The Sun Smasher: A Space Opera Classic Read online

  Rolf grinned. “It's natural you should think so—just as the good Sheriff thinks it of you. Don't be too hard on him, Kyle, it isn't his fault. He's quite right, you see. Neil Banning never existed."

  He bent his bead in a curiously proud little bow, and turned away. “You will be free tonight. Trust me, even if you do not understand."

  He was gone before Banning could think to yell for the deputy. Banning sat down on the bunk, utterly dejected. For a moment he had hoped, for a moment he had been sure that the big dark man knew the truth and could help him. It was that much harder to realize his mistake.

  "I suppose,” he thought bitterly, “that every lunatic in the country will start calling me brother."

  He didn't hear anything that evening about bail being arranged for him. He had not expected to.

  Banning picked at the dinner they brought him. He was tired, in a sullen, ugly mood. He stretched out on the bunk, thinking the hell with them, thinking of the pleasure he would have in suing them all for false arrest. After a while he fell into an uneasy sleep.

  The cold, iron sound of his cell door opening brought him up, wide awake. It was night now, and only the corridor lights were on. The big dark man stood in the open door, smiling.

  "Come,” he said. “The way is clear."

  Banning said, “How did you get in here? How did you get those keys?'

  He looked past the dark man, to the end of the corridor. The deputy was leaning forward across his desk with his head on the blotter. One arm hung down, relaxed and boneless.

  Banning cried out with sudden horror, “My God, what have you done, what have you got me into?” He flung himself on the cell door, trying to shut it again, to force the stranger out. “Get out, I won't have anything to do with it.” He began to yell.

  With an expression of regret, Rolf opened his left hand to reveal a small egg-shaped thing of metal, with a lens in one end. He said, “Forgive me, Kyle. There's no time now to explain."

  A brief pale flicker came out of the lens. Banning felt no pain, only a mild shock and then a dissolution as black and still as death. He did not even feel Rolf's arms catch him as he fell.

  When he woke again he was in a car. He was in the back seat, and Rolf was beside him, sitting so that he could watch him. The car was going very fast along a prairie road, and it was still night. The driver was no more than a shadow against the dim glow of the dashboard lights, and outside there was only a vast darkness caught under a bowl of stars.

  It was dark in the back seat, and Banning had not moved very much, nor spoken. He thought perhaps Rolf had not seen that he was conscious again. He thought that if he threw himself forward suddenly, he might catch the big dark man off guard.

  He gathered himself, trying not to change even the rhythm of his breathing.

  Rolf said, “I don't want to put you out again, Kyle. Don't make me."

  Banning hesitated. He could see from the way Rolf was sitting that he was holding something in his hand. He remembered the metal egg, and decided that he would have to wait for a better chance. He was sorry. He would have liked to get his hands on Rolf.

  "You killed that deputy,” he said. “Probably others, too. You're not only crazy, you're a killer."

  With irritating patience, Rolf said, “You're not dead, are you?"

  "No, but—"

  "Neither is the deputy, nor anyone else. These people have no part in our affairs. It would be shameful to kill them.” He chuckled. “Tharanya would be surprised to hear me say that. She thinks of me as a man without a soul."

  Banning sat up straight. “Who is Tharanya? What's that thing you knocked me out with? Where are you taking me—and what the hell is this all about?” His voice rose to a high pitch of fright and fury. He was no more than normally afraid of physical injury and death, but he had had a nerve-racking couple of days and he was not at his best. It seemed too much to ask for him to remain calm while being pushed over the nighted prairie at breakneck speed by a lunatic kidnapper and his accomplice.

  "I suppose,” Rolf said, “it wouldn't do any good if I told you I'm your friend, your best and oldest friend, and that you have nothing to fear.'

  "No. It wouldn't."

  "I didn't think so.” Rolf sighed. “And I'm afraid the answers to your questions won't help either. Jommor did a damn good job on you—better than I'd have believed possible."

  Banning took hold of the edge of the seat, trying to control himself. “And who is Jommor?"

  "Tharanya's right-hand man. And Tharanya is sole and sovereign ruler of the New Empire ... and you're Kyle Valkar, and I'm Rolf, who wiped your nose for you when you were—” He broke off, swearing in a language Banning did not understand. “What's the use?"

  "New Empire,” said Banning. ‘Delusions of grandeur. You still haven't told me what that gadget is."

  "Cerebro-shocker,” said Rolf, as one says “rattle” to a baby. He began to talk to the driver in that foreign and incomprehensible tongue, not taking his eyes off Banning. Presently there was silence again.

  The road got worse. The car slowed down some, but not enough to suit Banning. After a while he realized that there wasn't any road at all. Banning began again to measure the distance between himself and Rolf. He also began to doubt the power of the metal egg. Cerebro-shocker, indeed. Something else must have hit him back there in the cell, something he hadn't seen, a believable thing like a gun barrel or brass knuckles. It was dark in there and the door had been open. The accomplice, the driver, could easily have got in, could have been standing behind him, ready to lower the boom when Rolf signaled him.

  Ahead of them, a mile or so away across the flat prairie, there was a curious flare of light, and a great wind struck them, and was gone.

  The driver spoke, and Rolf answered, with a note of relief.

  Banning let himself roll with the motion of the car. He waited till it pitched in the right direction, and then he threw himself, fast and hard, at the big dark man.

  He was wrong about the metal egg. It worked.

  This time he did not go clear out. Apparently the degrees of shock could be controlled, and Rolf did not want him unconscious—only partly so. He could still see and hear and move, though not normally and what he saw and heard were like the impersonal shadow-shapes and unreal voices of a film, having no connection with himself.

  He saw the prairie roll on past the car, black and empty under the stars. Then he felt the car go slower and slower until it stopped, and he heard Rolf's voice telling him gently to get out. He took Rolf's hand, as though he were a child and Rolf his father, and let himself be helped. His body moved, but it had ceased to be his own.

  Outside there was a cold wind sweeping, and a sudden light that blotted out the stars. The light showed the car and the prairie grass. It showed the driver, and Rolf, and himself, laying their shadows long and black behind them. It showed a wall of metal, bright as a new mirror and straight for a hundred feet or so horizontally, but rising vertically in a convex curve.

  There were openings in the wall. Windows, ports, a door, a hatchway, who knew the right words? It was not a wall. It was the side and flank of a ship.

  Men came out of it. They wore strange clothing, and they spoke a strange tongue. They moved forward, and Rolf and the driver and Neil Banning walked to meet them. Presently they stopped in the full glare of the light. The strange men spoke to Rolf, and he answered them, and then Banning realized in a dim and distant way that the men were all looking at him and that in their faces was a reverence almost approaching superstition.

  He heard them say, “The Valkar!” And as far off as he was, he felt a small, faint shiver touch him at the fierce and hopeful and wild and half-despairing tone in which they said it.

  Rolf led him toward the open hatchway of the ship. He said quietly, “You asked me where I was taking you. Come aboard, Kyle—I'm taking you home."

  CHAPTER III

  THE ROOM in which Neil Banning found himself was larger and more sum
ptuous than the jail cell, but it was none the less a prison. He found that out as soon as full consciousness returned to him—he had a feeling he had passed out again, and for quite some time, but be could not be sure about this. Anyway, he had got up and tried the doors. One led into an adjoining bath, rather oddly appointed. The other was locked. Tight. There were no windows. The metal wall was smooth and unbroken. Light in the room came from some overhead source he could not see.

  For a few minutes he prowled uneasily, looking at things, trying to think. He remembered the weird nightmarish dream he had had about the light on the prairie and the great silver ship. Nightmare, of course. Some hypnotic vision induced by the dark man who called himself Rolf. Who in the devil's name was Rolf, and why had the man picked him as the victim of his insane behavior?

  A ship, in the middle of the prairie. The men in the strange clothes, who had hailed him as—what was the name again? Valkar. A dream, of course. Vivid, but only a dream—

  Or was it?

  No windows. No sense of motion. No sound—yes, there was a sound, or almost one, if you let your whole body listen for it. A deep throbbing, like the beating of a giant's heart. The air had an unfamiliar smell.

  With senses suddenly sharpened to an abnormal acuteness, Banning realized that everything in the room was unfamiliar. The colors, the textures, the shapes, everything from the plumbing fixtures to the furnishings of the bunk bed he had just left.

  Even his own body felt unfamiliar. The weight of it had changed.

  He began to pound on the door and yell.

  Rolf came almost at once. The man who had driven the car was with him, and now they both carried the egg-shaped metal things. The ex-driver bowed to Banning, but he stayed several paces behind Rolf, so that Banning could not possibly attack or evade both of them at once. They now wore clothing such as the men had worn in Banning's dream, a sort of tunic and closefitting leggings that looked comfortable and functional and quite unreal.

  Rolf entered the room, leaving the other man outside. Banning caught a glimpse of a narrow corridor walled in metal like the room, and then Rolf shut the door again. Banning heard it lock.

  "Where are we?” he demanded.

  "At the moment,” said Rolf, “we're well out from Sol on our way to Antares. I don't think the exact readings would mean much to you.'

  Banning said, ‘I don't believe you.” He didn't. And yet, at the same time he knew, somehow, that it was true. The knowledge was horrible, and his brain twisted and turned like a hunted rabbit to get away from it.

  Rolf walked over to the outer wall. “Kyle,” he said, “you must start to believe me. Both our lives depend on it."

  He pressed a stud somewhere in the wall, and a section of the metal slid back, revealing a port.

  "This isn't really a window,” Rolf said. “It's a viewplate, a very complex and clever electronic setup that reproduces a true picture of what ordinary sight couldn't see."

  Banning looked. Beyond the port was stunning darkness and light. The darkness was a depthless void into which his mind seemed to be falling, tumbling and screaming through drear infinities, disoriented, lost. But the light—

  He looked upon a million million suns. The familiar constellations were lost, their outlines drowned in the glittering ocean of stars. They crashed in upon him like thunder, he fell and fell in an abyss of ray and darkness, he—

  Banning put his hands over his eyes and turned away. He fell down on the bunk and lay there shuddering. Rolf closed the port.

  "You believe me now?"

  Banning groaned.

  "Good,” said Rolf. “You believe in a starship. Then you have logically to believe in a civilization capable of producing a starship, and a type of culture in which a starship is both useful and necessary."

  Banning sat up in the bunk, still sick and shaky and clinging to its comforting solidity. He knew it was hopeless, but he advanced his final negative argument.

  "We're not moving. If we're going faster than light—and that's impossible in itself, according to what little science I know—there ought to be some feeling of acceleration."

  "The drive is not mechanical,” Rolf said, standing where he could watch Banning's face. “Its a field-type force, and since we're part of the field we are, in effect, at rest. So there's no sense of motion. As to possibility—” He grinned. “While I was on Earth, searching for you, I was amused to note the first crack in that limiting-speed theory. A research physicist clocked some particles moving faster than light, and the apologetic explanations that they were only photons and had no mass is merely evading the question."

  Banning cried incredulously, “But a civilization of starships, whose people come and go to Earth—and yet nobody on Earth knows about it—it's impossible"

  "That,” said Rolf dryly, “is Earth egotism talking. Earth is a fringe world, and in some ways a damn retarded one. Politically, it's a mess—fifty different nations quarrelling and cutting each other's throats. The New Empire avoids open contact with such worlds. It just isn't worth the trouble."

  "All right,” said Banning. He made a gesture of defeat. “I'll accept the starship, the civilization, the—what did you call it?—New Empire. But where do I come into all this?"

  "You're part of it. A very important—I might even say pivotal—part of it."

  "You have the wrong man,’ said Banning wearily. “I told you, my name is Neil Banning, I was born in Greenville, Nebraska—"

  He stopped, and Rolf laughed. “You were having a pretty hard time proving that. No. You're Kyle Valkar, and you were born at Katuun, the old King City on the fourth world of Antares."

  "But my memories—my whole life on Earth!"

  'False memories,” said Rolf. “The scientists of the New Empire are experts in mental techniques, and Jommor is the best of them. When Earth was chosen as your place of exile, and you were brought there, a captive, with your own memory already blanked out, Jommor compiled a life history for you, synthesized from the minds of the natives. When it was implanted carefully in your mind, and you were set free with a new name, a new speech, a new life, Kyle Valkar was gone forever, and there was only the Earthman Neil Banning no longer a menace to anyone."

  Banning said slowly, “Menace?"

  "Oh, yes.” Rolf's eyes blazed suddenly with a savage light. “You're a Valkar, the last of them. And the Valkars have always been a menace to the usurpers of the New Empire."

  He began to move about nervously, as though the excitement he had in him was more than he could control. Banning stared at him blankly. He had had too many shocks, too close together, and things were just not registering any more.

  "The New Empire,” Rolf repeated. He made the adjective a bitter curse. “With that cat Tharanya at its head, and the craft of Jommor holding her up. Yes, the last Valkar was a menace to them."

  "But why?"

  Rolf's voice rolled. “Because the Valkars were the kings of the Old Empire, the star-empire that ruled half the galaxy, ninety thousand years ago. Because the star worlds have not altogether forgotten their rightful kings."

  Banning stared, and then he began to laugh a little. The dream had become too preposterous, too crazy. You couldn't take it seriously any more.

  "So I'm not Neil Banning of Earth. I'm Kyle Valkar, of the stars."

  "You are."

  "And I'm a king.'

  "No, Kyle. Not yet. But you almost made it, the last time. If we succeed this time, you will be.'

  Banning said flatly, “I'm Banning. That I know. I may look like Kyle Valkar. That must be why you picked me up. Let me see the others."

  Rolf's eyes narrowed. “Why?'

  "I'm going to tell them what kind of deception you're pulling"

  The big dark man spoke between his teeth. “No you're not. They think you're Kyle Valkar. Well, you are. But they also think you've got your memory back—which you haven't.'

  "Then you admit you're deceiving them?” Banning demanded.

  "Only in tha
t one matter. Kyle, they wouldn't follow on this venture if they thought you were still without memory! They'd know you couldn't take them to The Hammer."

  "The Hammer?'

  "I'll tell you of it later. Right now, get this through your skull. If they suspect you don't remember, they'll abandon this venture. You'll go back to Jommor. This time, it'll not be exile for you—but death."

  There was a deadly earnestness about Rolf. Banning tried to think. Then he said, “I can't speak that language of yours."

  "No. Jommor did a nice clean job on you."

  "Then how can I pass myself off as your Valkar?"

  Rolf answered obliquely, “You are in bad shape, Kyle. Fetching your memory back has given you a shock. You'll need to keep in this cabin, for quite a while. But I'll be here with you a lot."

  For a moment Banning didn't got it, then he understood “You mean, I'm to learn the language from you?"

  "Re-learn it. Yes."

  Banning said, after a moment, “All right. If there's nothing else I can do—"

  He was turning as he said it, and of a sudden he was on Rolf's broad back, his forearm around the dark man's neck in a strangle-hold, squeezing.

  Rolf gasped, “Sorry, Kyle—” and then his massive muscles seemed to explode like bursting springs, and Banning found himself hitting the cabin wall with a crash. He lay, the breath knocked out of him.

  Rolf unlocked the door. He turned a moment and said dourly, “I'd have been flayed alive for that, in the old King City. But it was a pleasure. Now cool down."

  He went out.

  Banning, left alone, sat and stared a long time without moving, at the metal wall. He felt that his mind was floundering, and he clawed for a grip on reality.

  "I am Neil Banning, and I am merely dreaming—"

  He struck the wall with his clenched fist. His knuckles bruised convincingly. Blood showed on them. No, that wouldn't work.

  "All right, this ship is real. A starship, going to Antares. Rolf is real, and this New Empire—a star empire that Earth doesn't dream of. But I'm still Neil Banning!"