RANE RANDALL slouched in one of Limpy’s chairs completely engrossed with thought. He didn’t see the Air Cop eyeing him from the doorway; nor did he see Limpy nudge the barman and say:
“They’re after him again. Take him a highball and ask if he knows Moses.”
The barman looked at Randall, then at the Air Cop. “I’ll bet that’s why they call him Rainy,” he said mournfully; “there’s always a storm when he’s around.”
“Sure,” agreed Limpy with a grin, “but he’s a good customer and always pays later for the damage when he tries to take the place apart, so get ready for a blackout.”
The barman took the drink to Randall’s table, set it down and mopped the varnished wood with his towel. “Limpy wants to know if you’re acquainted with Moses,” he muttered indetectably.
“Huh?” asked Randall, looking up quickly.
“Don’t look now,” warned the barman, “but they’re after you again.” He nodded toward the door.
The barman left and several seconds later Randall turned lazily to look at the doorway. He eyed the Air Cop, mildly surprised. So far as he knew, they couldn’t pin anything on him except incipient vagrancy, and while the situation demanded attention—immediate attention—it wasn’t a penitentiary offense. He turned back to his table, looked sternly at his glass and attempted to lose himself in a maze of low finance.
“Wrane Randall, rocketman?” asked a voice at his side a few moments later
Randall looked up at the Air Cop, then got slowly to his feet. It appeared that he was being polite, but he had discovered long ago that there was nothing like being prepared.
“Yeah, that’s me,” he admitted. “What do you want?”
“Come along.”
The Air Cop grasped Randall’s wrist and tried to flip his arm up behind his back. But Randall couldn’t see things that way and presented the Air Cop with a fistful of fingers.
The Air Cop did a quick-step adagio backward
on rubbery legs, tripped over a chair and went down. And the lights went out! Randall leaped for the nearest exit, went through to the alley and found himself in the grip of two husky patrolmen.
This time each had an arm and he wasn’t in any position to engage in sanguinary retaliations. Especially so, a moment later when one of the patrolmen jabbed a sapper into his side and turned on the juice. All the “jump” went out of Randall’s body immediately.
They carried him back to the entrance of Limpy’s where they found the Air Cop waiting.
“Ah, got him, I see,” he approved, wiping the blood from his mouth with an expensive handkerchief. Nothing, in an Air Cop’s opinion, was too good for an Air Cop, and as they were the private army of the Air Chief, outranking all local, state and national officers, they were in a position to indulge their opinions.
THE paralysis of the sapper was wearing off.
Randall gave a premonitory heave. One of the patrolmen brought out the sapper again to quiet him, but the Air Cop took the weapon and motioned the patrolman away.
“Go to headquarters and get a couple of squads of men, then come back here and rip all the wiring out of this dive. You needn’t be gentle, and you needn’t put it back,” he said with a grin. “Teach them a lesson.”
Then he turned to Randall. “I have orders to bring you in, in good condition—no bruises. So move along quietly and don’t count on any chances for escape. At the first sign of your getting mean, I’ll give you enough of the sapper to make you be a good boy for several hours. My ship is on the Administration Building roof. Now, march ahead!”
Randall staggered along, wishing his legs would behave, but somewhat relieved that he wasn’t to be accorded the usual treatment. When the Air Cops went after someone, it was usually merely an informal sentence of death. For instance, when they had an Irredentist, the common procedure was to allow an attempt to escape, then take in a dead man.
He was shoved into the tiny, steel cell at the rear of the one-man prison rocket, and the Air Cop went forward to the controls. A moment later Randall
heard the thrumming roar of the rockets and felt their thrust. The air whined and screamed around the tiny ship, then subsided to a shrill whispering. And Randall knew they had reached the stratosphere.
He was filled with sudden envy. There was power! And speed! But it was power and speed reserved for the exclusive use of the Air Chief and his men. Those rockets must be atomic, as it was rumored they were. Anyway, they were infinitely better than the crude, tricky hydrogen-oxygen rockets that the rest of the world used. And even those had been given to the world by the first predecessor of the present half-legendary, but very real ruling force that was called the Air Chief.
Randall wondered at the genius of that man of a hundred years ago who had in one short year created these powerful atomic rockets, subdued all the nations of the world with his strange, invincible weapons, then started the construction of his vast city of Yss in central Asia. Only when the city was completed and his overlordship of the earth secure, had the Air Chief given the world the inferior rocketships and a thousand other equally harmless advantages to knit the world into one gigantic whole.
Randall differed radically with those who fought the Air Chief, as did the Irredentists. He realized fully the international anarchy that had preceded the Air Chief’s coming. Even a despotic international rule was better than none at all, he maintained. But riding rockets like these and realizing that he could never be at the controls of such a ship, was almost enough to make a flagwaving, speech-making nationalist out of the most peaceful rocketman in the world. With these rockets nothing would be impossible. The moon would be easy! Then Mars and Venus! Then Mercury, the Asteroids, and the Moons of Jupiter! And after those . . .
FOR an hour he listened to the half-heard, halffelt roaring song of the rockets, and longing and envy filled his being. He even forgot the dangers of his own position. Then the rockets stuttered, the song shifted to the forepart of the ship, and jolted the ship strongly. The shrill whispering of the thin air rose to a scream and Randall knew they were descending.
The plane shuddered again to the fore-rockets, then the keel jets wracked the ship, then abruptly the ship was still and silent. Randall wished that there was a window to his cell so he could see where they had landed.
A moment later the wish proved unnecessary. The door of the cell opened and his captor motioned for him to come out. Randall stepped out into the bright sunlight, and was numbly aware that it had been night in New York when he had been taken.
He stared around as two guards stepped forward to take positions at his sides. He marveled at the slender spires of the buildings, the thronged streets, flashing aircraft. And he knew he was in the forbidden city, Yss.
They hurried him across the roof to the elevators, and started down at such a speed that Randall’s stomach hadn’t more than time enough for one good flip-flop, then his knees were buckling with the deceleration. They led him to a somberly quiet part of the building that Randall took for a hospital, and they halted at a desk. One of the guards spoke briefly with the girl. She looked curiously at Randall.
“I’ll tell Dr. Brophy immediately,” she said, rising and going into an inner office.
When she returned, she stood to one side and motioned for them to enter. Randall and his guards went into the inner office and found themselves confronted by four men—two of them were hospital orderlies who moved forward to take charge of Randall. One of the two older men dismissed the guards, then turned to his companion with a smile.
“Well? . . . What do you think of him, Torvald?”
Torvald was eyeing Randall with critical eyes. “We could have done better,” he said unenthusiastically.
“You’re wrong,” argued the one Randall thought to be Brophy. “We can tattoo this fellow’s brown eyes blue, raise the hairline, remold the face a bit—all superficial work. The important thing is that, according to his registration, this man’s skeletal structure, and especially the skull, is the counterpart of the—the other’s. Of course, Randall’s nose seems to have taken a turn for the worse, but we can fix that easily enough.”
Torvald shrugged. “I think we could have done better,” he maintained.
Randall tried to ease himself out of the orderlies’ grips, but they weren’t to be taken by surprise. And they being big and husky, Randall was sure that a struggle would be useless. He faced the two older men.
“What’s this all about?” he demanded.
Neither of them deigned to answer, but Dr. Brophy gestured to the orderlies to take him away. As though by prearrangement, they hustled him out of the room and to a gleaming operating theater. They lifted him helplessly into the air, then strapped him to the operating table. After checking carefully, they left without a word.
RANDALL lay motionless on the table, unable to move even his head. A padded metal clamp clutched the sides of his cranium securely. He could only stare up at the bunched lights above him and wonder what would come next. Though it was probably only minutes, it seemed hours before Brophy and Torvald came. Brophy was still arguing with his companion.
“It will work, I tell you,” Brophy insisted. “I have done it before, and this time by using my Gen-Rays to facilitate healing, it will be simple. You are new here. That is your trouble. You can’t realize that we mean it when we say we are centuries ahead of the outside world. Have you got that negative?”
Torvald gave him a flat folder. Stem took out a negative and fastened it in a bracket so that it covered completely the mouth of a radiation machine. Satisfied, he turned to Torvald.
“You seem to think that the transference, itself, is the most wonderful and unbelievable part. That is merely a very refined technique. We have been doing that for a century. The Air Chief himself first taught us that. But my Gen-Ray! That is mine! It takes surgery away from the sciences and makes it an art. The negative allows the rays to strike the living flesh in varying strengths, and under the rays the flesh molds itself.”
Torvald looked doubtful. “Possibly,” he said.
Brophy snorted. “Small minds from the outer world,” he commented. “Only we here in Yss have the bravery and science to really delve into the unknown. Well, first we’ll have to break this
ellow’s nose and set it right. You administer the anaesthetic.”
“Say, for God’s sake! Tell me what you’re going to do!” Randall pleaded, rolling his eyes to look at them in turn.
Brophy smiled shrewdly. “You are a fretful person,” he commented dryly. “Millions of people would like to be in your position and know that their body was destined to rule the world.”
“My body? What about my brain?” Something in the doctor’s words sent a chill through Randall.
Dr. Brophy shrugged slightly. “It shall be replaced with a much better one,” he comforted.
“But what about me?”
Brophy shrugged again. “Your brain will have to be destroyed. The Air Chief cannot have a former tenant of the body he is using walking around alive. It wouldn’t be proper, and besides, there won’t be any body for you if it were. The one the Air Chief has at present is just about worn out. He wears them ragged in ten years. Then we have to find another for him and attend to the brain transference. The anaesthetic, Torvald.”
“Do you mean,” asked Randall quickly, “that it has been done before?”
“Certainly. The Air Chief himself is the one who taught us.”
“Then the man who conquered the earth is the one who rules it now?”
“Yes,” Brophy agreed, fussing with the radiation machine. “Torvald!” he snapped annoyedly. “The anaesthetic! I can’t work while he is chattering.”
Randall struggled to loose his head from the clamp, to keep his face out of the mask. He felt as though he had been caught in the cogs of a great machine and that it was dragging him irresistibly to destruction. It was nightmarish! He was powerless to escape. The mask descended over his mouth and nose and the anaesthetic blanked out his consciousness like a candle flame in the wind.