Page:Stirring Science Stories, March 1942.djvu/8

, notions and nostrums from cranks. Therefore it was natural that he refused to see the sailor from the flagship of the fleet who said he had something awfully important to tell him, but that it wasn't official. It would have been better if Bartok had listened, for the sailor was going to tell him what the Admiral had said to his secretary while passing through the sailor's corridor. It had been: "By God, Hackenshaw, if something doesn't happen I sail for parts unknown and that beastly Bartok can fight his own war!" But the sailor never saw Bartok, in spite of deserting from the flagship and commandeering a lifeboat to make the trek from Venus to Algol. Instead he was shot for desertion when they picked him up in a math parlor where he was spending his last hours of life in the popular diversion of the day, capping formulas.

Hence it came as a staggering blow to Bartok to learn that the Fleet—all the line-ships, that is—had simply taken off into space after raiding all the cities near at hand for women. They were headed, when he heard the news, for a minor star-cluster near the edge of the universe, and in the opposite direction of that from which the invaders were coming.

"Akh!" screamed Bartok, when the news was broken to him. "The—the—the—" Words failed him. For hours afterwards he was in a daze. When he snapped out of it his first words were: "How about their commissariat?"

A subaltern tactfully informed him that they had made no provisions of any sort for food and supplies. A couple of hours after Bartok was heard to observe: "They're going to starve to death." Which was the exact truth.

When the Fleet was eliminated from the scheme of things Bartok found himself in more or less complete command of the colonial system. What vestiges of an executive committee there had been on Earth were quite shrivelled away. Most of the committee had died of fright when they learned that the Fleet had left them high and dry.

The Intelligence Wing took unto itself all authority of life and death, officially, at last. They had been shooting leaders for quite a while, but it hadn't been with sanction and consent from above. The Wing expanded legally to cover with its charter all those tenders, lighters and graving-ships which had been left behind by the back-bone of the Fleet. It made them the most powerful unit then in the colonial system, with fire-power to match any that sporadic rebellions might bring up.

Meanwhile the invaders progressed amazingly, almost forgotten as the cause of the system-wide crisis. They would have been totally lost from the public eye in the confusion had not reports come in about once a week that there was no further communication with such-and-such a sector. A few retired sailors moved forward pins on their star-maps and wondered how they managed it without once showing their hand.

And Bartok, who had once wished at least six times a day that he might have a free hand to remake the colonial system—"— and obstacles be damned!"—was wondering if a really sound case could be made out against his willfully inhibiting—by means of an overdose of cyanide —his metabolic process.

T BECAME apparent that after four months of horrid confusion and blood-letting that things were quieting down, partly due to the able handling of the situation by the Intelligence Wing, which managed to keep the lid on practically everywhere and save the system from a complete premature smash-up, mostly because the populance had got used to the idea of being invaded, and successfully.

The ordinary round of' living began again, with perhaps a little more feverish gaiety in the math parlors and a little less solemn conviction in the houses of worship. When Systemic Coordinator Bartok (the title had been hung on him while his back was turned; he still swore that he was nothing more than the Wing Commander acting under emergency powers) was able to take a vacation the last of the internal trouble was officially over and done with. It had been ugly, certainly, but there had been episodes in the system's history even less attractive, as when the docks broke down during the days of the old Nine Planet Federation and there had actually been people starving to death and homeless.

It had occurred to Bartok as he lounged in his birthday suit with the other convalescents at Venus Springs, at the South Pole, that it would be touching and entirely appropriate to the spirit of the service to pay tribute to that deceased but magnificent female, Babe MacNeice.

He had arranged in his mind's eye a procession of notables to lay wreaths on a simple block of tungsten. He had just begun to work out the details of the speech he would make when there came a faint blatting noise from his wrist, the only part of him that was dressed, and that purely for utility. From the tiny transceiver came: "Barty, this is Central in New Metropole. The recorder in your private office has just begun to squawk. Who's it hooked up to?"

Bartok thought, furrowed his brow like a plowed field. "MacNeice," he said at last. "She's the only one hooked up to G7. I'm coming right up." In about the time it took him to dress he had called a plane, one of the very special racer models that he had fallen into using during the quick-moving past months when a second clipped was a score of lives saved.

In two hours flat he was slamming his office door behind him and jiggling the dials of the transceiver set on G7. No answer.