Fire-Power 1 Tiny, trim Babe MacNeice descended the very secret staircase that led into the very private office of Intelligence Wing Commander Bartok. "Hello!" he gasped as the wall panel slid aside. "You're on Magdeburg's 83— or aren't you?" "There was very little doing there," she smiled, seating herself. "Except a bustle and roiling about as I left. It seems that someone had kidnapped their HQ secretary and sweated him for some information relative to their new interceptors." "Have they any idea," asked Bartok anxiously, "who that someone was?" Babe laughed. "They have the finger on him. From some confidential instructions he dropped while making a getaway, they learned that he was a secret agent for some Venusian colony or other. He was described as a thin old man of effeminate carriage and manner." Bartok smiled, relieved. "Your number twelve. Report, please." He started a phonograph turning and pointed the mike at Babe. The girl said chattily: "MacNeice went per orders to Magdeburg's 83 for confirmation or denial of rumors concerning a planned uprising against Terrestrial authority. There she found widespread reports of similar character; the entire planet was flooded with propaganda. "Information was conclusively—ah—secured—from an official to the effect that the colonial governor, Allison by name, was fomenting an insurrection by means of which he would be able to assume supreme authority over the planet and defend it against terrestrial forces. That is all." She lit a cigarette and stared dully at the floor as the wing commander sealed and labeled the report record. "That," said Bartok, "sews up Allison in a very uncomfortable sack. We'll send a cruiser tonight." "Sure," said the girl. "He hasn't got a chance. None of them have against the insidious Commander Bartok and his creatures of evil. That's me." "And don't tell me you don't love it," he grinned. "I know better. In the blood, that's where it is—the congenital urge to pry into other people's affairs and never be suspected. It gives us a kick like two ounces of novadyne." "Speaking of which," said Babe, "are you dining alone tonight?" "Nope. I have a standing date with my favorite little voyeur whenever she comes back to Earth. Scamper along to get dressed; I'll meet you in two hours at the living statues." The show-place of New Metropole, capital of the All Earth Union and Colonies, was the Square of Living Statues. Bathed in ever-changing lights, the groups of three men and three women, molded from the purest gold and silver and assembled with every artifice of the year A.D. 3880, changed steps and partners, moving through the hours of the day in a stately dance that was never twice the same in even the smallest step. Grouped on a lofty platform, the heroically proportioned figures were the focus of every visitor to the wonder-city of all time and space. There was absolutely nothing like them in the universe, nothing like their marvelous grace that would balance a three-ton male on his toes while whirling a two-ton female partner in a vast arc, all to the most subtly exquisite music that could be evolved from supertheramins and electroviolas. The music too was completely automatic. The divine harmonies came from nothing more than a revolving drum which selected at random sequences of tones and the companion coloring of the lights that flooded the statues in their dance. In a glassed restaurant Bartok and Babe were dining. Through the walls filtered enough of the music to furnish a subdued background to lovers' talk. But when these two got together it was business. As the wing commander had said, it was something in the blood. "MacNeice," snapped Bartok, "I am not arguing with you, I'm telling you. You are not going to do any such damfool thing as walk in on our piratical friends and confront them with what you doubtless think of as 'The Papers.' I'm going to get this melodrama out of your head if I have to beat it out." The girl's face was flushed and angry. "Try that and you'll get yours with an Orban," she snapped. "I say that if you bring it right home to them that we're on their tails they'll give up without a struggle, and we've saved so many lives and so much fuel that a medal for me will be in order." "The cruiser," said Bartok, "leaves tonight. And that settles everything. Forget, child, that this wing of the service was once its brains instead of its eyes and ears. We are now officially an appendage devoted to snooping, and the glorious history of the Intelligence Division is behind us." "Fitzjames," she muttered, gritting her teeth. "I'd like to take that Admiral of the Fleet by his beard and tear his head off. And don't tell me you aren't in the project body and soul." Mocking his tones she said: "I know better." "Off the record," admitted Bartok, "I may opine that our tiny suite of offices has more brains in its charladies' little fingers than the entire fighting forces have in all the heads of all the commanders of all their mile-long battlewagons. That is, naturally, gross overstatement and pure sentimentality on my part. Eat your Marsapples and shut up." She bit viciously into one of the huge fruit and swallowed convulsively, her eyes drifting through the glass wall to the living statues. They were performing a sort of minuet, graceful beyond words, to an accompaniment from the theremins in the manner of Mozart. "And what's more," barked the wing commander in an angry afterthought, "the body of the space navy could dispense with us at will, whereas without them we'd be lost. You can't exist for the purpose of making reports to nobody. What good would your spying have done if there hadn't been any cruiser to be sent off to bomb Allison's capital city?" "None at all," she snapped at him. "Only I don't like the job if it has to mean taking guff from every half-witted ensign who graduated because he knows how to work an Auto-Crammer. Barty, you know and I know that they hate us and check up on everything we send in. The—the sneaks!" Abruptly she was weeping. The wing commander, indecisively, passed her a handkerchief. Women! he was thinking. Sometimes they could be thoroughly opaque to reason. Any man could see through his sardonic recital of rules. The wing commander detested the well-set-up officers and gentlemen who would not and could not move until he had charted the course. The wing commander had a healthy contempt for any and all formality and routine, with which the naval service was weighed down as with tons of lead. But the wing commander was, first, last and always, of that unalterable cast of mind which makes the superb, chilled-steel military spy. In all the records of the All Earth Union and Colonies-navy, there had probably been no such man as Bartok. Back to the days of the Herkimer scandal there had been a succession of brilliantly proved men in his office, but for resourcefulness and the spy's temperament he had had no equal. He would have gone far in the old days; further than any intelligence man now could. Many years ago, when Earth had only a few hundred colonial planets, the news suddenly broke that there was a virtual dictatorship over the navy by the Intelligence Wing. Herkimer, since painted as a scoundrel of the deepest dye, had been merely an exceptionally enthusiastic officer. The course his enthusiasm ran included incidentally the elimination of much red tape in the form of unfriendly fleet officers; that he regretted as unfortunate and even tragic. But his mission of expanding Earth's culture and civilization to the stars would not brook interference. Classic scholars could scarcely avoid a comparison with the Roman emperor Trajan, who pushed the bounds of the Empire to the absolute limits of the Western world, and created a situation which hastened the fall of Rome by centuries. Since the Herkimer affair they had been very careful with the Intelligence Wing. Once it was almost abolished for good; a few years of operation of the fleet practically blind, with no ground laid for them or information of enemy movements, proved that to be impractical. But they did what they could to keep the spies within bounds. It was an actually heartbreaking situation to the executives of the Wing. But you can't keep the voyeur instinct down; that was what they were chosen for and that was how they operated. Take this affair on Magdeburg's 83. It was an insignificant outer planet very far away from New Metropole. Yet the filtering of rumors brought it into the brilliant limelight of the Wing. The body of the fleet could not move less than a mile-long battlewagon at one time; the Wing—personified by Commander Bartok —dispatched tiny, trim Babe MacNeice. She returned with the information that a hitherto trusted colonial officer had decided to play Napoleon and was secretly fortifying the planet. In the last analysis, lives were saved. The single cruiser could send a landing party and take the trusted colonial officer back to Earth for trial; surely a preferable alternative to a minor war with the propaganda-inflamed ophidians that were native to the planet. Wing executives did not speak—in private—of their love for the body of the fleet. They held to the stubborn conviction that there was nothing dumber than a flagship commander, nothing less beautiful than a flagship. 2 At about that time, things were popping on the lineship Stupendous, two million miles off the orbit of Venus. On it was jammed the entire Headquarters Wing of the All Earth and Colonies navy. In the very heart of the ship, inside almost a cubic mile of defensive and offensive power, was Wing Commander Fitzjames, by virtue of his command Admiral of th...
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