The _Elmoran_ pointed her bow, and the long blade of the figurehead warrior"s spear, toward Keegark. The city grew out of the ground-mist, a particolored blur at the delta of the dry Hoork River, and then a color-splashed triangle between the river and the bay and the hills on the landward side, and then it took shape, cross-ruled with streets and granulated with buildings. As they came in, von Schlichten, who had approached it from the air many times before, could distinguish the landmarks--the site of King Orgzild"s nitroglycerin plant, now a crater surrounded by a quarter-mile radius of ruins; the Residency, another crater since Rodolfo MacKinnon had blown it up under him; the smashed _Christiaan De Wett_ at the Company docks; King Orgzild"s Palace, fire-stained and with a hole blown in one corner by the _Aldebaran_"s bombs.... Then they were past the city and over open country.
"I wish we had some idea where the rest of those bombs are stored, sir," Lieutenant Morrison said. "We don"t seem to have gotten anything significant when we flew reconnaissance with the radiation detectors."
"No, about all that was picked up was the main power-plant, and the radiation-escape from there was normal," Pickering agreed. "The bombs themselves wouldn"t be detectable, except to the extent that, say, a nuclear-conversion engine for an airboat would be. They probably have them underground, somewhere, well shielded."
"Those prisoners Kankad"s commandos dragged in only knew that they were in the city somewhere," von Schlichten considered. "How about midway between the Palace and the Residency for our ground-zero, lieutenant? That looks like the center of the city."
The cutter turned and started back, having risen another ten thousand feet. Morrison pa.s.sed the word to the bombardier. The city, with the sea beyond it now, came rushing at them, and von Schlichten, standing at the front of the bridge, discovered that he had his arm around Paula"s waist and was holding her a little more closely than was military. He made no attempt to release her, however.
"There"s nothing to worry about, really," he was a.s.suring her.
"Pickering"s boys built this thing according to the best principles of engineering, and the stuff they got out of that big-economy-size shilling-shocker all checked mathematically...."
The red light on the bridge flashed, and the intercom shouted, "_Bomb off!_" He forced Paula down on the bridge deck and crouched beside her.
"Cover your eyes," he warned. "You remember what the flash was like in the screen when the _Jan s.m.u.ts_ blew up. And we didn"t get the worst of it; the pickup on the _Gaucho_ was knocked out too soon."
He kept on lecturing her about gamma-rays and ultra-violet rays and X-rays and cosmic rays, trying to keep making some sort of intelligent sounds while they clung together and waited, and, with the other half of his mind, trying not to think of everything that could go wrong with that jerry-built improvisation they had just dumped onto Keegark.
If it didn"t blow, and the geeks found it, they"d know that another one would be along shortly, and....
An invisible hand caught the gun-cutter and hurled her end-over-end, sending von Schlichten and Paula sprawling at full length on the deck, still clinging to one another. There was a blast of almost palpable sound, and a sensation of heat that penetrated even the airtight superstructure of the _Elmoran_. An instant later, there was another, and another, similar shock. Two more bombs had gone off behind them, in Keegark; that meant that they had found King Orgzild"s remaining nuclear armament. There were shattering sounds of breaking gla.s.s, and heavy thumps that told of structural damage to the cutter, and hoa.r.s.e shouts, and lurid cursing as Morrison and his airmen struggled with the controls. The cutter began losing alt.i.tude, but she was back on a reasonably even keel. Von Schlichten rose, helping Paula to her feet, and found that they had been kissing one another pa.s.sionately. They were still in each other"s arms when the pitching and rolling of the cutter ceased and somebody tapped him on the shoulder.
He came out of the embrace and looked around. It was Lieutenant (j.g.) Morrison.
"What the devil, lieutenant?" he demanded.
"Sorry to interrupt, sir, but we"re starting back to _Procyon_. And here, you"ll want this, I suppose." He held out a gla.s.s disc. "I never expected to see it, but at that it took three A-bombs to blow you loose from your monocle."
"Oh, that?" Von Schlichten took his trademark and set it in his eye.
"I didn"t lose it," he lied. "I just jettisoned it. Don"t you know, lieutenant, that no gentleman ever wears a monocle while he"s kissing a lady?"
He looked around. They were at about eight hundred to a thousand feet above the water, with a stiff following wind away from the explosion area. The 90-mm gun, forward, must have been knocked loose and carried away; it was gone, and so was the TV-pickup and the radar. Something, probably the gun, had slammed against the front of the bridge--the metal skeleton was bent in, and the armor-gla.s.s had been knocked out.
The cutter was vibrating properly, so the contragravity-field had not been disturbed, and her jets were firing.
"It was the second and third bombs that did the damage, sir," Morrison was saying. "We"d have gone through the effects of our own bomb with nothing more than a bad shaking--of course, on contragravity, we"re weightless relative to the air-ma.s.s, but she was built to stand the winds in the high lat.i.tudes. But the two geek bombs caught us off balance...."
"You don"t need to apologize, lieutenant. You and your crew behaved splendidly, lieutenant-commander, best traditions, and all that sort of thing. It was a pleasure, commander, hope to be aboard with you again, captain."
They found Kent Pickering at the rear of the bridge, and joined him looking astern. Even von Schlichten, who had seen H-bombs and Bethe-cycle bombs, was impressed. Keegark was completely obliterated under an outward-rolling cloud of smoke and dust that spread out for five miles at the bottom of the towering column.
There had been a hundred and fifty thousand people in that city, even if their faces were the faces of lizards and they had four arms and quartz-speckled skins. What fraction of them were now alive, he could not guess. He had to remind himself that they were the people who had burned Eric Blount and Hendrik Lemoyne alive; that two of the three bombs that had contributed to that column of boiling smoke had been made in Keegark, by Keegarkans, and that, with a few causal factors altered, he was seeing what would have happened to Konkrook. Perhaps every Terran felt a superst.i.tious dread of nuclear energy turned to the purposes of war; small wonder, after what they had done on their own world.
For one thing, he thought grimly, the next geek who picks up the idea of soaking a Terran in thermoconcentrate and setting fire to him will drop it again like a hot potato. And the next geek potentate who tries to organize an anti-Terran conspiracy, or the next crazy caravan-driver who preached _znidd suddabit_, will be lynched on the spot. But this must be the last nuclear bomb used on Uller....
Drunkard"s morning-after resolution! he told himself contemptuously.
The next time, it will come easier, and easier still the time after that. After you drop the first bomb, there is no turning back, any more than there had been after Hiroshima, four-hundred-and-fifty-odd years ago. Why, he had even been considering just where, against the mountains back of Bwork, he would drop a demonstration bomb as a prelude to a surrender demand.
You either went on to the inevitable catastrophe, or you realized, in time, that nuclear armament and nationalism cannot exist together on the same planet, and it is easier to banish a habit of thought than a piece of knowledge. Uller was not ready for membership in the Terran Federation; then its people must bow to the Terran Pax. The Kragans would help--as proconsuls, administrators, now, instead of mercenaries. And there must be manned orbital stations, and the Residencies must be moved outside the cities, away from possible blast-areas. And Sid Harrington"s idea of encouraging the natives to own their own contragravity-ships must be shelved, for a long time to come. Maybe, in a century or so....
Kankad had a good idea, at that, a most meritorious idea. He was sold on it, already, and he doubted if it would take much salesmanship with Paula, either. Already, she was clinging to his arm with obvious possessiveness. Maybe their grandchildren, and the Kankad of that time, would see Uller a civilized member of the Federation....
They paused, as the gun-cutter nuzzled up to the _Procyon_ and the canvas-entubed gangway was run out and made fast, looking back at the fearful thing that had sprouted from where Keegark had been.
"You know," Paula was saying, echoing his earlier thought, "but for that female p.o.r.nographer, that would have been Konkrook."
He nodded. "Yes. I hope you won"t mind, but there will always be a place in my heart for Hildegarde."
Then they turned their backs upon the abomination of Keegark"s desolation and went up the gangway together, looking very little like a general and his adjutant.
With a broadsword in his hand, von Schlichten fought his way toward the throne. There Firkked waited, a sword in one of his upper hands, his Spear of State in the other, and a dagger in each lower hand. Von Schlichten fought on, trying not to think of the absurdity of a man of the Sixth Century A.E., the representative of a civilized Chartered Company, dueling to the death with a barbarian king for a throne he had promised to another barbarian ... or of what could happen on Uller if he allowed this four-armed monstrosity to kill him!
_Ace Science Fiction Books by H. Beam Piper_
EMPIRE FEDERATION FIRST CYCLE FOUR-DAY PLANET/LONE STAR PLANET FUZZY PAPERS FUZZY SAPIENS LITTLE FUZZY LORD KALVAN OF OTHERWHEN PARATIME!
s.p.a.cE VIKING ULLER UPRISING THE WORLDS OF H. BEAM PIPER
ULLER UPRISING
"ZNIDD SUDDABIT!"
So the Ulleran challenge begins, with the rantings of a prophet and a seemingly incidental street riot. Only when a dose of poison lands in the governor-general"s whiskey does it become clear that the "geeks"
have had it up to their double-lidded eyeb.a.l.l.s with the imperialist Terran Federation"s Chartered Uller Company. Then, overnight, war is everywhere.
How it will end is in the (merely) two Terran hands of the new governor-general, a man shrewd enough to know that "it is easier to banish a habit of thought than a piece of knowledge." The problem is, the particular piece of knowledge he needs hasn"t been used in 450 years....