The Stolen Future Box Set Read online

  We both lay there panting as a stunned crowd gathered. I tried to catalog the pains in my legs, shoulders, and back. Far above me I could see the Nuum, descending far more slowly than we had. Suddenly the Silver Man scrambled to his feet and shoved through the crowd.

  I was a second behind him, throwing aside creatures that until now I had never imagined existed, and would never have touched in a dream. But each of them reacted as any human being would, scattering before us with a rising cry of bewilderment and fear.

  I ran full bore down the avenue, still holding the man’s coat in one clenched hand, aches and pains and coat forgotten in my desperation. I had risked death by fire and by falling to catch this man, and I wasn’t going to lose him now. Up ahead I spotted him bouncing off startled pedestrians. For me, they parted like the Red Sea. They thought I was a Nuum, and at that moment, I was perversely glad. The feeling did not last.

  A shadow passed me by, skimming the crowd until it overtook my quarry. The Nuum hovered overhead and in front of him, cutting off his escape. The Silver Man raised his weapon, but the Nuum fired first, aiming hastily from his unstable floating platform. The shot went wide into the crowded sidewalk—striking a pedestrian who flew backward through the air, dead before he hit the ground.

  A woman grazed by the same shot screamed and kept on screaming—but her hoarse shouts met with a vacuum. The entire street was frozen in horror. Even the fugitive and I had stopped dead in our tracks. Suddenly the tableau was broken by the swooping arrival of the other Nuum. Guns drawn, engines roaring, they landed their craft on the sidewalk and the street heedless of the people underfoot. They had almost reached the Silver Man when the first rock flew.

  The whole block went up like wildfire. Office workers and passersby and people of all walks of life suddenly became a hysterical mob armed with fists, lunch boxes, and carryalls. They descended on the Nuum like a wave, and the few shots that the conquerors got off only incited them further. Three hundred years of untold degradation and mistreatment erupted on a quiet city street all about me—until a frothing young woman clubbed me with her briefcase and I remembered too late that to these people, I was also a Nuum…

  I hardly remember how I survived that day. The mob surrounded me like an ocean wave; it beat mainly upon the Nuum, but I was battered and kicked and slapped. I have vague recollections of being knocked to the ground and realizing that I still held the coat, I threw it over my head and red coverall as best I could, concealing the color that to the mob was as a red flag to a bull.

  I was stepped on and kicked still, but it was the mindless movement of the crowd, and not any deliberate abuse. I curled into a defensive ball and prayed my bones would hold. In a few minutes, the noise died away and I risked raising the coat far enough to see.

  It was no-man’s-land all over again. I saw the civilian dead first; most lay on their stomachs, facing the Nuum’s last position, those who had died storming against the foe. But others lay facing opposite, black scorch marks on their backs, arms, necks and heads. The air was obscenely perfumed with stench of burnt flesh. In their panic, the Nuum had fired on everyone and everything. It had done them no good.

  At first I could pick the soldiers out solely by the dead that surrounded them. It was difficult to make out the bits of red cloth, among all the blood. Of the bodies, little remained; even the flying platforms had been torn to bits, or perhaps set upon with the Nuum’s own weapons. There was evidence that the mob had torn them from the soldiers’ hands and turned them on their owners. Even now, as I listened in the eerie silence, I could hear the sounds of superheated air sizzling not far away.

  I was the sole man standing in that graveyard avenue, the sole survivor of the slaughter I had helped to cause.

  Suddenly my eye was attracted by a silvery glint on the ground. Stepping forward, I gingerly moved a dead man out of the way—and found my quarry unconscious, but still breathing. My boot slipped in fresh blood as I freed him. His face was bleeding, but his metallic suit must have saved him from more serious injury. Now I had him; what was I to do with him?

  All at once I found myself in shadow. I looked up to see two large floaters above me, their decks crowded with men and guns. Many of the latter were pointed in my direction.

  “Ay, there!” a man called from above. “Stand slowly.”

  I obeyed, and realizing that I was still partially covered by the now-ruined coat, I let it slide away from me. Immediately the man’s face changed and the guns were moved away.

  “Hold on,” the man called again. “We’ll pick you up.”

  “I have a wounded man here.”

  “Leave him.”

  “I can’t,” I answered, shaking my head. “He’s a prisoner. We were chasing him when the riot started.”

  By this time the floater had descended to only a few inches above the ground. Its commander grimaced, plainly nervous to be here. With my officer’s eye, I could see his men’s eyes were rolling, their attention diverted and their concentration weak. This was not what they had been trained for.

  “Bring him, then, but hurry up,” the commander said, but when he did not offer any assistance, I was obliged to pick the Silver Man up myself and haul him aboard.

  There was a small cabin in the center of the flying disc, and by the time I had dumped my unconscious burden there with whatever gentleness I could muster, we were again airborne, heading by my guess toward the ongoing fighting. I had never flown before, and I admit that the experience would have been unnerving even without the grisly events of the past hour.

  As it was, the buildings betwixt which we flew caused updrafts and cross-winds that kept the little craft bobbing like a sailboat on a rough sea, and when, on approaching the disturbance, a random flash of weapons-fire prompted the commander to order immediate evasive maneuvers, I was thrown from side to side of the cabin and hard-pressed not to spread my breakfast all over its floor. At that I was lucky; had I been standing on deck, unprepared, I would surely have been thrown overboard to my death.

  The upper half of each wall was clear, so that I had an unobstructed view when I was not being tossed to and fro. I saw the crowds below, milling, not marching, point upward as we appeared. Whence the earlier gunfire had come I could not see, and none greeted us now. I breathed a sigh of relief that these were only onlookers, either drawn here by the noise, or else driven here from elsewhere by the riot, but in either case not part of it. I looked down at my prisoner to see how he was faring and thus missed the command to fire.

  The sizzling shrieks of weaponry and the screams of the trapped people below hit my ears at the same time. I leaped for the window to see every man on deck, weapon to shoulder, knuckles white from effort, firing randomly and at will at the crowd.

  I tried to get outside, hoping somehow to ameliorate the slaughter even if it meant my own life. I was partly responsible for this. It was my pursuit of the Silver Man that had attracted the Nuum’s attention. But the pilot threw the ship into another dive, swooping over another part of the crowd to afford easier shooting, and I was slammed against the opposite wall, where I slumped, senseless.

  When I woke a Nuum helped me swallow something for the pain, and bade me lie down. But I couldn’t. The noises of the crowds, the high far-off cries that had echoed in my mind at the height of the madness, had stopped. I staggered to my feet; I needed to see again the devastation, the dead, innocents and rioters alike strewn about like just another kind of garbage to be swept up by faceless men in the pre-dawn darkness. The dead, who would be walking still had I not brought down on them the wrath of their conquerors.

  That was what I feared to see; the truth was much worse.

  The Nuum had brought in even greater weapons. They left no bodies, nothing but dust; the silent streets were seas of black ash, stirred occasionally by the breeze, piled against an overturned vehicle or the cracked walls of high semi-transparent buildings now stained by the shadow-bodies of atomized souls. Nothing else moved. The weapons of the pe
ople into whose hands I had stumbled left little trace of those who fell before them.

  The central and highest tower of the entire city lay directly before us, its sparkling spire silhouetted against the low clouds that I had never seen so clearly—or so near. Away from disturbances, the sensation of flight that had unnerved me earlier now seemed so smooth I felt no fear. Perhaps my emotions had simply been drained out of me. They might have thrown me from the top of the tower and I wouldn’t have felt a thing.

  They flew directly into the building. Inside it was completely normal and visible. The hangar must have occupied an entire level, and was several floors high, with flying craft of all sizes and descriptions squatting on platforms on varying heights. Many of the one-man flyers were in use as elevators. The room buzzed with so much activity I wondered how they could dart about without mishap, but gradually the design of the place became clear and I could see that horizontal flight was allowed only at certain levels, and through defined corridors. It was as if bees had been gifted with human intelligence without sacrificing their organization. It was a Jules Verne novel come to life.

  My return to reality was quick and sudden. Someone clapped me lightly on the arm.

  “Let’s get this prisoner of yours put away.” The Nuum commander shifted his weight slightly from side to side, as if eager to get away. The adrenaline of the hunt wearing off, he was reluctant to look me in the eye. “Then I’ll see you down to the doctor.”

  The Silver Man lay where he had slid up against a wall during our aerial maneuvers, to all appearances still unconscious from his injuries. For all we knew, he could be dead, but the commander seemed oblivious to his plight. Between us, the commander and I hoisted the prisoner so that we could drag him along to the elevator.

  Please make your floor selection. The words sounded mechanical, even in my mind. This elevator is in service.

  “Detention,” said my companion to the air. The doors obediently slid closed and there was a faintest sense of downward movement. We stood without speaking, the Silver Man hanging limply between us. I found the silence most anxious, but at the same time I was praying for it to continue. If the Nuum exhibited the slightest curiosity—about me, or about the prisoner, what would I say? I had an assumed name, but no serial number, no unit, no idea how to answer any one of a thousand innocent questions he might pose.

  For all I knew, if he asked, and I could not answer, the elevator itself might reach out and render me as helpless as the man we carried.

  Sub-level four, the disembodied voice announced. Detention.

  “Let’s get him settled so you can see the doctor.”

  “No, thanks,” I grunted as I rearranged our burden. “I’ll be all right. I can get there by myself.” Five minutes’ examination by a doctor and I’d never leave this building.

  He sighed heavily, giving me a grieving look.

  “No, look, really,” I said. I lowered my voice. “What are they going to think if you have to help me? What kind of duty do you think they’re going to give me? It’s just some scrapes. I don’t want to be stuck in bed for a week.”

  He stood there for a minute. We were two trench veterans with the same disdain for the rear echelons. Wherever you go, men fight. And wherever men fight, some things don’t change.

  “All right,” he said at last. “But I’ll take him the rest of the way. You get back upstairs and get some sleep. That’s an order.”

  I walked away and let myself breathe. It was a short reprieve. Within sixty seconds I had gotten into trouble again.

  I wasn’t lost…exactly. I knew where I was; I simply didn’t know where I wanted to be. This is a fine distinction that can only truly be appreciated by those who have experienced it.

  I had put aside for the moment any thought of the massacre I had lived through. It wasn’t the first; it might not be the last. But those who dwell on such things do not survive long.

  Thinking there might be some way to track my movements, I had returned to the hangar, whereupon I had strolled straight into a corridor which led directly to another elevator. For those few seconds while I waited for a car, I struggled to stand nonchalantly while the spot between my shoulder blades itched intolerably in anticipation of a sizzling red beam that could turn me into dust before I could blink.

  When the doors opened and I was still alive, I stepped into the car and said: “Lobby.”

  Obediently, the car took my weight away as it dropped through the shaft hundreds of feet toward the ground. This made me much more nervous than flying, and I tried not to think about how fast I was going. Not as fast as the last fall I’d had, certainly! And with less worry about stopping, to boot.

  Then some hideous demon inside me changed my life forever and I could only watch in horror as I heard my own lips form the word:

  “Stop.”

  I have mentioned how in moments of extreme duress my mind unhinges itself from conscious control of my body and allows itself to be taken for a ride. This was one of those moments. My brain had formed one rebellious thought, fed it into my nervous system, and stepped back to watch the fun…

  I might never be in this position again. The Nuum were the overlords and guardians of all technology and science on this world. If there were answers, they would be found here, in their headquarters. If I had left then, I might have returned to the home of Bantos Han, washed the dye out of my hair, and sought work with the garbage collectors. How my life would have been different!

  Would I have made same choice, had I known that the fate of two worlds rested upon it? There are very few truly courageous men. Most of us simply rise to an occasion when we have no other choice, and if we live through it, we are hailed as heroes. But how many of us ever do something like that again?

  Had there been another option, I feel sure I would have taken it. Unfortunately there was not: Necessity is a poor substitute for courage, but a compelling one nonetheless.

  Please make a selection. This elevator is in service.

  The mechanical voice shocked me out of my introspection. It was time to make a decision.

  “Sub-level four.”

  Had I been so naive to think that the events of the past few days—or even the past few hours!—had been sufficiently astounding as to subdue my capacity for surprise, the detention section would have steered me straight from the moment I walked through its unlocked doors.

  Yes, I said “unlocked.” That was only the first surprise to greet me, but in a way it was very nearly the last of my life. Before I was to learn that valuable and dangerous lesson, however, I was to see and hear things that would age me a great many years and threaten to obliterate my very sanity.

  I quickly forgot about the curiously inviting door when I stepped through and found myself in a medieval dungeon. Having imagined this scene a great many times in the course of my history researches, I think I might be excused for saying that this discovery stopped me dead in my tracks.

  The change was immediate and total. Far from the gently gleaming white walls of the administration building with their indirect lighting and pristine floors, this corridor reflected the most primitive imaginable surroundings. Narrow and low-ceilinged, the corridor didn’t so much “stretch” before me as yawn like the decaying maw of a beached leviathan. The walls were narrow, dank with groundwater and slimy moss. Wet straw coated the slick floor, doing nothing to soak up the muck but contributing a great deal to the smell.

  Light was provided by widely-spaced ill-smelling torches whose flickering created more shadows than it dispelled. The Nuum had gone to great lengths to create as disagreeable an atmosphere as possible, a trait I was to learn was popular among them. As my eyes became more accustomed, I was able to pick out darker packets of shadow at regular intervals, midway between each pair of torches. The distances had been cunningly calculated so that the light never reached the doors themselves, never presenting even a symbolic ray of hope to the wretches entombed behind.

  But the prisoners themselves
were silent. As the muffled booming of the door behind preceded me down the haunted hallway, I heard nothing else but my own breath. I had lived this tableau in fiction and study so many times that I expected them to start wailing whenever someone came near. But where I would have anticipated the pleas of the wrongfully taken and the moaning of failing sanity, there was nothing but dying echoes and the belated fear that I might have trapped myself alone in hell.

  Chapter 9

  The Dungeon

  The itch between my shoulder blades was beginning to seem like an old friend. At that moment it was telling me that if the door should open and someone should find me standing here, I would have a very hard time explaining myself. That thought communicated itself to my reluctant feet, and I stepped into the dungeon.

  As I advanced the floor dropped in a gentle incline that ended just short of the first cell, where the floor leveled once more. At the same time, the temperature rose uncomfortably. The moss on the walls grew more lushly here, droplets of moisture gleaming even in that uncertain light, and the straw underfoot was little better than mud. The architect of this dungeon had gone his forebears one better: He had designed the entire floor to flood at regular intervals, transforming a hot, dismal cell into a steaming jungle with a locked door.

  Inside the first cell I heard something move.

  True to form, the doors appeared to be fashioned from thick beams with only a head-sized barred opening. As I stuck my torch near the opening I could smell the rotting wood adding its own aroma to the miasma of muddy straw and perpetual dankness.

  “Hello? Who’s in there?”

  “It’s still me,” grunted a surprisingly strong voice. “I haven’t escaped since you put me in here.”

  I could have danced. It was he! I’d found the Silver Man! Only now, in the excitement of my discovery, did I realize that I had no idea how I planned to convince him to tell me what I needed to know. If he was trapped inside, I was no less trapped outside. And he could at least explain to the Nuum why he was here…