Collected Fiction Read online

  “Good!” said Harris. “Unlock the door, will you?”

  “Anything you say, colonel,” said the old man agreeably and produced a large key from his pouch and fitted it into the lock. There was a slight creaking and the door swung open.

  “Young Dixon here wants to escape,” said the colonel.

  “It’s all right by me,” replied the sergeant, “though it’s going to be awkward when Colonel Blick asks what happened to him.”

  “The lieutenant has a plan,” confided the colonel. “He’s going to overpower you and escape.”

  “There’s more to it than just that!” said Kurt. “I’m figuring on swapping uniforms with you. That way I can walk right out through the front gate without anybody being the wiser.”

  “That,” said the sergeant, slowly looking down at his sixty-three inch waist, “will take a heap of doing. You’re welcome to try though.”

  “Let’s get on with it then,” said Kurt, winding up a round-house swing.

  “If it’s all the same with you, lieutenant,” said the old sergeant, eying Kurt’s rocklike fist nervously, “I’d rather have the colonel do any overpowering that’s got to be done.” Colonel Harris grinned and walked over to Wetzel.

  “Ready?”

  “Ready!”

  Harris’ fist traveled a bare five inches and tapped Wetzel lightly on the chin.

  “Oof!” grunted the sergeant cooperatively and staggered back to a point where he could collapse on the softest of the two cots.

  The exchange of clothes was quickly effected. Except for the pants—which persisted in dropping down to Kurt’s ankles—and the war bonnet—which with equal persistence kept sliding down over his ears—he was ready to go. The pafits problem was solved easily by stuffing a pillow inside them. This Kurt fondly believed made him look more like the rotund sergeant than ever. The garrison bonnet presented a more difficult problem but he finally achieved a partial solution. By holding it up with his left hand and keeping the palm tightly pressed against his forehead, it should appear to the casual observer that he was walking engrossed in deep thought.

  The first two hundred yards were easy. The corridor was deserted and he plodded confidently along, the great war bonnet wabbling sedately on his head in spite of his best efforts to keep it steady. When he finally reached the exit gate, he knocked on it firmly and called to the duty sergeant.

  “Open up! It’s Wetzel.”

  Unfortunately, just then he grew careless and let go of his headgear.

  As the door swung open; the great war bonnet swooped down over his ears and came to rest on his shoulders. The result was that where his head normally was there could be seen only a nest of weaving feathers. The duty sergeant’s jaw suddenly dropped as he got a good look at the strange figure that stood in the darkened corridor. And then with remarkable presence of mind he slammed the door shut in Kurt’s face and clicked the bolt.

  “Sergeant of the guard!” he bawled. “Sergeant of the guard! There’s a thing in the corridor!”

  “What kind of a thing?” inquired a sleepy voice from the guard room.

  “A horrible kind of a thing with wiggling feathers where its head ought to be,” replied the sergeant.

  “Get it’s name, rank, and serial number,” said the sleepy voice.

  Kurt didn’t wait to hear any more. Disentangling himself from the headdress with some difficulty, he hurled it aside and pelted back down the corridor.

  Lieutenant Dixon wandered back into the cell with a crestfallen look on his face. Colonel Harris and the old sergeant were so deeply engrossed in a game of “rockets high” that they didn’t even see him at first. Kurt coughed and the colonel looked up.

  “Change your mind?”

  “No, sir,” said Kurt. “Something slipped.”

  “What?” asked the colonel.

  “Sergeant Wetzel’s war bonnet. I’d rather not talk about it.” He sank down on his bunk and buried his head in his hands.

  “Excuse me,” said the sergeant apologetically, “but if the lieutenant’s through with my pants I’d like to have them back. There’s a draft in here!”

  Kurt silently exchanged clothes and then moodily walked over to the grille that barred the window and stood looking out.

  “Why not go upstairs to officers’ country and out that way?” suggested the sergeant, who hated the idea of being overpowered for nothing. “If you can get to the front gate without one of the staff spotting you, you can walk right out. The sentry never notices faces, he just checks for insignia.”

  Kurt grabbed Sergeant Wetzel’s plump hand and wrung it warmly. “I don’t know how to thank you,” he stammered.

  “Then it’s about time you learned,” said the colonel. “The usual practice in civilized battalions is to say ‘Thank you’.”

  “Thank you!” said Kurt.

  “Quite all right,” said the sergeant. “Take the first stairway to your left. When you get to the top, turn left again and the corridor will take you straight to the exit.”

  Kurt got safely to the top of the stairs and turned right. Three hundred feet later the corridor ended in a blank wall. A small passageway angled off to the left and he set off down it. It also came to a dead end in a small anteroom whose farther wall was occupied by a set of great bronze doors. He turned and started to retrace his steps. He had almost reached the main corridor when he heard angry voices sounding from it. He peeked cautiously around the corridor. His escape route was blocked by two officers engaged in acrimonious argument. Neither was too sober and the captain obviously wasn’t giving the major the respect that a field officer usually commanded.

  “I don’t care what she said!” the captain shouted. “I saw her first.” The major grabbed him by the shoulder and pushed him back against the wall. “It doesn’t matter who saw her first. You keep away from her or there’s going to be trouble!”

  The captain’s face flushed with rage. With a snarl he tore off the major’s breechcloth and struck him in the face with it.

  The major’s face grew hard and cold. He stepped back, clicked his calloused heels together, and bowed slightly.

  “Axes or fists?”

  “Axes,” snapped the captain.

  “May I suggest the armory anteroom?” said the major formally. “We won’t be disturbed there.”

  “As you wish, sir,” said the captain with equal formality. “Your breech-cloth, sir.” The major donned it with dignity and they started down the hall toward Kurt. He turned and fled back down the corridor.

  In a second he was back in the anteroom. Unless he did something quickly he was trapped. Two flaming torches were set in brackets on each side of the great bronze door. As flickering pools of shadow chased each other across the worn stone floor, Kurt searched desperately for some other way out. There was none. The only possible exit was through the bronze portals. The voices behind him grew louder. He ran forward, grabbed a projecting handle, and pulled. One door creaked open slightly and with a sigh of relief Kurt slipped inside.

  There were no torches here. The great hall stood in half darkness, its only illumination the pale moonlight that streamed down through the arching skylight that formed the central ceiling. He stood for a moment in awe, impressed in spite of himself by the strange unfamiliar shapes that loomed before him in the half-darkness. He was suddenly brought back to reality by the sound of voices in the anteroom.

  “Hey! The armory door’s open!”

  “So what? That place is off limits to everybody but the C.O.”

  “Blick won’t care. Let’s fight in there. There should be more room.” Kurt quickly scanned the hall for a safe hiding place. At the far end stood what looked like a great bronze statue, its burnished surface gleaming dimly in the moonlight. As the door swung open behind him, he slipped cautiously through the shadows until he reached it. It looked like a coffin with feet, but to one side of it there was a dark pool of shadow. He slipped into it and pressed himself close against the cold metal. As he did
so his hipbone pressed against a slight protrusion and with a slight clicking sound, a hinged middle section of the metallic figure swung open, exposing a dark cavity. The thing was hollow!

  Kurt had a sudden idea. “Even if they do come down here,” he thought, “they’d never think of looking inside this thing!” With some difficulty he wiggled inside and pulled the hatch shut after him. There were legs to the thing—his own fit snugly into them—but no arms.

  The two officers strode out of the shadows at the other end of the hall. They stopped in the center of the armory and faced each other like fighting cocks. Kurt gave a sigh of relief. It looked as if he were safe for the moment.

  There was a sudden wicked glitter of moonlight on axheads as their weapons leaped into their hands. They stood frozen for a moment in a murderous tableau and then the captain’s ax hummed toward his opponent’s head in a vicious slash. There was a shower of sparks as the major parried and then with a quick wrist twist sent his own weapon looping down toward the captain’s midriff. The other pulled his ax down to ward the blow but he was only partially successful. The keen obsidian edge raked his ribs and blood dripped darkly in the moon-light.

  As Kurt watched intently he began to feel the first faint stirrings of claustrophobia. The Imperial designers had planned their battle armor for efficiency rather than comfort and Kurt felt as if he were locked away in a cramped dark closet. His malaise wasn’t helped by a sudden realization that when the men left they might very well lock the door behind them. His decision to change his hiding place was hastened when a bank of dark clouds swept across the face of the moon. The flood of light that poured down through the skylight suddenly dimmed until Kurt could barely make out the pirouetting forms of the two officers who were fighting in the center of the hall.

  This was his chance. If he could slip down the darkened side of the hall before the moon lighted up the hall again, he might be able to slip out of the hall unobserved. He pushed against the closed hatch through which he entered. It refused to open. A feeling of trapped panic started to roll over him but he fought it back. “There must be some way to open this thing from the inside,” he thought.

  As his fingers wandered over the dark interior of the suit looking for a release lever, they encountered a bank of keys set just below his midriff. He pressed one experimentally. A quiet hum filled the armor and suddenly a feeling of weightlessness came over him. He stiffened in fright. As he did so one of his steel shod feet pushed lightly backwards against the floor. That was enough. Slowly, like a child’s balloon caught in a light draft, he drifted toward the center of the hall. He struggled violently but since he was now several inches above the floor and rising slowly it did him no good.

  The fight was progressing splendidly. Both men were master axmen and in spite of being slightly drunk were putting on a brilliant exhibition. Each was bleeding from a dozen minor slashes but neither had been seriously axed as yet. Their flashing strokes and counters were masterful, so masterful that Kurt slowly forgot his increasingly awkward situation as he became more and more absorbed in the fight before him. The blond captain was slightly the better axman but the major compensated for it by occasionally whistling in cuts that to Kurt’s experienced eye seemed perilously close to fouls. He grew steadily more partisan in his feelings until one particularly unscrupulous attempt broke down his restraint altogether.

  “Pull down your guard!” he screamed to the captain. “He’s trying to cut you below the belt!” His voice reverberated within the battle suit and boomed out with strange metallic overtones.

  Both men whirled in the direction of the sound. They could see nothing for a moment and then the major caught sight of the strange menacing figure looming above him in the murky darkness.

  Dropping his ax he dashed frantically toward the exit shrieking: “It’s the Inspector General!”

  The captain’s reflexes were a second slower. Before he could take off Kurt poked his head out of the open face-port and shouted down, “It’s only me, Dixon! Get me out of here, will you?” The captain stared up at him goggle-eyed. “What kind of a contraption is that?” he demanded. “And what are you doing in it?”

  Kurt by now was floating a good ten feet off the floor. He had visions of spending the night on the ceiling and he wasn’t happy about it. “Get me down now,” he pleaded. “We can talk after I get out of this thing.”

  The captain gave a leap upwards and tried to grab Kurt’s ankles. His jump was short and his outstretched fingers gave the weightless armor a slight shove that sent it bobbing up another three feet.

  He cocked his head back and called up to Kurt. “Can’t reach you now. We’ll have to try something else. How did you get into that thing in the first place?”

  “The middle section is hinged,” said Kurt. “When I pulled it shut it clicked.”

  “Well, unclick it!”

  “I tried that. That’s why I’m up here now.”

  “Try again,” said the man on the floor. “If you can open the hatch, you can drop down and I’ll catch you.”

  “Here I come!” said Kurt, his fingers selecting a stud at random. He pushed. There was a terrible blast of flame from the shoulder jets and he screamed skywards on a pillar of fire. A microsecond later he reached the skylight. Something had to give. It did!

  At fifteen thousand feet the air pressure dropped to the point where the automatics took over and the face plate clicked shut. Kurt didn’t notice that. He was out like a light. At thirty thousand feet the heaters cut in. Forty seconds later he was in free space. Things could have been worse though, he still had air for two hours—

  X.

  Flight Officer Ozaki was taking a cat nap when the alarm on the radiation detector went off. Dashing the sleep out of his eyes, he slipped rapidly into the control seat and cut off the gong. His fingers danced over the controls in a blur of movement. Swiftly the vision screen shifted until the little green dot that indicated a source of radiant energy was firmly centered. Next he switched on the pulse analyzer and watched carefully as it broke down the incoming signal into components and sent them surging across the scope in the form of sharp-toothed sine waves. There was an odd peak to them, a strength and sharpness that he hadn’t seen before.

  “Doesn’t look familiar,” he muttered to himself, “but I’d better check to make sure.”

  He punched the comparison button and while the analyzer methodically began to check the incoming trace against the known patterns stored up in its compact little memory bank, he turned back to the vision screen. He switched on high magnification and the system rushed toward him. It expanded from a single pin point of light into a distinct planetary system. At its center a giant dying sun expanded on the plate like a malignant red eye. As he watched, the green dot moved appreciably, a thin red line stretching out behind it to indicate its course from point of first detection. Ozaki’s fingers moved over the controls and a broken line of white light came into being on the screen. With careful adjustments he moved it up toward the green track left by the crawling red dot. When he had an exact overlay, he carefully moved the line back along the course that the energy emitter had followed prior to detection.

  Ozaki was tense. It looked as if he might have something. He gave a sudden whoop of excitement as the broken white line intersected the orange dot of a planetary mass. A vision of the promised thirty-day leave and six months’ extra pay danced before his eyes as he waited for the pulse analyzer to clear.

  “Home!” he thought ecstatically. “Home and unplugged plumbing!”

  With a final whir of relays the analyzer clucked like a contented chicken and dropped an identity card out of its emission slot. Ozaki grabbed it and scanned it eagerly. At the top was printed in red, “Identity Unknown,” and below in smaller letters, “Suggest check of trace pattern on base analyzer.” He gave a sudden whistle as his eyes caught the energy utilization index. 927! That was fifty points higher than it had any right to be. The best tech in the Protectorate considered hims
elf lucky if he could tune a propulsion unit so that it delivered a thrust of forty-five per cent of rated maximum. Whatever was out there was hot! Too hot for one man to handle alone. With quick decision he punched the transmission key of his space communicator and sent a call winging back to War Base Three.

  XI.

  Commander Krogson stormed up and down his office in a frenzy of impatience.

  “It shouldn’t be more than another fifteen minutes, sir,” said Schninkle.

  Krogson snorted. “That’s what you said an hour ago! What’s the matter with those people down there? I want the identity of that ship and I want it now.”

  “It’s not Identification’s fault,” explained the other. “The big analyzer is in pretty bad shape and it keeps jamming. They’re afraid that if they take it apart they won’t be able to get it back together again.”

  The next two hours saw Krogson’s blood pressure steadily rising toward the explosion point. Twice he ordered the whole identification section transferred to a labor battalion and twice he had to rescind the command when Schninkle pointed out that scrapings from the bottom of the barrel were better than nothing at all. His fingernails were chewed down to the quick when word finally came through.

  “Identification, sir,” said a hesitant voice on the intercom.

  “Well?” demanded the commander.

  “The analyzer says—” The voice hesitated again.

  “The analyzer says what?” shouted Krogson in a fury of impatience.

  “The analyzer says that the trace pattern is that of one of the old Imperial drive units.”

  “That’s impossible!” sputtered the commander. “The last Imperial base was smashed five hundred years ago. What of their equipment was salvaged has long since been worn out and tossed on the scrap heap. The machine must be wrong!”

  “Not this time,” said the voice. “We checked the memory bank manually and there’s no mistake. It’s an Imperial all right. Nobody can produce a drive unit like that these days.”