Computer War Page 5

“Thanks for the warning, Rossie. However, I have reason to believe that Mark Fielder’s Surety people still don’t know of this place. I’ll stick it out for awhile. I’ve got work to do.”

  Till, look. Why don’t you marry me? You’ve spent too many years at this sort of thing, instead of looking into a woman’s real place in life. What you need is love, Till. A home, children, a… a husband to look after. You’ve kept your nose to this espionage grindstone too long. You’ve had no experience in… well, in romance, in love. It’s time you learned…”

  She put a finger to his lips.

  “When this is over, Rossie, perhaps things will be different.” Her face went Chaplinesque. “I’m glad to know you’re so up on such matters. Because you’re quite right, I’ve never had much time for such things as romance, Rossie. Someday I’ll be glad to have you give me the benefit of your long, hard experience.”

  Chapter V

  Tilly Trice, bow slung over her shoulder, marched smartly up the thirty and more stone steps toward the impressive edifice ahead. Behind her, two by two and in moderately good order, came a full score of similarly garbed, similarly armed seeming youngsters. Surely, the oldest appeared to be no more than eighteen; some, such as Tilly herself, a mere fifteen.

  Each carried a quiver of arrows in such a manner that the feathered ends projected over the left shoulder for a quick draw. The bow was slung, almost as though it were a rifle, over the right shoulder. On each head was worn a natty cap, somewhat reminiscent of Robin Hood.

  Tilly marched briskly at the fore, a brassard of the Alphaland national colors around her right upper arm, a proud tilt to her head.

  The four guards who stood at the top went bug-eyed at the approaching troop—which didn’t hesitate for a moment, keeping correct cadence all the way.

  At the top, Tilly saluted the Lance Corporal smartly. “Honorary Ensign Lee, reporting for the audience with Deputy Matheison.”

  He goggled at her blankly.

  “Who?” he said. “Now, wait a minute. Who in Zen are you kids? What’re you doing here?”

  His fellow guards stood in their assigned positions, matching him gape for gape.

  Tilly saluted again. “Yes, sir,” she said snappily. Bridgetown’s Own, First Troop of the Alpha Scouts, reporting for the audience with Deputy Matheison of the Commissariat of Finance.”

  The Lance Corporal shook his head. “Listen, boy, I never even heard of Bridgetown, let alone the Alpha Scouts. “What’re you selling?”

  Tilly looked at him reproachfully.

  “We’re supposed to have an interview and get some sort of engraved plaque for our headquarters.”

  The corporal looked over his shoulder. “You fellas heard anything about this?”

  Two of them shook their heads in utter denial. The other was the type who had to insert himself, whatever.

  He said, “Well, Corporal, it seems to me I saw something on the Tri-Di news. Something about the Deputy being going to give some kinds an award, like. Yeah. It seems to me I saw something like that. I could be wrong.”

  The corporal looked at Tilly in doubt.

  “What’re those things you got over your backs?”

  “We’re Alpha Scouts” she said, as though that explained everything.

  “Alpha Scouts?” he said dimly.

  Tilly said: “Come wend the wild wi’ me, “Venture shall ever be.”

  The lance corporal blinked. He bit his under lip.

  “We ain’t never had no delegates of Alpha Scouts before,” he admitted.

  Tilly said, “I’ll come inside and show you my things, and you can phone the Deputy’s office and they’ll tell you all about it, I guess.” Her mouth trembled infinitesimally. “They couldn’t have forgot about the award,” she said miserably. “Not after we came all the way from Bridgetown.”

  “Okay, kid,” the guard said hurriedly. “Come on in.”

  He had meant only Tilly, but the others filed along behind.

  One of the three remaining guards shook his head. “Sooner or later,” he said, “you see everything. Hey, you know what those things they was carrying over their backs was? Bows and arrows.”

  “What’s a bows’n’arrows?” one of the others said disinterestedly.

  “Don’t you ever watch the historic shows on Tri-Di?”

  “Naw. I like those burlesque revivals with all the mopsies taking their clothes off all the time.”

  “Bows and arrows are like the cowboys used to shoot at the Indians. Fella, those were the times. Burning down the wagon trains and rustling the buffalo.”

  “Wrestling the buffalo?”

  An Alpha Scout stuck his head outside the entry and called, “The corporal says for one of you to come in.”

  One of the guards shrugged and went through the tall opaque door. On the other side, Centurion Combs slapped him behind the ear efficiently with a sap.

  Tilly Trice went outside again and said shrilly, “Hey, something’s wrong in here. The corporal’s sick. He’s got some kind of attack.”

  The remaining two guards made a beeline for the door, the pseudo-knowledgeable one saying, “I always thought he looked like he had a bad ticker, or something.”

  They pushed on through, their guns comfortably bolstered, their minds free of suspicion—and ran into the hands of two so-called Alpha Scouts apiece. They were grabbed efficiently, and Comb’s sap thudded once again.

  But then with a roar and burst of brawn, the second bashed his two slightly-built assailants together, threw them aside, and was down the corridor, running hard, at the same time tearing at his handgun, opening his mouth to shout a warning.

  Tilly called, “Bernal!”

  The arrow caught the fleeing guard in the upper spine and he was dead before his body hit the marble flooring.

  Tilly snapped, “All right, Combs, Bernal, Altshuler, Zimmerman. You and your men, double time. You know your posts. Take them! Gonzales, stick close to me. Let’s go!”

  On the run, they sped down corridors that seemed no strangers to them. On the several occasions that they came against Surety guards, or civilian-dressed employees of the Commissariat, the reaction of the others was such that the critical initial seconds of contact were their undoing. The halls were littered with Alphaland citizenry, either battered to insensibility or transfixed with lethal arrows.

  Tilly finally stopped. “This is it, isn’t it, Manuel?”

  “Should be. Let’s hurry.” The other looked like a kid in no more than his late teens, unless inspection came close enough to take in the wrinkles in his forehead, the depth of intelligence in his eyes. He wore heavy contact lenses. Of them all, he alone seemed nervous, as though the pace of action was unaccustomed.

  Tilly whispered urgently, “On your toes, boys. There’ll be action here.”

  She banged her slight shoulder against the massive door.

  Beyond, two Surety men were hurrying toward them, one with gun in hand, the other in the process of drawing.

  An arrow winged its deadliness past Tilly, missing her by less than six inches. It sped halfway through the lead guard’s throat, projecting its bloodiness behind, as the man crumbled forward to his knees, and then, gurgling, flat on his face, his feet drumming agony against the heavy carpeting.

  The second guard got one bolt off before being transfixed with three more arrows, then he too went down.

  “All right,” Tilly said. “Gonzales, it’s all yours. Fast now. We’ll hold until you’re through. But according to your speed, or lack of it, we’ll get out of here or not.”

  Manuel Gonzales unslung a purse-like affair from over his shoulder. He put it down carefully on a heavy table and began hurriedly bringing its contents forth, to lay them in semi-orderly rows on the table. His mouth was dry and he licked his lips often, with little result.

  He held an extension cord over his shoulder without looking to see who might take it. “Plug this in,” he said, his voice high. He cleared his throat. His hands were flying.
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  Tilly was standing in the middle of the large room, her bow in hand, an arrow on the string.

  Combs, cool as winter wind, came to the assistance of Manuel Gonzales, who was occasionally fumbling his gadgets.

  Combs said, soothingly, “How’s it work, Manuel?”

  Gonzales spoke, even as he tinkered. “It discharges a condenser-bank through a small coil, generating a very powerful magnetic pulse; then a charge of high explosive is rigged to implode the resultant magnetic field to produce an empire-size flux density. Just a single two-microsecond pulse—but it makes every computer-magnetic-memory within half a mile ‘forget’ all its information and the data stored in the machine at the time, necessitating complete reprogramming. It also whips most of the magnetic tape around, lousing up records no end.”

  Admiration in his voice, Combs said, “You lost me somewhere back there, but it sounds swell. We should’ve tried to get it into the War Ministry.”

  Tilly, still standing, arrow still on string, said, “No. Finance is even better. You don’t fight wars with soldiers anymore, not primarily.”

  Altshuler came in from the corridor, his face strained. He said, “Zimmerman copped one. That single bolt the guard got off.”

  Tilly looked at the two technicians. “Try to hurry it, fellows.” She went out into the hall.

  Several of the so-called Alpha Scouts, their bows at the ready, were standing guard. Two of them were bent over Zimmerman, who was propped up in a sitting position against the wall. His face was unnaturally pale and blood had already soaked through the improvised bandages.

  “How bad is it, Zim?” Tilly asked.

  “It’s pretty bad,” he grated. “I’ll never make it.”

  Tilly told those working on him, “When we run for it, you two carry him. The rest of us will cover.”

  Zimmerman shook his head. “It’d jeopardize everybody. Besides, if they got me, they’d stick me under Scop and I’d betray half our people in town. I’m expendable, Till. Finish me.”

  Her lips thinned back over her artificial buckteeth. She stared down at him.

  Finally she said, “Anything you want passed back home?”

  He shook his head again. “No. I said my famous last words when I left to come over here. I knew there was fat chance of ever coming back.”

  “All right,” she said, so low as hardly to be heard. Her eyes went suddenly to Bernal. “It’s an order, Bernal!”

  An arrow smashed the heart of the fallen guerrilla.

  Gonzales and Combs came running from the inner room.

  “Let’s go!” Combs yelled.

  They dashed down the corridors, back the way they had come. Their other groups merged with them as they progressed, coming on the run from the different points to which they had scattered when first entering the building. Three were missing, besides Zimmerman.

  They sped out the entry through which they had come a scant ten minutes earlier, and down the stone steps. There were shouts and sounds of confusion behind them, but none bothered to turn head to check the pursuit.

  At the bottom of the steps, a supposed tourist hover-bus edged up to the curb, even as they approached. They piled into it—on the surface a gang of teen-agers, costumed as though some sort of club.

  Combs was last, almost missing the bus as it took off, being pulled in the door at the last moment by Tilly Trice.

  “Thanks,” he puffed. “Remind me to marry you someday. Like your style.”

  “Tu, tu, tu,” she told him. “Already spoken for.”

  He looked at her sourly. “Oh, too bad.”

  The bus sped around a corner, barreled at full speed down a boulevard, spun around another corner.

  Altshuler, at the rear, called, “Uh-oh, some kind of Surety car.”

  Tilly yelled back to him, “Noise makes no difference now. Take it!

  A moment later a shattering blast tore up the street behind them.

  Altshuler looked admiringly down at a small grenade in his hand, the twin of the one he had just thrown. “Zen!” he said. “Ordinance is really turning them out these days.”

  Tilly clucked. “Watch your patriotism, Alt. Those aren’t the products of our ordinance plants. They were liberated from a local armory. How d’ya think we’d ever get such equipment over the borders with the kind of security they have here?”

  Chapter VI

  Number One was doing his best to relax in the comforting presence of Pater Riggin. He sipped at a glass of amontillado, imported for his sole use from a far land once called Spain.

  The Temple Monk said softly, “So the die is cast and there is no return.”

  Number One shifted in his comfortable chair. “Was there ever a return, Rig?”

  “Possibly that’s according to where you start from, Jim.”

  The other shook his heavy head. “There is never return, Rig. No matter how seemingly powerful you are, it’s an illusion. You’re pushed, you don’t march bravely forth.”

  “I’m not so sure I follow you,” the plumpish Temple Monk said. They were seated in the living room of the Presidor’s private quarters, as before, an old-fashioned wood fire in the fireplace.

  Number One looked at him strangely. “Do you think that Caesar could have changed his mind and not crossed the Rubicon?”

  Pater Riggin looked at him for a long moment. “You didn’t want power, Jim?”

  “No. It was thrust upon me. When the collapse of the past regime came, power lay there on the streets for anyone at all to take up. Should I have left it to the Karlists, or some other crackpot group?”

  The Temple Monk patted his rounded tummy and said mildly, “I have heard the story before, Jim. ‘If I didn’t do it, somebody else would.’ Also, ‘I did it for the sake of others.’ ”

  Number One scowled. “Sometimes I wonder what you really think about me, Rig. And more often I realize I don’t want to know. You’re the one man I feel I can talk to. But, carrying out along this line, what could I have done otherwise? You know my career as well as I do. Where could I have taken this turning, rather than that one?”

  Pater Riggin shook his head. “I doubt if you have ever read of a Yugoslavian named Djilas. However…”

  “Yugoslavian?”

  “A small country in Europe in the old days. During the Second War, it went Communist. Djilas was one of its top revolutionists, the right-hand man of the dictator-to-be, Tito. Djilas spent years in the government prisons, later fought for more years in the mountains as a partisan. When the war was over and his people in power, he was aghast. His comrades were quickly enriching themselves, entrenching themselves in lucrative government jobs for which they were often unsuited. Tito himself lived like an Oriental potentate. When Djilas, still the idealist, refused to conduct himself similarly and attempted to expose this New Class that had arisen from among the supposedly selfless leaders of the proletariat, he was imprisoned for his pains.”

  “Your point?” the Presidor growled, finishing his wine and reaching for the humidor.

  “I’m not sure I have one,” his old friend said wryly, “but I find in history few idealists who can resist wealth and power, once they are in grasp. It applies, of course, not only to political figures. Have you ever seen a religion which, once come to acceptance, does not indulge its leadership? My studies tell me most of the great religions were founded by men who foreswore material goods, but, once the religion was established, their following priests were seldom to be found among the poverty-stricken.”

  Number One looked at him thoughtfully. “I sometimes wonder that the United Temple puts up with you, Rig.”

  His companion chuckled. “You should be able to figure that out, Jim. I am your closest companion. My immediate Bishop, and his Holiness himself, might occasionally become impatient, but they can’t afford to bar from conclave the man who has Number One’s ear.”

  “I’ve told you I don’t like that term,” The Presidor growled.

  Before the other could answer, a light
flickered on the door and the screen there hummed.

  Number One glowered at it. “What is this, a shuttle station? I gave orders not to be disturbed. Once this damned war begins, I’ll be fortunate to sleep four hours a night.”

  “Ignore it.” Pater Riggin shrugged plump shoulders. “Why do you have deputies?”

  The other grunted, pressed a button set into the arm of his chair and came to his feet, scowling, to face the door.

  It came open and Jon Matheison, close pressed behind by Mark Fielder, came hurrying through. The former’s face was livid with anger—anger and what would seem to be despair.

  Number One was curt. “What is the meaning of this intrusion, Coaids? The Crusade is scheduled in a few days. I have need of time for rest and contemplation.”

  His Deputy of Finance began to say something, but Mark Fielder cut in, even as his eyes shifted about the apartment, taking in this, taking in that, resting briefly on Pater Riggin.

  The Surety man said, “The war, evidently, is already on.”

  “What! You mean they’ve attacked first!”

  Matheison said, “An unprovoked attack on my commissariat. I have still not completely evaluated the disaster.”

  Number One was glaring. “Make sense, you two! What has happened?”

  His financial head took a deep breath. “As far as we can make out, a group of a hundred or more Betastani, armed with bows and arrows, broke into the Treasury Building this afternoon. They…”

  “Armed with what ?”

  “Bows and arrows,” Fielder said grimly. “Their value as a secret weapon applies not only to this romp. The damned things don’t make a sound, produce no muzzle-flash, don’t affect capacitance-alarm circuits so they can be back-trajectoried to locate their source. They ring no alarms, since they’re of wood rather than metal. The funkers even had hard plastic arrowheads on the nardy things.”

  “The Treasury!” Pater Riggin blurted. “Why the Treasury? You mean they made off with…”

  Matheison shot a contemptuous look at him. “Gold? No, of course not. Even if there had been a good many more of them they couldn’t have taken off enough gold to make any difference, and even that’s if they could have gotten down into the vaults, which would have been impossible.”