Day of Truth Read online

  I had somehow pictured Heljanita’s castle as being mounted on the very summit of a great peak. But this was a relatively small mountain, and it no longer had a peak. The banks of cloud concealed nothing except the fact that there was nothing there. The summit of the slopes brought us to the rim of a gigantic bowl. We perched on the jagged ledge and looked out into nowhere. We could not see up into the cloud, nor could we see far round the rim. But we could see down quite clearly. We could see all of the pitted, pockmarked wall of heat-blasted rock which swept away in front of us into the flat floor of the vast crater. Whatever had happened had been drastic and neat. There were no great fissures, no loose boulders. It was as though the mountain had been hollowed out first, and then had its thin roof blasted out of the way—simply evaporated.

  “Volcanic eruption?” suggested Comarre, but there was no need to answer him. Nobody was sure what Heljanita had done, but we were all impressed. The idea flashed across my mind that he had blown up the fortress, time machine and all. But I banished that with the volcano to the realms of rank improbability.

  “Let’s go,” I said.

  “Which way?” asked Lestock.

  I briefly contemplated going down, but it was obvious that going round was much safer and likelier to lead to a sight of our destination.

  Pia and Heli were scared again, but this time they didn’t retreat right away into themselves. They moved a little closer to us. I had won a minor victory in that battle, at least.

  We walked slowly and uncomfortably on the uneven ledge with fog-shrouded slopes of unknown sheerness on one side and the frightening black drop on the other. There was never any danger, though. At its narrowest there was a good twelve to fifteen feet of safe ground to walk upon, and for the most part the outer edge of the rim did not fall away too sharply, so far as we could see. Walking was a lot easier and safer, because there was no snow. The ground was still warm to the touch.

  And so we reached Heljanita’s citadel without too much trouble and without a single shot fired. I felt sure that if Heljanita knew that we were coming, he would have had toys out on the ridge to meet us. It was a hopeful sign.

  We squinted up through the fog at the fortress, from what we hoped was a safe distance. We could see very little. It was not very impressive, not even as impressive as Darkscar’s group of tall, square buildings on Despair. The tower was small and rounded, and did not look as though it had been built to withstand any kind of an attack. This was not that encouraging, however. A party of eight hardly constituted a full frontal attack. We had to operate by stealth.

  “Now what?” I asked, handing back the voice of command to Darkscar.

  “I’d like to find a less direct means of entry than the door,” he said.

  “He’s unlikely to have dug any secret tunnels with convenient entrances some distance from the tower,” I pointed out. But I was wrong. He had.

  While Darkscar and I were looking up, Comarre and Diall were looking down, for no real reason. And they could see very clearly the entrances to the tunnels by which Heljanita’s toys had gained access to the hollow center of the mountain. When our attention was drawn to the dots of darkness set in the base of the gray black walls, we managed to pick out more objects set in the walls, including the batteries which Darkscar claimed must have been used to blast away the roof of the mountain.

  “It isn’t going to be easy, getting down there,” I said.

  “None of it is easy,” replied Darkscar.

  It is always more difficult and dangerous to go down a bad face of rock than to come up it. As least, I thought as we went down, if the supposed tunnels are only holes in the rock, we won’t have quite as much trouble coming back.

  We began the descent with little delay and no special preparation. The pockmarks and scars made abundant footholds, and the gentleness of the slope occasionally permitted us to make a substantial fraction of the descent on foot, as though walking carefully down steep stairs. Pia and Heli had very little difficulty. Wet rocks without snow and ice were child’s play to them. Instead of the snow, we had a new problem. The rock was extremely hot inside the crevices, and often too warm for comfort outside them.

  We sustained no bums, but only by virtue of singed gloves and charred boots.

  I suppose we were lucky to get down in one piece. We tended to take a cavalier attitude to what was, after all, a difficult climb. But none of us seemed to think of the possibility that we could get so close to the citadel and still not reach it. No one dropped a rifle, let alone himself.

  Once inside the tunnels, our recklessness disappeared, and we were all caution and alertness. We carried our guns as though we meant to use them. And we walked as silently as possible.

  The tunnels were lit by widely spaced lamps all on a single power cable. The light was dim and had an odd reddish tinge. It was meant for the electronic eyes of toys rather than for a convenience of men. Warm air drifted through the tunnels, and neat steps carried them spiraling upward toward Heljanita’s abode. We selected one at random and began to toil upward. We were tired now and feeling the results of our exertions. Our fight against the elements of Aetema was over, and we were back in the worlds of men and supermen. The real war was just beginning.

  There was no time to rest. Darkscar’s intuition was nagging him, telling him that the battle between the toys and the Confederacy might now be on and there was no time to lose.

  About halfway up—I judge—we came to the door. We hadn’t really expected to simply walk in on Heljanita. But we hadn’t expected to find a barrier as strong as this one. It was shielded by omega-energy. Our rifles had little or no chance of burning through it. We were emphatically locked out.

  “It has to be opened from the inside,” said Darkscar. “There isn’t even a gap for a key.”

  “If we shoot the shield down, he’ll certainly know we’re here,” added Diall.

  “We can’t shoot the shield down,” I said. “Eight rifles haven’t that much power.”

  “We’ll have to go round,” said Darkscar. He put his hand out to feel the limit of the shield. It was only a couple of inches thick. The thing was, how thick was the door?

  The only other way was to go back again and find another way in. None of us liked that idea. Blasting our way in was courting disaster. It was ridiculous to expect that it would go unnoticed. It spoke of extreme temerity that we should be here at all, let alone that we should blast our way in.

  “We’re more likely to get away with blasting down here than out on top,” said Comarre. “At least we’re in the middle of the mountain here. There’s still a lot of tunnel between us and the top. If we can get away with it anywhere, it’s here.”

  The chances of finding a way of entry which did not require blasting—especially bearing in mind the fact that Heljanita had taken the precaution of shielding this door—seemed somewhat remote. There was nothing else to do.

  We retired both females with Diall to a safe distance. The. remaining five of us adjusted our positions so that we were all secure ready to fire at the same spot. Five beams concentrated onto a square foot of rock is a great deal of power, but there was a lot of rock to be burnt away. One rifle would have taken an eternity, and it seemed an incredibly long time using five. Luckily, the door was only as thick as the shield. There is no point in making a shielded door a foot thick. What a shield doesn’t keep out, a foot of metal certainly won’t.

  We choked on the smoke and ash, but held our aim. Most of the debris was blasted clear on the other side of the door, for which we were duly grateful. The beams didn’t disintegrate most of the rock, just melted it or fragmented it

  As the gap widened, we advanced to get a clearer shot, to make sure that the tunnel we were making was wide enough both to get into and out of. We wanted to keep the power waste as low as possible. Already we were running the five rifles low on power. I would not have cared to put my trust in one’s lasting through a protracted gun battle. I only hoped that the toys would be fe
w and not alerted. The mess of molten magma flowed both ways from our gap and solidified two or three steps down. We avoided it successfully when we got in really close. The air was full of stinking dust and ash. The air itself seemed to be burning. Our means of entry to the fortress might have been effective, but it certainly was not neat.

  We persevered, and we succeeded. Then we had to wait. The tunnel was wide enough to squeeze through but far from cool enough. It would be some time before we dared risk it I visualized toys sitting upstairs with rifles poised to pick up off one at a time as we went round the door. We could see some of the corridor beyond but only a narrow sliver. Anything could have been on the other side of the door.

  We waited in tense silence, listening for what we might not be able to see.

  And we heard a soft shuffle of footsteps descending stairs. Darkscar’s lips curled to form the word “toy.” Every one of us held his or her breath. The even, sliding whisper sounded loud in our ears, although one sigh or cough from any of us would have drowned it. The very quietness of the footsteps was inhuman.

  Slowly, I moved the barrel of my rifle round to point into the gap in the wall, which still radiated red heat that was visible six or seven feet downward. It began to be painful to keep my breath down. I prayed that neither Ka nor Heli would give us away.

  A metal hand appeared in the gap, and the footsteps ceased. There was a pause, and then with a sinuous wriggle, the toy slid its body through the hole. Somehow, it avoided touching the wall. The instant its red eyes rounded the angle of the door, it saw us. It stopped. But it couldn’t turn. There wasn’t room.

  I stared into the oval patches of red that were its eyes, and the eyes seemed to stare back, and a long second passed while the toy was frozen in comically human uncertainty. Then I fired.

  My rifle was still on maximum power, because I had not thought to lower the discharge. The silver temples burst into greenish fire almost instantaneously. The red eyes shivered into black dust, and the inner workings of the head shone brightly as the metal melted. Then every- thing disappeared in a cloud of black smoke which reeked of plastic.

  Absently, as I stopped the burst of energy, I turned the discharge control to a more moderate intensity. Even while I did so, I never took my eyes off the toy. The silver shape slumped forward, absurdly like a dead man, and lay in the angle of the bypass we had created, sandwiched between hot rock and hot metal. Its outer skin began to melt in one or two places.

  “There was only one,” I said, to break the silence.

  I turned round when I received no reply. The Felides and Darkscar himself all seemed more surprised than relieved. But Pia and Heli were staring, fascinated, at the first dead stranger they had ever seen, with its wire-and-plastic guts spilling out in a burnt ruin from the molten loculus of its head.

  “We’d better move,” said Comarre.

  I began tentatively to pull the toy out of the hole and out of the way.

  “I can get through,” I said. “But can you?”

  The Felide looked critically at the size of the hole and nodded. I didn’t believe that he was all that confident. He just wanted to be on the other side of the door where he could see the enemy coming, and he didn’t mind risking a few bums to be there.

  “You think they know this one’s dead?” asked Valens. “Up there?”

  “I hope not,” I replied, without enthusiasm.

  “It’s as well it came through instead of going back,” Darkscar said.

  “Machines which make decisions make the wrong ones occasionally,” I replied.

  “It’s more likely a case of machines that follow orders blindly occasionally run into trouble,” said Comarre, with what I thought at the time might be a rare flash of insight.

  I succeeded in pulling the metal corpse clear of the hole in the wall. As I threw it down the steps, I wondered how all the control necessary to operate the metal body was crammed into such a slender frame. Perhaps they could have been a lot better than they were. After all, Heljanita was only a toymaker.

  Could he actually reduce civilization to ruins, I wondered, with nothing but toys?

  I decided that depended on the game he was playing.

  We went on up the stairs and met no more opposition, for the time being.

  DEATHDANCER

  Judson Deathdancer is not a clever man, but at least he is clever enough to be conscious of the fact. Unfortunately, he is something of a living caricature. He is large and a little clumsy. He has a heavy black beard and a formidable countenance, but a gentle disposition. He is a great fighter and a generous man. He conforms all too well to the popular image of a Falcorian. He is always sensitive about being seemingly forced to act the part of the heavy-handed fool. He is always a little overcautious and a little too ashamed of his mistakes. And so he is always a little reluctant to assert himself, unsure of command. While Cain Rayshade jealously seeks greatness, Judson Deathdancer finds it suddenly thrust upon him.

  During the Beast war, he fell tragically easy prey to Ralph Eagleheart’s persuasive tongue. In the seven years and more following the Beast war, he permits Cain Ray-shade to assert himself rather more than another man might have. He needs Rayshade, for both moral and substantial support.

  Deathdancer does not care for the real meat of power and command. To him leadership involves urging a band of faithful followers to greater efforts for a limited and strictly defined length of time. It is quite a different thing to handle the administration of the Confederacy, finely balanced on the edge of collapse, for an indefinite period. He is no tactician, no diplomat, and yet he manages. For seven years, the Confederacy remains uneasily intact. At his best, Deathdancer is uncomfortable, at his worst unreliable. He cannot handle difficult situations with an easy confidence, often because he is too scared of failure even to try. But he survives and is loved for it. He is the figurehead of the Confederacy. Rayshade can no more dispense with him than vice versa. Yet each man feels the other to be basically untrustworthy.

  Deathdancer does not like Rayshade, but he is ashamed of his dislike. He respects Rayshade’s greater intelligence but refuses to establish any kind of a bond of friendship. He prefers to remain distant and courteous, which Rayshade feels more intensely than he would open distrust. Deathdancer feels the gulf too, because that is not his way in the normal course of affairs. The absurdity of the situation does not prevent its perpetuation and it gets worse rather than better, even in the face of the common enemy—Heljanita.

  But the Confederacy goes on because neither Rayshade nor Deathdancer wants to lose it. They are both Beasts, both good men. Their personal problems dominate the way they think—as indeed they must—but both of them do feel a kind of duty to their position.

  The Confederacy not only holds the key to Rayshade’s ambition but also his beliefs. And Deathdancer, at least, has a conscience.

  INTERSTELLAR MELODRAMA AGAIN

  The magnetism of battle had not died in Judson Deathdancer. The Beast Lord of Falcor was a Beast to the core. The Beast war was only a memory; it had not been his war. The massacre in the House of Stars was forgotten; it had been none of his doing. Like everyone else, he remembered and regretted, but only occasionally. The past was the past. It was tomorrow that was threatened. Deathdancer was still a warrior, still a hero.

  There was a fabulous sensation of power beneath his fingertips as he hurled the colossal battleship around the sky. He was used to the feeling of strength, of the ability to compete successfully with nature, and the battleship felt just like that. True, it was slower than the smaller ships. If the Beasts were forced to flee at maximum velocity, the battleships would be left stranded like lame ducks. True, the drain on the power banks was terrific, even keeping the ship in straight flight. The Falcor had a short life expectancy. After one battle, it would be well nigh useless until its central column had been completely rebuilt. But for the moment, while it was at its peak in its own element of frantic combat, the battleship was an extension of Judson
Deathdancer. It was all power and glory.

  He felt the Beast fleet drifting apart as the clumsy, slow cylindrical net of the toys was blasted apart with a curling sweep of the Beast formation. He tried to urge the wayward fractions back together, but with only limited success.

  He knew the moment was approaching when the real battle would be on. When the formation began to dissolve, and the toys knew they had the upper hand, then the killing would begin, toe to toe, strength against strength. It was the only kind of fighting that the Falcorian recognized as real. It was the Felide way. In the Beast war, it had always been Deathdancer who bore the brunt of the Human attacks. He had always been in the center, the anchor of the Beast army.

  His own wing of the arrowhead was disintegrating faster than Rayshade’s. His ship was going to bear the first few moments of the toys’ power. He was going to be the one who found out how good the battleships really were, how good the toys really were, and how good the Beasts really were.

  Rayshade ordered three quick turns, and Deathdancer saw the fleet practically falling apart. We’ve got to do better than this, he thought. But he and Rayshade were already doing all that they could do. While he still had some coherency in his formation, Rayshade was trying desperately to part the toy fleet, spread it over the vast interstellar distances. Rayshade had to gain every inch of advantage within the next few minutes, while he still could.

  The toys tried to combat Rayshade’s cut and slash with ineffectual dabs and no real resistance. They failed, but they failed tactically. It was not that they were incapable, but simply because they were not trying. They could not fight a tight, tactical battle because they were simply not capable of it. They tried to analyze the complete situation at every second, and no computer in the galaxy was fast enough. They were always way behind Rayshade’s largely intuitive maneuvers. So they did not try to fight that way. They waited, knowing that all the time they gave away now could not hurt them in the end.