. He enjoyed his work at Project Star, for
he had a scientist's inquiring mind; but he liked even more the huge
Indian with whom he lived, the girl in the metallurgy section who wore
his engagement ring, and the book of rather impudent philosophy on
which he worked during his free evenings.
He also loved a long drink, a thoughtful pipe, an involved practical
joke, and the moody Siamese cat, Unquote.
* * * * *
Now he turned from the visiphone, as the image of Dr. Getty faded out
on its screen, and he frowned at Brave. "Son," he said, "why would
anybody take a potshot at me?"
"What does Doc Pomposity say about it?" rumbled the Indian.
"Mainly blah, blah, blah."
"Naturally," nodded Brave. "You know, sagamore, I think it's that
accident. There was something cockeyed about it.... I don't care
how shocked the fellow was, or how quickly the flame seared up and
anesthetized the wound; there should have been plenty of pain in that
hand. And he didn't even yip when it happened. He only looked peeved."
"Getty says he never got to infirmary. No one has seen him at all."
"Cockeyed," said Brave again. "The whole thing's a muddle." He stared
at Alan. "Boss, I have an instinct that warns me we're in for trouble."
"That's an instinct? When I get shot at, this gives you an instinct?"
"The noble red man has an instinct," said Brave imperturbably, "which
sits in his belly and beats on a tomtom when trouble's coming. I don't
mean ghastly wounds that don't make men cry out, or even lunatics
laying for you thereafter--and there's a connection between the two,
that's sure. But I mean big trouble. There's something in the air. I
can't quite catch it, but it's been there for a long time. Weeks and
months, sirdar."
"You've been reading the thesaurus again. You know more synonyms for
'master' than Roget. You mean this seriously, Brave? About trouble?" He
had a respect for the Indian's intuition which was based half on his
anthropological knowledge of the weird powers of certain older races,
and half on pure human superstition; at times when Brave made his
predictions, Alan felt as though a gypsy crone had passed by him and
whispered some incantation in his ear.
"I mean it, Alan. And the damned instinct has never been wrong yet.
It's beating in my guts right now like it did at Campana just before
hell broke loose."
"Well, batten down the hatches, then," said Alan resignedly, while the
hair on the back of his neck prickled and tried to stand up. "It's got
itself off to a fine start, your trouble. My tailor will never be able
to mend this jacket."
"Why don't you cook us some oysters Rockefeller and lobster thermidor
and all that Frenchified goop you brew up?" suggested Brave. "If we're
in for afflictions, we may as well meet 'em with pleasantly full
stomachs."
"Right. While I'm at it, you write a report of the incident--of both of
them--and sign my name. Getty'll never know the difference. He thinks
you haven't mastered Basic English yet."
"Ugh," said Brave. "Noble red man will inscribe li'l pictures on
birchbark for medicine man, while medicine man raises cain in frozen
food locker. Don't get that sauce too thin this time, patriarch. I
can't bear watery sauce on my lobsters."
CHAPTER II
Next morning, while Alan was still dressing and yawning, and Brave
was clattering skillets in the kitchen, humming the _allegro con
passionato_ movement from "Hard Hearted Hannah the Vamp of Savannah,"
the door chimes bonged softly. Brave went to the spywindow, surveyed
the caller, and shifted his grenade pistol to a handier position before
opening the door. A stranger stood on the threshold.
"Ichabod Crane," said Brave to himself, and aloud, "Yes?"
"Ah," said the stranger, "you would be the tough egg with the
unpronounceable name. Greetings, chieftain."
"How," said Brave with a straight face. "You want-um audience with
great sachem?"
"That I do, Lo."
"Oh, gad," groaned the Indian, "if I hear that weary old jest once
more I'll burst into tears and die. Come in, comedian. Dr. Rackham's
dressing."
"Thanks. Forgive me for the godawful gag, friend. I haven't eaten
breakfast yet and an empty stomach plays the devil with my sense of
humor." He rattled over to a chair and sat down. At least, thought
Brave, closing the door, you expected him to rattle. He was the longest
and thinnest bag of bones ever seen on Long Island. Fully six feet
eight, he was lean from the top of his narrow skull, which was covered
by an inch-long mat of straight stiff blond hair, to the soles of his
number twelve feet. If he had any fat in him at all it must have been
a very lonesome blob of fat indeed, well camouflaged and utterly alone
in a wilderness of stringy muscle, meager sinew, and shaving-slender
bones. His green eyes, perpetually half-lidded on either side of a nose
like the prow of a Chinese junk, were humorous and sharp and as bright
as polished emeralds.
Brave said to himself, Here is a shrewd customer, who isn't one-tenth
the fool he appears to be.
"You don't have an appointment with Dr. Rackham."
"No, I don't. A plump little meathead called Getty over at the central
offices said he'd be here, and I popped over on the chance. I want to
inveigle him onto a TV program of mine."
"Dr. Rackham is a busy man."
"So is President Blose of the U.S. of A., but _he_ came on the program,
Lo. Pardon me," said the man, "there I go again. It's second nature. I
don't mean to offend, but I was a disk jockey once. Look, friend, my
name is Jim McEldownie. I'm _Worlds of Portent_ McEldownie."
"I'm _Lashings of Victuals_ Kiwanawatiwa, and my eggs are scorching,"
said Brave, going out to the kitchen. "The books are counted, so are
the pipes, and the first editions are booby-trapped. Don't get ideas."
"Injun, I could grow to love you," said McEldownie. "Listen, seriously,
don't you ever watch TV?"
"I do not."
"That explains it. Existing in the dark like this, you wouldn't have
heard of me. I run this klatch, see, called _Worlds of Portent_, onto
which I entice various important and pseudo-important characters, and
there I cajole and browbeat and query till they tell me all sorts of
fascinating lies, and the public laps it up like a bunch of silly
cats."
* * * * *
Unquote, the Siamese, rose out of her hygienic playbox and gave him a
frozen glare. He recoiled. "My God," he said, "I seem to be offending
everyone this morning. Forgive me, puss."
Unquote snarled and collapsed in a boneless pile of beautiful fur. Alan
stuck his head into the room and said, "Where do you classify me?"
"Huh? Oh, hallo, Doc. You're important. Anybody from Project Star
is important. Whether the same can be said for those officials of
our mighty government who have gasped and babbled and turned blue on
_Portent_, I'm not one to declare. How about it, Doc? Will you appear?"
"Talking about what? Fuel? That's all I really know."
"If you can talk for thirteen minutes about it, without violating any
regulations or giving away secrets, I want you. Fuel is hot stuff with
the space-minded John Q."
"What do you think, Brave? Should we do it?"
Brave said, "Too much time and no fun, that's how it sounds to me."
"Oh, I don't know. I've never been on the air."
"Please," said McEldownie, shuddering like a leafless willow in a high
wind. "The phrase is 'on the space.' Air belongs to that outmoded,
decadent, but apparently deathless medium called radio. There, I've
said it. Have you got any mouth-washing soap?"
"A positive Hilton Boil," said Brave in the kitchen. "A real yokked-up
comic. Wait till I've fed him and we'll hurl him out."
"All right," said Alan, "I'll do it. I'm a ham at heart. When do you
want me?"
"Tomorrow night at eight vacant?"
"As vacant as--" he was going to say "Dr. Getty's head," but caught
himself in time. The TV man's flippancy was contagious. "Quite vacant.
Give Brave the directions and we'll be there."
Brave said, "Breakfast is on. There are three plates and food for two.
I hope you eat lightly, Mr. Portent."
"McEldownie, but call me Jim. I eat like a bird."
The bird, thought Alan half an hour later, must be a starving turkey
buzzard; he sighed and stood up. "We're due at work, Jim. See you at
eight tomorrow, then?"
"Seven-fifteen. I have to brief you. Cheers, gentlemen. Apologize to
the cat for me. I insulted it a while back and it's been burning holes
in my neck ever since." He took himself off, still with the illusion of
rattling bonily. Alan and Brave washed up and strolled down to their
laboratory.
Nothing happened that day or the next, save for a thorough search for
the missing welder, which turned up no trace of him. At seven-fifteen
the two friends walked into the TV studio in Manhattan.
"Hi," said McEldownie, waving a long hand. "Sit down and let's gurgle
about fuel." They did so. At one point the lean man said, "An idea.
What if Brave were to stand behind you all through the program? It'd
look impressive as hell. Sinister Indian guards scientist even on
national hookup. 'No precaution too elaborate for our men,' says head
of Project Star. How about it?"
Alan looked at Brave. He would not expose his friend to stupid
ridicule. Brave winked. "Okay," said Alan. "But no gags."
"Abso-bloody-lutely. Play it for gravity. Show people that there is
danger connected with the business. And I think there is," he added
solemnly.
Alan stared. "Why do you say that?"
"I don't mean the TV, I mean your work out on Long Island. You can't
tell me that nobody in the world wishes our country any ill, chum. We
have enemies just as we always have had. Why else the ack-ack and force
screens?"
Alan did not answer. He thought of Brave's prediction of trouble, and
he was more impressed with this lanky comedian than he had been before
that moment.
* * * * *
Thirty seconds before the program time he sat down at the round table
opposite McEldownie, and Brave took up a forbidding posture behind his
chair.
His host began to speak, and suddenly Alan realized why the tall blond
irrepressible fellow had been trusted with a program of such gravity
as _Worlds of Portent_. As the cameras rolled and the brilliant lights
came on, the jester's motley dropped away from him and was replaced by
a cloak of earnest sobriety. His fantastic appearance heightened the
seriousness; it was as shocking and thought-producing as if a scarecrow
had begun to talk Schopenhauer.
He knew precisely how much to say; when to sit back and let Alan do a
monologue, and when to interrupt with a pertinent question. He was a
genius at his work.
And then, perhaps four or five minutes after the telecast had begun,
Alan became aware of two things, each quite extraordinary. First, Brave
had disappeared. Alan glanced back over his shoulder and found the
Indian had vanished. The lights were so bright that his vision did not
extend to the walls of the studio, so he presumed that his friend was
still there somewhere; but he had left the range of the cameras. And
secondly, something was happening to Alan's mind.
He tried to analyze the trouble, but he could not do it. He could only
touch a few salient points of it; the fact that although he was talking
very learnedly, and with (so far as he could tell) lucidity and vigor,
_he_ was not controlling his tongue in the least. It was almost like
being drunk; there seemed to be a small entity perched on the root
of his tongue who was pulling the strings of speech. But whereas the
drunken entity was malicious and got him into all sorts of rows and
riots, this particular sprite was doing what seemed a fine job for him.
He knew quite well that he himself was not forming or directing the
words he spoke. It was unpleasant, to say the least.
And there was something else. His mind, freed of necessity to
concentrate on the program, was somewhere off in space, listening
intently ... listening to a voice from without and within, a voice
that inhabited the cold wastes of time and infinity as well as the
bone-bounded sphere of his brain.
_Listen to me, Alan Rackham_, said the voice. Wordlessly, yet with
words, from the farthest stretches of the galaxies and still existing
in the core of his own intellect, cold as hoarfrost, hot as berserker's
rage, gentle and persuasive as a doting mother, the voice said to him,
_Listen to me_.
* * * * *
He would not listen. It was good and evil both together, and if he
listened he would die. Yet it was said he would live. He would live
forever; if time can be measured in terms of endlessness, he would not
die. But he knew he would die. He struggled. The cameras picked up no
hint of the travail. His face was intense and good-humored and his
words were intelligent; and all the while he fought with the voice and
would not listen. He fought it for an hour, and for a month, and till
the end of the world came and beyond, and it spoke to him, fire and ice
in the same words, but without words, and then he began to listen to it.
At this point six minutes of the telecast had gone by.
_You are listening now_, said the voice. _You are listening, are you
not?_
_I'm listening, God curse you._
_I am taking you, Alan Rackham, as a bear takes a lamb, as a man takes
a woman, as a hand takes a glove and the glove takes the hand._
_I understand, curse you. Take me._
_I am older than your whole race, and wiser than its cumulative wisdom,
and I come from the stars._
_Of course, you come from the stars. You are myself, and I understand
you, friend._
_Yes, I am yourself, wiser and stronger and older and beyond you in
every way, and I am you. You are my servant, my slave, and myself._
_Certainly, master. Why do you tell me things I have always known?_
_You are not obeying when you follow me, for you follow yourself, you
who are now me._
_You are God, are you not?_ said Alan in his mind. _The Buddhists are
right._
_No. Not God. I am the atom and I am the intergalactic void, you and
me and everything right and wrong. Have you learned your lesson?_
_It is a lesson I knew in the womb._
_Now you are mine_, said the voice, approving without an iota's loss of
the flame and frost of hatred and love blended flawlessly.
_This is a pleasure beyond pleasure, sensation far above sensation.
This is maelstrom descent and flying into the sun. This is the keenness
of sexual transport to the nth power. I live for you._
_Now you have it. Never forget it._
_Never!_ swore Alan.
_Now forget it._
_I have forgotten it._
_Now what do you have to do for me?_
_Whatever it is you wish._
_Truly you are mine. Now you have forgotten me._
_I have forgotten._
_Who am I?_
_Who are you?_ asked Alan, perplexed.
_Truly you have forgotten. What have you to say?_
"So the problem of most importance confronting us then was, how can we
carry enough of this fuel to get us to the moon and back? It took us
seven years to solve that one, but as everyone knows, we did. Then Van
Horne discovered the hitherto unknown properties of--" he was talking
blithely, almost by rote, for this was history-book stuff; and there
had never been any sprite guiding his tongue at all, nor any voiceless
voice in the bitterness of the eternal chasm between the stars and
there was no memory anywhere in his consciousness of such things, nor
any lingering discomfortable feeling that he had known a thing now
forgotten....