The Chaos Weapon Read online

  “Which could explain the power difference between the potential energy available in Edel, and the energy needed to satisfy your Chaos equations,” supplied Hover, who had come up from the rear.

  “You know, Cass, I think you reached that point ahead of me. Damn, I should have thought of it before! That sort of power isn’t available to that character down there. Somebody or something else with a fantastic control of Chaos technique must be doing the manipulation.”

  “I’m still unhappy,” said Rutter, “about the idea of a disaster hanging around waiting for the arrival of a man.” He turned as a messenger approached and began to scan the information he was handed. “The results of our checks on the cat. As I suspected, it was out of New Sark. Chartered from a transit outfit by two men who came in from outspace a few hours earlier. They gave their names as Jequn and Asbeel.”

  “Hmm!” said the dark man. “Of all times and places!” Lines of deep speculation spread across his brow. “What else did you find out?”

  “The Civil Guard at New Sark ran the immigration checkouts through the galactic identifile for us. It drew a blank. Their stated planet of origin doesn’t exist, nor, officially, do the men. Their ship is berthed at New Sark spaceport. It came from so far out in deep-space that the spaceport officials can’t even classify the drive.”

  “I’ll bet they can’t!” This latter remark was Saraya’s aside to himself. “Captain Rutter, I want the Civil Guard instructed to attempt to arrest the man in the cat if he returns to New Sark. I say attempt advisedly, because they’ll have to be damn clever to succeed. Marshal Hover, you see that fellow down there on the plain. I want him sane and alive and delivered to ChaosCenter on Terra. It doesn’t matter what that assignment costs or how the goal is achieved, just make sure that it happens. You’ve Galactic Override Authority for the mission.”

  “You really think he’s that important, Saraya?”

  “I know he is. There’s nobody more important in our galaxy right now. Or potentially more dangerous. He’s one of a kind—and where his kind go, that’s where they point the Chaos Weapon.”

  “The Chaos Weapon? What in creation is that?”

  “I wish to hell I knew.”

  “I’ll go get him,” Hover volunteered. “You can explain the whole thing to me later. Somebody break out a flier for me.”

  “I’ll come with you,” said Rutter.

  “No!” The dark man stepped in decisively. “That character’s going to be well into Edel before the marshal can reach him. Whatever Chaos has waiting for Edel is going to break right then. If we read the energy equation right, there won’t be many survivors left. The marshal has had special preparation for survival in such emergencies—you haven’t.”

  Reluctantly the captain watched as Hover pulled on his warm-suit. Against the dark recess of the locker, Rutter could have sworn that something furry flickered above the marshal’s shoulder. Yet when he examined the phenomenon more carefully, no trace of it could be seen. Puzzled, he checked radio contact with the departing space-marshal, then turned to concentrate on monitoring the progress of the lone figure clearing the plain and now almost at the city’s outer limits. Something curious about the atmosphere made the image strangely double-edged.

  TWO

  WITH the screens studiously refocused, the progress of the man trudging through the snow was followed with agonized concern. Speculation about the nature of the netted package he dragged behind him proved singularly fruitless. The utility of such a burden was an open question. Shortly the man and his bundle topped a rise and appeared to make easier progress along more compacted tracks until at last he entered the outer limits of the city. In the meantime Hover’s flier had landed well clear of the houses, and the marshal could be seen making fast progress after his quarry on foot.

  If the fellow was aware of the flier’s arrival, he gave no sign of it, but concentrated instead on dragging his load over the smoothest terrain available. He appeared to be always watching the forbidding snow-mass hanging above the scarp. Rutter had switched on some of the cameras with telephoto lenses that had been trained on the city itself and obtained some close-ups of the back of the man for whom destiny appeared to have such a strange affinity. The pictures yielded no new information, but all were haloed by the same optical fringe that was gradually narrowing the field of view, giving the figure an apparently radiant outline which under the circumstances was most disconcerting.

  Despite this effect, however, it was obvious that the man had both purpose and objective. Although many times the watchers lost his image as he passed behind some of Edel’s buildings, he always came back into view at a predictable point, assuming he was taking the shortest route straight to the city’s center.

  “Find me a map of Edel,” the dark man said suddenly. “We keep speaking of Chaos Omega, but I don’t think any of us have looked to see what is actually at epicenter.”

  Rutter produced a map and spread it over a console. It showed a city plan typical of many established on planets after the Great Exodus from Terra. The early fathers had attempted a geometrical design radiating from a central focus. Now the centerpoint was ringed by the vast restructured administrative complex for the local government, and the seat of the Council for the Monai Space Confederation. Under the Chaos Omega point, however, Edel’s original government buildings had found a second lease on life through conversion into a commercial interspace trading center.

  As he turned back to watch the trudging figure, the breath caught sharply in Rutter’s throat. In the middle of a broad highway not far from the Chaos Omega epicenter and at a point where he was clearly in view, the man turned suddenly and ran back toward the package attached to the end of the rope. For one moment he was looking almost directly into the distant cameras, and although the warm-suit hid most of his features there was no mistaking the level of tension on his face.

  “This is it!” said Saraya. “He knows something we don’t.” He seized the radio handset. “Marshal—watch out for yourself. Something’s about to break. Our friend looks as if he’d had a vision of hell itself.”

  “Check! I can just see him. But there’s nothing down here which explains …”

  The man had dropped to his knees and was tearing urgently at his snow-covered bundle. The purpose of this maneuver was not apparent, but suddenly something blossomed close to the kneeling man. It looked like a white, expanding ball. The distortion of the picture became almost complete, and the final phase of the action was lost in a muted blur.

  All eyes in the lab-ship returned to the monitors checking the physical parameters which might signal the onset of catastrophe. It was not the monitors but their senses, however, that finally revealed the numbing truth. With a burst of subterranean thunder, the whole valley shook so violently that even on the great plateau the stabilizers of the lab-ships had difficulty maintaining the vessels in their vertical position. One of the technicians gave a cry of horrified realization as the nature of the disaster became apparent. With a fantastic heave, the whole valley floor rose and shook itself then settled again to leave a jagged chasm extending east to west approximately along the line previously followed by the Spring River.

  With the first recoil of the shock, the interference on the screens had cleared itself. Before their uncomprehending eyes there flowed wave upon wave of subterranean movement which rippled the valley’s surface as if the scene were being moved from below by a succession of gigantic underground rollers. The effect was that of a waterless sea, with dry waves breaking angrily against the foot of Edel scarp and drowning whole sectors of the city with the fall of its mirthless crests. The part of the city that did not sink into the fractured terrain was hopelessly fragmented by the tides of heaving bedrock. The immortal stability of the land on which man had dared to build was now part of a demon conspiracy apparently designed to reduce everything to one flat, featureless plain of scarcely compacted dust.

  Nor was this all. With open-mouthed dismay and fascination th
e watchers saw the huge avalanche gaining momentum as the shockwaves provoked it to move down toward Edel. Even the mountains themselves had been torn apart, and large fragments broke free and slipped with the mighty mass to pile high and dangerously on the granite backbone behind the inclined face of the scarp. The bruising upheaval had cracked the foundations of the great granite rock itself. Without warning, the entire face began to lean outward under the weight, and to fall with a calamitous slowness, crushing almost a third of the shattered city. This was followed by the full weight of the avalanche, which, now released from its former constraint, proceeded to bury much of what the scarp face had left uncrushed.

  “Q.E.D.!” said the dark man after a long period of silence. His voice was one from which all trace of emotion had been carefully strained. “Rutter, are you still in touch with Marshal Hover?”

  “In the middle of all that?” Rutter was incredulous. He looked bitterly across the altered landscape over which hung a low cloud of settling dust.

  “Keep trying to make contact until you either get an answer or you can prove he’s dead. But primarily concentrate your resources on finding the man Hover was following. Unlikely as it may seem, there’s a very strong chance he’s still alive. If he’s who and what I think he is, he would have entered that situation very well prepared. And I want him, Captain. Knowing what he knows could be just about the most important imperative for the survival of the human race. Is that understood?”

  “No,” said Rutter. “But that won’t interfere with the execution of your orders. We’ll call for disaster backup, then set one of the lab-ships down on the city itself. If any people are left down there in fragments larger than pieces of mince, we’ll fetch them back in plastic bags and you can sort the bits out later.”

  A technician reported directly to Saraya. “Look, the cat’s coming back.” He pointed to the terrain scanner, which showed quite plainly the vehicle moving back over its original course. “It must have been waiting just out of range.”

  “That means he too expects to find a very special survivor,” said the strange dark man, wrapping his black cloak closer round his shoulders.

  In the seconds before the maelstrom broke, Hover had come into clear sight of his quarry. The man had been kneeling before his bundle on the ground, tearing away the snow-packed netting which concealed a streamlined pod underneath. The apparatus was not familiar to the marshal, but its purpose rapidly became apparent. When the first subterranean shock pitched the ground as if it were the deck of a storm-tossed ship, the man had opened the pod and brought forth something that spread outward and upward like the blossoming of a great white flower. As the flower bloomed, the man stepped into its center; then the great petals closed around him to form a continuous cocoon that continued to expand until it formed a ball of some five meters diameter.

  All at once the marshal understood. Although this contraption was of strange design, it had to be some form of space-disaster capsule. Out in the highway well clear of any buildings, the man was now encapsulated in a womb formed from a series of super-tough concentric balloons. Nothing but a massive crushing force could hurt him, and cradled against all shock he could encounter most of the stresses of a space disaster and still survive. Furthermore, because of its relative lightness and its spherical shape, the sphere was perfectly suited to ride free upon a fragmenting surface where a heavier structure would have been trapped and crushed.

  Further consideration of the object was terminated by the necessity for the marshal to attempt to secure his own survival. Before he could decided upon a plan, the ground under his feet again reared crazily up beneath him. The pavement, not designed for such plasticity, shattered and split with a thousand fissures that opened and closed like hungry jaws, each with the capability of swallowing a man. Thrown heavily to the ground, Hover only narrowly missed death when hurtling masonry split off from a nearby building and deluged on to the roadway at his side. Twisting round, he was attempting to assess the degree of his present danger, when another wave of underground movement proved likely to throw the remainder of the shattered building down on top of him.

  “Help me, Talloth! I’m in danger!” His cry was directed to the insubstantial something that hovered over his shoulder.

  “Do you believe in me?”

  “Hell of a time you choose to ask questions. Don’t I share my existence with you? What do you want—blood?”

  The ground reared and bucked beneath him like a crazed animal. The paving split wide, and before Hover could swing to avoid it, he rolled into a shifting, opening pit.

  “Talloth …!”

  With the passing of the earth-spasm, the sides of the pit began to close. Teetering above, on slowly buckling skeletons of steel, the entire line of buildings near him broke into catastrophic collapse. The falling rubble poured like a cascade of furious water to bury the spot where the marshal was already trapped in his narrowing grave.

  “Tall …”

  Time was arrested.

  The whole universe seemed gripped by a mighty hand which forbade motion. Masonry descending from the sky froze into breathless immobility and ceased to tumble. The edges of the jagged pit into which Hover had fallen, were held apart. And, alone of all things present, only the marshal still had movement. Then time moved back in discrete quantum steps. He had fallen/was falling/would fall—was on ground he knew would break and finally had moved away from the potential chasm and out of the path of the deluge of falling bricks.

  Then Talloth, the brown, leathery, symbiotic god who lived on Hover’s shoulder, relaxed his grip on time’s insistent progress. For a few furious seconds the rate of movement around them seemed to multiply, with crevices opening and closing like snapping jaws and whole walls dropping from the sky. The accelerated heaving of the ground produced shocks which threw the stumbling marshal up into the air. But he landed on his back and waited doggedly while the universe wound slowly down to normal pace.

  As time came back to its accepted rate, Hover sat up to find himself in a landscape altered beyond all recognition. Edel was a heap of pulverized ruins, the massive scarp had all but disappeared, and fully a third of the former territory was in the process of being covered by the detritus of an avalanche of such proportions that any search for survivors in the areas would be futile.

  Shaking the fragments of his recent experience from his head, Hover attempted to explore his own situation. He was severely bruised, and his right leg was extremely painful when he attempted to stand. He reckoned, however, that no bones had been broken. The equipment packs at his waist and chest had survived intact. But when he examined the sad state of his communications set, flattened as if by hammer blows, he realized how narrowly Talloth had timed his escape.

  “Thanks, pal,” he muttered to the quivering insubstantiality on his shoulder. “But you cut that one remarkably fine.”

  “If you have criticisms,” said Talloth, “I can always arrange to put you back and leave you there.”

  “Forget it!” Hover was searching the scene for signs of the white bubble into which his quarry had retreated. Initially finding no sign, he considered that it must have somehow become crushed and buried. Then he noticed a whiter patch on the earth-mixed snow and found the open and deflated bubble abandoned and empty. Nearby, a youth lay dead from what appeared to be a deliberate head-wound. Of his quarry there was no sign at all.

  This situation raised problems. There was virtually no way in which the individual he was seeking could be distinguished from the scattered survivors who occupied the shattered scene. His only hope was to continue toward what he judged to have been the Chaos Omega epicenter in the hope that something could be found to explain what had brought the man to Edel in the first place.

  The buildings of the Monai Space Confederation had been built on a vast structural raft. At first sight, the buildings themselves appeared relatively undamaged, until one considered that not a single wall could now consist of more than broken fragments adhering to a b
uckled frame. Beyond these, an older building had suffered almost complete collapse as the outer walls had shattered, though the strength of the reinforced floors had remained. A fallen sign told him that here an interspace trading station had been located, and it was a leap of intuition that made Hover decided he was now probably looking for two men instead of one.

  He turned back then, trying to follow the route by which he had entered Edel. The way was mainly destroyed, and many detours were necessary where the roads had been obliterated by piles of rubble. Remembering Saraya’s injunction about the importance of his mission he had to force himself to harden his heart and to ignore the screams of people trapped in the wreckage or the pleas of those trying to attempt a rescue. Sometimes the resolve was painfully difficult to maintain as anguished reproaches followed his departing steps. But the mandate of Override Authority which had been impressed upon him necessarily outranked all other considerations.

  Finally he came to the end of the city ruins and stood on the edge of the plain. Even here the scene was nearly unrecognizable. The once supreme flatness of the great wasteland was now ridged and broken as if a giant had raked it with a careless harrow. He waited, alert and expectant, examining every shadow of a slowly closing dusk. One of the lab-ships took off from the plateau and passed overhead on a high trajectory that took it well behind him into the center of Edel. He noted the fact without particular concern. His own gamble was that the man he was looking for had come into Edel to collect someone else. Whether or not the attempt had been successful, that man at least would attempt to leave again, probably by the same route he had used to enter. Hover was maintaining a staunch position with the intention of making that escape impossible.

  Before long he had evidence that his intuition had been correct. Although he could see nothing, he could hear the complaint of a snow-cat’s engine as it strained over the ridged terrain. It was making for a point well to the left of his present position, and he moved rapidly to effect an interception, drawing the safety rings from his weapons’ pouches as he ran through the closing darkness. His fingers selected a shock pellet, and he slipped it into a projector as soon as he saw the dim outline of the cat heading in from the plain.