Early Days: More Tales From the Pulp Era

  He followed the girl into the adjoining room, where the Inquisitor was waiting. The Interrogation Chamber was an immense rectangular room with concrete floor and bleak white walls, in the center of which stood the Inquisitor.

  “Good morning, Kroll,” the Inquisitor said. Its metallic voice rattled and boomed in the big room. In the depths of the machine, relays clicked and hummed.

  Kroll bowed to it, and the Inquisitor responded with a gesture of a prolonged metal arm. “The first prisoner, Kroll.”

  “Miss Florence Horniman,” Kroll said. “Accused of treason against the State. Denies charge.”

  “How do you plead?” the machine asked coldly.

  “Not guilty,” stammered the girl.

  Two huge metal arms extended from the Inquisitor’s sides and folded around her. They drew her across the room to the bosom of the robot. “Feed in the data, Kroll.”

  At the signal, Kroll slipped in the tape on the girl. A moment passed while the Inquisitor digested the data, and then: “The plea of not guilty is rejected as invalid.”

  “You can’t just do that!” the girl said. “That’s my plea!”

  “Not valid in view of the evidence,” said the Inquisitor. Kroll smiled distantly. He had seen this scene repeated, over and over, almost every day for the ten years he had held the post. He wrapped his blue-and-gold Interrogator’s cloak around himself impressively and stepped forward.

  “You are accused of treason against the State,” Kroll said sonorously. “But it is my duty to inform you that your sentence may be mitigated upon your delivering us certain information—about leaders of your movement, future plans, location of your party cell, and so forth.”

  Florence Horniman’s eyes flashed brightly. “I won’t tell you anything!”

  “Perhaps I did not make myself clear,” Kroll said. He repeated his offer.

  “The answer is still no!”

  Kroll sighed. “Very well,” he said. A third hand slid from the Inquisitor’s body and a needle-thin finger traced a line down the girl’s bare arm. A bloody trickle appeared.

  She began to sob again. Kroll stepped closer and lifted her head. “Why must you hold out?” he asked. “Why don’t you speak?”

  Still silence. The finger rose again and sliced lightly across her cheek.

  “All right, take her away,” Kroll said when twenty minutes had passed. The Inquisitor was humming merrily, busily taping the data that had been extracted from the girl and feeding it to the main computers downstairs. They would integrate it and notify the State Police. It was a smooth-functioning system.

  The bloody thing that had been Florence Horniman was led away by a guard, and the next prisoner led in. It was the middle-aged man, Chester Wengrove.

  “Get your hands off me,” he snapped to the guard as he was shoved into the room. “You have no right to—”

  “Unfortunately, as a representative of the State he has every right,” Kroll said calmly. He fed Wengrove’s tape to the Inquisitor. The trial proceeded.

  Wengrove was stubborn; it took half an hour to break him down at all, but when he did speak he sang freely, giving data on his cell of the Movement.

  “Very good,” the Inquisitor said when Wengrove finally coughed and said he knew no more. “You are completely exonerated from the charge of treason, in view of the information you have given.”

  The eyes in the bloody face lit up. “I’m free, you mean?”

  “Unfortunately, no,” the Inquisitor said. “Because of your danger to the State, you must be kept in Quarantine Camp, along with other diseased former members of society, until such time as we are able to clear your mind of its confusion. But you will not be punished.”

  “I won’t be punished?” Wengrove repeated mindlessly.

  “When the Inquisitor says something, it means it,” Kroll said.

  “Take him away.”

  The next prisoner was Neil Leslie. He strode into the Inquisitor’s Chamber without having to be pushed, and confronted Kroll defiantly. “My turn, eh?”

  Kroll nodded. “Your companions have both been removed.” He nodded meaningfully toward the Inquisitor, whose claws were red with the blood of Florence Horniman and Chester Wengrove. “They both spoke most satisfactorily—after some persuasion.”

  “Torture, you mean.”

  “We’ve been through this already,” Kroll said. “Since you’re going to talk anyway, I don’t understand why you can’t save yourself a great deal of pain by talking now, before I hand you to the Inquisitor.”

  “Because I don’t mean to talk at all,” Leslie said. He ran a hand through his shock of blonde hair and glared fiercely at Kroll.

  “Very well,” the Interrogator said. He stepped to the robot and slipped in Neil Leslie’s tape.

  “I don’t understand you at all,” Kroll admitted, looking down at the pain-racked body before him. “Why don’t you talk? I don’t want to keep you in here, you know.”

  Bloodshot eyes looked back at him, eyes clouded with pain and hatred. “I’m not saying anything,” Leslie murmured. “Oil up your robot and let’s try again.”

  For the hundredth time the Inquisitor’s talons descended, raked a red line across the man’s body. He shuddered, but did not speak. Kroll shook his head impatiently. No prisoner had ever held out against the Inquisitor this long before. He found himself perspiring.

  The Inquisitor said, “The name of your leader is David Cosbro. Is this true?”

  No answer.

  A needle descended.

  Still no answer.

  “Your Cell was located in East Appalachia, Upper Quadrant. Is this true?”

  No answer again.

  Minutes passed, minutes in which Leslie continued to stare defiantly outward, continued to clench his fists and remain silent.

  Finally the Inquisitor opened its tightly-clamped arms and let Leslie stagger out. He slumped to the ground at the feet of the robot and leaned dazedly against the Inquisitor’s gleaming base.

  “Prisoner is on the verge of death,” the Inquisitor said. “Further questioning is pointless.”

  Kroll looked down in surprise and chagrin. In ten years, this was the first time a prisoner had not broken under Interrogation. He scowled angrily; it was his first failure.

  “You’re a stubborn man, Leslie. But it’s killed you.”

  “I’m not dead yet,” the prisoner said brokenly. Suddenly he mustered some strength and managed to look up. “Tell me something, Kroll. I want to know something.”

  “Yes?”

  “Why do you do what you do?”

  “You mean—Interrogate?”

  “I mean torture,” Leslie said.

  “I am an Interrogator because it is my duty to the State. Treason must be unmasked, the enemies of the State destroyed. It is necessary.”

  Leslie looked up, and there seemed to be pity in his eyes. “Just one question, Kroll. Doesn’t it bother you, when you go home? How do you know you’re right and we’re wrong?”

  Kroll started to say something, then saw there was no point in bothering.

  “Prisoner is dead,” said the Inquisitor.

  “Take him away,” ordered Kroll. The day was over.

  What Leslie had said preyed on Kroll’s mind all the way home. He got out of the tube and made his way to his austere room with his mind fixed on one question—the snarling words the dying prisoner had hurled at him: How do you know you’re right and we’re wrong?

  They had to be wrong, Kroll told himself firmly. The State had to be right. It was necessary; it was logical; it was the way things had always been.

  But the thought obsessed him, and the image of Neil Leslie’s face, bloody but undefeated, hung before him as he went about his evening’s activities. The face was still in his mind as he prepared to go to bed.

  Odd, Kroll thought. This was the first time he had been disturbed after a torture session. He had seen hundreds—no, thousands—pass through the Inquisitor, come out shambling rags of bo
ne and flesh, and it had never bothered him, because they were enemies of the State and deserved no more.

  He dropped off into an uneasy sleep. But suddenly, in the small hours of the night, he sat bolt upright in bed, a cold, clammy perspiration breaking out on him.

  Leslie had just asked the question for the hundredth time. And Kroll had had no answer. He didn’t know who was right. He just didn’t know. His mind, unswervingly loyal for so many years, swayed in an agony of doubt.

  He got out of bed and paced back and forth across the floor of his room.

  “The State is wrong!” he said aloud. But it didn’t sound right. It couldn’t be true. It wasn’t true. “Stupid!” he told himself. It was stupid to distrust the State—and wrong. “Wrong! Criminally, disgustingly wrong!”

  There! He felt better. He had rid himself of his foolish doubts. “How could I have been so foolish?” he said aloud. His nerves felt better now. Once again he was ready to do his duty as a loyal officer of the State.

  Smiling to himself for being so easily disturbed by the remarks of disloyal traitors, he climbed back into bed and closed his eyes. A few moments later, he was asleep.

  In the morning, everything seemed to be all right; the terrors of the last twelve hours were pale things of the past, no longer exerting pressure on him. He caught the tube and headed to the Ministry.

  He donned his uniform in the locker room and took the elevator to the Interrogation Floor. He stepped into his office. It was empty. No prisoners this morning? It didn’t seem likely.

  He pushed open the inner door and entered the Interrogation Chamber. To his surprise, he saw Matthews, one of his assistants, wearing the uniform of an Interrogator and standing near the robot, arms folded.

  “What are you doing in here dressed that way?” Kroll snapped.

  “I am the new Interrogator,” Matthews told him.

  “Since when?”

  “The appointment was made very early this morning,” the Inquisitor said. “We have all the evidence we need to brand you as a traitor to the State.”

  The new Interrogator turned a switch, and Kroll heard his own voice come from a speaker. “The State is wrong! Stupid! Wrong! Criminally, disgustingly wrong! How could I have been so foolish?”

  “There is no need to deny these words,” said the Interrogator. “It is only necessary that you tell us with whom you have been working.”

  “But there’s no one!” Kroll shouted. “You don’t understand! I’m loyal! I can explain!”

  But the new Interrogator merely looked cold as the long, chilling metal arms of the Inquisitor reached out and gathered Kroll to its steel bosom.

  THE ULTIMATE WEAPON

  (1956)

  As I described above, Randall Garrett and I had been hired early in 1956 to do short stories for Bill Hamling’s two magazines; the lead novellas for each issue were the domain of the veteran pulp writers Edmond Hamilton and Dwight V. Swain, and, occasionally, Milton Lesser or Paul W. Fairman, and our monthly package of material filled the pages behind them. But one of the regulars must have missed his novella deadline in June, 1956, because my records show that I produced an 18,000-worder for Hamling that month, to which I gave the sort of Edmond-Hamiltonian title that I thought a space-opera novella ought to have: “Starlords of Shanador.”

  Perhaps that sounded too much like a Hamilton title to Hamling, because when he published it in the January, 1957 issue of Imaginative Tales he called it “The Ultimate Weapon,” and, though I had put my own name on the manuscript, he stuck the byline of “S.M. Tenneshaw” on it. That was as good as publishing it anonymously, because “Tenneshaw” had begun life as a pseudonym in 1947 for a story in the Ziff-Davis pulp magazine Fantastic Adventures, true authorship now unknown, and had been used about a dozen times in the Ziff-Davis pulps by an assortment of writers, including Milton Lesser, Chester S. Geier, and, perhaps, Hamling himself. When he started his own magazines in 1951, Hamling had brought a lot of the Ziff-Davis house names over with him, and during the years that followed he ran five “Tenneshaw” stories that had been written by Garrett, Silverberg, or Garrett and Silverberg in collaboration, along with ten others the authorship of which remains unknown to this day.

  Hamling’s idea in Imagination and Imaginative Tales was to revive the classic pulp formula, as old as fiction itself, that was already becoming obsolete in the late 1950s: a sympathetic protagonist struggles against insuperable obstacles, valiantly faces defeat, and, after coming right to the edge of the abyss, eventually triumphs against all odds. John W. Campbell, when he took over Astounding Science Fiction in 1937, had rebelled against that formula and had found a group of sophisticated new writers—Robert A. Heinlein, L. Sprague de Camp, Theodore Sturgeon, Fritz Leiber, Isaac Asimov, and many more—to provide a kind of science fiction that was richer in characterization, more complex in concept, altogether more adult. Such postwar magazines as Horace Gold’s Galaxy and the Fantasy & Science Fiction of Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas had followed Campbell’s path. So did Hamling, when he began his magazines, but the sales figures were disappointing, and so, reasoning that there was a younger audience still wanting to be served, had pivoted back to the action-oriented science fiction that Amazing and Fantastic, where he had learned the editorial trade, were still providing.

  So I started “Starlords of Shanador” in classic pulp mode, opening with my protagonist’s name, showing that he was in big trouble, and providing a setting: “Laird Hammill raced frantically through the cold night of Denerix, largest world of the Shanador system. He was somewhere on a dark, vast plain outside the city of Lombrosa, and a half mile behind him lay the useless hulk of his burned-out landcar.” The story continues that way, slam and bang and biff and pow, displaying my precocious command of pulp formulas right to the curtain line (“We’ve won, darling…”) It moves along very nicely, I think. And in its portrayal of a race of intelligent beings that dwell in the hearts of stars I touch on a theme that I would return to, decades later, in my novel Starborne.

  ——————

  Laird Hammill raced frantically through the cold night of Denerix, largest world of the Shanador system. He was somewhere on a dark, vast plain outside the city of Lombrosa, and a half mile behind him lay the useless hulk of his burned-out landcar.

  The only light was the wide band of bright stars that was the galaxy of Shanador, glittering overhead; the only sound, the steady tunk-tunk of the radar-nosed pursuit robots creeping inexorably up from behind him. Desperately, Laird Hammill pounded on, clinging to the one wild hope that he would be able to avoid pursuers from the city and return safely to the scoutship he had hidden somewhere to the east.

  If they caught him, it meant death. The penalty for spying is a universal constant.

  As he ran, he heard the tiny beeping of his chest-radio. The transistors in his uniform pocket were picking up some sort of message from the main Earth fleet, hovering ten thousand light-years from Shanador. Cursing annoyedly, Hammill thumbed the transmitter without breaking stride.

  “This is Hammill,” he muttered. “Come in, I read you. Over.”

  He gasped for breath. It wasn’t easy to carry on a radio conversation while running for your life through pitch-black alien territory.

  “Hammill, this is Flagship Gifford. Haven’t heard from you in three days. What’s up? Over.”

  “Afraid I’m a lousy spy,” Hammill grunted. “Right now—uh—I’m in the process of being run ragged by a team of Denerixian pursuit-robots. I’ll report later, if I live through it. Over and out.”

  “Hammill!” yelled the tinny voice. “Come in, Hammill!”

  “Sorry, Gifford. I don’t have time to chat now.” He jabbed the transmitter off and slowed to catch his breath and survey the situation.

  Somewhere behind him, a team of tin bloodhounds was sniffing his trail, leading along the very efficient police corps of the Starlord of Denerix. The dim glow of the city of Lombrosa was just barely visible on the distant horiz
on.

  Ahead of him, on the far side of this damned plain, was his scoutship. But he wasn’t going to get there. He knew that, feeling a dull inexorability that he would be caught and executed as a spy.

  The hideous sound of the pursuit-robots grew louder. Hammill grabbed for breath and started running again. He wondered how long his strength was going to hold out. The torture-chambers of the Starlord of Denerix had a well-earned reputation in the Shanador system, and Hammill wasn’t too keen on getting a first-hand opinion.

  As he thought it over, he hadn’t done a very good job. He had been on Denerix a little less than a week, acting as advance-guard for the great Terran fleet that was massing to crush the Shanador Starlords.

  Hammill had been assigned to scout Starlord bases, probe for weak spots, look for chinks in the mighty network of force the Starlords had erected around their system. It would be sheer suicide for the fleet to attempt to attack blindly; Hammill was vital. And Hammill had failed.

  His first port of call had been the city of Lombrosa, capital of Denerix, which was one of the key-worlds of the Shanador system. He had planned to infiltrate among the hired mercenaries that formed the bulk of the local encampment, find out what was going on in the system, where the troop deployment was heaviest, where the weak worlds were. Then, he would relay the information back to the waiting fleet, and they would strike.

  Shanador had to be crushed. The confederacy of alien despots was known to be gathering its might for an assault on the Earth Federation itself, and in interstellar warfare it was a matter of get the first jump or none at all. Second best in an interstellar conflict was crushing defeat; there could be only one winner.

  When would Shanador strike? Earth didn’t know. There was talk of a mysterious weapon the Starlords were perfecting, a deadly mental projector whose properties were vague and terrifying; there were all kinds of rumors. The time had come to rid the universe of the Starlords, that was clear.