The Third Murray Leinster Page 5

  “In reason,” he said coldly, “I ought to let you take what this damned thing would give you. But—here!”

  Allison had panicked. The idea of a cattle fence suggested discomfort, of course, but it did not imply danger. The experience of a cattle fence, designed for huge hoofed beasts instead of men, was terrifying. Allison gasped. He made convulsive movements. Calhoun himself moved erratically. For one and a half seconds out of two, he could control his muscles. For half a second at a time, he could not. But he poked a pill into Allison’s mouth.

  “Swallow it!” he commanded. “Swallow!”

  The ground-car rested tranquilly on the highway, which here went on for a mile and then dipped in a gentle incline and then rose once more. The totally level fields to right and left came to an end here. Native trees grew, trailing preposterously with long fronds. Brushwood hid much of the ground. That looked normal. But the lower, ground-covering vegetation was wilted and rotting.

  Allison choked upon the pellet. Calhoun forced a second upon him. Murgatroyd looked inquisitively at first one and then the other of the two men. He said:

  “Chee? Chee?”

  Calhoun lay back in his seat, breathing carefully to keep alive. But he couldn’t do anything about his heartbeat. The sun shone brightly, though now it was low, toward the horizon. There were clouds in the reddened sky. A gentle breeze blew. Everything, to outward appearance, was peaceful and tranquil and commonplace upon this small world.

  But in the area that human beings had taken over there were cities which were still and silent and deserted, and somewhere—somewhere!—the population of the planet waited uneasily for the latest of a series of increasingly terrifying phenomena to come to an end. Up to this time the strange, creeping, universal affliction had begun at one place, and moved slowly to another, and then diminished and ceased to be. But this was the greatest and worst of the torments. And it hadn’t ended. It hadn’t diminished. After three days it continued at full strength at the place where previously it had stopped and died away.

  The people of Maya were frightened. They couldn’t return to their homes. They couldn’t go anywhere. They hadn’t prepared for an emergency to last for days. They hadn’t brought supplies of food.

  It began to look as if they were going to starve.

  IV

  Calhoun was in very bad shape when the sports car came to the end of the highway.

  First, all the multiple roadways of the route that had brought him here were joined by triple ribbons of road-surface from the north. For a space there were twenty-four lanes available to traffic. They flowed together, and then there were twelve. Here there was evidence of an enormous traffic concentration at some time now past. Brush and small trees were crushed and broken where cars had been forced to travel off the hard-surface roadways and through undergrowth. The twelve lanes dwindled to six, and the unpaved area on either side showed that innumerable cars had been forced to travel off the highway altogether. Then there were three lanes, and then two, and finally only a single ribbon of pavement where no more than two cars could run side by side. The devastation on either hand was astounding. All visible vegetation for half a mile to right and left was crushed and tangled. And then the narrow surfaced road ceased to be completely straight. It curved around a hillock—and here the ground was no longer perfectly flat—and came to an end.

  And Calhoun saw all the ground-cars of the planet gathered and parked together.

  There were no buildings. There were no streets. There was nothing of civilization but tens and scores of thousands of ground-cars. They were extraordinary to look at, stopped at random, their fronts pointed in all directions, their air-column tubes thrusting into the ground so that there might be trouble getting them clear again.

  Parked bumper to bumper in closely placed lines, in theory twenty-five thousand cars could be parked on a square mile of ground. But there were very many times that number of cars here, and some places were unsuitable for parking, and there were lanes placed at random and there’d been no special effort to put the maximum number of cars in the smallest place. So the surface transportation system of the planet Maya spread out over some fifty sprawling square miles. Here, cars were crowded closely. There, there was much room between them. But it seemed that as far as one could see in the twilight there were glistening vehicles gathered confusedly, so there was nothing else to be seen but an occasional large tree rising from among them.

  Calhoun came to the end of the surfaced road. He’d waited for the pellets he’d taken and given to Allison to have the effect they’d had on Murgatroyd. That had come about. He’d driven on. But the strength of the inductor field had increased to the intolerable. When he stopped the sports car he showed the effects of what he’d been through.

  Figures on foot converged upon him instantly. There were eager calls.

  “It’s stopped? You got through? We can go back?”

  Calhoun shook his head. It was just past sunset and many brilliant colorings showed in the western sky, but they couldn’t put color into Calhoun’s face. His cheeks were grayish and his eyes were deep-sunk, and he looked like someone in the last stages of exhaustion. He said heavily:

  “It’s still there. We came through. I’m Med Service. Have you got a government here? I need to talk to somebody who can give orders.”

  * * * *

  If he’d asked two days earlier there would have been no answer, because the fugitives were only waiting for a disaster to come to an end. One day earlier, he might have found men with authority busily trying to arrange for drinking water for something like two millions of people, in the entire absence of wells or pumps or ways of making either. And if he’d been a day later, it is rather likely that he’d have found savage disorder. But he arrived at sundown three days after the flight from the cities. There was no food to speak of, and water was drastically short, and the fugitives were only beginning to suspect that they would never be able to leave this place—and that they might die here.

  Men left the growing crowd about the sports car to find individuals who could give orders. Calhoun stayed in the car, resting from the unbearable strain he’d undergone. The ground-inductor cattle fence had been ten miles deep. One mile was not bad. Only Murgatroyd had noticed it. After two miles Calhoun and Allison suffered; but the medication strengthened them to take it. But there’d been a long, long way in the center of the induction-field in which existence was pure torment. Calhoun’s muscles defied him for part of every two-second cycle, and his heart and lungs seemed constantly about to give up even the pretense of working. In that part of the cattle-fence field, he’d hardly dared drive faster than a crawl, in order to keep control of the car when his own body was uncontrollable. But presently the field strength lessened and ultimately ended.

  Now Murgatroyd looked cordially at the figures who clustered about the car. He’d hardly suffered at all. He’d had half as much of the medication as Calhoun himself, and his body weight was only a tenth of Calhoun’s. He’d made out all right. Now he looked expectantly at what became a jammed mass of crowding men about the vehicle that had come through the invisible barrier across the highway. They hoped desperately for news to produce hope. But Murgatroyd waited zestfully for somebody to welcome him and offer him cakes and sweets, and undoubtedly presently a cup of coffee.

  But nobody did.

  It was a long time before there was a stirring at the edge of the crowd. Night had fully fallen then, and for miles and miles in all directions lights in the ground cars of Maya’s inhabitants glowed brightly. They drew upon broadcast power, naturally, for their motors and their lights. Off to one side someone shouted. Calhoun turned on his headlights for a guide. More shoutings. A knot of men struggled to get through the crowd. With difficulty, presently, they reached the car.

  “They say you got through,” panted a tall man, “but you can’t get back. They say—”

  Calh
oun roused himself. Allison, beside him, stirred. The tall man panted again:

  “I’m the planetary president. What can we do?”

  “First, listen,” said Calhoun tiredly.

  He’d had a little rest. Not much, but some. The actual work he’d done in driving three hundred-odd miles from Maya City was trivial. But the continuous, and lately violent, spasms of his heart and breathing muscles had been exhausting. He heard Murgatroyd say ingratiatingly, “Chee-chee-chee-chee,” and put his hand on the little animal to quiet him.

  “The thing you ran away from,” said Calhoun with effort, “is a type of ground-induction field using broadcast power from the grid. It’s used on Texia to confine cattle to their pastures and to move them where they’re wanted to be. But it was designed for cattle. It’s a cattle fence. It could kill humans.”

  He went on, his voice gaining strength and steadiness as he spoke. He explained, precisely, how a ground-induction field was projected in a line at a right angle to its source. It could be moved by adjustments of the apparatus by which it was projected.

  “But—but if it uses broadcast power,” the planetary president said urgently, “then if the power broadcast is cut off it has to stop! If you got through it coming here, tell us how to get through going back and we’ll cut off the power broadcast ourselves! We’ve got to do something immediately. The whole planet’s here. There’s no food! There’s no water! Something has to be done before we begin to die!”

  “But,” said Calhoun, “if you cut off the power you’ll die anyway! You’ve got a couple of million people here, and you’re a hundred miles from food. Without power you couldn’t get to food or bring it here. Cut the power and you’re still stranded here. Without power you’ll die as soon as with it.”

  There was a sound from the listening men around. It was partly a growl and partly a groan.

  “I’ve just found this out,” said Calhoun. “I didn’t know until the last ten miles exactly what the situation was, and I had to come here to be sure. Now I need some people to help me. It won’t be pleasant. I may have enough medication to get a dozen people back through. It’ll be safer if I take only six. Get a doctor to pick me six men. Good heart action. Sound lungs. Two should be electronics engineers. The others should be good shots. If you get them ready, I’ll give them the same stuff that got us through. It’s desensitizing medication, but it will do only so much. And try and find some weapons for them.”

  Voices murmured all around. Men hastily explained to other men what Calhoun had said. The creeping disaster before which they’d all fled,—it was not a natural catastrophe, but an artificial one! Men had made it! They’d been herded here and their wives and children were hungry because of something men had done!

  A low-pitched, buzzing, humming sound came from the crowd about the sports car. For the moment, nobody asked what could be the motive for men to do what had been done. Pure fury filled the mob. Calhoun leaned closer to Allison.

  “I wouldn’t get out of the car if I were you,” he said in a low tone. “I certainly wouldn’t try to buy any real property at a low price!”

  Allison shivered. There was a vast, vast stirring as the explanation passed from man to man. Figures moved away in the darkness. Lighted car windows winked as they moved through the obscurity. The population of Maya was spread out over very many square miles of what had been wilderness, and there was no elaborate communication system by which information could be spread quickly. But long before dawn there’d be nobody who didn’t know that they’d fled from a man-made danger and were held here like cattle, behind a cattle fence, apparently abandoned to die.

  * * * *

  Allison’s teeth chattered. He was a business man and up to now he’d thought as one. He’d made decisions in offices, with attorneys and secretaries and clerks to make the decisions practical and safe, without any concern for any consequences other than financial ones.

  He saw possible consequences to himself, here and now. He’d landed on Maya because he considered the matter too important to trust to anybody else. Even riding with Calhoun on the way here, he’d only been elated and astonished at the success of the intended coup. He’d raised his aim. For a while he’d believed that he’d end as the sole proprietor of the colony on Maya, with every plant growing for his profit, and every factory earning money for him, and every inhabitant his employee. It had been the most grandiose possible dream. The details and the maneuvers needed to complete it flowed into his mind.

  But now his teeth chattered. At ten words from Calhoun he would literally be torn to pieces by the raging men about him. His attache case with millions of credits in cash—it would be proof of whatever Calhoun chose to say. Allison knew terror down to the bottom of his soul. But he dared not move from Calhoun’s side, even though a single sentence in the calmest of voices would destroy him, and he’d never faced actual, understood, physical danger before.

  Presently men came, one by one, to take orders from Calhoun. They were able-bodied and grim-faced men. Two were electronics engineers, as he’d specified. One was a policeman. There were two mechanics and a doctor who was also amateur tennis champion of the planet. Calhoun doled out to them the pellets that reduced the sensitiveness of muscles to externally applied stimuli. He gave instructions. They’d go as far into the cattle fence as they could reasonably endure. Then they’d swallow the pellets and let them act. Then they’d go on. His stock of pellets was limited. He could give three to each man.

  Murgatroyd squirmed disappointedly as this briefing went on. Obviously, he wasn’t to make a social success here. He was annoyed, and he needed more space. Calhoun tossed Allison’s attache case behind the seats. Allison was too terrified to protest. It still did not increase the space left on the front seat between Calhoun and Allison.

  Four humming ground cars lifted eight inches off the ground and hovered there on columns of rushing air. Calhoun took the lead. His headlights moved down the single-lane road to which two joining twelve-lane highways had shrunk. Behind him, other headlights moved into line. Calhoun’s car moved away into the darkness. The others followed.

  Brilliant stars shone overhead. A cluster of thousands of suns, a hundred light-years away, made a center of illumination that gave Maya’s night the quality of a vivid if diffused moonlight. The cars went on. Presently Calhoun felt the twitchings of minor muscular spasms. He was riding into the field which had been first devised for purposes remote from the herding of cattle or humans, but applied to the first use on the planet Texia, and now applied to the second here.

  The road became two, and then four, and then eight lanes wide. Then four lanes swirled off to one side, and the remaining four presently doubled, and then widened again, and it was the twelve-lane turnpike that had brought Calhoun here from Maya City.

  * * * *

  But the rhythmic interference with his body grew stronger. Allison had spoken not one single word while Calhoun conferred with the people of Maya beyond the highway. His teeth chattered as they started back. He didn’t attempt to speak during the beginning of the ride through the cattle-fence field. His teeth chattered, and stopped, and chattered again, and at long last he panted despairingly:

  “Are you going to let the thing kill me?”

  Calhoun stopped. The cars behind him stopped. He gave Allison two pellets and took two himself. With Murgatroyd insistently accompanying him, he went along the cars which trailed him. He made sure the six men he’d asked for took their pellets and that they had an adequate effect. He went back to the sports car.

  Allison whimpered a little when he and Murgatroyd got back in.

  “I thought,” said Calhoun conversationally, “that you might try to take off by yourself, just now. It would solve a problem for me. Of course it wouldn’t solve any for you. But I don’t think your problems have any solution, now.”

  He started the car up again. It moved forward. The other cars
trailed dutifully. They went on through the starlit night. Calhoun noted that the effect of the cattle fence was less than it had been before. The first desensitizing pellets had not wholly lost their effect when he added to it. But he kept his speed low until he was certain the other drivers had endured the anguish of passing through the cattle-fence field.

  Presently he was confident that the cattle field was past. He sent his car up to eighty miles an hour. The other cars followed faithfully. To a hundred. They did not drop behind. The car hummed through the night at top speed—a hundred and twenty, a hundred and thirty miles an hour. The three other cars’ headlights faithfully kept pace with him.

  Allison, said desperately, “Look! I—don’t understand what’s happened. You talk as if I’d planned all this. I—did have advance notice of a—a research project here. But it shouldn’t have held the people there for days! Something went wrong! I only believed that people would want to leave Maya. I’d only planned to buy as much acreage as I could, and control of as many factories as possible. That’s all! It was business! Only business!”

  Calhoun did not answer. Allison might be telling the truth. Some businessmen would think it only intelligent to frighten people into selling their holdings below true value. Something of the sort happened every day in stock exchanges. But the people of Maya could have died!

  For that matter, they still might. They couldn’t return to their homes and food so long as broadcast power kept the cattle-fence in existence. But they could not return to their homes and food supplies if the power broadcast was cut off, either.

  Over all the night surface of the world of Maya there was light only on one highway at one spot, and a multitude of smaller, lesser lights where the people of Maya waited to find out whether they would live or die.

  V

  Calhoun considered coldly. They were beyond what had been the farthest small city on the multiple highway. They would go on past now-starlit fields of plants native to Maya, passing many places where trucks loaded with the plants climbed up to the roadway and headed for the factories which made use of them. The fields ran for scores of miles along the highway’s length. They reached out beyond the horizon,—perhaps scores of miles in that direction, too. There were thousands upon thousands of square miles devoted to the growing of the dark-green vegetation which supplied the raw materials for Maya’s space exports. Some hundred-odd miles ahead, the small town of Tenochitlan lay huddled in the light of the distant star-cluster. Beyond that, more highway and Maya City. Beyond that—