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Title: The Peacemaker
Author: Alfred Coppel
Illustrator: Bob Martin
Release Date: March 25, 2010 [EBook #31767]
Language: English
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PEACEMAKER ***
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[Illustration: _The _Arrow_ lanced down out of the night like a spear of
flame, vengeful and deadly._]
_The legends of Jaq Merril are legion--but legends. Hark, ye, then
to the true story of the pirate benefactor of Mankind!_
THE PEACEMAKER
By Alfred Coppel
Illustrated by BOB MARTIN
We humans are a strange breed, unique in the Universe. Of all the races
met among the stars, only _homo sapiens_ thrives on deliberate
self-delusion. Perhaps this is the secret of our greatness, for we are
great. In power, if not in supernal wisdom.
Legends, I think, are our strength. If one day a man stands on the rim
of the Galaxy and looks out across the gulfs toward the seetee suns of
Andromeda, it will be legends that drove him there.
They are odd things, these legends, peopled with unreal creatures,
magnificent heroes and despicable villains. We stand for no nonsense
where our mythology is concerned. A man becoming part of our folklore
becomes a fey, one-dimensional, shadow-image of reality.
Jaq Merril--the Jaq Merril of the history books--is such an image.
History, folklore's jade, has daubed Merril with the rouge of myth, and
it does not become him.
The Peacemaker, the chronicles have named him, and that at least, is
accurate in point of fact. But it was not through choice that he became
the Peacemaker; and when his Peace descended over the worlds of space,
Merril, the man, was finished. This I know, for I rode with him--his
lieutenant in a dozen and more bloody fights that earned him his
ironically pacific laurels.
* * * * *
Not many now living will remember the Wall Decade. History, ever
pliable, is rewritten often, and facts are forgotten. When it was gone,
the Wall Decade was remembered with shame and so was expunged from the
record of time. But I remember it well. It was an era compounded of
stupidity and grandeur, of brilliant discovery and grimy political
maneuver. We, the greedy men of space--and that includes Jaq
Merril--saw it end with sorrow in our hearts, knowing that we had killed
it.
If you will think back to the years immediately preceding the Age of
Space, you may remember the Iron Curtain. Among the nations of the Earth
a great schism had arisen, and a wall of ideas was built between east
and west. Hydrogen bombs were stockpiled and armies marched and
countermarched threateningly. Men lived with fear and hatred and
distrust.
Then, suddenly, came the years of spaceflight and the expanding
frontiers. Luna was passed. Mars and Venus and the Jovian Moons felt the
tread of living beings for the first time since the dawn of time. The
larger asteroids were taken and even the cold moonlets of Saturn and
Uranus trembled under the blast of Terran rockets. But the Iron Curtain
still existed. It was extended out into the gulf of space, an intangible
wall of fear and suspicion. Thus was born the Wall Decade.
Jaq Merril was made for that epoch. Ever in human history there are
those who profit from the stupidity of their fellows. Jaq Merril so
profited. He dredged up the riches of space and took them for his own.
And his weapon was man's fear of his brothers.
* * * * *
It was in Yakki, down-canal from the Terran settlement at Canalopolis,
that Merril's plan was born. His ship, the _Arrow_, stood on the red
sands of Syrtis Major, waiting for a payload to the Outer System. It
stood among a good many like it: the _Moonmaid_, the _Gay Lady_, the
_Argonaut_, and my own vessel, the _Starhound_.
We, the captains, had gathered in the Spaceman's Rest--a tinkling
gin-mill peopled with human wrecks and hungry-eyed, dusty-skinned women
who had come out to Mars hoping for riches and had found only the same
squalor they had left behind. I remember the look in Merril's eyes as he
spoke of the treasures of space that would never be ours, of the gold
and sapphires, the rubies and unearthly gems of fragile beauty and great
price. All the riches of the worlds of space, passing through our hands
and into the vaults of the stay-at-homes who owned our ships and our
very lives. It seemed to me that Merril suffered as though from physical
pain as he spoke of riches. He was nothing if not rapacious. Greedy,
venal, ruthless. All of that.
"Five of us," he said in a hard voice, "Captains all--with ships and
men. We carry the riches of the universe and let it slip through our
fingers. What greater fools could there be?"
Oh, he was right enough. We had the power to command in our hands
without the sense to grasp it firmly and take what we chose.
"And mark you, my friends," Merril said, "A wall has been built around
Mars. A wall that weakens rather than strengthens. A wonderful, stupid,
wall...." He laughed and glanced around the table at our faces, flushed
with wine and greed. "With all space full of walls," he said softly,
"Who could unite against us?"
The question struck home. I thought of the five ships standing out there
on the rusty desert across the silted canal. Five tall ships--against
the stars. We felt no kinship to those at home who clung to creature
comforts while we bucketed among the stars risking our lives and more.
We, the spacemen, had become a race apart from that of the home planet.
And Merril saw this in our faces that night so long ago, and he knew
that he had spoken our thoughts.
Thus was born the Compact.
Gods of space, but I must laugh when I read what history has recorded of
the Compact.
"_Merril, filled with the wonder of his great dream, spoke his mind
to the Captains. He told them of the sorrow in his heart for his
divided fellow men, and his face grew stern when he urged them to
put aside ideology and prejudice and join with him in the Compact._"
So speaks Quintus Bland, historian of the Age of Space. I imagine that I
hear Merril's laughter even as I write. Oh, we put aside ideology and
prejudice, all right! That night in Yakki the five Captains clasped
hands over the formation of the first and only compact of space-piracy
in history!
* * * * *
It was an all or nothing venture. Our crews were told nothing, but their
pockets were emptied and their pittances joined with ours. We loaded the
five ships with supplies and thundered off into the cobalt Martian sky
to seek a stronghold. We found one readily enough. The chronicles do not
record it accurately. They say that the fleet of the Compact based
itself on Eros. This is incorrect. We wanted no Base that would bring us
so close to the home planet every year. The asteroid we chose was
nameless, and remained so. We spoke of it seldom aspace, but it was ever
in our minds. There was no space wall, there to divide us one from the
other. It was a fortress against the rest of mankind, and in it we were
brothers.
When we struck for the first time, it was not at a Russian missile post
as the histories say. It was at the _Queen of Heaven_, an undefended and
unsuspecting merchantman. The records of Earth say the _Queen_ was lost
in space between Uranus and Mars, and this is so. But she was listed
lost only because no Russian or American patrol found her gutted hulk. I
imagine that at this very moment she hangs out beyond Pluto, rounding
the bend of the long ellipse we sent her on that day we stripped her
bones.
She carried gold and precious stones--and more important yet, women
being furloughed home after forced labor in the mines of Soviet Umbriel.
The _Starhound_ and the _Arrow_ bracketed her a million miles above the
plane of the ecliptic near Saturn's orbit, and killed her. We drew
abreast of her and forced her valves. We boarded her and took what we
chose. Then we slaughtered her men and sent them on their long voyage.
That was the beginning.
The attack against Corfu was our next move. This is the battle that
Celia Witmar Day has described in verse. Very bad verse.
"_Corfu slumbered, gorged and proud--
While _Arrow_, _Hound_ and _Maid_ marshalled
Freedom's might above the tyrant's ground,
And rained down death--_"
There is much more, of course. Brave phrases of emotion and fanciful
unreality written by one who never saw the night of space agleam with
stars.
There was no talk of tyranny or liberty aboard the _Hound_ that day we
leveled with the _Maid_ and the _Arrow_ a thousand miles over the
Russian Base of Corfu. There _was_ talk of the bullion stored under the
fortress' turrets.
Merril's face appeared in my visor screen, superimposed on the image of
the grimy little asteroid floating darkly against the starfields.
"Their radar has picked us up by now, and they're wondering who we are,"
he said, "Take the _Hound_ out on tangent left and join the _Maid_.
Cover my attack and stand by to put a landing party aground."
I watched the image of the _Arrow_--a sliver of darkness against the
crescent of Corfu--lancing down at the fortress. Her forward tubes were
glowing with the familiar pre-discharge emanation.
Below us, confusion reigned. For the first time in memory an asteroid
Base was under attack. Merril brought the _Arrow_ in to within fifty
miles and then unleashed the fury of his forward tubes. Hellfire
coruscated over the steel turrets and stone walls of Corfu. It splashed
like a liquid flame over men and metal and twisted the towers and
buttresses into spidery tendrils of glowing thread. Corfu died without
firing a shot.
We put a party from the _Hound_ aground ten hours later. Even then, we
had to wear insulated suits to walk in that still molten inferno.
Charred bodies had become one with the stuff of the fortress, and
nothing living was left within the keep. We looted Corfu's treasure and
lifted into space heavy with gold.
* * * * *
Time passed in an orgy of looting for the men of the Compact. We grew
rich and arrogant, for in space we were kings. Torn by suspicion of one
another, America and Russia could do nothing against us. They had built
an Iron Curtain in space, and it kept them divided and weak.
Endymion felt our blasts, and Clio. Then came Tethys, Rhea, Iapetus. We
cared nothing for the flag these Bases flew. They were the gathering
points for all the gold and treasure of space and we of the Compact took
what we wished of it, leaving a trail of blood and rapine behind us. No
nation claimed our loyalty; space was our mother and lust our father.
Thus, the Peacemakers.
* * * * *
For five full years--the long years of the Outer Belt--the _Arrow_, the
_Starhound_, the _Moonmaid_, the _Lady_ and the _Argonaut_ were the
scourges of the spacelanes. No patrol could find us, and no defense
could contain us. I recall how we laughed at the angry sputtering of
Earth's radio. Vast sums were spent in searches and new weapons to
protect the meek and the mutually distrustful from Merril and the men of
the Compact. Budgets, already strained to the breaking point by
generations of the cold war, creaked and groaned as Russians and
Americans spent furiously to build up their defenses against our
depredations. But though we were few and they many--space was large and
it hid us well.
And then one darkling day, Jaq Merril and I stood on the thin methane
snow that carpeted our Base's landing ramp, waiting under our own
blue-black sky for the return of the _Argonaut_. Merril had sent her
sunward to strike at the mines of Loki, an asteroid where Russian
_komisars_ rolled in mountains of blood-red rubies.
We waited through the day and into the sable night, but the _Argonaut_
did not return. For the first time since the formation of the Compact,
we had lost a ship, and something like unease crept into our hearts. The
carousal that night had no gaiety, and there was the sound of bereaved
women weeping.
Merril could learn nothing of the _Argonaut's_ fate. It was as though
she had dropped through a hole in the fabric of space itself and
vanished from the ken of men. To me he said: "I fear a new weapon." But
to the rest, he kept his peace and let the work of the Compact continue.
There was nothing else to be done. Our Wall Decade was waning, and when
a man or a Compact outlives the age that gave him or it birth, there is
nothing to do but go forward and meet the new day dawning.
So it was with the Compact. We lived on as we had lived before: looting
and killing and draining the wealth of space into our coffers. But in
the back of our minds a shadow was lurking.
On the next raid, the _Lady_ was lost. I saw it happen, as did Merril.
There was nothing we could do to help her, and she died, spilling men
into the void as she ruptured in her last agony.
It was off Hyperion, whence we had come to loot the trove built there by
the prospectors of the Saturnian Moons. And it was a trap.
The _Arrow_, the _Hound_ and the _Lady_ circled the moonlet, swinging
inward to the attack. It was the _Lady_ who was to put aground the
raiding party, and her valves hung open while men readied the
assault-boats. Our radar screens showed nothing of danger. There was
only the bloated giant in the sky, a ringed monster of yellow gold
against the starry velvet of space.
The _Lady_ dropped her boats, the _Hound_ and the _Arrow_ hovering by to
watch over their sister. And suddenly, the jagged moonscape below
erupted--belching streaks of fire that sought us like probing fingers. I
knew in one single instant of terror that this was the new weapon that
had killed the _Argonaut_, for it sliced into the _Lady's_ flanks as
though the steelite hull were cheese.
She bulged, glowing like an ember. There was a sudden nimbus of snow
about her as her air escaped and froze, and then she rolled into her
death-dance, open from bow to stern, spilling scorched corpses into the
void.
The _Arrow_ and the _Hound_ drove off into space like furies leaving the
spinning body of their sister ship behind, not waiting to watch her
crash down onto the rocky face of Hyperion. And now the five of the
Compact were only three, and again there was the sound of weeping among
our women.
* * * * *
Two months after that engagement, a single assault-boat returned to
Base. It was the lone survivor of the _Lady's_ landing party. By some
miracle, the three men aboard had escaped the holocaust. They had landed
and been captured and then they had fought their way free and into the
void once more. They were half-dead from starvation and exposure, but
they had brought word to Merril that the wall that had so long protected
us was crumbling.
Merril sought me out, his lean hard face grim and set.
"There was a Russian among the Americans on Hyperion," he said.
"A prisoner?" It was my hope that spoke so, not my sure knowledge of
what was to come.
Merril shook his head slowly. "A technician. They developed the beam
that killed the _Argonaut_ and the _Lady_--together." His voice was
harsh and bleak. Then suddenly he laughed. "We've touched them," he
said, "Touched them on their tender spot--their purses." He bowed low,
filled with bitter mockery. "Behold the diplomats, the men who are
accomplishing the impossible!"
And I knew that his words spelt doom. Doom for the Compact and for the
Wall Decade that was our life.
Yet we did not stint. In that year we raided Dione, Io, Ganymede, and
even the American naval Base on Callisto. We gutted six Russian and four
American rockets filled with treasure. And we ventured sunward as far as
the moons of Mars.
We dared battles with patrol ships and won. We killed the destroyer
_Alexei Tolstoi_ off Europa and we shattered an American monitor over
Syrtis itself, and watched the wreckage rain down on Yakki, the place
where the Compact was born.
And we lost the _Moonmaid_.
* * * * *
The radio told us the story. Other new weapons were being developed
against us, and here and there American and Russian spacecraft were seen
in company for the first time in the history of the Age of Space.
Convoys were formed from ships of both flags to protect spatial commerce
from the imagined "great fleet" of the Compact. None knew that only the
_Arrow_ and the _Starhound_, small ships, weary ships, were left to face
the slowly combining might of Earth.
And then at last, the pickings--growing slimmer always--diminished to
the vanishing point. Merril stood before us and gave the assembled crews
their option.
"The treasure hunt is over," our captain told us, "And those who wish
may withdraw now. Take your women and the space-boats and return to
Mars. You have your shares, and you can live in comfort wherever you
may choose. If you wish it, go now."
Some few did go, but most remained. I watched Merril's face, and saw one
last plan maturing there. Then he spoke again and we all understood. One
last raid ... to take Luna and command the world!
* * * * *
"_Still the unity of Mankind was not secure, and Merril, filled with
impatience for his great dream, decided on one final stroke. He
would descend on Luna Base itself with his fleet, and commanding all
Earth, he would drive men together--even though it might mean his
own death. With this plan of self-immolation in his heart, the
Peacemaker ordered his hosts and sought the pumice soil of the
mother planet's moon...._"
This is the way Quintus Bland, historian and scholar, puts it down for
posterity. I, one of "his hosts," would say it another way.
We had gutted the Solar System of its treasure and at last men were
uniting against us. Our "fleet" was reduced to two small ships and a
bare handful of men and women to fight them. Jaq Merril could see the
handwriting on the wall and he knew that all must be gambled on one last
throw of the dice. Only with Terra herself under our guns could we hope
to continue sucking the juice of the worlds into our mouths. It was all
or nothing, for we had grown used to our life and we could no longer
change it to meet the demands of the dawning age of Soviet-American
amity.
* * * * *
Side by side the _Arrow_ and the _Hound_ slanted sunward. Mars behind
us, ahead lay the Earth-Moon system. Ten years had passed since any of
us aboard the Compact ships had seen the home world, and though we no
longer felt a part of it, the sight of the silvery cloud-flecked globe
touched our hearts. Touched them as the sapphires of Mimas or the gold
of Corfu touched them. We saw the planet that gave us birth and we were
filled with hunger for it. To own it, command it, make it our own.
Luna's mountains were white and stark under our keels as Merril led us
across the curve of the southern horizon, seeking to put us into
position to attack the UN Moon Base in Clavius from the direction of the
Moon's hidden face.
We swung low across unnamed mountain ranges and deep sheer valleys
steeped in shadow. The voice of the ranger in the _Arrow_ came softly
through the open intercom into the tiny control room of the _Hound_. A
woman's voice, tense with excitement, but disciplined and controlled.
"Range five hundred miles, four seventy five, four fifty--"
And then Merril's voice, calm and reassuring, giving heart to all the
untried ones aboard with his steady conning commands.
"Four o'clock jet, easy, hold her. Drivers up one half standard. Steady
goes. Meet her. Steady--"
Line astern now, the two ships flashing low across the jagged lunar
landscape, and a world in the balance--
An alarm bell ringing suddenly, and my screen showing the fleeting
outline of a Russian monitor above, running across our stern. My own
voice, sharp with command:
"Gun pointer!"
"Here, sir!"
"Get me that gunboat."
The _Hound's_ turret wound about with agonizing slowness as the monitor
reached for the sky, clawing for altitude and safety. And then there
came a searing blast of fire and the fragments of the Russian gunboat
raining down lazily, seeking their eternal rest in the pumice of Luna's
hidden face.
But they had been warned at the UN Base. The monitor had left one dying
shriek in the ether, and the waiting garrison had heard. Merril knew it,
and so did I. We moved forward calmly, into the jaws of hell.
* * * * *
The _Arrow_ attacked from ten o'clock, low on the horizon, the _Hound_
from twelve o'clock high. We swept in over the batteries of pulsating
projectors, raining down our bombs. The ground shuddered and shook with
the fury of exploding uranium and the sky was laced with a net of fiery
death. The _Hound_ shrieked her protest as I swung her about for another
attack.
There was a sickening swerve and the smell of ozone in my ship.
Somewhere, deep within her, a woman screamed and I felt the deck under
me give as one of the questing beams from the fortress below cut into
the hull. Airtight doors slammed throughout the wounded vessel, and I
drove her to the attack again, hard. The last of the bombs clattered out
of the vents, sending mushrooms of pumice miles into the black sky. One
battery of guns below fell silent.
The _Arrow_ vanished into the night above and as suddenly reappeared,
her forward tubes spewing red fire onto the Base below. Then Merril
pulled her up again and disappeared among the pale stars.
The _Hound's_ hurt was mortal, I could feel her dying under my hands,
and tears streaked my face. Below decks, she was a shambles where the
cutting beam from the ground had torn part of her heart out. Still I
fought her. There was no retreat from this last raid, nor did I wish
any. There was a madness in us--a blood-lust as hot and demanding as
ever our lust for gold and treasure might have been.
I lashed the face of the fortress with the _Hound's_ forward tubes,
frantically, filled with a hateful anguish. I felt my ship losing way,
twisting and seeking rest on the jagged ground below, and thinking he
had deserted us, I cursed Merril in an ecstasy of blind fury.
Again and again the _Hound_ was hit. I knew then that Merril's plan had
been madness, a last gesture of defiance to the new age of unity among
men. The _Hound_ fell at last, spitting fire and gall in a futile dance
of death.
She struck on a high plateau, grinding into the pumice, rolling with
macabre abandon across the face of the high tableland. Then at last she
was still, hissing and groaning fitfully as she died, her buccaneering
days gone forever.
I donned a suit and staggered, half dazed, out into the lunar night. A
half-dozen men and women from the crew had survived the impact and they
stood by the wreckage, faces under the plastic helmets turned skyward.
They were one and all stunned and bleeding from the violence of the
_Hound's_ end, but they looked neither back nor around them. Their eyes
were filled with the insane glory of the drama being enacted in the sky.
The _Arrow_ had returned. She lanced down out of the night like a spear
of flame, vengeful and deadly. Straight into the mouth of the screaming
guns she dove, death spilling from her tubes. She bathed the Moon Base
in fire, searing the men within--Russian and American alike--into the
brotherhood of death.
Miraculously, she pulled up out of her encircling net of flame. We
watched in openmouthed wonder as she reached with sobbing heart for the
sky just once again--and then, failing, crippled and dying, she hung
above the crater's rim, framed with deadly beams from below, but radiant
in her own right--gleaming in the light of the sun.
This was defeat. We knew it as we stood by the tangled pile of steelite
that had been the _Hound_ and watched the _Arrow_ die. But nothing in
this life that I have lived ever told me so grandly that the Wall Decade
was ended--and our life of buccaneering with it--as the thing that
happened next.
The _Arrow's_ valve opened and a tiny figure stepped out--into space. I
did not need to be told that Jaq Merril was coming to meet the men he
had welded together against him.
Lazily, unreally, the tiny shape twisted over and over as it fell, until
at last it vanished amid the raw welter of craters and ridges beyond the
razor wall of Clavius....
* * * * *
I have told a true tale, though one that will not be believed. I have
taken the Peacemaker of the histories and painted him _as he was_.
But men are ashamed, and the chronicles of history must be rewritten to
hide their weaknesses, Jaq Merril has become a legend, and the man that
I knew is forgotten.
Merril--pirate, fighter, grandiose dreamer. That was my captain. Not the
colorless do-good creature of the legend. Merril fought for lust and
greed, and these are the things that will one day take men to the stars.
He knew this truth, of course, and that was the substance of his great
dream. Because of it, there are no longer walls in space, and the men
who united to fight the Peacemaker will one day rule the universe.
Meanwhile, chroniclers will write lies about him, and Jaq Merril's
laughter will echo in some ghostly Valhalla beyond the farthest star.
THE END
Transcriber's Note:
This etext was produced from _If: Worlds of Science Fiction_ January
1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S.
copyright on this publication was renewed. Minor spelling and
typographical errors have been corrected without note.
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