C Kornbluth - His Share of Glory The Complete Short Science Fiction

"That brings us down to 1939, the beginning of the war. The few Basques left fight with the French, the Spanish and any other army they fancy. Most of them die. A few thousand are left in the lower mountain villages. One day in 1951 the villages are bombed by German planes—

blown right off the map. Squads of soldiers hunt down the rest of the Basques in the hills and pop them off."

"But not Jose!" interjected the old man with considerable excitement and a little pride.

"That's right. Not Jose. Hoe was so well hidden that half the time he couldn't find his own den for a month once he had left it. Anyway—

there aren't any Basque villages nor any Basques. Yet the next year the Pyrenese Peoples' Republic is announced and in the next they held DeCuerva's army, which never did get through. Now, a dozen years later we see this uncannily perfect city of the future, achieved by a handful of men and women—whom we've seen—and that's that."

"That's what?" asked the girl abstractedly.

"That's what I was planning to ask you as soon as you regained consciousness."

"You've waited in vain," said Kay, licking her fingers. "I can't think on a full stomach. Nobody can. By the way, you neglected to explain the events of the night of a week ago. How did you know they suspected us of suspecting them of being not what they seemed to be?"

"You know the Mayor's office building?"

"Like a book. I might almost say I know it backwards."

"Right, child. You do know it backwards, and what's more you don't know the half of it. Because more than the half of it is underground. I bumbled on the Mayor that night going down into the basement of his building and asked if I could go too. Taking something of a chance I pushed by him before he could make an excuse.

"I guess he didn't have a gun, because I wasn't shot in the back for seeing what I saw. There were some machines there that make their hydroelectric turbines look like a pinwheel. Big—very big—and mysterious in function, to me at least. Simply didn't look like anything at all—except maybe a glorified and electric concrete mixer. And a couple of people mucking around with oiling-cans.

"They drew and fired; I shoved the mayor in and rolled the hall-desk against the door, propped that with my walking-stick for leverage and beat it for your flat."

"Nice condensed narration," she said thoughtfully. "But what made you poke around in the first place? Dashed if I had any grounds for suspicion of conspiracy and such."

"You've forgotten a lot since we took those psych courses. How do you tell a louse from an honest man?"

"A louse doesn't trust anybody."

"Right. Not even when he's middle aged does he trust a couple of moonstruck lovers. Any nasty old man who'd break in on a tete-a-tete is bad from head to toe.

"And the clincher, to me at least, was this bloody, mysterious and cancerous growth of the so-called Basque people in less than two decades. There was something too awfully methodical about their city.

It didn't show any of the right traits. No, not a single one. It was as though they'd deliberately set out to build themselves a city of the future intended to impress and amaze—one, also, geared to the maximum in efficiency."

Kay listened quietly. Finally she suggested, with a little shudder:

"Gestapo?"

"Couldn't be anything else, sweet." Ballister fell silent in the contemplation of bucking the secret police that had held the German empire of conquest together by torture, fire and sword for years beyond its normal lifespan. They were wise, villainous and tricky, the Gestapo.

It had been thought that the majority of them had been killed off by the Captives' Revolt years ago. Surely there couldn't be enough left to fill that city!

"It's a bridgehead," he said at last. "A stepping-stone for attack on an unprecedented scale and in an altogether new technique. You guess what that is?"

"Like the story about the rabbits, perhaps," Kay suggested diffidently.

"There were two rabbits being chased by a pack of hounds. They were tired, completely winded. There was no chance of them outrunning the hounds, who were young and fresh. So one rabbit said to the other rabbit: 'Let's hide in that bush until we outnumber them.' "

"Maybe," said Ballister. "Too bad reconnaissance is out of the question.

They must be patrolling the woods seven deep looking for us." He brooded for a while, then exploded: "And the young monster of a hydro-dam? What's that for?"

"Electric light," said Kay. She reconsidered after a moment. "No.

Because they have a strict curfew, so they don't need street-lights. And that dam would deliver twenty times the power needed for street-lighting. Maybe a hundred times that. I'm no installations engineer, boy."

"It's very important, that dam. Otherwise they wouldn't risk building a big, suspicious thing like that. And they do want to hide it; they did their best along that line to keep us from noticing it."

"What?" squeaked the girl. "That chauffeur stopped the car and pointed it out, and we've been taken to inspect it half a dozen times! Keep us from noticing it, forsooth!"

Ballister sat quietly and grinned like a cat.

The girl considered, then blushed and admitted shamefacedly: "You're right. They even fooled me, the psychist. They threw it into our faces so often that we were supposed to take it for granted and not think about the thing. The Purloined Letter, et seq."

"Good kid!" said Ballister with faked heartiness. "I wish to heaven that one of us was a real scientist—physics and nuclear chemistry. Because the one purpose of that dam is obviously to power the machinery I saw in the basement before the chase-scene. And I don't know what the machinery does …"

"So it's all solved, huh?" Kay asked belligerently. "As simple as pi square? The Gestapo's been repudiated by the German people, so they choose this method as a bridgehead on the continent for future use when the Swastika shall ride again."

"That's what it looks like," said Ballister self-satisfiedly.

"Things are seldom what they seem. That's what it ain't. How would even a heavily-disciplined Gestapo unit do what they've done in the time they've had?"

Ballister was rocked back on his heels. "Blast it," he said bitterly. "The man-hour formulae make it a rank impossibility. It's so far outside the realms of possibility that I'd bet my boots on it." A thought struck him:

"But the city's there, Kay!"

"Ignore it, boy. There's trickery involved. We'll have to find out where."

He looked at her glumly. "Reconnaissance?"

"Yep. Both of us."

Bazasch knew things about stalking that would pop the eyes of a Scottish stag-hunter. He had the knack of slipping along without enough covering to hide a rabbit, and in the little space of a week he tried to teach Kay and Ballister what he knew. In his own inarticulate way he got some of the principles over, though he despaired of ever making guerillistas of them.

Mournfully he explained that one had to be born to the fellowhood of stalkers and then be taken in hand by a wise old man who could explain things. He, Jose, could not explain. So long he had not talked to anybody but himself that the language sometimes seemed to be going altogether.

And between the grueling hikes-under-cover in the mountains the two Americans were gathering together their data, inferring wildly, working sometimes by association rather than logic, jumping through time and space in their reasoning rather than let go of a theory.

They evolved conclusive—to them—proof that Sir Mallory was the prime scoundrel behind the Pyrenese Peoples' Republic. Checking back on his mental notebook Ballister recalled what might be considered evidence to that effect:

"I had my eyes on him the moment he showed up in our little twosome.