Even before Oliver Fenton Arnold invented the subether drive that made galactic exploration possible, all of Earth except the N.A.L. was under Communism - and North America itself was being infiltrated and undermined. The real explosion of mankind into space, however, did not begin until 2013, when John Copeland discovered the uranium-rich planet Urania Four, thus assuring all mankind of cheap and virtually unlimited power. In 2016 the American anti-Communists, disgusted and alarmed by the success of the ‘do nothings’ and’ do-gooders’in blocking all effective action, left Earth en masse for the promising - and aptly named - planet, Newhope. Whereupon Communism took control of all Earth without firing a shot or launching a missile.
(vanMees, History of Civilization, Reel 21, slot 1281.)
The d’Alemberts had not waited to see what Colonel Grandon’s reaction to being discovered would be. Even as the Head was reaching for the button that turned on the rooftop speakers, their lightning reflexes had catapulted them out of their chairs and into instant action. Their common thought was to get up to the roof as quickly as they could and stop this traitor before he could do any more damage. Both of them raced across the room to the elevator tube, which they reached simultaneously.
The air cushions materialized as expected under their feet, but the ride up the tube seemed interminable. Indeed, it was nearly a minute and a half before the lift brought them to their destination - a timespan impossibly long to people who were used to measuring their movements in milliseconds.
Colonel Crandon had taken off in his own car by the time Jules and Yvette burst out of the elevator doorway. As they rushed across the open rooftop to their own vehicle, though, they heard a telltale whoosh directly over their heads. ‘Split!’ Yvette shouted, and they did just as a blaster beam from the airborne car burned a trail directly through the spots where they’d been. The searing ray scorched the edges of Jules’ clothing just a trifle as he drove forward, rolled, and got back onto his feet in one continuous motion. He never stopped running.
Colonel Crandon hesitated a moment longer above them, wondering whether to try another shot to kill - or at least delay - his pursuers. But then he realized that every second counted. Each instant he spent in target practice would mean that much more time the Head would have to mobilize the forces of SOTE - and Colonel Crandon knew precisely how vast those forces were. He would need every nanosecond to effect his escape.
While he took off into the darkness of night, Yvette and Jules scrambled across the flat roof to their car. It took them a full fifteen seconds to reach it, another five to jump in and close the doors, five seconds to start the engines, and five more to convert the craft to aerial flight. Thirty seconds in all, and another thirty added on because Grandon’s vehicle had gotten a flying start. The traitor was a full minute ahead of them.
With Jules in control, the d’Alembert car shot off the edge of the roof, accelerating as it went. Yvette was watching the sensors, trying to pick up a reading on the fugitive. ‘Got him!’ she cried at last. ‘Bearing twenty-six degrees northwest and running like a swifter with its tail on fire. We’ll have a hell of a time catching him.’
Jules grunted as he brought the craft up into the higher levels of atmosphere, so that there would be less air resistance to impair their speed. There wasn’t any planet bound vehicle faster than a Mark Forty
One Service Special - but Colonel Crandon had one, just as they did. All things being equal, the two cars should maintain their hundred and seventy kilometer gap until one or the other of them ran out of fuel.
‘Why doesn’t headquarters fire on him?’ Yvette wondered. ‘They’ve got enough firepower to down a battleship.’
‘They’re not shooting for the same reason we won’t,’ Jules said. ‘We have to get Grandon alive. Killing him won’t incapacitate the people he’s working for we have to assume he’s already told them everything he knows. On the other hand, we’d like to know some of his secrets, like who he’s working for. Killing him would lose us some valuable information.’
‘Then we’ll have one advantage in this chase,’ Yvette said. ‘His own side isn’t going to help him against us. I was a little worried they might come to his rescue.’
But the d’Alemberts were not the only ones capable of reasoning this way. Apparently, Colonel Grandon too knew that he was expendable to his side, and that he was on his own. He had to keep his distance from his pursuers; if it looked as though they were gaining on him, he was pretty sure his allies would step in and shoot him down to prevent what little he knew from falling into SOTE hands.
Therefore, while the SOTE agents behind him had to hold their fire, he did not. Putting the guidance controls on automatic, he locked his craft into its course and turned his attention to the vessel behind him.
It stubbornly kept on his tail, even though the people in it must have known they would not be able to catch up to him. He would have to do something to discourage them.
The one man he had been able to rescue from the back of the other car was beginning to come around, but the effects of even a mild stunner dosage took some time to wear off. Grandon knew the fellow would be too groggy for the next hour or so to be able to help much with the fighting. He grimaced at the realization of exactly how alone in this he was.
Taking aim at the car behind him, Grandon fired off the multiblasters that made up such a deadly part of his car’s armament. As he’d expected, those fearsome weapons had little effect on his pursuers, whose beamproof shields were as tough as his own. He had hoped that whoever was in that car would waste some time trying to dodge the beams, but they apparently knew the capabilities of their vehicle too well.
They flew straight at him, without shifting course in the slightest.
Okay, Grandon thought, setting his chin, we start to play rough. The flick of a lever brought his launchers into play, and the press of a button loaded them with bombs.
In the following vehicle, Yvette gasped as her scanners showed the bomb that had been lobbed out the rear of the fugitive car. While it had been aimed roughly at them, there was not a chance that it could have spanned the almost twenty kilometers between the vehicles. Instead, the bomb would miss them and fall on the densely populated land below, killing thousands - perhaps millions - of innocent people.
Instantly her trained reflexes came to the fore. Aiming up her own multiblasters, she fired them at the falling projectile. As the deadly beams scored a direct hit, the bomb exploded in midair, sending a shower of small and relatively harmless debris down upon the countryside. Jules, meanwhile, kept their car flying straight after Grandon’s, so there was no slackening of the chase.
Now, however, the fugitive was making matters more difficult for them. He launched two bombs straight downward, in widely scattered directions. Cursing under his breath as he saw them fall, Jules brought the car into a slight dip to give his sister a better shot. The female d’Alembert picked off these two projectiles with the same uncanny accuracy, but by the time Jules could bring the car back up into pursuit they had lost two more seconds of valuable time.
Again the traitor’s vehicle shot out bombs endangering innocent lives, and again the d’Alemberts reacted to protect the people of Earth. This time there were four of the bombs, and they were dropping so fast that it took a full ten seconds to blow them out of the sky and return to their flight path. ‘We’ll never catch him at this rate,’ Yvette cried.
‘Oh, I think the Head still has a few tricks up his sleeve,’ Jules replied. ‘Look there.’
He pointed at the scanner and Yvette looked in the indicated direction. There, at the extreme left edge of the screen, was a swarm of bright little shapes moving eastward. Their path would just about intersect that of the traitor’s car. ‘Tampeta division,’ Yvette guessed.
‘Right, they’ll try to cut him off and turn him back. If he should somehow make it by them, there’ll be other fleets just waiting for him. The Head probably has every fly able vessel in North America in the air right now, hovering on alert and waiting for developments to break. Nobody, not even Grandon, could wiggle out of a cordon like that.’
Even though the odds were now against their capturing the runaway colonel themselves, the d’Alemberts continued to watch the developments playing out on their screens. Grandon had spotted the Tampete fleet as soon as Jules had, and was now in the process of taking evasive action. His own car was smaller and more maneuverable than most of the SOTE craft in that formation, and he used that fact to masterly advantage. The fugitive dipped and soared through the atmosphere on an unpredictable roller coaster that kept his pursuers guessing. His flight path veered sharply off of the northwesterly course it had been following and began moving straight north. This, of course, invalidated the intersection course of the fleet and caused them to readjust their direction; after which, Grandon veered again. He was count ing on the maneuverability of his craft to help him skirt around the approaching fleet, flank them and outdistance them.
It almost worked.
Just over Jacksonville, Grandon encountered another blip a commercial airliner on its regular route down to Miami. The treacherous colonel had dipped very low into the atmosphere in an evasive maneuver when suddenly the plane appeared out of nowhere, coming at him almost head on. He banked quickly, and just did miss hitting the plane, but his reflex action cost him dearly. At that speed, and with his air resistance at that altitude, his car lost control. Buffeted now and helpless in the face of a series of crosswinds, the car shook and trembled. Down he plummeted, and the lower he went the less control he had.
With his vehicle that out of control, the d’Alemberts were able to gain on him. Crandon’s car was still too far away to be visible in the darkness of the early morning, but their scanners told them the story. The fall would be fatal, they could tell that; it had already gone too far to ever come under control, and they were still too far away to make any attempt to save it. Jules and Yvette could only watch helplessly as the final catastrophe hit.
With a blinding and deafening crash, Grandon’s car plunged headfirst into a suburban park. Only by the most fortunate of coincidences did it miss impacting in a residential neighborhood, and consequently no innocent human life was lost. But the vehicle itself made a pretty scene. Special Service cars like that one were never meant to be inspected by the general public, and were equipped with self-destruct mechanisms. As the vehicle smashed to earth, it turned into an enormous fireball that illuminated the landscape for kilometers around with a light brighter than a dozen suns. The sound of that tremendous explosion shattered windows within a ten block radius, and the shockwave could be felt halfway across the city. Nothing remained of the car and its contents but a fine dust that rained down on the city of Jacksonville for more than six hours afterward.
Colonel Grandon did not get to become the chief of SOTE’s Internal Security division by being stupid. When his vehicle began to slip from his control after the close brush with the airliner, he knew instantly that this present situation was hopeless. Being a man who could act quickly on reflexes, he moved at once to improve his chances of survival.
Consequently, at the very instant his car was being volatized on impact with the ground, Colonel Grandon was floating suspended in air by a parachute, one kilometer above ground level. He was reasonably certain he would not be spotted. At nighttime he would not be a visual attraction to anyone’s eye- and to pick him up on an infrared scanner, an observer would have to know precisely where to look for him. That was unlikely. So, as he drifted leisurely down to earth, he had time to think about what to do next.
His car was gone, and with it the man he’d tried to save from SOTE’s probings, probably under nitrobarb.
He did not regret his action - that man, had he been forced to reveal what he knew, could have given SOTS a clear enough description of Grandon to blow the colonel’s cover anyway. But, with the destruction of the car, he would probably also lose his pursuit. There was no possibility of any body surviving in the wreckage, so they would have no way of knowing he’d escaped. The Head would no doubt lay out a search pattern for him just on the possibility that he had eluded destruction, but of necessity that search would have to be a general one. With nine billion people currently inhabiting the surface of the planet Earth, any man who knew what he was doing could easily avoid detection by that type of search.
He landed in a residential section. His chute was of a specially designed material and vaporized at the touch of a match, leaving virtually no trace of its existence. He walked for several blocks to the nearest subway entrance, and took the first available train to anywhere. He changed trains three times at random before finally going to his destination - the monoliner station. At the ticket counter he bought a pass to Angeles-Diego, but used the passenger option and converted it once he was aboard the train to the Boswash Complex.
The Atlantic Seaboard from Massachusetts to Virginia was jammed with a population of more than a hundred million souls. Within that seething mass of humanity, of fleshpots and rampant confusion, a highly trained professional like Colonel Grandon easily avoided all the nets that had been cast for him. Twenty-four hours after arriving in Boswash, the fugitive had safely boarded the first in a series of airliners to relay him to his real destination - Moscow.
Twelve hours later, he was proceeding through channels to report to the man who’d paid him to betray the SOTS. A call to the proper number was relayed up the chain of command; and after a delay of only one hour - which indicated an efficient organization - his instructions came back: he was to go to a certain address and report to whomever he found there.
The house was an old one, a decrepit building on the seamier side of town. The windows were all boarded up and the bricks were grimy from decades of air pollution. There seemed to be no decent people on the streets - only what the colonel would have classified as ‘the criminal element’- though many people looked at him through drawn shutters. The banister of the outside stairs was covered with dust, undisturbed for months. This house was not a frequently visited spot.
Inside, the house was not much better. The smell of old cobwebs assailed his nostrils, the walls were covered with faded old wallpaper and the floor was bare except for an old board or two scattered about the floor. Grandon reached for a light switch, but nothing happened when he flipped it. The only light available was that which managed to filter in through the boarded up windows.
‘Hello,’ he called out.
‘Over here, Gospodin
Jones,’ came a muffled voice from behind one wall, calling him by the prearranged code name. Grandon took a step toward the voice. ‘Your Majesty, I...
‘Do not come any closer.’ The voice coming from the next room was still muffled, but sharp. ‘You will s tay at all times where I can see you and you cannot see me. It is a necessary precaution. And you are not to refer to me by that title - yet. I will not claim what I have not earned. It will come, in its season. Meanwhile, you will call me Gospodin Ivanov. It is not my name, but it will serve.’
‘As you wish, gospodin. I’ve come to you to report firsthand on the moves SOTE is making against you.’
‘The very fact that you are here at all - firsthand or otherwise - is indication that you have failed me. I paid you to be inside SOTE.’
‘That couldn’t be helped. Your other agents botched the job. I provided them with enough information to lay a perfect ambush. They failed. The fact that two of them were captured compromised my position. They didn’t know me by f ace or name, but there would be no doubt about where their information had come from. I knew I would be of no use to you dead or, worse, subjected to nitrobarb, so I escaped. The Head currently has no idea of where I am - or, in fact, any more than the merest suspicion that I’m still alive.’
‘What have you learned about his immediate plans? In particular, who is this secret agent he’s called in?’
‘I can’t say, but it does seem to be a team. Sarbatte, the agent who was to rendezvous with them at the Dunedin Arms, was told distinctly that there would be two of them. As I was escaping from the building I saw two figures following me. I shot at them, but apparently missed; I was in a hurry, you understand. It was dark up there, and I couldn’t make out more than two shapes, so I can’t tell you any more than that.’
‘You have failed me, Gospodin Jones,’ the voice reiterated. ‘These supposed superagents are still alive, and their identity is still unknown.’
‘But I can make it up to you,’ Grandon said desperately
‘I know the workings of SOTE inside and out; that knowledge is invaluable.’
‘Yes, I’ve read your reports; they were quite thorough. SOTE trains its people well. I wish my own people could report as concisely and accurately as you.’
Grandon smiled.
‘In fact,’ the voice continued, ‘your reports were so thorough that I no longer need you around. I’ve gotten all I can from you.’
The colonel paled. ‘But ...’
‘Left alive, there is always the chance you would be spotted and traced to me. That is a risk I cannot take, not at this late stage of the game. I do what I must do. You will realize I have no other choice.’
Grandon turned to flee, but a blaster beam lashed out and turned him to ashes in a split second. From the next room, a tall, thin, well-dressed man emerged and stroked his goatee. Two agents, he thought. Oh well, how much can two people do?