The Second Murray Leinster Megapack (44 page)

“They’re going to be wrathy and also scared when they find out we’ve double-crossed them,” said Igor, grinning. “They’ll probably shoot us. Certainly me. And then they’ll try it again. Can’t we do something about that, Joe? I think we can.”

One brain again. Gleefully, zestfully working it out.

* * * *

“The fact is simply that Igor Vladek and I decided to call off the war,” said Joe Carnahan evenly to the staring figures who faced him. “We were Twinned, once upon a time. We know each other pretty well. We decided to call off the whole thing. For good.”

The supreme general was too dazed even to hrrrmph.

“But we announced the destruction of Europia!” he bellowed. “By broadcast! We’ve been made fools of!”

This brought a smile to Joe’s lips. “The generals in Europia are just as bad off,” he said gently. “They went out on a limb, too. But I’m telling you what has to happen. You’ve got to make peace. Igor and I have made a compact. If anything happens to him I’ll use the ky—” He stopped, and smiled faintly. “I’ll use the device I was brought to Washington to use. He will keep his country from using a similar device as long as he’s alive. When he’s dead, it will be necessary to smash Europia unless peace is absolutely certain forever.

“Furthermore, if anything happens to me, he’ll do the same thing for the same patriotic reason. Every other weapon is stalemated, remember. And Igor and I have done trivial things to our machines that nobody else would be likely to understand. They could never make the machines work again.”

The twitching man was ashen-faced, now.

“What—what are we going to do?” he demanded in a trembling voice. “We—we—”

“You’re going to make peace,” said Joe gently. “Even if it costs your party the next election. You’re going to make peace because you can’t make war. Europia is in the same predicament As long as Igor and I are both alive, you’re going to have peace whether you like it or not!”

He turned and walked quietly toward the door. Nobody tried to stop him. They were still too dazed. He stopped in the doorway, merely a pleasant-faced civilian and by no means as impressive as the generals or even the statesmen.

“Wouldn’t someone like to say ‘Long live Joe Carnahan!’?” he asked mildly.

* * * *

In the hired car going back to his laboratory, he felt Igor’s thoughts touching his mind again, and he grinned. He knew Igor was grinning too.

“They’re going crazy over here,” said Igor comfortably. “Now they say I’ve bet the life of my country on my own life. Oh, they’re raging! But the American broadcasts were picked up, and they know I told them the truth. We’ve got to find some way to make peace sure, no matter what happens to us, Joe.”

The Blue Ridge rose up like a rampart against the sky ahead. All about was rolling country. Nice country. Unravaged and beautiful to look at and smell and feel. The car he had been using now had no escort of staff cars or attending generals.

“I’ve been thinking. Bixby Twinner, you remember, picked up the consciousness of the one who wore it and transmitted to its matched companion. I’ve got an idea that we could pick up consciousness without a Twinner. Pick up the consciousness of individual people. And there should be a way to let them be broadcast so everybody could receive them without Twinners.”

He stopped thinking in words. The two of them were one brain. His thoughts leaped ahead, and Joe Carnahan knew that his friend Igor Vladek, far away in Europia, was shaking with mirth as he savored the devastating possibilities in the new device Joe proposed.

It was a new weapon. An invincible weapon Joe proposed to give to the American Government a perfect weapon to enforce peace and secure justice. It was a weapon that would destroy any foreign government overnight.

It was a device that would enable the American Government to pick up and broadcast to the people of Europia exactly what the rulers of Europia were thinking, with such complete transmission of those rulers’ consciousness that the people of Europia would know absolutely that there was no fake about it.

And Igor would give exactly the same weapon to his own government, to reveal to the people of America the most private thoughts of their legislators and political lights!

That weapon would be more deadly than armies. More annihilating than atomic bombs. No government on earth could stand after the exposure of its members’ private thoughts! And this weapon made every other weapon too deadly to be used, because the use of any other weapon might provoke retaliation by this.

Joe Carnahan smiled as Igor shook with laughter, ten thousand miles away. He and Igor were Twinned again. They were friends as two people had never been friends before, though they’d never seen each other in the flesh and never would.

Riding back to his laboratory, Joe Carnahan felt a warm, inner satisfaction. He would never be lonely again.

*

THE LAWS OF CHANCE

(Originally Published in 1947)

CHAPTER I

Amid Debris

Steve Sims, former Professor of Physics at Thomas University, delicately pushed aside a brushy tree-branch and looked down to where the little town had been. It wasn’t there any longer. But there wasn’t a single monstrous atomic-bomb crater, as he might have expected. Half a dozen relatively small craters—no more than two to three hundred feet across—had obliterated a third of the town entirely and flattened all the rest. Then there’d been a fire. There was nothing left.

He regarded it without shock, but with a grim regret. This had been his home town. He’d spent a long time making his way to it from the vicinity of Thomas University, after there was no longer any hope there. He’d waited nearly four months, in the rapidly-appearing wasteland on the edge of the campus, hoping against hope for someone like himself to turn up able to help him on the work he still believed might partly repair the world catastrophe.

After there was no more chance there, it had taken him three months to get here—four hundred miles. There’d been interludes, of course. Once he stopped and joined a group who called themselves guerillas. Before he left them he’d killed a man in cold blood, an act he still remembered with satisfaction.

Then he’d had to hide from his late companions, and then he’d stayed on at a tiny community where the people were uninformed but resolute—too resolute entirely—and now he’d reached his home town and it was waste.

“Let’s go out and cut our throats,” said young ex-professor Sims to no one in particular.

It was a quotation, and he grimaced wryly to himself. He squatted down to watch the area of blackened debris which had been the scene of his childhood.

Since the bombs began to fall, like everybody else, he’d learned that it didn’t pay to take things for granted, or to be unduly brave, or to be frank about yourself, or anything which had been normal and excusable as little as a year ago. So Steve—no longer professor because there weren’t any colleges or students left—Steve Sims squatted close to the trunk of a tree and attentively regarded the ruins of his home town.

It was utterly dead and completely uninhabitable. It must have been destroyed a long time ago, because green things were already growing between the fire-blackened timbers where the town was merely flattened and burned out.

There was a greenish scum on the ponds at the bottoms of the bomb-craters, too, which proved that this was a high-explosive job, not atomic. And that proved that They—the people with bombs and planes—hadn’t an unlimited supply of the atomic bombs which melted the surface of the ground to a sort of crackled, glassy substance, which was highly radioactive.

Nothing like that was visible here. So if they used ordinary high explosives to flatten a small town, their stock of atomics was limited.

That was good. Steve recognized it as good, and then he wondered why he thought it was good. Whoever They were—and all of civilization had been smashed, and nobody knew who had started it—They couldn’t be touched by people like Steve. The atomic war had degenerated into an indiscriminate, hysterical mass slaughter of everybody by everybody else.

Steve was a wanderer, like most of the people left alive. He was homeless, and his only possessions were a very small lady’s automatic pistol, with only two clips of cartridges, a pair of fencing foils with the buttons broken off and the blades filed to needle-sharp points, one blanket—plasticoated on one side so it was water-proof—six child’s copy-books nearly filled with writing, and one-half of a roasted chicken. He’d stolen the chicken two days before.

“The obvious thing,” he repeated presently, “is to go out and cut my throat. But—”

“Oh-oh!” he said then.

There was a movement in the debris. An infinitely cautious movement. For an instant he couldn’t make it out, and then he saw a small figure crawl out from under an indescribable mess that looked like a heap of oversized black jackstraws. The figure looked about in a hunted manner, seemed to listen fearfully, and then came scrambling over the wreckage in Steve’s general direction. It moved with frenzied haste.

Steve watched, immobile. When somebody ran away, there was usually somebody else after them. It was not the business of a mere Wanderer to interfere. Especially, perhaps, not the business of a former professor of physics with six child’s copy-books full of a partly written treatise on “The Paradox of Indeterminacy.” But the discovery of his home town in ruins had pretty well removed that last reason for noninterference.

Still, he watched without any movement. The small figure scrambled over a tumbled heap of bricks. Something loose rolled down and other shattered stuff followed. There was a miniature landslide and a cloud of white dust arose.

“That’s bad!” said Steve.

The figure raced on. It was very small and pantingly in haste. It seemed filled with desperation. But it was the only moving thing in sight except a lazily soaring buzzard, flying in tranquil circles in the sky.

Except for the buzzard it was the only moving thing in sight. Then another figure stirred. This one appeared in the shoulder-high weeds which grew everywhere over what had been cleared land around the edge of town. The second was a larger figure. It moved swiftly to cut off the smaller one.

Steve watched. It was none of his business. The world was in ruins. There was no law. There was no government. There was no hope. So he could see no reason for him to risk his life interfering between two unknown persons, one fleeing and one pursuing. But on the other hand there was no longer any special reason to be careful of his life.

The smaller figure gained. It came to what had been a street, where the blast of the nearest bomb had blown straight along its length. Trees had fallen, but there was little wreckage. For two hundred yards the running small figure fled without hindrance, unseen by its pursuer and not seeing him. Then it stumbled and fell headlong, and scrambled to its feet and fled again. But now long hair tumbled about its shoulders and streamed behind.

“The devil!” said Steve Sims, in disgust.

He rose smoothly to his feet, slid the pack from his back, and pulled out one of the fencing-foils. He ran lightly through the trees, vexed, arguing with himself that this sort of thing happened too often for him to be responsible, that he might have to use a highly precious cartridge, that he might get killed, and generally assuring himself that he was a fool.

It was almost a quarter-mile before he really saw either of the two figures again. Then he reached a spot where he could look through the trees again upon the town. Much had happened. The girl had discovered her pursuer. He was almost upon her. Somewhere and somehow she had snatched up a splintered bit of wood.

As Steve reached the woods’ edge, the man snarled and plunged to seize her. She flailed the stick around in a desperate sweep, without accuracy and without real force. He flung up his arm, and the stick broke against it. But then he roared and plucked blindly at his eyes while she gasped and darted for the wood, her wild tresses fluttering behind like yacht pennants billowing in the winds of a happier day.

Bellowing, the man raced after her. He’d been dust-blinded only for a moment. She was barely ten yards before him when she dived between the first trees. There was utter horror upon her face when Steve appeared before her. But he jerked his thumb to one side.

“That way,” he said sharply.

She swerved and fled like a desperate deer. Steve stepped into the line she’d swerved from. The pursuer, raging, plunged into the woods.

He saw Steve and roared again. He charged.

And Steve brought up the needle-sharp foil and he ran right upon it, up to the very hilt, so that there was a sickening impact against the hard guard. Steve simply stepped aside and let him crash to the ground. He did not move after he had fallen.

Some five minutes later, Steve cleaned the foil painstakingly. There had been tobacco in the dead man’s pockets, and he’d had a rusty knife, and a flask of poisonously vile liquor. Also there were four diamond rings and a child’s necklace. Somehow the child’s necklace removed any distaste Steve might otherwise have felt for what he had done.

He straightened up and tossed aside the leaves on which he’d cleaned the foil. Then there was a faint stirring. The girl’s voice came shakily, although she remained invisible.