The Faceless Men E-Book

Arthur Leo Zagat

• Herausgeber: Wildside Press
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Seitenzahl: 129

Beschreibung

The Faceless Men

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

THE FACELESS MEN, by Arthur Leo Zagat

INTRODUCTION, by John Betancourt

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

THE FACELESS MEN,by Arthur Leo Zagat

INTRODUCTION, by John Betancourt

Arthur Leo Zagat (1896-1949) was one of the more talented authors publishing during the Golden Age of science fiction. His writing was always smooth and crisp, with well-drawn characters and none of the clunky, old-fashioned prose that characterized the work of many genre authors in those days.

Although Zagat wrote a substantial body of science fiction (some in collaboration with Nat Schachner), he was truly a general pulp author, and he published more than 500 stories in many genres, including horror, mystery and crime, weird menace, and series hero stories (his heroes were Doc Turner and Red Finder). His work appeared in mainstream markets like Argosy alongside genre stories in Astounding, Dime Mystery, The Spider, Operator 5, and even the sexy “adult” pulps, such as Spicy Mystery Stories. He published much excellent science fiction in Argosy in the late 1930s and into the 1940s, including the “Tomorrow” series, set in a near-future, post-holocaust United States.

Zagat was born in New York, went to school at City College, and served in the U.S. military in Europe during World War I. After the war, he studied at Bordeaux University, then graduated from Fordham Law School. He taught writing at New York University.

In 1941, he was elected to the first national executive committee for the Authors League pulp writers’ section. During World War II, he held an executive position in the Office of War Information. After that war, Zagat was active in organizing writers' workshops and other assistance for hospitalized veterans.

Zagat was married to Ruth Zagat; the couple had one daughter, Hermine, from whom I purchased his copyrights a few years ago. He died of a heart attack on April 3, 1949, at his home in the Bronx at the age 53. Had he lived another 20 years and transitioned into paperback books, as many of his contemporaries did, the whole history of the science fiction field might have added his name to the list of greats.

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

Copyright © 1948 by Popular Library, Inc., renewed 1976.

First published in Thrilling Wonder Stories, April 1948.

Reprinted by permission of the author’s estate.

Published by Wildside Press LLC.

wildsidepress.com | bcmystery.com

CHAPTER 1

Mighty Blue

Brad Lilling pretended to be engrossed in the illuminated logtape that flowed across his desk top under translucent plastic. Actually, he was acutely conscious of the footfalls coming toward him across the wide leadstone floor from the gauge bank.

“No,” he groaned inwardly. “Not again.” And then, “If he doesn’t lay off me, I swear I’ll turn him in to the Espee.”

But Brad knew he would not report Starl Kozmer to the Security Police. He knew the strength of the tie that binds all atomicians in a brotherhood rooted in the unremitting peril of their craft.

Kozmer wore the badge of the brotherhood where all could see—the purple ray burn that blanked out the right side of his face, which left only a lashless slit where an eye should be and cut a lavendar swath through his white mane. Brad himself was thus far unmarked, as were most of the younger men on the Station.

Protective devices had been vastly improved since Starl Kozmer began his long service, but even yet, now and then, workers vanished from among them—to a lead-lined grave or, which was worse, to the Custodial Colonies that were spoken of only in whispers.

Brad saw the aged atomician’s burn reflected in the milky-white plastic of his desk top, saw the other side of Kozmer’s face reflected—hollow-cheeked, netted with wrinkles. A profoundly disquieting face, but unwavering graph lines gave the younger man no excuse not to look up and ask tonelessly, “Well, what is it?”

“I’d like to suggest, Mr. Lilling, that Pile Two be shut down for overhaul. Yes”—the old gaugeman answered the lift of Brad’s eyebrows—“Yes, I know it sounds off beam, sir. Temperature and radiation remain constant, power output steady.”

He was talking for the sonowire that recorded for Espee ears all they said but his gnarled fingers were flashing a different message. How about it, they demanded in the code all ’prentice atomicians learn serving their time in the thundering pits. Make up your mind to throw in with us?

“Still,” he said aloud, “I’ve a hunch she’s getting ready to spit,” while his fingers warned, Time’s getting short.

Time be blasted. Brad’s own fingers answered, and the irritation was in his spoken reply.

“You’ve a hunch, have you? If you’d only get it into your head that we stopped running the piles by hunch years ago, you might rate something better than third grade tech.”

I’m not saying yes or no till I know a lot more about what you plan than you’ve told me.

I’ve told you all I dare. “Yes, sir. I guess you’re right, sir. I keep forgetting things are different from when I was in my twenties like you.” There’s some think you already know too much.

Brad Lilling knew only that, for months, the old man had been urging him to join some shadowy revolt that shaped darkly beneath the placid-seeming surface of routine.

It seemed incredible that anyone should wish to return to conditions as they were before Decade Crossroads. The world in those days, Brad had been taught, was a chaos of artificial national boundaries.

Continual tribal bickerings flared every so often into mass slaughter and between these “wars” life was hag-ridden by suspicion and fear. Many of the world’s peoples teetered eternally on the brink of starvation, all lived in constant apprehension of recurrent and, so it seemed to them, inevitable famine and pestilence.

In four generations under the rule of the Scientists there no longer was any war, any want, any disease, any fear.

* * * *

Today the race was a single Earth-encompassing economic machine of which every individual was a cog matching perfectly with every other, serving and being served by the whole. Every child at birth was assayed for his innate aptitudes, then was trained toward its optimum development.

When finally fabricated he was fitted into the precise sub-part of the exact sub-assembly for which he was designed. Thereafter he performed his assigned function for the requisite few hours in each twenty-four, was free to spend the rest as he pleased so long, naturally, as he did not spend them in such a way as to impair his efficiency.

He was housed, clothed, fed and provided with every facility for the recreations of his choice. When, because of age, or accident not his fault, he no longer was capable of serving the machine, he was retired but his way of life remained otherwise unchanged.

If unavoidable accident terminated his usefulness he was given tender care and every luxury of which he could avail himself in a Custodial Colony graded to his special case. What more could any reasonable being desire?

Yet there were those who, like Kozmer, chafed at what they called “regimentation” and prattled glibly of such discredited concepts as ‘the inherent dignity of man.’ More incomprehensible were those who grumbled at ‘the special privileges the Scientist class have arrogated to themselves.’

Was it not the Scientists who had created the cheap, limitless and inexhaustible power-source on which this whole new civilization was based? Faced with the alternative of self-annihilation, had not the people themselves voluntarily entrusted them with the sole control of Atomic Energy, its productions and all its uses?

It had not been by the Scientists’ desire that, as these uses penetrated more and more aspects of human life, they were compelled to assume wider and wider authority until, inevitably, there had been forced upon them the absolute autocracy with which they now were burdened.

To argue that they held this dominion only because they controlled the weapon against which there was no defense was to beg the issue. The point was that their very monopoly of this weapon had laid upon them the awful load of responsibility for the welfare of all mankind.

Thus had run for months Brad’s debate with the aged atomician whose single eye was fixed now so balefully upon him. Kozmer had been able to offer no logical rebuttal and yet—

And yet something, some doubt beyond logic, had kept Brad from returning an unequivocal no to the proposal that he join the plotters. Better decide fast, Brad Lilling, the old man’s fingers warned. It’s later than you guess.

“I’m sorry I bothered you, Mr. Lilling,” he said aloud. “I guess I’m just an old fool.”

“Very well, return to your post.”

Because the right half of his mouth did not move, its nerves obliterated by the ancient ray burn, Starl Kozmer’s smile was twisted and horrible. A vein throbbed in Brad’s temple as he watched it turn away from him, then his eyes dropped to the logtape. His hand leaped to a stud at the desk’s edge! A red graph line had jagged suddenly to indicate a jump in Pile Five’s radiation. If it wasn’t checked.…

The graph-line smoothed. Lilling’s hand fell away from the button that would have shunted in all the pile’s blockbars to shut it down and he nodded approval at the gaugeman whose shifting levers had quenched the flare before that had become necessary.

An automatic control had failed but the first of the two man-checks had not. No atomician ever permitted himself to contemplate what would happen if some day, on some one of the piles, all three safeguards should fail together.

The crisis over, it was very quiet in the high-ceiled, spacious control room. Except for the barely perceptible tremor of the floor beneath Brad’s feet there was no sign that, in this remote place, Man precariously harnessed the fires of creation itself to power his ultimate civilization. He glanced at the clock dial above the gauge banks. It still lacked thirty-four minutes of shift-change.

Then why was the wall at the room’s other end slitting?

The panel slid open, slid noiselessly shut again. The two who had entered wore the lead-cloth protective suits required everywhere on the Station. Here, so far above the piles, the hoods were lumped clumsily behind their heads.

One was Jon Porson, the heavy-jowled Station Director. The other’s back was turned to Brad as they paused down there, chatting. Not very tall, the stranger was so slender that his suit hung shapelessly about him but there was about him a quality of vibrant grace unusual in these precincts.

* * * *

Unusual too and vaguely disturbing was the deference evident in the Director’s gestures, in his very stance. His rating the highest to which a Technist could aspire, Porsen was arrogant with his inferiors, pompous with his equals, obsequious only to Scientists. For a Scientist to be visiting the Station implied something momentous in the wind.

The visitor laughed. It was a tinkling, silvery sound. It brought from Brad an exclamation of surprise, quickly stifled but not quickly enough. The stranger heard it, glanced around, then turned and looked straight at him, the heart-shaped outline of her small face framed by carelessly tossed, honey-hued ringlets.

Hot with embarrassment, Brad stared down at his logtape. What was a girl, Scientist or not, doing on the Station? They were coming toward him. Footfalls neared and a pulse-stirring perfume drifted across his nostrils.

“Technician Lilting,” Jon Porsen snapped. Brad jumped up to attention, stared into a pair of incredibly blue eyes in which tiny stars danced.

“Miss Arlen,” the Director was saying, “is inspecting the Station and has asked that you act as her guide.”

“Mr. Porsen has been very kind.” The girl’s throaty voice did unexpected things to Brad. “But I don’t think I ought to keep him from his important duties.” The corners of her mouth quirked with some covert amusement. “I’m sure you can explain things almost as well.”

“Yes, Miss Arlen.” Brad gasped as the name penetrated his daze. Arlen. No wonder Porsen was overawed. Gar Arlen was the all-powerful Administrator of Region Three, the globe’s northwest quadrant, and this must be his daughter, Joan. “I’ll try, miss.”

“You may start now,” Porsen said. “I shall myself take over your post here until Personnel can send down a relief Controlmaster.

“Yes, sir. Very good, sir.” Somehow Brad was out from behind his desk and stumbling toward the opposite end of the room with the girl beside him. They reached the wall. It opened, closed again to shut them into a small square space, low-ceilinged and seemingly without other exit. The girl was laughing again.

“Oh, dear,” she bubbled. “Porsen did look so funny when I said I’d rather have you show me around. He looked just utterly deflated.”

“Yes, Miss Arlen.”

“He’d been working so hard trying to impress me with how wonderful he is—so I’d tell father, naturally. And I kept wondering how he’d feel if he knew I won’t dare tell Dad I was ever within a hundred miles of this place.”

“Huh!” Brad exclaimed, staring. “You won’t dare—” He remembered who he was and what she was. “Yes, miss,” he tried to cover up his faux pas. “Of course, Miss Arlen.”

“Of course what?” she demanded.

“Of course you—your father— Oh, Jehoshaphat!” he groaned. “I give up. Why won’t you dare tell your father you’ve been on the Station?”

“Because my bodyguard said it was too dangerous and so I had to slip away from him. He won’t tell Dad because he’d be in trouble if he finds out he lost track of me but he would find out if I told him, so I can’t tell him because I don’t want to get him in trouble. Now do you understand?”

“I—I guess so.” What she’d said sounded as if it made sense. Maybe it did if you could get it disentangled. “Do you Scientists always go around with bodyguards?”

“Oh, no.” Those wonderfully blue eyes of hers rounded. “Only the last three or four months. It’s an awful nuisance too,” she confided. “Would you like to have an Espee agent, even one who worships, you, tagging around after you all the time?”

“I don’t think I would.”

* * * *

At the back of Brad’s mind there was the thought—it’s just about three months since Kozmer started plaguing me. And then his scalp was tightening with the thought—He knows she’s on the Station without her bodyguard.

“Look,” he ventured. “Maybe the guy had something at that. This certainly isn’t the safest place to be wandering around. Don’t you think you ought to give it up?”

“I do not.” Her eyes suddenly were the pale blue of ice, her voice cold and curt. “You’re wasting time, Technician Lilling. Please follow your instructions or turn me over to someone who can.”

“As you wish, Miss Arlen.” Wooden-faced, Brad gestured to the aperture opening behind her. “Do you mind stepping out?”

“I do mind,” she clipped, her lips white with cold fury. “That’s the way we came. I do not wish to return to the control room.”

“I understand that, Miss Arlen.” A muted roar flooded in as the door widened. “We are five hundred feet below it, at the base of the piles and at the level of the pits where the water that cools them is deradiated.