Part 1

THE LAST TWO ALIVE!

by ALFRED COPPEL

Aram Jerrold watched helplessly as Santane's beast-rockets screamed into the Void bearing madness to the Thirty Suns, and knew that this was cosmic Armageddon ... the crimson horror of Space-war would smash Galactic Civilization utterly and forever! Yet in his tortured mind a voice from the past commanded: "_You must save something from the ruins!_"

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories November 1950. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

The verdict, thought Aram Jerrold wearily, would be death. The Supreme Council itself would demand it. He had rebelled against the Tetrarchy--rebelled senselessly, desperately, without hope of success or escape--and the reckoning had come. The Government of the Thirty Suns would demand his life ... more, if the science of the Security Police were up to it. Aram repressed a shudder. He knew that science well. No one rose to a position of command in the Thirty Suns Navy or to membership in the Executive Committee of the Tetrarchy without respect for the methods of the dread Greens.

The courtroom was dark, a pattern of sombre hues calculated to impress a prisoner with the futility of hope. It had been weeks since Jerrold had seen the sun. Weeks of endless interrogation and repeated narcosynthesis. He had been shunted from Bureau to Bureau, from Department to Department, each set of cogs in the vast governmental machinery of the Terminus probing him for evidence of sabotage or rebellion within its own structure. He had been badgered, beaten, drugged and threatened. Now, at last, the end of the ordeal seemed near. There remained only the sentence of death to be passed--the method and place decided upon--and it would be done with. The ponderous bureaucracy of the Tetrarchy had wrung him dry, and now it prepared to cast him aside, satisfied that his rebellion was a purely personal aberration and not part of a widespread plot against the stability of galactic tyranny.

The drugs had clouded his vision, giving a nightmare mistiness to the shadowy courtroom. Jerrold could see that the room was empty but for the guards and clerks and the black-masked tribunes. It would not do, of course, to let the people know that one of the chosen masters--a member of the Executive Committee--had suddenly become an insubordinate rebel and traitor.

Behind him a door opened, splitting the gloom with a fleeting wedge of light. The wedge vanished and Aram Jerrold heard again the light, crisp footsteps. He knew without looking that it was Deve Jennet. She had been in the courtroom every day, giving testimony, slamming doors in his face. Doors that might possibly have led to freedom. Every day she had driven another rivet into the chains of evidence that bound him, methodically, deliberately.

She passed by him without turning her head and took a seat near the tribune's dais. Jerrold stared at her through the mist that swam sickeningly before his eyes. Dimly, the memory of her as she had been before this nightmare came to him. He remembered her, soft and yielding in his arms through the long nights of Terminus. Nights filled with tenderness and longing talk of freedom for the two of them somewhere beyond the stars.

This was the same woman, but changed. The lustrous dark eyes were the same, and the full lips. The same pale hair and slim body. But it sat encased in a severely cut uniform, all femininity gone from it. The uniform was green. The hated color of the Security Police....

Jerrold had heard again all the words that he had spoken to her through those nights. Only this time the words had been retold to three masked judges and their clerk. This time, the words had had a ring of doom.

At first Aram had suffered the tortures of the damned wondering why Deve had betrayed him. He had known well enough her high connections in the Supreme Council and he had known that she served as a member of the Greens. But he had imagined that she loved him, and he had been stupid enough to trust her. Now, after weeks of ordeal, it seemed to matter no longer. Jerrold wanted only to rest.

* * * * *

On the dais, one of the black-masked figures was speaking. Aram leaned forward painfully to catch what was being said.

"This court wishes to go on record as favoring a severe reprimand for the Bureau of Psychometrics personnel involved in the testing of Aram Jerrold. His inherent instability should have been uncovered long before he was appointed to the Executive Committee. Only the chance use of a mental probe on him--at the request of the Security Police--" he nodded toward Deve Jennet, "--prevented serious inconvenience to the Government of the Thirty Suns. Such negligence cannot be tolerated in so vital a Bureau."

He paused while the clerk recorded his remarks, then continued: "Aram Jerrold, you have been convicted of treason against the Government of the Thirty Suns. You have been proved guilty of attempting to use your position as an officer of the Thirty Suns Navy to steal a spacecraft and escape from the dominance of your government. You have disgraced your uniform and your high office as a member of the Executive Committee of the Supreme Council of the Government of the Thirty Suns--" The hooded man rolled the sonorous phrases off his tongue with obvious relish. "Have you anything to say before the sentence of the court is passed?"

Jerrold looked at Deve Jennet. She sat motionless, her body tense in the green Police uniform. It was hard for Jerrold to speak. The druggings and violent interrogations had left him weak. Yet a spark of rebellion remained. Enough to lash out against his tormentors for one last time.

"I ... I want only to say," he began thickly, "that ... what I have done ... I would do again, gladly. I was sick of oppression ... tired of not ... daring even to think a thought of my own. Sick of pompous bureaucratic tyranny...." Jerrold drew a shuddering breath. "The Tetrarchy rules thirty star-systems ... but thirty star systems are not the Universe. Somewhere, I thought ... there must be freedom. My crime ... was _failure_ ... nothing more!"

"Enough!" The tribune's voice shook with sudden anger. "This court is not convened to listen to treasonous tirades! The clerk will strike the prisoner's remarks from the record!"

Darkness flickered momentarily at the edges of Jerrold's field of vision. He felt spent by his effort at defiance. He forced himself to stand erect.

"The sentencing will proceed!"

"The prisoner will face the Standard!" intoned the clerk.

* * * * *

Aram raised his eyes to the hated symbol on the wall behind the judges' dais. Long habit made him square his shoulders under the tattered remains of his blue uniform. He stared up at the Standard of the Tetrarchy's Spaceship and Sun, despising everything it stood for.

"_Aram Jerrold, traitor and rebel: you are sentenced by this court to death by slow disintegration!_ For the safety of the Tetrarchy!"

The words fell like stones from the lips of the masked tribune into the fragile silence of the vaulted chamber.

In spite of himself, Jerrold flinched. Sometimes men survived weeks of torment under the cancerous rays of the disintegrators....

One of the judges spoke in low tones to his colleagues.

"We have received a request from Kaidor V, gentlemen. Provincial Governor Santane asks that this sentence be commuted to life imprisonment on Kaidor V so that the prisoner may be used in some experimental work now in progress there."

Aram could feel his stomach muscles tightening and the weakness seeping into his knees. The disintegrators would be preferable to becoming an experimental animal on Kaidor V. The Kaidor province was the farthest of the Thirty Suns, and the arsenal of the Tetrarchy. The ghastliest of the Tetrarchy's weapons came from Kaidor, and they had to be tested there ... on living men.

"It seems," muttered one of the tribunes pettishly, "that every time a naval officer is convicted of anything a request comes through from Kaidor that he be turned over to Santane. One would imagine Governor Santane is building a navy!" He shuffled the papers before him while the others waited. "Still," he continued thoughtfully, "it would be politically unwise to execute this prisoner here on Terminus. The spacemen of his command are based here and there is no point in stirring up trouble in the Fleet... I am inclined to recommend acceptance of this offer to take him off our hands."

"_Objection, sirs!_" Jerrold looked about to see that Deve Jennet was on her feet, addressing the members of the tribunal.

"As you know, sirs," she was saying crisply, "I have the good fortune to be one of the lesser members of the Executive Committee in my office as liaison officer from Security. I feel it only fair to warn you that the Supreme Council would be extremely displeased if this prisoner should escape with his life. It is felt that an example must be made of him. If it is unwise to carry out the sentence here on Terminus, I will be happy to arrange a transfer to Atmion IV. On the Green planet there will be no possibility of trouble by Fleet members. I must insist that you accede to the wishes of the Council. Aram Jerrold must die in the disintegrators. No other course of action will be acceptable to the Supreme Council!"

The three judges conferred among themselves and then the senior spoke again. The tone of his voice indicated all too well the awe in which the Supreme Council and all its appendages was held by members of the Judicial Department of the Thirty Suns Government.

"This court was not aware that the Supreme Council had any special desires concerning the disposition of this case. Had it been known to us earlier, we would not have considered even for a moment the request of Provincial Governor Santane."

"The Supreme Council, gentlemen," returned Deve Jennet stiffly, "_has_ an interest in this case, as I have indicated to you. It has been communicated to you in the proper time and form. I await your action on it."

"Of course, Leader Jennet, of course. It was not our intention to question the policies of the Council!" The judge signalled the guards.

"Aram Jerrold is hereby remanded to the custody of the Security Police, to be transported by first available spaceship to Atmion IV, there to be put to death in the manner prescribed by Directive 25-A-38 governing Execution of Convicted Persons Above the Rank of Commander. Remove the prisoner!"

Aram passed near Deve Jennet as she replied: "It will be so reported, gentlemen." And then looking somberly at Jerrold she added, "I myself will go to Atmion IV to see to it that this prisoner is accorded the treatment he deserves."

Aram stumbled out of the courtroom under guard. Deve's final words rang strangely in his ears, a perplexing threnody of the dreams they had shared in the hazy past. He had the odd feeling that in spite of the things that had passed, the end was not yet....

* * * * *

Of the flight out to Atmion, Jerrold remembered almost nothing. The iron determination that had kept him on his feet during the last days of his trial failed him at last and the reaction of the druggings he had suffered hit him ... hard. He writhed in the agonies of addiction for the duration of the trip out from Terminus. He knew vaguely that he lay in the prison ship's infirmary, strapped to a bunk. The discomforts of acceleration and the shift into second-stage flight above light speed added themselves to his tortures and filled his nightmares with nauseating spectres. For two weeks Jerrold went through sheer hell as his drug-saturated system screamed for more narcotics. None were given.

By the time the huge prison ship touched down on the dread world of the Greens, Aram Jerrold was on his way back. Spent, weak and emaciated, he heard the landing alarms and knew that he would live to face the disintegrators.

* * * * *

Atmion IV, the only habitable planet of a star-system bizarre and hateful! Three suns in the smoky sky, air that tasted of brimstone and ashes. Heavy, deadening gravity. A world of hot rain that fell daily out of the hazy cloud canopy, a desert at periaston and quagmire at apastron. Barren ground and a turbulent, sulphuric sea.

The three suns blazed through the overcast as the prison ship settled into the steaming mud that was the spaceport. Scalding rain sluiced down the long flanks of the vessel, corrosive and fetid.

Aram Jerrold knew of Atmion IV. No officer in the Fleet did not. It was a foul planet, a world unwanted by any of the many Bureaus, and as such the perfect prison world. The planet of the Greens. On all its vast hulk there was only one settlement. The Green Fortress. Political exiles and condemned prisoners from all over the Tetrarchy of the Thirty Suns were brought to the Fortress on Atmion IV. None ever returned.

Aram remembered that Atmion lay in the Twenty Ninth Decant, only four light years from Kaidor on the very periphery of the Tetrarchy. These were the outpost systems, the suns far from mighty Terminus and the center of the teeming life of the galaxy. These were the hinterlands of empire, sullen, unknown, unwanted.

The Green Fortress proper stood on a high crag, etched against the smoky grey of Atmion IV's eternal overcast. Standing in the open port of the prison ship, Jerrold could see the black bulk of the turreted stronghold through the curtain of driving rain. The spaceport was a sea of mud that still boiled in places from the heat of the great starship's landing jets.

Chained in a long line, the human cargo of the vessel was herded through the rain and mud toward an electrified wire enclosure. Aram smiled wryly at that evidence of "Security." What need was there for it on this world? Where could a prisoner go if he should find himself on the other side of the wire barrier? It was likely, Jerrold thought, that there was a Directive on it from Terminus, and that accounted for the electrified wire.

He estimated that there were perhaps nine hundred men and women in the human chain that stretched from the starship to the long reception buildings within the enclosure. The chaff of heterodoxy--cast off by the single-track machinery of galactic bureaucracy.

The Greens drove the sodden prisoners through the gates without rancor or interest. It was as though the prisoners had ceased to be human once they crossed the line that excluded them from the society of free men.

Inside the long, draughty shelters, the prisoners were stripped naked, men and women alike, run through cleansing water jets, dried, clothed and photographed. Then they were broken into groups and registered by Greens sitting in armored cubicles within the walls. There was a machine-like efficiency to the bureaucratic procedure on this level. Aram Jerrold had the impression that the operation would continue to run by sheer momentum should higher authority suddenly try to halt it....

* * * * *

Jerrold presented himself before a Green of about forty, a man with a thin, tired face and colorless eyes, who codified the information given him, looking up at the prisoner with no apparent interest. Quite abruptly, he emerged from his cubicle, signalling another Green to take his place.

"You," he said to Aram; "come with me."

Jerrold followed the Green out of the reception building and out into the rain. For a wild moment, Aram had the impulse to try an escape, but the thought died stillborn. Escape was plainly impossible. There was simply no place to go--even if he could shake free of his guard and the others stationed about the enclosure. The prison ship was being refuelled a short distance from the reception pen, but the valves were closed and guarded.

Presently Jerrold and his guide reached a shaft imbedded in the side of the crag, atop which sat the grim Fortress. Aram turned his eyes upward. The great, bastioned stronghold seemed to crouch on the crest of the cliff. On the highest turret, a green banner emblazoned with a golden Spaceship and Sun hung sodden and limp in the falling rain.

With no hesitation, the Green stationed at the guard-post by the shaft entrance signalled Aram and his guide through. There was a short walk up a spiralling ramp and then they stood before what appeared to be simply a blank wall. Jerrold stared in perplexity as his guard took a bit of metal from his tunic and held it to the wall.

"Isotope," said the guard shortly, "It acts as a key to the scanner ... below."

Before Aram could question him, the section of wall slid back soundlessly and they stepped into a tubecar. Quickly, the Green set up a complicated series of stops on the tubecar controls and the vehicle started downward with a rush.

Aram clutched at the man for support. Something was not as it should be. Then, quite suddenly, he realized what it was. The tubecar was travelling _down_ ... and the Fortress lay above!

"Where are we going?" he asked cautiously.

The Green shook his head.

"Aren't the condemned cells above in the Fortress?"

"Be quiet. Talk is dangerous!"

"But...."

"Be quiet," the Green said again. "You'll understand soon enough. We have to be careful. Not all of us here are of the Group." He turned his back on Jerrold.

Aram's head was spinning. What was there on Atmion that a Green need fear? And what was this ... Group?

With a wisdom born of his long imprisonment, Aram Jerrold decided to hold his peace. What would be would be, and it was becoming increasingly plain that he was about to learn of things that he had not dreamed existed.

After what seemed to be an interminable period, the tubecar began to slow. The hum of atomics died and the car came to a stop. They must be well below the level of the Fortress now, reflected Jerrold, and very likely under the sea. The panels slid away and in front of them stretched a long white corridor lighted by dim bulbs set in the curved ceiling.

"There are miles of tubeways down here," said the guard, "and only the isotope key gives entrance. The central pattern on the tubecar has been altered, too ... for the safety of the Group. Follow me."

At the end of the corridor, a steelite door barred further progress. The Green produced his isotope key again and touched it to the metal.

"A word of advice," he said to Jerrold coolly. "Listen and believe. A great many risks have been taken and a vast amount of work done to bring you this far."

He leaned forward and shoved the metal door open. Within lay a brightly lit chamber. The glare of it hurt Jerrold's eyes and he stood a moment, blinking on the threshold. Slowly, as his eyes accustomed themselves to the light, Aram became aware of a group of men and women who watched him impassively. There were a few in Fleet uniform. One or two of them casual acquaintances he had thought lost in space or imprisoned by the Greens. There were others in prison garb, and here and there he could see the dread color of the Security Police. His heart began to pound. Another trap? But why?

One slight figure in green stood a little apart, watching him through shadowed eyes. Jerrold felt the breath catch in his throat.

It was Deve Jennet!

* * * * *

With a cry Deve ran to him. Jerrold felt a surge of mixed fury and desire. Almost defensively, he lifted his hand and struck Deve across the face.

She gasped and stepped back, eyes suddenly bright with tears, a thin streak of blood marking her pale face. The gathered strangers muttered angrily. Aram turned to stare at them; his face set and grim. Anger was pulsing within him, a deep, consuming anger born of the tortures he had suffered--he looked at the stunned girl--because of _her_.

"Oh, Aram ... what have they done to you?" whispered Deve.

"What have _they_ done to me?" he asked thickly. "_They?_ Now tell me you had no part in it!" He was hemmed in, lost in a sea of treachery and formless dangers. For a few moments he had dared to let himself hope...! And this was the end of it. Deve again. And another trap! "What more do you want from me? Is this just entertainment for you? To raise my hopes and then step on them again? Maybe you'd like to open my veins and have a drink of my blood?"

"Aram ... _stop it_!"

"You lying, cheating wench! Was it you that brought me to the Fortress? Was it you that spilled all my stupid dreams to those black ghouls who tried me?" he asked bitterly.

"Yes! Yes, it was me!" sobbed Deve, "but can you listen to me? Aram, I beg you! Listen to me!"

Aram felt some of the rage draining out of him. He stared at Deve in confusion. There were tears streaking her face. There was no reason for her to cry now, he thought heavily. Her job was done. Done well.

"I had to do it that way, Aram. You can't know how I've suffered for you ... every minute of the time. But it had to be done, I swear it! There was no other way I could get you here to the Group! If I had let you go your own way, you'd have been killed, Aram. I'd have died with you gladly, but there are other things that must be done. And we can live, Aram! Do you understand me? We can live!"

Jerrold looked about him. The group had gathered around him. Someone said: "Listen to Deve Jennet, Jerrold!"

Dave stepped close to him again, her face upturned. He felt again the old desire for her, even here--now. Did it matter that she had betrayed him? Did anything matter any more to him? The last ebb of fury flowed out of him, leaving him silent and relaxed at last. If this was a trap ... what did it matter? He had nothing to lose now.

He realized quite suddenly then that he wanted very much to believe what Deve said. He wanted it so badly that he reacted defensively, not daring to let himself be hurt by her again. Very cautiously, he let down the barriers that he had erected against her since the very first day of the trial when he had known for the first time that she had been his betrayer.

Deve sensed the change in him and laid a hand on his arm. "You ... you will listen now?" she asked quietly.

Aram nodded, his eyes fixed on her face. The bruise on her lips was dark and painful looking.

"I heard of your arrest the day it happened, Aram," she said. "I knew what the end of it would be if they could find no real evidence against you--you'd have been subjected to an extensive mental probing that would have left you ... an ... an idiot. That's true. You know it is."

Aram nodded agreement.

"You would have been lost to _us_," Deve said, "and Aram, we need you! Need you desperately!"

Aram looked about him in confusion. Still weak from his bout with the drugs, he was having difficulty marshalling his thoughts.

"Who are you people?" he demanded. "_What_ are you?"

* * * * *

A grizzled naval officer stepped forward. Aram recognized him as Kant Mikal, recorded in the headquarters of the Thirty Suns Navy as having been lost in space two years earlier while on a routine exploration into the Thirtieth Decant.

"We have no name, other than 'the Group,'" he said simply. "We have as our purpose the prevention of a disastrous war ... possibly even the destruction of civilization as we have known it."

"You don't make any sense," Jerrold said confusedly. "What is there in the galaxy that can threaten the Tetrarchy with a war such as you describe?"

"There is a very real and present danger, Aram Jerrold," Mikal said flatly. "_Santane_...."

Aram felt a chilling premonition. Santane again. He remembered the testy words of the black judge who had condemned him: "One would think Santane were building a fleet...."

Mikal seemed to read his thoughts. "Yes," he said, "Provincial Governor Santane."