The Overlords of War Read online

  Startled by bright light, he shut his eyes for a moment. A brilliantly illuminated doorway was opening in the ship’s side above a flight of steps suspended on nothing. Corson hesitated, then rushed up them. The door closed again silently as soon as he had passed through, but he had been prepared for that.

  “Come in, Corson,” said a voice—a young girl’s voice. ‘There’s no reason to stand about in the corridor.”

  That was a human voice! Not an imitation! The Urians would not have been able to fake one so convincingly. A machine might have managed it, but Corson doubted whether his enemies would have added such a finishing touch to a trap he had already fallen into. People at war seldom gave invaders the tourist treatment.

  Corson obeyed. He pushed at a half-open door nearby, and it slid back into the wall. He saw a wide room, at the far end of which was a gigantic viewport. He could clearly make out the dark mass of the forest they were flying over and, sparkling at the horizon, a brighter line which he reasoned must be an ocean with the sunrise glinting on it.

  He swung around. A girl was looking at him. A sort of veil, or mist, was all she wore. Fair hair framed her smiling face. He could detect no enmity in her gray eyes. She seemed remarkably at ease. It had been five years since Corson had seen anything remotely like a woman apart from the issue plastoids with which you had to make do aboard a ship of war. The ability to reproduce was too critical a resource for women of breeding age to be risked in space. And this one, moreover, was beautiful.

  He regained his breath, swiftly reviewed the situation, and allowed his combat reflexes to gain control. It was as though a secondary personality took him over. He snapped, “How did you know I’m called Corson?”

  At once the girl’s expression betrayed astonishment mingled with fear. He had put his finger on the crux of the matter. The fact that she used his name might imply that the Princes of Uria knew about the mission of the Archimedes, right down to the identities of the crew. On the other hand the girl was definitely human, body and voice, and her presence on Uria was in itself a total mystery. No surgeon could make a Urian look like that; no operation could re-

  place a homy beak with soft lips like those. If the girl had been fully clad he might have felt reservations. As it was, every detail of her figure proclaimed her origin. He could clearly see her navel, something which Urians—hatched from eggs—did not possess. And plastoids were never built to a standard that could deceive a man.

  “But you’ve just told me!” she exclaimed.

  “No, you called me by name first of all,” he said, feeling as though he were spinning round and round. His brain was working frantically, but in vain. He felt a strong impulse to kill the girl and make off with the ship, but surely she could not be alone on board, and he must know more before he acted. Perhaps he might not in fact have to kill her.

  He had never heard any report of humans going over to the Urian side. In a war whose main and perhaps sole basis lay in a fundamental biological difference combined with the ability to inhabit similar planets, there was no future for the traitor’s trade. And—he realized suddenly—he had not noticed the characteristic Urian smell when he came aboard. He was certain he could have detected the tang of chlorine instantly. Even so . . .

  “Are you a prisoner?”

  He wasn’t hoping that she would admit it, but she might let fall a clue.

  “What funny questions you ask!” She opened her eyes wide and her lips started to tremble. “You’re a stranger! I thought— Why should I be a prisoner? Are women kept prisoner on your planet?”

  Her expression changed suddenly. He read intense terror in her gaze.

  “No!”

  She cried out and flinched away, casting around for something to use as a weapon. Then he knew what he had to do. He strode across the room, brushed aside the feeble blow she aimed at him, planted a palm on her mouth and caught her in a wrestling hold. His thumb and forefinger sought the pressure points in her throat. She slumped. A trifle harder and she would have died. He was content to knock her out. He wanted to give himself time to think.

  He searched the ship and convinced himself they were alone on board. Fantastic! That a young girl in a pleasure boat—he couldn’t find a single weapon—should be cruising cheerfully over the forests of an enemy planet: it defied belief. He located the instrument panel, but the controls meant nothing to him. A red spot which must represent the ship was moving across a wall map. He recognized neither the continents nor the oceans of Uria. Had the commander of the Archimedes brought them to the wrong planet? Out of the question. The vegetation, the solar spectrum, the composition of the air, were enough to identify Uria, and the attack they had suffered wiped away the final doubt

  He glanced out of a viewport. They were flying at about three thousand meters, and as nearly as he could judge at about four hundred k.p.h. In ten minutes at most they would be over the ocean.

  He returned to the first cabin and sat down on an ornate chair, staring at the girl. He had laid her on the floor and put a cushion under her head. One seldom finds cushions aboard a warship—embroidered ones, at any rate. He struggled to recall precisely what had happened since he set foot in the ship.

  She had called him by name.

  Before he had opened his mouth.

  She had seemed terrified.

  Before he had thought of attacking her.

  Partly, it had been the fear he could read in her eyes which drove him to action.

  Telepathic?

  If so, she knew his name and his mission and knew about the Monster, too. So she would have to disappear, especially if she was in the pay of the Princes of Uria.

  But she had retreated even before he thought of overpowering her . . .

  She was stirring. He set about tying her up, tearing long strips of cloth from a tapestry. One doesn’t find tapestries aboard a warship. He bound her wrists and ankles, but did not gag her. Also he tried to determine the nature of the garment she had on. It was neither woven fabric nor a gas, but something more like a gleaming mist, so light that it was hard to see. Only at the comer of his eye could he clearly discern its contours. A sort of energy field? Certainly not a force field, anyhow.

  The language she had addressed him in was pure Pangal, but that meant nothing. Urians spoke it as well as Terrestrials. Corson had even tried to teach the rudiments of Pangal—that language which proudly claimed to embody the common factors of all intelligence —to the Monster, but without success. As usual.

  But it was thinking about the Monster which gave him the key to the puzzle.

  This girl must have at least one talent in common with the Monster. She must be capable of foreseeing the future, within limits. She had been aware, the moment he entered the ship, that he would ask her, “How do you know I’m called Corson?” The fact that her terror had decided him to attack her made no odds, merely posed the problem of proximate cause. As did most temporal paradoxes. Those who came in contact with Monsters learned something about temporal paradoxes, generally the hard way. So he could assess the girl’s precognitive range at about two minutes. She was doing better than the Monster, then.

  Not that that shed any light on her presence on Uria.

  CHAPTER 4

  The sun had been up for more than an hour, and they were flying over the ocean out of sight of land. Corson was beginning to wonder what was keeping the Urian fleet when the girl suddenly roused.

  “Corson, you’re a brute!” she said. “Attacking a woman who had made you welcome—that was contemptible! We might be back in the barbarian days of the Solar Powers!”

  He studied her closely. Although she was writhing in her bonds,

  he could read no alarm in her face, only anger. It followed that she knew he did not mean her any immediate harm. Her delicate features relaxed and the rage gave way to cool determination. She seemed too civilized to spit in his face, but effectively that must be what she wanted to do.

  “I had no option,” he said. “Like the
y say, all’s fair in love and war.”

  Nonplused, she stared at him. “What war are you talking about? Corson, you’re out of your mind!”

  “George,” he said. “George Corson.”

  At least she had not foreseen that, the other half of his full name, or at any rate she had not bothered to use it. With deliberation he set about untying her. He realized that that was why her face had relaxed. She let him do it without saying a word. Then she rose in a single movement, rubbed her wrists, confronted him and—before he had time to move—slapped his face, twice. He did not react.

  “Just as I thought,” she said scornfully. “You can’t even cog. How could an atavism like you crop up? What use are you? Oh, something like this could only happen to me!”

  She shrugged her shoulders and turned away, her gray eyes fixed on the sea over which the craft was soundlessly floating.

  Exactly like the heroine of an old teleplay, Corson thought. A prewar teleplay of the kind in which girls would pick up guys by the road, and a lot of more or less dreadful things would happen to them, and generally they wound up falling in love. Myths. Like coffee, or tobacco—or a ship such as this one.

  “That’ll teach me to invite people in whom I don’t know,” she went on, as though playing a part in just such a teleplay. “We’ll find out who you are when we get to Dyoto. Until then, you behave yourself. I have influential friends.”

  “The Princes of Uria?” Corson suggested sarcastically.

  “I’ve never heard of any princes. Maybe in legendary times . .

  Corson swallowed hard.

  “Is this planet at peace?”

  “Oh, only since twelve centuries ago to my knowledge! And I hope it’ll stay that way to the end of time.”

  “Do you know any of the natives?”

  “Yes, of course. They’re avians. Intelligent, harmless, spend most of their time discussing philosophy. Slightly decadent types. Ngal

  R’nda is one of my best friends. Say, who do you think you’re dealing with?”

  “I don’t know,” he confessed. That was a strict and literal truth.

  Her manner softened. “I’m hungry,” she said. “You must be too, I imagine. I’ll go and see if I’m still capable of fixing something for us after what you’ve put me through.” He could not detect the slightest apprehension in her tone, only friendliness.

  “Your name?” he said. “After all, you do know mine.”

  “Floria,” she answered. “Floria Van Nelle.”

  That’s the first woman who’s told me her name in five years . . .

  “No,” he corrected himself silently. “If I’m not dreaming, if this is not a trap, or a hallucination, the three-dimensional full-color delirium of a dying man, then in twelve hundred years, or two thousand, or three thousand.”

  She was putting a glass in his hand. He almost dropped it.

  When he was full, his brain started to work normally again. He took stock of the situation. He still had no idea what could have happened on Uria except that apparently a state of peaceful coexistence obtained between the millions of humans who lived here and the scarcely more numerous native population. He knew he was bound for Dyoto, an important city, in company with the loveliest girl he had ever set eyes on.

  And that the Monster was wandering in the Urian forest, ready to breed, to give birth to eighteen thousand little Monsters who would quickly become as dangerous as their parent. That would be in at most six months, perhaps less if the Monster found plenty to eat.

  Now he could work out what had most likely happened. When the Monster hurled itself clear of the ship just before the explosion, it had not made a jump of a few seconds through time, but a journey across millennia. And had dragged George Corson along. The Princes of Uria no longer existed; nor did the Solar Powers. The war had been lost or won, but in any case forgotten. He could consider himself discharged from the service and abandon his soldier’s uniform. Or else he could regard himself as a kind of involuntary deserter, marooned in the future. He was no longer any more than one man lost among the billions of citizens of a galactic federation covering the whole of the Lens and extending towards the Andromeda Nebula. It united planets he would doubtless never go to, linked by a network of transmatters allowing virtually instantaneous transit from world to world.

  Now, he had no identity, no past to live down, no mission to accomplish. From Dyoto, he could head for any of the stars he had seen shining in the night sky and there pursue the only profession he knew, war. Or choose another. He could run away, forget Earth, forget Uria, forget the Monster, forget this girl Floria Van Nelle, lose himself for ever in the mazes of space.

  And let the new inhabitants of Uria figure out on their own how to cope with the Monster and—soon—its eighteen thousand offspring.

  But he couldn’t fool himself. He was aware it would be a long time before he stopped asking himself one all-important question: why had Floria come to pick him up just in time?

  Why did she give the impression that she was acting, rather poorly, a role she had learned by heart? Why had she switched from anger, which wasn’t faked, to cordiality as soon as she had her wits about her again?

  CHAPTER 5

  From a distance Dyoto resembled an enormous pyramid whose base rested on air more than a kilometer above the ground, a jagged cloud along whose sides dark planes flecked with sparkling dots of light were ranged like geological strata on the flank of an eroded mountain. It took Corson’s breath away.

  Then the pyramid seemed to disintegrate. The cloud became a labyrinth. The buildings, or machines, which composed the city were widely spaced one from another. A twin river jetted vertically from the earth and ran through the city like a pillar trapped inside an invisible tube. Vehicles flitted along the city’s three-dimensional arteries. Just as the ship carrying Corson reached its outskirts, two major buildings, both cubical in shape, rose skyward and flew off toward the ocean.

  Dyoto, Corson told himself, was a fine example of city planning based on antigravity and bearing the stamp of an anarchically conceived society. In his experience the use of antigrav was confined to warships. As for anarchy, that was no more to him than a historical label; it had no place in time of war. Every man, every object, had a role assigned by the system. But in twelve centuries, or however many millennia, there had been time for things to change. At first sight it was clear that antigrav must now be as common as fusion power. Could it itself have become a source of energy? He had heard vaguely about projects of that kind. Antigrav generators aboard warships consumed a hell of a lot of power, but that meant nothing. The forces exerted by one mass on another must also represent a vast energy potential.

  Such a city, by contrast with those he was used to, was not a more or less fixed collection of structures. It was a fluid group of them; one could cast or hoist anchor at will. Only the primary function of the city endured, that of bringing people together so they could exchange goods and ideas.

  Slowly Floria’s ship climbed along one of the faces of the pyramid. The buildings were so arranged, Corson noted, that even the lowest stories of the city enjoyed a great deal of sunlight. That argued the existence of some central authority, regulating traffic and allotting places to new arrivals.

  "Here we are,” Floria said abruptly. “What are you going to do?” “I thought you were going to turn me over to the police.”

  Seeming interested, she said, “That’s what would have happened in your time? Well, the lawmen will find you by themselves if that’s what they want. I’m not sure they still know how to carry out an arrest, though. The last one must have happened a decade ago.”

  “I—I assaulted you.”

  She burst out laughing. “Let’s say I needled you, shall we? And it’s been a terrific experience, keeping company with a man who can’t tell from one moment to the next what you’re going to say or do.”

  She walked straight up to him and kissed him on the mouth, then drew back before he had time to clutch
at her. He stood there gaping. Then he told himself that what she’d said had the ring of truth. Meeting him had excited her. Well, she might not be used to men like him, but he knew women like her. He had found favor in her eyes because he had used violence against her. So the fundamental characteristics of humanity couldn’t have changed in these twelve centuries even if certain superficial talents had evolved.

  He could capitalize on a situation like this.

  But something in him rebelled. He wanted to get the hell out. A kind of instinct was urging him to put the maximum possible distance between this planet and himself. The impulse was solidly founded on what he knew was going to happen here. Possibly in twelve centuries—or more—the human race had made enough progress to get rid of eighteen thousand Monsters easily. He doubted it. And he was well aware that if he stayed in Floria’s vicinity much longer he was going to become attached to her in a way that would seriously hamper his freedom of action.

  “Thanks for everything,” he said. “If I can do anything in return one day . . . ?”

  “You’re very sure of yourself,” she said. “And where are you thinking of going?”

  “Some other planet, I hope. I . . . Well, I get around a lot, and I’ve spent plenty of time on this world.”

  Her eyes widened a little. “I won’t ask why you’re lying, Corson. But I am wondering why you lie so badly.”

  “I enjoy it.”

  “Not very much, apparently.”

  “I do my best.”

  He was aching to put a multitude of questions to her, but he bit them back. He would have to explore this new universe on his own. For the time being he wanted to keep his secret, so he would have to make do with the meager data he had acquired during this morning’s conversation.

  “I’d hoped for something else,” she said. “Still, it’s up to you.”

  “I can do you a favor anyhow. I’m going to get off this planet.

  You do the same. In a few months life here is apt to be intolerable.”

  “Go with you?” she countered ironically. “You’re not even capable of seeing one minute into the future, and here you are playing the prophet! Well, I’ll give you some advice in return. Get some new clothes. If you don’t you’ll look very silly.”