Synthetic Men Page 9

  Lolan read the labels crudely painted beside each. His heart gave a bound as he found the one he sought. Nimbly he ran up the iron rungs in the wall, then swung hand over hand to the hole and paused in its entrance, over the roaring torrent below. The others were following more slowly. Atarkus came haltingly, handicapped by his years. At length all were ascending the inky tunnel.

  Four times they were forced to stop and rest. It was gruelling work. Their hands were rubbed raw by the pitted surface of the iron ladder. Over an hour had elapsed when they reached a flat iron plate that covered the hole. Eleven o'clock! An hour left. Lolan trembled with impatience.

  Wedging himself securely on the ladder, he forced upward on the plate. Dim light flowed into the tunnel. With his nerves crying for caution, he shoved the plate aside and crawled forth. Gun in fist, he shot his glance about the small room.

  The others emerged with bloody hands and dirty clothes, tired to the bone, but eager for whatever lay ahead. Prince Lolan paced to the door. "We're in luck!" he hissed. "No guards around. Now to find protective armor and go to work!"

  They found the heavy suits used by workmen in a room near the ramp leading down to the radite deposit. When they had crawled into them, they could hardly walk. Constructed of heavy rubber and slabs of lead, each one weighed over two hundred pounds. Helmets provided poor vision through thick, murky glass. But the outfits would be all that stood between them and death in the radite pit.

  Now they were staggering down the ramp and through a wide door. All four recoiled from the sight that struck their eyes. On gigantic insulators, a huge lump of blazing diamond seemed to repose. Even through colored glass it pained the eyes to look at it. The walls and floor all about it glowed with the same supernal brilliance. Tiny white flame ran ceaselessly over the jagged surface of the stone.

  Lolan squinted at his watch. "Eleven-fifteen!" he blurted. "Can we do it in forty-five minutes?"

  "We can if we've got to!" Vesh-Tu grunted. "How do we move the blessed thing?"

  The prince drew his gun. "Stand back," he snapped. "This should break it down into convenient sizes!" He levelled the gun, squeezed the trigger twice.

  A convulsive roar shook the very walls. For an entire minute, every man in the room was blinded. When they could see again, it was to regard the crumbled remains that strewed the floor. No pieces larger than a good-sized book remained. But when they tried to lift them, they discovered the chunks weighed as much as corresponding pieces of gold! Staggering under their burdens, they ascended the ramp with their small loads and hurried to the sewer opening.

  One after the other, four pieces tumbled in. Tensely they waited for the detonation. It came, a rumbling roar that drove a blast of air into their faces. Lolan grinned bleakly. "Their guns are just that much less powerful!" he promised. "Now if we can just clear up all that stuff in time—"

  At a wabbling run they staggered back to the job. It went like that for a half hour, while the litter of shattered radite grew smaller and smaller. Lolan's watch showed a quarter to twelve. He thought of the thousands of Venusians out on the streets, waiting to act ... thought of Mora, ready to lead her little group. Then there came the sound that drove all other thoughts from his mind. The tramp of running feet!

  Lolan acted instinctively. "Keep it up!" he shouted through his mask. "Irak and I have guns. We'll stand them off somehow!"

  Fear shot through the pit like an electric charge. Lolan and Irak struggled for speed as they ran up the incline. The sound of voices and footfalls was louder. They made it past the room where the radite was being disposed of. That door must be kept available, or Arzt's victory was certain. On down the hall they plunged, around a turn, into another.... Their running steps locked in a halt. Arzt and his crew were racing toward them a hundred feet ahead!

  The shooting broke out simultaneously. Rock dust filled the tunnel from the battering of force-bolts. Arzt's voice struck through the sounds, bellowing orders. Lolan and Irak were back of the corner, now, waiting—

  Two Martians raced up, prodded by their leader's hoarse screams. They never fired their guns, for the Venusians chopped them down in full stride. Lolan tore his mask off. "Won't need these any more," he grunted. "The job's up to them now. If I go out, it's not going to be in that smelly thing."

  In back of them he could hear Atarkus and Vesh-Tu's labored breathing. From time to time there came the deep, thunderous explosions that meant the work was going on. Lolan darted a glance at his watch. Five minutes to twelve!

  Now they pressed back against the wall in wait for another pair who raced up. The Martians plunged into their sights. Triggers were squeezed, guns steadied. But the shots, when they came, were feeble. Beside Lolan the wall shuddered slightly and a trickle of rocks slid down it. He watched the man he had hit stagger back, screaming. It took another shot to finish him.

  A new tenseness came into the tunnel. Every man present, Martian or Venusian, knew what was happening. The last of the radite was being disposed of. In another five minutes Arzt's hordes would be no more than a handful among an army of vengeance-driven natives.

  The seconds slogged slowly through Prince Lolan. He was waiting, hoping—then his hopes were dashed as twenty-five Martians raced concertedly for the pair of them. Arzt was sacrificing everything to stop them.

  Irak began to swear excitedly. "This gun—the thing won't work fast enough, Lolan! Can't stop them with these."

  "Then we'll use the new guns!" The idea took him so swiftly he fumbled through two seconds getting his little copper disintegrator into position. A long blue serpent of flame licked out at the Martians. Where it touched, men withered and went down without a sound. Arzt roared his anger. He flung his useless weapon with all his might at his former subordinate.

  "Damn your Venusian heart!" he screamed. "You can't stop us! Can't—"

  The words choked off. Irak had cut him down with a single shot. Silence dwelt in the tunnel, and through it came a hoarse cry:

  "Lolan! It's done! The last of it's gone. Were—were we in time?"

  Lolan sank back against the wall. He let his eyes fill with the ghastly remains of his former underlings. "Yes," he muttered to himself. "Yes! They're—finished!"

  There was jubilation throughout all Areeba that day. The scene in the tunnel had been duplicated everywhere. Martians, one minute brutal and ruthless, became craven cowards the next. There was not a man of them alive by night.

  At sundown, Lolan stood with Mora, Atarkus, and the others high in command at the ruins of the palace. The sun had broken through the perpetual clouds to cast a golden fog over everything. The beauty of it seemed to hold them all.

  "It's symbolic," Lolan told the Emperor. "Symbolic of the grandeur to come for Venus. I see a future for you as the greatest emperor our world has ever known."

  Atarkus shook his head. "Not for me, my boy. For you! I am old, ready to leave the struggle to the young. Irak, who could be a more fitting ruler for Venus than the prince we lost and gained again?"

  Irak's ugly face grinned. "No one. But an Emperor must have an Empress! Could that not be arranged too?"

  Atarkus saw the flush on his daughter's face, the corresponding color in Prince Lolan's cheeks. "Arranged!" he grunted. "That's been done a long time. It was arranged the day Lolan came back from Mars!"

  The End

  *******************************

  Norris Tapley’s Sixth Sense,

  by Ed Earl Repp

  Fantastic Adventures April 1940

  Short Story - 7261 words

  "You can’t make me believe in luck," said Frazier.

  "It’s no such thing. It’s a sort of sixth sense that lets you

  take advantage of the breaks." But Tapley had a ring...

  Chapter I

  The two of them stood at the end of the hard-luck line. Two hundred other dejected men separated them from from the employment window of the Space-Craft plant.

  A trace of a smile crossed the features of one of the men
as he glanced at the man behind him.

  “Well, Tapley, line’s moving a little,” Dave Frazier remarked cheerfully. “By noon—”

  “By noon,” Norris Tapley cut in, “we’ll be singing hymns for soup at the Salvation Army. Don’t get your hopes up, my friend. Space-Craft will have those fifty riveters by the time we get in sight of the interviewer.”

  “Say, now,” Frazier grinned. “You aren’t letting this job hunting business get you down, are you? A man can’t have bad luck always, you know. You’re bound—”

  “Can’t he?” Tapley interrupted again. His sour features mirrored a soul deviled by cynicism. “That’s where you’re wrong. When I was a kid, it was always me that got his pants snagged on a limb when the farmer caught us snitching apples. In college I was the lad who had the best lab experiments but flunked the course—because my lab book got burned in a small fire.

  “Last year I was drawing five hundred a month in this very plant. Then an efficiency expert decided my job cost more than it was worth. Now I’m licking boots for the privilege of driving rivets for Space-Craft. Listen, Mister, you’re either born lucky or you’re born with luck like mine.”

  Dave Frazier smiled slowly and shook his head.

  “You said ‘luck’. I wonder if you know the meaning of the word.”

  Bitterly, Tapley snorted, “Enough to know I haven’t got it. But I know something else, too.” He realized he was talking more than he intended, but went on.

  “I know this is the last time I’ll wear out shoe-leather in a job line!”

  The blond young physicist looked surprised. “Then—then you’re expecting another position somewhere?” Frazier asked.

  “Position? Yeah, you might call it that. Sort of a permanent position.”

  Dave Frazier caught his meaning, then, and a look of shock claimed his pale eyes.

  “Say, now, look here!” he began, but Tapley cut him off with a sigh of disgust.

  “Oh, hell! Don’t take me too seriously. But when you’ve seen as much of life as I have, you’ll realize what I mean: that some of us are born under the proverbial dark star.”

  Frazier’s eyes remained fixed thoughtfully on Tapley’s surly features for a few seconds. Then:

  “I’ve got a theory about luck, too. I don’t think there’s any such thing as good luck always happening to some and bad luck to others. To me, luck means the same as intuition.”

  “You’re getting involved there,” Tapley remarked dryly.

  “Well, look. Luck isn’t a divine blessing—it’s an acute ability. It means not walking under a signboard because some tiny sense heard plaster crumbling above the sidewalk; a sound far too faint even for a dog’s ears, perhaps. It means that a stockbroker sells out all of a certain block of securities because a thousand tiny facts in his mind welded themselves into one cord of certainty—that the stock was going to drop.

  “How did he know it? Scraps of conversation, figures, experience, all tending toward the final deduction. And all of it done unconsciously to the stockbroker!”

  “You say ‘some tiny sense’ heard that signboard preparing to give way,” Tapley frowned. “What do you mean by ‘sense’?”

  Getting warmed up to his speech, young Frazier fished for a cigarette, found only crumbs, and went on earnestly without the thought-catalyst of tobacco.

  “You’ve studied science,” he said. “You realize, of course, that our crude ‘five senses’ take cognizance of only about a fiftieth of the sounds and sights that actually exist. Why couldn’t some shock, some jolt, put part of our minds into parallel with these other forty-nine octaves? Such an event could account for phenomenal ability in sports, which otherwise seems to be luck. In other words, luck is the infinite capacity for analyzing problems instantly and unconsciously!”

  Tapley scoffed. “What about horse racing? Your theory won’t hold water there.”

  “You show me a man who can win consistently, over a period of years, or even months, and I’ll admit I’m wrong. The point is, you can’t. Gambling luck is vastly exaggerated. Most gamblers die poor, anyway.”

  * * *

  Frazier shrugged his wide shoulders under his seedy coat.

  “It’s all theory, of course. But I like to think that something could happen at any time to jolt a man’s consciousness into the plane where he’d have that boundless luck some individuals seem to possess! It’s not beyond—”

  A bell rang harshly, drawing their attention to the wide gate in the structural glass wall surrounding the plant. Over an amplifier, a man’s metallic tones rasped:

  “All positions filled! Leave applications at employment office if you wish to be notified—”

  The shuffle of men’s feet leaving the line blotted out the words. Mechanically, the group filtered into the street and went back into the score of dismal points from which they had come. Tapley was chuckling unpleasantly when he turned back to Dave Frazier.

  “There’s the jolt you were asking for,” he jibed. “But I don’t see any gilt-edged break attached to it!”

  Good-naturedly, Frazier came back: “That’s not quite the type of jolt I meant. But I can’t say it wasn’t a stiff enough one.”

  They walked off together, not speaking until they had gained the clamorous business district. Norris Tapley began to feel condescending toward his young friend. Poor, damned fool! He’d be trudging back and forth for months, he supposed, answering ads. While he, Tapley, had made his mind up to the thing he’d avoided so long.

  “What’s your line, Frazier?” he asked, just before they reached the corner where he was to turn down. “What do you do when they give you a chance?”

  Once more Frazier warmed up. “Astrophysics,” he answered, something in his very tone implying love of the work. “I—I’ve done quite a bit along that line. All on my own, of course. I’ve got a scheme now that would make those space giants Space-Craft turns out as antiquated as the Model T. They’re nine-tenths machinery. My ships would be one-tenth machinery, with the rest of the space for storage and living. Sometime I’ll show you my plans—”

  His eyes said he was eager to do it now, while his hand unconsciously rubbed at a bulging pocket.

  “You do that,” Tapley smiled thinly. “Right now I’ve got to rush. Where’ll I find you—in case I hear of anybody needing a good astrophysicist?”

  “Central Park,” Dave Frazier replied. “On any of the benches near an ash can. They make first-class stoves at night, when the cops aren’t around!”

  Then they parted, Frazier’s blond head looming inches above the throng as he moved away. Tapley stood in thought. He had two dollars and fifteen cents left from the five he’d got on his wristwatch. He really owed it to his landlady, but she didn’t need it as much as he wanted that last delicious meal he was planning.

  So he headed for Maxie’s, where he could get the best French dinner in town for a dollar seventy-five. Turning the corner, he squinted as the setting sun poured its blinding brilliance into his eyes. His hand made a quick gesture meant to shut off the light. A sharp gasp tightened his throat.

  On his little finger was a ring with a green stone, a cheap thing an aunt had given him years ago. Cheap as it was, it had an unusual cut that gave it seemingly bottomless depth, like that of a volcanic pool which measures the very core of Earth. Now the sun’s rays were setting it on fire with light that penetrated Tapley’s very skull. He staggered back, pawing at his eyes. The spell was broken, then, but in his brain was a humming and a tingling that made him light-headed.

  The tingling seeped down through his body like champagne flowing through his veins. He straightened up, looked about him with new alertness. Hurriedly he fell back into the crowd as he noticed people watching him.

  His glance stole to Aunt Mary’s ring. But even though he furtively held it up to let the sun bathe it once more, it remained the same cheap bauble he’d worn for ten years. Norris Tapley drifted on, a puzzled and strangely exhilarated man.

  Sev
eral blocks short of Maxie’s Café, something brought him up short before the Colonial Club, New York’s most expensive restaurant. With a clutch of panic, he found himself turning into it! He, Norris Tapley—without the price of the cover charge!

  He had scarcely entered the warm, fragrant atmosphere when the second strange thing happened.

  Chapter II

  Death Picks a Winner

  It was as if everyone in the exclusive café had been awaiting his entrance. From the sunken dining floor, hundreds of faces tipped up to his in smiling expectancy. The string orchestra struck up “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow.” Two men in evening dress moved from the checkroom toward him, smiling broadly.

  Eventually, the noise died down, with Tapley still standing there while a short, blue-jowled man pumped his hand.

  “Congratulations!” he was saying. “I am Andre, the proprietor. We have been expecting you, Monsieur. Welcome!”

  “You’ve been expecting—me?” Tapley got out.

  “Mais, oui!” beamed the portly little restaurateur, while the head waiter nodded and rubbed his hands. “Vous savez—you are the five-hundred-thousandth customer to enter these doors! Tonight you are my guest. Eat, drink, at my expense. Henri, show the gentleman to his table!”

  Amid a polite din of applause, Tapley was ushered to a table near the orchestra, decorated with a centerpiece that would have paid his rent for three months. At last the excitement died down, and the embarrassed engineer was allowed to order and think it over.

  It was the first time luck had happened in his life as far back as he could remember. But was it luck? Never in the world would he have entered such a place as this of his own free will; some force stronger than his will had dragged him through those doors. Tapley was reminded with a quick thrill of Dave Frazier’s words. Had he somehow been conscious of the things that were taking place inside the Colonial Club as he passed?