The Secret Martians by Jack Sharkey (best historical fiction books of all time TXT) 📗

one eyebrow, and was appraising me carefully, as if trying to gauge the intensity of my emotions. No one said a word for a minute, while Clatclit shut the window and came to stand a bit behind me, to my right, leaving the show to me.

Baxter found his voice first. When he spoke, it was in the casual friendly tone he'd used at our first meeting, his inflection giving no sign that I had him covered by the most deadly weapon in the solar system.

"Since I am still alive," he said dryly, "I can only assume that you want to see me about something before I die, else you would have blasted me through that window."

"That's very accurate," I said grimly. "If you'll tell your men to be seated, and to keep their hands where I can watch them, I'll lower this barrel a bit. I wouldn't want an accidental finger twitch to terminate our conversation."

Charlie and Foster, white-faced, looked at Baxter. He gave a curt nod, and they sat down. I stayed back from the desk, keeping my back against the wall beside Clatclit. I didn't want anyone else coming in and sneaking up behind me. Baxter swung slightly about in his chair to face me, then laced his fingers on his knees.

"Now that we're settled," he said, "what can I do for you, Mister Delvin?"

"Baxter," I said, "I just came from seeing one of the Ancients. He and I had a long talk."

Baxter never flickered an eyelash. He just nodded and waited politely for me to continue.

"It seems you are a menace to them. They stand in the way of your ambition, and must be destroyed. However, the Ancients, even with their extra dimension, don't seem to have any increase in brain power. Their evaluation of your intentions is without doubt the correct one, but as to their interpretation of your motives, they're full of hot air."

A slight smile of grudging approval appeared on his round face. "Very good, Mister Delvin. Well thought out. Tell me, just what do they think I'm after?"

"According to them, you want to be the visible kingpin of the tri-planet civilizations, instead of just running things from behind the scenes. For a while, I thought it made sense, too. But then it occurred to me that this puppet-control of our worlds is just the sort of position that would appeal to you, Baxter. You'd enjoy being the secret master of Venus, Earth and Mars. I could imagine you chuckling to yourself, delighting in being an apparent public servant, and saying to yourself, 'The fools; if they only knew—' Am I right?"

Baxter's smile grew broader. "In substance, yes. I do rather like being the kingpin incognito, as it were. But go on, you were about to make a point."

"Well, if that were the case, then the Ancients wouldn't have to be destroyed, sent back to their dimension forever. You'd be suited by the status quo. Alien beings on Mars would just be alien beings on a Mars which you still controlled. So there's got to be something more that you want. You have all the power I know of, right now. So there can be only one thing left for you to want: some power I don't know of."

"I must congratulate you on your perspicacity," he said. "Yes, there is something more, Mister Delvin. That much I will tell you. But as to what it is—" He spread his hands. "I don't see that it's your concern."

"You—" I said, then paused. His insouciance was not in keeping with his situation. Therefore, the situation was not the one which I thought it was. "You're pretty chipper," I said, "for a man held at collapser-point."

"Oh? Am I being chipper?" he said, all raised eyebrows and facetious wonder. "I hadn't noticed."

"You fool," I said softly.

Baxter's amiable smile vanished and a hard light came into his eyes. "What do you mean?" he said, through clenched teeth.

"I mean," I said gently, but with deadly earnest, "that the Brain back on Earth selected me because of my mental abilities. I mean, Baxter, that I can figure things out faster than you can dream them up."

"The Brain picked you," he said coldly, "because it was rigged by the Ancients. And for no other reason."

I nodded. "And the Ancients rigged it to pick the man most likely to succeed in your destruction."

Baxter was suddenly silent. He watched me intently.

I lounged against the wall, waving the muzzle of the collapser up and down slowly. "Let me clue you in to my reasoning, Baxter old man," I grinned. "This is a collapser. It is in working order. You do not fear it. Ergo, you have some protection from it. I would deduce that you are at present wearing a shield of some sort. A shield which you have kept secret from everyone but yourself and the inventor, who is probably long since dead, if I know your approach to things."

Charlie and Foster turned and looked at him, their eyes bugging out in surprise. Till that moment, they'd thought their weapon invincible against anything.

"You astound me," Baxter said, admiringly. "But there's something you don't know about the shield. It protects not by deflection, but by reflection."

"I could have gotten that part figured out, too, if I just allowed my mind to wander a bit through the paths yours seems to prefer. Nice work. Not only are you protected, but your assailant is himself destroyed."

"And so, Mister Delvin," Baxter smiled, starting to get up from his chair to come and disarm me.

"And so," I said, "nothing!"

Baxter stopped on hearing the easy confidence of my voice. He hesitated, looked at me.

"You shouldn't have kept it a secret," I said, smiling. "Charlie and Foster, here, are therefore quite vulnerable to the ray." It was rewarding to see their increased pallor. "So, you guys," I addressed them, "unless you want to go out in a blaze of blue sparks, how about tying this silly old man to his chair?"

They faltered only the fraction of an instant, and then they had a furious, cursing Baxter neatly hooked at ankles and wrists to his chair with their security-manacles.

"All right," Baxter growled deep in his throat, when they had been gun-gestured back to their places. "You are clever, Delvin! So what happens now? Do you beat me to death with your fists, or what?"

"If necessary," I said. A brief flicker of fear went across his face. "But so far as I'm concerned, destroying you need not mean physical dissolution. I don't care so much about Baxter the man as I do about Baxter the kingpin. To keep my end of the bargain, I can simply report what I know to the World Congress, and have you stashed away where you can never carry out any of your totalitarian schemes."

The normal ruddiness of Baxter's face was superseded by a sickly gray. "You can't—" he said, then stopped. At the moment, it was quite apparent that I could.

"And as for your big secret power," I said, calmly and without boasting, "it took me about two seconds' brainwork to guess what it is."

Baxter just sat and smoldered, his mouth clamped shut.

"The Ancients," I said, "live in Location, with a capital L. I've already experienced a demonstration of their logistic powers. They had me bobbing around like a balloon down in their weird little cavern. And they were also able, not so long ago, to manipulate the workings of the International Cybernetics Brain across a void millions of miles wide. That, by me, shows one power which any would-be dictator would give a hell of a lot to get ahold of: teleportation."

Baxter stared at me in furious amazement.

"But," I went on, "there seemed to be a couple of details which didn't jibe, if that were the case. If they could manage control over cosmic distances so easily, why should they go to the trouble of getting a man, me, to bump you off? Why not simply teleport you into something fatal? That would be the easier method. But they didn't do it. Therefore, for some reason, they couldn't. Well then, Jery, I thought to myself, what could the reason be? In their dimension, that of ultimate Place, or Location, distances have no meanings. Everything in creation is Here. So what held them up? What kept them from snatching you? Obviously, only one thing could, Baxter: the contact-material, parabolite."

He kept his features rigid, but sweat was beading his brow. It gleamed like diamonds in the lamplight.

"It seems that the Ancients can only control areas where their contact-material is present. Until the mineral was found by Earth scientists, that place was on Mars only. Then some of the material was taken back to Earth, for museums, for analysis, and even for paperweights and such. My guess is that one of the technicians who runs the Brain has a hunk of the stuff on his desk, right?"

Baxter narrowed his eyes, then relaxed and nodded. "Yes. As soon as I figured out the Brain had been gimmicked, I went there to check. I had it removed immediately. Then I refed the data into the Brain, and found the name of the man who should have been sent here to destroy the Ancients."

I nodded. "Your own. Philip Baxter. Which is why you sped up here so damned fast after I arrived. And also why you had to toss me into a cell. One thing eludes me, though. What gave you the hint that the Brain might have been rigged?"

Baxter smiled wearily. "Your loss of the Amnesty. When these idiots here called me, my first reaction was to chew them out and to have you released. It was only after talking to you that it dawned on me that you seemed ill-equipped for the task I had in mind. I got to wondering about the Brain, then. That's when I went over to see for myself, and found the parabolite."

I nodded again. "Yes. In their cavernful of the stuff, they could float me all over the place. When some of the stuff was near the Brain, they could control that. But nothing else. Nothing that was not in the presence of the mineral. That is, excepting one part of the mineral: the chunk that comprises the false Amnesty. Something had to happen to that hunk of it. Something that simultaneously rendered that piece out of their control, and told them that you were a menace to their existence in this dimension."

"If you think I'll tell you that—" he said angrily.

"No need to. I've figured out that one, too. When I first figured out just what parabolite was, I compared it to a rubber ball on an elastic cord. Trying to destroy it by force was impossible. It just bounced and swung into the cushion of its fourth dimension. But, sticking with the analogue, what happens if the rubber ball is attacked from all sides simultaneously? It has nowhere to go, then. And, I asked myself, what could attack parabolite from even its extra dimension? What, except another piece of parabolite? Oh, not in the frictive way, like diamond cutting diamond. You still controlled only three of the dimensions using that method. And it had been tried already by scientists and found useless. So you had to attack it on the no-dimensional level. Since the three forms of matter—solid, liquid and gas—all must exist with height, breadth and depth, you had to use the only thing in our universe that we have besides matter: energy. Fire? No, heat had been tried already. Atomic dissolution? A bit better, perhaps; a battery of collapsers, working on the subatomic level, had managed to destroy a fraction of a gram of the stuff, simply from the laws of chance encounters with parabolite molecules in the fourth dimension. A ray as powerful as the collapser-ray undoubtedly accidentally gets generated in an extra dimension, but only in the most minor way, not nearly enough for your purpose."

"And what," Baxter asked between tautened lips, "is my purpose?"

"Since your rule-the-worlds dream necessitates the ability to teleport your agents wherever you please, you must have parabolite wherever you please. This in turn necessitates pulverizing the mineral down to its very molecules, and sowing it into the atmosphere of the three planets. Then you will be free to take complete command. The hitch, of course, is that the pulverization of parabolite would engender, as the Ancient put it, a jolt. A jolt which would unlatch Location from our dimension, sending the Ancients off forever. They didn't like the idea, and so they set out to destroy you."

Baxter's jaw, during the last part of my narrative, had gone slack, and he stared at me idiotically. I had to grin.

"Yes, I know what suffering you're going through at this moment, Baxter old boy. 'All for nothing,' you're telling yourself. If you had only known, huh?"

"You—you mean," he