This Fortress World (7 page)

The room blurred into a fantasy of color. I threw a hand up in front of my eyes. With the other I caught hard at the edge of the doorway for support…

Siller said something, but it was only a senseless jumble of sounds.

I took one step forward and fell. I was unconscious before I hit the floor.

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I woke up next morning and my education began. I was in a large bed. The room was not the one I had seen last night. I felt rested, but when I tried to move, stiffened muscles screamed their protest. My face felt hard. My hand smarted. There was a knot on the back of my head…

"Where's your gun?" Siller whispered from the doorway. His voice was like the hiss of a snake.

I sat up, groaning, trying to shake the sleep away.

"Where's your gun?:" Siller asked again, even softer, and I noticed that his gun with the long, slim barrel dangled from relaxed fingers.

I pawed at my chest. I found nothing but skin. A rumpling of the smooth, soft blanket revealed only the fact that I was naked.

There was a tiny explosion from the doorway, as if someone had expelled air from between his lips. Something hissed through my cropped hair. I looked up. The gun no longer dangled between Siller's fingers. It pointed straight at me.
What a little opening it has,
I thought foolishly,
no bigger than the head of a pin.

"What—" I began.

Siller cut me off. "If I had been any one of a million men you would be dead by now."

Sheepishly I glanced behind me. Just above my head a small needle was half embedded in the wall.

"All right. I've learned my lesson," I said, and reached up to remove the needle from the wall.

"I wouldn't do that if I were you," Siller said casually. "It's poisoned."

My finger tips trembled an inch from the needle.

"Lesson number two," Siller said. "Never touch anything you don't understand. Corollary: never become involved in a situation until you know what you hope to gain and what you stand to lose and the extent and quality of the opposition."

With a pair of tweezers, Siller loosened the needle from the wall. He dropped it carefully into a small vial, which he corked and placed in his left-hand pocket.

"Then you don't follow your own advice," I snapped ungratefully, "or you wouldn't have taken me in."

"That," said Siller, "is where you are mistaken."

After that he was silent. When I had dressed and eaten, he gently applied new salve to my face and hand. His hands felt unpleasantly warm and moist.

"I imagine you were never a handsome man," Siller remarked dryly. "So your change in appearance can't be called disfigurement exactly. The face should be completely recovered in a week. Except your eyebrows and lashes and perhaps a little discoloration. The hand may take a little longer. If you live that long.

"But you can claim the distinction of being the only living man who was ever hit squarely by the bolt from a flash gun."

I decided that Siller's suite of rooms was hidden in an abandoned warehouse. From a doorway in his somehow-too-luxurious bedroom, a flight of steps led down to a subterranean level. There was plentiful room for an adequate and secluded practice range. That day, among stones, dirt, insects, and rodents, I learned the rudiments of weapons.

Siller balanced my flash gun in his hand. "Somebody named Branton invented the energy storage cell. Or maybe he only found it and rediscovered the principle. That's what you have under that flap on your jacket. Slip one into the butt of the gun, it strikes two contacts. Pull the trigger"—
spat
! a blue bolt sped from the gun to splash against a crudely painted outline of a man on the stone wall—"the circuit is closed. A one-hundredth part of the energy is released. The barrel is non-conductive. It channels the energy in the direction the gun is pointed.

"There's a button on the barrel. If the forefinger presses this when the trigger is pulled, the burst is ten times as long. That's useful against a mob. The cell itself has a small lever on the side. When the cell is inserted in the butt of the gun, that lever is pressed down. Otherwise no energy can be released. You can press it down by hand, though. Drop it, or throw it, and the lever will spring up, and the cell will let loose all its energy at once when it strikes against an object."

I practiced short bursts. From the first I seemed to have a natural aptitude for shooting. My shots seldom wandered far from the outline of the figure on the wall, and soon they were centering in the body every time.

"The body is the place to aim with a flash gun. It's the largest target and the target most difficult to move. A body-hit and you're dead. If you shoot at the head, you're bragging. Braggarts don't live long."

Siller was a storehouse of gunman's wisdom.

"A flash gun is the fist in the face, the heel in the teeth, the knee in the groin. It's brute force, unabashed violence. I like the needle gun. A poisoned needle in the right spot will kill almost as quickly and far more quietly. The needle gun is the poison in the cup, the knife in the back. It's subtle, secret, stealthy; it gives no warning before, no notice after. A flash gun has its advantages—if you ever have to face a half-dozen attackers or a mob. I'll never get in a spot like that. Besides, needles are cheaper. And you can always get them. Cells are scarce."

All that day I practiced. Soon, from fifty feet, I could hit the part of the body I aimed at, nine times out of ten. After that I practiced drawing the gun out of the shoulder pocket. But I couldn't equal Siller's catlike quickness. When he went up to the suite for food, I inspected his jacket. Into the gun pocket was clipped an ingenious little device constructed from a spring, a catch, and a release lever. When the gun was thrust in, it cocked the spring. When the hand entered the jacket, pulling it out a little from the body, the lever released the catch and the gun shot upward into the palm.

I unclipped the device from his pocket and fitted it into mine. When Siller returned, put on his jacket, and shoved his gun into the pocket, he looked puzzled. We drew. I had my gun pointed at him before the barrel of his gun had cleared the jacket.

He frowned, but it slowly turned into a grudging smile. "You're smarter than I thought, Dane. You might have a chance outside after all."

I offered to return the device.

"Keep it," he said. "I have others."

I went on practicing. Draw and fire. Draw and fire. Draw, turn, fire. Practice until the movements became as automatic as breathing. Siller would say, "Dane!" A gun would appear in my hand. He would take a cautious step forward, a whisper of a movement that scarcely stirred the dust, and I would spin, crouched, a gun spitting flame into a blackened stone figure.

We dueled for hours.

"Watch the eyes," Siller would say. "The eyes are mirrors of decision. Before the hand knows, the eyes have revealed the mind's intention. Except Sabatini. His eyes never change expression whether he's kissing a girl or mutilating a child."

I would cover Siller with my unloaded gun. His hand would dart out, snakelike, to twist the gun away, push it aside, and draw his own.

"Not so close. Keep the gun away, back against your side or your hip. You have to disarm me and still stay far enough away so that I can't bother your aim."

Practice again. Draw and fire. Draw and fire. Soon I could hear a scuttling sound among the stones, draw my gun, and leave a rat smoking and twitching in the dust. After a moment Siller joined the game.

"Good shot!" he said, his eyes glittering. "The next one's mine."

The rodent population took a sharp and sudden drop.

Siller showed me how to hold and use a knife, how to silence an enemy quietly and finally, how to duel, how to deal with a man when you have a knife and he is weaponless and, more important, when the situation is turned around. He showed me how to make a sleeve scabbard and gave me a keen knife to slip into it. Finally, grudgingly, he admitted that I would have a chance of staying alive, even in a world of Agents.

After a late afternoon meal, Siller vanished with my clothes. He left a robe that strained at the seams and reached only to my knees. I searched the suite. I had already noted that the subterranean room had no windows and no doors, and I could find no others upstairs. There was only the one door, and it was locked.

I roamed the suite restlessly. Finally I looked through the bookcases. The majority of the titles seemed to be fiction. I passed them by. But at last I came upon a small case filled with more serious books. The wide range of subjects revealed a facet of Siller that I had not suspected.

There were a number of Jude's books. I might have taken down
The Book of the Prophet, The Church,
or
Ritual and Liturgy,
but I knew them by heart. And the others were meaningless to me, the technical ones like
Principles, Energy and Basic Circuit Diagrams, Machines and Man's Inheritance,
and so forth. I had received a religious, not a lay, education.

The book I finally pulled out had a battered cover and well-thumbed pages. There was no author listed and no publishing details. There was only the title,
The Dynamics of Galactic Power.
I settled down in a deep chair to read. I read slowly and carefully, but the time passed swiftly, because there was meat in the book, a strange new food that made my head swim with something close to intoxication. All of it was fascinating, but one passage I can remember still, almost word for word.

We must face the realities of power. The key to understanding is the fortress world, and there is no key to the fortress. Let us look at it, clearly, with eyes unglazed by dreams, unblinded by false hopes.

Defense is supreme. Its symbol is the fortress. Within the fortress are all the men and supplies necessary to defend it. Let the attack come. It comes over vast distances, over light years, bringing with it the vast army of men it needs, the arms it needs to fight with, the ammunition it must expend, the mountains of supplies necessary to clothe and feed its men. Let the attack cross the great moat, eating up its supplies, expending its energy on distance, losing its men through boredom, disease, and dissension. Let the attack come. And let the defenders be determined. The attack can never succeed.

Consider the expense, the economics of power. The demands of mounting an attack can drain a world of men and wealth. What does a world need to defend itself? A ring of pilotless, coasting rockets and an efficient monitor system. The attacking ships cannot pass until the rockets are swept out of the sky, and if the defense is properly geared to production, it can easily keep up with the losses. And the attackers must wait and disintegrate, if their home world does not first rebel against the insatiable demands of conquest.

And if the attack succeeds in spite of odds, in defiance of losses, count the cost. Behind it a broken planet, its resources squandered on conquest, its people impoverished, starving, rebellious. Count the gain. A world which cannot be exploited. The commander of the attacking force is inside a fortress which is now his. He is the ruler, and his former ruler can no more enforce his orders than he could make the defenders obey him before the conquest. And if anyone says loyalty, I do not know what he means. The only loyalty inside a fortress is to oneself.

That is the psychology of the fortress. And this, too: A man on another world is an enemy, not a fellow human but an alien. We will hate him.

And this is the politics of the fortress: The defense must be determined and it must be efficient. Determination and efficiency are qualities that masses of people cannot share and continue sharing without diffusion. These can be enforced only from above. A fortress must be ruled by one man or a few men. A democracy is impossible.

There have been democracies within recorded history. Count them. There have been few enough. What was their fate? They changed their form of government, or it was changed for them. Progressive centralization made them into dictatorships, or they were conquered.

Count the major forces in the galaxy. The individual rulers, the Church, the Peddlers. The rulers are satisfied, the Church is satisfied, the Peddlers are content. The only loser is the people.

Is there no hope, then? And the answer is, none. The people cannot revolt because they have no power. They have no power to fight, but, more important, they have no power to think or, having thought, to communicate. The people are ignorant and illiterate. The rulers have kept them so. And if by some miracle, they do revolt, what then? In the ensuing chaos the nearest world swoops down to conquer.

And so we look at the stars and sigh for the golden time. And our sigh is a windy nothing fading into nothing…

I closed the book and put it aside as Siller entered with my clothes. They had been altered to fit me, and the dark stain around the neck had been removed.

There was no one nearby who looked like an Agent, Siller reported. If Sabatini was still searching, he was doing it secretly. Siller had heard that the Cathedral was being repaired. Hurriedly, because it was rumored that the Archbishop might make an inspection of Brancusi. When he spoke about the Cathedral, his eyes were on me, but my face was almost masklike from the immobility of the burned skin.

He watched me while I put on the clothes.

"What did the girl leave?" he asked casually.

"She left—" I began, and stopped.

"What?" Siller asked sharply.

"I don't remember."

"Sit down," he said. "It's time we talked."

I sat down on the edge of one of the chairs, conscious of a great fatigue. My face hurt and my head was aching again.

"What about?" I asked.

"About the girl and why she went into the Cathedral and what she left there and why you're going to give it to me," Siller said flatly. His emotionless, confident voice made me cold.