Colossus and Crab by D. F. Jones Read Free Book Online

under command, Colossus could exact unthinkable retribution… .
    When Forbin and Blake had emerged from the Sanctum, her nerves had sustained yet another shock, less from Forbin than from Blake. The one-time genial bully, confident of his sexuality, tough, and a good companion - as long as he was center-stage - had shriveled to a slack-mouthed, glassy-eyed oaf. Neither of the men had seemed aware of their surroundings: she had caught Forbin’s sleeve.
    As if in a haze, he had seen her dimly, his expression showing she was as irrelevant to him as a fly to an elephant.
    “No,” he had said in an unrecognizable, gravelly voice, “no time. Do as you …” There the sentence stopped. “No time!”
    “But Chief-“
    In the early years she’d called him that. Perhaps it got through to his thinking brain. Briefly he fought to control himself, to communicate with her.’ ‘Do the best you can. have no time!”p>
    Momentarily their gaze had met; she saw the horror in his eyes. She could not imagine what held the mind of the man she had loved for fifteen years. Whatever, it had to be worse than the revolt. Colossus had said or done something terrible to bring these two men to the edge of destruction. That had to be the answer; what else could it be?
    She had slumped into her chair, hands pressed on the desk to conceal the uncontrolled trembling. “Do the best you can.” That, and no more. She tried.
    So the iron hand came into play. She could not stop the flood, but she tried to stem it, fear eating at her heart.
    Elsewhere in the complex, after the brief madness which had turned quiet scientists into blind killers had evaporated, they lapsed into guilt-ridden silence. Galin and his crew were dead - the killers shied off that remembrance - and the wild joy of the triumph over the Sect, and possibly Colossus, lacking further motivation, left the staff in a suspended state of animation. Blake’s expected orders did not arrive; unease swamped guilt. Something had gone wrong, badly wrong, and as that realization grew, so unease was translated into fear. None knew of the coming of the Martians.
    Forbin’s brief intercom command for all staff to remain in the complex calmed no minds, increasing the fear of the unknown.
    Worst of all, although all outputs from Colossus stayed silent, the scientific staff dreaded that the Master might speak again. They knew the fear was irrational, for the power was off, yet they still feared. The scrape of a match, the click of a lighter, was enough to make all near an outlet visibly jump. They waited, silent and sweating, held by discipline and the cold fact that they had no option.
    To an observer on the west side of Newark, the giant UN structure, covering a third of Manhattan and dwarfing the midtown skyscrapers of old New York, would have looked its normal cliff-faced self, but for those within the labyrinth the picture was very different.
    Men and women, deep in shock, trapped above the two hundredth floor by powerless elevators, picked their uncertain way among the debris, peering fearfully from the broken windows at the Hudson River, their nostrils stung with the acrid tang of burnt cordite. From that top vertiginous fifty floors the five gray mastodons riding at anchor midway between New Jersey and Manhattan looked like insignificant toys, but the survivors who watched, separated by race, culture, and many tongues, knew better, united as never before by a bond of common, terrible experience: together they had suffered what no one had endured for well over a hundred years - the bombardment of heavy guns.
    Each generation has the illusion of superiority over its forbears. Nuclear man smiles condescendingly at the idea of the arrows of Agincourt; to him, they are not much more effective than the ancient guns which could only deliver a paltry ton of high explosive. What was that compared with the hideous power of gigaton warheads?
    But death comes to all, and twenty-second-century people soon