The Golden Age Of Science Fiction Vol Iii Part 17

It is the White House that draws most strongly at the interest and curiosity of the homely, common throng that visits the capital.

But there were no casual visitors at the White House on the seventh of September. Certain Senators, even, were denied admittance. The President was seeing only the members of the Cabinet and some few others.

It is given to a Secret Service operative, in his time, to play many parts. But even a versatile actor might pause at impersonating a President. Robert Delamater was acting the role with never a fumble. He sat, this new Robert Delamater, so startlingly like the Chief Executive, in the chair by a flat top desk. And he worked diligently at a ma.s.s of correspondence.

Secretaries came and went; files were brought. Occasionally he replied to a telephone call--or perhaps called someone. It would be hard to say which happened, for no telephone bells rang.

On the desk was a schedule that Delamater consulted. So much time for correspondence--so many minutes for a conference with this or that official, men who were warned to play up to this new Chief Executive as if the life of their real President were at stake.

To any observer the busy routine of the morning must have pa.s.sed with never a break. And there was an observer, as Delamater knew. He had wondered if the mystic ray might carry electrons that would prove its presence. And now he knew.

The Chief of the U. S. Secret Service had come for a consultation with the President. And whatever lingering doubts may have stifled his reluctant imagination were dispelled when the figure at the desk opened a drawer.

"Notice this," he told the Chief as he appeared to search for a paper in the desk. "An electroscope; I put it in here last night. It is discharging. The ray has been on since nine-thirty. No current to electrocute me--just a penetrating ray."

He returned the paper to the drawer and closed it.

"So that is that," he said, and picked up a doc.u.ment to which he called the visitor's attention.

"Just acting," he explained. "The audience may be critical; we must try to give them a good show! And now give me a report. What are you doing? Has anything else turned up? I am counting on you to stand by and see that that electrician is on his toes at twelve o'clock."

"Stand by is right," the Chief agreed; "that's about all we can do. I have twenty men in and about the grounds--there will be as many more later on. And I know now just how little use we are to you, Del."

"Your expression!" warned Delamater. "Remember you are talking to the President. Very official and all that."

"Right! But now tell me what is the game, Del. If that devil fails to knock you out here where you are safe, he will get you when you leave the room."

"Perhaps," agreed the pseudo-executive, "and again, perhaps not. He won't get me here; I am sure of that. They have this part of the room insulated. The phone wire is cut--my conversations there are all faked.

"There is only one spot in this room where that current can pa.s.s. A heavy cable is grounded outside in wet earth. It comes to a copper plate on this desk; you can't see it--it is under those papers."

"And if the current comes--" began the visitor.

"When it comes," the other corrected, "it will jump to that plate and go off harmlessly--I hope."

"And then what? How does that let you out?"

"Then we will see," said the presidential figure. "And you've been here long enough, Chief. Send in the President's secretary as you go out."

"He arose to place a friendly, patronizing hand on the other's shoulder.

"Good-by," he said, "and watch that electrician at twelve. He is to throw the big switch when I call."

"Good luck," said the big man huskily. "We've got to hand it to you, Del; you're--"

"Good-by!" The figure of the Chief Executive turned abruptly to his desk.

There was more careful acting--another conference--some dictating. The clock on the desk gave the time as eleven fifty-five. The man before the flat topped desk verified it by a surrept.i.tious glance at his watch. He dismissed the secretary and busied himself with some personal writing.

Eleven fifty-nine--and he pushed paper and pen aside. The movement disturbed some other papers, neatly stacked. They were dislodged, and where they had lain was a disk of dull copper.

"Ready," the man called softly. "Don't stand too near that line." The first boom of noonday bells came faintly to the room.

The President--to all but the other actors in the morning's drama--leaned far back in his chair. The room was suddenly deathly still. The faint ticking of the desk clock was loud and rasping. There was heavy breathing audible in the room beyond. The last noonday chime had died away....

The man at the desk was waiting--waiting. And he thought he was prepared, nerves steeled, for the expected. But he jerked back, to fall with the overturned chair upon the soft, thick-padded rug, at the ripping, crackling hiss that tore through the silent room.

From a point above the desk a blue arc flamed and wavered. Its unseen terminal moved erratically in the air, but the other end of the deadly flame held steady upon a glowing, copper disc.

Delamater, p.r.o.ne on the floor, saw the wavering point that marked the end of the invisible carrier of the current--saw it drift aside till the blue arc was broken. It returned, and the arc crashed again into blinding flame. Then, as abruptly, the blue menace vanished.

The man on the floor waited, waited, and tried to hold fast to some sense of time.

Then: "Contact!" he shouted. "The switch! Close the switch!"

"Closed!" came the answer from a distant room. There was a shouted warning to unseen men: "Stand back there--back--there's twenty thousand volts on that line--"

Again the silence....

"Would it work? Would it?" Delamater's mind was full of delirious, half-thought hopes. That fiend in some far-off room had cut the current meant as a death-bolt to the Nation's' head. He would leave the ray on--look along it to gloat over his easy victory. His generator must be insulated: would he touch it with his hand, now that his own current was off?--make of himself a conductor?

In the air overhead formed a terrible arc.

From the floor, Delamater saw it rip cras.h.i.+ngly into life as twenty thousand volts bridged the gap of a foot or less to the invisible ray. It hissed tremendously in the stillness....

And Delamater suddenly buried his face in his hands. For in his mind he was seeing a rigid, searing body, and in his nostrils, acrid, distinct, was the smell of burning flesh.

"Don't be a fool," he told himself fiercely. "Don't be a fool! Imagination!"

The light was out.

"Switch off!" a voice was calling. There was a rush of swift feet from the distant doors; friendly hands were under him--lifting him--as the room, for Robert Delamater, President-in-name of the United States, turned whirlingly, dizzily black....

Robert Delamater, U. S. Secret Service operative, entered the office of his Chief. Two days of enforced idleness and quiet had been all he could stand. He laid a folded newspaper before the smiling, welcoming man.

"That's it, I suppose," he said, and pointed to a short notice.

"X-ray Operator Killed," was the caption. "Found Dead in Office in Watts Building." He had read the brief item many times.

"That's what we let the reporters have," said the Chief.

"Was he"--the operative hesitated for a moment--"pretty well fried?"

"Quite!"

"And the machine?"

"Broken gla.s.s and melted metal. He smashed it as he fell."

"The Eye of Allah," mused Delamater. "Poor devil--poor, crazy devil. Well, we gambled--and we won. How about the rest of the bet? Do I get the Mint?"

"h.e.l.l, no!" said the Chief. "Do you expect to win all the time? They want to know why it took us so long to get him.

"Now, there's a little matter out in Ohio, Del, that we'll have to get after--"

Contents

TREE, SPARE THAT WOODMAN.

By DAVE DRYFOOS

The single thing to fear was fear--ghastly, walking fear!

Stiff with shock, Naomi Heckscher stood just inside the door to Cappy's one-room cabin, where she'd happened to be when her husband discovered the old man's body.

Her nearest neighbor--old Cappy--dead. After all his wire-pulling to get into the First Group, and his slaving to make a farm on this alien planet, dead in bed!

Naomi's mind circled frantically, contrasting her happy antic.i.p.ations with this shocking actuality. She'd come to call on a friend, she reminded herself, a beloved friend--round, white-haired, rosy-cheeked; lonely because he'd recently become a widower. To her little boy, Cappy was a combination Grandpa and Santa Claus; to herself, a sort of newly met Old Beau.

Her mouth had been set for a sip of his home brew, her eyes had pictured the delight he'd take in and give to her little boy.

She'd walked over with son and husband, expecting nothing more shocking than an ostentatiously stolen kiss. She'd found a corpse. And to have let Cappy die alone, in this strange world ...

She and Ted could at least have been with him, if they'd known.

But they'd been laughing and singing in their own cabin only a mile away, celebrating Richard's fifth birthday. She'd been annoyed when Cappy failed to show up with the present he'd promised Richard. Annoyed--while the old man pulled a blanket over his head, turned his round face to the wall, and died.

Watching compa.s.sionately, Naomi was suddenly struck by the matter-of-fact way Ted examined the body. Ted wasn't surprised.

"Why did you tell Richard to stay outside, just now?" she demanded. "How did you know what we'd find here? And why didn't you tell me, so I could keep Richard at home?"

She saw Ted start, scalded by the splash of her self-directed anger, saw him try to convert his wince into a shrug.

"You insisted on coming," he reminded her gently. "I couldn't have kept you home without--without saying too much, worrying you--with the Earth-s.h.i.+p still a year away. Besides, I didn't know for sure, till we saw the tree-things around the cabin."

The tree-things. The trees-that-were-not. Gnarled blue trunks, half-hidden by yellow leaf-needles stretching twenty feet into the sky. Something like the h.o.a.ry mountain hemlocks she and Ted had been forever photographing on their Sierra honeymoon, seven life-long years ago.

Three of those tree-things had swayed over Cappy's spring for a far longer time than Man had occupied this dreadful planet. Until just now ...

The three of them had topped the rise that hid Cappy's farm from their own. Richard was running ahead like a happily inquisitive puppy. Suddenly he'd stopped, pointing with a finger she distinctly recalled as needing thorough soapy scrubbing.

"Look, Mommie!" he'd said. "Cappy's trees have moved. They're around the cabin, now."

He'd been interested, not surprised. In the past year, Mazda had become Richard's home; only Earth could surprise him.

But, Ted, come to think of it, had seemed withdrawn, his face a careful blank. And she?

"Very pretty," she'd said, and stuffed the tag-end of fear back into the jammed, untidy mental pigeon-hole she used for all unpleasant thoughts. "Don't run too far ahead, dear."

But now she had to know what Ted knew.

"Tell me!" she said.

"These tree-things--"

"There've been other deaths! How many?"

"Sixteen. But I didn't want to tell you. Orders were to leave women and children home when we had that last Meeting, remember."

"What did they say at the Meeting? Out with it, Ted!"

"That--that the tree-things think!"

"But that's ridiculous!"

"Well, unfortunately, no. Look, I'm not trying to tell you that terrestrial trees think, too, nor even that they have a nervous system. They don't. But--well, on Earth, if you've ever touched a lighted match to the leaf of a sensitive plant like the mimosa, say--and I have--you've been struck by the speed with which other leaves close up and droop. I mean, sure, we know that the leaves droop because certain cells exude water and nearby leaves feel the heat of the match. But the others don't, yet they droop, too. n.o.body knows how it works ..."

"But that's just defensive!"

"Sure. But that's just on Earth!"

"All right, dear. I won't argue any more. But I still don't understand. Go on about the Meeting."

"Well, they said these tree-things both create and respond to the patterned electrical impulses of the mind. It's something like the way a doctor creates fantasies by applying a mild electric current to the right places on a patient's brain. In the year we've been here, the trees--or some of them--have learned to read from and transmit to our minds. The range, they say, is around fifty feet. But you have to be receptive--"