Golden Age Science Fiction Classics (2011) Read online

  Halkett had learned the Jovian language and proved a good ambassador for he was sympathetic with the flipper-men. He did his best to fulfill his mission but could not succeed. The flipper-men told

  Halkett that they had no hard feelings but would prefer to avoid the earthmen lest further trouble develop.

  Halkett went back with this word and Crane realized that trouble was ahead. He flashed word back to the Interplanetary Council and it ordered him to hold all his posts and await reinforcements from earth and Mars. Weathering would send on most of the Martian divisions of the Council's Army as rapidly as possible.

  Soon after the arrival of the first reinforcements the storm broke. The Jovians had come to see, despite Halkett's attempt at reassurance, what Crane's expanding system of posts would mean in time. They sent to Crane asking from him a promise that no more earthmen would come to Jupiter. Crane curtly refused to make such a promise. Even so the flipper-men might have remained inactive had not by some inconceivable brutality an atom-blast been turned upon their envoys as they left the fort. Crane's summary execution of the men responsible for the action could not mend matters.

  For the Jovians, aroused at last, rose upon the earthmen. Over all South Jupiter they poured out of the fern forests in incalculable masses upon the forts of the earthmen. They had not even the crude chemical weapons the Martians had used, their only arms spears and great maces, but there were tens of thousands of them to every earthman. Crane set himself grimly to hold his dozen posts against the floods of the flipper-men.

  He had given Halkett command of one of the posts on the other side of South Jupiter. Halkett gripped himself and used all his experience to hold the post. He fought as all of Crane's twelve posts were fighting, to hold back the endless Jovian masses. The atom-blasts scythed them down, the atomic bombs burst in terrific destruction among them, but the Jovians came on to the attack with a sort of mild but resolute determination.

  Crane now was fighting to maintain earth's hold upon South Jupiter until reinforcements could come. He sent brief reports back to the Earth. The Council appreciated the situation, commandeered all rockets for the sole purpose of transporting their legions and weapons to South Jupiter. Only skeleton garrisons were left in the Martian posts. Yet it seemed that by sheer numbers the Jovians would overwhelm the earthmen.

  One of Crane's twelve posts they did indeed take. A strange sidelight on the nature of the Jovians is that after losing hundreds of thousands in the long attack on the fort, they contented themselves with razing it to the ground when they had captured it and holding the earthmen in it prisoners. There was no massacre as had been the case on Mars. Crane, however, managed with the coming of further reinforcements to reestablish the fort.

  The tide was turning in the earthmen's favor. Every day brought in new rockets of men and supplies to Crane and the flipper-men could not face the atom-blasts and bombs forever, even with their in- calculable numbers. Their attacks died away as the twelve forts grew stronger and they retired into the great forests. Any parties venturing from the forts they fell upon. It was the same situation as on Mars three years before, and Crane dealt with it in the same way. Halkett was one of his own aides now, and so too was Hall Burnham who had come on from Mars with the reinforcements.

  Crane held his hand until he had strengthened his twelve posts beyond danger of attack, then established at gradual intervals no less than ninety more posts in a network around South Jupiter. He was going to proceed on Weathering's Martian plan, subjugating the planet section by section, except that Crane was operating only in South Jupiter and leaving the northern half of the great planet quite untouched. Patiently he established and strengthened his hundred- odd posts.

  When his network of strong forts around South Jupiter was complete, Crane went ahead to conquer it section by section as he had planned. It was a Herculean undertaking for the earthmen. Their greatest obstacle was not the Jovians themselves, who could offer no effective resistance to the atom-blasts and bombs of Crane's men, but the terrible Jovian gravity that made each movement an effort, that required them to wear the metal body-support armor and made their movements still more difficult.

  Yet in section after section the divisions of Crane's mobile forces, Halkett and Burnham among their commanders, crashed through the steamy fern forests with atom-blasts and drove the Jovians slowly but resistlessly until they were hemmed in and brought to action. There were fights of terrific fury in the green twilight of the huge damp forests, for few of the Jovians surrendered, the great majority fighting with immovable resolution until the atom-blasts and bombs slew them.

  Crane's grip upon South Jupiter tightened with each section subjugated by the superhuman endeavors of his men. He flashed word to the Interplanetary Council that his plan was following schedule. He was conquering sections in such a way as to cut off from each other by subjugated territories, the larger Jovian masses. Then in the midst of this tremendous task occurred an astonishing incident, one that made earth first incredulous and then wrathful. Halkett became a traitor.

  * * * * *

  The first reports of Halkett's treachery that got back to earth were confused and contradictory. Later ones stated that Captain Halkett was under guard in one of the South Jupiter posts. He had been the cause of the hard-fought subjugation campaign in one of the sections failing, and of a large Jovian force escaping. That was all that was known certainly at first.

  Then came details. Three forces under Halkett and Burnham and an officer named James had been operating against the Jovians in that section. Halkett commanded a heavy atom-blast battery and Burnham and James had been driving the Jovian forces toward it. For a score of the short Jovian days and nights the men of Burnham and James had pushed the Jovians in the desired direction, toiling against the relentless gravitation's drag, through the endless fern forests they had to cut through and against the weird beasts they dislodged from those forests. They had without question done their part against the Jovians.

  But Halkett had not. He had deliberately ordered his men not fire on the Jovians and the flipper-men had escaped past him. Earth. could hardly credit the news. There came from soldiers and civilians alike a swift demand for Halkett's punishment. The Council ordered Crane to send Halkett home for court-martial.

  Crane told Halkett that in the guardhouse on South Jupiter, and told him much more for he was half-crazed with the thing.

  "Halk, how could you have done it?" he kept saying. "I've got send you back now and God knows what a court-martial will do you with feeling against you so strong on earth."

  "Don't worry about it, Crane," said Halkett steadily. "I did as wanted and I'm willing to take my medicine."

  "But why did you do it?" Crane demanded for the hundredth time. "Halkett, if you'll only plead that you didn't know the Jovians were coming through—that it was some kind of blunder—"

  Hall Burnham seconded him. "A blunder on your part would lose you your commission but you'd escape a sentence," he told Halkett. "Surely it was partly that, at least."

  Halkett shook his head. "It wasn't. I can't explain just what it was, why I did it—but if you'd have seen those Jovians coming through the forest there, weary, terrorized, hunted onward for days yet somehow unresentful—I couldn't turn the atom-blasts loose on them!"

  Crane made a gesture. "Halkett, I understand what you felt but even so you shouldn't have done it. I'd go back with you to earth for the trial but I can't leave here now."

  "It's all right, Jimmy," Halkett told him. "I'm willing to take what comes."

  Halkett departed for earth under guard in one of the next detachment of rockets, while Crane and Burnham and the rest went on with the subjugation of South Jupiter. During the voyage the rocket's officers were careful to show Halkett consideration but no man of them spoke a word to him except when necessary. Feeling in the army against its first traitor was intense.

  When Halkett reached earth after that strange voyage from Jupiter, the heads of the Council order
ed an immediate court-martial. It took place in the great Army building. Halkett's trial occupied four days and during those days the building was surrounded by crowds waiting to hear his fate.

  Popular indignation at Halkett ran high, and many cries for his summary execution were being voiced. People contrasted the gallant struggles of Crane and the rest to hold South Jupiter for humanity with this treachery on the part of a trusted officer. Halkett might have been lynched if he had been less well guarded.

  * * * * *

  Inside the great building Halkett stood up and heard his conduct judged. The officers who heard the case gave him a fair trial. His counsel argued ably concerning Halkett's previous gallant record, the possibility of temporary aberrations and the like. Halkett might have escaped but for his own testimony a little later.

  "I was quite in command of all my faculties when I ordered the atom-batteries not to fire," he said quietly.

  "Did you realize, Captain Halkett," asked the presiding officer crisply, "that in so doing you were betraying your sworn oath?"

  Halkett said that he had realized. "Then what reason can you give for your deliberate breach of trust?"

  Halkett hesitated. "I can't give any reason that you'd understand," he said.

  Then he burst out with sudden white passion—"Why shouldn't I have done it? After all, Jupiter belonged to the Jovians, didn't it? What were we there but invaders, interlopers? How could I order those hunted flipper-men destroyed when all they were trying to do was to keep their own world?"

  His counsel made frantic signals to him but Halkett was beyond restraint. "What right have we Earth races on Mars or Jupiter either? What right had we to wipe out almost all the Martians as we did, and to repeat it now on Jupiter? Because their planet has resources, the Jovians have to be killed!"

  That outburst removed any chance of Halkett's acquittal. The presiding officer read gravely the sentence of ten years in military prison.

  "It is only consideration of your former record on Mars and South Jupiter and the fact that you were one of Drake's historic party," he stated, "that keeps this court from giving you a life-sentence or even the extreme penalty."

  Halkett took the verdict without any show of emotion and was led back to his cell. Burnham, who had come in from Jupiter in time for the trial's end, went to see him before he was taken to the military prison. Halkett shook hands with him in silence—the two had nothing to say.

  With Halkett in prison the world's wrath was appeased. His name was stricken off all the records of the Council's Army. Burnham went back to Jupiter. Halkett spent his days in the shops of the military prison, helping manufacture atom-blasts and bombs and other army supplies. He stood imprisonment quietly.

  Crane had moved heaven and earth to get Halkett acquitted but had found his influence useless. Burnham came back and told him how Halkett had taken the verdict. For a long time these two sat silent, perhaps thinking of three thrilled youngsters in technical school who had followed Gillen's flight and rushed to join Drake.

  Crane went grimly on with the business of subduing South Jupiter. In the excited activity of that campaign the world forgot Halkett quickly. Crane's plan was working with the precision of a machine, section after section of the great planet being subjugated. Over all South Jupiter those Jovians not yet attacked were moving up into the planet's northern half as yet unvisited by the earthmen's forces.

  In four earth years South Jupiter was under earth control. It was gripped tightly by Crane's system of forts, most of its forests had been destroyed by atom-blasts, and as towns grew slowly around the forts great grain-planting projects were getting under way. There were some reservations of Jovians, but the greater part of the Jovians not slain during the subjugation were in North Jupiter. There the fern forests still stretched untouched from the equator to the northern pole, the same as when Gillen first had seen them. But now Crane was looking north toward them.

  Jimmy Crane was now General James Crane, thirty-one years old and with gray showing at his temples from nine years of strenuous campaigning on Mars and Jupiter. He had been back to earth twice from Jupiter, once with Burnham who was now a colonel, and both times had tried to see Halkett but had been prevented by strict regulations. Halkett had for four years now worked quietly on in the prison shops making atom-blasts, bombs and rocket parts.

  Crane and the Council laid plans for the subjugation of North Jupiter. It was to be done peacefully if possible—the Jovians were to be offered great fern forest reservations and other inducements. But peacefully or not, the planet had to come under control. Crane, who knew the Jovians, began assembling forces on South Jupiter, even as he sent Burnham into North Jupiter to offer the Jovians the Government's terms.

  Burnham failed absolutely, as Crane and almost everyone else had expected, to win the Jovians to peaceful settlement. The flipper-men had no faith at all in the earthmen's promises, and no desire to live on reservations. Crane flashed word of that to the Council, which authorized him to proceed by force. A great preparation began on earth and on South Jupiter.

  In the midst of his preparations Crane learned that Halkett had been released, his sentence halved for good behavior. He tried to locate Halkett through agents but no one knew where Halkett had gone on leaving prison. Crane was doing the work of two men in the great preparations for the North Jupiter campaign, and could not for the time institute any search for his former comrade.

  4

  The Renegade

  Rocket fleets arrived ceaselessly, pouring men and materials into South Jupiter from earth and Mars. The recruiting offices on earth were working night and day. Crane took the men they sent and mixed them with his veterans, drilled them, trained them in Jovian fighting, made disciplined armies of them. He concentrated men and materials at the equatorial posts.

  For Crane was going to follow a different plan in North Jupiter. Instead of establishing a network of posts as on Mars and South Jupiter, he was going to encircle Jupiter with a thin band of earth forces and then push that band northward toward the pole. His circle. Crane saw, would grow smaller and stronger the farther north it pushed, and would drive the Jovians in North Jupiter onward until those not slain were hemmed in in the warm north polar region.

  It took two years of preparation before Crane deemed his forces sufficient. Neither he nor Burnham had in that time heard anything; of Halkett, nor had anyone else. Burnham thought that Halkett must be dead. But both had other things enough to think of when Crane began the long-planned campaign. With his forces encircling the equator of the planet, he ordered an advance. The band around the planet began to crawl north.

  Fighting with the flipper-men began in days. The Jovians by that time knew better than to charge atom-blasts or expose themselves to the barrage of atomic bombs. They tried a kind of guerrilla fighting which was not ineffective in the dense fern forests. But Crane's forces simply blasted the forests out of the way as they advanced, and the Jovians had either to flee or be slain.

  Crane moved his headquarters north behind his band of forces. He directed the band's northward movement by radio, sending reinforcements in rockets to whatever part that was held back by fiercer resistance. Crane chose to advance slowly and avoid undue losses. There was no haste—the Jovians were being pushed ever .northward by the contracting circle. Within a half-year earth heard that its forces had advanced half the distance between Jupiter's equator and northern pole.

  Then came to earth surprising news of a check to Crane's advance. His band had been flung back with heavy losses by the Jovians at a half-dozen places around the planet! Incredibly, it had been done by Jovians armed with atom-blasts and atomic bombs! They had prepared a circle of rude trenches and earthworks at strategic locations around the planet and had inflicted terrible damage on Crane's band of men when it advanced to that circle!

  Earth was aflame instantly with apprehensive excitement. Until then it had taken Crane's final success as certain—the Council had even granted future concessions to
the North Jupiter territories. How had the primitive Jovians come to use the atomic weapons? From Crane, who had hastily halted the advance of his circle, came the answer. The Jovians were being led by a renegade earthman who for the past two years had been training them in the production and use of the atom-blasts and bombs. And this renegade was Mart Halkett!

  Halkett had been recognized unmistakably by some of Crane's officers during the attack on the Jovian works, had been seen directing the Jovian defense. Halkett! The man who seven years before had played the traitor and who now had become renegade, leading the flipper-men against his own race! It was evident that on his release from prison Halkett had got to South Jupiter in some rocket and then had made his way into North Jupiter and used his technical skill and prison factory experience to set the Jovians making atom-blasts and atomic bombs and digging defenses for the coming struggle.

  Halkett became immediately the supreme malefactor to the earth peoples. On earth and on Mars and on South Jupiter men flamed with rage at his name. A thousand deaths were advocated for Halkett if ever he were captured. Crane and Burnham and the rest of the Council Army's men appeared even greater in heroism against the black background of this renegade's treachery. A fierce desire to crush the Jovians and execute Halkett swept earthmen everywhere.

  "You will enter into no treatments whatever with the Jovians' renegade leader," flashed the Council to Crane. "Proceed with the North Jupiter campaign according to your own judgment."

  Crane read the message. He and Burnham had been stunned by the news about Halkett and Crane for a time would not believe it. "It can't be Halkett," he had said over and over. "I tell you, he wouldn't fight against the Council—against us."