Three tough, cynical fighting-men of
Earth--Danton, Keith, Van Ness--rose
from their tomb of forgetfulness ... to
find themselves space-wrecked on Mars,
the last hope of mankind against the
evil and immortal Oligarchs. It was
weird, incredible, it was a horrible
dream ... but it was real. Or was it?
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Planet Stories January 1951.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
_His name was Burton. John R. Burton._
_He was as happy as anyone could expect to be. His wife loved him and
he loved his wife. Their children were very well adjusted, as was
everyone of course in the New World system._
_Burton worked ten hours a week in a coal mine, though the job was
merely one demanding the overseeing of machines. The rest of the week
was one of leisure devoted to gardening, hobbies, play, music. There
was no more hate, no violence, no feelings of insecurity. It wasn't
that everyone loved everyone else particularly. It was just that no one
was afraid of the future anymore._
_Sometimes though, Burton had bad dreams. Sometimes they were very bad.
In these dreams it seemed that he was somebody else. Someone who--_
_But after he woke up he never remembered the dreams, so, he thought,
maybe they didn't matter._
_Burton guessed that what he was in the dreams was too horrible to
remember._
* * * * *
Danton sat in the chair before the control bank and stared at his hands
until they seemed to stop shaking. It had been a long, long way to
Mars. A long, long time in which to think.
Of, for example, who had he been for the last hundred years? He had
been someone, someone with a name, a job, a ritual, a wife, kids,
everything. A valuable worker, a nice round peg in one of countless
millions of nice round holes. Who and what you had been for the past
hundred years was certainly a question that could bother you, he
thought.
He glanced at Keith and Van Ness. It wasn't bothering them now. They
had been two other people for a century also--but they weren't bothered
now. They had passed out cold on pre-New World bourbon.
They had better snap out of it, Danton thought a little desperately.
The ship had about reached Mars. They had better get up from there.
His hands started shaking again. He got a cigarette lighted and
the opiate stuff crawling in his throat. He closed his eyes. For
an instant it felt better, hiding in there behind the darkness of
his closed lids. But then the thoughts came faster, like schools of
irritated fish.
A final war like the last one, destructive beyond memory anyway, was
one most of the survivors had been more than happy to forget. They had
welcomed reconditioning, the moving into the PLAN, into the New World
system of non-violence. People became, largely, depending on the amount
of reconditioning necessary, someone else. You can't change solidly
laid foundations of thought and still be the same person.
So it was a New World. In it the people were New. Everything starting
over again from scratch. A small decentralized population. Beneficent
leaders, masters of psychology. No weapons, not even in museums, no
conception of war, no fears of tomorrow. There were no enemies on
Earth. In fact, the mind was conditioned so that the concept of an
enemy was impossible. Outer space was merely a region of lovely stars
on clear nights.
Of the few New System soldiers left, most were willing to be
reconditioned. Three of them hadn't been willing. Richard Danton, Don
Keith, Dwight Van Ness. They had degenerated into drunken pariahs,
people without a group with which to identify themselves, lonely, lost,
aging and ailing. Finally they did accept reconditioning. Not because
they wanted to. But because they had to or go completely insane. Seers,
Secretary of Social Security, said this was bad, but that they might
be able to bring about an adjustment. It would be difficult, he said,
because of involuntary conditioning, but he would see what he could do.
Evidently he had done all right. Danton couldn't remember the
subsequent hundred years. But he had been someone. They had blotted him
out, fixed him up with another name, twisted ganglia, altered synapsis,
probed lobotomy here and there. Everything went, name, identity, the
entire business inside and out.
But all the time, Richard Danton had been there, a pattern. A circuit
disconnected. When they had needed him, they had merely twisted ganglia
back, altered synapsis, probed lobotomy again. And after a hundred
years here he was again, resurrected, like a ghost. And when they were
done with him, after his assignment was finished, he would go back into
the grave, and that someone else would go on living.
But maybe not this time. Maybe not again. This could be a dangerous
assignment for him and Keith and Van Ness. They might never get back to
Earth, and that might be all right--for them.
He would rather die fighting, as a soldier, than keep on living as
someone else, someone he didn't even know.
According to Seers there was a chance that the final war had not been
quite so final. The Oligarch Council had evidently escaped Earth
in secretly constructed spaceships, destined for Mars. If they had
actually gotten to Mars, and had survived, they were there still, and
it would be only a matter of time until they returned to Earth and
destroyed it.
Other factors made it even more complicated. Earth couldn't defend
itself, for one thing. It had no weapons. It had no human being capable
of manning a weapon if it had one. Seers had said that the sanity of
the world depended on absolute secrecy. The population was never to
know anything at all, never to suspect that they might be threatened.
Such knowledge, Seers said, would destroy the New System. The people
weren't psychologically capable of receiving knowledge of insecurity,
not for a long time yet.
But what bothered Danton was--_who have I been for the last hundred
years?_
* * * * *
Keith was crawling across the floor, gasping at an oxygen inhalor. The
small, thin-faced and cynical soldier got up and sat down. He grinned.
"Are we in Valhalla yet, Captain?"
"You still take this whole thing as a joke, Keith?"
"The psyche boys are good," Keith said. "Plenty good. And I still say
this is just delusion they're feeding us, on suggestion tape, after
good shots of hypnosene."
"Why would they do that?"
"They tried to recondition us, make good little workers out of us.
But it didn't take. We don't remember, sure--but that's no sign we
were successfully changed. I say we weren't. I got it all figured out,
Captain. They're killing us. Mercifully, of course, making us die
happy. But we're dying just the same, dying in a dream. A dream of
soldiering, of heroics, of sacrifice and high honor. Just the way we'd
want it. And instead of waking up, we'll really die, in the line of
duty. Like a good soldier should."
"But--"
"I'm not blaming them. I think it's a fine idea. For one thing, we
aren't sure it's not really happening, so we'll have to accept it as
truth. It's the real thing any way you look at it." Danton saw the
grin fade slowly across the mask of Keith's face. "Are we really here,
Captain?"
Danton peered into the scope again. "Yes," he whispered.
"Mars, the god of war," Keith said, "awaits his favorite sons."
A big dull reddish ball, like an eyeball, a blood-shot eye. The cone
of its giant shadow streaming out, a quadrant of the heavens. And then
all at once, as if the eye were closing, it darkened except where the
sun splattered down on its far half, a pool of sickly light radiating
outward into dissipating orange and brown.
Danton thought of the Oligarchs down there, or what remained of them.
The Oligarchs and the slaves they would have brought with them in their
ships. In a hundred years they could have multipled considerably.
And the Oligarchs themselves, the last of the old world type of
faithless human madness--essentially amoral, no empathy, tremendous
egotism--filled with the old ideas of class superiority. They destroyed
with utter casualness. What advanced stage had their paranoid culture
reached in a century? It wasn't something one wanted to think about.
The planet was reaching up like a clenched red fist. He felt the
impulse to duck. Sweat ran down his face, itched along his ribs. A
hundred years was a long time to be someone else, and now Danton was
wondering if he dared trust himself anymore as a soldier. His hands
moved again over the controls.
The wrecked Oligarch ship had been found off the Mindanao Deeps by a
sub-sea exploring party, brought up, reconditioned, studied. There were
records and documents in it, and from these Seers made his decision.
He brought back Danton. In secret, of course; send them to out of
living graves. They were trained, made into astrogators, cosmologists.
Everything in absolute secrecy, of course. And after the ship blasted
off for Mars, only the three of them and Seers retained any knowledge
that there had been a ship at all. The reconditioners had fixed that
up. Those who had found it, the scientists who had studied it, no one
remembered a thing.
"Find out what you can, then come back," Seers had said. "Don't fight.
If you fight, you might never come back. We would never know then
what to do. We can prepare ships like this one, Danton. In secret, of
course, send them to Mars. But we don't want to take a chance like that
unless we have to. If activity like that ever leaked out to the people,
that would be the end of the New System. A sudden blast of insecurity
would wreck our delicately balanced new order."
It was a fine ship, Danton thought. The Oligarchs knew machines. They
worshiped them. The ship was also a monstrous arsenal, a hurtling
fountain of destruction, loaded with hydrogen bombs and something
called a proton cannon that could curl a planet up in space like a moth
in a flame.
Power, death, throbbing around him, hot and terrible ... the ordnance
console key inches from his fingertips. Keith had said he didn't want
to go back to Earth. Not and face all that business again. Why not let
go, blast, die right here when the attack came? That was a soldier's
way!
"I'm going to throw her into an orbit," Danton said.
He saw the weird swirling light of the moons then, the moons of Mars,
as the ship slowed in its orbit. Heavy cloud-banks drifting low in
colossal valleys. And then he saw the ships. Three of them rising like
giant silver beetles.
* * * * *
He didn't know whether he deliberately bungled and failed to lift the
ship out of its orbit in time, or whether--but psychologically there
weren't such things as accidental blunders. Anyway, now it was too
late. Maybe everyone on earth would be wiped out because of it, but
Danton blundered, moved too slowly. From the ships a white cloud of
released energy flashed, blinded, billowed. His ship bucked and swerved
and lurched.
Keith whispered tensely, "I'll take that ordnance, Captain. _I'll take
it!_"
Van Ness weaved upright, sucking at an oxygen capsule, mumbling.
Danton said, "They're not firing now. They're curious, maybe. Let them
get in close. They'll come in, try to identify us. It must have just
occurred to them that this is one of their old ships. Then we fire,
clear our course, and run."
"Run, run, get your gun!" Van Ness mumbled.
Danton swung the view-plate. The ships hovered behind, slightly above,
coasting, waiting, watching. Danton laughed aloud. For a hundred years
he had been dead. Now he was alive. Really alive. His fingers were
hot and wet as he gripped the T-bar, and he saw that the ships were
improved types. He couldn't escape back to earth now, even if he wanted
to. And he didn't have time now to figure out whether he wanted to or
not. It was too late now for thinking. He preferred it that way. He
said, "They're coming in close now. Keith, this is it!"
Keith nestled into the ordnance chair like a bird. His body was tight
with anticipated pleasure. His fingers hooked, spread, began to tremble
individually. Death was there, all around.
Without looking up, seemingly without reason, he asked, "You were
engaged to marry a very pretty girl when the war ended, weren't you,
Captain? Someone named Mara?"
Danton hadn't forgotten. "That's right. I couldn't explain it to
her--why I wouldn't be reconditioned. She married someone else. A
cybernetics engineer, named George."
"The hell with them, all of them!" Keith said. "You wouldn't want to go
back there. That's what they all think about us, Captain. While they
need us we're great guys, and afterwards--don't touch. No, Captain,
whether this is delusion or the real thing, this is how we were meant
to go. We're lucky, Captain!"
Keith manipulated the ordnance keys. Danton's eyes went blind before
the incredible flash of kinetic energy release. His eyes closed. Music,
lifting, whirling round and round and he was rocking with gentle joyous
softness in a cradle of death....
But Danton got his hands up against the darkness, held on to it, pushed
it this way and that, got it away from his eyes. He crawled back into
the chair, blinked into the viewer. He didn't see the ships now,
anywhere. Only the great clenched fist of the war-world, the red world,
rushing up, growing with a silent onrushing fury, looming, broadening.
Keith's fingers dug into Danton's shoulder. "I got 'em, Captain! Burned
them out like ants on a hot plate. They burned so beautiful...."
The ship had suffered from the repercussion; nothing responded right.
Danton shoved more intensifier units into the stern tubes, straightened
her a little with a couple of bursts from the steering jets, then
power-dived with the tubes roaring.
He fought the controls. The numbness, the roaring, the intolerable
rising temperature of the walls. Fighting for some sort of balance
to get the ship hurtling in at least a low-level orbit. The walls
quivered, then the whining, sighing, falling through a dense sea of
twisting vapor.
Danton watched the altimeter, the power gauges, manipulated the
power-tube stops. His body was an unfeeling, unconscious circuit of
responses. Somehow he got the ship at vertical. The plate brought
the landscape up to him, presented it to him like the unveiling work
of a mad artist. Up-pushing violence of mountain walls, a valley,
forest, dense alien looking stuff, thick and high and entangled and
phosphorescent with a pinkish glow drifting like the reflection of a
vast roaring furnace.
And--a senseless glimpse of something archaic, too primitive to be
real. Only a glimpse, so that immediately after, he decided he must
have seen something else. A long trail of armored cars. Amtracs, it
seemed, bristling with ancient types of guns. Armored cars. Amtracs. A
few hundred years ago they had had them in Earth museums.
The ship roared and shook. The scream of metal penetrated Danton's
skull, became part of an iron ball grinding in his head....
No sentience possessed him now, no mind, no body, no hate or joy or
hope or confused indecision about his twisted motivations. He thought
simply, death possesses me.
* * * * *
But death was only nearby. Life was a power-tube, dimming to a dull
yellow, flickering dangerously. Movement was without real substance.
Shapes, voices vague and distant. He heard Van Ness and Keith talking
once. Someone yelled. There was the burning sigh of the electronic
rifles they had evidently been able to salvage.
The light brightened slowly. He sat up. Keith and Van Ness stood
beside him. Clothing torn, faces scratched and bleeding. Keith's mouth
was tight, his jaw muscles rigid and pale. He turned, held his rifle
steady. Van Ness wanted to know if Danton felt all right now, anything
else wrong besides the knock on the head.
Danton said he didn't know. "I thought it would be cold here." He was
sweating. The air was muggy, quiet. The lake was huge before him, the
mountains beyond it gigantic and blue-misted. The lake was glassy and
still. Behind him was thick forest, reddish leaves, high trees, thickly
entangled, odd flowers, shadows. A feeling of things alive--but of
a cautious kind of living. Little eyes waiting and watching in the
bushes, on the fringes.
"Out of this valley, on the desert, it would be plenty cold," Keith
said.