The Mercenaries
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Transcriber's note:
This etext was produced from _Astounding Science Fiction_,
March, 1950. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence
that the copyright on this publication was renewed.
THE MERCENARIES
by
H. BEAM PIPER
Illustrated by Brush
_Once, wars were won by maneuvering hired fighting men; now wars
are different--and the hired experts are different. But the human
problems remain!_
Duncan MacLeod hung up the suit he had taken off, and sealed his shirt,
socks and underwear in a laundry envelope bearing his name and
identity-number, tossing this into one of the wire baskets provided for
the purpose. Then, naked except for the plastic identity disk around his
neck, he went over to the desk, turned in his locker key, and passed
into the big room beyond.
Four or five young men, probably soldiers on their way to town, were
coming through from the other side. Like MacLeod, they wore only the
plastic disks they had received in exchange for the metal ones they wore
inside the reservation, and they were being searched by attendants who
combed through their hair, probed into ears and nostrils, peered into
mouths with tiny searchlights, and employed a variety of magnetic and
electronic detectors.
To this search MacLeod submitted wearily. He had become quite a
connoisseur of security measures in fifteen years' research and
development work for a dozen different nations, but the Tonto Basin
Research Establishment of the Philadelphia Project exceeded anything he
had seen before. There were gray-haired veterans of the old Manhattan
Project here, men who had worked with Fermi at Chicago, or with
Oppenheimer at Los Alamos, twenty years before, and they swore in amused
exasperation when they thought of how the relatively mild regulations of
those days had irked them. And yet, the very existence of the Manhattan
Project had been kept a secret from all but those engaged in it, and its
purpose from most of them. Today, in 1965, there might have been a few
wandering tribesmen in Somaliland or the Kirghiz Steppes who had never
heard of the Western Union's Philadelphia Project, or of the Fourth
Komintern's Red Triumph Five-Year Plan, or of the Islamic Kaliphate's
Al-Borak Undertaking, or of the Ibero-American Confederation's Cavor
Project, but every literate person in the world knew that the four great
power-blocs were racing desperately to launch the first spaceship to
reach the Moon and build the Lunar fortress that would insure world
supremacy.
He turned in the nonmagnetic identity disk at the desk on the other side
of the search room, receiving the metal one he wore inside the
reservation, and with it the key to his inside locker. He put on the
clothes he had left behind when he had passed out, and filled his
pockets with the miscellany of small articles he had not been allowed to
carry off the reservation. He knotted the garish necktie affected by the
civilian workers and in particular by members of the MacLeod Research
Team to advertise their nonmilitary status, lit his pipe, and walked out
into the open gallery beyond.
* * * * *
Karen Hilquist was waiting for him there, reclining in one of the metal
chairs. She looked cool in the belted white coveralls, with the white
turban bound around her yellow hair, and very beautiful, and when he saw
her, his heart gave a little bump, like a geiger responding to an
ionizing particle. It always did that, although they had been together
for twelve years, and married for ten. Then she saw him and smiled, and
he came over, fanning himself with his sun helmet, and dropped into a
chair beside her.
"Did you call our center for a jeep?" he asked. When she nodded, he
continued: "I thought you would, so I didn't bother."
For a while, they sat silent, looking with bored distaste at the swarm
of steel-helmeted Army riflemen and tommy-gunners guarding the transfer
platforms and the vehicles gate. A string of trucks had been passed
under heavy guard into the clearance compound: they were now unloading
supplies onto a platform, at the other side of which other trucks were
backed waiting to receive the shipment. A hundred feet of bare concrete
and fifty armed soldiers separated these from the men and trucks from
the outside, preventing contact.
"And still they can't stop leaks," Karen said softly. "And we get blamed
for it."
MacLeod nodded and started to say something, when his attention was
drawn by a commotion on the driveway. A big Tucker limousine with an
O.D. paint job and the single-starred flag of a brigadier general was
approaching, horning impatiently. In the back seat MacLeod could see a
heavy-shouldered figure with the face of a bad-tempered great
Dane--General Daniel Nayland, the military commander of Tonto Basin. The
inside guards jumped to attention and saluted; the barrier shot up as
though rocket-propelled, and the car slid through; the barrier slammed
down behind it. On the other side, the guards were hurling themselves
into a frenzy of saluting. Karen made a face after the receding car and
muttered something in Hindustani. She probably didn't know the literal
meaning of what she had called General Nayland, but she understood that
it was a term of extreme opprobrium.
Her husband contributed: "His idea of Heaven would be a huge research
establishment, where he'd be a five-star general, and Galileo, Newton,
Priestley, Dalton, Maxwell, Planck and Einstein would be tech
sergeants."
"And Marie Curie and Lise Meitner would be Wac corporals," Karen added.
"He really hates all of us, doesn't he?"
"He hates our Team," MacLeod replied. "In the first place, we're a lot
of civilians, who aren't subject to his regulations and don't have to
salute him. We're working under contract with the Western Union, not
with the United States Government, and as the United States participates
in the Western Union on a treaty basis, our contract has the force of a
treaty obligation. It gives us what amounts to extraterritoriality, like
Europeans in China during the Nineteenth Century. So we have our own
transport, for which he must furnish petrol, and our own armed guard,
and we fly our own flag over Team Center, and that gripes him as much as
anything else. That and the fact that we're foreigners. So wouldn't he
love to make this espionage rap stick on us!"
"And our contract specifically gives the United States the right to take
action against us in case we endanger the national security," Karen
added. She stuffed her cigarette into the not-too-recently-emptied
receiver beside her chair, her blue eyes troubled. "You know, some of us
could get shot over this, if we're not careful. Dunc, does it really
have to be one of our own people who--?"
"I don't see how it could be anybody else," MacLeod said. "I don't like
the idea any more than you do, but there it is."
"Well, what are we going to do? Is there nobody whom we can trust?"
"Among the technicians and guards, yes. I could think of a score
who are absolutely loyal. But among the Team itself--the top
researchers--there's nobody I'd take a chance on but Kato Sugihara."
"Can you even be sure of him? I'd hate to think of him as a traitor,
but--"
"I have a couple of reasons for eliminating Kato," MacLeod said. "In the
first place, outside nucleonic and binding-force physics, there are only
three things he's interested in. Jitterbugging, hand-painted neckties,
and Southern-style cooking. If he went over to the Komintern, he
wouldn't be able to get any of those. Then, he only spends about half
his share of the Team's profits, and turns the rest back into the Team
Fund. He has a credit of about a hundred thousand dollars, which he'd
lose by leaving us. And then, there's another thing. Kato's father was
killed on Guadalcanal, in 1942, when he was only five. After that he was
brought up in the teachings of Bushido by his grandfather, an old-time
samurai. Bushido is open to some criticism, but nobody can show where
double-crossing your own gang is good Bushido. And today, Japan is
allied with the Western Union, and in any case, he wouldn't help the
Komintern. The Japs'll forgive Russia for that Mussolini back-stab in
1945 after the Irish start building monuments to Cromwell."
A light-blue jeep, lettered _MacLeod Research Team_ in cherry-red, was
approaching across the wide concrete apron. MacLeod grinned.
"Here it comes. Fasten your safety belt when you get in; that's Ahmed
driving."
Karen looked at her watch. "And it's almost time for dinner. You know, I
dread the thought of sitting at the table with the others, and wondering
which of them is betraying us."
"Only nine of us, instead of thirteen, and still one is a Judas,"
MacLeod said. "I suppose there's always a place for Judas, at any
table."
* * * * *
The MacLeod Team dined together, apart from their assistants and
technicians and students. This was no snobbish attempt at
class-distinction: matters of Team policy were often discussed at the
big round table, and the more confidential details of their work. People
who have only their knowledge and their ideas to sell are wary about
bandying either loosely, and the six men and three women who faced each
other across the twelve-foot diameter of the teakwood table had no other
stock-in-trade.
They were nine people of nine different nationalities, or they were nine
people of the common extra-nationality of science. That Duncan MacLeod,
their leader, had grown up in the Transvaal and his wife had been born
in the Swedish university town of Upsala was typical not only of their
own group but of the hundreds of independent research-teams that had
sprung up after the Second World War. The scientist-adventurer may have
been born of the relentless struggle for scientific armament supremacy
among nations and the competition for improved techniques among
industrial corporations during the late 1950s and early '60s, but he had
been begotten when two masses of uranium came together at the top of a
steel tower in New Mexico in 1945. And, because scientific research is
pre-eminently a matter of pooling brains and efforts, the independent
scientists had banded together into teams whose leaders acquired power
greater than that of any _condottiere_ captain of Renaissance Italy.
Duncan MacLeod, sitting outwardly relaxed and merry and secretly
watchful and bitterly sad, was such a free-captain of science. One by
one, the others had rallied around him, not because he was a greater
physicist than they, but because he was a bolder, more clever, less
scrupulous adventurer, better able to guide them through the maze of
international power-politics and the no less ruthless if less nakedly
violent world of Big Industry.
There was his wife, Karen Hilquist, the young metallurgist who, before
she was twenty-five, had perfected a new hardening process for SKF and
an incredibly tough gun-steel for the Bofors works. In the few minutes
since they had returned to Team Center, she had managed to change her
coveralls for a skirt and blouse, and do something intriguing with her
hair.
And there was Kato Sugihara, looking younger than his twenty-eight
years, who had begun to demonstrate the existence of whole orders of
structure below the level of nuclear particles.
There was Suzanne Maillard, her gray hair upswept from a face that had
never been beautiful but which was alive with something rarer than mere
beauty: she possessed, at the brink of fifty, a charm and smartness that
many women half her age might have envied, and she knew more about
cosmic rays than any other person living.
And Adam Lowiewski, his black mustache contrasting so oddly with his
silver hair, frantically scribbling equations on his doodling-pad, as
though his racing fingers could never keep pace with his brain, and
explaining them, with obvious condescension, to the boyish-looking
Japanese beside him. He was one of the greatest of living mathematicians
by anybody's reckoning--_the_ greatest, by his own.
And Sir Neville Lawton, the electronics expert, with thinning red-gray
hair and meticulously-clipped mustache, who always gave the impression
of being in evening clothes, even when, as now, he was dressed in faded
khaki.
And Heym ben-Hillel, the Israeli quantum and wave-mechanics man, his
heaping dinner plate an affront to the Laws of Moses, his white hair a
fluffy, tangled chaos, laughing at an impassively-delivered joke the
English knight had made.
And Rudolf von Heldenfeld, with a thin-lipped killer's mouth and a
frozen face that never betrayed its owner's thoughts--he was the
specialist in magnetic currents and electromagnetic fields.
And Farida Khouroglu, the Turkish girl whom MacLeod and Karen had found
begging in the streets of Istanbul, ten years ago, and who had grown up
following the fortunes of the MacLeod Team on every continent and in a
score of nations. It was doubtful if she had ever had a day's formal
schooling in her life, but now she was secretary of the Team, with a
grasp of physics that would have shamed many a professor. She had grown
up a beauty, too, with the large dark eyes and jet-black hair and
paper-white skin of her race. She and Kato Sugihara were very much in
love.
A good team; the best physics-research team in a power-mad,
knowledge-hungry world. MacLeod thought, toying with the stem of his
wineglass, of some of their triumphs: The West Australia Atomic Power
Plant. The Segovia Plutonium Works, which had got them all titled as
Grandees of the restored Spanish Monarchy. The sea-water chemical
extraction plant in Puerto Rico, where they had worked for Associated
Enterprises, whose president, Blake Hartley, had later become President
of the United States. The hard-won victory over a seemingly insoluble
problem in the Belgian Congo uranium mines----He thought, too, of the
dangers they had faced together, in a world where soldiers must use the
weapons of science and scientists must learn the arts of violence. Of
the treachery of the Islamic Kaliphate, for whom they had once worked;
of the intrigues and plots which had surrounded them in Spain; of the
many attempted kidnappings and assassinations; of the time in Basra when
they had fought with pistols and tommy guns and snatched-up clubs and
flasks of acid to defend their laboratories.
A good team--before the rot of treason had touched it. He could almost
smell the putrid stench of it, and yet, as he glanced from face to face,
he could not guess the traitor. And he had so little time--
* * * * *
Kato Sugihara's voice rose to dominate the murmur of conversation around
the table.
"I think I am getting somewhere on my photon-neutrino-electron
interchange-cycle," he announced. "And I think it can be correlated to
the collapsed-matter research."
"So?" von Heldenfeld looked up in interest. "And not with the problem of
what goes on in the 'hot layer' surrounding the Earth?"
"No, Suzanne talked me out of that idea," the Japanese replied. "That's
just a secondary effect of the effect of cosmic rays and solar
radiations on the order of particles existing at that level. But I think
that I have the key to the problem of collapsing matter to plate the
hull of the spaceship."
"That's interesting," Sir Neville Lawton commented. "How so?"
"Well, you know what happens when a photon comes in contact with the
atomic structure of matter," Kato said. "There may be an elastic
collision, in which the photon merely bounces off. Macroscopically,
that's the effect we call reflection of light. Or there may be an
inelastic collision, when the photon hits an atom and knocks out an
electron--the old photoelectric effect. Or, the photon may be retained
for a while and emitted again relatively unchanged--the effect observed
in luminous paint. Or, the photon may penetrate, undergo a change to a
neutrino, and either remain in the nucleus of the atom or pass through
it, depending upon a number of factors. All this, of course, is old
stuff; even the photon-neutrino interchange has been known since the
mid-'50s, when the Gamow neutrino-counter was developed. But now we come
to what you have been so good as to christen the Sugihara Effect--the
neutrino picking up a negative charge and, in effect, turning into an
electron, and then losing its charge, turning back into a neutrino, and
then, as in the case of metal heated to incandescence, being emitted
again as a photon.
"At first, we thought this had no connection with the spaceship
insulation problem we are under contract to work out, and we agreed to
keep this effect a Team secret until we could find out if it had
commercial possibilities. But now, I find that it has a direct
connection with the collapsed-matter problem. When the electron loses
its negative charge and reverts to a neutrino, there is a definite
accretion of interatomic binding-force, and the molecule, or the
crystalline lattice or whatever tends to contract, and when the neutrino
becomes a photon, the nucleus of the atom contracts."
* * * * *
Heym ben-Hillel was sitting oblivious to everything but his young
colleague's words, a slice of the flesh of the unclean beast impaled on
his fork and halfway to his mouth.
"Yes! Certainly!" he exclaimed. "That would explain so many things I
have wondered about: And of course, there are other forces at work
which, in the course of nature, balance that effect--"
"But can the process be controlled?" Suzanne Maillard wanted to know.
"Can you convert electrons to neutrinos and then to photons in
sufficient numbers, and eliminate other effects that would cause
compensating atomic and molecular expansion?"
Kato grinned, like a tomcat contemplating the bones of a fish he has
just eaten.
"Yes, I can. I have." He turned to MacLeod. "Remember those bullets I
got from you?" he asked.
MacLeod nodded. He handloaded for his .38-special, and like all advanced
cases of handloading-fever, he was religiously fanatical about
uniformity of bullet weights and dimensions. Unlike most handloaders, he
had available the instruments to secure such uniformity.
"Those bullets are as nearly alike as different objects
can be," Kato said. "They weigh 158 grains, and that means
one-five-eight-point-zero-zero-zero-practically-nothing. The diameter is
.35903 inches. All right; I've been subjecting those bullets to
different radiation-bombardments, and the best results have given me a
bullet with a diameter of .35892 inches, and the weight is unchanged. In
other words, there's been no loss of mass, but the mass had contracted.
And that's only been the first test."
"Well, write up everything you have on it, and we'll lay out further
experimental work," MacLeod said. He glanced around the table. "So far,
we can't be entirely sure. The shrinkage may be all in the crystalline
lattice: the atomic structure may be unchanged. What we need is matter
that is really collapsed."
"I'll do that," Kato said. "Barida, I'll have all my data available for
you before noon tomorrow: you can make up copies for all Team members."
"Make mine on microfilm, for projection," von Heldenfeld said.
"Mine, too," Sir Neville Lawton added.
"Better make microfilm copies for everybody," Heym ben-Hillel suggested.
"They're handier than type-script."
MacLeod rose silently and tiptoed around behind his wife and Rudolf von
Heldenfeld, to touch Kato Sugihara on the shoulder.
"Come on outside, Kato," he whispered. "I want to talk to you."
* * * * *
The Japanese nodded and rose, following him outside onto the roof above
the laboratories. They walked over to the edge and stopped at the
balustrade.
"Kato, when you write up your stuff, I want you to falsify everything
you can. Put it in such form that the data will be absolutely worthless,
but also in such form that nobody, not even Team members, will know it
has been falsified. Can you do that?"
Kato's almond-shaped eyes widened. "Of course I can, Dunc," he replied.
"But why--?"
"I hate to say this, but we have a traitor in the Team. One of those
people back in the dining room is selling us out to the Fourth
Komintern. I know it's not Karen, and I know it's not you, and that's as
much as I do know, now."
The Japanese sucked in his breath in a sharp hiss. "You wouldn't say
that unless you were sure, Dunc," he said.
"No. At about 1000 this morning, Dr. Weissberg, the civilian director,
called me to his office. I found him very much upset. He told me that
General Nayland is accusing us--by which he meant this Team--of
furnishing secret information on our subproject to Komintern agents. He
said that British Intelligence agents at Smolensk had learned that the
Red Triumph laboratories there were working along lines of research
originated at MacLeod Team Center here. They relayed the information to
Western Union Central Intelligence, and WU passed it on to United States
Central Intelligence, and now Counter Espionage is riding Nayland about
it, and he's trying to make us the goat."
"He would love to get some of us shot," Kato said. "And that could
happen. They took a long time getting tough about espionage in this
country, but when Americans get tough about something, they get tough
right. But look here; we handed in our progress-reports to Felix
Weissberg, and he passed them on to Nayland. Couldn't the leak be right
in Nayland's own HQ?"
"That's what I thought, at first," MacLeod replied. "Just wishful
thinking, though. Fact is, I went up to Nayland's HQ and had it out with
him; accused him of just that. I think I threw enough of a scare into
him to hold him for a couple of days. I wanted to know just what it was
the Komintern was supposed to have got from us, but he wouldn't tell me.
That, of course, was classified-stuff."
"Well?"
"Well then, Karen and I got our digestive tracts emptied and went in to
town, where I could use a phone that didn't go through a military
switch-board, and I put through a call to Allan Hartley, President
Hartley's son. He owes us a break, after the work we did in Puerto Rico.
I told him all I wanted was some information to help clear ourselves,
and he told me to wait a half an hour and then call Counter Espionage
Office in Washington and talk to General Hammond."
"Ha! If Allan Hartley's for us, what are we worried about?" Kato asked.
"I always knew he was the power back of Associated Enterprises and his
father was the front-man: I'll bet it's the same with the Government."
"Allan Hartley's for us as long as our nose is clean. If we let it get
dirty, we get it bloodied, too. We have to clean it ourselves," MacLeod
told him. "But here's what Hammond gave me: The Komintern knows all
about our collapsed-matter experiments with zinc, titanium and nickel.
They know about our theoretical work on cosmic rays, including Suzanne's
work up to about a month ago. They know about that effect Sir Neville
and Heym discovered two months ago." He paused. "And they know about the
photon-neutrino-electron interchange."
Kato responded to this with a gruesome double-take that gave his face
the fleeting appearance of an ancient samurai war mask.
"That wasn't included in any report we ever made," he said. "You're
right: the leak comes from inside the Team. It must be Sir Neville, or
Suzanne, or Heym ben-Hillel, or Adam Lowiewski, or Rudolf von
Heldenfeld, or--No! No, I can't believe it could be Farida!" He looked
at MacLeod pleadingly. "You don't think she could have--?"
"No, Kato. The Team's her whole life, even more than it is mine. She
came with us when she was only twelve, and grew up with us. She doesn't
know any other life than this, and wouldn't want any other. It has to be
one of the other five."
"Well, there's Suzanne," Kato began. "She had to clear out of France
because of political activities, after the collapse of the Fourth
Republic and the establishment of the Rightist Directoire in '57. And
she worked with Joliot-Curie, and she was at the University of Louvain
in the early '50s, when that place was crawling with Commies."
"And that brings us to Sir Neville," MacLeod added. "He dabbles in
spiritualism; he and Suzanne do planchette-seances. A planchette can be
manipulated. Maybe Suzanne produced a communication advising Sir Neville
to help the Komintern."
"Could be. Then, how about Lowiewski? He's a Pole who can't go back to
Poland, and Poland's a Komintern country." Kato pointed out. "Maybe he'd
sell us out for amnesty, though why he'd want to go back there, the way
things are now--?"
"His vanity. You know, missionary-school native going back to the
village wearing real pants, to show off to the savages. Used to be a
standing joke, down where I came from." MacLeod thought for a moment.
"And Rudolf: he's always had a poor view of the democratic system of
government. He might feel more at home with the Komintern. Of course,
the Ruskis killed his parents in 1945--"