Read Ebook: Mary Anonymous by Walton Bryce Emshwiller Ed Illustrator

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Ebook has 194 lines and 10359 words, and 4 pages

MARY ANONYMOUS

Ten miles out of New Washington the duralium observation tower was a slim needle stuck in the ground. Three officers of the UN High Command waited at the top of it, within view of the rocket. They waited for zero hour. They were Major-General Engstrand, Lt. Colonel Morgenson, and Major Schauffer.

At 0500, Professor Michelson entered. He still wore a chemical-stained smock, a faded shirt and a pair of baggy trousers. He sat down in a dissolving way indicating a vast accumulated weariness. He felt old, very old, now that the last big project was finished.

"The G-Agent's all loaded," he finally said. "Three tons." He looked out the window. "You may give the firing orders, sir," he said to Major-General Engstrand.

Relief sighed voicelessly in the tower room.

Schauffer also looked out the window. Morgenson contemplated his fingernails. Engstrand stood very straight, filled with the magnitude of this moment's promise of final victory. Then he grabbed up the phone. "All right, Burkson. Everything's set. The rocket will go as scheduled."

He sat down and wiped slowly at his puffy but somehow powerful face.

The slim and calm Schauffer turned, got a bottle out of the liquor cabinet, poured four drinks. "We've worked long and hard," he said. "A toast to a well earned victory, gentlemen."

They drank.

Michelson was thinking, not of a well earned victory, but of retirement and rest. Forty years he had worked. For victory over the Eurasians. After that, for victory over the Martians. He wanted to sleep late, fish and rest in the sun.

"Three tons of G-Agent," Engstrand said softly.

The rocket would hit Mars. Countless other rockets would fly out of it, each directed, each exploding and casting out its deadly sprays and gases of the G-agent.

"Within an hour," Morgenson said, "after the rocket hits, there won't be a bug, a germ, a piece of lichen left alive. Unless somebody sends it there, there won't be anything alive on Mars again for a long time."

"I'd still like to know what kind of life it is," Schauffer said.

Michelson looked at the floor. "Now we'll never know."

"But we'll stay alive to speculate about it, and some day maybe they'll figure how to get a man across space. And then we'll know what died up there."

There was a chance, Michelson knew, but a very slim one, that something might go wrong. The rocket might crash on the Earth somewhere. But no one else probably even dared to think about it. None of them were as old nor as tired as Michelson. A lot of people would die. Just in case the Martians might have something in the way of gases as deadly as the G-agent, the population had been supplied with hypos of antidote, gas masks, and suiting. But still, so many people would die. However such a thing was very highly improbable.

They drank again.

Engstrand put his hand on Michelson's bowed shoulders. "Again you've done a magnificent job, old friend." His voice was low. "Three weeks ahead of schedule. That time advantage may have saved us all. God knows what the Martians are getting ready to send now!"

"One thing we can be thankful for," Schauffer said. "No spies. No worry about security, no saboteurs. Of course the Martians are lucky too--or were--in that respect." He looked thoughtfully into his glass. "The Martians did us a favor really. They created world unity. A psychologist couldn't have predicted it. But think of that--since the war with Mars, no human being has ever tried to sabotage anything directed at defeating the Martians!"

"It's natural enough. This time it's humans against--well--God knows what! But nothing human." Engstrand poured himself another drink. "No human being has had anything to identify with in the enemy's camp. You're right, Major. In a way, the Martians did us a favor. And now we'll do them one--one last favor. They're too damn evil to live, and they'll sure be glad, somewhere in their guts, to be finished off!"

Schauffer turned to Michelson, and grinned. "Where's Mary?"

"She wasn't feeling well," Michelson said. "I left her out at Lake House." He stood up. Quietly, he said. "Good-bye, gentleman. I'm going home, to Lake House. I'm tired."

"Aren't you going to watch the rocket blast?"

Michelson shook his head. "I think not."

They all shook hands with Michelson. "Write us, will you, Mike," Engstrand said. "Let us hear from you often."

"Of course," Michelson said. At the door he turned, an old man, stooped by years of devotion to more and more deadly chemicals. "If you need me, I'll still be at Lake House."

Instruments far in advance of the original telemetering and servomotor devices, had measured temperature, radiation, chemical makeup of atmosphere, minerals, various field effects, measured and catalogued all life, even to its cultural development, then sent back their measurements and evaluations on ultra-high-frequency to ground observers on Earth.

He had sent out the first rockets with monkeys, rats, guinea pigs and birds to test the effects of alien conditions on living organisms. No human being had ever survived. They stopped trying.

But the Martians had been carrying on a program much the same. They had been frightened. They had sent deadly rockets. The war had begun, a fantastic push-button operation between worlds millions of miles apart. This Earth rocket loaded with three tons of G-agent was what the UN hoped would be the last retaliatory gesture in a number of years of interspatial bickering. For it was also evident now that no Martian could get across space to Earth.

Michelson sighed, stepped into the elevator and started home. Home to rest, fish, lie in the sun. Home to Mary who kept him occupied and entertained in his loneliness.

But Mary had not been ill. She had not stayed at Lake House either. She had been aboard Michelson's helio, hiding in the luggage compartment. She had the key to Michelson's office and she was there.

But her head ached now. She hadn't slept for two days, thinking about what had to be done. Her head ached worse now as the wave directives came again and again, bringing new bursts of coercive pain with any deep emotional hint of possible resistance.

Now, in fact, there was doubt in Mary's mind that there was any desire to resist the directives, or if there ever had been. Now even those lingering wonderings about the possibility of doubt brought pain.

Better just to act. And it was time.

The clock gave her exactly one hour, she knew, to destroy the central building sector, the heart of the giant UN Research Foundation, and also wreck the rocket due to blast for Mars. She had heard Daddy Mike say what time the rocket would blast if he got the G-Agent loaded on schedule, and she knew he had done that.

There was little if any caution exercised at the Foundation. It had been well established by years of precedent that humans just didn't sabotage an effort directed at aliens. Especially Martians who, time and time again, had almost brought destruction to earth in innumerable unexpected ways. Added to that was the fact that no Martian could get across the void to take care of it directly, any more than an Earthman could to Mars for a similar purpose.

Mary had the advantage of this freedom. But the immediacy with which she could be identified by all the personnel about the Foundation might be a handicap as well as a possible advantage. She would have to exercise extreme caution herself.

The directives had stopped. She was on her own as long as she didn't resist the preceding orders. From this point on it was strictly Mary's responsibility.

She checked the electrodoor. No one was approaching Daddy Mike's office. She wasn't sure whether or not he would return to his office before going to Lake House. She wondered what he would do, how sad he would be, to find her gone.

From behind the rearmost, long unused files in the filing cabinet, she took the capsule of G-Agent. There was enough of the nerve gas in the ten ounce container to destroy everyone in the building, within half an hour after it was thrown into the ventilator shaft.

She went to the wall, pressed the button, and the opening was revealed by a sliding panel. Without hesitation, she tossed in the capsule of G-Agent. Dimly, she remembered how she had collected it, painfully over a period of months, drop by drop and stored it in the special non-corrosive alloy of the container. She had access to all of Daddy's laboratory equipment.

The container would explode in half an hour. Thirty minutes to get outside the buildings and over to the pits and the lethal rocket.

She felt nothing but a kind of depersonalized tension of responsibility as she removed her hat and took the small deadly neutron beam gun from the tiny sling she had fixed inside. She put the hat back on and tied the ribbon under her chin. The hat had caused much amused reaction from those friends of Daddy Mike who had become accustomed to her being constantly with the old man.

She ran into the bright shine of the tubular metal hall. She hoped with a flash of unexpected feeling that Daddy Mike would leave the building before the G-Agent was activated.

He loved her. Her heart throbbed painfully as she remembered how much Daddy loved her. How he had held her on his lap and stroked her hair and philosophized endlessly to her, not caring that she was not supposed to understand such complexity. But sharing this as he did all things with her in his aging loneliness.

She crouched there in the hall and thought of that, how she would love Daddy as Daddy loved her. Except that she was incapable of love. Dimly she remembered that once, long, very long ago, there had been a kind of spontaneous expression of physical desire, and sensuous pleasure, from the contact with others. But since then there had been the experiments, endless, too painful to recall. The bursting of blood and the repair, the brain slicing and the laying open of cells, and the sewing up. Years, a lifetime, a foreverness of pain, and the apparent making good as new again. But the scars were too deep too show, and too deep to mend.

Such pain for so long, the cold objective testing, had killed any capacity for love. Mary was convinced of that.

She held the gun to her left side and ran in nakedness and silence down the glowing tube.

An overweight guard in his brown UN uniform eased around the curve in the tube and stood with his back to her. It was a good place for him to walk what was to him a useless beat. There was nothing to guard against but boredom. This was the building's left wing and fairly isolated, and he could merely stand here and wait for the far end of his shift.

She slid along the wall. Her feet moved with a vague whispering silence, the silence of unconscious stealth. But then the guard turned to place his heel more comfortably on the inward-sloping bottom of the tube. And he saw her.

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