Science Fiction Adventures – December 1956
(1956)*
Randall Garrett & Robert Silverberg
(as by Robert Randall)
illustrated by Emsh
Centuries of alien conquest had made Earth a slave planet, and only a pitiful handful of men dared dream of rebellion. But they had a weapon they didn't even know about!
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11 May 3035
"This whole situation is very amusing," Terrag Broz said. The Terran Administrator peered across his desk at his chief assistant without showing a trace of the amusement he claimed to feel. "But I think Orvid Kemron has been allowed to go far enough. Bring him here," lie snapped.
"At once," said the other, rising to leave.
"It took them a long time to get this far, Gornik," the Administrator said. He permitted himself a twisted smile.
"Don't tell me you're getting sentimental at last," Nacomon Gornik said.
"Hardly. You'd better get moving.
Terrag Broz gestured toward the door, and his assistant left. Broz watched Gornik's green-furred body retreating down the corridor, and heard the deep bass rumble of his voice as he gave orders to a pair of Terran soldiers waiting in the corridor.
The even clumping of four booted feet told him that the soldiers were on their way to fetch Orvid Kemron. Broz knew that the insurrectionist would be brought swiftly and silently to the Khoomish headquarters.
"What happened to the men we caught?" Terrag Broz asked, as Gornik re-entered the office.
"Still being held," Gornik replied.
"And the bombs?"
"They've all been detected and inactivated."
"I hope so," Broz said grimly. "It would be too bad to have this lovely building blown sky-high after the Earthmen were so kind as to build it for us."
The Administrator looked down, turning his attention to the neatly-arranged stacks of papers on his desk. He lifted off the uppermost and scanned it. "A complaint from Liverpool," he said. "Too much precipitation yesterday."
His purple lips split in a broad grin. "A great pity," he said, chuckling. "We'll see how they'll like it when the time comes for us to throw hurricanes at them instead of spring rains. Maybe then Earth will think twice about having invited us to rule them."
Nacomon Gornik glanced at his chief. "How long will that be, Terrag? How long do we have to wait?"
"I don't know," the Administrator said. "I'm afraid that all depends on Orvid Kemron."
"Orvid Kemron!"
Someone was calling his name. He opened his eyes, and squeezed them closed immediately. Someone was shining a light into his face.
"Wake up, Kemron," said the voice again. "Wake up. We don't have all night."
Kemron opened his eyes a little. All he could see was the glare of the light and the muzzle of a stungun held in a pair of gloved hands. Behind the dazzle of the light, he could barely make out two figures.
It was an effort to move from his bed. Finally, Kemron struggled up to full awareness and lifted himself from the bed.
"Who are you? What do you want?"
He knew good and well what they wanted.
The day had been seven years in coming, but at last it was here. He wondered how long they had known about him. Seven years of hard work, of pretending to be something he was not, of scheming and planning—all shot to ashes. The alien rulers of Earth had nabbed him, and humanity's resistance movement would be left without its leader.
"Where are we going?" he asked as he put on his clothes. "What's the idea of waking a man up in the middle of the night?"
"Don't ask questions," said one of the men.
Or were they men? They were wearing heavy coveralls, gloves, and hoods; they could easily be the Khoomish themselves. Yes, thought Kemron. I'm important enough to have the overlords come after me in person. He wished he knew whether there was green fur underneath the concealing cloth.
He locked the magnetic clasp at his throat with slow deliberation.
"Hurry it up," the taller of the two said. The stungun nudged Kemron's ribs.
"Hold on, will you? Let me wash up a bit first." He walked to the washstand without waiting for any reply and plunged his head under the cold water. He rinsed a moment, then withdrew his head. After drying himself, he glanced up over his shoulder, noting the positions of the two armed men. They were waiting about ten feet away.
I've got to get word through to the others that I'm caught, Kemron thought. But the Khoomish, he decided, had probably picked up his bomb-layers just as neatly as they'd snagged him. There wasn't much chance they'd missed anyone.
Damn them!
"Enough stalling. Come now or we'll take you," one guard said.
"A minute. I'm thirsty."
Kemron filled his drinking-glass, but instead of draining it he whirled and threw it at the hood of the taller guard, hearing it land with a pleasing thunk! In the same motion he jumped at the other guard.
The uniformed figure went over surprisingly easily when Kemron leaped, and before he could regain control of himself Kemron had clubbed him senseless. But when he swung to deal with the other guard, he saw that the drinking-glass had had little effect.
He stared at the stungun in the other's hand for a moment. Through his mind flashed the sudden remembrance of the dizzying pain of a stun-gun's beam. He could still hear Nella's scream in his memory—she had been shot down six months ago by a Khoomish guard after she had slugged another of the green-furred beings. Her nerves had been raw for three days.
The alien's finger pressed the trigger and the darkness exploded into a brilliant flare of green.
It was hard to tell one Khoomish from another, but there was no doubt in Kemron's mind that the steely-eyed, green-furred being who confronted him was Terran Administrator Terrag Broz. Kemron felt a sudden wave of fear wash over him, leaving him chilled and weak.
The Administrator smiled grimly from behind his huge desk, showing the surprisingly human teeth back of his purple lips. But the expression in his eyes remained cold and forbidding.
"You don't know how glad I am to see you, Mr. Kemron," he said, in an oddly soft voice. "Do sit down." He gestured with one hand, signalling the guards.
One of them pulled up a chair for Kemron, and the other pushed him down into it. Kemron saw now that his two captors were Earthmen, members of the loyal army maintained by the Khoomish overlords.
No doubt the guards thought he was the worst sort of traitor, since certainly they were aware he had been scheming to destroy the Khoomish—the beloved Khoomish, the green-furred saviors from the stars who had rescued Earth from anarchical chaos. Kemron saw the undisguised hatred in the eyes of both of them.
He wanted to tell them that they were the real traitors, not he. But he knew they would only laugh and remind him of the provisional government. It had been Earth's only attempt at self-government in a thousand years, and a complete, miserable failure.
It's not easy to overthrow a conqueror when the conquered welcome him with open arms, Orvid Kemron thought.
The guards stepped back, their stunguns held ready. Terrag Broz reached out a thick forearm and flipped a switch on his desk. A sparkling array of lights brightened one wall. Kemron knew what they were: thousands of little electronic eyes, every one watching him. One wrong move, and a stunner would beam him down before he could do anything.
One stunning was enough; Kemron had no craving for more. He still had a prodigious headache from the first.
Terrag Broz looked at the guards. "You can go now. I don't think he'll do anything foolish."
Kemron heard the door open and close softly behind him as the guards left. The Terran Administrator waited a long few minutes before speaking.
"I might as well tell you," Broz said levelly, "that we've known about your underground for a long time, Mr. Kemron. It has been a source of constant amusement to us. It was only when you took the—ah—unkind action of attempting to destroy our headquarters that we were forced to take you into custody."
Kemron said nothing. He found it almost impossible to bring his head up to meet the Khoomish's fiery eyes, and his own weakness irked him.
Abruptly Broz punched out a question. "How many are there in your organization?" he asked.
"I won't tell you," Kemron said stolidly.
"Ah, well. There is no need to," the Administrator said. His smile widened. "There are exactly four hundred and sixty-eight men, including yourself."
Kemron blinked. The fear inside him melted into dull despair. They hadn't missed a man.
Terrag Broz stretched up out of his seat, giving Kemron a view of his awe-inspiring bulk, and came to rest leaning on his knuckles. "Don't you think that's a rather small number of people to man a resistance movement?" the Khoomish asked. "Out of nearly four billion human beings, you have an underground which consists of something like one one-hundred thousandth of one percent of the total population. Not exactly what I would call a popular uprising."
"We could have done it, though," Kemron said. "We could have done it."
"Certainly," Broz agreed. "If you had blown up this building, our control over Earth would have snapped. Then mankind would have had to try governing herself, presumably with your party in control—and with the same disastrous results that occurred seven years ago, before we came."
Kemron's eyes blazed angrily. "That's just it!" he protested. "At least mankind would be free! Even if we failed, it would be through our own faults, on our own shoulders—we'd be responsible ourselves. Suppose civilization did collapse? So what? We pulled ourselves out of barbarism once; we can do it again!"
"I don't deny it," said the Khoomish. "But it seems to me an awful waste of time."
"Waste of time!" The Earthman's voice was thick with anger. "We've wasted a thousand years already! First the Sslesor, then the Velks, and now you. One alien ruler after another! We're tired of being pawns in a galactic chess game, being shuttled back and forth from one set of interstellar aliens to another."
"I see," Terrag Broz said smoothly. He folded his arms, and Kemron watched his fingers digging into the furry skin over his biceps. "You're tired of being ruled. You want another chance for yourselves. But the rest of the people on Earth don't seem to be tired of it—do they, Mr. Kemron?"
The Khoomish smiled again. "No comment?" He paused, and his gleaming eyes narrowed. "The word describing your rebellion, Mr. Kemron, is—premature. A revolution now, with Earth solidly behind the Khoomish, would only lead you into the same futile trap that the earlier underground fell into."
"Earlier underground?"
"Of course. The same patterns of action recur over and over in humanity. Many other men have tried to overthrow their rulers. There have been others in the past ten centuries, all right. And during the rule of our predecessors, the Sslesor, the most nearly successful against them was a man you might have known. His name was Joslyn Carter."
Kemron was amazed. Joslyn Carter? The head of the Provisional Government had also been a leader of the underground?
"Joslyn Carter it was," the Khoomish said. "I had thought you might have been more well-informed about other members of your trade. Particularly Joslyn Carter..
3 July 3027
Joslyn Carter leaned across his desk and pressed the phone stud before the sound of the attention chime had died from the air.
"Carter here," he said, looking squarely into the pickup.
"Priority call from Staten Island, sir," said the operator. "Viceroy Johnson is on the line."
"Put His Munificence on," said Carter. Viceroy Johnson, he thought darkly. They took on Terrestrial names because we can't pronounce half the sibilances of their language. I wonder what the Johnsons think of that.
He knew good and well what they thought of it. They loved it. The Sslesor had ruled nearly a thousand years, and most of the time had inspired nothing but affection from their Terran subjects—with occasional exceptions, such as Joslyn Carter.
The Sslesor Viceroy's face faded into the scre...
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