The Second Murray Leinster Megapack (43 page)

“Twinning was ordered stopped all of fifteen years ago,” said Joe patiently. “The Army knew that I’d been Twinned when they asked me to work on counter-bomb devices, and that was even earlier. But of course I don’t mind if you raise the question of security.”

To query his fitness for the handling of the nation’s very top-drawer number one super-secret weapon was ironic. He’d invented it. It was put to him as a matter of obligation when the teeth were drawn from the United Nations’ peace-enforcement arrangements. Igor had been asked to work for his government too, at about the same time. And they’d hated to stop being Twinned, but they had to.

They turned in their Bixby Devices three years before Twinning was outlawed, but they were still friends. Joe and Igor were practically one self, but on matters that had to be military secrets they couldn’t continue to have one mind. Their obligations were different. Igor owed loyalty to Europia, and Joe to the United States. So they’d reluctantly separated their thoughts.

The staff car swerved in toward Washington past the Fort Meyer reservation, and presently the Arlington Bridge lay before them, and the staff cars closed in and swept across the Potomac and past the Lincoln Memorial. Joe Carnahan felt sick at what lay ahead of him.

He and Igor had written once or twice after they turned in their Twinners, but they’d had to stop that, too. Their minds were too closely attuned. Joe knew intuitively what Igor had in the back of his mind, no matter how cryptically he phrased it. And Igor could read more than was wise in the baldest of sentences that Joe might write. They were employed in the task of making their respective nations safe against attack. They simply couldn’t risk communication of any sort.

* * * *

Even when they ceased to write—well—their minds had reached out and touched a few times. That was telepathy, perhaps, or thought-transference. It wasn’t as complete as the old Twinning. Joe had been thinking of Igor, one night, and suddenly he felt Igor’s friendly thought, and—sitting quite alone, ten thousand miles apart—for a little while they talked eagerly, if cagily.

They could veil their thoughts from each other when not wearing Twinners, but they knew each other too well to hide much very successfully Perhaps three or four times they happened to think of each other simultaneously, and their minds linked rather tenuously. But inevitably it was risky. So Joe Carnahan had been careful not to think about Igor these last few years.

He’d been pretty lonely.

The staff cars didn’t go to the White House. They went to another place entirely, which normally it was much more difficult to get into. Then Joe was escorted down underground and traveled for a surprising distance in a little car that ran by compressed air so that its movement could not be detected above ground. And ultimately he reached a place so far below the surface that it was believed even atomic bombs couldn’t blast it in.

Then the generals, hrrrrrmphing, turned Joe Carnahan over to a secretary, who escorted him to the man who had sent for him. That man was twitching with strain, and he tried to explain to Joe that everything possible had been done to smooth away the differences between the United States and Europia, but that the Europian government gave every sign of forcing the matter to war, and public opinion in the United States would not permit the American government to back down.

“I know,” said Joe. He said it without heat. “Your party committed you at the last election. You won the election on an issue of foreign policy. You asked for this situation, and you’re stuck with it, and if you back down without a war—why—your party might lose the next election.”

The twitching man blinked at him. A secretary viewed Joe with startled disfavor. There are some public officials so exalted that it is a discourtesy to tell them the truth.

“All right,” said Joe tiredly. “If you don’t make a fight of it, somebody else will. The same thing’s probably true in Europia. Elections have to be won, even if they cause wars. The question is simply who will make war first. It’s my job to murder Europians for your political party, to keep them from murdering Americans for one of their political parties. When do I start?”

The twitching man said that it was the Government’s intention to wait until the last possible instant in hope of some change in the Europian government’s stand. Joe was to take his post. If he received the signal—which would be a word flashed on a television screen by the control-board—he was to take offensive action against Europia. The targets would have been listed for him, with their coordinates, by the General Staff.

“What am I, by the way?” asked Joe without interest. “Last time I was called on, I was told I was a lieutenant colonel. Nothing happened then.”

The twitching man blinked helplesly. The secretary explained that Joe was still a lieutenant colonel. No higher rank could be granted to a civilian without official reserve status. War Department regulations were strict.

Joe smiled without mirth.

“All right,” he repeated. “It was just to make the murder regular. I wanted to be sure I wasn’t a civilian committing an atrocity.”

He ignored them, thereafter, and examined his device. It was very large, and the parts that did the simplest things were the most complicated in construction.

He did not notice when the twitching man went out. He only noticed that the generals had come in when one of them hrrrrmphed at the other one.

“Well?” he said with a trace of impatience.

One of them ahemmed and said it would be an historic moment, and they wished to watch.

“Get out!” said Joe Carnahan savagely. “You bother me! I’m busy!”

One of the two generals hrrrmphed with such indignation that it sounded like a bugle and said stiffly that he knew that Joe was merely an assimilated civilian, but nevertheless was subject to military discipline.

“Get out!” raged Joe Carnahan. “You can’t even do your own murders! I’ve got to kill the best friend a man ever had!”

Joe glared at them, not making ready while they remained. After moments of indignant hrrrmphing, they went out.

He picked up the sheets of coordinates. He set them up, savagely. He ran through the circuit-testing routine twice, once with one break to assure that the United States’ top super-secret weapon did not go into action, and once with an entirely different break so that every part of every circuit was verified.

Then he was ready to commit the most monstrous murder ever engineered by men, because if he did not commit it upon the people of another nation, it might be committed upon the people of the United States.

He sat down grimly in the operator’s chair. He had sat there four times before. Three times for tests of the ky, the device. The fourth time when Russian politics required an international crisis for the benefit of those in power. That had been a near thing. A single long-range missile flung at the United States would have forced him to push down the plastic-handled “Operation” lever, and make such a holocaust as six years of the last war had hardly produced.

The room was very still. It was deep down in the bedrock under the alluvial soil of the city. It should be invulnerable. Joe Carnahan sat back and bitterly meditated upon patriotism as a virtue used by dynasts and demagogues to bloody all the pages of history. Men were trapped by it because other men were trapped by it. For him to close this circuit and that, and then push down the operations lever, would create the moment of greatest horror men had ever known. He would gain nothing by it. But he could not revolt against the order because another man in another nation might not revolt.

There was no decoration in this place. It had no thick carpet, nor stately furniture, because no eminent person held sway here. Only Joe Carnahan, who had made his country close to invulnerable in defense and irresistible in attack. And his reward was the order to kill.

He sat motionless, his lips twisted, waiting. He couldn’t have made this machine if it hadn’t been that he once was Twinned to Igor. He’d shared Igor’s brain, and by that fact each of them had gained so that they were scientists whose work—except for such things as this—was good. They’d had a companionship that had made both of them what they were, and maybe Igor was at this moment sitting at the control-board of some such monstrous device, awaiting the command of another twitching politician.

Joe felt a thought from Igor’s brain. It was oddly friendly. It formed words, and they formed the voice he’d heard so often with Igor’s ear’s.

“Sure,” said Igor wryly, ten thousand miles away. “Sure, I’m waiting for orders to blow America to ruins. I don’t like it either.”

Joe Carnahan froze. Into his mind came bitterly the thought that he ought to send word somehow that Europia was ready to strike, too, so it could be anticipated. Then the thought that Igor knew those thoughts.

“Uh-huh,” said Igor’s voice in his brain. “Sure, I know. I know you didn’t, too. Funny, huh?”

“Not a bit,” said Joe, bitterly. He yearned toward Igor, and knew that Igor knew it. “I wish we could do something, Igor!”

He felt no self-consciousness. Igor knew what he was thinking. They were two people who knew each other so certainly that they didn’t even have to pretend.

“What’ve you got, Joe?” asked Igor suddenly. “Maybe if you’ve got something we can’t stand against, I can make my side back down.”

Joe Carnahan tried, very carefully, to tell Igor—who was a part of himself, after all—what the top priority, top drawer, number one super-secret military gadget could do. Not what it was, but what it could do. He held his brain grimly away from the details of its construction. He concentrated on remembering the tests, and what they’d done to a mountain range in Antarctica.

“Yeah,” said the phantom of Igor’s voice in his brain. Then came pictures. Clear, lucid pictures. Not of the machine before Joe, but of another. Different here and there, but the same. Igor’s machine. They’d been one brain for a long time, though in two bodies; and now their separated brains worked alike.

“Mine’s like this. Must be the same idea.”

But he already knew. When Joe Carnahan saw the pictures of Igor’s machine, merely in recognizing the difference between the two, he’d told Igor every detail of his own.

“We’re even Stephen,” said Igor. There was the same grimness in his thought that had come to Joe. “We’ve got the same trick, Joe. The one who shoots last gets killed. What’re we going to do?”

Their brains merged more fully, and for a time Joe was not conscious of question and answer, of separate thoughts. The linkage between them, made possible by their long attuning to each other, became intensified by the identity of their emotions. They were one brain again, thinking together like a man thinking to himself. But there were two minds throwing thoughts into focus for joint examination.

When the signal to fire came upon one of the two television-screens, both knew it at the same instant. If one fired, both would, and the holocaust would be equal in both nations.

“No use in that, Joe,” said Igor’s thought “Look! We’ll shift coordinates and fire! Testing my outfit, I worked in Antarctica too! Remember your coordinates for testing? We blast hell out of the South Pole!”

They were one mind in two bodies, as they’d been long years before. Their hands worked swiftly, together, making completely different motions with no confusion at all. Only long practise could have given them that. It felt extraordinarily good to be one brain with Igor again, and Joe Carnahan felt a surge of emotion from his friend at the controls of the machine which had been intended to devastate the United States.

“Feels good, huh?”

Igor felt as Joe did. And Joe, his face pale and tense and his fingers flying at the setting up of new coordinates, felt as if he were grinning at his brain-twin.

The second television-screen flashed the signal. Joe Carnahan was ordered to attack Europia. The two sets of fingers, almost half a world apart, finished their tasks. And then the two of them reached out their hands and, somehow grinning at each other, pushed down the “Operations” handles on their separate machines.

Sheer annihilation rose into the air, whining thinly. The sound of its going ceased as its component parts vanished. For long, long seconds it would streak through space, and where it landed there would be nothingness. It would strike with such speed that no detector-device could register its coming in time to actuate a counter-weapon. And when it had struck there would be simply nothing at all.

There was a little clanging noise somewhere in the machine before Joe Carnahan. It was finished. He relaxed. He felt good. He felt clean.

He felt Igor grinning with him, beyond an ocean and half a continent more. And swiftly, swiftly the two minds flung thoughts together for examination and Joe Carnahan realized that for the first time in long, long years he was not lonely.

He knew—they knew—that the operation of the two devices had been known to others than themselves. In seconds, now, broadcasts would begin. Justifying, indignant broadcasts. The people of the United States would be told of the imminent danger in which it had been, and that only instant and overwhelming attack by the ever-ready defense forces of the country had forestalled a murderous and unwarned attack by Europia.

The people of Europia would also be told of the monstrous and shameful intention of the United States to rain down annihilation. And both nations would be told that the danger was past since the other nation lay in ruins.