Arthur Zagat - The Golden Age of Science Fiction Volume IX

For a huge concrete sphere was whirling, tossing, gyrating in a welter of waters. The din was terrific. I rolled over and over, my arms almost pulled out of their sockets. Then, like a ton of brick, something collided with my head. There was a blinding flare in the black void, and I knew no more.

Slowly I came out of a hideous nightmare.

My head ached frightfully, and my wounds smarted and stung. It was dark, but a faint luminescence from somewhere enabled me to faintly discern my surroundings. I was wedged between a steel cable-bracket and the curving wall. Across the glass strewn floor a body lay, sprawling queerly.

The room was swaying in long undulations, or was it my head? I lay helpless, unable to move. A leg dangled uselessly. There was a bump, the sound of scraping. I heard confused sounds penetrating the walls, and the jar of steady impacts.

A half an hour passed so; maybe an hour: I had no means of telling. I was weak from pain and loss of blood, and slightly delirious.

A faint whirring noise, a sudden intensity in the illumination caused me to turn my head. The steel shutter was glowing red, then a shower of white sparks broke through. The heavy steel was melting away into incandescence. It crashed.

A group of men stumbled cautiously in. Now I was sure I was delirious. For the men wore khaki uniforms! Americans! Then, in my fever, I thought I heard a familiar voice cry out my name. It was Jim’s voice. A roaring curtain of blackness shut down on me.

When I awoke again I was lying in a clean-sheeted hospital bed. Jim was sitting at the side, staring at me with gloomy eyes.

“Hello, Jim,” I gasped weakly. “How did I get here?”

It was touching to see the instantaneous delight on his weathered countenance.

“So you came to at last, you old son-of-a-gun! Thought you were cashing in on us for a while. How did you get here? That’s just what I want to know. How in hell did you get here?”

I was still pretty weak. “You pulled me out. What happened?”

“We’re still trying to puzzle it out. Wouldn’t be surprised if you had a hand in it, you blighter. We were watching that damned cloud, worrying ourselves to death. What with the New York going out like a light, and not hearing anything from you, we were pretty low.

“Then, suddenly, there was a tremendous detonation. The whole cloud mass collapsed like a pricked bubble, and a bottomless pit yawned underneath the ocean—and, next thing we knew, our raft was yanked from under our feet, plunging and bucking in a swirl of waters.

“I just had time to grab hold of a stanchion, when we were sucked down into a whirlpool such as I never hope to see again. Round and round we spun, the tumbling waters mountain high above us. I was buried most of the time in crashing billows; my arms were almost pulled out of their sockets.

“I never expected to see daylight again,” Jim went on. “My hold was being broken when at last we were spewed out somehow onto a sea that looked as if a thousand hurricanes were blowing down.

“I managed to get my men together—what was left of them. There were pitifully few. Later, I heard that our losses were enormous. Over seventy-five per cent of our rafts on a 50-mile front were lost, and the enemies’ were almost totally wiped out.

“When the mile-high seas had toned down a bit, we saw a huge concrete ball tossing about like a cork. Couldn’t make out what the devil it was. Then someone noticed a door. We got that open, but there was a steel one inside. We had to slice it with an oxy-hydrogen flame. Inside, snug as a bug in a rug, were you.

“Now come on, tell me how in blazes you got in there. If you don’t spill it quick, I’ll bust.”

I sat up in my excitement. “Don’t you see, they were afraid the ray might fail. They had those concrete balls stuck all around so that the officers at least could escape, if it did. Their best technical men must have been running the control room. They made sure to have that specially strong. And the wave caused by the water pouring into the hole swept me right over here, just where I started from.”

Jim had both hands on my shoulders, was pushing me down. “Whoa, baby, whoa. That’s just as clear as a darkness-rayed area. Count up to ten, and start all over again.”

“’Ten-shun!”

The general himself strode into the room. And then I had to tell my story straight.

Uncle William Boles’ war-battered old Geest gun gave the impression that at some stage of its construction it had been pulled out of shape and then hardened in that form. What remained of it was all of one piece. The scarred and pitted twin barrels were stubby and thick, and the vacant oblong in the frame behind them might have contained standard energy magazines. It was the stock which gave the alien weapon its curious appearance. Almost eighteen inches long, it curved abruptly to the right and was too thin, knobbed and indented to fit comfortably at any point in a human hand. Over half a century had passed since, with the webbed, boneless fingers of its original owner closed about it, it last spat deadly radiation at human foemen. Now it hung among Uncle William’s other collected oddities on the wall above the living room fireplace.

And today, Phil Boles thought, squinting at the gun with reflectively narrowed eyes, some eight years after Uncle William’s death, the old war souvenir would quietly become a key factor in the solution of a colonial planet’s problems. He ran a finger over the dull, roughened frame, bent closer to study the neatly lettered inscription: GUNDERLAND BATTLE TROPHY, ANNO 2172, SGT. WILLIAM G. BOLES. Then, catching a familiar series of clicking noises from the hall, he straightened quickly and turned away. When Aunt Beulah’s go-chair came rolling back into the room, Phil was sitting at the low tea table, his back to the fireplace.

The go-chair’s wide flexible treads carried it smoothly down the three steps to the sunken section of the living room, Beulah sitting jauntily erect in it, for all the ninety-six years which had left her the last survivor of the original group of Earth settlers on the world of Roye. She tapped her fingers here and there on the chair’s armrests, swinging it deftly about, and brought it to a stop beside the tea table.

“That was Susan Feeney calling,” she reported. “And there is somebody else for you who thinks I have to be taken care of! Go ahead and finish the pie, Phil. Can’t hurt a husky man like you. Got a couple more baking for you to take along.”

Phil grinned. “That’d be worth the trip up from Fort Roye all by itself.”

Beulah looked pleased. “Not much else I can do for my great-grand nephew nowadays, is there?”

Phil said, after a moment, “Have you given any further thought to—”

“Moving down to Fort Roye?” Beulah pursed her thin lips. “Goodness, Phil, I do hate to disappoint you again, but I’d be completely out of place in a town apartment.”

“Dr. Fitzsimmons would be pleased,” Phil remarked.

“Oh, him! Fitz is another old worry wart. What he wants is to get me into the hospital. Nothing doing!”

Phil shook his head helplessly, laughed. “After all, working a tupa ranch—”

“Nonsense. The ranch is just enough bother to be interesting. The appliances do everything anyway, and Susan is down here every morning for a chat and to make sure I’m still all right. She won’t admit that, of course, but if she thinks something should be taken care of, the whole Feeney family shows up an hour later to do it. There’s really no reason for you to be sending a dozen men up from Fort Roye every two months to harvest the tupa.”