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

disc. It lay on his desk, now, along with the collapser. I felt, with the new information I'd garnered, that my work was done, and that the new data fed into the Brain would produce some other results, not involving me.

I looked at the Amnesty, then nodded. "Kind of gets you, after awhile. To know that you are the most influential person in creation is to automatically act the part. A shame, in a way."

"The hell it is!" Baxter snapped. "Good grief, man, why'd you think the Amnesty was created in the first place?"

I sat up straight and scratched the back of my head. "Now you mention it, I really don't know. It seems a pretty dangerous thing to have about, the way people jump when they see it."

"It is dangerous, of course, but it's vitally necessary. You're young, Jery Delvin, and even the finest history course available these days is slanted in favor of World Government. So you have no idea how tough things were before the Amnesty came along. Ever hear of red tape?"

I shook my head. "No, I don't believe so. Unless it had something to do with the former communist menace? They called themselves the Reds, I believe...."

He waved me silent. "No connection at all, son. No, red tape was, well, involvement. Forms to be signed, certain factors to be considered, protocol to be dealt with, government agencies to be checked with, classifications, bureaus, sub-bureaus, congressional committees. It was impossible, Jery, my boy, to get anything done whatsoever without consulting someone else. And the time lag and paperwork involved made accurate and swift action impossible, sometimes. What we needed, of course, was a person who could simply have all authority, in order to save the sometimes disastrous delays. So we came up with the Amnesty."

"But the danger. If you should pick the wrong man—"

Baxter smiled. "No chance of that, Jery. We didn't leave it up to any committee or bureau or any other faction to do the picking. Hell, that would have put us right back where we'd been before. No, we left it up to the Brain. We'd find ourselves in a tight situation, and the Brain after being fed the data, would come up with either a solution, or a name."

I stared at him. "Then, when I was here before, I was here solely to receive the Amnesty, is that it?"

Baxter nodded. "The Brain just picks the men. Then we tell the men the situation, hand over the Amnesty, and pray."

I had a sudden thought. "Say, what happens if two men are selected by the Brain? Who has authority over whom?"

Baxter grimaced and shivered. "Don't even think such a thing! Even your mentioning such a contingency gives me a small migraine. It'd be unprecedented in the history of the Brain or the Amnesty." He grinned, suddenly. "Besides, it can't happen. There's only one of these—" he tapped the medallion gently "—in existence, Jery. So we couldn't have such a situation!"

I sank back into the contour chair, and glanced at my watch. Much too late to go back to work. I'd done a lot in one day, I reasoned. Well, the thing was out of my hands. Baxter had the information I'd come up with, and it had been coded and fed to the Brain. As soon as the solution came through, I could be on my way back to the world of hard and soft sell.

"You understand," said Baxter suddenly, "that you're to say nothing whatever about the disappearance of the Space Scouts until this office makes the news public? You know what would happen if this thing should leak!"

The intercom on Baxter's desk suddenly buzzed, and a bright red light flashed on. "Ah!" he said, thumbing a knob. "Here we go, at last!"

As he exerted pressure on the knob, a thin slit in the side of the intercom began feeding out a long sheet of paper; the new answer from the Brain. It reached a certain length, then was automatically sheared off within the intercom, and the sheet fell gently to the desktop. Baxter picked it up and swiftly scanned its surface. A look of dismay overrode his erstwhile genial features.

I had a horrible suspicion. "Not again?" I said softly.

Baxter swore under his breath. Then he reached across the desktop and tossed me the Amnesty.

"I hope you know what you're doing," said Baxter at the gleaming glass doorway of the spaceport. "Why a man who has absolute authority should choose to ride public transportation when he could have his pick of the fleetest government ships on Earth—"

I didn't tell him it was because of little details like stereovision, autobars, and, not least of all, comfort, that I had chosen to ride the Valkyrie. She sat waiting even now, far out in the center of the landing strip, two hundred towering feet of silver, crammed with all the luxuries engineering ingenuity could put aboard her. I had, thanks to a government credit card, a private cabin. I intended to enjoy myself, this trip.

I'd managed to convince Baxter that it was less likely the public would suspect there was anything amiss if I went to Mars incognito, with the Amnesty worn under my clothing, for use only in emergencies. An Amnesty-bearer arriving on Mars in a government ship might cause talk. Disastrous talk.

Baxter was rattling on and on, giving me the names of my contacts on Mars for the seventeenth time, and I was giving him perfunctory nods as though I was paying attention, though I was actually watching the other passengers leaving the check-in desk. After all, I'd be in space with them for almost two days. You never know what might develop.

The co-rider I had in mind was a girl, with hair like irridescent cornsilk, and a figure that made the stereovision starlets look 2-D in comparison. She had her back to me, but even before she turned around, I knew she was beautiful. It was just the way she stood there, facing the passenger-check robot. She—well, she stood like a girl who is beautiful.

Then she turned around, and I gave my instincts an A plus.

Her eyes were the deepest of blues, actually a purple tone, and they were wide, serious and shining. There was a certain determination about the set of her jaw that I liked, and her lips were like soft red velvet. A man could kiss those lips and sink slowly into warm crimson seas; lose himself in the heated softness of their gentlest pressures.

"Delvin!"

Baxter's voice shattered my reverie, and I tore my eyes from the girl, though the after-effects of dreaming left my mind in confused fragments. "Huh?" I said, looking at his face and almost failing to recognize it.

"I said—" Baxter's voice was impatient and over loud, "—that you had best, in the interests of open-space safety, not flash that Amnesty while you're aboard the Valkyrie. Passengers have a way of working themselves into a panic that is almost an uncanny gift! They'll all start suspecting their neighbors of treason, or worse, and—"

But I wasn't hearing his diatribe any more. As he'd spoken that first sentence, the girl with the shimmering cornsilk hair had been passing within a few feet of us, and I'd felt, rather than actually seen, her slender shoulders stiffen beneath the blue silken fabric of her blouse. And she'd hesitated for a moment in midstep, as though she were going to turn about and see which man in the universe was the one to whom the Amnesty had been given.

I watched her move out into the sunlight, crossing the field in brisk but dainty strides. Any second now, I told myself. She thinks she hasn't been seen. She's getting far enough away so that—Aha! Now!

Halfway to the ship, the girl turned, apparently busily concerned about the clasp of her handbag, as though it had come open without warning. I kept my head turned, to look as though I were watching Baxter. But my eyes were still on her. She looked at me. Then she turned and went on toward the ship.

"Had to see who I was!" I said to myself. "So now she knows I've got the Amnesty. And so—And so, what?"

5

Since antigravity, artificial gravity, and low-thrust take-offs were still in the realm of science-fiction, even the luxury liners like the Valkyrie had to bed their passengers down in shock-absorbing couches until the ship was free of gravitation. So it wasn't until we'd achieved escape velocity from Earth that I saw the girl again.

I'd decided to wander into the lounge and try to locate her. It would be an easy task if she were present, what with her startling good looks. But it turned out to be even simpler than that.

She came to me.

I was just easing myself out of my couch, when my cabin door opened and closed. And locked.

That last part intrigued me even before I turned about. I was wondering what sort of menace I had to meet, and bewailing the fact that the collapser was still in my luggage, when I saw who my visitor was. I started to smile, but the smile left as I saw the saw-edged steak knife in her hand.

"Listen, whoever you are!" she said. Her voice was low, angrily intense, but still a pleasure to hear, somehow.

"I'm listening, I assure you!" I said, politely. "A voice like yours doesn't caress these tired old eardrums every day."

She accorded my compliment a smile, but it was a bleak one, and there was a certain wry lift to her left eyebrow. "Very suave, I'm sure," she said. "But I'm not in the mood, thank you. Now, you just sit down on your bunk and behave, and—"

"Mind if I get a cigarette?" I asked, gesturing toward my traveling case. I tried to be casual about it, but I must have failed. I lose my head around women, as I've said.

"I'll get them for you," she said, waving the knife's glittering blade at me. I moved away and sat on the edge of my bunk. She flicked the clasp open, and spread the two halves apart. There were two shirts and some underwear in the case, plus the collapser. Not a cigarette to be seen. She looked at me, narrow-eyed.

"I don't smoke," I explained weakly.

"You Amnesty-bearers!" she grated between even, white teeth. "Ready to destroy everybody with impunity, aren't you! You wouldn't even wait to find out what I wanted!"

"I haven't said a word," I pointed out delicately.

"You lied about the cigarettes," she accused.

"How would you treat a stranger who burst into your cabin with an unsheathed knife?" I said, exasperated.

She looked down at the knife, and reddened. "Maybe I was a bit abrupt about this. It's just that—" Her face suddenly crinkled up, and her deep blue-violet eyes burst into tears. Then the knife fell to the carpet, and her face was buried in her hands. I leaned forward and removed the knife from within her reach, then took her by the shoulders.

She whimpered hopelessly, between shuddering sobs, "Am I under arrest?"

"Depends," I said. "Depends entirely on why you came in here like this. And what my possession of the Amnesty has to do with it. And how," I added, puzzled, "you seemed to know so much about Amnesty-bearers and their vile dispositions!"

She took her hands from her face, streaked with tears, and said, with a shy grin, "I was guessing at that part. I just kind of assumed they'd all be pretty intolerant. Who wouldn't be, with all that power?"

"Well, I wouldn't for one," I said defensively. "I only bite when I'm bitten."

She found a handkerchief somewhere and began sopping up the wet spots from her complexion; a complexion, I noted happily, that did not come off with water.

"Have a chair," I said, and rang for the steward. "I hope you drink?"

"Not a lot," she admitted. "But I could use one right now."

"Good," I said, watching her as she poised gracefully on the chair before my cabin's private stereo set. "By the way, my name's Jery. Jery Delvin."

She flushed scarlet again, and said, "Mine is White."

"First name?" I asked. She paused. "What is your first name?"

She looked at the carpet. "Snow," she said softly.

"For real?" I said. "Like with the dwarfs?"

She nodded, as one who'd been over the same conversational ground many wearisome times in the past. "Mother was a Walt Disney fan, back in the Age of Movies."

I shook my head, and rang for the steward again. "I think we both could use a drink."

Later, the puzzled steward departed for the dining salon to return the steak knife which Snow had "accidentally" picked up. We sipped our drinks in mutual silence for a minute or two, regarding one another over the rims of our tumblers. To me, Snow was looking better by the minute.