6 Great Short Novels of Science Fiction Read online

  MacKinnon saw the Fader slide under the table and reach up. Then he was gone. Apparently he had, in some fashion, attached himself to the underside of the table.

  Mother Johnston made a great to-do of opening up. The lower door she opened at once, with much noise. Then she clumped slowly up the steps, pausing, wheezing, and complaining. MacKinnon heard her unlock the door.

  “A fine time to be waking honest people up!” she protested. “It’s hard enough to get the work done and make both ends meet without dropping what I’m doing every five minutes and—”

  “Enough of that, old girl,” a man’s voice answered, “just get along downstairs. We have business with you.”

  “What sort of business?” she demanded.

  “It might be selling liquor without a license, but it’s not—this time.”

  “I don’t. This is a private club. The members own the liquor; I simply serve it to them.”

  “That’s as may be. It’s those members I want to talk to. Get out of the way now, and be spry about it.”

  They came pushing into the room, Mother Johnston, still voluble, carried along by the van. The speaker was a sergeant of police. He was accompanied by a patrolman. Following them were two other uniformed men, but they were soldiers. McKinnon judged by the markings on their kilts that they were corporal and private—provided the insignia in New America were similar to those used by the United States Army.

  The sergeant paid no attention to Mother Johnston. “All right, you men,” he called out, “line up!”

  They did so, ungraciously but promptly.

  “All right, corporal—take charge!”

  The boy who washed up in the kitchen had been staring round-eyed. He dropped a glass. It bounced around on the hard floor, giving out bell-like sounds in the silence.

  The man who had questioned Dave spoke up. “What’s all this?”

  The sergeant answered with a pleased grin. “Conscription—that’s what it is. You are all enlisted in the army.”

  “Press gang!” It was an involuntary gasp that came from no particular source.

  The corporal stepped briskly forward. “Form a column of twos,” he directed. But the little man with the worried eyes was not done.

  “I don’t understand this,” he objected. “We signed an armistice with the Free State three weeks ago.”

  “That’s not your worry,” countered the sergeant, “nor mine. We are picking up every able-bodied man not in essential industry. Come along.”

  “Then you can’t take me.”

  “Why not?”

  He held up the stump of a missing hand. The sergeant glanced from it to the corporal, who nodded grudgingly and said, “Okay—but report to the office in the morning and register.”

  He started to march them out when Alec broke ranks and backed up to the wall, screaming. “You can’t do this to me! I won’t go!” His deadly little vibrator was exposed in his hand, and the right side of his face was drawn up in a spastic wink that left his teeth bare.

  “Get him, Steeves,” ordered the corporal. The private stepped forward, but stopped when Alec brandished the vibrator at him. He had no desire to have a vibroblade between his ribs, and there was no doubt as to the uncontrolled dangerousness of his hysterical opponent.

  The corporal, looking phlegmatic, almost bored, leveled a small tube at a spot on the wall over Alec’s head. Dave heard a soft pop! and a thin tinkle. Alec stood motionless for a few seconds, his face even more strained, as if he were exerting the limit of his will against some unseen force, then slid quietly to the floor. The tonic spasm in his face relaxed and his features smoothed into those of a tired and petulant, and rather bewildered, little boy.

  “Two of you birds carry him,” directed the corporal.

  The sergeant was the last to leave. He turned at the door and spoke to Mother Johnston. “Have you seen the Fader lately?”

  “The Fader?” She seemed puzzled. “Why, he’s in jail.”

  “Ah, yes—so he is.” He went out.

  ~ * ~

  Magee refused the drink Mother Johnston offered him.

  Dave was surprised to see that he appeared worried for the first time. “I don’t understand it.” Magee muttered, half to himself, then addressed the one-handed man. “Ed, bring me up to date.”

  “Not much news since they tagged you, Fader. The armistice was before that. I thought from the papers that things were going to be straightened out for once.”

  “So did I. But the government must expect war if they are going in for general conscription.” He stood up. “I’ve got to have more data. Al!” The kitchen boy stuck his head into the room.

  “Whatcha want, Fader?”

  “Go out and make palaver with five or six of the beggars. Look up their king. You know where he is?”

  “Sure. Over by the auditorium.”

  “Find out what’s stirring, but don’t let them know I sent you.”

  “Right, Fader. It’s in the bag.” The boy swaggered out.

  “Molly.”

  “Yes, Fader?”

  “Will you go out and do the same thing with some of the business girls? I want to know what they hear from their customers.” She nodded agreement. He went on, “Better look up that little redhead that has her beat up on Union Square. She can get secrets out of a dead man. Here”—he pulled a wad of bills out of his pocket and handed her several—”you better take this grease. You might have to pay off a cop to get back out of the district,”

  Magee was not disposed to talk and insisted that Dave get some sleep. He was easily persuaded, not having slept since he entered Coventry. That seemed like a lifetime past; he was exhausted. Mother Johnston fixed him a shakedown in a dark, stuffy room on the same underground level. It had none of the hygenic comforts to which he was accustomed—air conditioning, restful music, hydraulic mattress, nor soundproofing—and he missed his usual relaxing soak and auto-massage, but he was too tired to care. He slept in clothing and under covers for the first time in his life.

  He woke up with a headache, a taste in his mouth like tired sin, and a sense of impending disaster. At first he could not remember where he was—he thought he was still in detention Outside. His surroundings were inexplicably sordid; he was about to ring for the attendant and complain when his memory pieced in the events of the day before. Then he got up and discovered that his bones and muscles were painfully stiff, and—which was worse—that he was, by his standards, filthy. He itched.

  MacKinnon entered the common room and found Magee sitting at the table. He greeted Dave. “Hi, kid. I was about to wake you. You’ve slept almost all day. We’ve got a lot to talk about.”

  “Okay—shortly. Where’s the ‘fresher?”

  “Over there.”

  It was not Dave’s idea of a refreshing chamber, but he managed to take a sketchy shower in spite of the slimy floor. Then he discovered that there was no air blast installed, and he was forced to dry himself unsatisfactorily with his handkerchief. He had no choice in clothes. He must put back on the ones he had taken off or go naked. He recalled that he had seen no nudity anywhere in Coventry, even at sports—a difference in customs, no doubt. He put his clothes back on, though his skin crawled at the touch of the once-used linen.

  Mother Johnston had thrown together an appetizing breakfast for him. He let coffee restore his courage as Magee talked. It was, according to Fader, a serious situation. New America and the Free State had compromised their differences and had formed an alliance. They quite seriously proposed to break out of Coventry and attack the United States.

  MacKinnon looked up at this. “That’s ridiculous, isn’t it? They’d be outnumbered enormously. Besides, how about the Barrier?”

  “I don’t know—yet. But they have some reason to think that they can break through the Barrier—and there are rumors that whatever it is can be used as a weapon, too, so that a small army might be able to whip the whole United States.”

  MacKinnon looked puzzled. “
Well,” he observed, “I haven’t any opinion of a weapon I know nothing about, but as to the Barrier—I’m not a mathematical physicist, but I was always told that it was theoretically impossible to break the Barrier—that it was just a nothingness that there was no way to touch. Of course, you can fly over it, but even that is supposed to be deadly to life.”

  “Suppose they had found some way to shield from the effects of the Barrier’s field,” suggested Magee. “Anyhow, that’s not the point for us. The point is: they’ve made this combine; the Free State supplies the techniques and most of the officers; and New America, with its bigger population, supplies most of the men. And that means to us that we don’t dare show our faces anyplace, or we are in the army before you can blink.

  “Which brings me to what I was going to suggest. I’m going to duck out of here as soon as it gets dark and light out for the gateway before they send somebody after me who is bright enough to look under a table. I thought maybe you might want to come along.”

  “Back to the psychologists?” MacKinnon was aghast.

  “Sure—why not? What have you got to lose? This whole damn place is going to be just like the Free State in a couple of days—and a Joe of your temperament would be in hot water all the time. What’s so bad about a nice quiet hospital room as a place to hide out until things quiet down? You don’t have to pay any attention to the psychiatrists—just make animal noises at ‘em every time one sticks his nose into your room until they get discouraged.”

  Dave shook his head. “No,” he said slowly, “I can’t do that.”

  “Then what will you do?”

  “I don’t know yet. Take to the hills, I guess. Go live with the Angels if it comes to a showdown. I wouldn’t mind them praying for my soul as long as they left my mind alone.”

  They were each silent for a while. Magee was mildly annoyed at MacKinnon’s bullheaded stubbornness in the face of what seemed to him a reasonable offer. Dave continued busily to stow away grilled ham while considering his position. He cut off another bite. “My, but this is good.” he remarked, to break the awkward silence, “I don’t know when I’ve had anything taste so good. Say—”

  “What?” inquired Magee. looking up and seeing the concern written on MacKinnon’s face.

  “This ham—is it synthetic, or is it real meat?”

  “Why, it’s real. What about it?”

  Dave did not answer. He managed to reach the refreshing room before that which he had eaten left him.

  ~ * ~

  Before he left, Magee gave Dave some money with which he could have purchased for him things that he would need in order to take to the hills. MacKinnon protested, but the Fader cut him short. “Quit being a damn fool, Dave. I can’t use New American money on the Outside, and you can’t stay alive in the hills without proper equipment. You lie doggo here for a few days while Al or Molly picks up what you need, and you’ll stand a chance—unless you’ll change your mind and come with me?”

  Dave shook his head at this and accepted the money.

  It was lonely after Magee left. Mother Johnston and Dave were alone in the club, and the empty chairs reminded him depressingly of the men who had been impressed. He wished that Gramps or the one-handed man would show up. Even Alec, with his nasty temper, would have been company—he wondered if Alec had been punished for resisting the draft.

  Mother Johnston inveigled him into playing checkers in an attempt to relieve his evident low spirits. He felt obligated to agree to her gentle conspiracy, but his mind wandered. It was all very well for the senior judge to tell him to seek adventure in interplanetary exploration, but only engineers and technicians were eligible for such billets. Perhaps he should have gone in for science, or engineering, instead of literature; then he might now be on Venus, contending against the forces o£ nature in high adventure instead of hiding from uniformed bullies. It wasn’t fair. No—he must not kid himself; there was no room for an expert in literary history in the raw frontier of the planets; that was not human injustice, that was a hard fact of nature, and he might as well face it.

  He thought bitterly of the man whose nose he had broken and thereby landed himself in Coventry. Maybe he was an “upholstered parasite,” after all—but the recollection of the phrase brought back the same unreasoning anger that had gotten him into trouble. Involuntarily he let his cortex drop out of his circuit of consciousness, and he let himself be dominated by his throbbing, emotional thalamus—the “old brain” of his prehistoric, tooth-and-claw ancestors, with its undelayed reactions and unreasoned evaluations. He was glad that he had socked that so-and-so! What right had he to go around sneering and calling people things like that?

  He found himself thinking in the same vindictive spirit of his father, although he would have been at loss to explain the connection. As a matter of fact, the connection is not superficially evident, for his father would never have stooped to name-calling. Instead, he would have offered the sweetest of smiles and quoted something nauseating in the way of sweetness and light. For Dave’s father was one of the nastiest little tyrants that ever dominated a household under the guise of loving kindness. He was of the more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger, this-hurts-me-more-than-it-does-you-son school, and all his life had invariably been able to find an altruistic rationalization for always having his own way. Convinced of his own infallible righteousness, he had never valued his son’s point of view on anything, but had dominated him in everything—always from the highest moralistic motives.

  He had had two main bad effects on his son: the boy’s natural independence, crushed at home, rebelled blindly at every sort of discipline, authority, or criticism which he encountered elsewhere and subconsciously identified with the not-to-be-criticized paternal authority. And secondly, through years of association he imitated his father’s most dangerous social vice—that of passing unself-critical moral judgments on the actions of others.

  When Dave was arrested for breaking a basic custom— to wit, atavistic violence—his father washed his hands of him with the statement that he had tried his best to make a man of him, and could not be blamed for his son’s failure to profit by his instruction.

  A faint knock caused them to put away the checkerboard in a hurry. Mother Johnston paused before answering. “That’s not our knock,” she considered, “but it’s not loud enough to be the nosies. Be ready to hide.”

  MacKinnon waited by the fox hole where he had hidden the night before, while Mother Johnston went to investigate. He heard her unbar and unlock the upper door, then she called out to him in a low but urgent voice, “Dave! Come here, Dave—hurry!”

  It was Fader, unconscious, with his own bloody trail behind him.

  Mother Johnston was attempting to pick up the limp form. MacKinnon crowded in, and between the two of them they managed to get him downstairs and to lay him on the long table. He came to for a moment as they straightened his limbs. “Hi, Dave,” he whispered, managing to achieve the ghost of his debonair grin, “somebody trumped my ace.”

  “You keep quiet!” Mother Johnston snapped at him, then in a lower voice to Dave, “Oh, the poor darling—Dave, we must get him to the doctor.”

  “Can’t... do ... that,” muttered the Fader. “Got … to get to the ... gate—” His voice trailed off. Mother Johnston’s fingers had been busy all the while, as if activated by some separate intelligence. A small pair of scissors, drawn from some hiding place about her large person, clipped away at his clothing, exposing the superficial extent of the damage. She examined the trauma critically.

  “This is no job for me,” she decided, “and he must sleep while we move him. Dave, get that hypodermic kit out of the medicine chest in the ‘fresher.”

  “No, Mother!” It was Magee, his voice strong and vibrant. “Get me a pepper pill. There’s—”

  “But, Fader—”

  He cut her short. “I’ve got to get to the doctor, all right, but how the devil will I get there if I don’t walk?”

  “We would carry yo
u.”

  “Thanks, Mother,” he told her, his voice soft. “But the police would be curious. Get me that pill.”

  Dave followed her into the ‘fresher and questioned her while she rummaged through the medicine chest. “Why don’t we just send for a doctor?”

  “There is only one doctor we can trust, and that’s the doctor. Besides, none of the others are worth the powder to blast them.”

  Magee was out again when they came back into the room. Mother Johnston slapped his face until he came around, blinking and cursing. Then she fed him the pill.

  The powerful stimulant, esoteric offspring of common coal tar, took hold almost at once. To all surface appearance Magee was a well man. He sat up and tried his own pulse, searching it out in his left wrist with steady, sensitive fingers. “Steady as a metronome,” he announced. “The old ticker can stand that dosage, all right.”