Mars is My Destination, Frank Belknap Long [reading an ebook .TXT] 📗

I was out of breath and feeling a little dizzy, because when you hit anyone as hard as I'd hit Hard Eyes, not caring much whether I killed him or not, it takes a minute or two to recover. I still hadn't quite gotten my breath back when the door of Wendel's office slammed open and Wendel himself stood there, staring down at the guard with a look of consternation on his face.

I became a little alarmed when I saw that Lynton had moved out from the wall and was making straight for him with his arm drawn back. Hell—that's an understatement. I became very much alarmed, because the one thing I didn't want was to have Wendel belted unconscious and laid out on the floor at the guard's side before I could have a talk with him.

I got between them just in time, and I grabbed Wendel by the shoulders and hurled him back into his office and when he staggered a little and almost fell I grabbed hold of him for the second time, and slammed him down in the chair in front of his big, metal-topped desk.

He looked up at me for a moment with a killing rage in his eyes, but I didn't give him a chance to get his breath back. For the barest instant, though, if he had been quick enough, he might have succeeded in getting to his feet and lashing out at me, for I saw something on the opposite side of the room that seemed almost too good to be true, and I took three full seconds out to stare at it.

It was a big tele-communicator screen—just the kind of screen I had been sure I'd find somewhere in the plant, but hardly in Wendel's private office. The fact that Sherwood had one in his office was not quite so surprising, for Sherwood's custodianship of thermonuclear weapons had made him more communication-conscious.

I'd counted on being able to persuade Wendel to accompany me to wherever the plant's screen happened to be located, after I'd had a serious talk with him. But since he hadn't wanted me to have a talk with him until he'd done his best to get me killed or crippled for life, and I would now have to keep him boxed up in his office by force while we conducted the talk, having the screen so accessible was one hell of a lucky break.

"Shut the door," I told Lynton. "And lock it."

I waited until Lynton had complied, my hands on Wendel's shoulders with so fierce a clamp-hold that he gave up trying to rise.

"You'll never get out of here alive!" he choked. "If you think—"

"Don't press your luck, Wendel," I said, warningly. "I might be tempted to break your neck."

"That insignia you're wearing doesn't mean a thing now, Graham. Don't you understand? You couldn't command a fly to crawl over a bread crumb. The Wendel Combine is taking over the Colony."

"Not a fly, Wendel," I said. "The Wendel Combine. A big boa constrictor has nothing in common with a fly and I'm not interested in bread crumbs. And this will surprise you. You're going to do the commanding. You're going to command the boa constrictor to start disgorging—every kill it's ever swallowed. It's going to flatten itself out until it's just a mass of cold mottled skin, which the Board will know how to deal with."

"Who's going to make me?"

"I am," I said. "You have just ten minutes to make up your mind. You either turn over all of the Combine's nuclear weapons to the Board, break the back of the Wendel police force by arresting all of its officers and placing yourself under house arrest and order every Wendel employee to cooperate with the Board or—Joseph Sherwood will vaporize the plant with a thermonuclear bomb. The rocket will be guided by remote control and will hover directly above the plant until the bomb has been dropped. Only the plant will be destroyed. There will be no zone of spreading radio-active contamination."

All of the color drained from Wendel's face, leaving it ashen. "You must be mad!" he gasped. "You'd die too."

"I'm aware of that," I said. "We'll all be vaporized together. But it isn't too bad a way to die, Wendel. You feel no pain, never know—"

"Do you expect me to take that threat seriously?" he breathed.

"I'm afraid I do," I said. I gestured toward the tele-communicator. "Sherwood will tell you how serious it is. He's waiting to talk to you. Suppose we turn that screen on and listen to what he has to say. I'm sure you know how to get the right wave-length. The Wendel spy network would hardly fail to keep you informed when Sherwood changes the code frequencies."

"You said ten minutes," Wendel was breathing harshly now and the veins on his forehead were thick blue cords. "You'd have to let Sherwood know when to drop the bomb. You haven't been in communication with him since you arrived here. Suppose I refuse to dial? That's a very intricate, highly specialized communicator. You couldn't operate it."

That made me change my mind about letting him do the dialing. I was pretty sure I'd experience no difficulty in getting in contact with Sherwood and I didn't want to give Wendel a chance to make the communicator even more specialized by ripping put some of the wiring.

I turned to Lynton and indicated by tapping Wendel forcibly on the shoulder that I was about to relinquish my hold on the Combine's difficult president, and would he kindly take my place behind the chair.

"Don't let him move," I cautioned, when we'd changed places. "Keep a tight grip on his shoulders."

"Don't worry," Lynton said. "If he moves an inch I'll do what you said might not be a bad idea—break his neck."

It didn't take me long to discover that Wendel had lied about the communicator, which meant, of course, that he had been hoping I'd give him a chance to do a quick job of sabotage on the wiring.

It was just a run-of-the-mill, two-way televisual communicator, with nothing specialized about it.

There was a humming sound for a few seconds right after I'd finished dialing and it gave me a chance to scrutinize Wendel's face to see how he was taking it.

He was terrified, all right. But his lips were still set in defiant lines and I was sure that if he could have gotten a grip on my throat right at that moment getting his fingers unlocked wouldn't have been easy.

I thought that when Sherwood's image appeared on the screen there would be just one minute of hard-to-live-through uncertainty—that he'd back up what I'd told Wendel with his hand on the rocket release button and look straight at me, as if awaiting a signal I had no intention of giving.

But I suddenly realized I didn't know just how it was going to be. Would Wendel stay defiant right up to the end, would he defeat me through sheer stubbornness, even though he was mortally terrified?

But there was one thing I did know. For the first time, as I waited for Sherwood's image to appear on the screen, I knew with absolute certainty, beyond any possibility of doubt, that I could never go through with it.

The rocket had to be prepared and ready—the nuclear deterrent had to be a reality—or I could never have carried the bluff through with the kind of confidence that just the knowledge that you're holding the highest cards in the deck can give you.

I had to feel that I just might give the signal.

But vaporizing the plant would have cost the lives of thirty thousand people and not more than a fourth of them were vicious criminals. I just couldn't see myself ordering a nuclear bomb to be dropped on more than twenty thousand completely innocent Wendel plant engineers and laboratory technicians.

Perhaps I shouldn't have felt that way, because if the Wendel Combine took over the Colony three or four times that number of innocent people would perish, or sink into degradation and become completely enslaved. But I did feel that way and—well, I wouldn't have to live with what I'd done, because I'd be killed by the blast. But I didn't want that on my conscience even as a dead man.

I couldn't go through with it, but had I ever really intended to? It didn't mean I couldn't win, didn't change what I'd come to do. If I could carry my bluff through without flinching, right up to the zero-count instant, there was a very good chance that Wendel would crack. A very good chance still.

I had the highest cards in the deck and was only handicapped in one way. If the zero-count instant came and Wendel didn't crack I couldn't play them.

I've never really believed in miracles. But if you're holding what you think are the highest cards, and something happens to your hand you never dreamed could happen—if you look and see you've got a card that's even higher, just slipped in between the others as a gift ... well, that's pretty close to a miracle, isn't it?

I thought when Sherwood's image appeared on the screen he'd be sitting alone behind his desk, with his thumb on the rocket-release button. But he wasn't alone and when I saw who was with him I almost stopped breathing....

Joan was with him and she was looking straight at me out of the screen.

"Don't do it, Ralph!" she pleaded. "Oh, God, no—"

Then I saw that she was staring past me and without turning I knew that she was appealing to Wendel with the same look of pleading desperation in her eyes. "If he gives the signal his command will be obeyed. And he'll do it unless you stop him! When you've lived with a man in the intimacy of marriage—yes, that's important and I have to say it—you know him better than anyone else. You know what he's capable of. He'll give the signal unless you do as he says, because the insignia he's wearing gives him no choice. If you don't stop him now ... you'll die with him!"

I turned then and stared straight at Wendel. I'd never seen a man sag before in quite the way he did. All of the life seemed to go out of his eyes. His defiance gave way to a look of utter hopelessness, of abject surrender, and he sank so low in his chair that he seemed on the verge of slumping to the floor, despite Lynton's grip on his shoulders.

His voice, when he spoke, scarcely rose above a whisper. "All right, Graham," he said. "You win."

As I turned back to the screen and saw the look of overwhelming relief and gratefulness in Joan's eyes I couldn't help wondering how close she had been to being right. Had the insignia really given me any choice? If Wendel had stayed defiant and refused to crack—would I have gone through with it? How much does any man know about himself?

I'd probably never know the answer.

In the days that followed every one of the Wendel agents were rounded up and returned to Earth to stand trial. I never did find out the identity of the agent who had shot the dart at me from high up on the spiral or the one who had sent a little mechanical killer in my direction by the shores of Lake Michigan in New Chicago.

It didn't worry me at all, because I was sure that both of those delightful characters were among the agents who had been rounded up in the mopping up operations.

Oh, yes—they rescued her with her hair in disarray and no longer standing high up on her head. Three days later, drifting through empty space about three hundred thousand miles from Mars. She's in prison now and will have to answer charges. But I intend to go all out in the plea I'll make in her defense when she comes up for trial.

Some judges are enlightened and merciful and others are harsh tyrants, but with the backing of the Board I'm not too worried about the outcome. If it goes against us, I'll take it to the highest court in the land, and the backing of the Board carries plenty of weight there too.

Eventually I forgave Commander Littlefield.

"I'm a hard man, Ralph," he said, standing in the starlight outside the Port Administration Section with a crumpled sheet of paper in his hand, right after he'd received assurances from Earth he'd be placed in command of a new sky ship. "I did what I did because I am what I am. I knew that her life hung in the balance, that every word we exchanged increased the danger. But when I weighed that against the future of the Colony—I felt I had no choice. I knew