6 Great Short Novels of Science Fiction Read online

  “What the deuce are you talking about?” he snapped. “Stand aside and let me pass.”

  The one who had remained silent raised his weapon and aimed it at MacKinnon’s chest. The other grabbed his arm and pulled the weapon out of line. “Don’t shoot the dumb fool, Joe,” he said testily. “You’re always too anxious.” Then to MacKinnon, “You’re resisting the law. Come on—be quick about it!”

  “The law?” MacKinnon gave a short, bitter laugh, and snatched his rifle up from the seat beside him. It never reached his shoulder—the man who had done all the talking fired casually, without apparently taking time to aim. The rifle was smacked from MacKinnon’s grasp, and flew into the air, landing some forty feet away.

  The member of the pair who had remained silent followed the flight of the gun with detached interest and remarked, “Nice shot, Blackie. Never touched him.”

  “Oh, just luck,” the other demurred, but grinned his pleasure at the compliment. “Glad I didn’t nick him, though—saves writing out a report.” He returned his stubby, curiously convoluted weapon to his belt, resumed a crisp, official manner, and spoke again to MacKinnon, who had been sitting in dumbfounded silence, rubbing his painfully smarting hands. “Well, tough guy? Do you behave, or do we come up there and get you?”

  MacKinnon gave in. He drove the tortoise to the designated spot and waited sullenly for orders. “Get out and start unloading,” he was told.

  He obeyed, under compulsion. As he piled his precious possessions on the ground the one addressed as Blackie separated each item into two piles, while Joe listed them on a printed form. He noticed presently that Joe listed only the items that went into the first pile. But he did not understand that he was being robbed until Blackie told him to reload the tortoise with the items from that pile, and commenced himself to carry goods from the other pile into the building. MacKinnon started to protest—

  Joe punched him in the mouth, coolly and without rancor. MacKinnon went down, but got up again, fighting. He was in such a blind rage that he would have tackled a charging rhino just as readily. Joe timed his rush and clipped him again. This time he could not get up at once.

  Blackie stepped over to the washstand in one corner of the office. Presently he came back with a wet towel and chucked it at MacKinnon. “Wipe your face on that, bud, and get back into the buggy. We got to get going.”

  ~ * ~

  MacKinnon had time to do a lot of serious thinking as he drove Blackie into town. Beyond a terse answer of “Prize court” to MacKinnon’s inquiry as to their destination, Blackie did not converse, nor did MacKinnon press him to, anxious as he was to have information. His mouth pained him from the repeated punishment it had taken, his head ached, and he was no longer tempted to precipitate action by hasty speech.

  Evidently Coventry was not quite the frontier anarchy he had expected it to be. There was a government of sorts, apparently, but it resembled nothing that he had ever been used to. He had visualized a land of noble, independent spirits who gave each other wide berth and practiced mutual respect. There would be villains, of course, but they would be treated to summary, and probably lethal, justice as soon as they demonstrated their ugly natures. He had a strong, though subconscious, assumption that virtue is necessarily triumphant.

  But having found government, he expected it to follow the general pattern that he had been used to all his life—honest, conscientious, reasonably efficient, and invariably careful of a citizen’s rights and liberties. He was aware that government had not always been like that, but he had never experienced it—the idea was as remote and implausible as cannibalism, or chattel slavery.

  Had he stopped to think about it, he might have realized that public servants in Coventry would never have been examined psychologically to determine their temperamental fitness for their duties, and, that since every inhabitant of Coventry was there—as he was—for violating a basic custom and refusing treatment thereafter, it was a foregone conclusion that most of them would be erratic.

  He pinned his hope on the knowledge that they were going to court. All he asked was a chance to tell his story to the judge.

  His immediate dependence on judicial procedure may appear inconsistent in view of how recently he had renounced all reliance on organized government, but it was only superficially so. He could renounce government verbally, but he could not do away with a lifetime of environmental conditioning. His cortex was canalized, whether he wished it or not, into certain evaluating habits.

  He could curse the court that had humiliated him by-condemning him to the Two Alternatives, but he expected courts to dispense justice. He could assert his own rugged independence, but he expected persons he encountered to behave as if they were bound by the Covenant—he had met no other sort. He was no more able to discard his past history than his accustomed body.

  But he did not know it yet.

  ~ * ~

  MacKinnon failed to stand up when the judge entered the courtroom. Court attendants quickly set him right, but not before he had provoked a glare from the bench. The judge’s appearance and manner were not reassuring. He was a well-fed man, of ruddy complexion, whose sadistic temper was evident in face and voice. They waited while he dealt drastically with several petty offenders. It seemed to MacKinnon, as he listened, that almost everything was against the law.

  Nevertheless, he was relieved when his name was called. He stepped up and undertook at once to tell his story. The judge’s gavel cut him short.

  “What is this case?” the judge demanded, staring at MacKinnon’s damaged features, his face set in grim, intolerant lines. “Drunk and disorderly, apparently. I shall put a stop to this slackness among the young if it takes the last ounce of strength in my body!” He turned to the clerk. “Any previous offenses?”

  The clerk whispered in his ear. The judge threw MacKinnon a look of mixed annoyance and suspicion, then told the customs guard to come forward. Blackie told a clear, straightforward tale with the ease of a man used to giving testimony. MacKinnon’s condition was attributed to resisting an officer in the execution of his duty. He submitted the inventory his colleague had prepared, but failed to mention the large quantity of goods which had been abstracted before the inventory was made.

  The judge turned to MacKinnon. “Do you have anything to say for yourself?”

  “I certainly have, doctor,” he began eagerly. “There isn’t a word of—”

  Bang! The gavel cut him short. A court attendant hurried to MacKinnon’s side and attempted to explain to him the proper form to use in addressing the court. The explanation confused him. In his experience, “judge” naturally implied a medical man—a psychologist skilled in social problems. Nor had he heard of any special speech forms appropriate to a courtroom. But he amended his language as instructed.

  “May it please the honorable court, this man is lying. He and his companion robbed me. I was simply—”

  “Smugglers generally think they are being robbed when customs officials catch them,” the judge sneered. “Do you deny that you attempted to resist inspection?”

  “No, your honor, but—”

  “That will do. Penalty of fifty per cent is added to the established scale of duty. Pay the clerk.”

  “But, your honor, I can’t—”

  “Can’t you pay it?”

  “I haven’t any money. I have only my possessions.”

  “So?” He turned to the clerk. “Condemnation proceedings. Impound his goods. Ten days for vagrancy. The community can’t have these immigrant paupers roaming at large, and preying on law-abiding citizens. Next case!”

  They hustled him quickly away. It took the sound of the key grating in the barred door behind him to make him realize the extent of his predicament.

  ~ * ~

  “Hi, pal, how’s the weather outside?” The detention cell had a prior inmate, a small, well-knit man who looked up from a game of solitaire to address MacKinnon. He sat astraddle a wooden bench on which he had spread his cards, and
studied the newcomer with unworried eyes.

  “Clear enough outside—but stormy in the courtroom,” MacKinnon answered, trying to adopt the same bantering tone and not succeeding. His mouth hurt him.’

  The other swung a leg over the bench and approached him with a light, silent step. “Say, pal, you must ‘a’ caught that in a gear box,” he commented, inspecting MacKinnon’s mouth. “Does it hurt?”

  “Like the devil,” MacKinnon admitted.

  “We’ll have to do something about that.” He went to the cell door and rattled it, filling the building with the din. “Hey! Lefty! The house is on fire! Come a-runnin’!”

  The guard sauntered down and stood opposite their cell door. “Wha’ d’yuh want, Fader?” he said.

  “My old school chum has been slapped in the face with a wrench, and the pain is inordinate. Here’s a chance for you to get right with Heaven by oozing down to the dispensary and snagging a dressing and some neoanodyne.”

  The guard’s expression was not encouraging. The prisoner looked grieved. “Why, Lefty,” he said, “I thought you would jump at a chance to do a little pure charity like that.” He waited for a moment, then added, “Tell you what—you do it and I’ll show you how to work that puzzle about ‘How old is Ann?’ Is it a go?”

  “Show me first.”

  “It would take too long. I’ll write it out and give it to you.”

  When the guard returned, MacKinnon’s cell mate dressed his wounds with gentle deftness, talking the while. “They call me Fader Magee. What’s your name, pal?”

  “David MacKinnon. I’m sorry, but I didn’t quite catch your first name.”

  “Fader. It isn’t,” he explained with a grin, “the name my mother gave me. It’s more a professional tribute to my shy and unobtrusive nature.”

  MacKinnon looked puzzled. “Professional tribute? What is your profession?”

  Magee looked pained. “Why, Dave,” he said, “I didn’t ask you that. However,” he went on, “it’s probably the same as yours—self-preservation.”

  Magee was a sympathetic listener, and MacKinnon welcomed the chance to tell someone about his troubles. He related the story of how he had decided to enter Coventry rather than submit to the sentence of the court, and how he had hardly arrived when he was hauled into court.

  Magee nodded. “I’m not surprised,” he observed. “A man has to have larceny in his heart or he wouldn’t be a customs guard.”

  “But what happens to my belongings?”

  “They auction them off to pay the duty.”

  “I wonder how much there will be left for me.”

  Magee stared at him. “Left over? There won’t be anything left over. You’ll probably have to pay a deficiency judgment.”

  “Huh? What’s that?”

  “It’s a device whereby the condemned pays for the execution,” Magee explained succinctly, if somewhat obscurely. “What it means to you is that when your ten days are up you’ll still be in debt to the court. Then it’s the chain gang for you. You’ll work it off at a dollar a day.”

  “Fader—you’re kidding me.”

  “Wait and see. You’ve got a lot to learn, Dave.”

  Coventry was an even more complex place than Dave had gathered up to this time. Magee explained to him that there were actually three sovereign, independent jurisdictions. The jail where they were prisoners lay in the so-called New America. It had the forms of democratic government, but the treatment he had already received was a fair sample of how it was administered.

  “This place is heaven itself compared with the Free State,” Magee maintained. “I’ve been there.”

  The Free State was an absolute dictatorship; the head man of the ruling clique was designated the “Liberator.” Their watchwords were duty and obedience; and arbitrary discipline was enforced with a severity that left no room for any freedom of opinion. Governmental theory was vaguely derived from the old functionalist doctrines. The State was thought of as a single organism with a single head, a single brain, and a single purpose. Anything not compulsory was forbidden.

  “Honest, so help me,” claimed Magee, “you can’t go to bed in that place without finding one of their damned secret police between the sheets.”

  “But at that,” he continued, “it’s an easier place to live than with the Angels.”

  “The Angels?”

  “Sure. We still got ‘em. Must’ve been two or three thousand die-hards that chose to go to Coventry after the Revolution—you know that. There’s still a colony up in the hills to the north, complete with Prophet Incarnate and the works. They aren’t bad hombres, but they’ll pray you into heaven even if it kills you.”

  All three States had one curious characteristic in common—each one claimed to be the only legal government of the entire United States, and looked forward to some future day when they would reclaim the “unredeemed” portion; i.e., outside Coventry. To the Angels this was an event which would occur when the First Prophet returned to Earth to lead them again. In New America it was hardly more than a convenient campaign plank, to be forgotten after each election. But in the Free State it was a fixed policy.

  Pursuant to this purpose there had been a whole series of wars between the Free State and New America. The Liberator held, quite logically, that New America was an unredeemed section, and that it was necessary to bring it under the rule of the Free State before the advantages of their culture could be extended to the outside.

  Magee’s words demolished MacKinnon’s dream of finding an anarchistic Utopia within the Barrier, but he could not let his fond illusion die without a protest. “But see here, Fader,” he persisted, “isn’t there some place where a man can live quietly by himself without all this insufferable interference?”

  “No—” considered Fader. “No, not unless you took to the hills and hid. Then you’d be all right, as long as you steered clear of the Angels. But it would be pretty slim pickin’s, living off the country. If you really want to go off and be a hermit you’d do better to try it on the Outside, where there aren’t so many objections to it.”

  “No”—MacKinnon’s backbone stiffened at once—”no, I’ll never do that. I’ll never submit to psychological reorientation just to have a chance to be let alone. If I could go back to where I was before a couple of months ago, before I was arrested, it might be all right to go off to the Rockies, or look up an abandoned farm somewhere. But with that diagnosis staring me in the face—after being told I wasn’t fit for human society until I had had my emotions retailored to fit a cautious little pattern, I couldn’t face it. Not if it meant going to a sanitarium—”

  “I see,” agreed Fader, nodding, “you want to go to Coventry, but you don’t want the Barrier to shut you off from the rest of the world.”

  “No, that’s not quite fair— Well, maybe, in a way. Say, you don’t think I’m not fit to associate with, do you?”

  “You look all right to me,” Magee reassured him with a grin, “but I’m in Coventry, too, remember. Maybe I’m no judge.”

  “You don’t talk as if you liked it. Why’re you here?”

  Magee held up a gently admonishing finger. “Tut! Tut! That is the one question you must never ask a man here. You must assume that he came here because he knew how swell everything is here.”

  “Still—you don’t seem to like it.”

  “I didn’t say I didn’t like it. I do like it; it has flavor. Its little incongruities are a source of innocent merriment. And any time they turn on the heat I can always go back through the gate and rest up for a while in a nice quiet hospital, until things quiet down.”

  MacKinnon was puzzled again. “Turn on the heat? Do they supply too hot weather here?”

  “Huh? Oh, I didn’t mean weather control—there isn’t any of that here except what leaks over from Outside. I was just using an old figure of speech.”

  “What does it mean?”

  Magee smiled to himself. “You’ll find out.”

  ~ * ~
>
  After supper—bread, stew in a metal dish, a small apple —Magee introduced MacKinnon to the mysteries of cribbage. Fortunately MacKinnon had no cash to lose. Presently Magee put the cards down without shuffling them. “Dave,” he said, “are you enjoying the hospitality offered by this institution?”

  “Hardly. Why?”

  “I suggest that we check out.”

  “A good idea, but how?”

  “That’s what I’ve been thinking about. Do you suppose you could take another poke on that battered phiz of yours in a good cause?”

  MacKinnon cautiously fingered his face. “I suppose so— if necessary. It can’t do me much more harm, anyhow.”