BACKLASH

  By Jack Williamson

  Sometimes it isn’t the best possible idea to go back in time and

  have your enemy killed. That can make things even worse—

  From Astounding Science Fiction August 1941 edition – Short Story

  Illustrated by M Isip

  Synopsis : Curiously the best way to annihilate the enemy was

  Not to kill him, but to let him escape entirely!

  Now the blizzard had died to a fitful wailing. The aurora shimmered through a dark haze of wind-driven ice crystals. Drifted snow covered half the grounded rocket. Frost cracked sharply in the tiny cabin, and the girl woke.

  Challis, cramped with chill in the pilot seat, thought she could have been beautiful. But her pinched face had the blue pallor of the concentration camps, and her thin body was shapeless in the shoddy gray of the New State labor battalions.

  She sat up quickly, stiff with sleep, yet somehow graceful. Challis wondered what would happen when she met Captain Dent. Vic Dent was his friend, but a handsome devil, too. And there were few unattached women in the Pantechnicon.

  She went tense, shuddering.

  “Cold, Nadya?” asked the lean American.

  “The Yellow Guards”—her dark eyes flicked past him, quick and wary as the eyes of some hunted animal—“I thought I heard them.” She peered anxiously through a frost-rimmed port, into the thick antarctic twilight. “Can they find us?”

  “I don’t think so.” With a comforting grin, Challis opened a thermos jug. “We’re lucky the blizzard struck. That wras three thousand miles behind. Levin’s yellow devils probably think we went down in the sea. So cheer up, kid.” He splashed smoking tea into a paper cup. “Forget your Russian gloom.”

  Her haunted eyes were huge and liquid in her starved pale face.

  “How can I?” whispered Nadya Stanislav. “You were splendid, to take me away from the labor camp —I don’t know how you ever found me. But what’s the use?” Her thin shoulders shrugged in the gray. “Where can we go? Levin rules all the world. There’s nowhere left.”

  “My beautiful, hopeless Rahshyan!” The tanned rocket pilot grinned cheerfully. “Drink your tea.”

  She took one obedient sip.

  “Father came from Russia, but I’m American,” she protested gravely, “and there’s nothing to be gay about. There’s no more America. Levin’s New State is a dark monster that has swallowed all the world.”

  The face of Challis went bleak and hard.

  “Even America.” His voice was flat and dull. “I was over Chicago, in a rocket fighter, when the Eurasians dropped the first uranatomic bombs. You can’t imagine—it was hell—”

  He shut his eyes in a useless effort to shut out all the past, and made his hard face smile again. “But now we are free, Nadya,” he went on huskily. “We must forget all that’s happened —everything but the Pantechnicon.”

  Sleep was soft again in her deep, throaty voice:

  “Pantechnicon—what is that?”

  “The Pantechnicon is where we’re going,” he told her. “We can be there in an hour now. I couldn’t tell you before, Nadya—your father’s there.”

  “Father!” Her big eyes were staring and black. “They told me he had been—liquidated.” She caught her breath. “Why couldn’t you tell me?”

  “The Yellow Guards were too close behind, until the blizzard struck,” he said. “I thought one of us was enough to take the secret into their little Inquisition, in case we got caught. Understand?”

  Biting her white lower lip, she nodded silently.

  “The Pantechnicon has no defenses except secrecy,” he added. “If Levin ever suspect that it exists, that will be the end of everything. The Yellow Guards would scour the world to find us. A single uranatomic bomb could wipe us out—and blot out the last chance on Earth for our kind of life.”

  “My father?” Her huge eyes were still dark and bewildered; tears rolled out of them. “He’s—here?”

  “This is one continent where Levin isn’t dictator.” Challis gestured at the rugged wilderness of ice, dark and hostile under the veil of flying drift. The dying blizzard still made a hollow wailing against the rocket nozzles. “Here the only rulers are winter and night and death.”

  Unconsciously, Nadya drew the shoddy gray closer to her throat.

  “They’re kinder than the Yellow Guards.” Challis turned up the silent electric heater and made a cheerful grin. “Years ago, when we saw the totalitarian storm sweeping the world, we planned the Pantechnicon to protect one seed of civilization.” He gestured toward the freezing dark.

  “It’s hidden here. A scientific Shangri La, to be a lamp of culture through the dark age ahead. I had money enough to pay for it. I found people I could trust. The job wasn’t easy. We had to keep it secret, and Levin moved faster than we expected. But we did it.”

  A tear splashed into Nadya’s cup. “And father’s here?”

  “We got Dr. Stanislav out of a Yellow Guard prison four years ago,” Challis told her. “He was one scientist we had to save because his work wasn’t finished. Probably you know what he had begun?”

  Nadya shook her head.

  “I was a war nurse, and then counterespionage. It’s seven years since I saw him.”

  “The greatest discovery since the uranatomic generator.” His voice lifted with enthusiasm. “He has found a whole new science. Infra-gravities, he calls it. The forces in the strange borderland between electromagnetics and gravitation. He has done things that will amaze you.” Challis grinned at her.

  “You didn’t know we came to see you in the prison camp?”

  Nadya caught her breath, and her big eyes went dark with bewildered wonder.

  “Dr. Stanislav has built a projection cell,” Challis told her. “I don’t

  quite follow the mathematics. But he bends space somehow with an in-fra-gravitic field. So that you can look across the fold into a place maybe half around the world. That’s how we found you, and studied the prison routine to plan the escape.”

  His brown grin broke her frozen astonishment.

  “For all we know,” he finished, “your father and Captain Dent may be watching us this moment.”

  Her dark eyes looked around the tiny cabin uncertainly.

  “Who’s Captain Dent?”

  “Vic Dent was a rocket ordnance expert until America fell,” he said. “He helped me plan the Pantechnicon and flew in many a rocket load of equipment himself. Now that job’s done, he’s your father’s research assistant.” His grin turned mock ferocious. “Even if Vic is my friend —I warn you.”

  Her big eyes stared a solemn protest.

  “How can we be gay while Levin •rules the world?” •

  “My tragic, lovely Rahshyan.” He blew her a cheerful kiss. “Wait till we’re safe in the Pantechnicon.”

  “I’m not Russian, and we’ll never be safe.” Shivering, she stared into the snow-driven dark. “Nobody ever .is safe. The Yellow Guards never give up.”

  His gray eyes were sympathetic.

  “Sometimes it’s harder to escape from their memory than it is from the Guards. But let’s go.” He started the throbbing injectors. “The Pantechnicon is another world.”

  A crashing blast broke the rocket free of the grasping frost. It leaped into the flying drift. The aurora shimmered pale across the stars. Surely, Challis told himself, they would never be discovered. Levin

  wouldn’t trust explorers this far beyond the reach of the Yellow Guards.

  At last Challis pointed, shouting above roaring jets:

  “There it is!”

  Clouds and drift made a ghostly floor ahead. Naked black mountains lifted out of it, cut a jagged line against the pale aurora. A thin gray wisp trailed from the lip of-a lofty volcanic cup.

  That cloud wisp was all that might betray the Pantechnicon. He thought no chance rocket pilot was apt to guess its meaning. There were live volcanoes in Antarctica. The mountain’s flanks were too steep to be scaled on foot in these incessant blizzards, and it would take a brave man to dive blindly into that cloud-filled cone.

  Nadya was staring, eyes bright with excitement.

  Challis grinned at her and dropped the rocket into the black-walled cup. The dense fog of condensation cut his vision to a few yards, and he snapped on the klystron feeler beams.

  For a moment the fog was lit with the blue shimmer of the Nordholm field. Damping out convection currents, the field held in place the insulating cloud that protected the crater from the savage cold above.

  The rocket dropped below the ceiling, and Nadya saw the Pantechnicon. Challis heard her breathless cry and turned from the controls. Elation had colored her thin face. He knew that she was beautiful.

  He landed on the narrow runway blasted out of the cragged north slope. Nadya hastily powdered her nose as he unsealed the valve. They climbed out, and Challis waved at the sentry in front of the hangar cut into the black cliffs.

  “Only one man with a pistol?” Nadya was astonished. “Against all the Yellow Guards?”

  “If they find us,” Challis said, “nothing is going to help.”

  From the runway’s edge they looked down across the Pantechnicon. The gray cloud roof floated between sheer basaltic walls. Red cattle grazed green meadows on the flat crater floor. A crawling tractor combine was harvesting yellow wheat. Young trees stood softly green along the quiet streets of a red-tiled village. Clear as bells, the voices of children playing ball came up to the high runway.

  “Such peace,” whis pered Nadya. “It can’t be real!”

  Challis saw her tears, and his voice went matter-of-fact.

  “Vaults are cut in the mountain under our feet,” he said. “They are filled with the books that Levin has been burning. Our museums contain all the art treasures add scientific equipment we had time to gather.” “We have a few scientists—such as your father. Doctors, artists, engineers. But more of us are just plain common people, farmers and mechanics, carpenters and miners and printers. A couple of hundred, altogether; enough to be a permanent nucleus of civilization.”

  Nadya gulped back a sob.

  “It’s all so happy,” she whispered. “So bright and warm and quiet. Just like a peaceful country village!” She saw the American flag flying over the schoolyard where the children shouted, and saluted solemnly. “You don’t know what that flag means to me.” Her voice was choked. “Not unless you’ve had to kneel in the mud to Levin’s lightning banner.”

  Challis looked away from her wet face; tears made him uncomfortable. He gestured across the bright floor of the black-walled valley.

  “Indirect lighting,” he said. “New-type fluorescent tubes, powered from the uranatomic generator. The volcanic soil is rich enough to grow five or six crops a year. Besides, the hydroponic gardens—”

  “Forgive me for going soppy.” Nadya dried her eyes. “Let’s find my father.”

  “His lab is in Pantechnicon Tower.” Challis pointed at a tall, graceful building beyond the red-tiled town. “See the silver bubble on the roof? That’s his projection cell that we used to find you.”

  With a casual greeting to the sentry, Challis led her down a long ramp. Hibiscus splashed huge red blooms beside them, and a mockingbird trilled. A silent electric car stopped at the foot of the ramp, and a tall man got out.

  “Vic Dent,” Challis murmured. “I warned out.”

  “I heard your jets, Challis.” White teeth smiled out of Dent’s brown, handsome face. He wore grease-spotted coveralls like an officer’s uniform. Shaking hands with Challis, he spoke to Nadya. “Welcome, darling. We expected you a week ago.”

  “Yellow Guard trouble,” Challis said. “Nadya wants to see her father.”

  Dent jerked his bare dark head toward the shimmering bubble on Pantechnicon Tower. His lean face looked worried.

  “Something wrong?” asked Challis.

  “Stanislav’s rebuilding the projection cell into some sort of weapon,” Dent told him gravely. “He wants to attack Levin. I told him we’re safe so long as we just lie low. But he won’t listen to reason.”

  “He’s bitter,” Challis agreed. “I’ll talk to him.”

  Pantechnicon Tower was the community’s heart. The great uranatomic generator was in its basement vaults. The long wings contained libraries, lecture rooms, and laboratories, planned to keep science a living, growing thing, even in this exile. An elevator lifted them past the administration offices to Dr. Stanislav’s laboratory.

  The big Russian limped heavily to meet them across a long, cluttered room and took Nadya in his arms. His gray-streaked beard didn’t quite hide the long white scar where a uranatomic bomb had burned one side of his face.

  “Nadya—my little Nadyezhda!”

  Challis and Dent assumed a tactful interest in the big tri-polar infra-gravitic field coils Dent had been busy winding. Soon Stanislav called:

  “Come up to the cell. Challis, I’ve got something to show .you.” Emotion quivered in his deep voice. “At last I’ve got a weapon that Levin can’t beat.” His dark, hollow eyes looked down at the thin girl. “At last, little Nadya, I can pay back what the Yellow Guards did to Sergei and Sonya, and my poor Alleyueva—”

  Gravely, Nadya protested:

  “Please, father—let’s forget. They are dead, and now we are free. The past is past. It can’t be changed.”

  His haunted eyes glittered.

  “Perhaps it can be!” His quivering fingers caught the arm of Challis in a grasp painfully tense. “Come.”

  They climbed a metal stair into the fused-quartz spheroid. A flat copper disk made a six-foot floor. A control post rose out of its center. Stanislav tapped keys upon it, and a muted whine started under their feet. Dent dropped a copper door into place.

  Standing close beside Nadya, Challis had a brief glimpse of the red-tiled town and the dark basaltic cliffs leaping up to the roof of cloud beyond. Then a milky glow filled the quartz. The whine grew louder and abruptly faded.

  Challis felt a faint, giddy sensation, as if the copper floor had tilted inexplicably. The pale girl made a little gasping cry and clutched his hand.

  “Watch, Nadya.” The Russian’s voice was strange and harsh with hatred. “I’ll show you Levin.”

  The crystal shell cleared again. Nadya caught her breath and Challis felt her fingers tighten. The crater was gone! The projection cell seemed to .be floating with them, high over a dark, featureless landscape.

  Watching a little illuminated chart, Stanislav tapped his keys. That dark, flowing world became fixed and brighter. Above a sprawling city, Challis saw an immense and ornate tower. Upon the tower stood a colossal statue of a man in uniform. One mighty fist was lifted in salute, and sodium-vapor tubes made yellow lightning flashing in its clutch.

  “The statue of Levin.” Dent’s hard voice was crisp as a guide’s. “At the New State capitol.”

  Stanislav tapped the keys, and they dropped toward the streets. Beneath the colossus, gray death flowed in an endless river: gray-pointed tanks and guns and armored cars, and ranks of robot-faced men in gray.

  “The Yellow Square.” Dent’s voice held no emotion. “And there is Levin.”

  Challis found the stand at last, draped in black-and-yellow lightning banners. Beneath his colossal statue, the black-mustached man in uniform looked oddly insignificant.

  “Levin!” Nadya whispered hoarsely, and her eyes were dark with dread. “Reviewing the army that conquered the world!”

  Angrily, Stanislav’s blunt fingers fell hard upon the keys. The crystal bubble turned milky, once more. When it cleared, the Yellow Square was gone. They were floating low over a pen fenced with barbed wire.

  Ragged men huddled in it, unsheltered, knee-deep in mud.

  The Washington Monument , stood lonely in the gray background.

  An Eurasian officer snapped an order. The gray-clad guards turned their machine guns through the fence. The sound seemed queerly remote in the quartz cell. But the prisoners toppled into the mud. Challis started, biting into his knuckles.

  The crystal shell glowed and cleared again. The whine was louder once more. The fields were bright and peaceful beyond the red-tiled town, and black cliffs soared to the flat roof of cloud.

  Pale and shaken, Challis stared at Stanislav.

  “I thought,” he gulped, “there were faces I knew. I saw the President of the United States.” He shook his head, bewildered. “But the Washington Massacre happened last year.”

  The bearded man nodded.

  “It did,” he said. “And Levin’s victory parade, in the Yellow Square, was three years ago.” His hollow eyes burned with elation. “With the new tri-polar units I can deflect the projection field back through time.

  That’s where I’m going to attack Levin—in his vulnerable past.”

  “In the past?” Challis blinked. “Things that have happened can’t be changed. The future, maybe. But the past is real.”

  “Reality is relative.” The dark, sunken eyes of Stanislav were almost hypnotic. “Science has yet to find any absolute. The statistical mathematics of probability has conquered. The facts of yesterday are merely more probable.”

  Challis shook his head.

  “If we live in a world that is merely probable, how are we to know it?”

  “We don’t/’ The big Russian shrugged. “Suppose the probability against your existence here is a million to one. If the universe around you is on the same plane of probability, you cannot determine the fact. Everything else is equally tenuous. For you, in your own particular strand of cause and effect, your own probability of existence always appears to be one hundred percent.

  “But the absolute is always illusion. The past is merely relatively probable. There is a continual branching and diffusion of probability in the direction of the future. It is that which points the arrow of entropy.

 

1 2 3