One Against the Legion Read online

  Space Vengeance!

  "I am omnipotent and omniscient. I want every man on every planet to shudder and grow pale when he thinks of Me. For I have suffered gross injuries that must be avenged..."

  This sinister message - and a loathsome serpent-like trademark were the only clues the Legion of Space had to the identity of Mankind's most evasive and horrible enemy. But meanwhile, He or It had meticulously begun to destroy the world...

  The Legion of Space was well accustomed to facing mortal peril in the black depths of outer space in order to defend humanity against its unearthly foes. But even they were to find their courage and ingenuity tested to the utmost limits in their fight against the vile phantom that called itself God and shrouded the Universe in an incredible web of terror...

  Also by JACK WILLIAMSON from GATEWAY

  The Humanoid Touch

  Manseed

  The Cometeers

  One Against the Legion

  Beachhead

  The Power of Blackness

  Terraforming Earth

  Golden Blood

  The Humanoids

  ENTER THE SF GATEWAY . . .

  Towards the end of 2011, in conjunction with the celebration of fifty years of coherent, continuous science fiction and fantasy publishing, Gollancz launched the SF Gateway.

  Over a decade after launching the landmark SF Masterworks series, we realised that the realities of commercial publishing are such that even the Masterworks could only ever scratch the surface of an author's career. Vast troves of classic SF & fantasy were almost certainly destined never again to see print. Until very recently, this meant that anyone interested in reading any of those books would have been confined to scouring second-hand bookshops. The advent of digital publishing changed that paradigm for ever.

  Embracing the future even as we honour the past, Gollancz launched the SF Gateway with a view to utilising the technology that now exists to make available, for the first time, the entire backlists of an incredibly wide range of classic and modern SF and fantasy authors. Our plan, at its simplest, was – and still is! – to use this technology to build on the success of the SF and Fantasy Masterworks series and to go even further.

  The SF Gateway was designed to be the new home of classic science fiction & fantasy – the most comprehensive electronic library of classic SFF titles ever assembled. The programme has been extremely well received and we've been very happy with the results. So happy, in fact, that we've decided to complete the circle and return a selection of our titles to print, in these omnibus editions.

  We hope you enjoy this selection. And we hope that you'll want to explore more of the classic SF and fantasy we have available. These are wonderful books you're holding in your hand, but you'll find much, much more . . . through the SF Gateway.

  www.sfgateway.com

  1

  The Deadly Invention

  “Unusual. Important. Indubitably dangerous.” The low grave voice of Commander Kalam, without losing its deliberate calm, had emphasized each word. “You have been selected for this duty, Captain Derron, because the Legion feels that you have earned implicit trust.”

  After four grim years, that scene was still as vivid in the mind of Chan Derron, as if a red-hot die had stamped it there. For that strange assignment had turned all his life, out of beckoning promise, into the dark incredible web of mystery and terror and despair.

  “Yes, sir.”

  Chan Derron saluted briskly. He stood eagerly at attention, waiting in that huge, simply furnished chamber in the Green Hall that was the office of the Commander of the Legion of Space.

  A big man, lean and trim and straight hi the green of the Legion, he looked steadfast as a statue of bronze. His hair, rebellious against the comb, was like red-bronze wire.

  His skin was deeply bronzed with space-burn. Even his eyes held glints of unchanging bronze.

  His whole bearing held a promise of uncrushable strength that it warmed the Commander’s heart to see.

  Beneath his military readiness, however, Chan Derron’s heart was thumping. He was proud of the uniform that had been his for less than a year; fiercely proud of the decorations he had already won, in the war with the Cometeers. And he was desperately eager to know what was coming next. His breath caught, and he watched the lean dark face of Jay Kalam.

  “I have ordered all of Admiral-General Samdu’s fleet to assist with this assignment—it is important enough to justify that,” the Commander was saying. “But the crucial duty is such that one ship—and one man, Captain Derron—must be trusted to carry it out.”

  Chan Derron tried to swallow the little lump of eagerness in his throat. A duly commissioned captain—he mustn’t tremble like a wide-eyed cadet. After all, he was twenty-two. But the low-voiced question startled him: “You know of Dr. Max Eleroid?”

  “Of—of course,” he stammered. “If you mean the geodesic engineer? The man who redesigned the geodyne, and invented the geopeller? At the academy we studied his text on geodesy.”

  “So you were an engineer?” The Commander faintly smiled. “Dr. Eleroid,” he said, “is probably the greatest physical scientist living—although his dread of publicity has kept him from becoming widely known. And he has just done something new.”

  Chan Derron waited, wondering.

  “This morning,” Jay Kalam said, “Eleroid came into this office, with an assistant behind him staggering under a box of equipment. He was frightened. He begged me to take him and his invention under the protection of the Legion.

  “The invention is his most important, he said, and his most dangerous. He had decided not to work it out at all, he told me—until the System was placed in danger by the coming of the Cometeers.

  “He set out to complete it, then, as a weapon. It is a little too late for the war. But he intends to entrust it to the Legion as an adjunct to AKKA in the defense of mankind.

  “Yesterday, anyhow, he found evidence that an intruder had been in his laboratory—that’s somewhere west, in the Painted Desert. This unknown spy has him baffled and very thoroughly scared. Only two people had been trusted with any details of his work, he said—his daughter, and this assistant, Jonas Thwayne. He has no clue to the spy’s identity; but he gives him credit for being a remarkably clever man.”

  The Commander straightened sternly.

  “That’s the background of the matter, Captain Derron. And here are your orders.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “We are going to aid Dr. Eleroid with a field test of this invention —it has never been tested, he says, except on the minutest scale—and then, if the test is successful, he will leave it in your hands.

  “You will go back aboard your cruiser and proceed at once to Rocky Mountain Base. There you will find awaiting you twenty workmen, with atomotored excavating equipment, explosives, and building materials. You will take them aboard, and then rise without delay on a course for the New Moon. You follow me, Captain?“

  “I do, sir.”

  “When you have reached an altitude of two thousand miles,” Jay Kalam continued, “you will open this envelope and proceed to the spot designated inside.”

  Chan Derron accepted a small green envelope, sealed with the wings of the Legion in dark green wax, and put it in an inside pocket of his tunic.

  “You will land at the designated spot, and disembark the workmen and equipment. At a point you will select, they are to dig an excavation twenty feet square and twenty deep. In that, working under your orders, they are to build a room armored with two feet of perdurite, provided with a stair and a concealed door with a special lock —you will be given the specifications.

  “This task must be completed by twelve noon, tomorrow, Legion time. You wil
l put the men and equipment back aboard the Corsair . The cruiser will return at once, under your first officer, to Rocky Mountain Base. And you, Captain Derron—”

  Chan Derron caught his breath, as the Commander suddenly rose.

  “You will remain on guard, near the hidden door. You will keep your ultrawave communicator, emergency rations, and your proton needle and bayonet. You will stand guard while Dr. Eleroid and his assistant land, enter the hidden chamber, and test the invention.

  “Finally, if the experiment is successful, Dr. Eleroid will deliver his apparatus and notes into your care, for the Legion. You will call your cruiser to return, go aboard with Eleroid, the assistant, and the machine, and come back at once to Rocky Mountain Base. Is that all clear, Captain Derron?”

  “Clear enough, sir,” said Chan Derron. “If you feel that one man is enough—”

  “Samdu’s fleet will be on duty to see that there is no outside interference,” the grave Commander assured him. “For the rest, we must rely upon secrecy, precision of action, and division of knowledge. Upon you, Captain Derron, rests the final responsibility.” His dark eyes stabbed into Chan’s. “This is as great a trust as the Legion has ever given any man, but I believe you are equal to it.”

  Chan gulped. “I’ll do my best, sir.”

  “The Legion can ask no more.”

  The matter already appeared grave enough, perhaps, but Chan Derron was not used to being depressed by the details of his duty. The mystery surrounding this affair he found pleasantly exciting, and the faint hint of danger was like a tonic to him.

  On his way back to the Corsair —the trim little geodesic cruiser that was his proud first command—he was humming a song.

  He had never been to the New Moon, then.

  But he had often seen the artificial satellite, careening backward across the sky of Earth. And soon, no doubt, with Commander Kalam trusting him with such important assignments as this, he should have a furlough earned—his heart leapt at the promise—on the gay New Moon.

  Striding toward the vast space-port that sprawled brown across the desert mesa beside the Green Hall’s slender spire, he kept time to the popular tune, whose age-hallowed sentiments ran: Where first we danced, On the bright New Moon, Where we romanced, On the far New Moon, I lost a million dollars —But I found you, dear!

  He strode aboard the slim silver Corsair . In his bright expectations, this strange duty had already taken him to some far planet. When he came to open the sealed envelope, however, his ship two thousand miles out toward the New Moon, the destination he read was back on Earth—a barren islet in the bleak Antarctic Ocean.

  The Corsair dropped among screaming birds. Chan selected a level spot on the highest granite ledge, a hundred feet above the gray unresting sea. The twenty workmen fell to. Hamming atomic drills sliced into the living rock. A web of structural metal was flung across the pit. Rock debris was fused into massive walls and roof of adamantine perdurite.

  Next day the cruiser departed on the very stroke of noon. Left alone among the settling birds, that soon covered even the hidden door, Chan Derron shuddered to something colder than the bitter south wind.

  Beyond this black pinnacle, and the green-white chaos that forever roared about its foot, the polar sea ran empty and illimitable. Low and yellowed in the gray northward sky, the sun glinted on the summits of a few icebergs. So far as he could tell, he might have been the only man upon the planet. And a sudden bleak fear rose in him, that all Commander Kalam’s elaborate precautions against the unknown spy had not been enough.

  Once more, anxiously, he inspected his proton blaster. Perfected since the cometary war to replace the lighter proton pistols that had served so long, it projected an intense jet of nucleonic bullets far swifter and more deadly than any solid projectile. The holster became a stock, for accurate long range work. A folding bayonet snapped out for use at close quarters.

  Chan tried to find comfort in the fine, silent mechanism, in its chromium trimness and its balanced weight. But the lonely wail of the bitter wind, the empty hostility of the cold sky and the ice-studded sea, awoke in his heart a brooding apprehension.

  He shouted with relief when the Bellatrix—the long bright flagship of Admiral-General Hal Samdu—plunged down through a cloud of shrieking birds. Two men were put off, and a heavy wooden box. The Bellatrix roared back spaceward. In seconds, it had vanished.

  Chan Derron had never seen Dr. Eleroid, but he knew the scientist now from his portrait in the geodesic text. Eleroid was a big, slightly awkward, slow-moving man, with a red, rugged, genial face. But for his eyes, he might have been taken for a butcher or a bartender. His eyes, however, wide-set and seen through heavy lenses, possessed the magnetic power of genius.

  Eleroid was still afraid. That was obvious from his anxious peering about the islet, from a sudden start when the white-cloaked assistant touched him, from the relief on his broad face when Chan strode to meet him.

  “Glad to thee you, Captain.” His deep soft voice had an occasional lisp. “Where is the vault.

  We must have them!”

  Chan indicated the door, disguised with a slab of natural rock, and returned to help the small, perspiring assistant with the box. Dr. Eleroid watched it very anxiously, and lent his own strength to help them down the narrow stair.

  They set the box down in the middle of the bare, square, gray-armored room. The assistant was rubbing at red weals on his thin hands. Suddenly he began to sneeze, and covered his face with his handkerchief. Max Eleroid gestured imperatively toward the stair.

  “You are to stand guard, Captain.” His voice was hoarse with tension. “We’ll lock the room. I’ll call you, by ultrawave, when we are done.” His trembling hand touched Chan Derron’s arm. “Keep a vigilant watch, Captain,” he begged. “For the the safety of the System may be at stake.”

  The massive door thudded shut. Chan moved a little away, and the birds settled over it again.

  Rock and sky and sea were empty as before. The south wind was more biting, the northward sun feebler. Pacing back and forth, he shuddered again.

  His apprehension, he was trying to tell himself, was silly—when something touched him. At first he thought that only a bird had brushed him. Then he felt the fatal lightness of his belt and his hand flashed with well-trained swiftness for his blaster.

  He found that it was gone!

  He stared around him, bewildered. Rock and sky and sea were ominously vacant as ever. What could have happened to the weapon? He could see no possible answer.

  The screaming birds mocked his sanity. This clearly meant danger—the operation of some unknown and hostile agency. But how was he to meet it? Samdu’s guarding fleet must be somewhere not far beyond that bleak gray sky. He would call the Admiral—But his own signal was already humming from the little black disk of the ultrawave communicator, that hung by its cord from his neck. He touched the receiver key and slapped the instrument to his ear.

  “Help!” It was Max Eleroid. “Thith man—” The lisping voice was queerly muffled, choked. “Thith man—he ith not—”

  An odd purring hum came out of the communicator, and then it was silent.

  2

  Adequate Evidence

  The same disturbing message had been picked up by the fleet. When the Bellatrix

  landed, not an hour afterward, Chan Derron was found staggering aimlessly about the rock. “My blaster’s gone!” he gasped to the Admiral-General. “If it hadn’t been taken, I might have been able to cut a way in, in time to help.”

  “Where is your vault?” demanded the rugged old spaceman. His huge ugly face was ashen gray, and the anxious gestures of his great scarred hands had already set all the stiff white mass of his hair on end. “We’ll have a look.”

  Chan pointed out the scarcely visible seam.

  “It’s locked.” His voice trembled with the dread of the hour that he had waited.

  “Eleroid locked it, on the inside. I tried it, after he called. You’ll
have to cut through the perdurite.”

  “If we can—” Hal Samdu’s battered hands clutched, hi tortured indecision. “If only old Giles Habibula were here! He has a gift for locks—but he’s off on Phobos, beyond the sun from us now, eating and drinking himself to death at John Star’s table.” He shook his head. “I don’t know quite what to do—”

  “We can’t wait, sir,” Chan Derron urged him. “I’m afraid to think what must have happened in that room. Haven’t you equipment, on the battleship, that can cut through that door—”

  His voice dropped into a chasm of incredulity.

  For the huge Legionnaire had bent and seized the projecting knob of rock that formed a disguised handle for the massive slab of armor, balanced on its pivots in the doorway, as if he would break the lock with his own unaided muscles. And the door swung smoothly open.

  Hal Samdu straightened to stare grimly at Chan. “Locked, eh?”

  Chan Derron stepped dazedly back, and a black wind of terror blew cold about his heart.

  “It was locked!” he gasped. “I tried it!”

  But a cold deadliness of doubt glittered abruptly in the blue eyes of the Admiral-General. His big hand deliberately hauled out his own proton needle and he covered the weaponless Chan.

  “Hold him, men,” he commanded. “I’m going to look inside.” Hal Samdu and his officers went down into the small square chamber. In the garish light of the tube still burning against the ceiling, they found Dr. Max Eleroid and the man in white. They were both sprawled still, and the slighter body of the assistant was already stiffening into the rigor of death.

  Rivulets and pools of darkening blood stained the new gray perdurite. Both men had been stabbed. And the weapon still protruding from the back of Dr. Max Eleroid was a service blaster, of the new Legion type, holster-stock and bayonet locked in place.