SPACE POLICE
EDITED WITH
AN INTRODUCTION AND NOTES BY
ANDRE NORTON
CLEVELAND AND NEW YORK
THE WORLD PUBLISHING COMPANY
Library of Congress Catalog
Card Number: 56-5309
FIRST EDITION
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The
Publishers wish to acknowledge with thanks permission to use the following
stories contained in this volume:
"Bait"
by Roy L. Clough, Jr. Copyright 1951 by Street & Smith Publications, Inc.
Reprinted from Astounding
Science-Fiction, June
1951, by permission of the publisher and the author.
"The
Closed Door" by Kendall Foster Crossen. Copyright 1953 by Ziff-Davis
Publishing Company. Reprinted from Amazing Stories, August-September 1953, by
permission of the author's agent, Forrest Ackerman.
"Beep"
by James Blish. Copyright 1954 by Galaxy Publishing Corporation. Reprinted
from Galaxy, February 1954, by permission of the author's agent, Kenneth S.
White.
"Of
Those Who Came" by George Longdon. Copyright 1953 by King-Size
Publications, Inc. Reprinted from Fantastic Universe, June-July 1953, and New
Worlds, November 1952, by permission of the author's agent, E. J. Carnell.
"Police
Operation" by H. Beam Piper. Copyright 1948 by Street & Smith
Publications, Inc. Reprinted from Astounding Science-Fiction, June 1948, by permission of the author's agent, Harry Altshuler.
"Pax Galactica" by Ralph Williams. Copyright 1952 by Street & Smith
Publications, Inc. Reprinted from Astounding Science-Fiction, November 1952, by permission of the author's
agent, Scott Meredith. "Tough Old Man" by L. Ron Hubbard. Copyright 1950
by Better Publications, Inc. Reprinted from Startling Stories, November 1950, by permission of the author's
agent, Forrest Ackerman. "Agent of Vega" by James H. Schmitz.
Copyright 1949 by Street & Smith Publications, Inc. Reprinted from
Astounding Science-Fiction, June 1949, by permission of the author and his
agent, Scott Meredith. "The Sub-Standard Sardines" by Jack Vance.
Copyright 1949 by Better Publications, Inc. Reprinted from Startling Stoiies, January 1949, by permission of the author's
agent, Scott Meredith.
HC1255
Copyright
© 1956 by The World Publishing Company. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced
in any form without
written permission from the publisher, except for briei passages included in a review
appearing in a newspaper
or magazine. Manufactured in the United States of America.
Contents
foreword 7
We Police Ourselves: Future Tense
Bait by roy l. clough, jr. 11
The
Closed Door by kendall foster crossen 19
Beep by james blish 37
We Are Policed
Of Those Who Came by george longdon 77
Police Operation by h. beam piper 92
Pax Galactica by ralph williams 124
Galactic
Agents
Tough Old Man by l. ron hubbard 151
Agent of Vega by james h. schmitz 173
The Sub-Standard Sardines by jack vance 231
FOREWORD
Since criminals and the police have in the past both drawn
upon science for aid in their unremitting war, this established pattern will,
without a doubt, continue into the future. Space pirates will devise methods
for looting rocket ships on course between planets, patrolmen new means for
tracing the bandits. And the sky will provide no limit to either.
So we can visualize in days to come "modern" police procedures
which will keep abreast of the times to prove to the solar system and beyond
that crime never pays. Or we can shiver a little at the thought that there
might even be now strange agents hidden among us, tracing down their own
wrongdoers, both entirely alien to our world or time.
And what of the future yet more remote—of law
enforcement officers who patrol sets of solar systems in a galaxy-wide net of
law and order? Will it be the same old crimes which set them to labor, or
wholly new forms of wrongdoing? It is anyone's guess. Only it is a certain bet
that the police shall continue to serve the public good—in one form or another.
Andre Norton
We Police Ourselves: Future Tense
1. Police Chief O'Neil Davis, who worried about
"the problems imposed upon law enforcement agencies by extraterrestrial
life forms," discovers anew
that the solution of an apparently
insolvable case may lie in plain sight waiting to be used. That was certainly
so in the matter of the invisible
bandit
ROY L.
CLOUGH, JR.
BAIT
Police chief o'neil davis watched the great metal bubble of the Moon
shuttle carrier float down into its cradle. He squinted his eyes a scant
fraction of a second before the dissipators flashed and sighed audibly.
Security Commissioner Morley eyed the
dissipator ring. Some of the coils were still glowing dull red as the last
trickles of kinetic energy converted into light and heat. His unlit cigar
rotated slowly in his mouth. "I wonder," he said, "just what
kind of a load we get this time."
Chief Davis shrugged, "The old order changeth." He diddled the
point of a pencil against the corner of his desk blotter. "Someday I
shall write me a book on the problems imposed upon law enforcement agencies by
extraterrestrial life forms." He pulled open the top drawer of his desk
and took out a flimsy. "We got the windup on that Martian watch
deal."
"Oh?"
"Only
twelve thousand were smuggled in. Half of them were
11 located before sale. Most of the rest have
been recovered and restitution made. Diplomatic apologies of course—for
whatever they are worth."
"What I can't understand is how they
were able to make such a good quality timepiece so cheaply."
"They couldn't. We know, unofficially of
course, what the real deal was—a production surplus. One of the Geeks slipped
up somewhere and didn't shut the robot machines off after the order had been
filled. That left them with twelve-thousand-odd watches, the raw materials for
which had to be accounted for. So they get the bright idea of smuggling them to
Earth and selling them on the side at a price that'll cover the raw materials
in them and the cost of getting them here. This way they figure to break even
and write off the surplus."
"And a lot of suckers think they're
buying fifty-dollar watches for five dollars."
"In a sense, they
were." Chief Davis grinned wryly. "Only the Geeks neglected to tell
them about the five extra minutes built into every hour—Martian days being
twenty-six Earth-hours long."
Morley said: "You did a good job on that
case—but I'm here to discuss another matter with you. No doubt you know what I
mean?"
The grin vanished from
Chief Davis' face and was replaced with a worried frown. "I'm afraid I
do."
Morley bit down hard on his cigar and reached
for the desk lighter. "This thing is becoming very embarrassing to
us," he said between puffs of blue smoke. "There seems to be a chance
of interplanetary friction developing over the stand being taken— hints are
being cast out by some of the tele-tabloids."
'The Elusians are a very sensitive
race," Chief Davis admitted, "and this is just the sort of thing the
sensational press likes to keep raking over. I know, it embarrasses me, too;
but I can see the news value in a burglar who is so clever he can repeatedly
outwit the best mechanical and electronic protective devices."
"What's the latest tally?"
"Twenty-four 'jobs,' the last two within
the past week." Chief Davis hesitated, "And you won't like this: we
haven't got a single lead on him—except along the lines the newsboys have been
hinting at."
bait 13
"Elusian?"
"Something like that. That is what makes
it so tough. Here we have an interesting situation—the perfect burglar, from a
criminal point of view, apparently a member of a race that is completely and
absolutely psychologically incapable of knowingly committing a dishonest
act."
"And a touchy and
sensitive race at that," said Morley, "to whom the merest mention of
the possibility of dishonesty of one of their race would be a mortal
insult."
"With the fact remaining that only an Elusian
has the, ah, physical peculiarities which would make it possible to nullify
the effects of protective equipment."
"Well," said Morley, "what do you think?"
Chief Davis rubbed the ball of his thumb on
his cheek and stared out the window. "To be very frank with you,
Commissioner, I'm not thinking, and I'll tell you why. I'd like to keep my
sanity. I've been over this thing, every scrap of information that has turned
up, or been dug up, I've gone over a dozen times." He looked steadily at
Morley, "The truth of the matter is that the facts are mutually
exclusive."
Morley returned his calm gaze with an effort.
"That is quite a statement to make, Chief."
"I'm aware of that."
"Aren't you going to do anything?"
"Certainly. I said I wasn't thinking—of
identities. I know it's your business to worry about the identity of the thief,
and the newsboys may consider it their province to speculate about his
identity, but to me, it makes little difference."
"Meaning?"
"I'll catch who I'll catch when I catch him."
"Um-m-m. You know, I
rather had the idea that modern protective measures had just about eliminated
burglary."
"That, to some extent, is just the trouble. We've had hardly a case
of any importance in the past hundred years. Burglary no longer pays. The invention
of the body-wave machine licked the burglary problem over night. Add to this
the automatic alarms, trip wires, window switches and all—which most places
have—and burglary is impossible."
"Only it isn't."
"Exactly.
Paradoxically, we can prevent crimes of this nature; but we can't do anything
about them after they have been committed. There is a good reason for this.
Burglary, as a profession, has been out of circulation for so long that the
appurtenances have disappeared. In the old days a burglar was by no means
self-sufficient. Stealing the goods was only half the job. Once he had the
loot he had to run around looking for a professional receiver of stolen goods.
It was at this level and in connection with such disposals that arrests could
be made and solutions arrived at."
"Meaning, perhaps, that in order to
control crime, one needs crime?" Morley looked thoughtful.
"In a sense, yes. In this case our
super-thief needs no auxiliary criminal in order to stay 'in business.' He has
been taking only money."
"But to take the money he must first get
by the burglar-proof body-wave field and several other protective
devices."
Chief Davis nodded. "Of course. That is
why I said the facts seem to be mutually exclusive. Fact one: No Terran, or for
that matter any humanoid type can penetrate a body-wave field. Fact two: No
Elusian can be psychologically capable of crime. Fact three: Fact one and fact
two contradict fact number four—"
'Which
is?"
"That somebody is getting through and taking the money."
Commissioner Morley scratched his head.
"Give me this Elusian business again."
"One of the first things a professional
law man learns is the details of the Ellus-Earth, or as it is more commonly
called, the Elusian protective treaty."
"Something about their delicate nervous systems, isn't it?"
"Delicate is the word for it. The
Elusians are a very remarkable race, of great interest to evolutionists. They
had a dominant mutation very recently, perhaps only a thousand Earth-years
ago. Much of their body and mind structure is crystalline in nature. Because of
this they are extremely sensitive to certain types of radiation and fields
which a humanoid would be incapable of detecting. The simple body-wave field,
for example, which is used as a protective measure, is death or insanity for an
Elusian. Several severe injuries happened to the first of them to visit
Earth—that being the primary cause for the treaty."
bait 15
"That I understand," said Morley,
"and under the treaty some sort of gadget shuts off protective fields when
an Elusian approaches?"
"That is basically correct. Certain
areas, and this includes all major spaceports, are specified as safe for
Elusians. That means, all protective devices, of the field-generating type, are
fitted with automatic shutoffs, tuned to the body frequency common to Elusians."
"Sounds
like both an expensive and risky business."
"In one sense it is, in another it is
not. Elusian products are extremely valuable to us, and vice versa. Too, don't
forget that Elusians are completely honest."
"You seem quite certain of that."
"I am. It is because of the way their
motivation process works. In school I've been through the whole thing over and
over. It is the way the Elusian brain works and it can't work to produce a
dishonest act. I know it seems fantastic, but it's true."
"I should think this would have been
taken advantage of by some mobsters. For instance, what is to prevent them from
kidnaping an Elusian and forcing him to go along and spring the locks for
them?"
"The fact that it won't work that way.
It was tried of course. Provision for this exigency was made in the treaty. The
devices don't shut down if the Elusian is in company with anybody else—of
another race, that is."
"Which, since you say
it has been tried, must have been rough on some Elusians."
"It was. Also rough on the Terran who tried it. Under the terms of
the treaty kidnaping or detaining an Elusian carries the death penalty.
Mandatory and no recourse."
"You've given me quite a bit of
background on this," said Morley, "which helps me to understand it
better, but it makes it a bit harder for me to say what I have to. I'm here at
the instructions of the rest of the commissioners. Did you know?"
"I suspected."
"I can give it to you
straight then. The point is that this 'Ghost' burglar business has been making
entirely too much stir. We appreciate your difficulties, but that is your line
of business. We want the matter cleaned up. We've got diplomatic pressure on
us, so we've got to put pressure on you. It boils down to a question of either,
or." "I see."
"What shall I tell
them?"
Chief
Davis stared out the window, idly watched the line of individuals descending
the ramp from the Moon shuttle. He rather liked being chief of police—a good
job; good pay; nice social standing. It had its headaches, but it was the one
job he knew he fitted best. He thought it all over, then he said:
"Tell you what, Commissioner. You may
let them know I said I'd have the 'Ghost' burglar in two weeks or I'll mail in
my resignation."
And after Morley had left he sat there
staring at the panel which had closed on his back and wondered how he would do
it.
It was a pretty plausible story and the
tele-news sheets obligingly printed it without editing. It briefly recounted
the long chain of burglaries, told of the great cunning of the thief and of his
seeming imperviousness to protective fields. It stated that after a long study
of the matter a new and different protective system had been worked out and was
now in use in "several places." Chief of Police O'Neil Davis was
credited with the development of the system, and he was quoted as saying that
he was certain a foolproof method of dealing with the situation had been worked
out.
As
a protective measure it was probably a little short in the ethics department,
but as a trap it was a dilly.
The
stout oak table stood in the middle of the cage area behind the cashier's
window. On it was stacked several hundred dollars in one's, five's and ten's.
Good usable wrinkled money with dirty edges. Four feet away, clamped to the
other end of the table was an ancient riot gun, aimed squarely at the money.
The gun had an interesting feature; bolted in place around the trigger mechanism
was a black metal box. Obligingly it was fitted with a heavy plate glass cover
that exposed a two-way magnetic trip resting against the trigger. From the box
a couple of copper wires ran to the pile of money. The wires were neatly
stitched through each pile x)f bills and from there ran to a wall socket
power supply.
Anybody
could see plainly what the setup was. If one jiggled the wires, the mechanism
would be set off; if one unplugged the
bait 17
wall
socket, the residual currents would cease and the switch would trip, and, of
course, the same thing would happen if the wires were cut. A technician,
studying the thing a bit more deeply would also reason that bringing any tools
near the box would also set off the mechanism. And he'd be right.
Commissioner
Morley snorted. "The most asinine thing I ever saw. It's so obvious."
Chief
Davis smiled tightly. "You don't like it? I thought it was a rather good
psychological challenge."
"And
shutting down all the other protective equipment? It seems you're practically
inviting the 'Ghost' to help himself."
"I'm
accepting the responsibility," replied Davis. He took the last cigarette
from the gay-colored plastic package, crumpled the container and tossed it on
the floor. Morley shook his head disgustedly and started out. "Be with
you in a minute," Davis called out, "I want to give the thing a final
check." The policeman saw Morley's back turn toward him. Quickly he
checked over the mechanism. He wanted to be very certain of one thing.
That the gun wasn't loaded!
It was a rather impudent bit of business. The
money, of course, was gone.
It did not require a great deal of detective
work to figure out how it had been accomplished. The burglar, working with
remarkable skill had simply unscrewed the plate glass cover from the firing
mechanism attached to the ancient riot gun. The nonmetallic screw driver he had
used still lay on the table. Jammed between the trigger and its guard,
effectively preventing any motion of the trip, were rolled-up bits of a plastic
cigarette package.
Nor was the final touch
missing. The heavy enameled wire was twisted in curlicues across the table top.
It read: THANK YOU
Commissioner Morley's face was grave as he
filed into Chief Davis' office at the head of a line of commissioners. He got
right to the point. "Davis, we've all seen this morning's telecast of the
failure of your absurd protective system."
Davis
seemed quite at ease. "Sit down, gentlemen. Now what is it you
wanted?"
The byplay annoyed Morley. "That's not
all. This trick of shutting down the protective body-wave field has annoyed
the Elusian envoy. He says it makes it pretty obvious that no Terran or Martian
is suspected and that his people are highly incensed at the implication."
"He is, is he?"
"Don't try to make light of it." Morley's face was dark.
"Tell him to relax. It wasn't an Elusian, it was a Terran. One of
my boys picked him up an hour ago." Chief Davis grinned, "A very
clever lad. He was a specialist in protective devices. He had rigged himself a
body-wave transformer that altered the human pattern to that of an
Elusian." He helped himself to a cigarette, glanced from the plastic
package to Morley, then back again and chuckled. "A very clever chap, but
he spilled it all under a shot of pentathol. The story will be on the views at
the next flash."
Morley was plainly relieved, but just as plainly puzzled. "I don't
see how such a cockeyed setup as that gun and wire business—" he broke
off.
"You don't?" Davis asked. He
studied his fingernails in leisurely fashion. No point in rushing it. Give the
commissioners a chance to see they had a very capable chief of police. That was
a good title. He was glad he'd be keeping it. Finally he said: "Simple.
Sometimes it's much easier to catch a smart crook than a dumb one." He
buffed his nails on the desk blotter and looked up at them. "Very simple.
He tried to pass money with holes in it."
2. The "locked room murder" is a
device much loved by mystery-story writers. And Detective Inspector Colder, a
quiet reader of such masters of the distant past as Rex Stout, applied
what he had learned in such study to solve a "perfect" crime of the far future.
KENDALL FOSTER CROSSEN
The Closed Door
Alister chu,
manager of the Planetary Rest Hotel, was a much disturbed man. The Galactic
Acrylic Convention was in full swing, which meant that he hadn't slept for two
days. When he wasn't rushing to answer the demands of a convention committee,
he was busy soothing the complaints of non-convention guests. At the moment, he
was trying to estimate the damage resulting from the latest cocktail party,
while a group of Acruxians sang their national anthem in the corridor and two
delegates from Canopus were in the Solar Room hammering out a Nocturne that had
been especially arranged for polydactylic pianists. And then his visiphone
buzzed.
Without noting the origin of the call,
Alister Chu flipped the switch and fairly snarled into his mouthpiece:
"Well, what do you want?" Then he recognized the face on the screen.
It was one of the hotel's most important guests, and there was no doubt that he
was also an angry guest. Alister quickly erased the anger from his own face and
added: "Sorry, Mr. Gru, I ...
the convention is making me rather jumpy."
"It's
making me more than that," snapped the guest. He spoke
Terran
with hardly a trace of an accent. "If there's one thing I can't abide,
it's practical jokers. You'd better get up here at once, Chu."
"Right away, sir. What—seems to be the trouble?"
"I've already told you," the guest
said. His gaze shifted away for a minute. "The Warning Red just flashed on
in my room, so you'll have to wait until your damned Mercurian stops parading
up and down the hall, but I want you here immediately afterward. I will not
stand—" He broke off and a startled expression came over his face. Alister
Chu saw that he was staring off to one side of the visiphone, then he started
to scribble madly with a pencil on the pad that was beside the phone. "I
was wrong," he said thickly. "It's not-"
At this point, as it seemed to Chu, the guest
fell apart. Not literally, of course, but there was a minute when his face
seemed to be working in all directions at once, then he fell forward in front
of the visiphone. From the way he fell, Alister Chu was almost certain that he
was dead.
Then a gloved hand came into view on the
screen, moved quickly to the phone itself, and the screen went dead.
Alister Chu went quickly from the room,
stopping for a moment beside the desk of his assistant. "Something's
happened upstairs," he said quietly. "I think you had better put in a
call for the police. I'll be on the hundred and seventieth floor. Mr. Gru's
room." He hurried on toward the elevators, trying to look as if nothing had
happened.
Chief Inspector Maiset,
head of the Solar Department, Terran Division, took the call that came into the
Interplanetary Criminal Police Commission. Since it was coming in over a closed
circuit, he didn't bother to activate the screen. He never did on such calls,
his reason being, as he said, that he saw enough policemen without looking at
another one when it was not necessary.
"Maiset here," he said into the audiphone. He listened for a
few minutes, doing nothing more than grunt occasionally to show that he was
still there. "Let me see now," he said amiably when his caller had
run down, "you say the case involves suspected murder, although you're
not sure anyone is dead; a hotel full of suspects, if it is necessary to
suspect anyone of anything, these being delegates from all over the galaxy.
That about it? No, no, you did quite right. I expect you'll be needing someone
like Detective Inspector Calder. He'll be right along. You'll meet him?
Good."
Chief
Inspector Maiset disconnected. He leaned over and pressed one of a number of
buttons on his desk, then waited patiently.
After
a moment the door to his office opened and a young man stepped inside. Being a
detective, he was in plain clothes. That is, he wore an attractive one-piece
suit which made him look like any one of a dozen successful young businessmen.
But his face lacked the alertness of such young men, his expression usually
giving the impression that he was half asleep.
"Another
official call, I see," the young man said as he came up to the chief
inspector's desk.
"That's true,"
admitted Maiset, "but how did you know?"
"Simple
deduction," the young man answered. "When it's an official call, you
never activate the screen. There is, you'll note, a slight film of dust over
the screen switch. Since you also never summon me unless there's a case, it
means you just received a plea for help from some other station. That, in turn,
means a case involving either delicate interplentary relations or
murder,"
The
chief inspector beamed at the young man. Detective Inspector Jair Calder was
always making just such deductions as these. Although it was an age when crime
was usually solved by unrelieved science, the chief inspector was a sentimental
man who delighted in the old literature of crime, and therefore never ceased to
be pleased by Calder's ability.
"You're
right," he said. "I just had a call from Sub-Inspector Aly Mordette
of the Terran Provincial Police. It's suspected murder and delicate
interplanetary relations. At the new Planetary Rest Hotel. You know where it
is?"
Inspector Calder nodded.
"All
that Mordette has done is throw an energy belt around the hotel so that no one
can enter or leave. He'll meet you on the Third Level above the hotel and key
you through the belt."
Inspector Calder nodded
again and left.
A
few minutes later he arrived at the Third Level in his small, inconspicuous
air-car. He was broadcasting a short-wave impulse which only the police sets
could pick up as a means of identification.
The police cruiser soon came alongside, then
led the way down toward the hotel. Inspector Calder set his air-car down on the
roof-port of the hotel, and by the time he climbed out the uniformed
sub-inspector was waiting for him.
The latter was a large, abdominal man, whose
light blue uniform managed to look wrinkled in spite of being manufactured from
non-wrinkleable plastic. The expression on his red face indicated that the sub-inspector
was a man who lived in an aura of constant suspicion.
"Inspector Jair Calder?" he asked
formally as Jair stepped from his car.
"Yes," Jair said pleasantly.
"I take it you're Sub-Inspector Mor-dette? A bit of a go here, eh?"
"It would seem so," the
sub-inspector said glumly. "I haven't done a thing, you understand. The
hotel is filled with all sorts of queer fish—and some of them are fish—and
there's no telling what'll hurt their feelings. A mere sub-inspector in the
Provincial Police doesn't carry much weight, I can tell you."
"Just so," Jair agreed. "I
expect we ought to look in on the trouble, don't you think?"
"We'll have to do down to the hundred
and seventieth floor," the sub-inspector said. He started for the
elevators and Inspector Calder fell into step beside him. "Things haven't
changed much, I tell you, in spite of all the talk about living in a brave new
galaxy."
"How do you mean?" Jair asked.
The sub-inspector waved his hand at the hotel. "All this. Convention
at a hotel. Place filled with big shots. A guy gets murdered —probably for the
same sort of reason people were murdered three hundred years ago. And it's a
time for the little policeman to watch his step or some big shot will have his
job. Oh, we have our Twenty-second Century gadgets, but everything works just
the same as it did in the Nineteenth or Twentieth Century. You can take my word
for it, Inspector."
"I shall," Jair said amiably.
The sub-inspector scowled uncertainly, but
was silent for the rest of the trip. When they stepped out of the elevator on
the hundred and seventieth floor, it seemed that the hall was filled with
policemen. But finally, halfway down the corridor, Jair caught sight of an
immaculately dressed man who could only be the manager of the hotel. He saw
them at the same time and hurried to meet them.
"Well, I'm certainly glad that you're
here," he said, speaking directly to Jair and ignoring the sub-inspector.
"I do trust that this unfortunate matter can be handled discreetly. We
have a number of important men here this week and I wouldn't want them
disturbed."
"We shall handle them most gently,"
Jair said. "I'm Inspector Calder, of Planepol. And you're—?"
"Alister Chu," the manager said.
"I have the honor of being the manager of—"
"Of course," Jair interrupted.
"Now, what seems to be the trouble?"
The manager quickly told of the call he'd
received from the guest on this floor. He explained the whole thing in great
detail, including his impression of the guest's falling apart: "Not literally,
of course." By the time he'd finished, they were standing in front of the
room in question.
"Of course," Jair said, agreeing
with the impression. He glanced around the luxurious, brightly-colored
corridor. "You know, this is the first time I've seen the Planetary Rest
Hotel, although I've read about it. Everything is constructed of plastic,
eh?"
"Oh, yes." For a minute, pride replaced the worried look on
Alister Chu's face. "As you may know, the hotel is owned by Plasti-corp
and they built everything with their own products. There are two hundred and
seventy-three different plastics used. Notice how springy the floor is; it cuts
down fatigue by sixty per cent. The doors, for example, are of Plexilite with a
tensile strength several times that of steel. Then, due to a few new formulas,
we are the only hotel capable of catering to every life form in the
galaxy—"
"I was wondering about that,"
interrupted Jair Calder. "Do you have separate sections for the
inhabitants of other planets?"
"Oh, no. We have special rooms, of
course, but they're on the same floors. Why, there are a number of rooms for
Mercurians right here on this floor."
"Mercurians? I should think it would be dangerous for your human
guests having them on the same floor."
"No danger of that at all," the
manager said. "When the Mercurians want to leave their rooms they
naturally have to come through a sort of air-lock. There are warning lights
which go on in all the other rooms, in the hallway and in the elevators. This
gives everyone a good thirty seconds to get out of the way." "What
about damage to the hallway?"
"None at all," the manager said
with pride. "A Mercurian passing through the hall will raise the
temperature to about two hundred degrees Centigrade, but none of the plastic
used will grow soft at temperatures below two hundred and fifty degrees Centigrade.
So there's plenty of margin. And the hallway reverts to its normal temperature
within thirty seconds after the Mercurian has passed. At the end of the hall there
are special Mercurian elevators, taking them down to where they can enter their
fire coaches."
"All of this is very interesting,"
Jair Calder said, "but I suspect we'd better get down to cases. This the
room of the guest?"
"Yes."
"His
name?"
"G. G. Gru. He's been coming here
regularly since we opened, and he always reserves the same room."
"He was not, I take it, a delegate to the convention?"
"Oh, no. In fact, he loathed the convention."
"I see. Well, since he
doesn't answer the door, I expect you'd better open it."
For the first time, the manager looked
embarrassed. "I can't," he said.
Something akin to interest crept into Inspector Calder's eyes. "Why
not?"
"Well, we have two sorts of doors here.
The regular doors are locked or unlocked by a combination of pressures. The
combination is given the guest and then changed for the next guest. Naturally,
the management has no difficulty opening those doors if circumstances demand
it. But with certain regular guests—and Mr. Gru was one of these—we replace the
door with a special one with a palm-lock keyed to the atomic structure of the
guest. No one but the guest can either lock or unlock these doors."
"Ah," said Jair Calder. He was really interested now, "I
presume there is interior ventilation and so no windows?"
"That is correct, Inspector."
"And this door is the only entrance or exit?"
"Yes."
Inspector Calder looked again at the door. It
was a plain plastic door, dark green in color, perfectly smooth and unbroken
except for the slight impression, in the shape of a hand, which was the
palm-lock.
Now the inspector, like his chief, was of a
romantic turn of mind and was fond of the old literature on crime. So, perhaps,
it was only natural that, staring at the door, he muttered to himself: "If
Gideon Fell could have lived to see this . . ."
"I beg your pardon, Inspector?" the manager said.
"Nothing," Jair Calder said
hurriedly. "An unimportant historical allusion. Now, Mr. Chu, I believe
you said that Mr. Gru was on the visiphone to you at the time he was apparently
killed? And that you yourself saw another hand reach in and turn off the visiphone?"
"That's right."
"And you also tell me that this
door—which is the only egress to this room—could not be locked or unlocked by
anyone except Mr. Gru?"
"That
is also correct, Inspector."
"But then," suddenly exclaimed
Sub-Inspector Mordette, "that means the murderer is still in the room.
We'd better prepare to rush him."
"It'll be a pity if you're right,"
Inspector Calder said. "And how do you suggest rushing into the room,
Sub-Inspector?"
"Why—why—" stammered the official, "I guess we'll just
break the door down."
"You couldn't break
that door down if you had a thousand men," the manager said with a
patronizing air.
"He's right, you know," said Jair.
He drew a small weapon from his picket. "But I expect this will get us in.
Plexilite, I believe you said?"
"What's
that?" the manager asked.
"Aromatic hydrocarbon gun," the
inspector answered. "Very useful in getting through Plexilite doors. In
fact, it's the only thing that'll do the trick." He aimed the gun and
moved it in a half circle while holding the trigger down. The door swung open,
leaving a half-moon section hanging from the lock.
Mr. G. G. Gru was slumped
across his desk in front of the visi-phone screen, in much the fashion that the
hotel manager had described. There was no doubt that he was quite dead.
Inspector Jair Calder walked across and stood
looking down at the body, ignoring the fact that Sub-Inspector Mordette and his
men were sniffing around the room with drawn weapons. Then, as he saw Mordette
approaching, he leaned over and ripped off the top sheet of a scratch pad on
the desk. He folded back the top inch or so and held it in his hand. There was
a jagged tear across the lower half.
"No villain, eh, Mordette?" he asked casually.
"No," growled the sub-inspector.
"An Algenibian worm couldn't be hidden in here without my men finding
him." He stopped and gazed down at the body. "No wound. Must have
been a magnetic weapon."
Inspector Calder grunted what might have been
either an affirmative or negative.
"Demagnetized," Mordette said with
scorn. "Just a fancy method of electrocution. I told you that even methods
hadn't changed in the last two hundred years."
"So you did," murmured Jair.
"Mr. Chu, I take it that Mr. Gru here was from Sinus Two?"
"Yes, Inspector."
"Hmmm. I thought so. Humanoid, but a Si-type
of life." He glanced again at the paper in his hand. "As you probably
suspected, Mr. Chu, the victim did try to leave us a clue to his death, but I'm
afraid most of it has been made off with." He held the paper up so that
the others could see it. One jagged piece of paper, torn on both sides, still
retained a crude drawing of a six-sided figure and the letters COO.
"Coo?" asked a
bewildered sub-inspector. "What sort of a clue is that?"
"Not a very good one, I'm afraid,"
admitted Jair. "By itself, the word might indicate a soft, murmuring
sound—hardly to be associated with an act of violence. I believe at one time it
was also an expression of surprise among a small, lower-class group of
Ter-rans. Then again—and perhaps more to our purpose—it might be part of a
name. Mr. Chu . . ."
"Yes, Inspector?"
"I'd
like a little assistance, please. First, a place where I may conduct the
investigation. Preferably a comfortable place where I might also have some
coffee. Then, someone sufficiently familiar with the convention here to inform
me about the various delegates. Thirdly, I'd like a quick search made of your
register and a list of all names which have the letters C-O-O appearing
together."
"Of
course, sir," the manager said. "We have a rather comfortable executive's
lounge."
"Fine."
Inspector Calder walked out of the room with the others trooping behind him. As
he stepped into the hallway, he lurched and almost fell. He stooped quickly and
came up holding a small, transparent six-sided figure. As he held it up to the
light, faint markings could be seen inside as if someone had managed to etch
the letter U within the solid.
"A
rather interesting piece of Plexilite," he observed. "Any idea what
it was doing in the corridor, Mr. Chu?"
"No,"
the manager said. He stepped closer and looked at it. "Looks like interior
etching. Could it be some sort of costume jewelry, perhaps?"
"Perhaps,"
Jair said. He tossed it in the air a couple of times and then put it in his
pocket. He took one more look at the door. "Mr. Chu, what about someone's
removing the door from its hinges?"
"It
can only be done when the current is off or when the door is unlocked, and even
then it's a good twenty-minute job. There would have been no time for the . . .
ah . . . murderer to replace the door. You will remember the warning light went
on while Mr. Gru was speaking to me. So a Mercurian went down the hallway
within thirty seconds and I myself was here as soon as the Mercurian returned
to his room."
"Of course. Shall we
go lounge like executives?"
The
manager disapproved of the levity, but he led the way to the elevator without
speaking.
"Now," said
Inspector Calder, when they were in the luxurious executive's lounge,
"before you dash off to fetch my coffee, the list of names, and a
convention expert, would you know the time you received the call from Mr.
Gru?"
"Yes,"
said the manager. "It was just one minute past two o'clock."
"Then," said
Jair, writing the time down, "Mr. Gru was murdered at approximately one
minute and ten seconds past two. The Mercurian entered the hallway at
approximately one minute and thirty-five seconds past two. How long would you
say before he returned to his room?"
"Four or five minutes. I waited in the
elevator until the light went off."
"Let's say five
minutes. So at six minutes and thirty-five seconds past two, the Mercurian went
back to his room of fire. Then, at seven minutes and five seconds past two, you
entered the corridor —and found it empty?"
The manager nodded.
"Good. While you're about it, you might
also find out which one of your Mercurians was promenading down the
corridor."
Inspector Calder studied the timetable he'd
written down, ignoring the glum-looking sub-inspector, until the hotel manager
returned. With him was another Terran, a rather brusque-looking young man
dressed in the latest sports-plastic.
"This," he said, "is James
Bruce. He's an employee of Plasti-corp and has been in charge of the present
Acrylic convention. Mr. Bruce, Inspector Calder of the I.CP.C"
"Hi, Inspector," the newcomer said
in a breezy fashion. "Chu, here, told me about the business upstairs. I'll
be glad to help in any way I can. I do hope, however, that your investigation
won't disturb our convention too much. We have some pretty important men
here." He bore down on the word important just enough. Jair Calder got the
implication, but gave no recognition of having noticed it:
"We'll try to keep the murder from
inconveniencing you too much," he said dryly. "What is your position
with Plasticorp, Mr. Bruce?"
"Vice president in charge of testing.
But I'm also the convention chairman. And if I do say it myself, this is one
of our best conventions. We've been having a high old time."
"Quite," the Inspector said. "Mr. Chu, the names?"
"Only four guests fit the
requirements," the manager said. "Cooerl II, from Mercury. Rruda
Akcoo of Mars. Somer Alcoon of Rigel. And Amos Coombs, a Terran. All of them
are delegates to the convention."
Jair Calder nodded and turned to the
convention chairman. "You know them, Mr. Bruce?"
"Sure.
All of them are good guys."
"They are delegates from different companies?"
"Not exactly," Bruce said. "To
get the picture, you have to realize that Plasticorp controls about ninety per
cent of the plastics business in the galaxy. There are a few minor companies,
but almost everyone at this convention is a part of Plasticorp. These four are
all executives in the corporation. I'll vouch for them, Inspector."
"That's nice of you," Jair Calder
said dryly. He turned back to the manager. "Did you learn which Mercurian
was out?"
The manager nodded. "By a strange coincidence, it was this same
Cooerl II."
"Let's hope it was no
more than a coincidence. You have a flame-suit I can borrow?"
The
manager nodded.
"I'll go up and see Cooerl II then,"
the inspector said. "Mr. Bruce, I wonder if you'd mind learning the
whereabouts of Coombs, Akcoo, and Alcoon at about two o'clock?"
"Sure
thing," Bruce said.
Inspector Calder donned a standard flame-suit
and returned to the hundred and seventieth floor. He'd arranged for the desk to
announce he was coming, so he was admitted without delay. Once the inner door
had closed, the Mercurian turned from the controls and greeted his visitor
politely.
The Mercurians were, of course, originally descended from a form of salamander, but Cooerl II stood upright and resembled a salamander about as much as Jair Calder resembled the Peking Man. The
Mercurian and the Terran exchanged polite views on the weather, the Mercurian's
relatives, and other such unimportant matters for several minutes.
"I understand," Jair Calder finally
said, "that you were out in the hall briefly this afternoon. I wonder if
you'd mind telling me why?"
"Certainly not." The Mercurian's
voice sounded querulous in the head-phones. "I was notified by the
operator that there was a visiphone call for me. There is no set in my
room—I understand the heat is not good for the screen—and so I went to the
public visiphone booth at the end of the corridor. But there was no one there
when I answered. Apparently the party had hung up, or it was a practical
joke."
"Strange," said Jair, more to
himself, "this is the second mention of a practical joke without any more
evidence than that. You met no one in the hallway?"
"Of course not. It would be dangerous to
anyone other than another Mercurian or someone dressed as you are now."
Inspector Calder wasted another few minutes
telling the Mercurian how much he admired his home planet and wishing him
warmth and good health, and then left the room. Out in the hall he removed the
flame-suit, emerging drenched in sweat, and went back downstairs. The manager,
Mr. Bruce and the Provincial Police still waited for him.
"I checked up on the
boys for you," Bruce announced. "All three of them have perfect
alibis. They were in a committee meeting from one until three."
"Thank you," said Inspector Calder. "What about
yourself?"
"Me?" asked the startled vice
president. "You're kidding, Inspector. But if you really want to know, I
got an alibi too."
Jair Calder nodded agreeably and sat down. He
tasted the coffee which was sitting at his place and was glad to find it fresh
and hot. Then he turned to the manager.
"Mr. Chu, I must trouble you for two
more things. I'd like all the elevator operators who were on duty from about
twelve o'clock until after two brought here one at a time so that I can
question them. I'd also like to question any other guests on the hundred and
seventieth floor who were in their rooms at about two o'clock. That is,
excepting the Mercurians. Then—I believe the hotel has its own shops, does it
not?"
"Yes, indeed. You can purchase anything
without leaving the hotel."
"Good. Check each shop and get me a list
of any unusual purchases made during the past two days." He waited until
the manager left the room and then smiled at Sub-Inspector Mordette.
"Best do this in an orderly fashion, eh, Mordette? Looks better on the
report."
"You see,"
Mordette said triumphantly, "even you must follow the exact form that was
used centuries ago." "I'll make a note of it," Jair said
solemnly.
For the next several
minutes, he was busy with the stream of hotel employees who came in to be
questioned, all of them nattily attired in the hotel service uniform. But the
result of the questioning only proved that no one had been on the one hundred
and seventieth floor between twelve and two o'clock except G. G. Gru, himself,
and the Mercurian.
The manager returned to report that the other guests of the one hundred
and seventieth floor had all been downstairs with the exception of a rather
ill-tempered crustacean from Aldebaran who refused even to be questioned.
Inspector Calder nodded and seemed to lose
interest in that trend of thought.
"You will be finished soon, won't
you?" the manager inquired anxiously. He stifled his conviction that the
inspector was incompetent and would never be finished.
"I expect so," Jair said. "You checked with your
shops?"
"Yes. There were a few unusual purchases.
The Pleasure Shop sold a silver-handled whip to a visiting Terran and had one
request for Martian /hung cigarettes. These are illegal, of course, so there
was no sale. The Dispensary sold a small order of carbolic acid and one of
formaldehyde."
"All right," Inspector Galder said.
"I think I'd like to make an outside call. Where is the nearest public
visiphone booth?"
"Through there," the manager said, indicating a door.
While the inspector was gone, the manager
tried to hold a conversation with the sub-inspector in the hope of learning
that Inspector Calder had some idea of leaving the hotel before too long.
"Maybe it was suicide," he suggested, glancing idly at a hotel
service man who had entered and was fixing one of the wall lights. "I've
heard that the inhabitants of Sirius II are often melancholy. And after all,
the room was locked."
"Personally," the sub-inspector
finally said, "I'd think that somebody pumped poison through your
ventilating system, if it weren't for the fact that you saw the murderer's hand
on the screen. And maybe that's what it was anyway. Witnesses are never very reliable."
"Nonsense," the manager said
sharply. "It couldn't be done." He looked sharply at the
sub-inspector, but the latter had already decided he'd been hasty in venturing
an opinion at all.
"I'd vote for
suicide/' James Bruce added. "Moody, all of those humanoid types. They're
almost human, but not quite, and they can't stand it"
Sub-Inspector Mordette still refused to rise
to the bait, so the three men fell silent. They watched the repairman stroll
from the room, then turned to staring at the ceiling while they waited.
"Well," said Inspector Calder,
coming back into the room in what seemed to be good humor, "I expect we'll
be through with this shortly." He sat in his chair and pulled out a
cigarette case. "Cigarette, anyone?"
James Bruce took one, but the others refused.
"I say," Calder exclaimed. He
reached over and grabbed Bruce's lighter just as he was about to activate it.
Then he jumped up and went over to the wall. He reached up and pulled a small
brown ball from the wall. "A thallium bomb," he said to the others.
"A good thing I saw it before you struck that lighter. The slightest
change in temperature and we would've all been poisoned."
"Good heavens," said the manager.
His face was pale, a color that was matched by the faces of the other two men.
"How did it get there? There hasn't been anyone in the room but the three
of us."
"No
one?" Jair Calder asked softly.
"Not a soul. It—" A startled
expression came over the manager's face. "There was a repairman," he
said. His face darkened with anger. "I'll-"
"Never mind," said the inspector.
He opened a small case and popped the thallium bomb into it. "I was the
repairman who came in. It was easy to borrow a coat. I also put the bomb
there."
"But why?"
"I just wanted to demonstrate that the
testimony we received stating no one appeared on the one hundred and seventieth
floor meant nothing. Repairmen, like servants, are invisible people. I think we
can be pretty sure that our murderer, dressed in a hotel uniform, was up on the
floor twice today."
"Twice?" said Mordette. "Why twice?"
"First, he had to arrange matters—it was
this arrangement which Mr. Gru thought was a practical joke. Then, after
arranging for a call to be put through to Cooerl II, he returned to the floor,
killed Mr. Gru, grabbed up the clue or part of it, ran out and off the floor.
Thirty seconds doesn't sound like much time, but he needed no more."
"But—but what about the door?" asked the manager.
"Oh, yes, he unlocked the unlockable door and locked it
again."
"But it's impossible."
"Only improbable," Jair Calder
said. "Mr. Chu, where did you keep the special door to that room when the
guest from Sirius II was not here?"
"In
the workshop in the basement."
"And the regular door
is kept there when Mr. Gru is in the hotel?" The manager nodded.
"I wonder if you'd mind phoning down and
checking the door situation now?" the inspector asked.
The manager crossed the room in nervous
strides to an audi-phone. He talked for a minute, then returned, a frown on his
face.
"I don't understand it," he said. "They report that the
regular door and the special door are both there. That means—"
"A third door," finished Jair
Calder. "Also special, in that it was made for this one occasion. I might
add that it was just like your special door except for a slight chemical
difference. The murderer's first trip was to install his door, of course. By the
way," he added, turning to Bruce with a smile, "as vice president in
charge of testing I imagine you carry a Sonicolt, don't you?"
The vice president nodded.
"Could I see it a moment?"
James Bruce handed over what appeared to be a
good-sized automatic pistol. Inspector Calder peered at it.
"A 47-M caliber," he said. "You use this
for testing plastic?"
"Yeah," Bruce said. "That's
the best Sonicolt made. Our plastic will stand the full force of it, even
through a supersonic periodic disturbance of 47,000 cycles per second, it is even strong enough to ki—" He broke
off.
"Exactly," the inspector said
softly. "While relatively harmless to human beings, a Sonicolt will kill
anyone from Sirius II. And it was such a weapon as this that killed Mr.
Gru."
"But I don't understand," said the manager.
"Si-type life form," said Jair.
"The inhabitants of Sirius II, while humanoid in appearance, have a
silicon constitution instead of
carbon. A supersonic weapon of this strength
would literally shatter their insides. So you weren't so far wrong, Mr. Chu,
when you said you had the impression he was falling apart."
"Why was he murdered?" Mordette asked.
"I think it was over plastics," said the inspector.
"Nonsense," James Bruce declared
roughly. "Sirius II has never been in the race on plastics."
"But I think they were about to get into
it through Mr. Gru," Jair Calder said pleasantly. "Mr. Bruce, you're
more familiar with plastic formulae than I am. I wonder if you'd check the
formula I've written down." He handed a sheet of paper to the vice president.
The latter looked at the paper and his face
twisted with rage. He leaped to his feet, one hand darting for his pocket.
But for all of his faults, Sub-Inspector Mordette needed only one hint
to alert him. He'd gotten that hint from the tone of Calder's voice. He grabbed
James Bruce and snatched the small magnetic gun out of his hand before he had a
chance to use it. Then, still holding the vice president with one ham-like
hand, he looked to the Interplanetary detective.
"He's the murderer all right,"
Inspector Calder said. "Take him away."
Sub-Inspector Mordette motioned toward the
door and two of his men came in and took James Bruce out.
"Now, what about it?" Mordette
asked heavily. "What made him break like that?"
"This," said Calder. He held up the
paper so that they could both see what had been carefully written on it.
ch.coch
hcn
ch,=chc00r |
,ch.=chcooh
"What does it
mean?" Mordette asked.
"That's the formula for the door he
made," Jair said. "It's the same as the regular formula except for a
slight difference which lowers its softening point. You see, Plexilite is a
polymethyl methacrylate plastic, sometimes known as the plastic with a memory.
In other words, it can be molded into one form and then, if you heat it, it
will immediately revert to its original form." "What does that have
to do with it?"
"Everything. You see, Mr. Bruce made the
door exactly like the regular door, except that in molding it he put into the
door an old-fashioned keyhole—something which hasn't been used in a hundred
years. He also molded a key to fit it and so was able to unlock and lock the
door."
"But
what happened to the keyhole and the key?"
"Cooerl II," Jair Calder said.
"The call to the Mercurian was a plan to get him to pass along the hallway
just after the murder. In doing so, he raised the temperature to about two
hundred degrees centigrade—not warm enough to bother the other doors, but
enough to make this one door 'remember' its original form, which was a door
without a keyhole. And the key, which he'd dropped on the floor, became
this." Jair reached into his pocket and held up the small figure he'd
picked up earlier. "What looks like etching is where he filed the key. In
reverting, the filed edges were inside."
"The clue on the paper."
"Part of it," said Jair. "Gru
must have guessed when he saw his murderer and tried to write down the formula,
or part of it. The six-sided figure he drew was probably part of the chemical
symbol for the reaction between phenol and formaldehyde—that being what Bruce
added and which he purchased here in the hotel. The COO was undoubtedly part of
the formula I've written here."
"But
why?"
"Plastics," the inspector said.
"Mr. Gru had made an appointment with a patent attorney concerning
something he was going to call Ancolite. On the scratch pad upstairs was part
of a formula which the murderer overlooked. Not the complete formula, but
enough to be interesting." He pulled the slip of paper from his pocket and
unfolded the section which earlier he'd folded back. He read from it. "
'CO-Two A-N-O plus Si-O-Two plus C-six-H-five-O-H.' It's enough to indicate
that Mr. Gru had apparently found a way to make a plastic primarily from air.
This might easily put Plasticorp out of business."
"But—" began the
manager.
"Exactly,"
said Inspector Calder. "James Bruce committed murder in order to save his
corporation. But it was a wasted effort. I must turn this paper over to the
government of Sirius II and they probably have a chemist who can reconstruct
the formula. You see," he added, turning to the sub-inspector, "you
were quite wrong about nothing having changed in the past two hundred years.
This was a crime which could not have happened then.
"Which,"
he continued, "brings us up to the point that James Bruce will, according
to law, have to be tried on Sirius II. I'll write a supplementary report, but
you'll have to file the main report. And I have no doubt that Mr. Bruce will
be found guilty. After which, perhaps, there'll be some action against
Plasticorp."
"One
thing puzzles me," said Mordette, still finding something to worry him.
"I've had no experience with this sort of thing. How shall I make the
charge? The victim wasn't a man, so homicide seems somehow wrong."
"Of
course it is," Inspector Jair Calder said briskly. "The proper charge
is silicide." He waved to the two men and walked out, once more looking
sleepy.
They waved back.
3. The "Event Police" were under oath
to safeguard history in the making, Josef Faber of the Service, learning his trade, incidentally learns why a
"beep" ruled not only Terra but all the universe. This is a story of an organization fully prepared to smash
any trouble before
it started from five
minutes to five centuries in the future!
JAMES BLISH
Beep
Josef faber lowered his newspaper slightly. Finding the
girl on the park bench looking his way, he smiled an agonizingly embarrassed
smile and ducked back into the paper again.
He was reasonably certain that he looked the part of a middle-aged,
steadily employed, harmless citizen enjoying a Sunday break in the bookkeeping
and family routines. He was also quite certain, despite his official
instructions, that it wouldn't make the slightest bit of difference if he
didn't. These boy-meets-girl assignments always came off. Jo had never tackled
a single one that really had required him.
As a matter of fact, the newspaper, which he
was supposed to be using only as a blind, interested him a good deal more than
his job did. He had only barely begun to suspect the obvious ten years ago when
the Service had snapped him up; now, after a decade as an agent, he was still
fascinated to see how smoothly the really
important
situations came off. The dangerous situations—not boy-meets-girl.
This affair of the Black Horse Nebula, for
instance. Some days ago the papers and the commentators had begun to mention reports
of disturbances in that area, and Jo's practiced eye had picked up the mention.
Something big was cooking.
Today it had boiled over—the Black Horse Nebula had suddenly spewed
ships by the hundreds, a massed armada that must have taken more than a century
of effort on the part of a whole star-cluster, a production drive conducted in
the strictest and most fanatical kind of secrecy—
And, of course, the Service had been on the
spot in plenty of time. With three times as many ships, disposed with
mathematical precision so as to enfilade the entire armada the moment it broke
from the nebula. The battle had been a massacre, the attack smashed before the
average citizen could ever begin to figure out what it had been aimed at—good
had triumphed again over evil.
Of course.
Furtive scuffings on the gravel drew his
attention briefly. He looked at his watch, which said 14:58:03. That was the
time, according to his instructions, when boy had to meet girl.
He had been given the strictest kind of
orders to let nothing interfere with this meeting—the orders always issued on
boy-meets-girl assignments. But, as usual, he had nothing to do but observe.
The meeting was coming off on the dot, without any prodding from Jo. They
always did.
Of course.
With a sigh, he folded his newspaper, smiling
again at the couple —yes, it was the right man, too—and moved away, as if
reluctantly. He wondered what would happen were he to pull away the false
mustache, pitch the newspaper on the grass, and bound away with a joyous whoop.
He suspected that the course of history would not be deflected by even a second
of arc, but he was not minded to try the experiment.
The park was pleasant. The twin suns warmed
the path and the greenery without any of the blasting heat which they would
bring to bear later in the summer. Randolph was altogether the most comfortable
planet he had visited in years. A little backward, perhaps, but restful, too.
It was also slightly over a hundred
light-years away from Earth. It would be interesting to know how Service
headquarters on Earth could have known in advance that boy would meet girl at a
certain spot on Randolph, precisely at 14:58:03.
Or how Service headquarters could have
ambushed with micro-metric precision a major interstellar fleet, with no more
preparation than a few days' build-up in the newspapers and video could
evidence.
The press was free, on Randolph as
everywhere. It reported the news it got. Any emergency concentration of Service
ships in the Black Horse area, or anywhere else, would have been noticed and
reported on. The Service did not forbid such reports for "security"
reasons or for any other reasons. Yet there had been nothing to report but that
(a) an armada of staggering size had
erupted with no real warning from the Black Horse Nebula, and that (b) the
Service had been ready.
By now, it was a commonplace that the Service
was always ready. It had not had a defect or a failure in well over two
centuries. It had not even had a fiasco, the alarming-sounding technical word
by which it referred to the possibility that a boy-meets-girl assignment might
not come off.
Jo hailed a hopper. Once inside, he stripped
himself of the mustache, the bald spot, the forehead creases—all the make-up
which had given him his mask of friendly innocuousness.
The hoppy watched the whole process in the
rear-view mirror. Jo glanced up and met his eyes.
"Pardon me, mister, but I figured you didn't care if I saw you. You must be a Service man."
"That's right. Take me to Service HQ, will you?"
"Sure enough." The hoppy gunned his machine. It rose smoothly
to the express level. "First time I ever got close to a Service man.
Didn't hardly believe it at first when I saw you taking your face off. You sure
looked different."
"Have to, sometimes," Jo said, preoccupied.
"I'll bet. No wonder you know all about
everything before it breaks. You must have a thousand faces each, your own
mother wouldn't know you, eh? Don't you care if I know about your snooping
around in disguise?"
Jo
grinned. The grin created a tiny pulling sensation across one curve of his
cheek, just next to his nose. He stripped away the overlooked bit of tissue and
examined it critically.
"Of course not. Disguise is an
elementary part of Service work. Anyone could guess that. We don't use it
often, as a matter of fact—only on very simple assignments."
"Oh." The hoppy sounded slightly
disappointed, as melodrama faded. He drove silently for about a minute. Then,
speculatively: "Sometimes I think the Service must have time-travel, the
things they pull . . . well, here you are. Good luck, mister."
"Thanks."
Jo went directly to Krasna's office. Krasna
was a Randolpher, Earth-trained, and answerable to the Earth office, but
otherwise pretty much on his own. His heavy, muscular face wore the same
expression of serene confidence that was characteristic of Service officials
everywhere—even some that, technically speaking, had no faces to wear it.
"Boy meets girl," Jo said briefly.
"On the nose and on the spot." "Good work, Jo. Cigarette?"
Krasna pushed the box across his desk.
"Nope, not now. Like to talk to you, if
youVe got time."
Krasna pushed a button, and a toadstool-like
chair rose out of the floor behind Jo. "What's on your mind?"
"Well," Jo said carefully.
"I'm wondering why you patted me on the back just now for not doing a
job."
"You did a job."
"I did not," Jo said flatly.
"Boy would have met girl, whether I'd been here on Randolph or back on
Earth. The course of true love always runs smooth. It has in all my
boy-meets-girl cases, and it has in the boy-meets-girl cases of every other
agent with whom I've compared notes."
"Well, good," Krasna said, smiling. "That's the way we
like to have it run. And that's the way we expect it to run. But, Jo, we like
to have somebody on the spot, somebody with a reputation for resourcefulness,
just in case there's a snag. There almost never is, as you've observed. But—if
there were?"
Jo snorted. "If what you're trying to do is to establish preconditions
for the future, any interference by a Service agent would throw the eventual
result farther off the track. I know that much about probability."
"And what makes you think we're trying to set up the future?"
"It's obvious even to the hoppies on your own planet; the one that
brought me here told me he thought the Service had time-travel. It's especially
obvious to all the individuals and governments and entire populations that the
Service has bailed out of serious messes for centuries, with never a single
failure." Jo shrugged. "A man can be asked to safeguard only a small
number of boy-meets-girl cases before he realizes, as an agent, that what the
Service is safeguarding is the future children of those meetings. Ergo—the
Service knows
what those children are to
be like, and has reason to want their future existence guaranteed. What other
conclusion is possible?"
Krasna took out a cigarette and lit it deliberately; it was obvious that
he was using the maneuver to cloak his response.
"None," he admitted at last. "We have some foreknowledge,
of course. We couldn't have made our reputation with espionage alone. But we
have obvious other advantages: genetics, for instance, and operations research,
the theory of games, the Dirac transmitter —it's quite an arsenal, and of
course there's a good deal of prediction involved in all those things."
"I see that," Jo said. He shifted
in his chair, formulating all he wanted to say. He changed his mind about the
cigarette and helped himself to one. "But these things don't add up to
infallibility—and that's a qualitative difference, Kras. Take this affair of
the Black Horse armada. The moment the armada appeared, we'll assume, Earth
heard about it by Dirac, and started to assemble a counter-armada. But it takes
Unite time to bring together a concentration of ships
and men, even if your message system is instantaneous.
"The Service's
counter-armada was already on hand. It had been building there for so long and
with so little fuss that nobody even noticed it concentrating until a day or so
before the battle. Then planets in the area began to sit up and take notice,
and be uneasy about what was going to break. But not very uneasy; the Service
always wins—that's been a statistical fact for centuries. Centuries, Kras. Good
Lord, it takes almost as long as that, in straight preparation, to pull some
of the tricks we pulled! The Dirac gives us an advantage of ten to twenty-five
years in really extreme cases out on the rim of the Galaxy, but no more than
that."
He
realized that he had been fuming away on the cigarette until the roof of his
mouth was scorched, and snubbed it out angrily. "That's a very different
thing," he said, "than knowing in a general way how an enemy is
likely to behave, or what kind of children the Mendelian laws say a given
couple should have. It means that we've some way of reading the future in
minute detail. That's in flat contradiction to everything I've been taught
about probability, but I have to believe what I see."
Krasna
laughed. "That's a very able presentation," he said. He seemed
genuinely pleased. "I think you'll remember that you were first impressed
into the Service when you began to wonder why the news was always good. Fewer
and fewer people wonder about that nowadays; it's become a part of their
expected environment." He stood up and ran a hand through his hair.
"Now you've carried yourself through the next stage. Congratulations, Jo.
You've just been promoted!"
"I
have?" Jo said incredulously. "I came in here with the notion that I
might get myself fired."
"No.
Come around to this side of the desk, Jo, and I'll play you a little
history." Krasna unfolded the desktop to expose a small visor screen.
Obediently Jo rose and went around the desk to where he could see the blank
surface. "I had a standard indoctrination tape sent up to me a week ago,
in the expectation that you'd be ready to see it. Watch."
Krasna
touched the board. A small dot of light appeared in the center of the screen
and went out again. At the same time, there was a small beep of sound. Then the
tape began to unroll and a picture clarified on the screen.
"As
you suspected," Krasna said conversationally, "the Service is
infallible. How it got that way is a story that started several centuries back.
This tape gives all the dope. You should almost be able to imagine what really
happened...."
II
Dana
Lje—her father had been a Hollander, her mother born in the Celebes—sat down in
the chair which Captain Robin Wein-baum had indicated, crossed her legs, and
waited, her blue-black hair shining under the lights.
Weinbaum eyed her quizzically. The conqueror
Resident who had given the girl her entirely European name had been paid in
kind, for his daughter's beauty had nothing fair and Dutch about it. To the eye
of the beholder, Dana Lje seemed a particularly delicate virgin of Bali,
despite her western name, clothing and assurance. The combination had already
proven piquant for the millions who watched her television column, and Weinbaum
found it no less charming at first hand.
"As one of your most recent victims/' he said, "I'm not sure
that I'm honored, Miss Lje. A few of my wounds are still bleeding. But I am a
good deal puzzled as to why you're visiting me now. Aren't you afraid that I'll
bite back?"
"I had no intention of attacking you
personally, and I don't think I did," the video columnist said seriously.
"It was just pretty plain that our intelligence had slipped badly in the
Erskine affair. It was my job to say so. Obviously you were going to get hurt,
since you're head of the bureau—but there was no malice in it."
"Cold comfort," Weinbaum said
dryly. "But thank you, nevertheless."
The Eurasian girl shrugged. "That isn't
what I came here about, anyway. Tell me, Captain Weinbaum—have you ever heard
of an outfit calling itself Interstellar Information?"
Weinbaum shook his head. "Sounds like a
skip-tracing firm. Not an easy business, these days."
"That's just what I thought when I first saw their
letterhead," Dana said. "But the letter under it wasn't one that a
private-eye outfit would write. Let me read part of it to you."
Her slim fingers burrowed in her inside
jacket pocket, and emerged again with a single sheet of paper. It was plain
typewriter bond, Weinbaum noted automatically: she had brought only a copy with
her, and had left the original of the letter at home. The copy, then, would be
incomplete—probably seriously.
"It goes like this: 'Dear Miss Lje: As a
syndicated video commentator with a wide audience and heavy responsibilities,
you need the best sources of information available. We would like you to test
our service, free of charge, in the hope of proving to you that it is superior
to any other source of news on Earth. Therefore, we offer below several
predictions concerning events to come in the Hercules and the so-called
"Three Ghosts" areas. If these predictions are fulfilled 100%—no
less—we ask that you take us on as your correspondents for those areas, at
rates to be agreed upon later. If the predictions are wrong in any respect, you
need not consider us further/ "
"H'm," Weinbaum
said slowly. "They're confident cusses—and that's an odd juxtaposition.
The Three Ghosts make up only a little solar system, while the Hercules area
could include the entire star-cluster—or maybe even the whole constellation,
which is a hell of a lot of sky. This outfit seems to be trying to tell you
that it has thousands of field correspondents of its own, maybe as many as the
government itself. If so, I'll guarantee that they're bragging."
"That may well be so. But before you
make up your mind, let me read you one of the two predictions." The letter
rustled in Dana Lje's hand. " 'At 03:16:10, on Year Day, 2090, the
Hess-type interstellar liner Biindisi will
be attacked in the neighborhood of the Three Ghosts system by four—'"
Weinbaum sat bolt upright in his swivel
chair. "Let me see that letter!" he said, his voice harsh with
repressed alarm.
"In a moment," the girl said,
adjusting her skirt composedly. "Evidently I was right in riding my hunch.
Let me go on reading: '—by four heavily armed vessels flying the lights of the
navy of Hammersmith II. The position of the liner at that time will be at coded
coordinates 88-A-theta-88-aleph-D and-per-se-and. It will-'"
"Miss Lje," Weinbaum said,
"I'm sorry to interrupt you again, but what you've said already would
justify me in jailing you at once, no matter how loudly your sponsors might
scream. I don't know about this Interstellar Information outfit, or whether or
not you did receive any such letter as the one you pretend to be quoting. But I
can tell you that you've shown yourself to be in possession of information that
only yours truly and four other men are supposed to know. It's already too
late to tell you that everything you say may be held against you; all I can say
now is, it's high time you clammed up!"
"I thought so," she said,
apparently not disturbed in the least. "Then that liner is scheduled to
hit those coordinates, and the coded time coordinate corresponds with the
predicted Universal
Time.
Is it also true that the Brindisi will be carrying a top-secret communications
device?"
"Are you deliberately
trying to make me imprison you?" Wein-baum said, gritting his teeth.
"Or is this just a stunt, designed to show me that my own bureau is full
of leaks?"
"It could turn into that," Dana
admitted. "But it hasn't, yet. Robin, I've been as honest with you as I'm
able to be. You've had nothing but square deals from me up to now. I wouldn't
yellow-screen you, and you know it. If this unknown outfit has this information,
it might easily have gotten it from where it hints that it got it: from the
field."
"Impossible."
"Why?"
"Because the information in question
hasn't even reached my own agents in the field yet—it couldn't possibly have
leaked as far as Hammersmith II or anywhere else, let alone to the Three Ghosts
system! Letters have to be carried on ships, you know that. If I were to send
orders by ultrawave to my Three Ghosts agent, he'd have to wait three hundred
and twenty-four years to get them. By ship, he can get them in a little over
two months. These particular orders have only been under way to him five days.
Even if somebody has read them on board the ship that's carrying them, they
couldn't possibly be sent on to the Three Ghosts any faster than they're
traveling now."
Dana nodded her dark head. "All right. Then what are we left with
but a leak in your headquarters here?"
"What, indeed," Weinbaum said
grimly. "You'd better tell me who signed this letter of yours."
"The signature is J. Shelby Stevens."
Weinbaum switched on the intercom. "Margaret, look in the business
register for an outfit called Interstellar Information and find out who owns
it."
Dana Lje said, "Aren't you interested in
the rest of the prediction?"
"You
bet I am. Does it tell you the name of this communications device?"
"Yes," Dana said. "What is it?"
"The Dirac communicator."
Weinbaum groaned and turned on the intercom
again. "Margaret, send in Dr. Wald. Tell him to drop everything and
gallop. Any luck with the other thing?"
"Yes, sir," the intercom said.
"It's a one-man outfit, wholly owned by a J. Shelby Stevens, in Rico City.
It was first registered this year."
"Arrest him, on suspicion of espionage."
The door swung open and Dr. Wald came in, all six and a half feet of
him. He was extremely blond, and looked awkward, gentle, and not very
intelligent.
"Thor, this young lady is our press
nemesis, Dana Lje. Dana, Dr. Wald is the inventor of the Dirac communicator,
about which you have so damnably much information."
"It's out already?" Dr. Wald said,
scanning the girl with grave deliberation.
"It is, and lots
more—lots more. Dana, you're a good girl at heart, and for some reason I trust
you, stupid though it is to trust anybody in this job. I should detain you
until Year Day, video-casts or no videocasts. Instead, I'm just going to ask
you to sit on what you've got, and I'm going to explain why."
"Shoot."
"I've already
mentioned how slow communication is between star and star. We have to carry all
our letters on ships, just as we did locally before the invention of the
telegraph. The overdrive lets us beat the speed of light, but not by much of a
margin over really long distances. Do you understand that?"
"Certainly," Dana said. She
appeared a bit nettled, and Weinbaum decided to give her the full dose at a
more rapid pace. After all, she could be assumed to be better informed than the
average layman.
"What we've needed for a long time,
then," he said, "is some virtually instantaneous method of getting a
message from somewhere to anywhere. Any time lag, no matter how small it seems
at first, has a way of becoming major as longer and longer distances are involved.
Sooner or later we must have this instantaneous method, or we won't be able to
get messages from one system to another fast enough to hold our jurisdiction
over outlying regions of space."
beep 47
"Wait a minute/' Dana said. "I'd
always understood that ultra-wave is faster than light." "Effectively
it is; physically it isn't. You don't understand that?" She shook her dark
head.
"In
a nutshell/' Weinbaum said, "ultrawave is radiation, and all radiation in
free space is limited to the speed of light. The way we hype up ultrawave is to
use an old application of wave-guide theory, whereby the real transmission of
energy is at light speed, but an imaginary thing called phase velocity is going
faster. But the gain in speed of transmission isn't large—by ultrawave, for
instance, we get a message to Alpha Centauri in one year instead of nearly
four. Over long distances, that's not nearly enough extra speed."
"Can't it be speeded
further?" she said, frowning.
"No.
Think of the ultrawave beam between here and Centrums III as a caterpillar.
The caterpillar himself is moving quite slowly, just at the speed of light. But
the pulses which pass along his body are going forward faster than he is—and if
you've ever watched a caterpillar, you'll know that that's true. But there's a
physical limit to the number of pulses you can travel along that caterpillar,
and we've already reached that limit. We've taken phase velocity as far as it
will go.
"That's
why we need something faster. For a long time our relativity theories
discouraged hope of anything faster—even the high phase velocity of a guided
wave didn't contradict those theories; it just found a limited, mathematically
imaginary loophole in them. But when Thor here began looking into the question
of the velocity of propagation of a Dirac pulse, he found the answer. The
communicator he developed does seem to act over long distances, any distance,
instantaneously—and it may wind up knocking relativity into a cocked
hat."
The
girl's face was a study in stunned realization. "I'm not sure I've taken
in all the technical angles," she said. "But if I'd had any notion of
the political dynamite in this thing—"
"—you'd
have kept out of my office," Weinbaum said grimly. "A good thing you
didn't. The Brindisi is carrying a model of the Dirac communicator out to the
periphery for a final test; the ship is supposed to get in touch with me from
out there at a given Earth time, which we've calculated very elaborately to
account for
48 space
police
the
residual Lorentz and Milne transformations involved in overdrive flight, and
for a lot of other time-phenomena that wouldn't mean anything at all to you.
"If
that signal arrives here at the given Earth time, then— aside from the havoc it
will create among the theoretical physicists whom we decide to let in on it—we
will really have our instant communicator, and can include all of occupied
space in the same time-zone. And we'll have a terrific advantage over any
lawbreaker who has to resort to ultrawave locally and to letters carried by
ships over the long haul."
"Not," Dr. Wald
said sourly, "if it's already leaked out."
"It
remains to be seen how much of it has leaked," Weinbaum said. "The
principle is rather esoteric, Thor, and the name of the thing alone wouldn't
mean much even to a trained scientist. I gather that Dana's mysterious
informant didn't go into technical details ...
or did he?"
"No," Dana said.
"Tell
the truth, Dana. I know that you're suppressing some of that letter."
The girl started slightly. "All
right—yes, I am. But nothing technical. There's another part of the prediction
that lists the number and class of ships you will send to protect the Brindisi—
the prediction says they'll be sufficient, by the way—and I'm keeping that to
myself, to see whether or not it comes true along with the rest. If it does, I
think I've hired myself a correspondent."
"If
it does," Weinbaum said, "you've hired yourself a jailbird. Let's see
how much mind-reading J, Whatsit Stevens can do from the sub-cellar of Fort
Yaphank." He abruptly ended the conversation and ushered Dana Lje out
with controlled politeness.
in
Weinbaum let himself into Stevens' cell,
locking the door behind him and passing the keys out to the guard. He sat down
heavily on the nearest stool.
Stevens
smiled the weak benevolent smile of the very old, and laid his book aside on
the bunk. The book, Weinbaum knew— since his office had cleared it—was only a
volume of pleasant, harmless lyrics by a New Dynasty poet named Nims.
"Were our predictions
correct, Captain?" Stevens said. His voice was high and musical, rather
like that of a boy soprano.
Weinbaum nodded. "You still won't tell us how you did it?"
"But I already have," Stevens
protested. "Our intelligence network is the best in the Universe,
Captain. It is superior even to your own excellent organization, as events have
shown."
"Its results are superior, that I'll
grant," Weinbaum said glumly. "If Dana Lje had thrown your letter
down her disposal chute, we would have lost the Brindisi and our Dirac
transmitter both. Incidentally, did your original letter predict accurately the
number of ships we would send?"
Stevens nodded pleasantly, his neatly trimmed
white beard thrusting forward slightly as he smiled.
"I was afraid so." Weinbaum leaned
forward. "Do you have the Dirac transmitter, Stevens?"
"Of course. Captain. How else could my
correspondents report to me with the efficiency you have observed?"
"Then why don't our receivers pick up
the broadcasts of your agents? Dr. Wald says it's inherent in the principle
that Dirac 'casts are picked up by all instruments tuned to receive them, bar
none. And at this stage of the game, there are so few such broadcasts being
made that we'd be almost certain to detect any that weren't coming from our own
operatives."
"I decline to answer that question, if
you'll excuse the impoliteness," Stevens said, his voice quavering
slightly. "I am an old man, Captain, and this intelligence agency is my
sole source of income. If I told you how we operated, we would no longer have
any advantage over your own service, except for the limited freedom from
secrecy which we have, I have been assured by competent lawyers that I have
every right to operate a private investigation bureau, properly licensed, upon
any scale that I may choose; and that I have the right to keep my methods
secret, as the so-called 'intellectual assets' of my firm. If you wish to use
our services, well and good. We will provide them, with absolute guarantees on
all information we furnish you, for an appropriate fee. But our methods are our
own property."
Robin Weinbaum smiled twistedly. "I'm
not a naïve man, Mr. Stevens," he said. "My
service is hard on naïveté.
You know as well as I do
that the government can't allow you to operate on a free-lance basis, supplying
top-secret information to anyone who can pay the price, or even free of charge
to video columnists on a 'test/ basis, even though you arrive at every jot of
that information independently of espionage—which I still haven't entirely
ruled out, by the way. If you can duplicate this Brindisi performance at will,
we will have to have your services exclusively. In short, you become a hired
civilian arm of my own bureau."
"Quite,"
Stevens said, returning the smile in a fatherly way. "We anticipated that,
of course. However, we have contracts with other governments to consider:
Erskine, in particular. If we are to work exclusively for Earth, necessarily
our price will include compensation for renouncing our other accounts."
"Why
should it? Patriotic public servants work for their government at a loss, if
they can't work for it any other way."
"I
am quite aware of that. I am quite prepared to renounce my other interests. But
I do require to be paid."
"How
much?" Weinbaum said, suddenly aware that his fists were clenched so
tightly that they hurt.
Stevens
appeared to consider, nodding his flowery white poll in senile deliberation.
"My associates would have to be consulted. Tentatively, however, a sum
equal to the present appropriation of your bureau would do, pending further
negotiations."
Weinbaum
shot to his feet, eyes wide. "You old buccaneer! You know damned well that
I can't spend my entire appropriation on a single civilian service! Did it ever
occur to you that most of the civilian outfits working for us are on cost-plus
contracts, and that our civilian executives are being paid just a credit a
year, by their own choice? You're demanding nearly two thousand credits an hour
from your own government, and claiming the legal protection that the
government affords you at the same time, in order to let those fanatics on
Erskine run up a higher bid!"
"The
price is not unreasonable," Stevens said. "The service is worth the
price."
"That's
where you're wrong! We have the discoverer of the machine working for us. For
less than half the sum you're asking, we can find the application of the device
that you're trading on— of that you can be damned sure."
"A dangerous gamble,
Captain."
"Perhaps. We'll soon
see!" Weinbaum glared at the placid face.
"I'm
forced to tell you that you're a free man, Mr. Stevens. We've been unable to
show that you came by your information by any illegal method. You had
classified facts in your possession, but no classified documents, and it's your
privilege as a citizen to make guesses, no matter how educated.
"But
we'll catch up with you sooner or later. Had you been reasonable, you might
have found yourself in a very good position with us, your income as assured as
any political income can be, and your person respected to the hilt. Now,
however, you're subject to censorship—you have no idea how humiliating that
can be, but I'm going to see to it that you find out. There'll be no more
newsbeats for Dana Lje, or for anyone else. I want to see every word of copy
that you file with any client outside the bureau. Every word that is of use to
me will be used, and you'll be paid the statutory one cent a word for it—the
same rate that the FBI pays for anonymous gossip. Everything I don't find
useful will be killed without clearance. Eventually we'll have the modification
of the Dirac that you're using, and when that happens, you'll be so flat broke
that a pancake with a hare lip could spit right over you."
Weinbaum paused for a
moment, astonished at his own fury.
Stevens'
clarinetlike voice began to sound in the windowless cavity. "Captain, I
have no doubt that you can do this to me, at least incompletely. But it will
prove fruitless. I will give you a prediction, at no charge. It is guaranteed,
as are all our predictions. It is this: You will never find that modification.
Eventually, I will give it to you, on my own terms, but you will never find it
for yourself, nor will you force it out of me. In the meantime, not a word of
copy will be filed with you; for, despite the faot that you are an arm of the
government, I can well afford to wait you out."
"Bluster,"
Weinbaum said.
"Fact. Yours is the bluster—loud talk
based on nothing more than a hope. I, however, know whereof I speak. . . . But
let us conclude this discussion. It serves no purpose; you will need to see my
points made the hard way. Thank you for giving me my freedom. We will talk
again under different circumstances on—let me see; ah, yes, on June 9th of the
year 2091. That year is, I believe, almost upon us."
Stevens picked up his book again, nodding at
Weinbaum, his expression harmless and kindly, his hands showing the marked
tremor of paralysis agitans. Weinbaum moved helplessly to the door and flagged
the turnkey. As the bars closed behind him, Stevens' voice called out:
"Oh, yes; and a Happy New Year, Captain."
Weinbaum blasted his way back into his own
office, at least twice as mad as the proverbial nest of hornets, and at the
same time rather dismally aware of his own probable future. If Stevens' second
prediction turned out to be as phenomenally accurate as his first had been,
Captain Robin Weinbaum would soon be peddling a natty set of secondhand
uniforms.
He glared down at Margaret Soames, his
receptionist. She glared right back; she had known him too long to be
intimidated.
"Anything?" he said.
"Dr. Wald's waiting for you in your
office. There are some field reports, and a couple of Diracs on your private
tape. Any luck with the old codger?"
"That," he said crushingly, "is Top Secret."
"Poof. That means that nobody still
knows the answer but J. Shelby Stevens."
He collapsed suddenly. "You're so right.
That's just what it does mean. But we'll bust him wide open sooner or later.
We've got to."
"You'll do it," Margaret said. "Anything else for
me?"
"No. Tip off the clerical staff that
there's a half-holiday today, then go take in a stereo or a steak or something
yourself. Dr. Wald and I have a few private wires to pull . . ,"
"Right," the receptionist said.
As soon as the door closed, his mood became
abruptly as black as before. Despite his comparative youth—he was now only
fifty-five—he had been in the service a long time, and he needed no one to tell
him the possible consequences which might flow from possession by a private
citizen of the Dirac communicator. If there was ever to be a Federation of Man
in the Galaxy, it was within the power of ƒ. Shelby Stevens to ruin it before
it had fairly gotten started. And there seemed to be nothing at all that could
be done about it.
"Hello, Thor," he said glumly.
"Hello, Robin. I gather things went badly. Tell me about it."
Briefly, Weinbaum told him. "And the worst of it," he
finished, "is that Stevens himself predicts that we won't find the
application of the Dirac that he's using, and that eventually we'll have to buy
it at his price. Somehow I believe him—but I can't see how it's possible. If I
were to tell Congress that I was going to spend my entire appropriation for a
single civilian service, I'd be out on my ear within the next three
sessions."
"Perhaps that isn't his real
price," the scientist suggested. "If he wants to barter, he'd
naturally begin with a demand miles above what he actually wants."
"Sure, sure . . . but frankly, Thor, I'd
hate to give the old reprobate even a single credit if I could get out of
it." Weinbaum sighed. "Well, let's see what's come in from the
field."
Thor Wald moved silently away from Weinbaum's
desk while the officer unfolded it and set up the Dirac screen. Stacked neatly
next to the ultraphone—a device Weinbaum had been thinking of, only a few days
ago, as permanently outmoded—were the tapes Margaret had mentioned. He fed the
first one into the Dirac and turned the main toggle to the position labeled
Start.
Immediately the whole screen went pure white
and the audio speakers emitted an almost instantly end-stopped blare of sound—
a beep which, as Weinbaum already knew, made up a continuous spectrum from
about 30 cycles per second to well above 18,000 cps. Then both the light and
the noise were gone as if they had never been, and were replaced by the
familiar face and voice of Weinbaum's local ops chief in Rico City.
"There's nothing unusual in the way of
transmitters in Stevens' offices here," the operative said without
preamble. "And there isn't any local Interstellar Information staff,
except for one stenographer, and she's as dumb as they come. About all we
could get from her is that Stevens is 'such a sweet old man.' No possibility
that she's faking it; she's genuinely stupid, the kind that thinks Betelgevse
is something Indians use to darken their skins. We looked for some sort of list
or code table that would give us a line on Stevens' field staff, but that was
another dead end. Now we're maintaining a twenty-four hour Dinwiddie watch on
the place from a joint across the street. Orders?"
Weinbaum dictated to the blank stretch of
tape which followed: "Margaret, next time you send any Dirac tapes in
here, cut that damnable beep off them first. Tell the boys in Rico City that
Stevens has been released, and that I'm proceeding for an Order In Security to
tap his ultraphone and his local lines—this is one case where I'm sure we can
persuade the court that tapping's necessary. Also—and be sure you code
this—tell them to proceed with the tap immediately and to maintain it
regardless of whether or not the court okays it. I'll thumbprint a Full
Responsibility Confession for them. We can't afford to play patty-cake with
Stevens—the potential is just too damned big. And oh, yes, Margaret, send the
message by carrier, and send out general orders to everybody concerned not to
use the Dirac again except when distance and time rule every other medium out.
Stevens has already admitted that he can receive Dirac 'casts."
He put down the mike and stared morosely for
a moment at the beautiful Eridanean scrollwood of his desktop. Wald coughed inquiringly.
"Excuse me, Robin," he said,
"but I should think that would work both ways."
"So should I. And yet the fact is that
we've never picked up so much as a whisper from either Stevens or his agents. I
can't think of any way that could be pulled, but evidently it can."
"Well, let's rethink the problem, and
see what we get," Wald said. "I didn't want to say so in front of the
young lady, for obvious reasons—I mean Miss Lje, of course, not Margaret—but
the truth is that the Dirac is essentially a simple mechanism in principle. I
seriously doubt that there's any way to transmit a message from it which can't
be detected—and an examination of the theory with that proviso in mind might
give us something new."
"What proviso?" Weinbaum said. Thor
Wald left him behind rather often these days.
"Why, that a Dirac transmission doesn't
necessarily go to all communicators capable of receiving it. If that's true,
then the reasons why it is true should emerge from the theory."
"I see. Okay, proceed on that line. I've
been looking at Stevens' dossier while you were talking, and it's an absolute
desert. Prior to the opening of the office in Rico City, there's no dope whatever
on J. Shelby Stevens. The man as good as rubbed my nose in the fact that he's
using a pseud when I first talked to him. I asked him what the 'J' in his name
stood for, and he said, 'Oh, let's make it Jerome.' But who the man behind the
pseud is—"
"Is it possible that he's using his own initials?"
"No," Weinbaum said. "Only the dumbest ever do that, or
transpose syllables, or retain any connection at all with their real names.
Those are the people who are in serious emotional trouble, people who drive
themselves into anonymity, but leave clues strewn all around the
landscape—those clues are really a cry for help, for discovery. Of course we're
working on that angle—we can't neglect anything—but J. Shelby Stevens isn't
that kind of case, I'm sure." Weinbaum stood up abruptly. "Okay,
Thor—what's first on your technical program?"
"Well ...
I suppose we'll have to start with checking the frequencies we use. We're
going on Dirac's assumption—and it works very well, and always has—that a positron
in motion through a crystal lattice is accompanied by de Broglie waves which
are transforms of the waves of an electron in motion somewhere else in the
Universe. Thus if we control the frequency and path of the positron, we
control the placement of the electron—we cause it to appear, so to speak, in
the circuits of a communicator somewhere else. After that, reception is just a
matter of amplifying the bursts and reading the signal."
Wald scowled and shook his blond head.
"If Stevens is getting out messages which we don't pick up, my first
assumption would be that he's worked out a fine-tuning circuit that's more
delicate than ours, and is more or less sneaking his messages under ours. The
only way that could be done, as far as I can see at the moment, is by something
really fantastic in the way of exact frequency control of his positron-gun. If
so, the logical step for us is to go back to the beginning of our tests and
re-run our diffractions to see if we can refine our measurements of positron
frequencies."
The scientist looked so inexpressibly gloomy
as he offered this conclusion that a pall of hopelessness settled over Weinbaum
in sheer sympathy. "You don't look as if you expected that to uncover
anything new."
"I don't. You see, Robin, things are different in physics now than
they used to be in the Twentieth Century. In those days, it was always
presupposed that physics was limitless—the classic statement was made by Weyl,
who said that 'It is the nature of a real thing to be inexhaustible in content/
We know now that that's not so, except in a remote, associational sort of way.
Nowadays, physics is a defined and self-limited science; its scope is still
prodigious, but we can no longer think of it as endless.
'This is better established in particle
physics than in any other branch of the science. Half of the trouble physicists
of the last century had with Euclidean geometry—and hence the reason why they
evolved so many recomplicated theories of relativity—is that it's a geometry of
lines, and thus can be subdivided infinitely. When Cantor proved that there
really is an infinity, at least mathematically speaking, that seemed to clinch
the case for the possibility of a really infinite physical universe, too."
"I remember," Wald continued, "the man who taught me
theory of sets at Princeton, many years ago. He used to say: 'Cantor teaches
us that there are many kinds of infinities/ There was a crazy old man!"
"So go on, Thor."
"Oh," Wald blinked. "Yes.
Well, what we know now is that the geometry which applies to ultimate
particles, like the positron, isn't Euclidean at all. It's Pythagorean—a
geometry of points, not lines. Once you've measured one of those points, and it
doesn't matter what kind of quantity you're measuring, you're down as far as
you can go. At that point, the Universe becomes discontinuous, and no further
refinement is possible.
"And I'd say that our positron-frequency
measurements have already gotten that far down. There isn't another element in
the Universe denser than plutonium, yet we get the same frequency-values by
diffraction through plutonium crystals that we get through osmium
crystals—there's not the slightest difference. If J. Shelby Stevens is operating
in terms of fractions of those values, then he's doing what an organist would
call 'playing in the cracks' —which is certainly something you can think about
doing, but something that's in actuality impossible to do."
"Maybe Stevens has rebuilt the organ?"
"If he has rebuilt the metrical frame of
the Universe to accommodate a private skip-tracing firm," Wald said
firmly, "I for one see no reason why we can't counter-check him by
declaring the whole cosmos null and void."
"All right, all
right," Weinbaum said, grinning. "I didn't mean to push your analogy
right over the edge—I was just asking. But let's get to work on it anyhow. We
can't just sit here and let Stevens get away with it. If this frequency angle
turns out to be as hopeless as it seems, we'll try something else."
"It's a very pretty problem," Wald said.
The computer occupied an entire floor of the Security building, its
seemingly identical banks laid out side by side on the floor along an advanced
pathological state of Peano's "space-filling curve." At the current
business end of the line was a master control board with a large television
screen at its center, at which Dr. Wald was stationed, with Weinbaum looking,
silently but anxiously, over his shoulder.
The screen itself showed a pattern which,
except that it was drawn in green light against a dark gray background,
strongly resembled the grain in a piece of highly polished mahogany. Photographs
of similar patterns were stacked on a small table to Dr. Wald's right; several
had spilled over onto the floor.
"Well, there it is," Wald sighed at length. "And I won't
struggle to keep myself from saying 'I told you so.' What you've had me do
here, Robin, is to reconfirm about half the basic postulates of particle
physics—which is why it took so long, even though it was the first project we
started." He snapped off the screen. "There are no cracks for J.
Shelby to play in. That's definite."
"If you'd said That's flat,' you would
have made a joke," Weinbaum said sourly. "Look . . . isn't there
still a chance of error? If not on your part, Thor, then in the computer? After
all, it's set up to work only with the unit charges of modern physics; mightn't
we have to disconnect the banks that contain that bias before the machine will
follow the fractional-charge instructions we give it?"
"Disconnect, he says," Wald
groaned, mopping his brow reflectively. "The bias exists everywhere in
the machine, my friend, because it functions everywhere on those same unit
charges. It wasn't a matter of subtracting banks; we had to add one with a bias
all its own, to counter-correct the corrections the computer would otherwise
apply to the instructions. The technicians thought I was crazy. Now, five
months later, I've proved it."
Weinbaum grinned in spite of himself.
"What about the other projects?"
"All done—some time back, as a matter of
fact. The staff and I checked every single Dirac tape we've received since you
released J. Shelby from Yaphank, for any sign of intermodulation, marginal
signals, or anything else of the kind. There's nothing, Robin, absolutely
nothing. That's our net result, all around."
"Which
leaves us just where we started," Weinbaum said. "All the monitoring
projects came to the same dead end; I strongly suspect that Stevens hasn't
risked any further calls from his home office to his field staff, even though
he seemed confident that we'd never intercept such calls—as we haven't. Even
our local wiretapping hasn't turned up anything but calls by Stevens'
secretary, making appointments for him with various clients, actual and
potential. Any information he's selling these days he's passing on in
person—and not in his office, either, because we've got bugs planted all over
that and haven't heard a thing."
"That
must limit his range of operation enormously," Wald objected.
Weinbaum
nodded. "Without a doubt—but he shows no signs of being bothered by it. He
can't have sent any tips to Erskine recently, for instance, because our last
tangle with that crew came out very well for us, even though we had to use the
Dirac to send the orders to our squadron out there. If he overheard us, he
didn't even try to pass the word. Just as he said, he's sweating us out—"
Weinbaum paused. "Wait a minute, here comes Margaret, And by the length of
her stride, I'd say she's got something particularly nasty on her mind."
"You
bet I do," Margaret Soames said vindictively. "And it'll blow plenty
of lids around here, or I miss my guess. The I.D. squad has finally pinned down
J. Shelby Stevens. They did it with the voice-comparator alone."
"How does that
work?" Wald said interestedly.
"Blink
microphone," Weinbaum said impatiently. "Isolates inflections on
single, normally stressed syllables and matches them. Standard I.D. searching
technique, on a case of this kind, but it takes so long that we usually get the
quarry by other means before it pays off.
Well, don't stand there like a dummy, Margaret. Who is he?"
"
'He/ " Margaret said, "is your sweetheart of the video waves, Miss
Dana Lje."
"They're crazy!" Wald said, staring at her.
Weinbaum came slowly out of his first shock of stunned disbelief.
"No, Thor," he said finally. "No, it figures. If a woman is
going to go in for disguises, there are always two she can assume outside her
own sex: a young boy, and a very old man. And Dana's an actress; that's no news
to us."
"But—but why did she do it, Robin?"
"That's what we're going to find out
right now. So we wouldn't get the Dirac modification by ourselves, eh! Well,
there are other ways of getting answers besides particle physics. Margaret, do
you have a pick-up order out for that girl?"
"No," the receptionist said.
"This is one chestnut I wanted to see you pull out for yourself. You give
me the authority, and I send the order—not before."
"Spiteful child. Send it, then, and
glory in my gritted teeth. Come on, Thor—let's put the nutcracker on this
chestnut."
As they were leaving the computer floor,
Weinbaum stopped suddenly in his tracks and began to mutter in an almost
inaudible voice.
Wald said, "What's the matter,
Robin?" "Nothing. I keep being brought up short by those predictions.
What's the date?" "M'm . . . June 9th. Why?"
"It's the exact date that 'Stevens'
predicted we'd meet again, damn it! Something tells me that this isn't going to
be as simple as it looks."
If Dana Lje had any idea of what she was in
for—and considering the fact that she was 'J- Shelby Stevens' it had to be
assumed that she did—the knowledge seemed not to make her at all fearful. She
sat as composedly as ever before Weinbaum's desk, smoking her eternal
cigarette, and waited, one dimpled knee pointed directly at the bridge of the officer's
nose.
"Dana,"
Weinbaum said, "this time we're going to get all the answers, and we're
not going to be gentle about it. Just in case you're not aware of the fact,
there are certain laws relating to giving false information to a security
officer, under which we could heave you in prison for a minimum of fifteen
years. By application of the statutes on using communications to defraud, plus
various local laws against transvestism, pseudonymity, and so on, we could probably
pile up enough additional short sentences to keep you in Yaphank until you
really do grow a beard. So I'd advise you to open up."
"I have every intention of opening
up," Dana said. "I know, practically word for word, how this
interview is going to proceed, what information I'm going to give you, just
when I'm going to give it to you—and what you're going to pay me for it. I knew
all that many months ago. So there would be no point in my holding out on
you."
"What you're saying,
Miss Lje," Thor Wald said in a resigned voice, "is that the future is
fixed, and that you can read it, in every essential detail."
"Quite right, Dr. Wald. Both those things are true."
There was a brief silence.
"All right," Weinbaum said grimly. "Talk."
"All right, Captain Weinbaum, pay me," Dana said calmly.
Weinbaum snorted.
"But I'm quite
serious," she said. "You still don't know what I know about the Dirac
communicator. I won't be forced to tell it, by threat of prison or by any other
threat. You see, I know for a fact that you aren't going to send me to prison,
or give me drugs, or do anything else of that kind. I know for a fact, instead,
that you are going to pay me—so I'd be very foolish to say a word until you do.
After all, it's quite a secret you're buying. Once I tell you what it is, you
and the entire service will be able to read the future as I do, and then the
information will be valueless to me."
Weinbaum was completely
speechless for a moment. Finally he said, "Dana, you have a heart of
purest brass, as well as a knee with an invisible gunsight on it. I say that
I'm not going to give you my appropriation,
regardless of what the future may or may not say about it. I'm not going to
give it to you because the way my
Government—and yours—runs things makes such a price impossible. Or is that
really your price?"
"It's my real price . . . but it's also
an alternative. Call it my second choice. My first choice, which means the
price I'd settle for, comes in two parts: (a)
to be taken into your service as a responsible officer; and (b) to be married
to Captain Robin Weinbaum."
Weinbaum sailed up out of his chair. He felt
as though copper-colored flames a foot long were shooting out of each of his
ears.
"Of all the—" he began. There his voice failed completely.
From behind him, where Wald was standing, came something like a large,
Scandinavian-model guffaw being choked into insensibility.
Dana herself seemed to be smiling a little.
"You see," she said, "I don't
point my best and most accurate knee at every man I meet."
Weinbaum sat down again, slowly and carefully. "Walk, do not run,
to nearest exit," he said. "Women and childlike security officers
first. Miss Lje, are you trying to sell me the notion that you went through
this elaborate hanky-panky—beard and all—out of a burning passion for my dumpy
and underpaid person?"
"Not entirely," Dana Lje said.
"I want to be in the bureau, too, as I said. Let me confront you, though,
Captain, with a fact of life that doesn't seem to have occurred to you at all.
Do you accept as a fact that I can read the future in detail, and that that, to
be possible at all, means that the future is fixed?"
"Since Thor seems able to accept it, I
suppose I can too—provisionally."
"There's nothing provisional about
it," Dana said firmly. "Now, when I first came upon this—uh, this
gimmick—quite a while back, one of the first things that I found out was that I
was going to go through the 'J- Shelby Stevens' masquerade, force myself onto
the staff of the bureau, and marry you, Robin. At the time, I was both
astonished and completely rebellious. I didn't want to be on the bureau staff;
I liked my free-lance life as a video commentator. I didn't want to marry you, either. And above
all, the masquerade struck me as ridiculous.
"But the facts kept
staring me in the face. I was going to do all those things. There were no
alternatives, no fanciful 'branches of time,' no decision-points that might be
altered to make the future change. My future, like yours, Dr. Wald's, and
everyone else's, was fixed. It didn't matter a snap whether or not I had a
decent motive for what I was going to do; I was going to do it anyhow. Cause
and effect, as I could see for myself, just don't exist. One event follows
another because events are just as indestructible in space-time as matter and
energy are.
"It was the bitterest of all pills. It
will take me many years to swallow it completely, and you too. Dr. Wald will
come around a little sooner, I think. At any rate, once I was intellectually
convinced that all this was so, I had to protect my own sanity. I knew that I
couldn't alter what I was going to do, but the least I could do to protect
myself was to supply myself with motives. Or, in other words, just plain
rationalizations. That much, it seems, we're free to do! the consciousness of
the observer is just along for the ride through time, and can't alter
events—but it can comment, explain, invent. That's fortunate, for none of us
could stand going through motions which were truly free of what we think of as
personal significances.
"So
I supplied myself with the obvious motives. Since I was going to be married to you and couldn't
get out of it, I set out to convince myself that I loved you. Now I do. Since I
was going to join the bureau staff, I thought over all the advantages that it
might have over video commentating, and found that they made a respectable
list. Those are my motives.
"But
I had no such motives at the beginning. Actually, there are never motives
behind actions. All actions are fixed. What we called motives evidently are
rationalizations by the helpless, observing consciousness, which is intelligent
enough to smell an event coming —and, since it cannot avert the event, instead
cooks up reasons for wanting it to happen."
"Wow," Dr. Wald
said, inelegantly but with considerable force.
"Either
Vow' or 'balderdash' seems to be called for—I can't quite decide which,"
Weinbaum agreed. "We know that Dana is an actress, Thor, so let's not fall
off the apple tree quite yet. Dana, I've been saving the really hard question
for the last. That question is: How? How did you arrive at this modification of
the Dirac transmitter? Remember, we know your background, where we didn't know
that of Shelby Stevens.' You're not a scientist. There were some fairly
high-powered intellects among your distant relatives, but that's as close as
you come."
"I'm
going to give you several answers to that question," Dana Lje said.
"Pick the one you like best. They're all true, but they tend to contradict
each other here and there.
"To begin with, you're right about my
relatives, of course. If you'll check your dossier again, though, you'll
discover that those
so-called 'distant' relatives were the last
surviving members of my family besides myself. When they died, second and
fourth and ninth cousins though they were, their estates reverted to me, and
among their effects I found a sketch of a possible instantaneous communicator
based on de Broglie-wave inversion. The material was in very rough form, and
mostly beyond my comprehension, because I am, as you say, no scientist myself.
But I was interested; I could see, dimly, what such a thing might be worth—and not only in money.
"My interest was fanned by two
coincidences—the kind of coincidences that cause-and-effect just can't allow,
but which seem to happen all the same in the world of unchangeable events. For
most of my adult life, I've been in communications industries of one kind or
another, mostly branches of video. I had communications equipment around me
constantly, and I had coffee and doughnuts with communications engineers every
day. First I picked up the jargon; then, some of the procedures; and
eventually, a little real knowledge. Some of the things I learned can't be
gotten any other way. Some other things are ordinarily available only to highly
educated people like Dr. Wald here, and came to me by accident, in a hundred
other ways—all natural to the environment of a video network."
Weinbaum said, with unintentional
brusqueness: "What's the other coincidence?" "A leak in your own
staff." "Dana, you ought to have that set to music." "Suit yourself."
"I can't suit myself," Weinbaum
said petulantly. "I work for the Government. Was this leak direct to
you?"
"Not at first. That was why I kept
insisting to you in person that there might be such a leak, and why I finally began to hint about it in public, on my program.
I was hoping that you'd be able to seal it up inside the bureau before my first
rather tenuous contact with it got lost. When I didn't succeed in provoking
you into protecting yourself, I took the risk of making direct contact with the
leak myself—and the first piece of secret information that came to me through
it was the final point I needed to put my Dirac communicator together. When it
was all assembled, it did more than just communicate. It predicted. And I can
tell you why."
Weinbaum said thoughtfully, "I don't
find this very hard to accept, so far. Pruned of the philosophy, it even makes
some sense of the 7- Shelby Stevens' affair. I assume that by
letting the old gentleman become known as somebody who knew more about the
Dirac transmitter than I did, and who wasn't averse to negotiating with
anybody who had money, you kept the leak working through you—rather than
transmitting data directly to unfriendly governments."
"It did work out that way," Dana
said. "But that wasn't the genesis or the purpose of the Stevens
masquerade. I've already given you the whole explanation of how that came
about."
"Well, you'd better name me that leak,
before the man gets away."
"When the price is paid, not before.
It's too late to prevent a getaway, anyhow. In the meantime, Robin, I want to
go on and tell you the other answer to your question about how I was able to
find this particular Dirac secret, and you didn't. What answers I've given you
up to now have been cause-and-effect answers, with which we're all more
comfortable. But I want to impress on you that all apparent cause-and-effect
relationships are accidents. There is no such thing as a cause, and no such
thing as an effect. I found the secret because I found it; that event was
fixed; that certain circumstances seem to explain why I found it, in the old
cause-and-effect terms, is irrelevant. Similarly, with all your superior
equipment and brains, you didn't find it for one reason, and one reason alone:
because you didn't find it. The history of the future says you didn't."
"I pays my money and I takes no choice,
eh?" Weinbaum said ruefully.
"I'm afraid so—and I don't like it any
better than you do." "Thor, what's your opinion of all this?"
"It's just faintly flabbergasting,"
Wald said soberly. "However, it hangs together. The deterministic Universe
which Miss Lje paints was a common feature of the old relativity theories, and
as sheer speculation has an even longer history. I would say that in the long
run, how much credence we place in the story as a whole will rest upon her
method of, as she calls it, reading the future. If it is demonstrable beyond
any doubt, then the rest becomes perfectly credible—philosophy and all. If it
doesn't, then what remains is an admirable job of acting, plus some metaphysics
which, while self-consistent, are not original with Miss Lje."
"That
sums up the case as well as if Fd coached you, Dr. Wald," Dana said.
"Fd like to point out one more thing. If I can read the future, then 'J-
Shelby Stevens' never had any need for a staff of field operatives, and he
never needed to send a single Dirac message which you might intercept. All he needed
to do was to make predictions from his readings, which he knew to be
infallible; no private espionage network had to be involved."
"I
see that," Weinbaum said dryly. "All right, Dana, let's put the
proposition this way: I do not believe you. Much of what you say is
probably true, but in totality I believe it to be false. On the other hand, if
you're telling the whole truth, you certainly deserve a place on the bureau
staff—it would be dangerous as hell not to
have you with us—and the marriage is a more or less minor matter, except to you
and me. You can have that with no strings attached; I don't want to be bought,
any more than you would.
"So:
if you will tell me where the leak is, we will consider that part of the
question closed. I make that condition not as a price, but because I don't want
to get myself engaged to somebody who might be shot as a spy within a
month."
"Fair
enough," Dana said. "Robin, your leak is Margaret Soames. She is an
Erskine operative, and nobody's bubble-brain. She's a highly trained technician."
"Well,
I'll be damned," Weinbaum said in astonishment. "Then she's already
flown the coop—she was the one who first told me we'd identified you. She must
have taken on that job in order to hold up delivery long enough to stage an
exit."
"That's
right. But you'll catch her, day after tomorrow. And you are now a hooked fish,
Robin."
There was another
suppressed burble from Thor Wald.
"I
accept the fate happily," Weinbaum said. "Now, if you will tell me
how you work your swami trick, and if it backs up everything you've said to
the letter, as you claim, I'll see to it that you're also taken into the bureau
and that all charges against you are quashed. Otherwise, I'll probably have to
kiss the bride between the bars of a cell."
Dana smiled. "The
secret is very simple. It's in the beep."
Weinbaum's jaw dropped.
"The beep? The Dirac noise?"
"That's right. You didn't find it out
because you considered the beep to be just a nuisance, and ordered Miss Soames
to cut it off all tapes before sending them in to you. Miss Soames, who had
some inkling of what the beep meant, was more than happy to do so, leaving the
reading of the beep exclusively to 'J. Shelby Stevens' —who she thought was
going to take on Erskine as a client."
"Explain," Thor
Wald said, looking intense.
"Just
as you assumed, every Dirac message that is sent is picked up by every receiver
that is capable of detecting it. Every receiver —including the first one ever
built, which is yours, Dr. Wald, through the hundreds of thousands of them
which will exist throughout the Galaxy in the Twenty-Fourth Century, to the
untold millions which will exist in the Thirtieth Century, and so on. The Dirac
beep is the simultaneous reception of every one of the Dirac messages which have ever
been sent, or ever will be sent. Incidentally, the cardinal number of the total
of those messages is a relatively small and of course finite number; it's far
below really large finite numbers such as the number of electrons in the
Universe, even when you break each and every message down into individual
'bits' and count those."
"Of
course," Dr. Wald said softly. "Of course! But, Miss Lje ... how do you tune for an individual
message? We tried fractional positron frequencies, and got nowhere."
"I
didn't even know fractional positron frequencies existed," Dana confessed.
"No, it's simple—so simple that a lucky layman like me could arrive at it.
You tune individual messages out of the beep by time-lag, nothing more. All the
messages arrive at the same instant, in the smallest fraction of time that
exists, something called a 'chronon.'"
"Yes,"
Wald said. "The time it takes one electron to move from one quantum-level
to another. That's the Pythagorean point of time-measurement."
"Thank
you. Obviously no gross physical receiver can respond to a message that brief,
or at least that's what I thought at first. But because there are relay and
switching delays, various forms of feedback, and so on in the apparatus itself,
the beep arrives at the output end as a complex pulse which has been
'splattered' along the time axis for a full second or more. That's an effect
which you can exaggerate by recording the 'splattered' beep on a high-speed
tape, the same way you would record any event that you wanted to study in slow
motion. Then you tune up the various failure-points in your receiver, to
exaggerate one failure, minimize all the others, and use noise-suppressing
techniques to cut out the background."
Thor
Wald frowned. "You'd still have a considerable garble when you were
through. You'd have to sample the messages—"
"Which
is just what I did; Robin's little lecture to me about the ultrawave gave me
that hint, I set myself to find out how the ultrawave channel carries so many
messages at once, and I discovered that you people sample the incoming pulses
every thousandth of a second and pass on one pip only when the wave deviates
in a certain way from the mean. I didn't really believe it would work on the
Dirac beep, but it turned out just as well: 90% as intelligible as the original
transmission after it came through the smearing device. I'd already got enough
from the beep to put my plan in motion, of course—but now every voice message
in it was available, and crystal-clear: If you select three pips every
thousandth of a second, you can even pick up an intelligible transmission of
music—a little razzy, but good enough to identify the instruments that are
playing—and that's a very close test of any communications device."
"There's
a question of detail here that doesn't quite follow," said Weinbaum, for
whom the technical talk was becoming a little too thick to fight through.
"Dana, you say that you knew the course this conversation was going to
take—yet it isn't being Dirac-recorded, nor can I see any reason why any
summary of it would be sent out on the Dirac afterwards."
"That's
true, Robin. However, when I leave here, I will make such a transcast myself,
on my own Dirac. Obviously I will—because I've already picked it up, from the
beep."
"In other words,
you're going to call yourself up—months ago."
"That's
it," Dana said. "It's not as useful a technique as you might think at
first, because it's dangerous to make such broadcasts while a situation is
still developing. You can safely 'phone back' details only after the given
situation has gone to completion, as a chemist might put it. Once you know,
however, that when you use the Dirac you're dealing with time, you can coax
some very strange things out of the instrument."
She paused and smiled. "I have
heard," she said conversationally,
"the
voice of the President of our Galaxy, in 3480, announcing the federation of the
Milky Way and the Magellanic Clouds. IVe heard the commander of a world-line
cruiser, traveling from 8873 to 8704 along the world-line of the planet
Hathshepa, which circles a star on the rim of NGC 4725, calling for help across eleven million light-years—but what kind
of help he was calling for, or will be calling for, is beyond my comprehension.
And many other things. When you check on me, youil hear these things too—and
you'll wonder what many of them mean.
"And you'll listen to them even more
closely than I did, in the hope of finding out whether or not anyone was able
to understand in time to help."
Weinbaum and Wald looked dazed.
Her voice became a little
more somber. "Most of the voices in the Dirac beep are like that—they're
cries for help, which you can overhear decades or centuries before the senders
get into trouble. You'll feel obligated to answer every one, to try to supply
the help that's needed. And you'll listen to the succeeding messages and say:
'Did we—will we get there in time? Did we understand in time?'
"And in most cases you
won't be sure. You'll know the future, but not what most of it means. The
farther into the future you travel with the machine, the more incomprehensible
the messages become, and so you're reduced to telling yourself that time will,
after all, have to pass by at its own pace, before enough of the surrounding
events can emerge to make those remote messages clear.
"The long-run effect,
as far as I can think it through, is not going to be that of omniscience—of our
consciousness being extracted entirely from the time-stream and allowed to view
its whole sweep from one side. Instead, the Dirac in effect simply slides the
bead of consciousness forward from the present a certain distance. Whether it's
five hundred or five thousand years still remains to be seen. At that point the
law of diminishing returns sets in—or the noise-factor begins to overbalance
the information, take your choice—and the observer is reduced to traveling in
time at the same old speed. He's just a bit ahead of himself."
"You've
thought a great deal about this," Wald said slowly. "I dislike to
think of what might have happened had some less conscientious person stumbled
on the beep." "That wasn't in the cards," Dana said.
In the ensuing quiet, Weinbaum felt a faint,
irrational sense of let-down, of something which had promised more than had
been delivered—rather like the taste of fresh bread as compared to its smell,
or the discovery that Thor Wald's Swedish "folk-song" Nat-og-Dag was
only Cole Porter's Night
and Day in another language.
He recognized the feeling: it was the usual emotion of the hunter when the hunt
is over, the born detective's professional version of the post coitum triste. After looking at the smiling, supple Dana Lje
a moment more, however, he was almost content.
"There's one more thing," he said.
"I don't want to be insufferably skeptical about this—but I want to see
it work. Thor, can we set up a sampling and smearing device such as Dana
describes and run a test?"
"In fifteen minutes," Dr. Wald
said. "We have most of the unit already in assembled form on our big
ultrawave receiver, and it shouldn't take any effort to add a high-speed tape
unit to it. I'll do it right now."
He went out. Weinbaum and Dana looked at each
other for a moment, rather like strange cats. Then the security officer got up,
with what he knew to be an air of somewhat grim determination, and seized his
fiancee's hands, anticipating a struggle.
That first kiss was, by intention at least,
mostly pro forma. But by the time Wald padded back into the office, the letter
had been pretty thoroughly superseded by the spirit.
The scientist harrumphed and set his burden
on the desk. "This is all there is to it," he said, "but I had
to hunt all through the library to find a Dirac record with a beep still on it.
Just a moment more while I make connections . . ."
Weinbaum used the time to bring his mind back to the matter at hand,
although not quite completely. Then two tape spindles began to whir like so
many bees, and the end-stopped sound of the Dirac beep filled the room. Wald
stopped the apparatus, reset it, and started the smearing tape very slowly in
the opposite direction.
A distant babble of voices came from the speaker. As Weinbaum leaned
forward tensely, one voice said clearly and loudly above the rest:
"Hello, Earth bureau.
Lt. T. L. Matthews at Hercules Station NGC 6341, transmission date 13-22-2091.
We have the last point on the orbit-curve of your dope-runners plotted, and the
curve itself points to a small system about 25 light-years from the base here;
the place hasn't even got a name on our charts. Scouts show the home planet at
least twice as heavily fortified as we anticipated, so we'll need another
cruiser. We have a 'can-do' from you in the beep for us, but we're waiting as
ordered to get it in the present. NGC 6341 Matthews out."
After the first instant of stunned amazement—for no amount of
intellectual willingness to accept could have prepared him for the overwhelming
fact itself—Weinbaum had grabbed a pencil and begun to write at top speed. As
the voice signed out he threw the pencil down and looked excitedly at Dr. Wald.
"Seven months ahead," he said,
aware that he was grinning like an idiot. "Thor, you know the trouble
we've had with that needle in the Hercules haystack! Ths orbit-curve trick must
be something Matthews has yet to dream up—at least he hasn't come to me with it
yet, and there's nothing in the situation as it stands now that would indicate
a closing-time of six months for the case. The computers said it would take
three more years,"
"It's new data," Dr. Wald agreed solemnly.
"Well, don't stop there, in God's name! Let's hear some more!"
Dr. Wald went through the ritual, much faster this time. The speaker
said:
"Nausentampen. Eddettompic. Berobsilom.
Aimkaksetchoc. Sanbetogmow. Datdectamset. Domatrosmin. Out."
"My word," Wald said. "What's all that?"
"That's what I was talking about,"
Dana Lje said. "At least half of what you get from the beep is just as
incomprehensible. I suppose it's whatever has happened to the English
language, thousands of years from now."
"No, it isn't," Weinbaum said. He
had resumed writing, and was still at it, despite the comparative briefness of
the transmission. "Not this sample, anyhow. That, ladies and gentlmen, is
code-no language consists exclusively of four-syllable words, of that you can
be sure. What's more, it's a version of our code. I can't break it down very
far—it takes a full-time expert to read this stuff-but I get the date and some
of the sense. It's March 12, 3022, and there's some kind of a mass evacuation
taking place. The message seems to be a routing order."
"But
why will we be using code?" Dr. Wald wanted to know. "It implies that
we think somebody might overhear us—somebody else with a Dirac. That could be
very messy."
"It
could indeed," Weinbaum said. "But we'll find out, I imagine. Give her another spin, Thor."
"Shall I try for a
picture this time?"
Weinbaum
nodded. A moment later, he was looking squarely into the green-skinned face of
something that looked like an animated traffic signal with a helmet on it.
Though the creature had no mouth, the Dirac speaker was saying quite clearly,
"Hello, Chief. This is Thammos NGC 2287, transmission date Gor 60, 302 by
my calendar, July 2, 2973 by yours. This is a lousy little planet. Everything
stinks of oxygen, just like Earth. But the natives accept us and that's the
important thing. We've got your genius safely born. Detailed report coming
later by paw. NGC 2287 Thammos out."
"I
wish I knew my New General Catalogue better," Weinbaum said. "Isn't
that M 41 in Canis Major, the one with the red star in the middle? And we'll be
using non-humanoids there! What was that creature, anyhow? Never mind, spin her
again."
Dr.
Wald spun her again. Weinbaum, already feeling a little dizzy, had given up
taking notes. That could come later; all that could come later. Now he wanted
only scenes and voices, more and more scenes and voices from the future.
iv
The indoctrination tape ended, and Krasna
touched a button. The Dirac screen darkened, and folded silently back into the
desk.
"They
didn't see their way through to us, not by a long shot," he said.
"They didn't see, for instance, that when one section of the government
becomes nearly all-knowing—no matter how small it was to begin with—it
necessarily becomes all of the government that there is. Thus the bureau turned
into the Service and pushed everyone else out.
"On the other hand, those people did
come to be afraid that a government with an all-knowing arm might
become a rigid dictatorship. That couldn't happen and didn't happen, because
the more you know, the wider your field of possible operation becomes and the
more fluid and dynamic a society you need. How could a rigid society
expand to other star-systems, let alone other galaxies? It couldn't be
done."
"I
should think it could," Jo said slowly. "After all, if you know in
advance what everybody is going to do—"
"But
we don't, Jo. That's just a popular fiction—or, if you like, a red herring. Not all of the business of the cosmos is carried on over
the Dirac, after all. The only events we can ever overhear are those which are
transmitted as a message. Do you order your lunch over the Dirac? Of course you
don't. Up to now, you've never said a word
over the Dirac in your life.
"And
there's much more to it than that. All dictatorships are based on the
proposition that government can somehow control a man's thoughts. We know now that the consciousness of the observer is
the only free thing in the Universe. Wouldn't we look foolish trying to control
that, when our entire physics shows that it's impossible to do so? That's why
the Service is in no sense a thought police. We're interested only in acts.
We're an Event Police."
"But
why?" Jo said. "If all history is fixed, why do we bother with these
boy-meets-girl assignments, for instance? The meetings will happen
anyhow."
"Of
course they will," Krasna agreed immediately. "But look, Jo. Our
interests as a government depend upon the future. We operate
as if the future is as real as the past, and so far we haven't been
disappointed: the Service is 100% successful. But that very success isn't
without its warnings. What would happen if we stopped supervising events? We
don't know, and we don't dare take the chance. Despite the evidence that the
future is fixed, we have to take on the role of the caretaker of inevitability.
We believe that nothing can possibly go wrong . . . but we have to act on the
philosophy that history helps only those who help themselves.
"That's
why we safeguard huge numbers of courtships right through to contract, and even
beyond it. We have to see to it that every single person who is mentioned in
any Dirac 'cast gets bom.
Our
obligation as Event Police is to make the events of the future possible,
because those events are crucial to our society—even the smallest of them. It's
an enormous task, believe me, and it gets bigger and bigger every day.
Apparently it always will."
"Always?"
Jo said. "What about the public? Isn't it going to smell this out sooner
or later? The evidence is piling up at a terrific rate."
"Yes
and no," Krasna said. "Lots of people are smelling it out right now,
just as you did. But the number of new people we need in the Service grows
faster—it's always ahead of the number of laymen who follow the clues to the
truth."
Jo
took a deep breath. "You take all this as if it were as commonplace as
boiling an egg, Kras," he said. "Don't you ever wonder about some of
the things you get from the beep? That 'cast Dana Lje picked up from Canes
Venatici, for instance, the one from the ship that was traveling backward in
time? How is that possible? What could be the purpose? Is it—"
"Pace,
pace," Krasna said. "I don't know, and I don't care. Neither should
you. That event is too far in the future for us to worry about. We can't
possibly know its context yet, so there's no sense in trying to understand it.
If an Englishman of around 1600 had found out about the American Revolution, he
would have thought it a tragedy; an Englishman of 1950 would have a very different
view of it. We're in the same spot. The messages we get from the really far
future have no contexts yet."
"I
think I see," Jo said. "I'll get used to it in time, I suppose, after
I use the Dirac for a while. Or does my new rank authorize me to do that?"
"Yes,
it does. But, Jo, first I want to pass on to you a rule of Service etiquette
that must never be broken. You won't be allowed anywhere near a Dirac mike
until you have it burned into your memory beyond any forgetfulness."
"I'm listening, Kras,
believe me."
"Good.
This is the rule: The date of a Serviceman's death must never be mentioned in a
Dirac 'cast."
Jo
blinked, feeling a little chilly. The reason behind the rule was decidedly
tough-minded, but its ultimate kindness was plain. He said, "I won't forget
that. I'll want that protection myself. Many thanks, Kras. What's my new
assignment?"
"To begin with/' Krasna said, grinning,
"as simple a job as IVe ever given you, right here on Randolph. Skin out
of here and find me that cab-driver—the one who mentioned time-travel to you.
He's uncomfortably close to the truth; closer than you were in one category.
"Find
him, and bring him to me. The Service is about to take in a new raw
recruit!"
We Are Policed
4. To hunt criminals on an alien world—a chase over unknown territory with the natives unaware of either the pursued or the
pursuer—policing a strange solar system for its own safety. This adventure of
an unknown officer from Sirius is a new note in law enforcement service.
GEORGE LONGDON
Of Those Who Came
Evening sun touched the top of the blue hills. The lonely
slopes lay in shadow, gray and dim, and I stopped the saloon halfway along the road
that wound down into the valley. Below was a single house, seen among trees,
and above it oscillated a faint yellow radiance coming from an
indistinguishable source.
I sat motionless, gloved hands on the wheel, feeling
no surprise. The yellow halo slowly shrank, dropping down towards the rooftop
and coalescing into a spheroid which gradually sank from view behind the house.
A dim reflection on the trees showed it was still there, concealed by the
building. I started the saloon and began to wind down
into the valley.
The
sky was growing dark. Seen across the valley the house had only been a dim
outline and it passed from view as the saloon sped into the valley bottom where
a river ran between wooded banks. I drove to the bridge. The saloon murmured
across and began to climb the winding road towards the house. Fifty yards away I parked the vehicle under trees and got out.
The night was very still, and the yellow
reflections that had
illuminated
the rear of the house were gone. Moving silently I crept near, parting bushes
to look into the garden.
The spherical vessel rested on turf behind the house, but the power that
sustained it had been turned off, leaving it a fragile tracery of spidery
girders almost as thin as wire, vulnerable now that the lines of force forming
the hull had been collapsed. Two green vaporous shapes moved inside the vessel,
visible through the tracery of its sides. I grew completely still, watching.
Two, I thought. Only two. I had expected that
there would be three forms in the vessel.
After a long time the vaporous shapes slowly
left the machine and crossed the turf towards the house. They were of diffused
outline, slightly luminous in the gathering dark, tall as a man. Only when
they were gone from view round the corner of the house did I step out from the
bushes towards the ship that had come so far.
Its tracery of fragile members buckled under
the blows of the spanner brought from the car, bending and folding into a
tangle of jointed wire. Within moments it was destroyed beyond even the skill
of its owners to repair. Silence returned. A few stars, immeasurably remote
worlds, had begun to show in the heavens. I looked up, searching for bright
Sirius from where I knew the vessel had come. But drifting cloud obscured that
section of the night sky.
A green shape came round the corner of the
house and stopped. I sensed its surprise, quickly followed by antagonism and
fury. Glowing it came across the turf, its speed increasing to catch me.
I turned on my heels and ran, slipping
through the bushes to the road. The saloon was not far. I dragged open the
door, jumped in . . . and not until half the valley lay behind did I stop,
looking back.
The two green shapes were searching round the
house. For a long time they passed in and out among the bushes like mysterious
pillars of green light, then they returned to the house, were lost from view.
My agitation began to subside. I told myself that things had worked out well on
the whole, that as much had been accomplished as could be expected. Obviously
they had not believed their coming was anticipated, must now be regretting
having left their vessel unguarded.
I drove slowly back towards the house. It was
unfortunate that there had been no time to bring a weapon—or at least one of
such a type as would be effective against the beings from the spheroid. There
was every reason why their physical make-up should be familiar to me. They
could control matter, but were not matter themselves. A life-form totally
dissimilar to any known on Earth, they were sentient, highly intelligent, yet
composed of molecules as insubstantial as those of the air. My sworn duty was
to destroy them. Theirs was to eliminate me.
An opening in the bushes permitted a view of
the rear of the house. The broken vessel was gone, but whether hidden away with
the hope of repair or concealed because its presence would arouse suspicion,
could not be decided. The house was silent and I crept round it.
Two men had just emerged and were walking
quickly away down the road. One was a trifle more than average height, the
other an inch or two below. They were of average build, quite undistinguished.
To my trained eye they appeared not as individuals, but as types.
A good disguise, I thought. They had speedily
adopted the appearance of average types of the life-forms among which they
would now move. That offered concealment, yet opportunity for unlimited
activity. There was not a man on Earth who would not swear each was a human,
just like himself.
I went round the house quickly, looking
inside through each window. No light showed, nor was there any movement.
Satisfied, I went back to the car. Apparently the vessel had brought two only,
despite supposition to the contrary.
The brilliant headlights soon picked out the
two figures walking quickly down towards the bottom of the valley. I slowed,
reaching back to lock the saloon doors on the inside, and stopped near them, my
face in the shadow. The slightly taller figure came to my window, and I put it
down an inch.
"We'd like a lift on into town," he
said.
They did it well, I thought. Very well—had
studied everything down to the slight local accent, and adopted it
automatically. Everyone would swear the two were exactly what they appeared to
be.
"I don't recognise you," I said.
"You strangers hereabouts?" The figure hesitated, nodding, one hand
already on the doorhandle, trying to open it.
"We're salesmen for a
big business concern," he said. "A cab was to pick us up, but must
have mistaken our instructions. So we thought we'd walk on as it's only a mile
or so. But we'd appreciate that lift. .."
"Sorry—got four friends to pick up just
down the road." I said and accelerated and let in the clutch. The little
man had remained in front of me, and he did not move. They were like that, I
thought —they knew there was no danger, and sometimes forgot, especially at the
beginning....
The wing of the saloon passed through him.
When I looked back both were walking quickly on after me.
I sped for town. They had not suspected and I
had learned enough to feel safe in going on. Eliminating them was now the
problem. No form of physical violence could succeed. Poison was out—they would
not eat. Gassing was impossible—they did not breathe though they could simulate
chest movements when necessary to complete their disguise. They were virtually
ageless, and did not reckon time by any standard used on Earth. By conscious
will they could form the molecules making up their substance into any shape
they wished, simulating an outline which would provide protection in the
environment they inhabited.
The proprietor of the next town's only hotel
greeted me with smiles, and I saw that he remembered my week's stay and large
tips.
"I'm expecting a couple of
friends," I told him. "Commercial travelers here for a deal. You
might give me a ring when they come in."
He beamed. "I will see to it
personally." "Good," I said.
I went towards the stairs,
and paused, looking back. "Oh, don't say I asked after them. I want to
look in on them as a surprise-get it?"
"Certainly, Mr. Smith, certainly," he said.
Smith, I thought. But it was as good a name as any ... In my job one seldom used one's own name.
Alone in my room, I reviewed the situation.
The newcomers had arrived as expected and I had traced them. That there were
only two, instead of the three anticipated, was the only error but it
simplified matters. Two would be easier to deal with and my knowledge of them
was complete. They must not be allowed to become lost amid Earth's teeming
millions or they would become a secret, ever-present and certainly-active
menace. My job was to follow and eliminate them at the earliest possible
moment.
Presently
the bell rang on my door. I got up, crossed to it and then remembered I had not
switched on the light. It would look odd to be seen there without it.
I depressed the switch and opened the door.
"Yes?"
"Your
friends are just in," the manager said. "They've booked until midday
tomorrow."
"You're sure it's them?" I asked.
"I
think so, sir—a Mr. Dulice, a bit above average height, booked for himself and
his friend . . ."
"That'll
be them," I agreed. Dulice, I thought. It was as good a name as Diesnar
and the latter sounded odd by Earth standards. I wondered if the manager had
noticed the light come on under the crack of the door. "I was
dozing," I said. Best to make sure. "Thanks. Needn't mention me to
them. Maybe I'll leave it until tomorrow."
"Their
room is Number Thirteen, end of the corridor," he said. "Thanks. Good
night."
He
left and I wondered what he would do if he knew what the occupants of Room 13
were. Not respectable Mr. Dulice and companion but Diesnar and Iago,
nonphysical entities playing their usual game of imitation—a game that had been
perfected by millions of generations of evolutionary selection.
The
room clock showed two hours until midnight. That gave about seven hours in all,
until dawn. I had known that my visit to Room 13 would certainly not be delayed
until then despite my assurance to the contrary. Instead the hours of darkness
would see much activity.
I
unlocked a trunk and took out a light metal box, which a second key fitted. The
weapon inside was not recognisable as such by Earth standards but might have
passed for an antique pedestal of bronze, ending in a cup in which a carved
crystal rested. But it was not a pedestal and not bronze—was instead the
product of much scientific research and inestimably valuable. I doubted whether
half a dozen such instruments existed in the cosmos. Those that did were in
safe keeping.
With it in a pocket I went
out and walked silently to Room 13. A faint light burned in the hall stairway
below, but the hotel was quiet. I recalled that the manager had said something
about being short-staffed. The bronzen object fitted snugly in one hand and my
fingers came upon a lever which could be depressed. Holding it I tapped.
Silence followed. I tapped again. The knob turned and the door opened.
"I have a message/' I said evenly. The
door opened fully and I went in, moving quickly to the right along the wall, my
left hand extended back towards the door and on the lighting switch.
"You've forgotten the light," I said.
The switch clicked under my
pressure. A glance showed me Dulice, alias Diesnar, was gone. The other—the
smaller and weaker —stared at me.
"I was not expecting
anyone," he murmured. "You've made some error . . ."
I examined him without
speaking. His features were so near average, his dress and appearance so near
the normal, that no person in all the world would have given him a second
glance.
"You do it very well," I said.
His astonishment, dismay and terror could be
sensed. He did not show it—an appearance of terror would have to be simulated
consciously and would serve no useful purpose. Hence it was absent. But his
bland expression was not all I had to go by.
"Surely—you think me someone else?" he said softly.
He was moving slowly back. I quickly closed
the door and stood with my back to it.
"No," I said. "No, not someone else—Iago."
It took him a moment to
integrate and recognise the Earth oral vibrations forming his true name. But I
saw that he had done so and knew me now and why I had come.
"Better keep still," I said. "Where's-Mr. Dulice?"
The silence was so long. I thought he was not
going to speak. His face shone in the light. His lips almost seemed to smile.
"Gone,"
he said at last.
"Obviously.
And where?"
"That you can find out."
"It would save trouble if you—told me," I murmured. I took the
bronze pedestal from my pocket. He saw it. His eyes fixed on the carved
crystal, and I sensed his terror anew. It was stronger, this time—the terror of
a being faced with death.
"Why should I tell you?" he asked evenly.
"Because, if you do not I shall kill you."
He shrugged. It was well done. "I do not fear death."
"Odd," I said. "I do."
My fingers tightened slightly on the lever
which controlled the compact, immeasurably complicated apparatus inside the
hollow plinth.
"You came far enough," I said, "to this planet. You might
have escaped more easily if you'd landed near a large city, though I can guess
you wanted to avoid observation. This time your effort to appear quite average
was a mistake. However, where is Diesnar?"
The eyes looking back at me were cool, but I
sensed and knew the tenor and decision in the other's heart.
"That's
for you—to find," he breathed.
I pressed the lever. It was no use waiting.
The crystal hummed and sang, ringing like taut wires in the wind, and I closed
my eyes, not wanting to see Iago. I wished him no harm, personally. Might even
have liked him in some ways, despite his weakness. He was different from
Diesnar, the leader, who was strong enough for both.
I opened my eyes in time to see the last wisps of green mist shred away
into nothing and dissipate on the air. A few moments passed and a knock came on
the door, I opened it.
"Yes?"
The manager appeared apologetic. "I was
just retiring, sir—did you ring? I was passing . . ."
"No," I said. "We don't want
anything." I put the pedestal in my pocket—the crystal had cooled quickly.
"Thanks all the same. Oh— do you know where Mr. Dulice went?"
The manager shook his head. "I haven't
seen him come down, sir. I've been at the reception desk—we're short-staffed,
though I've got a new man to take over."
I went back to my room. The
annihilation of Iago gave me no elation. I had not supposed him difficult to
deal with but his companion would be very different. Diesnar was clever and a
foe anyone might justly fear.
I locked the piezo-electric crystal and waveform generator away in its
metal case and stood by the window, the light out so that no revealing shadow
fell upon the glass. Wind-driven clouds were passing a weak moon and the little
town was asleep. I knew Mr. Dulice would not be asleep but watching
somewhere...
With infinite caution I opened the window and went out upon the iron
fire-escape, listening. An alley lay below, lit by a single lamp where it met
an adjoining street. At the dim end of the alley, scarcely discernible from the
shadows, stood a man. I withdrew and went down into the hall, where a youth
dozed behind a lit desk. I did not give him a second glance.
"Just going out to get some books from my car," I said.
The streets were as near deserted as did not
matter. The alley was like a well, stretching way into complete blackness. I
followed the one wall, knowing risks were greatest in the section under the
lamp. But risks had to be taken. Agents who uphold law and order are not chosen
from the timid.
The lamp behind, the gloom ahead was
complete. Clouds had banked against the moon so that even the high rooftops
flanking the alley could not be seen against the sky. A car passed along the
road, sending down after me a brief humming. I sensed that my enemy was very
near, hating me and probably already aware that Iago was dead. There could be
no half-measures in this hunt. My instructions were to annihilate them.
Guessing that, Mr. Dulice's reactions were readily predictable.
The wall at my back, the bricks rough under
my hands, I edged on into the blackness, listening often, and with every sense
strung to its highest point of receptivity. I sensed that the figure anyone
would take for an ordinary commercial traveller, Mr. Dulice, was nearer. If the
moon came up it was as Mr. Dulice that he would be visible.
That was how the imitative adaptability of my
quarry worked— he had become an average representative of the creatures among
whom he sought to hide. That process was largely instinctive, the outcome of an
ancestry where survival had depended upon the perfect imitation of other
life-forms. Those whose imitative processes had been less than perfect had on
the whole survived less well. That was how evolution worked and Mr. Dulice was
at the tail end of a long evolutionary period and his imitation of an average
human life-form was excellent.
The tiny sound of something
brushing stones froze me against the wall. I realised that I should have
brought the resonant disintegrator. The knowledge of my error ran through me
like a cold fear. In this job those who made errors seldom had the opportunity
to repeat them—instead they died . . . But that little pedestal-shaped weapon
was special. I had adopted the habit of locking it away to guard against its
loss. Accidents could happen—and that pedestal had to be checked in when my
task was finished. Better that I never return at all than return without it.
Diesnar would deduce that I carried it, I
decided. By playing on that belief I could keep my advantage.
"Mr. Dulice/' I whispered.
Neither of us would want anyone else in the
town to know we were other than we appeared. He would not want a howling mob
chasing him, even though they could not harm him. As for myself I preferred
secrecy.
No reply came. A gap in the moving cloud let
a weak moonray glow momentarily into the alley. Directly opposite me, his back
to the wall, was Dulice. We could have touched hands by reaching out.
The moonlight went. Somewhere in the distance
a whistle sounded and wheels on rails. That would be the 2 a.m.
electric-train passing south, I thought. I had not known it was already quite
so late.
"Mr. Dulice," I said quietly, "I have killed your
companion . . ."
His terror could be sensed, so strong was the
emotion. Had he been a real man his breathing would have sounded heavily.
"There have been times when we allowed
one of you to live," I said evenly. That was true—but only a long time ago
when new arrivals such as Diesnar had been less well equipped. "Would you
guarantee to put in our hands all the information you possess of your
companions, their names and plans?"
Came a scarcely audible rustle, then silence.
It seemed apparent that Mr. Dulice expected immediate annihilation. I guessed
that his terror was so extreme he had for the moment lost the power to use the
pseudo-larynx which was now part of his make-up.
"Come," I said. "I expect an answer—in the
circumstances."
"You
underestimate me . . ."
The words were a whisper—and from high up on my left. I moved out into
the alley and saw his shadow on the iron fire-escape, ascending rapidly. I ran
to the ladder, climbing. He went through the window into my room. When I
reached the window the door had just closed. The metal box containing the
pedestal was gone.
We only made mistakes like that once, I thought, running for the door. The corridor
was empty—so were the stairs and hall. The youth was frankly asleep now,
snoring. I passed him and emerged into the street.
Diesnar would be waiting somewhere. He would
prefer I did not live for while I lived he was listed among the hunted.
A clock struck loudly. I crossed the street
and watched the hotel for a moment. The building was dark except for the glass
above the entrance door. Mr. Dulice might not try to open the metal box but
merely hide it. Either way, he now had a ponderous advantage—that of knowing
the apparatus was not in my possession.
A man was a long way down the street at a corner, watching, and began
walking towards me. He was very slightly over average height—just such a man as
one might meet a thousand times in a thousand cities of the Earth.
I withdrew round the
nearest corner and looked back. The man was following—the distance between us
had decreased. Our roles had changed, I thought. Mr. Dulice had become the
hunter, I the hunted. It was a role he would adopt readily, one well suited to
his character.
The buildings thinned a little as I went
eastwards through the town. Every time I looked back my follower was there. He
wanted secrecy as much as I—would play the game the way I led until very near
the end.
Waste lots slipped behind and a viaduct
bridge. I went off it onto turf. At my back was a high wire fence—below it a
bank sloping down to the railway. No one would disturb us here at this hour.
The nearest lamp was far away, the moonlight intermittent, the nearest
buildings away down the line.
Mr. Dulice stopped a few paces away. "I
didn't come across the light-years of space to have my plans interrupted by
meddlers," he said.
I wondered whether he held the resonator.
Turned on me it could prove equally fatal.
"You cannot be allowed to settle on this
planet/' I pointed out, watching him keenly. "Succinctly you're a bad lot,
Mr. Dulice."
"I made my way," he said.
I knew then that he had not got the resonator—probably
had been unable to open the box. Had he, he would not have talked but acted,
and his action would have ended my part of the case. Now he came forward so
that we were two paces apart.
"You know I shall have to kill you," he said.
"Of course—provided you have the chance."
He inclined his head. "I make my own chances."
We watched each other. In a way, we were
evenly matched—now. Possibly his strength exceeded mine. From experience I knew
that one of them could summon up great physical power when survival depended on
it. Not the power of nerves and muscles of ordinary flesh but that of the
interaction orbits of the molecules making up his form, that strength could be
none the less nearly irresistible.
"You've often hunted us," he said.
"It's a habit which should stop . . ."
"I'm paid for my
work," I said, never looking from him.
He was watching for an opening.
Suddenly—abruptly—it would be over, for one of us.
Then he moved—so did I. My hands clasped
round one arm above the elbow and one leg by the knee, gripping with all my
strength. He came up in my grasp like an empty, hollow dummy, struggling. He
realised at that moment too that I had not fled this way without purpose.
He screamed as I flung him down towards the
electrified rails. The cry echoed to the sky even as he descended. It was not a
cry of terror but triumph.
"We were three! There's Piert!"
Then he touched the electrified rails. A
flash glowed abruptly between earth and sky. He was almost as conductive as
solid metal, I thought. Nothing of Mr. Dulice remained—only a wisp of thin
green vapor drifting up on the night air and dispersing.
Piert, I thought. Piert, the leader—I should
have known! But he had not been seen nor visible to follow. I had traced the
two only. Such a plan was like Piert. He would go off alone—might now be lost
in some populous city. Or again he might be near. Piert was the kind who stuck
around to see things out—in his own way . . .
I turned from the fence quickly, eyes
searching the road below and the expanse of turf, half expecting Piert to be
there, waiting for me. Were he it would end his way. Piert was more than the equal of the two
disposed of . . . worse, could have followed me while I had not suspected his
presence . . .
A group of men was coming towards me, shouting. Those in the lead began
to run, waving their arms.
"It was murder!" one cried.
They had seen me throw Dulice down and I ran.
This was not the time for difficult explanations. As an agent one has to make
one's own way out of difficulties. When the difficulties were of this type, an
avoiding action was called for. Furthermore, while I argued Piert would act.
The hotel was quiet, the youth gone, possibly
to get tea or coffee. I hurried to the room Mr. Dulice had hired and searched
quickly. The metal box was not there. I went to my own room and traced back the
way he must have gone, watching for likely hiding-places. There seemed to be
none—or those I saw were too obvious for a mind of Mr. Dulice's calibre to
adopt.
I went out of the hotel. Dulice had appeared
to go left and the road was almost bare of hiding-places until the next corner.
Beyond the corner was a railed garden, small and sunk below street level. At
the bottom of the steps was a metal box, shiny and new. I descended, brought it
up, and unlocked it. The resonator safe in my pocket, I hesitated, then locked
the box and returned it to its previous position. Piert was the type who would
be aware of developments. He might know it was there, return to reassure himself
or carry it off.
With everything I possessed on Earth stowed in my case I hurried out of
the hotel, wondering if already too much time had been wasted. It would be wise
to move on. Voices sounded along the street and three workmen came into view.
"That's him!" one shouted, pointing at me.
They had been quick in tracing me—almost too quick. The other way along
the street others were coming, a torch bobbing in their leader's hands. Behind
in the alley would be others. I wondered whether it was luck or whether Piert
was present and had already acted.
I put down my case, waiting. The railwaymen
were confident because of their numbers, yet hesitated to lay hands on me.
"We saw him throw the man down the embankment," one said to
another. "It was attempted murder, clear as daylight."
I tensed my skin against their grasp but they
only surrounded me, increasingly hesitant.
"Look," I said, "I'm an ordinary
man. I ran—who wouldn't with a pack like you after him? If you think there's
been murder done, then go back and look for the body!"
"It's a plan to get rid of us," one said.
I laughed. "If you think so, some go back and some stay."
"You're trying to leave town," another pointed out.
"So what? Who wouldn't, after being chased like a thief?"
They were silent, looking at each other. The enthusiasm of the first
rush that had carried them after me was subsiding—some were beginning to doubt
the truth of what they had seen.
"Perhaps we made a mistake . . ." one said.
"No. He threw him down, clear as daylight."
"It's a job for the authorities to look into," a third
suggested.
I did not want that. The wheels of authority
turn slowly and Piert would be hundreds of miles away by the time it was
decided there was indeed no body.
"He's an ordinary looking kind of
cove," the first man said. "Maybe it was all an—an illusion—"
Another man had come down the street behind them, and stood on the
perimeter of the circle in shadow.
"That's your saloon in the open-air park
down the road," he shot at me over their heads.
It was. I had bought it as the world could
prove. I nodded. Something in the timber of the voice—something lacking—chilled
me, but I could not see him clearly over the surrounding heads.
The newcomer gave an exclamation. "He
admits it! That's why you'll not find a body! I stayed behind, going down to
see if the man was alive. He was dead. There's no body now." He pointed at
me accusingly. "He came back, threw the body in his car and took it away.
I didn't try to stop him—he had a gun. He's dumped both in the river in my
opinion. It was quick work—but he had time to do it."
The
workmen looked at the speaker. "Yes, I did notice this chap stay
behind," one said.
Another nodded. "There'd be time to nip
down to the bridge—"
I
was afraid, then. Terribly afraid. They had lost an exact sense of the time
that had passed. Worse, it might have been possible for me to have taken a body
down to the river. Time had flown while I had been searching for the pedestal.
"It's all lies,"
I said. "I never had a gun."
"That's
for a judge and jury to decide," they said, and pressed closely round me.
We walked noisily through
the town. I was surrounded, and shaken. This was the kind of thing no agent
likes to happen. We like secrecy. We expect no outside aid—know indeed, that
there will be none forthcoming—and the situation was ugly. There was enough
proof against me to keep me tied up so long that Piert could be ten thousand
miles away and then it would take half a lifetime to find him.
The workmen told each other they had seen me
do it, gaining confidence. "I still think there's been some mistake,"
one objected.
They silenced him. The mistake had been mine,
coupled with bad luck that sent the late gang off work at that very moment when
Dulice had pitched down on to the live rails.
They pressed closer as we neared the police station. "Where's that man
who saw him take the body?" one asked. They needed to reassure themselves
now.
"I'm here," the voice said.
It was slightly flat, yet somehow absolutely normal.
"Ah, you saw him," the man said,
satisfied. "You'll have to tell the police. You're new here, eh?"
"I was going to the station to see if there were any late trains
stopping." The newcomer was behind me, beyond the fringe of the crowd.
"No expresses stop here all night," someone said.
There was silence, then one said,
"You'll need to give evidence. We didn't see him come back. What you saw
is important. What's your name?"
"Peart,"
the man said. "Samuel Peart. I was at the hotel."
I knew then that Piert had
engineered it and lied to convict me and wanted me to know. That was like him.
He must have the satisfaction of knowing that I knew, thus doubling his own
triumph. In that was his revenge for Iago and Diesnar and for all the others of
his type I had hunted down.
"You're a stranger here?" one asked again.
"Yes."
He put the human sound of triumph into his voice, knowing I should hear it and understand and thus hate
tenfold my defeat.
It was awkward. We agents like things to be
kept quiet. We do not like a town stirred to awareness of our presence and
actions. But things had gone too far. At that moment only a dozen workmen
possessed the fringe of this knowledge, excluding Piert and myself. Of their
number one doubted. The others were still so surprised they needed to reassure
each other.
I halted and turned around. The newcomer was
the youth of the hotel. "I didn't have time to take the body away, Mr.
Peart," I said evenly. "But I did have time to find—and open—the box
Mr. Dulice took."
It meant nothing to the workmen. For a second I savored the terror which
instantly replaced Piert's satisfaction and which could be sensed with a
feeling of almost physical impact. He had been clever, getting a job at the
hotel. Then I pressed the lever of the pedestal.
Piert's outline wobbled, shrank inwards, and he dissipated away into
faint green vapor which drifted and vanished like cigarette smoke on the
evening air.
"Strewth!" a workman breathed.
I walked through them and ran. My feet made no sound. I heard their shouts as I reached my saloon but
lost them as I drove for the valley. It had been an untidy case, I thought, but
the workmen would end up doubting their own eyes.
I lifted my vessel, a mere lattice structure
of girders thin as wire, from the water, set it on the bank and put up the
force screens. My human shape, replica of the life-forms amid which I had
moved, began to vanish. I glided into the vessel, set now for the Dog Star.
We police from Sirius do not like outlaws to
prey upon unsuspecting worlds, however remote.
5. Verkan Vall> who policed not backward or
forward in time but across
it—keeping the citizens of his particular world in line when they
went visiting into other level civilizations-was presented with a new type of quarry in the nighthound from Venus. But
the case was only routine for a Paratime
Trooper.
H. BEAM PIPER
Police Operation
. .
there may be something in the nature of an occult police force, which operates
to divert human suspicions, and to supply explanations that are good enough for
whatever, somewhat in the nature of minds, human beings have— or that, if there
be occult mischief makers and occult ravagers, they may be of a world also of
other beings that are acting to check them, and to explain them, not
benevolently, but to divert suspicion from themselves, because they, too, may
be exploiting life upon this earth, but in ways more subtle, and in orderly, or
organized, fashion/'
Charles
Fort: Lot
John strawmyer stood, an irate figure in faded overalls and
sweat-whitened black shirt, apart from the others, his back to the weathered
farm-buildings and the line of yellowing woods, and the cirrus-streaked blue
October sky. He thrust out a work-gnarled hand accusingly.
'That
there heifer was worth two hund'rd, two hund'rd an' fifty dollars!" he
clamored. "An' that there dog was just like one uh the fam'ly; an' now
look at'm! I don't like t' use profane language, but
you'ns gotta do some'n about this!" 92
Steve Parker, the district
game protector, aimed his Leica at the carcass of the dog and snapped the
shutter. "We're doing something about it," he said shortly. Then he
stepped ten feet to the left and edged around the mangled heifer, choosing an
angle for his camera shot.
The two men in the gray whipcords of the
State police, seeing that Parker was through with the dog, moved in and
squatted to examine it. The one with the triple chevrons on his sleeves took it
by both forefeet and flipped it over on its back. It had been a big brute, of nondescript breed, with a rough black-and-brown coat.
Something had clawed it deeply about the head, its throat was slashed
transversely several times, and it had been disemboweled by a single slash that
had opened its belly from breastbone to tail. They looked at it carefully, and
then went to stand beside Parker while he photographed the dead heifer. Like
the dog, it had been talon-raked on either side of the head, and its throat had
been slashed deeply several times. In addition, flesh had been torn from one
flank in great strips.
"I can't kill a bear outa season,
no!" Strawmyer continued his plaint. "But a bear comes an' kills my
stock an' my dog; that there's all right! That's the kinda deal a farmer always
gits, in this State! I don't like t' use profane language—"
"Then don't!" Parker barked at him,
impatiently. "Don't use any kind of language. Just put in your claim and
shut up!" He turned to the men in whipcords and gray Stetsons. "You
boys seen everything?" he asked. "Then let's go."
They walked briskly back to the barnyard,
Strawmyer following them, still vociferating about the wrongs of the farmer at
the hands of a cynical and corrupt State government. They climbed into the
State police car, the sergeant and the private in front and Parker in the rear,
with his camera on the seat beside a Winchester
carbine.
"Weren't you pretty short with that
fellow back there, Steve?" the sergeant asked as the private started the
car.
"Not too short. '1 don't like t' use profane language,'"
Parker mimicked the bereaved heifer owner, and then he went on to specify:
"I'm morally certain that he's shot at least four illegal deer in the last
year. When and if I ever get anything on him, he's going to be sorrier for
himself than he is now."
"They're the
characters that always beef their heads off," the sergeant agreed.
"You think that whatever did this was the same as the others?"
"Yes. The dog must have jumped it while
it was eating at the heifer. Same superficial scratches about the head, and
deep cuts on the throat or belly. The bigger the animal, the farther front the
big slashes occur. Evidently something grabs them by the head with front claws,
and slashes with hind claws; that's why I think it's a bobcat."
"You know," the private said,
"I saw a lot of wounds like that during the war. My outfit landed on
Mindanao, where the guerrillas had been active. And this looks like bolo-work
to me."
"The surplus-stores are full of machetes
and jungle knives," the sergeant considered. "I think I'll call up
Doc Winters, at the County Hospital, and see if all his squirrel-fodder is
present and accounted for."
"But most of the
livestock was eaten at, like the heifer," Parker objected.
"By definition, nuts have abnormal
tastes," the sergeant replied. "Or the eating might have been done
later, by foxes."
"I hope so; that'd let me out," Parker said.
"Ha, listen to the man!" the
private howled, stopping the car at the end of the lane. "He thinks a nut
with a machete and a Tarzan complex is just good clean fun. Which way,
now?"
"Well, let's see." The sergeant had
unfolded a quadrangle sheet; the game protector leaned forward to look at it
over his shoulder. The sergeant ran a finger from one to another of a series of
variously colored crosses which had been marked on the map.
"Monday night, over here on Copperhead
Mountain, that cow was killed," he said. "The next night, about ten
o'clock, that sheep flock was hit, on this side of Copperhead, right about here.
Early Wednesday night, that mule got slashed up in the woods back of the Weston
farm. It was only slightly injured; must have kicked the whatzit and got away,
but the whatzit wasn't too badly hurt, because a few hours later, it hit that
turkey flock on the Rhymer farm. And last night, it did that." He jerked a
thumb over his shoulder at the Strawmyer farm. "See, following the ridges,
working toward the southeast, avoiding open ground, killing only at night.
Could be a bobcat, at that."
"Or Jink's maniac with
the machete/' Parker agreed. "Let's go up by Hindman's Gap and see if we
can see anything."
They turned, after a while, into a rutted
dirt road, which deteriorated steadily into a grass-grown track through the
woods. Finally, they stopped, and the private backed off the road. The three
men got out; Parker with his Winchester, the sergeant checking the drum of a
Thompson, and the private pumping a buckshot shell into the chamber of a riot
gun. For half an hour, they followed the brush-grown trail beside the little
stream; once, they passed a dark gray commercial-model jeep, backed to one
side. Then they came to the head of the gap.
A man, wearing a tweed coat, tan field boots,
and khaki breeches, was sitting on a log, smoking a pipe; he had a bolt-action
rifle across his knees, and a pair of binoculars hung from his neck. He seemed
about thirty years old, and any bobby-soxer's idol of the screen would have
envied him the handsome regularity of his strangely immobile features. As
Parker and the two State policemen approached, he rose, slinging his rifle, and
greeted them.
"Sergeant Haines, isn't it?" he
asked pleasantly. "Are you gentlemen out hunting the critter, too?"
"Good afternoon, Mr. Lee. I thought that
was your jeep I saw down the road a little." The sergeant turned to the
others. "Mr. Richard Lee; he's staying at the old Kinchwalter place, the
other side of Rutter's Fort. This is Mr. Parker, the district game protector.
And Private Zinkowski." He glanced at the rifle. "Are you out hunting
for it, too?"
"Yes, I thought I might find something, up here. What do you think
it is?"
"I don't know," the sergeant
admitted. "It could be a bobcat. Canada lynx. Jinx, here, has a theory
that it's some escapee from the paper-doll factory, with a machete. Me, I hope
not, but I'm not ignoring the possibility."
The man with the matinee-idol's face nodded.
"It could be a lynx. I understand they're not unknown in this
section."
"We paid bounties on two in this county,
in the last year," Parker said. "Odd rifle you have, there; mind if I
look at it?"
"Not at all." The man who had been
introduced as Richard Lee unslung and handed it over. "The chamber's
loaded," he cautioned.
"I never saw one like this," Parker said. "Foreign?"
"I think so. I don't know anything about
it; it belongs to a friend of mine, who loaned it to me. I think the action's
German, or Czech; the rest of it's a custom job, by some West Coast gunmaker.
It's chambered for some ultra-velocity wildcat load."
The
rifle passed from hand to hand; the three men examined it in turn, commenting
admiringly.
"You
find anything, Mr. Lee?" the sergeant asked, handing it back.
"Not
a trace." The man called Lee slung the rifle and began to dump the ashes
from his pipe. "I was along the top of this ridge for about a mile on
either side of the gap, and down the other side as far as Hindman's Run; I
didn't find any tracks, or any indication of where it had made a kill."
The game protector nodded,
turning to Sergeant Haines.
"There's
no use us going any farther," he said. "Ten to one, it followed that
line of woods back of Strawmyer's, and crossed over to the other ridge. I think
our best bet would be the hollow at the head of Lowrie's Run. What do you
think?"
The
sergeant agreed. The man called Richard Lee began to refill his pipe
methodically.
"I
think I shall stay here for a while, but I believe you're right. Lowrie's Run,
or across Lowrie's Gap into Coon Valley," he said.
After Parker and the State policemen had
gone, the man whom they had addressed as Richard Lee returned to his log and
sat smoking, his rifle across his knees. From time to time, he glanced at his
wrist watch and raised his head to listen. At length, faint in the distance, he
heard the sound of a motor starting.
Instantly,
he was on his feet. From the end of the hollow log on which he had been
sitting, he produced a canvas musette-bag. Walking briskly to a patch of damp
ground beside the little stream, he leaned the rifle against a tree and opened
the bag. First, he took out a pair of gloves of some greenish, rubberlike
substance, and put them on, drawing the long gauntlets up over his coat
sleeves. Then he produced a bottle and unscrewed the cap. Being careful to
avoid splashing his clothes, he went about, pouring a clear liquid upon the
ground in several places. Where he poured, white vapors rose, and twigs and
grass crumbled into brownish dust. After he had replaced the cap and returned
the bottle to the bag, he waited for a few minutes, then took a spatula from the
musette and dug where he had poured the fluid, prying loose four black,
irregular-shaped lumps of matter, which he carried to the running water and
washed carefully, before wrapping them and putting them in the bag, along with
the gloves. Then he slung bag and rifle and started down the trail to where he
had parked the jeep.
Half an hour later, after driving through the
little farming village of Rutter's Fort, he pulled into the barnyard of a
rundown farm and backed through the open doors of the barn. He closed the
double doors behind him, and barred them from within. Then he went to the rear
wall of the barn, which was much closer to the front than the outside
dimensions of the barn would have indicated.
He took from his pocket a black object like
an automatic pencil. Hunting over the rough plank wall, he found a small hole
and inserted the pointed end of the pseudo-pencil, pressing on the other end.
For an instant, nothing happened. Then a ten-foot-square section of the wall
receded two feet and slid noiselessly to one side. The section which had slid
inward had been built of three-inch steel, masked by a thin covering of boards;
the wall around it was two-foot concrete, similarly camouflaged. He stepped
quickly inside.
Fumbling at the right side of the opening, he found a switch and flicked
it. Instantly, the massive steel plate slid back into place with a soft, oily
click. As it did, lights came on within the hidden room, disclosing a great
semiglobe of some fine metallic mesh, thirty feet in diameter and fifteen in
height. There was a sliding door at one side of this; the man called Richard
Lee opened and entered through it, closing it behind him. Then he turned to the
center of the hollow dome, where an armchair was placed in front of a small
desk below a large instrument panel. The gauges and dials on the panel, and the
levers and switches and buttons on the desk control board, were all lettered
and numbered with characters not of the Roman alphabet or the Arabic notation,
and, within instant reach of the occupant of the chair, a pistollike weapon lay
on the desk. It had a conventional index-finger trigger and a hand-fit grip,
but, instead of a tubular barrel, two slender parallel metal rods extended
about four inches forward of the receiver, joined together at what would
correspond to the muzzle by a streamlined knob of some light blue ceramic or
plastic substance.
The man with the handsome immobile face
deposited his rifle and musette on the floor beside the chair and sat down.
First, he picked up the pistollike weapon and checked it, and then he examined
the many instruments on the panel in front of him. Finally, he flicked a switch
on the control board.
At
once, a small humming began, from some point overhead. It wavered and shrilled
and mounted in intensity, and then fell to a steady monotone. The dome about
him flickered with a queer, cold iridescence, and slowly vanished. The hidden
room vanished, and he was looking into the shadowy interior of a deserted barn.
The barn vanished; blue sky appeared above, streaked with wisps of high cirrus
cloud. The autumn landscape flickered unreally. Buildings appeared and
vanished, and other buildings came and went in a twinkling. All around him,
half-seen shapes moved briefly and disappeared.
Once,
the figure of a man appeared, inside the circle of the dome. He had an angry,
brutal face, and he wore a black tunic piped with silver, and black breeches,
and polished black boots, and there was an insignia, composed of a cross and
thunderbolt, on his cap. He held an automatic pistol in his hand.
Instantly,
the man at the desk snatched up his own weapon and thumbed off the safety, but
before he could lift and aim it, the intruder stumbled and passed outside the
force-field which surrounded the chair and instruments.
For
a while, there were fires raging outside, and for a while, the man at the desk
was surrounded by a great hall, with a high, vaulted ceiling, through which
figures flitted and vanished. For a while, there were vistas of deep forests,
always set in the same background of mountains and always under the same blue
cirrus-laced sky. There was an interval of flickering blue-white light, of
unbearable intensity. Then the man at the desk was surrounded by the interior
of vast industrial works. The moving figures around him slowed, and became more
distinct. Now the dome grew visible, coruscating with many-colored lights and
then the humming died and the dome became a cold and inert mesh of fine white
metal. A green light above flashed on and off slowly.
He
stabbed a button and flipped a switch, then got to his feet, picking up his
rifle and musette and fumbling under his shirt for a small mesh bag, from which
he took an inch-wide disk of blue plastic. Unlocking a container on the
instrument panel, he removed a small roll of solidograph-film, which he stowed
in his bag. Then he slid open the door and emerged into his own dimension of
space-time.
Outside was a wide hallway, with a pale green
floor, paler green walls, and a ceiling of greenish off-white. A big hole had
been cut to accommodate the dome, and across the hallway a desk had been set
up, and at it sat a clerk in a pale blue tunic, who was just taking the
audio-plugs of a music-box out of his ears. A couple of policemen in green
uniforms, with ultrasonic paralyzers dangling by thongs from their left wrists
and holstered sigma-ray needlers like the one on the desk inside the dome, were
kidding with some girls in vivid orange and scarlet and green smocks.
"Here comes your boss-man/' one of the
girls told the cops, as he approached. They both turned and saluted casually.
The man who had lately been using the name of Richard Lee responded to their
greeting and went to the desk. The policemen grasped their paralyzers, drew
their needlers, and hurried into the dome.
Taking the disk of blue plastic from his
packet, he handed it to the clerk at the desk, who dropped it into a slot in
the voder in front of him. Instantly, a mechanical voice responded:
"Verkan Vail, blue-seal noble, hereditary Mavrad of Nerros. Special
Chief's Assistant, Paratime Police, special assignment. Subject to no orders
below those of Tortha Karf, Chief of Paratime Police. To be given all
courtesies and co-operation within the Paratime Transposition Code and the
Police Powers Code. Further particulars?"
The clerk pressed the "no"-button.
The blue sigil fell out the release-slot and was handed back to its bearer, who
was drawing up his left sleeve.
"You'll want to be sure I'm your Verkan
Vail, I suppose?" he said, extending his arm.
"Yes, quite, sir."
The clerk touched his arm with a small instrument which swabbed it with
antiseptic, drew a minute blood-sample, and medicated the needle prick, all in
one almost painless operation. He put the blood-drop on a slide and inserted it
at one side of a comparison microscope, nodding. It showed the same
distinctive permanent colloid pattern as the sample he had ready for comparison;
the colloid pattern given in infancy by injection to the man in front of him,
to set him apart from all the myriad other Verkan Vails on every other
probability-line of paratime. "Right, sir," the clerk nodded.
The
two policemen came out of the dome, their needlers hol-stered and their
vigilance relaxed. They were lighting cigarettes as they emerged.
"It's
all right, sir," one of them said. "You didn't bring anything in with
you, this trip."
The
other cop chuckled. "Remember that Fifth Level wild-man who came in on the
freight conveyor at Jandar last month?" he asked.
If
he was hoping that some of the girls would want to know what wild-man, it was a
vain hope. With a blue-seal mavrad around, what chance did a couple of ordinary
coppers have?
Verkan
Vail turned to the clerk. "I want a strato-rocket and pilot for Dhergabar
right away. Call Dhergabar Paratime Police Field and give them my ETA; have an
air-taxi meet me, and have the chief notified that I'm coming in. Extraordinary
report. Keep a guard over the conveyor; I think I'm going to need it again,
soon." He turned to the little redhead. "Want to show me the way out
of here to the rocket field?" he asked.
Outside, on the open landing field, Verkan
Vail glanced up at the sky, then looked at his watch. It had been twenty
minutes since he had backed the jeep into the barn on that distant other
time-line; the same delicate lines of white cirrus were etched across the blue
above. The constancy of the weather, even across two hundred thousand parayears
of perpendicular time, never failed to impress him. The long curve of the
mountains was the same, and they were mottled with the same autumn colors, but
where the little village of Rutter's Fort stood on that other line of
probability, the white towers of an apartment-city rose—the living quarters of
the plant personnel.
The
rocket that was to take him to headquarters was being hoisted with a crane and
lowered into the firing-stand, and he walked briskly toward it, his rifle and
musette slung. A boyish-looking pilot was on the platform, opening the door of
the rocket; he stood aside for Verkan Vail to enter, then followed and closed
it, dogging it shut while his passenger stowed his bag and rifle and strapped
himself into a seat.
"Dhergabar Commercial Terminal,
sir?" the pilot asked, taking the adjoining seat at the controls.
"Paratime Police Field, back of the
Paratime Administration Building."
"Right, sir. Twenty seconds to blast,
when you're ready." "Ready now." Verkan Vail relaxed, counting
seconds subconsciously.
The rocket trembled, and Verkan Vail felt himself being pushed gently
back against the upholstery. The seats, and the pilot's instrument panel in
front of them, swung on gimbals, and the finger of the indicator swept slowly
over a ninety-degree arc as the rocket rose and leveled. By then, the high
cirrus clouds Verkan Vail had watched from the field were far below; they were
well into the stratosphere.
There would be nothing to do now for the
three hours in which the rocket sped northward across the pole and southward to
Dhergabar; the navigation was entirely in the electronic hands of the robot
controls. Verkan Vail got out his pipe and lit it; the pilot lit a cigarette.
"That's an odd pipe, sir," the
pilot said. "Out-time item?"
"Yes, Fourth Probability Level; typical
of the whole paratime belt I was working in." Verkan Vail handed it over
for inspection. "The bowl's natural brier-root; the stem's a sort of
plastic made from the sap of certain tropical trees. The little white dot is
the maker's trademark; it's made of elephant tusk."
"Sounds pretty crude to me, sir."
The pilot handed it back.. "Nice workmanship, though. Looks like good
machine production."
"Yes. The sector I was on is really
quite advanced, for an electrochemical civilization. That weapon I brought back
with me —that solid-missile projector—is typical of most Fourth Level culture.
Moving parts machined to the closest tolerances, and interchangeable with
similar parts of all similar weapons. The missile is a small bolt of
cupro-alloy coated lead, propelled by expanding gases from the ignition of some
nitro-cellulose compound. Most of their scientific advance occurred within the
past century, and most of that in the past forty years. Of course, the
life-expectancy on that level is only about seventy years."
"Humph! I'm seventy-eight, last
birthday/' the boyish-looking pilot snorted. "Their medical science must
be mostly witchcraft!"
"Until
quite recently it was," Verkan Vail agreed. "Same story there as in
everything else—rapid advancement in the past few decades, after thousands of
years of cultural inertia."
"You
know, sir, I don't really understand this paratime stuff," the pilot
confessed. "I know that all time is totally present, and that every moment
has its own past-future line of event-sequence, and that all events in
space-time occur according to maximum probability, but I just don't get this
alternate probability stuff at all. If something exists, it's because it's the
maximum-probability effect of prior causes; why does anything else exist on any
other time-line?"
Verkan
Vail blew smoke at the air-renovator. A lecture on paratime theory would
nicely fill in the three-hour interval until the landing at Dhergabar. At
least, this kid was asking intelligent questions.
"Well,
you know the principle of time-passage, I suppose?" he began.
"Yes,
of course; Rhogom's Doctrine. The basis of most of our psychical science. We
exist perpetually at all moments within our life-span; our extraphysical ego
component passes from the ego existing at one moment to the ego existing at the
next. During unconsciousness, the EPC is 'time-free'; it may detach, and
connect at some other moment, with the ego existing at that time-point. That's
how we precog. We take an autohypno and recover memories brought back from the
future moment and buried in the subconscious mind."
"That's
right," Verkan Vail told him. "And even without the autohypno, a lot
of precognitive matter leaks out of the subconscious and into the conscious
mind, usually in distorted forms, or else inspires 'instinctive' acts, the
motivation for which is not brought to the level of consciousness. For
instance, suppose you're walking along North Promenade in Dhergabar, and you
come to the Martian Palace Caf6, and you go in for a drink, and meet some girl,
and strike up an acquaintance with her. This chance acquaintance develops into
marriage and a year later you are killed in a rocket crash leaving her a
widow."
"Just
about that happened to a friend of mine not long ago," the pilot said.
"Go on, sir."
"Well, in the microsecond or so before
you die—or afterward, for that matter, because we know that the extraphysical
component survives physical destruction—your EPC slips back a couple of years,
and re-connects at some point pastward of your first meeting with this girl,
and carries with it memories of everything up to the moment of detachment, all
of which are indelibly recorded in your subconscious mind. So, when you
re-experience the event of standing outside the Martian Palace with a thirst,
you go on to the Starway, or Nhergal's, or some other bar. In both cases, on
both time-lines, you follow the line of maximum probability; in the second
case, your subconscious future memories are an added causal factor."
"And when I back-slip, after I've been
needled, I generate a new time-line? Is that it?"
Verkan Vail made a small sound of impatience.
"No such thing!" he exclaimed. "It's semantically inadmissible
to talk about the total presence of time with one breath and about generating
new time-lines with the next. All time-lines
are totally present, in perpetual co-existence. The theory is that the EPC
passes from one moment, on one time-line, to the next moment on the next line,
so that the true passage of the EPC from moment to moment is a two-dimensional
diagonal. So, in the case we're using, the event of your going into the Martian
Palace exists on one time-line, and the event of your passing along to the
Starway exists on another, but both are events in real existence.
"Now, what we do in paratime
transposition is to build up a hypertemporal field to include the time-line we
want to reach, and then shift over to it. Same point in the plenum; same point
in primary time—plus primary time elapsed during mechanical and electronic lag
in the relays—but a different line of secondary time."
"Then why don't we have past-future time
travel on our own time-line?" the pilot wanted to know.
That was a question every paratimer has to
answer every time he talks paratime to the laity. Verkan Vail had been
expecting it; he answered patiently.
"The Ghaldron-Hesthor field-generator is
like every other mechanism; it can operate only in the area of primary time in
which it exists. It can transpose to any other time-line, and carry with it
anything inside its field, but it can't go outside its own temporal area of
existence, any more than a bullet from that rifle can hit the target a week
before it's fired/' Verkan Vail pointed out. "Anything inside the field is
supposed to be unaffected by anything outside. Supposed to be is the way to
put it; it doesn't always work. Once in a while, something pretty nasty gets
picked up in transit." He thought briefly of the man in the black tunic.
"That's why we have armed guards at terminals."
"Suppose
you pick up a blast from a nucleonic bomb," the pilot asked, "or
something red-hot, or radioactive?"
"We
have a monument, at Paratime Police Headquarters, in Dhergabar, bearing the
names of our own personnel who didn't make it back. It's a large monument; over
the past ten thousand years it's been inscribed with quite a few names."
"You
can have it; I'll stick to rockets!" the pilot replied. "Tell me
another thing though. What's all this about levels, and sectors, and belts?
What's the difference?"
"Purely
arbitrary terms. There are five main probability levels, derived from the five
possible outcomes of the attempt to colonize this planet, seventy-five thousand
years ago. We're on the First Level—complete success, and colony fully
established. The Fifth Level is the probability of complete failure—no human
population established on this planet, and indigenous quasi-human life evolved
indigenously. On the Fourth Level, the colonists evidently met with some
disaster and lost all memory of their extraterrestrial origin, as well as all
extraterrestrial culture. As far as they know, they are an indigenous race; they
have a long pre-history of stone-age savagery.
"Sectors
are areas of paratime on any level in which the prevalent culture has a common
origin and common characteristics. They are divided more or less arbitrarily
into sub-sectors. Belts are areas within sub-sectors where conditions are the
result of recent alternate probabilities. For instance, I've just come from the
Europo-Ameri-can Sector of the Fourth Level, an area of about ten thousand
parayears in depth, in which the dominant civilization developed on the
North-West Continent of the Major Land Mass, and spread from there to the Minor
Land Mass. The line on which I was operating is also part of a sub-sector of
about three thousand parayears' depth, and a belt developing from one of
several probable outcomes of a war concluded about three elapsed years ago. On
that time-line, the field at the Hagraban Synthetics Works, where we took off,
is part of an abandoned farm; on the site of Hagraban City is a little farming
village. Those things are there, right now, both in primary time and in the
plenum. They are about two hundred and fifty thousand parayears perpendicular
to each other, and each is of the same general order of reality."
The
red light overhead flashed on. The pilot looked into his visor and put his
hands to the manual controls, in case of failure of the robot controls. The
rocket landed smoothly, however; there was a slight jar as it was grappled by
the crane and hoisted upright, the seats turning in their gimbals. Pilot and
passenger unstrapped themselves and hurried through the refrigerated outlet and
away from the glowing-hot rocket.
An air-taxi, emblazoned
with the device of the Paratime Police, was waiting. Verkan Vail said good-by
to the rocket-pilot and took his seat beside the pilot of the aircab; the
latter lifted his vehicle above the building level and then set it down on the
landing-stage of the Paratime Police Building in a long, side-swooping glide.
An express elevator took Verkan Vail down to one of the middle stages, where he
showed his sigil to the guard outside the door of Tortha Karf's office and was
admitted at once.
The Paratime Police chief rose from behind
his semicircular desk, with its array of keyboards and viewing-screens and communicators.
He was a big man, well past his two hundredth year; his hair was iron-gray and
thinning in front, he had begun to grow thick at the waist, and his calm
features bore the lines of middle age. He wore the dark-green uniform of the
Paratime Police.
"Well, Vail," he greeted. "Everything secure?"
"Not exactly, sir." Verkan Vail
came around the desk, deposited his rifle and bag on the floor, and sat down in
one of the spare chairs. "I'll have to go back again."
"So?" His chief lit a cigarette and waited.
"I traced Gavran Sarn." Verkan Vail got out his pipe and began
to fill it. "But that's only the beginning. I have to trace something
else. Gavran Sarn exceeded his Paratime permit, and took one of his pets along.
A Venusian nighthound."
Tortha Karfs expression did not alter; it
merely grew more intense. He used one of the short, semantically ugly terms
which serve, in place of profanity, as the emotional release of a race that has
forgotten all taboos and terminologies.
"You're sure of this, of course."
It was less a question than a statement.
Verkan Vail bent and took cloth-wrapped
objects from his bag, unwrapping them and laying them on the desk. They were
casts in hard black plastic of the footprints of some large, three-toed animal.
"What do these look like, sir?" he asked.
Tortha Karf fingered them and nodded. Then he
became as visibly angry as a man of his civilization and culture-level ever permitted
himself.
"What does that fool
think we have a Paratime Code for?" he demanded. "It's entirely
illegal to transpose any extraterrestrial animal or object to any time-line on
which space-travel is unknown. I don't care if he is a green-seal thavrad;
he'll face charges, when he gets back, for this!"
"He was a green-seal thavrad,"
Verkan Vail corrected. "And he won't be coming back."
"I hope you didn't have to deal
summarily with him," Tortha Karf said. "With his title, and social
position, and his family's political importance, that might make difficulties.
Not that it wouldn't be all right with me, of course, but we never seem to be
able to make either the Management or the public realize the extremities to
which we are forced at times." He sighed. "We probably never
shall."
Verkan Vail smiled faintly. "Oh, no,
sir; nothing like that. He was dead before I transposed to that time-line. He
was killed when he wrecked a self-propelled vehicle he was using. One of those
Fourth Level automobiles. I posed as a relative and tried to claim his body for
the burial-ceremony observed on that cultural level, but was told that it had
been completely destroyed by fire when the fuel tank of this automobile burned.
I was given certain of his effects which had passed through the fire; I found
his sigil concealed inside what appeared to be a cigarette case." He took
a green disk from the bag and laid it on the desk. "There's no question;
Gavran Sarn died in the wreck of that automobile."
"And the nighthound?"
"It was in the car with him, but it
escaped. You know how fast those things are. I found that track"—he
indicated one of the black casts—"in some dried mud near the scene of the
wreck. As you see, the cast is slightly defective. The others were fresh this
morning, when I made them." "And what have you done so far?"
"I rented an old farm near the scene of
the wreck, and installed my field-generator there. It runs through to the
Hagraban Synthetics Works, about a hundred miles east of Thalna-Jarvizar. I
have my this-line terminal at the durable plastics factory; handled that on a
local police-power writ. Since then I've been hunting for the night-hound. I
think I can find it, but I'll need some special equipment, and a hypno-mech
indoctrination. That's why I came back."
"Has it been attracting any
attention?" Tortha Karf asked anxiously.
"Killing cattle in the locality; causing
considerable excitement. Fortunately, it's a locality of forested mountains and
valley farms, rather than a built-up industrial district. Local police and
wild-game protection officers are concerned; all the farmers excited, and going
armed. The theory is that it's either a wildcat of some sort, or a maniac armed
with a cutlass. Either theory would conform more or less to the nature of its
depredations. Nobody has actually seen it."
"That's good!" Tortha Karf was
relieved. "Well, you'll have to go and bring it out, or kill it and obliterate
the body. You know why as well as I do."
"Certainly, sir," Verkan Vail
replied. "In a primitive culture, things like this would be assigned
supernatural explanations, and embedded in the locally accepted religion. But
this culture, while nominally religious, is highly rationalistic in practice.
Typical lag-effect, characteristic of all expanding cultures. And this
Europo-American Sector really has an expanding culture. A hundred and fifty
years ago, the inhabitants of this particular time-line didn't even know how to
apply steam power; now they've begun to release nuclear energy, in a few crude
forms."
Tortha Karf whistled, softly. "That's
quite a jump. There's a sector that'll be in for trouble in the next few
centuries."
"That is realized locally, sir." Verkan Vail concentrated on
relighting his pipe for a moment, then continued: "I would predict
space-travel on that sector within the next century. Maybe the next
half-century, at least to the Moon. And the art of taxidermy is very highly
developed. Now, suppose some farmer shoots that thing; what would he do with
it, sir?"
Tortha Karf grunted. "Nice logic, Vail.
On a most uncomfortable possibility. He'd have it mounted, and it'd be put in
a museum, somewhere. And as soon as the first spaceship reaches Venus, and they
find those things in a wild state, they'll have the mounted specimen
identified."
"Exactly. And then, instead of beating
their brains about where their specimen came from, they'll begin asking when it
came from. They're quite capable of such reasoning even now."
"A hundred years isn't a particularly
long time," Tortha Karf considered. "I'll be retired, then, but
you'll have my job, and it'll be your headache. You'd better get this cleaned
up, now, while it can be handled. What are you going to do?"
"I'm not sure, now, sir. I want a
hypno-mech indoctrination, first," Verkan Vail gestured toward the
communicator on the desk. "May I?" he asked.
"Certainly." Tortha Karf slid the instrument across the desk.
"Anything you want."
"Thank you, sir." Verkan Vail
snapped on the code-index, found the symbol he wanted, and then punched it on
the keyboard. "Special Chief's Assistant Verkan Vail," he identified
himself. "Speaking from office of Tortha Karf, Chief Paratime Police. I
want a complete hypno-mech on Venusian nighthounds, emphasis on wild state,
special emphasis domesticated nighthounds reverted to wild state in terrestrial
surroundings, extra-special emphasis hunting techniques applicable to same. The
word 'nighthound' will do for trigger-symbol." He turned to Tortha Karf.
"Can I take it here?"
Tortha Karf nodded, pointing to a row of
booths along the far wall of the office.
"Make set-up for wired transmission; I'll take it here."
"Very well, sir; in fifteen
minutes," a voice replied out of the communicator.
Verkan Vail slid the communicator back.
"By the way, sir; I had a hitchhiker, on the way back. Carried him about a
hundred or so parayears; picked him up about three hundred parayears after
leaving my other-line terminal. Nasty-looking fellow, in a black uniform;
looked like one of these private-army storm troopers you find all through that
sector. Armed, and hostile. I thought I'd have to ray him, but he blundered
outside the field almost at once. I have a record, if you'd care to see it."
"Yes,
put it on." Tortha Karf gestured toward the solidograph-projector.
"It's set for miniature reproduction here on the desk; that be all
right?"
Verkan
Vail nodded, getting out the film and loading it into the projector. When he
pressed a button, a dome of radiance appeared on the desk top, two feet in
width and a foot in height. In the middle of this appeared a small solidograph
image of the interior of the conveyor, showing the desk, and the control board,
and the figure of Verkan Vail seated at it. The little figure of the storm
trooper appeared, pistol in hand. The little Verkan Vail snatched up his tiny
needier; the storm trooper moved into one side of the dome and vanished.
Verkan Vail flipped a
switch and cut out the image.
"Yes.
I don't know what causes that, but it happens, now and then," Tortha Karf
said. "Usually at the beginning of a transposition. I remember, when I
was just a kid, about a hundred and fifty years ago—a hundred and thirty-nine,
to be exact—I picked up a fellow on the Fourth Level, just about where you're
operating, and dragged him a couple of hundred parayears. I went back to find
him and return him to his own time-line, but before I could locate him, he'd
been arrested by the local authorities as a suspicious character, and got
himself shot trying to escape. I felt badly about that, but—" Tortha Karf
shrugged. "Anything else happen on the trip?"
"I
ran through a belt of intermittent nucleonic bombing on the Second Level."
Verkan Vail mentioned an approximate para-time location.
"Aaagh!
That Khiftan civilization—by courtesy so called!" Tortha Karf pulled a
wry face. "I suppose the intra-family enmities of the Hvadka Dynasty have
reached critical mass again. They'll fool around till they blast themselves
back to the stone age."
"Intellectually,
they're about there, now. I had to operate in that sector, once— Oh, yes,
another thing, sir. This rifle." Verkan Vail picked it up, emptied the
magazine and handed it to his superior. "The supplies office slipped up on
this; it's not appropriate to my line of operation. It's a lovely rifle, but
it's about two
ho space
police
hundred
percent in advance of existing arms design on my line. It excited the curiosity
of a couple of police officers and a game-protector, who should be familiar
with the weapons of their own time-line. I evaded by disclaiming ownership or
intimate knowledge, and they seemed satisfied, but it worried me."
"Yes.
That was made in our duplicating shops, here in Dherga-bar." Tortha Karf
carried it to a photographic bench, behind his desk. "I'll have it
checked, while you're taking your hypno-mech. Want to exchange it for something
authentic?"
"Why,
no, sir. It's been identified to me, and I'd excite less suspicion with it
than I would if I abandoned it and mysteriously acquired another rifle. I just
wanted a check, and Supplies warned to be more careful in future."
Tortha
Karf nodded approvingly. The young Mavrad of Nerros was thinking as a paratimer
should.
"What's the
designation of your line, again?"
Verkan
Vail told him. It was a short numerical term of six places, but it expressed a
number of the order of ten to the fortieth power, exact to the last digit.
Tortha Karf repeated it into his stenomemograph, with explanatory comment.
"There
seems to be quite a few things going wrong, in that area," he said.
"Let's see, now."
He
punched the designation on a keyboard; instantly, it appeared on a translucent
screen in front of him. He punched another combination, and, at the top of the
screen, under the number, there appeared:
EVENTS, PAST ELAPSED FIVE YEARS.
He punched again; below
this line appeared the sub-heading:
EVENTS INVOLVING PARATIME
TRANSPOSITION.
Another code-combination
added a third line:
(ATTRACTING
PUBLIC NOTICE AMONG INHABITANTS.)
He pressed the "start"-button; the
headings vanished, to be replaced by page after page of print, succeeding one
another on the screen as the two men read. They told strange and apparently disconnected
stories—of unexplained fires and explosions; of people vanishing without trace;
of unaccountable disasters to aircraft. There were many stories of an epidemic
of mysterious disk-shaped objects seen in the sky, singly or in numbers. To
each account was appended one or more reference-numbers. Sometimes Tortha Karf
or Verkan Vail would punch one of these, and read, on an adjoining screen, the
explanatory matter referred to.
Finally Tortha Karf leaned
back and lit a fresh cigarette.
"Yes,
indeed, Vail; very definitely we will have to take action in the matter of the
runaway nighthound of the late Gavran Sarn," he said. "I'd forgotten
that that was the time-line onto which the Ardrath expedition launched those
antigrav disks. If this extraterrestrial monstrosity turns up, on the heels of
that 'Flying Saucer' business, everybody above the order of intelligence of a
cretin will suspect some connection."
"What
really happened, in the Ardrath matter?" Verkan Vail inquired. "I was
on the Third Level, on that Luvarian Empire operation, at the time."
"That's
right; you missed that. Well, it was one of these joint-operation things. The
Paratime Commission and the Space Patrol were experimenting with a new
technique for throwing a spaceship into paratime. They used the cruiser
Ardrath, Kalzarn Jann commanding. Went into space about halfway to the Moon and
took up orbit, keeping on the sunlit side of the planet to avoid being
observed. That was all right. But then, Captain Kalzarn ordered away a flight
of antigrav disks, fully manned, to take pictures, and finally authorized a
landing in the western mountain range, Northern Continent, Minor Land-Mass.
That's when the trouble started."
He
flipped the run-back switch, till he had recovered the page he wanted. Verkan
Vail read of a Fourth Level aviator, in his little airscrew-drive craft,
sighting nine high-flying saucerlike objects.
"That
was how it began," Tortha Karf told him. "Before long, as other
incidents of the same sort occurred, our people on that line began sending back
to know what was going on. Naturally, from the different descriptions of these
'saucers,' they recognized the objects as antigrav landing-disks from a
spaceship. So I went to the Commission and raised atomic blazes about it, and
the
Ardrarh
was ordered to confine operations to the lower areas of the Fifth Level. Then
our people on that time-line went to work with corrective action. Here"
He wiped the screen and then began punching
combinations. Page after page appeared, bearing accounts of people who had
claimed to have seen the mysterious disks, and each report was more fantastic
than the last.
"The standard smother-out
technique," Verkan Vail grinned. "I only heard a little talk about
the 'Flying Saucers', and all of that was in joke. In that order of culture,
you can always discredit one true story by setting up ten others, palpably
false, parallel to it— Wasn't that the time-line the Tharmax Trading
Corporation almost lost their paratime license on?"
"That's
right; it was! They bought up all the cigarettes, and caused a conspicuous
shortage, after Fourth Level cigarettes had been introduced on this line and
had become popular. They should have spread their purchases over a number of
lines, and kept them within the local supply-demand frame. And they also got
into trouble with the local government for selling unrationed petrol and
automobile tires. We had to send in a special-operations group, and they came
closer to having to engage in out-time local politics than I care to think
of." Tortha Karf quoted a line from a currently popular song about the
sorrows of a policeman's life. "We're jugglers, Vail; trying to keep our
traders and sociological observers and tourists and plain idiots like the late
Gavran Sam out of trouble; trying to prevent panics and disturbances and
dislocations of local economy as a result of our operations; trying to keep out
of out-time politics—and, at all times, at all costs and hazards, by all means,
guarding the secret of paratime transposition. Sometimes I wish Ghaldron Karf
and Hesthor Ghrom had strangled in their cradles!"
Verkan Vail shook his head. "No,
chief," he said. "You don't mean that; not really," he said.
"We've been paratiming for the past ten thousand years. When the
Ghaldron-Hesthor trans-temporal field was discovered, our ancestors had pretty
well exhausted the resources of this planet. We had a world population of half a
billion, and it was all they could do to keep alive. After we began paratime
transposition, our population climbed to ten billion, and there it stayed for
the last eight thousand years. Just enough of us to enjoy our planet and the
other planets of the system to the fullest; enough of everything for everybody
that nobody needs fight anybody for anything. We've tapped the resources of
those other worlds on other time-lines, a little here, a little there, and not
enough to really hurt anybody. We've left our mark in a few places—the Dakota
Badlands, and the Gobi, on the Fourth Level, for instance—but we've done no
great damage to any of them."
"Except the time they blew up half the
Southern Island Continent, over about five hundred parayears on the Third Level,"
Tortha Karf mentioned.
"Regrettable accident,
to be sure," Verkan Vail conceded. "And look how much we've learned
from the experiences of those other time-lines. During the Crisis, after the
Fourth Interplanetary War, we might have adopted Palnar Sarn's 'Dictatorship of
the Chosen' scheme, if we hadn't seen what an exactly similar scheme had done
to the Jak-Hakka Civilization, on the Second Level. When Palnar Sam was told
about that, he went into paratime to see for himself, and when he returned, he
renounced his proposal in horror."
Tortha Karf nodded. He wouldn't be making any
mistake in turning his post over to the Mavrad of Nerros on his retirement.
"Yes, Vail; I know," he said.
"But when you've been at this desk as long as I have, you'll have a sour
moment or two, now and then, too."
A blue light flashed over
one of the booths across the room. Verkan Vail got to his feet, removing his
coat and hanging it on the back of his chair, and crossed the room, rolling up
his left shirt sleeve. There was a relaxer-chair in the booth, with a blue
plastic helmet above it. He glanced at the indicator-screen to make sure he was
getting the indoctrination he called for, and then sat down in the chair and
lowered the helmet over his head, inserting the ear plugs and fastening the
chin strap. Then he touched his left arm with an injector which was lying on
the arm of the chair, and at the same time flipped the starter switch.
Soft, slow music began to chant out of the
earphones. The insidious fingers of the drug blocked off his senses, one by one.
The music diminished, and the words of the hypnotic formula lulled him to
sleep.
He
woke, hearing the lively strains of dance music. For a while, he lay relaxed.
Then he snapped off the switch, took out the ear plugs, removed the helmet and
rose to his feet. Deep in his subconscious mind was the entire body of
knowledge about the Venusian nighthound. He mentally pronounced the word, and
at once it began flooding into his conscious mind. He knew the animal's
evolutionary history, its anatomy, its characteristics, its dietary and
reproductive habits, how it hunted, how it fought its enemies, how it eluded
pursuit, and how best it could be tracked down and killed. He nodded. Already,
a plan for dealing with Gavran Sarn's renegade pet was taking shape in his
mind.
He picked a plastic cup from the dispenser,
filled it from a cooler-tap with amber-colored spiced wine, and drank, tossing
the cup into the disposal-bin. He placed a fresh injector on the arm of the
chair, ready for the next user of the booth. Then he emerged, glancing at his
Fourth Level wrist watch and mentally translating to the First Level
time-scale. Three hours had passed; there had been more to learn about his
quarry than he had expected.
Tortha Karf was sitting behind his desk,
smoking a cigarette. It seemed as though he had not moved since Verkan Vail had
left him, though the special agent knew that he had dined, attended several
conferences, and done many other things.
"I checked up on your hitchhiker,
Vail," the chief said. "We won't bother about him. He's a member of
something called the Christian Avengers—one of those typical Europo-American
race-and-religious hate groups. He belongs in a belt that is the outcome of the
Hitler victory of 1940, whatever that was. Something unpleasant, I daresay. We
don't owe him anything; people of that sort should be stepped on, like
cockroaches. And he won't make any more trouble on the line where you dropped
him than they have there already. It's in a belt of complete social and
political anarchy; somebody probably shot him as soon as he emerged, because
he wasn't wearing the right sort of a uniform."
"And
did you find out about my rifle?" Verkan Vail asked.
"Oh, yes. It's a reproduction of
something that's called a Sharp's Model '37,235 Ultraspeed-Express. Made on an
adjoining paratime belt by a company that went out of business sixty-seven
years ago, elapsed time, on your line of operation. What made the difference
was the Second War Between The States. I don't know what that was, either—I'm
not too well up on Fourth Level history —but whatever, your line of operation
didn't have it. Probably just as well for them, though they very likely had
something else, as bad or worse. I put in a complaint to Supplies about it, and
got you some more ammunition and reloading tools. Now, tell me what you're
going to do about this nighthound business."
Tortha Karf was silent for a while, after Verkan Vail had finished.
"You're taking some awful chances, Vail," he said, at length.
"The way you plan doing it, the advantages will all be with the
nighthound. Those things can see as well at night as you can in daylight. I
suppose you know that, though; you're the nighthound specialist, now."
"Yes. But they're accustomed to the
Venus hotland marshes; it's been dry weather for the last two weeks, all over
the northeastern section of the Northern Continent. I'll be able to hear it,
long before it gets close to me. And I'll be wearing an electric headlamp. When
I snap that on, it'll be dazzled for a moment."
"Well, as I said, you're the nighthound
specialist. There's the communicator; order anything you need." He lit a
fresh cigarette from the end of the old one before crushing it out. "But
be careful, Vail. It took me close to forty years to make a paratimer out of
you; I don't want to have to repeat the process with somebody else before I can
retire."
The grass was wet as Verkan Vail—who reminded
himself that here he was called Richard Lee—crossed the yard from the farmhouse
to the ramshackle barn, in the early autumn darkness. It had been raining that
morning when the strato-rocket from Dherga-bar had landed him at the Hagraban
Synthetics Works, on the First Level; unaffected by the probabilities of human
history, the same rain had been coming down on the old Kinchwalter farm, near
Rutter's Fort, on the Fourth Level. And it had persisted all day, in a slow,
deliberate drizzle.
He didn't like that. The woods would be wet,
muffling his quarry's footsteps, and canceling his only advantage over the
night-prowler he hunted. He had no idea, however, of postponing the hunt. If
anything, the rain had made it all the more imperative that the nighthound be
killed at once. At this season, a falling temperature would speedily follow.
The nighthound, a creature of the hot Venus marshes, would suffer from the
cold, and, taught by years of domestication to find warmth among human habitations,
it would invade some isolated farmhouse, or, worse, one of the little valley
villages. If it were not killed tonight, the incident he had come to prevent
would certainly occur.
Going to the barn, he spread an old horse
blanket on the seat of the jeep, laid his rifle on it, and then backed the jeep
outside. Then he took off his coat, removing his pipe and tobacco from the
pockets, and spread it on the wet grass. He unwrapped a package and took out a
small plastic spray-gun he had brought with him from the First Level, aiming it
at the coat and pressing the trigger until it blew itself empty. A sickening,
rancid fetor tainted the air—the scent of the giant poison-roach of Venus, the
one creature for which the nighthound bore an inborn, implacable hatred. It was
because of this compulsive urge to attack and kill the deadly poison-roach that
the first human settlers on Venus, long millennia ago, had domesticated the
ugly and savage nighthound. He remembered that the Gavran family derived their
title from their vast Venus hotlands estates; that Gavran Sam, the man who had
brought this thing to the Fourth Level, had been born on the inner planet. When
Verkan Vail donned that coat, he would become his own living bait for the
murderous fury of the creature he sought. At the moment, mastering his
queasiness and putting on the coat, he objected less to that danger than to the
hideous stench of the scent, to obtain which a valuable specimen had been
sacrificed at the Dhergabar Museum of Extraterrestrial Zoology, the evening
before.
Carrying the wrapper and the spray-gun to an
outside fireplace, he snapped his lighter to them and tossed them in. They were
highly inflammable, blazing up and vanishing in a moment. He tested the
electric headlamp on the front of his cap; checked his rifle; drew the heavy
revolver, an authentic product of his line of operation, and flipped the
cylinder out and in again. Then he got into the jeep and drove away.
For half an hour, he drove quickly along the valley roads. Now and then,
he passed farmhouses, and dogs, puzzled and angered by the alien scent his coat
bore, barked furiously. At length, he turned into a back road, and from this to
the barely discernible trace of an old log road. The rain had stopped, and, in
order to be ready to fire in any direction at any time, he had removed the top
of the jeep. Now he had to crouch below the windshield to avoid overhanging
branches. Once three deer—a buck and two does-stopped in front of him and
stared for a moment, then bounded away with a flutter of white tails.
He was driving slowly now, laying behind him
a reeking trail of scent. There had been another stock-killing, the night
before, while he had been on the First Level. The locality of this latest
depredation had confirmed his estimate of the beast's probable movements, and
indicated where it might be prowling tonight. He was certain that it was
somewhere near; sooner or later, it would pick up the scent.
Finally, he stopped, snapping out his lights.
He had chosen this spot carefully, while studying the Geological Survey map
that afternoon; he was on the grade of an old railroad line, now abandoned and
its track long removed, which had served the logging operations of fifty years
ago. On one side, the mountain slanted sharply upward; on the other, it fell
away sharply. If the nighthound were below him, it would have to climb that
forty-five-degree slope, and could not avoid dislodging loose stones, or
otherwise making a noise. He would get out on that side; if the nighthound were
above him, the jeep would protect him when it charged. He got to the ground,
thumbing off the safety of his rifle, and an instant later he knew that he had
made a mistake which could easily cost him his life; a mistake from which neither his comprehensive logic nor his hypnotically
acquired knowledge of the beast's habits had saved him.
As he stepped to the ground, facing toward the front of the jeep, he
heard a low, whining cry behind him, and a rush of padded feet. He whirled,
snapping on the headlamp with his left hand and thrusting out his rifle
pistol-wise in his right. For a split second, he saw the charging animal, its
long, lizardlike head split in a toothy
grin, its talon-tipped fore-paws extended.
He fired, and the bullet went wild. The next
instant, the rifle was knocked from his hand. Instinctively, he flung up his
left arm to shield his eyes. Claws raked his left arm and shoulder, something
struck him heavily along the left side, and his cap-light went out as he
dropped and rolled under the jeep, drawing in his legs and fumbling under his
coat for the revolver.
In that instant, he knew
what had gone wrong. His plan had been entirely too much of a success. The
nighthound had winded him as he had driven up the old railroad-grade, and had
followed. Its best running speed had been just good enough to keep it a hundred
or so feet behind the jeep, and the motor-noise had covered the padding of its
feet. In the few moments between stopping the little car and getting out, the
nighthound had been able to close the distance and spring upon him.
It was characteristic of First-Level
mentality that Verkan Vail wasted no moments on self-reproach or panic. While
he was still rolling under his jeep, his mind had been busy with plans to retrieve
the situation. Something touched the heel of one boot, and he froze his leg
into immobility, at the same time trying to get the big Smith & Wesson
free. The shoulder-holster, he found, was badly torn, though made of the
heaviest skirting-leather, and the spring which retained the weapon in place
had been wrenched and bent until he needed both hands to draw. The eight-inch
slashing-claw of the nighthound's right intermediary limb had raked him; only
the instinctive motion of throwing up his arm, and the fact that he wore the
revolver in a shoulder-holster, had saved his life.
The nighthound was prowling around the jeep,
whining frantically. It was badly confused. It could see quite well, even in
the close darkness of the starless night; its eyes were of a nature capable of
perceiving infrared radiations as light. There were plenty of these; the jeep's
engine, lately running on four-wheel drive, was quite hot. Had he been standing
alone, especially on this raw, chilly night, Verkan Vall's own body-heat would
have lighted him up like a jack-o'-lantern. Now, however, the hot engine above
him masked his own radiations. Moreover, the poison-roach scent on his coat was
coming up through the floor board and mingling with the scent on the seat, yet
the nighthound couldn't find the two-and-a-half foot insectlike thing that
should have been producing it. Verkan Vail lay motionless, wondering how long
the next move would be in coming. Then he heard a thud above him, followed by a
furious tearing as the nighthound ripped the blanket and began rending at the
seat cushion.
"Hope it gets a paw-full of
seat-springs," Verkan Vail commented mentally. He had already found a
stone about the size of his two fists, and another slightly smaller, and had
put one in each of the side pockets of the coat. Now he slipped his revolver
into his waist-belt and writhed out of the coat, shedding the ruined shoulder-holster
at the same time. Wriggling on the flat of his back, he squirmed between the
rear wheels, until he was able to sit up, behind the jeep. Then, swinging the
weighted coat, he flung it forward, over the nighthound and the jeep itself, at
the same time drawing his revolver.
Immediately, the nighthound, lured by the
sudden movement of the principal source of the scent, jumped out of the jeep
and bounded after the coat, and there was considerable noise in the brush on
the lower side of the railroad grade. At once, Verkan Vail swarmed into the
jeep and snapped on the lights.
His stratagem had succeeded beautifully. The
stinking coat had landed on the top of a small bush, about ten feet in front of
the jeep and ten feet from the ground. The nighthound, erect on its haunches,
was reaching out with its front paws to drag it down, and slashing angrily at
it with its single-clawed intermediary limbs. Its back was to Verkan Vail.
His sights clearly defined by the lights in
front of him, the paratimer centered them on the base of the creature's spine,
just above its secondary shoulders, and carefully squeezed the trigger. The big
.357 Magnum bucked in his hand and belched flame
and sound—if only these Fourth Level weapons weren't so confoundedly
boisterous!—and the nighthound screamed and fell. Recock-ing the revolver,
Verkan Vail waited for an instant, then nodded in satisfaction. The beast's
spine had been smashed, and its hind quarters, and even its intermediary
fighting limbs had been paralyzed. He aimed carefully for a second shot and
fired into the base of the thing's skull. It quivered and died.
Getting a flashlight, he found his rifle,
sticking muzzle-down in the mud a little behind and to the right of the jeep,
and swore briefly in the local Fourth Level idiom, for Verkan Vail was a man
who loved good weapons, be they sigma-ray needlers, neutron-disruption
blasters, or the solid-missile projectors of the lower levels. By this time, he
was feeling considerable pain from the claw-wounds he had received. He peeled
off his shirt and tossed it over the hood of the jeep. Tortha Karf had advised
him to carry a needier, or a blaster, or a neurostat-gun, but Verkan Vail had
been unwilling to take such arms onto the Fourth Level. In event of mishap to
himself, it would be all too easy for such a weapon to fall into the hands of
someone able to deduce from its scientific principles too far in advance of the
general Fourth Level culture. But there had been one First Level item which he
had permitted himself, mainly because, suitably packaged, it was not readily
identifiable as such. Digging a respectable Fourth-Level leatherette case from
under the seat, he opened it and took out a pint bottle with a red
poison-label, and a towel. Saturating the towel with the contents of the
bottle, he rubbed every inch of his torso with it, so as not to miss even the
smallest break made in his skin by the septic claws of the nighthound. Whenever
the lotion-soaked towel touched raw skin, a pain like the burn of a hot iron
shot through him; before he was through, he was in agony. Satisfied that he had
disinfected every wound, he dropped the towel and clung weakly to the side of
the jeep. He grunted out a string of English oaths, and capped them with an
obscene Spanish blasphemy he had picked up among the Fourth Level inhabitants
of his island home of Nerros, to the south, and a thundering curse in the name
of Mogga, Fire-God of Dool, in a Third Level tongue. He mentioned Fasif, Great
God of Khift, in a manner which would have got him an acid-bath if the Khiftan
priests had heard him. He alluded to the baroque amatory practices of the Third
Level Illyalla people, and soothed himself in the classical Dar-Halma tongue
with one of those rambling genealogical insults favored in the Indo-Turanian
Sector of the Fourth Level.
By this time, the pain had
subsided to an over-all smarting itch. He'd have to bear with that until his
work was finished and he could enjoy a hot bath. He got another bottle out of
the first-aid kit—a flat pint, labeled "Old Overholt," containing a
locally-manufactured specific for inward and subjective wounds—and medicated
himself copiously from it, corking it and slipping it into his hip pocket
against future need. He gathered up the ruined shoulder-holster and threw it
under the back seat. He put on his shirt. Then he went and dragged the dead
nighthound onto the grade by its stumpy tail.
It was an ugly thing, weighing close to two
hundred pounds, with powerfully muscled hind legs which furnished the bulk of
its motive-power, and sturdy three-clawed front legs. Its secondary limbs,
about a third of the way back from its front shoulders, were long and slender;
normally, they were carried folded closely against the body, and each was armed
with a single curving claw. The revolver-bullet had gone in at the base of the
skull and emerged under the jaw; the head was relatively undamaged. Verkan Vail
was glad of that; he wanted that head for the trophy-room of his home on
Nerros. Grunting and straining, he got the thing into the back of the jeep, and
flung his almost shredded tweed coat over it.
A last look around assured him that he had
left nothing unaccountable or suspicious. The brush was broken where the
night-hound had been tearing at the coat; a bear might have done that. There
were splashes of the viscid stuff the thing had used for blood, but they
wouldn't be there long. Terrestrial rodents liked nighthound blood, and the
woods were full of mice. He climbed in under the wheel, backed, turned, and
drove away.
Inside the paratime-transposition dome,
Verkan Vail turned from the body of the nighthound, which he had just dragged
in, and considered the inert form of another animal—a stump-tailed, tuft-eared,
tawny Canada lynx. That particular animal had already made two paratime
transpositions; captured in the vast wilderness of Fifth Level North America,
it had been taken to the First Level and placed in the Dhergabar Zoological
Gardens, and then, requisitioned on the authority of Tortha Karf, it had been
brought to the Fourth Level by Verkan Vail. It was almost at the end of all its
travels.
Verkan
Vail prodded the supine animal with the toe of his boot; it twitched slightly.
Its feet were cross-bound with straps, but when he saw that the narcotic was
wearing off, Verkan Vail snatched a syringe,
parted the fur at the base of its neck, and gave it an injection. After a
moment, he picked it up in his arms and carried it out to the jeep.
"All
right, pussy cat," he said, placing it under the rear seat, "this is
the one-way ride. The way you're doped up, it won't hurt a bit."
He
went back and rummaged in the debris of the long-deserted barn. He picked up a hoe, and discarded it as too light. An old plowshare was too unhandy. He
considered a grate-bar from a heating furnace, and then he found the poleax
lying among a pile of worm-eaten boards. Its handle had been shortened, at some
time, to about twelve inches, converting it into a heavy hatchet. He weighed
it, and tried it on a block of wood, and then, making sure that the secret door
was closed, he went out again and drove off.
An hour later, he returned. Opening the
secret door, he carried the ruined shoulder-holster, and the straps that had
bound the bobcat's feet, and the ax, now splotched with blood and tawny
cat-hairs, into the dome. Then he closed the secret room, and took a long drink
from the bottle on his hip.
The job was done. He would take a hot bath,
and sleep in the farmhouse till noon, and then he would return to the First
Level. Maybe Tortha Karf would want him to come back here for a while. The
situation on this time-line was far from satisfactory, even if the crisis
threatened by Gavran Sarn's renegade pet had been averted. The presence of a
chief's assistant might be desirable.
At least, he had a right to expect a short
vacation. The claw-wounds were still smarting vexatiously. A hot bath, and a
night's sleep— He took another drink, lit his pipe, picked up his rifle and
started across the yard to the house.
Private Zinkowski cradled the telephone and
got up from the desk, stretching. He left the orderly room and walked across
the hall to the recreation room, where the rest of the boys were loafing.
Sergeant Haines, in a languid gin-rummy game with Corporal Conner, a sheriff's
deputy, and a mechanic from the service station down the road, looked up.
"Well, Sarge, I think we can write off
those stock-killings," the private said.
"Yeah?" The sergeant's interest quickened.
"Yeah. I think the whatzit's had it. I
just got a buzz from the railroad cops at Logansport. It seems a track-walker
found a dead bobcat on the Logan River branch, about a mile or so below MMY
signal tower. Looks like it tangled with that night freight up-river, and came
off second best. It was near chopped to hamburger."
"MMY signal tower; that's right below
Yoder's Crossing," the sergeant considered. "The Strawmyer farm
night-before-last, the Amrine farm last night— Yeah, that would be about
right."
"That'll suit Steve Parker; bobcats
aren't protected, so it's not his trouble. And they're not a violation of State
law, so it's none of our worry," Conner said. "Your deal, isn't it,
Sarge?" ised Sam Kane, the AP man at Logansport, that I'd let him in
"Yeah. Wait a
minute." The sergeant got to his feet. "I prom-on anything new."
He got up and started for the phone. "Phantom Killer!" He blew an
impolite noise.
"Well, it was a lot of excitement while
it lasted," the deputy sheriff said, "Just like that Flying Saucer
thing."
6. Galactic Security decided that this upstart
planet Terra must be taught a lesson—for its own good, of course. Only the results proved to be highly surprising to
both Terra and Galactic Security. Consult either Colonel Albert Baker or the
Galactic Task Commander on that point.
RALPH WILLIAMS
Pax Galáctica
In north America, it was a bright, cool April night when
Galactic Security, after several years of careful observation, decided the
Solar Phoenix was a little too hot for Terrestrials to play with.
Early Warning, as was its function, made
first contact as the ships flashed up over the northwestern horizon. The first
report was disbelieved, it was off the grid and too high and too fast-but it
was followed almost instantly by contact from three other sites. The controller
made a rough mental plot from those first few tracks and did not like it at
all. He gnawed his thumbnail for about thirty seconds, and by that time the
tracks were going up in plot. The sight decided him. There was no time to be
wrong about this, the strangers were closing too fast, better to take a chance
on looking silly than to be caught short.
He scrambled everything he had and
transmitted a full alert-On the control deck of the lead ship of the second
element, the captain and the task commander of the GS patrol stood watching
Earth roll by them fifty miles below.
"We're
being tracked," the watch officer said. He did not speak 124 in English,
of course, nor in any Earthly tongue. As a matter of fact, he did not speak at
all, as we use the term.
The task commander nodded. "Let 'em
track. This is task, not reconnaissance. They'll have plenty of reason to know
we're here in a few minutes, anyway."
Below, off the starboard bow, a smudge of
light marking an airfield suddenly winked out. "Rather effective security
they have, at that," he added grudgingly, "considering their
technical limitations."
"Coming
on first target," the watch officer said.
The task commander glanced at the position
plot and stepped over to his station. "Polka Dot Leader, Task
Leader," he said, "coming on your target. Advise on execution."
"Polka Dot Leader, Roger," the
speaker said, "coming on target." Thirty miles ahead, the first
gleaming shape showed gaping holes along its belly as its bays slid open.
"On target," the speaker said.
An orderly array of stubby-winged projectiles
drifted leisurely out of her belly.
"All clear, 1319 and a quarter," the speaker said.
"Roger," the task commander said. "Rendezvous."
The empty bays of the big silver ship blinked
shut and she stuck her nose up and began to climb. Below her, her progeny
dipped and swung faster and faster toward Earth, while the remainder of the
formation swept past above.
The task commander studied the position plot
again. "Polka Dot Two," he said, "coming on your target."
The radar did not at first catch the drop,
but when the lead ship left formation and began to climb, the controller
smelled death on its way. Without thinking twice, he ordered Bomb Warning A. He
had no way of knowing what was coming, but those ships up there were certainly
nuclear powered, no chemical engine could drive that high and fast, and
whatever they laid would be potent. For himself, and the personnel of plot,
there was nothing he could do. They had to stay and keep trying. He did not, he
thought somewhat gloomily, even have time to worry about it; at that moment
the first tracks on the projectiles began to come through, as they separated
from the formation, and he began to be very busy.
There
was no use trying for the ships themselves, they went over at five times his
interceptors' ceiling and six times their speed, he vectored everything he had
in on the extrapolated drop course. Even this was useless, he soon found. As
they closed with his fighters, the projectiles suddenly put on power and took
evasive action. He had guessed they would, a free drop would hardly be made
from that altitude and distance, but confirmation did not make him happy. The
first projectile sizzled past the fighters at fifteen hundred miles an hour and
streaked for the base-Strategic Air Command alerted on the first flash, and by
the time the GS patrol had made its second drop the heavies were rumbling out
onto the runways. They were armed and their eggs snuggled lethally in their
bellies, but their pilots did not yet know their targets. Their mission was
retaliatory, to get air-borne before the first strike hit them, and to see
there were no bases for the enemy to return to. They would get their targets
when the enemy was identified.
They never did get them. The first bomber was
fifty miles out climbing on course when they got the bad news from their controller.
A moment later their own radar picked up the bandit, closing fast from above.
The turrets began to swivel, but they were not fast enough, they could not even
track the enemy; as he flashed by at two thousand yards something flickered out
to touch the big bomber, and it crumpled in on itself and lost speed and began
to fall through the night just beginning to be touched by dawn.
The commanding general of SAC himself had
observed the action by radar.
"Those weren't
bomb-drops," he said. "They were fighter-drops. Fighter-bombers,
probably. They'll be here next." His words were prophetic. They were—
The GS patrol had flown into day, through it,
and back into night again, on a course that roughly quartered the globe, by the
time the last drop was made. Task Leader and Red Stripe Three pulled up to
orbital altitude together and cut power. Polka Dot Leader had already made her
pickup and the others were dropping down to do the same, but it would be some
time before Red Stripe's parasites completed their missions.
Reports were coming in regularly, it was
already obvious that the strike would be completely successful, and the task
commander
was in a jovial mood. There were losses, of
course, even with a ten-to-one superiority in speed and an astronomical edge in
armament a planet-wide action against an alert and savagely resistant foe
cannot be fought without losses, but they were well within the calculated
margin the commander had sent back to base in his preliminary estimate. He had
done a good, workmanlike job, and he knew it. Adequate recognition would come
at base, but in the meantime he wanted to explain just how good a job it was,
and he could not very well do this to military personnel; they were all below
him in rank so he sought out the civilian observer from the Department of
Minorities and Backward Peoples.
"How do you like it?" he asked. "Good, fast, clean job,
don't you think? All we have to do now is pick up our chicks, seed the inhibitor,
and get out."
The Department man was somewhat dazed, he had never seen anything quite
like this before. "Well, yes, I suppose so," he said. "How many
casualties do you think there will be?"
The task commander pulled at his lip,
mentally extrapolating the reported losses. "Not more than twenty,"
he said confidently, "just over one per cent. Very cheap, really, for a
planetary action of this scope."
"No, no," the Department man said
impatiently. "I know our own losses are light. The others, I mean, the
Terrestrials, how many of those do you think we're killing?"
"Well, I hadn't really tried to
guess," the task commander said uneasily. He had not thought of the
natives before as people, he was familiar with them, of course, from the years
of observation and his briefing; but he had been thinking only in terms of installations
to be destroyed.
"I suppose they'll run rather
high," he said. "We've tried to avoid nonstrategic targets, but you
can't rip the heart out of a heavily militarized planet without killing people.
Yes, I suppose their casualties will be heavy."
He scratched thoughtfully at his nose.
"Um-m-m . . . military crews . . . civilian personnel . . . we're
pinpointing our strikes, you understand, but population is so dense in some
areas, we can't confine fission products, vapors, dusts, and I don't suppose
they are at all well protected .. •
let's say three or four million, in all."
The
Department man stared at him. "Three or four million? Do
you
suppose the Council knew that when they authorized this raid?"
"Of course they did/'
the task commander said impatiently. "You have to remember this planet is
already heavily overpopu-lated, well over two billion, it's really bursting at
the seams, these people breed like flies. Actually, four million is only two
tenths of a per cent, or less, of the total population. A
minor famine or epidemic could take that many, the next atomic war could have
taken ten or twenty per cent, if we hadn't pulled their teeth.
"It's bad, I'll grant you that," he
added hastily, seeing the look on the Department man's face. "Even tragic.
But you have to look at things like this rationally, from the long view. These
people have to be controlled for their own good, we can't let them just run
loose to slaughter each other and perhaps even destroy the planet.
"With the advanced weapons they had,
they were like idiot children playing with machine guns."
The Pentagon was not, in the raiders'
operations, a military target. In the midst of disaster and
confusion, Intelligence and Communications still functioned, if not smoothly,
at least adequately. The basic picture of the raid and its effect began to
shape up almost before the last raider had slid up through the atmosphere to
join the formation orbiting effortlessly above.
First,
there was no longer in any part of the world, so far as careful reconnaissance
could determine, any store of fissionable material nor any plant for processing
such material. Where these had been were now boiling pits of liquid magma, with
the air above and about lethally charged with radioactive debris. Either the
raiders had perfect intelligence, or they had instruments able to sniff out the
stuff with uncanny precision, in either event they had got them all.
Second,
most of the nuclear technicians—and this included the best technical and
scientific brains in the world—had gone with their works.
Third,
the raiders were extraterrestrial. They had not spared any major nation, and
they were too well-armed and well-organized, they did not fit in any Earthly
technology.
Whence they had come, and whither gone, no
one could say with assurance, but their purpose was clear—to see that men did
not again use nuclear energy for either war or peace.
Forty-eight hours later, as the inhibitor settled down from the
stratosphere, a secondary interdict became manifest. Men would also no longer
use chemical explosives. Above a pressure of two hundred psi, chemical
reactions were self-damping. Hydroelectric and steam plants functioned
normally, low-compression engines and jets idled without power; but guns
fizzled damply and high-compression engines stalled. A ceiling had been put on
the compact power available to man.
Attempts were made at censorship, the
enormity of the raid's implications were so obvious that the most stringent
measures were indicated. Presses and editions were impounded, reporters locked
up and even shot, a straight embargo on all nonmilitary long-distance
communications was clamped down, security officers sprouted new ulcers and went
sleepless. But it was too big, too sudden and unexpected, too spectacular. Even
after years of indoctrination and screening and stringent regulation, there
were too many poor security risks in the services, too many leaks, too many
people who simply refused to understand the necessity for keeping their mouths
and minds and eyes and ears closed in matters of military significance. And in
every community there were the loud-mouths and wiseacres who could draw and
spread conclusions from the fact that Oak Ridge and Brookhaven and Hanford and
Los Alamos were hit, that their automobiles no longer ran, that guns would not
shoot.
The news got out.
Men of good will had been talking disarmament
for years. Now they had it, a free gift from heaven, somewhat roughly delivered
but none the less effective.
After the first shock, thoughtful men
everywhere began to consider what it might mean—
"It means," Paul Bonner said,
"rescue at the eleventh hour, the Marines have landed, the courier has
ridden up with the reprieve." He sipped appreciatively at his second
preprandial martini. "These are very good, dear."
His wife, curled at his feet before the
fireplace, nodded complacently.
"It means," he continued, "men can relax and live again.
Here
we
were, sitting on a powder magazine, the few sane ones among us at the mercy of
the brainless yuts giving each other hotfeet, and now suddenly some watchful
intelligence, like a careful parent, has snatched the matches away."
"I'm going to miss our
car," his wife sighed.
"I
shan't," Bonner said positively. "There were too many cars, too many
airplanes, too much speed. Man's machines evolved faster than he. We weren't
built to cover miles in split minutes. Now we can slow down and catch up,
consolidate our gains, live at a more natural pace, take time to think and
really live. I say, it's a cheap price to pay."
And:
"The
fact of disarmament itself," Professor Salton wrote in his diary, "is
of secondary significance, and must have been adjudged so by the raiders
themselves. Had they been chiefly intent on demilitarizing the planet, they
would not logically have confined themselves to the targets they chose. The
logic of complete demilitarization would have included the dispersal of armies
in the field, and the destruction of all heavy industry which might contribute
to the manufacture of munitions other than chemical and nuclear explosives. It
is significant that stores of poison gas and biological warfare centers were
not attacked.
"The
inference can therefore be drawn that the raiders were socially sophisticated
enough, and sufficiently well informed, to recognize the deep imbalance in our
culture between the physical and social sciences.
"Their primary concern
was to right this imbalance."
The
professor turned a page and sat for a moment with poised pen, seeing not the
blank sheet before him, but the panorama of western history, developing in
tracings of ever more complex scope from the first few crabbed scribblings of
the Sumerians.
"The
focus of the main stream of human thought and inquiry," he wrote,
"proceeds across the broad canvas of the plenum not in a steady progression,
but in complicated pendulumlike sweeps from extreme to extreme—Hegelian thesis
and antithesis, except that the final result is never a simple balancing, the
synthesis results rather from the shading in of all areas between the opposite
poles of thought until the distinction is lost and it all becomes one. This
pendulum has multi-dimensional articulation, so that the trace is never a
simple linear function, it never covers exactly the same area twice. Its
movement is a complex function of all the things men have known or thought
about since the beginning of time.
"The European Renaissance came as a
reaction to the sterile perfectionism of Augustinian idealism. Because its
impetus derived from an extreme of preoccupation with human behavior and morals,
it not only swung wildly to the opposite extreme of rigidly objective
experimentalism, but it spent its major force in the field of physical science.
This was no accident, it was an inevitable outgrowth of the spirit of the
times and the antecedents of our culture.
"We have now worked around the periphery of physical knowledge
till we have again reached the pole of intuitive rationalism, where the
universe melts into a confusing amorphism only scholars can feel at home in.
Men of inquiring and independent minds must inevitably recoil into a simpler
atmosphere where sight and touch again have meaning.
"The next swing should have directed us
back to a concern with human motivation and activity.
"There were several indications that
this trend was indeed developing.
"Men were wondering seriously why they thought like men, in a world
engineered for the comfort of their animal bodies; as five hundred years
earlier they had wondered why men had bodies, if only the soul were important.
The development of the physical sciences had subtly loosened the hold of
superstition on the minds of men, so that if they were unwilling to follow,
they at least tolerated, students who classified the cherished opinions of themselves
and others as phenomena in the physical universe, and called all the physical
universe a valid field for objective inquiry. Scattered engineers and
clinicians here and there were beginning to establish functional relations
between pride and pay scales, human fellowship and production records, social
status and sexual mores. The alchemistic mind-doctors were seeking the
philosopher's stone which would transmute the dross of our individual foibles
into shining gold—but stumbling here and there on factual discoveries
scientists might later turn to good account. Perhaps Korzybski had written the
'Novum Organum' of a new Renaissance. And the germs of new mathematics that
could handle the manifold variables were sprouting. The time was ready for a
Newton.
"But it came too late. It needed fifty
or a hundred years to get its growth, and with the helium bomb the world no
longer had that time left.
"So the Raiders came. In effect, they
moved the clock of our conquest of the physical world back a hundred years.
Before they came, we had passed the peak of the gasoline age and were moving
into the atomic age. When they left, we were back in the age of steam.
"Undoubtedly, in the years to come, men
will again discover energy sources as powerful as those they lost, but it will
take time, perhaps not as long as the original hundred years, but still a
breathing spell. And in that time the science of human behavior will have its
chance. By the time we are ready to fly to the stars again, or have the power
to blast whole armies out of existence, we will have means of controlling
ourselves so that this power is used with cunning foresight for the good of
man, rather than suicidally, like an idiot child playing with a machine gun.
"This is the best
thing that could have happened to men."
And:
A writer who had dedicated the best years of
his life to a crusade against the pointless stupidities and petty unthinking
cruelties of his fellow men, at two bits a word, was putting the finishing
touches on a rush article.
"Pride,"
he wrote, "goeth before a fall—and men who thought they had tamed all
nature, and were looking for new worlds to loot in the stars, have suddenly
learned they have a master. The simple-minded barbarians who strutted
valorously with the power of thousands of horses at their command have seen
their most prized works crumble like sand castles before the tide.
"It
was a lesson men sorely needed, the simple lesson of humility.
"In
my own mind, for the first time since Hiroshima, is peace and good will and
comfortable assurance that me and mine will live out our normal span in a world
of men chastened and rendered less cocksure by this experience.
"I say, God bless the
raiders—"
There were, of course, some who were not quite so sure— On a hillside in Asia some two months after the
raiders had come, Sergeant Albert Baker sat in the bright summer sun watching
through glasses the mouth of a low pass. A cloud of dust rose there which came
quickly down into the valley. Sparkles of light from burnished lance-tips
flashed from the cloud. A Mongol swordsman with horsetails tied to his cap
cantered out ahead and reined up to look around.
Baker's
lips drew back in a snarl. This was the enemy. To them, the inhibitor had meant
nothing. They threw their guns away, sharpened their lances, and whooped down
upon the gun crews, tankers, and machine-gunners who clubbed useless carbines
and threw rocks. The first few weeks had been massacre. After that the
Americans recovered somewhat from their shock, began to reorganize and pick up
edged weapons, to fight their way back to the sea. They were outnumbered and
outmaneuvered, they could not in a few days learn a type of warfare devoid of
firepower and mechanized supply, and the retreat was mostly a rout.
During
that time, only men who moved fast and learned quickly survived. Baker was only
nineteen, but he had come all the way, in this fighting he was an old hand, a
veteran who knew all the tricks. He could hardly remember what it felt like to
ride in a truck, sleep on a full belly, or command weapons that killed in great
bursts of flame or sheets of lead. The tools he knew were knife and spear,
arbalest and sword. His enemy was not a plane or a tank, it was the flat-faced
horseman with sword or lance.
The
Americans now stood with their backs to the sea, waiting for evacuation
complicated by lack of Diesel- or gasoline-powered landing craft. Their
situation was not bad, really, there were not very many of them left to
evacuate, most were dead in the hills and plains of the interior; and to some
extent supply had caught up with them here, they ate more often and they had a
weapon to at least harass the horsemen.
The
leading squadrons were well into the valley now, the point abreast of Baker. He
moved his magneto box around between his knees and squatted over it, his
glasses on the man standing on a spiny ridge at the lower end of the valley.
Presently the man signaled, and Baker pressed the plunger. In the valley
below, a thin vapor began to creep out from all sides toward the horsemen in
the center. Baker carefully checked his sector with his glasses. All cylinders
had fired—they almost had to, poison gas was cheap in the United States but
dear here where the cylinders were brought up on men's backs, and they had been
spread thin.
"All right," he said finally, "let's
get out of here before those gooks spot us."
His men needed no urging, they had been
uncomfortably aware of their exposed position for some time. They picked up
their weapons and moved off at a swift walk along the hillside. There was a
small gully they must cross, and here they donned masks before they scrambled
down. The bank on the other side was steep, they needed to boost each other up
to make it, and they were not all up when half a troop of the enemy, red-eyed
and wheezing, came stampeding up out of the valley at them.
Baker saw them coming only a few hundred
yards away, with his little force split, half on the bank and half below. He
dropped his arbalest to cock it and shouted a warning.
There were three pikes in the party, twelve-foot shafts with heavy,
wicked points of razor-ground steel armor scrap. The men had been using these
to climb the bank, they snatched them away now and swung out to set them with
drilled precision. The other men in the gully had captured swords and bayoneted
M-i's, except for Baker and one other with arbalests of jeep spring-leaves and
airplane cable mounted on M-i stocks. One man, a swordsman, was hanging on the
edge of the bank by his elbows, on the verge of hoisting himself over, he
twisted his head to look over his shoulder, hesitated a moment, and then slid
back down to join them. Baker was glad to see him come, there was another
arbalest on the bank, that was a good place for him, but the swordsmen and spearmen
up there were useless. Still he could not order them back down, this looked
like a death trap. Their left flank was anchored on the bank, but their right
hung in the air. He grabbed two spearmen and swung them around to give some
protection, but there were just not enough of them to cover it adequately. He
and the other arbalestier stepped in behind the pikemen and spearmen, who had
dropped to their knees, and Baker slipped in a quarrel.
The enemy point swerved in at them, settling
his lance, and at five yards Baker shot the horse in the throat. The other
arbalestier took the second. A swordsman flashed by on the right and swung
viciously at Baker, who parried with the stock of his weapon. At the same
moment, from the corner of his eye he saw a horse caught on two of the pikes
and one of his spearmen leaping out, yelling, over the pikemen and struggling
horses to bayonet its rider. After that there was only dust and confusion and
flashing steel and yelling men, and then sudden quiet. It took some minutes
for Baker to realize the clash was over and he still alive—actually the enemy
had not been anxious to press their charge home or turn his flank, they had
only been trying to get out of the valley as quickly as possible and the
platoon had been in the way.
Still,
it had not been fun, the brief flurry had cost them men. Baker cursed the enemy
and the raiders both, thinking how much difference even one stinking Browning
would have made—
After twenty years, the
inhibitor against high-pressure chemical reaction lost its effectiveness and
needed to be re-seeded. It was a routine task for one cruiser, there was no
real reason for the former task commander, now deputy fleet admiral, to go
along. At the moment, however, things were quiet and Galactic Security labored
under an economy budget. The admiral needed the flight-time, and besides he was
curious. He held a peculiar affection for Earth, the action of twenty years
before had been his first independent task command, and still stood in his
mind as a perfectly planned and executed job.
The civilian observer from the Department of Minorities and Backward
Peoples went along because the Department wanted a check and he had asked for
the assignment. He, too, was curious; this had been an unorthodox and
controversial experiment from the start, and he was still unconvinced of its
overall desirability.
They came in over the pole on almost the same
course they had flown twenty years before, and the admiral was first to notice
the change.
"No
radar," he said, watching the instruments.
Where before a whole continent had quivered and reacted with alert
savagery to their appearance, they now coasted alone through the bright sky,
apparently unheeded and unknown to men. It made the admiral vaguely uneasy.
The seeding was to be done at two hundred thousand, in a crisscross
pattern which would take several hours, and the Department observer wanted to
go down in the tender and make some checks at a lower altitude. The admiral
decided to go with him.
They glided down to five thousand feet before
applying power, careless of who might see the disk-shaped flier drifting
overhead; there was no particular reason to avoid observation now, this planet
had already known them.
Over the northern United States, there was
superficially little change, the admiral had little difficulty in orienting
himself by the photo-charts made more than twenty years before, railroads and
highways still cut in straight lines across the plains checker-boarded by
wheatfields. Not till they came over the lakes region did they begin to notice
significant differences. Here, small villages spotted crossroads where they had
not appeared on the old charts, and cities had shrunk and drawn in upon
themselves. Once again, the United States was a predominantly rural nation.
In the days immediately after the raid, there
had been little change in those cities not directly affected. There were deaths
from radiation sickness and poisoning as the debris of the raid sifted through
the atmosphere, and film badges and gas masks became a part of the everyday
costume of those who could afford them; automobiles rusted where they stood and
there were minor inconveniences; but the streetcars still ran, electric signs
flashed, and the plumbing worked. In those first days, aside from the blasted
areas, the farms and suburbs were hardest hit. Life there had tied itself
tightly to the internal-combustion engine, to tractors and trucks and aircraft
and Diesel engines.
There were not very many crops planted or
harvested in North America that year.
As summer wore on, the cities also began to
feel the pinch. Distribution was difficult without trucks, highlands and
reservoirs needed helicopters and power boats for maintenance. Prices rose and
inconveniences multiplied.
By fall, in the poorer sections, people were starving.
By the next spring, the population of the
United States was less than sixty million and the machinery of civilization
rusted unattended while people scrabbled for food. The bones of Paul Bonner
and his pretty wife lay in a roadside ditch, with spring rains melting the ice
and flesh from them.
That summer was bad too, but the seeds of
resurgence were sprouting. The federal gold hoard came out of its vaults to buy
food men would not sell for paper, and when the hard yellow coin began to
circulate people forgot their despair and their wits sharpened and they looked
about for opportunity. Old stern-wheelers slid off the banks and creaked out of
sloughs to push tons of Argentine beef and horses and grain up the inland
waters from New Orleans. Independent train crews hauled loads for speculators
out from St. Louis and Cincinnati and Kansas City. People drifted back to the
cities to build steam tractors.
In another year the trains were running on
schedules of a sort and a few turbine-powered automobiles and trucks were on
the highways.
Five years after the raid, the country was
back on its feet, but it was not the same country. Cultures, like individuals, discard
patterns of behavior associated with defeat and cherish jealously those
associated with gratification. The trauma of sudden, almost mortal, disaster is
apt to intensify these reactions to the point of mania.
From five thousand feet, the country now
looked green and prosperous, even the scars of Brookhaven were growing over.
The admiral studied the peacefully pastoral scene, the bustling but not
overcrowded cities, with approval.
From five thousand feet, he could not see the
scavenger-gnawed skeletons still tangled in obscure briar patches, nor the
scars and bitterness and hatred still tangled in people's hearts. If he saw, he
did not particularly note the little groups of hard-faced observers here and
there who studied his craft through binoculars and carefully filmed its every
move.
The Department observer could not see them
either, but he was better versed in social phenomena than the military man, and
he was not so sure.
"Let's see what Europe looks like," he said.
In Asia, after the debacle,
the Americans evacuated about twelve thousand troops to Japan. Most of these,
being veteran and reliable, were brought back to restore order when the
domestic military establishment fell apart. Now again there were detachments in
the Philippines and the Pacific Islands, and in Malaya to protect the growing
rubber demand, but the mainland of Asia was left to the warlords and khans.
In Europe, defeat had not been so disastrous.
The enemy there were almost as heavily mechanized as the NATO nations, and as
discomfited to find themselves suddenly disarmed. Also, they experienced
internal troubles from those of their own peoples who had never taken kindly to
statism. These troubles were compounded by the fact that the dissident elements
were mainly just those who clung to and were most adept with yataghan and
knife, bow and lance, horse and camel; many a Muscovite commissar fumbled uselessly
with his pistol while Finnish knife or Montenegrin dagger or Ukrainian scythe
bit into him.
Still,
the enemy had numbers, and under the urge of famine he swept across Europe,
looting and burning and killing to the Rhine, sending isolated raiding parties
as far as the Pyrenees, then decomposed from internal stresses. His troops
frittered away and disappeared, but Europe lacked the energy to recover. When
the first great wave of horsemen from the steppes came, the only organized
opposition they met was from the scattered American garrisons along the Rhine,
and they foraged to the channel, so that in middle Europe hardly stone stood on
stone and one might go for miles without seeing a living man.
Here,
the admiral could see the skulls even from the air. In Potsdamer-Platz, they
were piled in the neat Asiatic habit into a pyramid over fifty feet high.
They
swung back across Bavaria then, and along the Rhine, staring wordlessly at the
desolation below, livened only by the occasional disorderly gaggle of squat
dark riders with their trains of loot. The admiral tugged uneasily at his
collar and glanced sidelong at the civilian, but the latter said nothing, and
then the admiral suddenly brightened. Away across the Rhine his trained eye had
caught a hint of order, a flash of steel. He tapped the pilot's arm and
pointed, and they swung down over a marching column of men, coming with burnished
arms and steady step and even formation along a highway to cut behind a swarm
of the savages.
Colonel Albert Baker pulled his horse off to
the side and reined around to watch his regiment come up into the battle-line.
They were rugged and tough, veterans with a sprinkling of husky recruits from
midwestern prairies and Norman farms and Scotch hills, the fastest marching
infantry since Grant's, and, with allowances for fire-power, perhaps the
deadliest. Still, this was the time they were vulnerable, the next few minutes
while they maneuvered directly from the column of march into the line. The
colonel did not like it, but he was working on Evaluation's clockwork schedule,
and there was nothing much he could do about it. The forward elements of his
flanking archers began to drift out onto the plain, and he debated whether to
throw them forward as a screen, slowing down his disposition but making a
tactically sounder maneuver. Just then a squadron of dragoons jingled past at a
trot, and he breathed easier. Corps had promised the cavalry screen, but he
distrusted cavalry, they were always skittering off somewhere else when you
needed them most, and he had not really believed they would show up.
The 103rd was next in the line, his right
flank would rest on them, and he watched now as they moved into position
smartly, and with drums beating to set the step his regiment swung out onto
When they were clear the colonel raised his hand, bugles screamed, the plain
and up into line. Standard-bearers ran forward and dressed and set guidons,
squads and companies wheeled and marked time and countermarched, dust rose and
swirled in choking clouds, lieutenants and sergeants back-pedaled anxiously
and shouted hoarse commands and blew on whistles. The pattern began to fill in.
Lines grew out of seeming chaos and weaved back and forth, dressing, and then
the regiment was blocked solidly in its place, left flank on the river and
right on the 103rd. The colonel eased himself in his saddle and lit a cigar,
turning to survey the field as a whole.
For the first time since he had got his
orders, he began to see how the battle would shape up. They had cut the hordes
off from their train, he saw, far down the valley in his rear women and
children, cook fires and wagons and pack animals tangled in a frightened mess.
The enemy were strung up the valley, sucked up there probably by skirmishing
cavalry, but pausing now to look back at the infantry who had come in behind
them. It had been a tricky maneuver, but it had worked, and the enemy now must
either fight or run. They would fight, the colonel knew, the horsemen would
never leave their women and loot without a battle. He waited with cold
confidence, knowing the light cavalry did not exist that could break a division
of drilled heavy infantry solidly anchored with protected flanks.
He
eased his right leg and studied his own men again. They were at ease now, their
places marked by their weapons, some sitting, smoking or chewing field
rations, breathing easy and in good shape. To their rear there was a sudden
clatter as the batteries of steam centrifugals and mortars galloped up. Must be
about time for things to start, the colonel thought sourly, it would be a
miracle if artillery was actually spaded in and fired up by the time action
joined. He trotted slowly back to his command post and joined his staff.
The
horde made up its mind, bunched and began to drift back down the valley. Half a
dozen blimps came up over the hills to the right and scattered napalm and
spreading blobs of gas on the enemy, and suddenly they picked up speed and
started coming like an avalanche, spread out over a half mile front, a wall of
dust two hundred feet high surging along with them. The infantry were on their
feet now, nervously stamping out butts, opening lanes for the dragoons to
stream back through. Behind, there was a whine as the turbine-driven
centrifugals came up to speed.
Baker
spoke to his bugler. The bugle sang and the lines stiffened and solidified.
Company officers ran back and forth dressing the front, and then suddenly the
pikemen dropped and set their pikes and raised their shields. What had been an
orderly array of men in infantry blue battle dress was now a solid line of
glittering steel, reaching from river to cliffs on the far side, backed solidly
by the lines of archers and swordsmen, file closers and mobile reserve, a heavy
infantry division in line of battle. It made a grim, imposing sight. In the
unnoticed flier overhead, the admiral almost fell out of his seat in his
excitement, the fighting he knew was nothing like this, but he liked it.
The
colonel was alert but unimpressed, he had seen it many times before, and he
knew the rest would not be so pretty. He gauged the distance to the enemy, and
spoke to his bugler again. The archers stepped out between the pikes and took
their stand, leisurely setting their arrows in the ground in preparation for
rapid fire. They were the elite, a pikeman or arbalestier could be trained in a
few months but an archer needed to grow up with a longbow in his hands to use
it effectively, and the colonel guarded them jealously, not because he loved
them but because he couldn't get along without them. He wondered now, as he had
often before, if the arbalest would ever be technically improved to the point
of being a completely satisfactory missile weapon for light infantry.
The
first ranks of oncoming horsemen were five hundred yards out now, and the
mortars popped for the first time and sent a flood of lazy bombs arching
overhead to burst and spread blazing napalm. The shouts of officers calling the
range came dimly above the general racket, and then the first volley from the
archers rose and fell in a cloud and slugs from the centrifugals began to
whistle overhead, playing like hydraulic blasts on the onrushing enemy, eroding
them away in patches and swathes. The archers were firing at will now, the air
was solid with their shafts, it seemed impossible that horse or man could come
through that hail and the sickening plop of the fire-bombs. Still they came,
and there rose an answering swarm of arrows from their short stiff bows to
rattle on the in-fantry's upraised shields. The archers skipped nimbly back
into their ranks, and from between the now unobscured pikes the flamethrowers
spat clouds and flame.
On
Baker's front, the enemy broke, they dashed up against the pikes and recoiled,
unable to force the flaming wall with its sharp steel core. Neither could they
turn and face the gas cloud rolling threateningly in their rear, they raced in
tangled streams back and forth parallel to the front, seeking a weak spot,
while arbalestiers and centrifugals and flame-throwers poured fire relentlessly
into them.
The
103rd was not having such good luck. Their front was broken in two places, and
one serious melee developed into a momentary break-through. Baker alerted part
of his reserve to help if necessary, but they closed up without aid and the
cavalry in the rear finished off the few enemy who did come through.
The
battle was over now, the rest slaughter. Baker turned his attention again to
his own front, watching with cold appreciation the death his regiment was
dealing.
The
enemy was seeking only escape. Some tried to swim the river, where Baker's
archers picked them off at leisure. Some scrambled up the cliffs on the other
side, where they made equally good targets, and some drove recklessly back into
the gas cloud to
142 space
police
strangle.
Very few got away. The mass thinned, and then there were only isolated riders
racing madly past, and then nothing but a slowly settling cloud of dust, with
an occasional limping figure drawing a flurry of fire, riderless horses stampeding
aimlessly.
Baker
looked at his watch. It was somewhat under two hours since he had ordered his
men into action; less than two hours to annihilate a dozen hordes that had
harried whole provinces for years—a good day's work.
The admiral settled back
into his seat and drew a deep breath.
"Well,"
he said somewhat inadequately, "I'm afraid we didn't do such a good job of
stopping war on this planet."
"We
certainly lowered the population level that was worrying you Malthusians,
though," the observer said. "That little tiff down there," he
waved his hand, "must have helped by five or six thou-» sand."
He
rubbed wearily at his face. "No, it's no good," he said heavily.
"We never should have permitted this experiment. You shoot-em-up boys are
always too anxious to civilize people by gunfire. I am going to recommend that
the Department question Security's stand in this matter at the next Council
meeting, and urge we review the whole history of our contact with these people.
It may not be too late to do something constructive yet."
"Now
wait a minute," the admiral said stubbornly. "This may not have gone
just according to plan, but it wasn't our plan, you long-hairs were the people
who developed this theory that if we could block off the natives' physical
expansion they'd be forced to develop a peaceful civilization; all Security did
was to implement that plan. And there is some improvement. They may still be
killing each other, but at least they aren't using mass weapons any more, it's
man to man, between warriors. They aren't blowing up whole cities, women and
children, the sick and peaceful along with the belligerent—"
The stretcher-bearers were working through
the ranks now, picking up the dead and wounded, but they did not bother with
the enemy. The dragoons were taking care of them. They were out front again,
picking their way gingerly between the burning areas where the bombs had
dropped, thrusting and hacking here and there as they found wounded, catching
horses, dismounting to pick up an especially interesting bit of loot.
Let them have it, the colonel thought, what he wanted was the wagon
train in the rear. There would be the real loot, women and stores and gold and
all the stripped wealth of this land fine-combed again and again by the
raiders. The colonel fought for his rank and his retirement and vaguer, higher,
imponderables he felt but could not have put a name to, but his men fought for
loot. There was no rotation in this army, only death or crippling wounds, retirement
perhaps for a few who were lucky, at the end of a hard life of constant battle.
They needed the occasional fierce satisfactions of looted gold and wine,
unopposed slaughter and destruction, to balance the hard discipline of their
daily life. The colonel knew this, he did not begrudge them their fun, although
for disciplinary reasons he liked to take his in quieter form. So now he sat,
forgetting the battle already, estimating his chances, plotting cunningly how
his regiment should be first to fall upon the camp.
He suddenly noticed some of the men looking
up, and pointing, and he, too, looked up and for the first time saw the Galactic
observation flier, hanging motionless over the battlefield. His mind went back
twenty years, to the gully in Korea, to the hundred thousand men who had left
their bones to whiten in that retreat, to his mother and father and brothers
and sisters, who had lived near Oak Ridge before the raiders came, in an area
still posted as radioactive.
He studied the flier carefully.
"You, too, boy," he thought,
"Just wait a while, we'll get to you yet, we haven't forgotten—"
Professor Salton was writing in his diary—
"In retrospect," he wrote, "it
is obvious that the effect of the raiders upon Terrestrial development was much
more complex than at first appeared. They halted the explosive burgeoning of
physical power available to man, and forced him to direct his energies in
other directions. They gave man time and impetus to develop the social sciences
he had forgotten in the sudden unfolding of physical power. But they altered
his basic orientation.
"Before the raid, men lived in a world in which they were supreme,
and had only each other to fear. The abrupt brutality of the raid, emphasized
by its aftermath of famine and disruption, sharply reminded them that they were
small fry in a shark-swarming, hostile universe, apt at any moment to be gulped
up.
"Five hundred years earlier, they might
have withdrawn into a shell of protective humility and prayer. A
hundred years later, they might have understood the workings of their own minds
well enough to preserve a balance. As it was, they reacted instinctively, but in
the pattern of an aggressive culture, aggressively.
"Since physical science had failed them,
they cast it aside and snatched up the newer, subtler tools of thought and
life. The new learning that might have taught men to live with each other was
ground and sharpened for hostile uses.
"The millennium of peace, which seemed
so close, has again been postponed—'
And:
"Colonel Baker," the general said,
"I'd like you to meet Major Pellati. He's the man who set up your targets
for you this afternoon, the chief of our corps evaluation staff."
"Well, you did a good job on that,
major," the colonel said. "Everything folded together like a
peddler's pack. I don't think a hundred
of those devils got away."
"We didn't intend for very many to get
away." The major looked around distastefully. "You like this
racket?" he asked abruptly.
It was somewhat noisy. Division headquarters
had been set up in an old building, a monolithic concrete relic of the atomic
age, as indestructible without explosives as a mountain, and the junior
officers had promptly organized a party.
At one end of the plank bar twenty company
officers were harmonizing "Dinah." Half the band were following
Baker's band leader in the "Tennessee Waltz" while the other half
played something unidentifiable but certainly not the "Tennessee
Waltz." As a finishing touch, three Marine observers within arm's length
of Baker and Pellati were defiantly bellowing "Zamboanga." It was
quite a party.
"Why, yes," Baker said, "it is a little noisy."
With common consent, they picked up a bottle
of Calvados from the bar and sought quieter surroundings. "Oops,"
Pellati said at the first door they tried and backed hurriedly out. "Occupied,"
he said briefly. They wandered down a long hall and found an alcove housing an
ex-window, now ventilated agreeably by the fresh evening air. They sat down on
the window ledge with the bottle between them.
"Yes, sir, that was a nice action,"
Baker said. Something that had been lurking in the back of his mind all day
came to the fore. "Were you in Korea?" he asked.
"I was at Inchon. That's where we first
used von Neumann's mathematics to evaluate a large-scale operation. Worked pretty good."
"That was before my time. I got there
just in time to be right in the middle when the raid hit and the gooks climbed
all over us. That's what I was thinking about; this afternoon, I was thinking,
'Boy, I'll bet this leams you buggers a good
lesson, I've been saving this twenty years for you.'"
He sucked gently at the bottle. "Did you
say you were in Evaluation at Inchon?" he asked suddenly. "Didn't
know they had anything like that then."
"Well, it was pretty crude stuff,"
the major said. "Experimental. Half mathematics and half good
guessing."
"It still looks like
magic to me."
"It isn't. Tactics isn't an art any
more, or even science. It's just engineering. If your intelligence is good, and
you know what you've got to work with, all you have to do is work up the
equations. With those savages we were fighting today, you don't even have to
make allowances for independent thought, they don't think, just react like
machines. Once you know the basic pattern of that reaction, you can just about
predict every move they'll make for the next six months. Then it's just a
question of being in the right place at the right time."
"Did you see that raider flier this afternoon?" he asked
abruptly.
Baker nodded.
"Those
are the ones we'll have to sweat for," the major said.
"Well," Baker said piously, "I
hope to live to see the day, but I don't know; they've got a pretty big edge on
us in weapons—"
"Weapons don't mean a thing, colonel.
Disparity in armament is simply one of the factors to which we assign weights
in the tactical and strategic equations." He took a cigar from his pocket
and lit it carefully, staring cross-eyed down his long nose.
"Twenty
years ago, we put our faith in gadgets—radar and guns and engines and nuclear
explosives—and you remember what happened. We learned our lesson. There's
always somebody with bigger and better stuff. So now we learn to use what we do
have with maximum effect, and stick to simple weapons we know won't fail us.
Our hole card is the infantryman walking on his own two legs with good solid
steel in his hands.
"We
can't lose, because we don't depend on tools, we depend on knowing what people
are going to do with tools, and adapt our own action to the circumstances. With
the Latin Americans we used a combination of force and economic and moral
action. With the British, we used economic and political means. With these
gooks, we use force at the moment, it's cheaper to kill them than to educate
them. I don't know just what we'll use with the Raiders, but we'll take them,
don't ever doubt that, all in good time, after we've cleaned our own house and
have this planet organized.
"I
worked on the initial evaluation, right after the raid, we had plenty of
material to work up, and we learned enough even then to show they had
weaknesses. Our biggest unit is still working on it, every time somebody comes
up with a new refinement they work it down a little finer, every time we get
new data it goes into the mill. The pictures we got of that fellow this
afternoon are on the way back already. That's what we want now, little things,
which side the pilot sits on, what part of the battle interested them, anything
to fill in the picture.
"Some
day, they'll land, get close enough for us to get our hands on them, and we'll
be ready for them."
The major took the cigar
out of his mouth and spat.
The watch chief socio-technician was
monitoring reports by radio-fax, television, and voice; and keeping up a
running fire of commentary for the evaluators and calculators who were
screening the material and feeding it into the machines.
"Raider
landing as predicted," he said, "near major urban center —Chicago.
Bless Bess, what a ship, big as the Queen Mary—"
Machines clicked and
chattered and hummed smoothly.
"Plan
Sugar-fourteen, modification three on basis current information, just
initiated."
"Somebody's dragging
their feet," one of the calculators said. "I just cranked out
modification five, and mod-4 was acknowledged by Field control at 2113."
"Log it," the watch chief advised. "They'll try to bounce
it on us, they're always wrong but they keep hoping."
"Mod-4 coming up," he added. "Only three and a half minutes late,
they're outdoing themselves today. That's old Fatso running to the ship instead
of walking— Which stupid knothead took my coffee cup?"
On a balcony overlooking the control center,
the commanding officer was explaining the operation to some high brass.
"Well, I can see you have a nice
operation here," a general said. "Very smooth. But what I don't
understand is how you Evaluation people are so sure the Raiders don't have
something equivalent to our own Strategic and Tactical Evaluation. If they do,
what are we going to do then?"
"They can't have," the CO said
positively. "Remember, we've been evaluating these people for fifty years.
"In order to have STE, you have to have
a basic science of human motivation. And they don't have it. The Raid itself is
our basic evidence for that. There's no indication that they had anything
whatever to gain from the raid, they did it to save us from self-destruction.
"A race that can
destroy half a planet's population, forcibly impose its will on an alien race,
not for the legitimate aim of self-preservation but because it wants to play
God, can't possibly understand even the first rudiments of social control.
That type of thinking is authoritarian, symptomatic of egotistic atomism.
"No, we'll take them all right. We have
to. The universe isn't safe with people like that running loose, living in an
insane world of subjective surrealism, but acting on men who live and die in
the real world of objective events.
"They're
like idiot children playing with a machine gun."
Galactic Agents
7.
A special type of officer to do a special job—the job of teaching a recruit of the Frontier Patrol everything a
fledgling constable should
know—that was Keno Martin.
With him a man learned the hard way for he
was a veteran who could not be matched—as George Moffat discovered.
L. RON
HUBBARD
Tough Old Man
The young officer named George Moffat was inspired, natty and
brilliant that day he stepped down from the tramp space-can to the desolate
plains of Ooglach. Fresh from the Training Center of the Frontier Patrol in
Chicago, on Earth, newly commissioned a constable in the service, the universe
was definitely the exclusive property of Mr. Moffat.
With the orders and admonitions of his senior
captain—eighteen light years away—George Moffat confronted the task with joy.
Nothing could depress him—not even the shoddy log buildings which made up
Meteorville, his home for the next two years—if he lasted.
But he'd last. Constable Moffat was as certain of that as he was of his
own name. He'd last!
"This is a training assignment," he
had been told by the senior captain. "For the next two years you will work
with Old Keno Martin, the senior constable in the service. When you've learned
the hard way you can either replace him as the senior constable or have a good
assignment of your own. It all depends on you.
"You'll find Old Keno
a pretty hard man to match. I've never met him myself. He came to us as an
inheritance from Ooglach when we took it over—he'd been their peace officer for
fifteen years and we sent him a commission sight unseen. He's been a constable now for twenty years and he's pretty set in his ways. I
guess."
Moffat had known very well what he was being
told. The Frontier Patrol always sent a man to the God-forgotten ends of
nowhere under instruction for his first two years of service. The harder the
assignment the greater the compliment to the recruit. That he had drawn Old
Keno Martin was compliment beyond the highest adulation.
"Good Lord!" his
running mate Druid had told him, "Old Keno is more of a legend than a man.
You know what's happened to the only three recruits sent to him for training?
He wore them out and did them in. Every one of them came back and turned in his
resignation. George, I wish you luck. By golly you'll need it!"
Constable Moffat, stepping through the frozen
mud of the main street of Meteorville, wasn't daunted even now. The
multi-colored icy wastes, the obvious savageness and antagonism of the inhabitants
who glowered at him as he passed in his horizon blue and gold, the sagging
temperature that registered thirty below at high noon, neither could these
daunt him.
Resigned, did they? Well, he was George
Moffat and no old broken-down untrained ex-peace-officer-made-constable was
going to show him up. Old Keno was going to be retired when they found a
replacement for him. George Moffat, strong and young, full of morale and
training, already considered Old Keno as good as replaced.
He gloried in the obvious fact that the patrol was hated here. Ooglach,
furthest outpost of Earth's commerce, held more than its share of escaped
criminals. The men who watched him from windows and walks would meet his cool
gaze. He became more and more conscious of what he was and where he was until
the problem of Old Keno dwindled to nothing.
A man had to be hard in the patrol. The
instructors at school were fond of saying that. He had to be able to endure
until endurance seemed his ordinary lot in life. He had to be able to shoot
faster and more accurately than any human could be expected to shoot, and he
had to be able to thrive under conditions which would kill an unconditioned
man. George Moffat could do all these things. Question was, at his age could
Old Keno?
Constable
George Moffat entered the low building which boasted the battered sign: Fiontiei Constabulary, Ooglach. He entered and at
first glance felt pity for the man he was to relieve.
Old
Keno Martin, in a patched blue uniform shirt, sat at a rough plank desk. He was
scribbling painfully with a pen which kept tripping in the rough official paper
and scattering small blots. It was aching cold in the room and the ashes of the
fireplace were dead.
He
was a spare man of uncertain age, George observed, and he had no more idea of
how to keep and wear a uniform than he probably had about grand opera. A
battered gray hat sat over his eyes, two blasters were belted about his waist,
both on one side, one lower than the other.
The
squadroom was bare, without ornament or comforts, the only wall decoration
being a mildewed copy of the Constitution of the United States. Some cartridge
boxes and several rifles lay upon a shelf, some report books on the desk. This,
observed Moffat with a slightly curled lip, was law and order on Ooglach!
Old
Keno looked up. He saw the horizon blue and gold and stood.
"I,"
said Moffat, "have just been ordered up from base." He handed his
sheaf of official papers and identification over and Old Keno took them and
scanned them with distinterest.
To
George it seemed that his attitude clearly said, "Here's another one of
them to be broken and sent on his way. A boot kid, badly trained and conceited
in the bargain." But then, thinking again, George wasn't sure that that
was Old Keno's attitude. The man, he knew suddenly, was going to be very hard
to predict.
Old
Keno offered his hand and then a chair. "I'm Keno Martin. I'll have the
boy stir up the fire for you if you're cold. Newcomers find it chilly here in
Meteorville."
Old
Keno returned to his reports while George Moffat, seeing no sign of the boy
mentioned, glanced yearningly at the dead fireplace. Suddenly George realized
what he was doing. The lot of a constable was endurance. If Old Keno, knowing
he was coming, had already started the program of hazing, George was ready.
Grimly
he refused the warmth for himself and concentrated on Old Keno.
"I
understand/' said Keno after a while, "that if you measure up I'm to be
retired from service." "Well—" began George.
"Wouldn't know what to do with
myself," said Old Keno decidedly. "But that's no bar to your
measuring up. If you can you can and that's all there is to it. I won't stand
in your way."
Young George said to himself that he doubted
it. The temperature must be twenty below in this room. Inside his gloves his
hands felt blue and frostbitten. "I'll bet you won't," George told
himself.
"Matter of fact," said Old Keno,
"I'm kind of glad you're here. The general run of crime is always fairly
heavy and this morning it got heavier. It will be good to have help on this
job. I've been kind of hoping they'd send me an assistant—"
"I'll bet you have," said George to himself.
"That could really take it, of
course," continued Old Keno. "Ooglach is a funny place. Hot as the
devil in some places, cold in others. Requires versatility. You know why this
place is important?"
"Well, I-"
"This planet is a meteor deposit. About
fifteen or twenty million meteors a day fall into its atmosphere but that isn't
a patch on what it used to get before the atmosphere formed as it is. Its face
is studded with the things and there are holes all over the place.
"We ship several hundred billion dollars
worth of industrial diamonds from here every year. Naturally we have to mine
the bulk of them out of old meteors and that keeps a miner population
around—which is always a tough one. Some of those stones are gem stones.
They're a United States monopoly and it's our job to see that they don't get
lifted. We frown on all illegal export—especially when it begins with
murder."
Moffat perked up. He forgot about the cold
room. This was what he had been training for. He was very conscious of his
superiority in such cases. The latest methods of crime detection had been built
into him as second nature. His young body had been trained to accomplish the
most strenuous manhunts. Mentally he was well balanced, physically he was at
his peak. He knew it and he was anxious to prove it.
"You've got some idea of who is doing this?" said Moffat.
"Well, shouldn't be too hard. Of course there's plenty of tough
gents on Ooglach who wouldn't stop at anything—but the point is they're cowed.
My angle is—the people who did this must be new. They murdered a mine guard up
at Crater seven hundred forty-three and emptied the safe of a month's haul.
That would be about thirty-five million dollars in gems.
"Any man who had been around here any
time would have known better. That means the gents who did it probably came in
their own spaceship. It's probably parked beyond the radar detection
sphere—somewhere to the south. No, it wasn't local talent."
Moffat almost smiled. Old Keno's faith in
himself seemed monstrous to him. He looked with interest at the old constable
and realized with a start that all his own studies in criminology and
physiognomy had not fitted him to make an accurate estimate of Keno Martin's
true character. The man was illusive.
"So, if it's all the same to you,"
said Keno, "we'll just put together a kit and take out of here for the
mine. I just got this report half an hour ago and I stopped here long enough to
write this dispatch for my boy to take to that space-can you came in. I want
this data relayed to other planets, though of course we'll probably get these
people a long time before they get away. You all ready to go?"
For a moment Moffat was dismayed. He had considered himself fit and
ready, and yet he knew that his long trip on the tramp had wearied him
enormously. You don't sleep and eat well on a tramp, and how welcome would be a
few hours of rest! But he banished all thought of it. Keno would know he was
tired. This was just another way of wearing him down.
"I'm ready," he said. "Just
tell your boy to bring my case from the ship. I feel fine."
"Good," said Old Keno. He opened
the back door and yelled in some remarkable gibberish at the shed. Then he took
down from a shelf several boxes of cartridges, looked to the loads in his guns
and handed a rifle to Moffat.
Old Keno waited patiently at the door until a
slab-faced native brought a high-speed tractor around front and then, after
placing the cartridges in the cab, Old Keno mounted up.
"Wait a minute/' said Moffat. "I
don't see any food. How long are we going to be gone?"
The
old constable looked embarrassed. "I'm sorry about that. My mind was just
so busy with other things. Bring out a case of rations from the kitchen."
Moffat smiled to himself. This campaign was
so obvious. He brought the rations and threw them into the back of the cab and
then, eyes on the old constable, mounted up in his turn.
Suddenly
he was assailed with a doubt. Maybe it was just senility that had made Old Keno
forget. A man wouldn't go tearing off into any trackless waste without food
just to show up a new recruit. Hmm—maybe headquarters had its reasons for
wanting to replace this man,
"Where's your coat?" said Moffat,
eyeing the patched sleeves of Old Keno's uniform shirt.
"That's
so," said the old constable, looking oddly at Moffat. "I forgot that
too, I guess." He bawled at the boy, who brought up a heavy service
mackinaw. But Old Keno did not put it on. He laid it across the back of the
seat and addressed himself to the controls.
The
revving motor sent great plumes of white snow spiraling upwards. Several curious
folks came into the street to look. Moffat glanced at the old constable and
felt a genuine wave of pity. "Poor Old Keno," he thought.
The
yellow sky lay hard against the blinding plain. In the far distance a range of
hundred-thousand-foot peaks reached forever skyward, white and orange in their
perpetual covering of frost. The tractor sped across the wastes at two hundred
miles per hour, skimming the hummocks, its hydraulic seats riding easy while
the treads bucked, spun and roared. A high fog of snow particles was left
behind them and the cold which had been intense at the beginning began to turn
Moffat's blood to ice crystals in his veins.
At
last he surrendered. "Isn't there a heater in this thing?" he said.
Old
Keno flushed. "I'm sorry, I've got so much on my mind I didn't even think
of it." And he reached down to throw a button on the panel, which brought
an immediate trickle of faintly warm air into the cab, raising the interior
temperature from a minus fifty to a mere minus twenty.
Moffat
tried not to show how eagerly he received this succor from his distress. He was
beginning to feel a little frightened of Old Keno. There he sat in his shirt
sleeves, oblivious of weather. Beside him was Moffat, bundled to the eyes in
all that the service could offer a man in the way of warmth—and which was not
enough.
By
golly, thought Moffat, a man could pretty well perish riding in one of these
things if he wasn't careful. He glanced sideways at Keno. The old constable did
not find anything unusual about his uncoated state.
"He's
senile," Moffat decided. "He's unable to feel anything." And
then again he thought, "He's trying to run me out. I'll stick it if it's
the last thing I ever do on Ooglach." And he knew with a slight shudder
that this very well might be the last thing he did on Ooglach or anywhere else!
Half
an hour later they pulled up beside the shaft of Crater 743, where the mine buildings clustered under a ten-foot coating of snow and
ice. Their presence had been seen from afar and a small knot of men awaited
them. Their greeting was respectful, bordering on awe.
"I've
been watching for you, Constable," said the foreman. "I'm very sorry
to have to trouble you but—"
"I suppose you
trampled up all the clues," said Keno gruffly.
The
crowd parted to let him through. They had known better than to touch the
murdered man or the safe or to walk on tracks, and Keno and Moffat were able to
inspect the scene as it had been found at dawn by the cook.
Keno
looked at the dead man and muttered to himself, "Forty-five Mauser at the
range of two feet. Silencer employed. Asleep when he was hit. Alarm signal
shorted out by the intruder. Safe opened with an alpha torch."
He
knelt before the broken door and Moffat was amazed to hear him muttering the
code of arches and sworls which would identify future fingerprints.
Moffat,
puzzled, got down beside the old constable and at length, by catching the light
just right, was able to make out the fact that at least there was a fingerprint
there. But even with all his training he knew he would need powder and a
magnifier to read that mark.
He looked wonderingly at Keno. Either the old
constable was pulling his leg or he actually could read that print. It could be
a bluff. After all what did a lone fingerprint matter in this case.
Moffat
was additionally puzzled to find that the crew at the mine had been so
meticulous as to avoid obliterating the tracks of the retreating felons. He was
impressed against his wish by this. It meant these people really walked lightly
where Old Keno was concerned. He was wondering if Keno had remembered to bring
a plaster cast outfit when he heard Keno grumbling.
"Leader's
about five feet tall, walks with a bad limp, been in the Russian Army, very
quick, probably shoots left-handed. The other two men are ex-convicts, both
with dark hair, heavy features-one about a hundred and ninety-five pounds, the
other two hundred and thirty. They rely entirely on the leader for orders.
They'll fight if told. Come along, Constable Moffat. We'll see what can be done
to intercept these people."
Moffat
could have deduced a number of these things but not all of them. He was bemused
by it. This old man was not bluffing! And that fact made Keno loom larger than
before. Moffat began to dwindle in his own estimation.
Without
a word to the waiting men Old Keno climbed into the cab, slammed the door,
waited briefly for Moffat to get settled and went off at full speed along the
clear track of a departing skimmer.
Young Constable Moffat was not prepared for
the accuracy of this tracking. He was beginning to understand why the other
young recruits had quit here and resigned from service. Old Keno was not only
good, he was dismaying. A man's ego wouldn't long withstand the pummeling of
such exhibitions of endurance and manhunter sense that Old Keno had displayed
to him today.
Now
the old man was following the thin line left by the skimmer—and he was
following it at two hundred and fifty miles per hour.
As
a skimmer is driven by a tractor propeller and rises on stub wings to travel it
leaves only an occasional scratch in the snow. Yet Keno Martin was following
this scratch. He was evidently seeing it some hundreds of yards ahead and
turning accurately whenever it turned.
They raced across the trackless expanse,
going south. They were
silent for the most part. The dumbbell suns
gradually sank until the shadows of the ice hummocks were long and blue across
the wastes of crystal white.
Moffat was tired. The trip on the space-tramp had been a hard one, and
the long hours of traveling over these blinding, glaring ice fields were just
too much. It would have been too cold for the human endurance of any man who
had not had months of conditioning to these temperatures. Moffat had had that
conditioning. But each agonizing breath of frozen air came closer to breaking
him.
Then he realized that Old Keno, wrestling the
tractor, showed no signs of fatigue. Insensibly Moffat's estimation of his own
capabilities dropped. He began to regard Keno with a sort of awe.
"Don't you want me to take it for
awhile?" he said at last out of of a guilty conscience.
"Sorry, this will get tough as soon as
those suns set and we'll have to rely on our spots. I'll just hold on if it's
all the same to you."
After a while young Moffat began to fidget.
Then he suddenly realized what was the matter. "Say, aren't you
hungry?" he said.
Old Keno looked at him blankly. Then he said, "Oh yes, yes of
course. Get yourself something to eat."
Moffat started to turn and in that moment
realized all the sensations that a man must feel who is caught in a strait
jacket. He could not swivel more than an inch in either direction. His heavy
uniform coat was frozen solid upon him.
Impotently he cursed the supply station
eighteen light years away. The trickle of heat had melted a filter of snow from
under the windshield. While it was still daylight it had dampened his coat. As
the suns set the temperature had dropped to about fifty below zero.
"Turn up the heat," he said plaintively. Old Keno blinked at
him.
"That's all the heat there is," he apologized.
"Well, hit me with your fist or
something," said Moffat. Old Keno blinked again. "It's my coat,"
said Moffat.
Keno grunted and brought a backhand slap against Moffat's chest which
cracked the ice sheathing. With the disintegration begun the young constable
could move about. He procured a can of rations.
These
had been packed by some far-off organization which never
had expected for a minute that anyone was
going to eat any of them. Theoretically when one took off the lid heat was
instantaneously generated through all the food. Moffat broke the cover and for
the next ten seconds—but no more—the mass was warm. Before he could get the
first mouthful between his teeth the savage cold had frozen it through.
He started to complain and then he looked at
the stolid Keno. Frozen rations were nothing to the old man—he was munching
mechanically on the food. "Well," thought Moffat, "if he can
take it I can." And he reached into an inner pocket with his clumsy glove
and brought out a chocolate bar, which flew into splinters each time he took a
bite from it.
"You'd better let me
drive/' said Moffat. "You'll need some of your strength later on. We don't
want to get tired out."
He intended this as a vengeful reference to
Old Keno's age. But the senior constable paid no attention whatever.
"I said you'd better let me drive for
awhile/' said young Moffat.
"You sure you can handle this
thing?" said Old Keno. "We were taught all types of vehicles in
school/' said Moffat a little savagely.
"Well/' said Old Keno doubtfully,
"I suppose we've got more time than we really need. And we've been making
pretty good speed. You might as well start learning now as ever." He set
the automatic control on the tractor and when it reached a level stretch,
during which the control could operate, they swiftly switched.
Moffat may have been bitterly cold outside
but he was burning within. So the old man thought they'd lose speed if he
drove, did he? Well, since when did youth take any lessons from age on that
subject.
The dark was very thick and the floodlights
were piercingly bright on the track ahead. The multicolored cliffs and valley
of ice fled past them. Moffat found that it was extremely difficult to trace
the track accurately. More than once Old Keno had to tap him sharply to keep
him from straying.
Each time Old Keno tapped young Moffat seethed
anew. There sat the old fool in his patched blue shirt, not caring any more
about this cold than he did about rations. Obviously the old man was out to
show him up, to make a fool out of him, to break his spirit. Obviously Keno
expected to send him back to headquarters with his resignation written and
ready to be turned in. Well, that would never happen.
The tractor roared and whined. Young Moffat
let it out to two hundred and ninety miles an hour. At this speed the ice
hummocks were a blur and even more often now Old Keno had to tap him to keep
him on the track.
"Pretty soon," said Old Keno,
"we'll start down. The snow level at this time of the year stops at about
twenty-three thousand feet. You'll find Ooglach's got a lot in the way of drops
and rises. There isn't any sea level, properly speaking.
"We've got three seas but from the
lowest to the highest there's an eighteen-thousand-foot difference in
elevation. I'd hate to think of what would happen if they ever got connected.
"It's two hundred and ninety thousand
feet from the lowest point on this planet to the highest. Nature scraped her up
some when she was built. I guess she wasn't rightly intended for men. This
plateau we're on is the most comfortable spot you'll discover."
Moffat listened with some disbelief. The old
man was just trying to scare him away.
"The low valleys are all
scorchers," Keno continued, "and the one where I think our friends
are hanging out will be running about a hundred and fifty degrees now that the
sun has set."
Young Moffat glanced sideways at him. "Warm, huh?"
"Well, it isn't so bad once you get used to it," said Old
Keno. "By the way you'll want to start looking sharp now. We'll have to
turn off these lights. If we show them as we come over the top edge into the
valley they'll have plenty of time to get away in their space-can. D'ye
mind?" he said.
Young Moffat thought savagely that if Old
Keno could drive in the dark, as he had immediately after sundown, he certainly
could. He reached down and threw the light switch.
Instantly, as a reaction, the whole world was
black to him. He lost his sense of direction utterly. He was light-blinded and
yet hurtling forward over uneven terrain at tremendous speed. He did not know
whether he was turning to right or left and felt certain that he was about to
shoot on a tangent from his course. In a panic young Moffat grabbed at the
light panel but he was too late.
He felt the tractor start
to turn. He felt Old Keno's savage pull at the levers which might avert the
disaster. Then there was a terrifying crash and a roar, a splintering of glass,
the scream of a dismembered motor and the dying whine of treads running down to
a slow clatter.
Young Moffat picked himself up off an ice
hummock two hundred feet from the scene of the wreck. He was dazed and
bleeding. One of his gloves was missing and one of his boots was ripped all the
way down the side, exposing his flesh to the killing winds of the night. For a
moment he could not tell ground from stars. A few planets of his own invention
were spinning giddily in space.
After a bit he located the direction of the wreck by the sound of
dripping fuel. He crawled back to it fearfully. He thought perhaps Old Keno lay
dead within it. Moffat saw his own track in the luminous snow and found that he
had plowed straight through a feathery snowbank, which alone had saved him.
Two feet above or below the course he had
taken would have brought him into disastrous collision with enormous lumps of
ice.
He fumbled over the area and at last located
the dark crushed blob of the wreck. All his resentment for Keno was gone now.
He knew that this was his own fault. He felt that if the old man were dead he
could never forgive himself. He should have known he would not be able to drive
at that speed with the lights out.
"Where are you?" he shouted into
the cab, fumbling through the torn upholstery.
With a sob he slid in through the broken
windshield and felt along the upended floor for Old Keno's body. But it was not
there.
Young Moffat scuttled crabwise out of the
fuming wreckage and began to look through the debris for a pocket torch.
"Well, I'm mighty glad to find that you're all right, son."
Moffat leaped upright as though he'd been shot.
"I walked on down the line," said
Old Keno. "We're within about two hundred yards of the edge there and we
would have been starting down soon anyway. So we ain't lost much time."
Moffat threw the torch he had found to the
ground before him. If Old Keno had only been reproving or solicitous—if he had
shown something, anything, but the calm cool detachment of a man who,
immediately after a wreck, would walk on a little further just to see how
things were—
"I might have been
killed," said young Moffat.
"Oh no," said Old Keno. "On my
way up to the rim I looked at you there in the snow and saw that you were all
right."
The inferred superiority of this was almost
more than Moffat could stand. He was rising to a point of fury.
"Well, you'd better not stand
there," said Keno, the wind tugging at his thin shirt. "You're liable
to get cold. Come along."
Moffat fumbled through the drift and found
his glove. Then he turned to trudge after Keno. As he cooled he found that
something terrible and devastating had happened to his ego.
He had always considered himself so
competent. And he had always felt that older men were used up and worn out. Now
he found that a man who must be well over sixty easily had the edge on him both
in poise and in endurance. The cool rationality of the fellow had gnawed at
young Moffat's ego until its borders were frayed.
Sunk now in his own estimation to the level
of a schoolboy who is subject to tantrums, young Moffat followed in Keno's
tracks and presently came up with the old man.
If he had expected an end to travail because
they were to go downhill into a valley Moffat was mistaken. One of Ooglach's
moons, yellow and gibbous, had begun to rise. By its light the enormous crater
before them, thirty thousand feet deep, lay like the entrance to the infernal regions.
Its black sides were rough and jagged and
precipitous. At twenty-three thousand feet one could see, by looking across
several miles to the other side, where the snow level ended. Below that clung a
handful of trees, ghostly now in the brilliant moonlight.
Young Moffat stared at the precipice before him. There was a track down
it which angled off at a steep grade, cut probably by some mining survey
expedition. But Keno was not considering such a path.
"We've lost quite a lot of time," said Old Keno. "We'll
have to make up for it one way or the other. Let's pitch off here and scramble
on down the sidewall. It's only about thirty thousand feet and the jumps are
pretty easy.
"I've been here before. I didn't take
this side but I don't expect we'll run into a lot of trouble. Now—you keep
close to me and don't go losing your hold on anything and falling because we
don't want to mess this up again tonight."
Young
Moffat took the implied criticism haggardly. Old Keno slid forward over the ice
and started to drop down from crevice to crevice with a swift agility which
would have done credit to an orangutan.
Young
Moffat started out eagerly enough but in a very few minutes he discovered how
bruised and shaken he had been by the wreck. And Old Keno, who must have been
just as bruised, was stretching out a lead on him which was in itself a blunt
criticism.
Harassed
and scrambling, young Moffat tried his best to keep up. He slid from one block
of ice to the next, scraped his shins on pinnacles, cut his hands on ledges
and, as the drop increased, time after time hung perilously to a crumbling
chunk of basalt over eternity. He needed all his strength to get across each
gap. And his foot hurt where his boot was torn.
Old
Keno, far far below and evidently having no trouble, constantly widened the
gap. Young Moffat's lungs were aching. If he had been too cold before he was
too hot now. His uniform was shortly in ribbons and by the time he had gone
down three thousand feet he gladly abandoned the jacket forever. He used only
one sleeve of it to bind up a shin which really could have used a few stitches
put in by a competent doctor.
He
was getting weaker as the swings and leaps took more and more heavy toll of
him. He began to look down and ahead through a reddish haze which each time
told him that the gap was getting wider and that Old Keno was having no
trouble.
An
hour later he came up, an aching, half-sobbing wreck. He hit against a soft
form. He could not even see the old man. He slumped down on a boulder.
"Well,
I'm glad you caught up to me," said Old Keno. "Now let's get moving.
I took a look down into the valley and got the space-can spotted down there.
They got a little fire lighted. Don't drop so far behind again."
Young
Moffat cleared his gaze and looked at Old Keno. "That man," thought
Moffat, "is going to kill me yet."
After all this terribly arduous
mountaineering through the dark, over crevasses and down pinnacles and
chimneys, swinging by razor-sharp outcrops to crumbling ledges, Old Keno Martin
didn't even have the grace or politeness to be short of breath. In the moonlight
he was still his neat somewhat faded self.
Beaten
through and through, his conception of himself so thoroughly shot that only a
miracle performed by himself could ever bring it back to life, young Moffat did
his best to follow.
Thirty
thousand feet is a long way down! And the difficulties of the descent made it
also a long way around. Time after time Old Keno waited for him. Never a word
of encouragement, never a word of comment on the difficulties of the
descent—Old Keno was neither short of breath nor apparently tired of limb.
Hours
later, when they at last came to the bottom of that scorching hell, Moffat
supposed that he had at least passed through the worst of it. His breath was
sobbing in and out of him. His body was a rack of pain. The only thing that had
kept him going this long was the knowledge that the worst was almost over.
Certainly he had no more to experience. But he was wrong!
As
Old Keno had said, it was a hundred and fifty degrees here in this crater. The
sand was baking hot. He reached his hand up to his eyes and swept away some of
the perspiration which was blinding him. His lips were thickened by
dehydration.
The
night was so hot and so dry that it pulled the moisture out of a man with a
physical force, cracking his skin and drying his eyes until it was torture to
keep them open longer than a minute at a time.
"Don't
walk forward," said Keno, "there's a two-thousand-foot drop about
twenty feet in front of us."
Moffat,
stumbling forward, hadn't even realized he had caught up with Keno again. He
was startled by the voice and he backed up a few steps. He concentrated his
eyes on the spot Keno indicated and at last he saw the dark chasm. Gingerly he
approached the edge.
He
felt that he was looking into the very bowels of the planet although he could
see nothing but blackness. He sensed the awesome depth of it. He stepped back
cautiously, afraid that if he made a sudden movement he might fall headlong
over the edge. The heat waves coming up from that black hole made him dizzy and
his legs felt as though they might slip out from under him at any second. He
turned back to Keno.
"We're
within a quarter mile of them/' said Old Keno. "I doubt if they got wind
of us. It's a heck of a long ways back there to the ridge and they probably
figured we was a meteorite like I thought they would. If they saw our crash at
all, that is. That crew can't have been here more than ten or twenty minutes
but they got a fire goin' already. Smell it?"
Moffat
sniffed at the wind in vain. He could not discover the least odor of woodsmoke.
Just breathing this air was enough to sear the lungs and burn scars on the
throat without trying to smell anything in the bargain. He looked wonderingly
at the old constable.
"They'll
be boiling some fresh meat they got back at the mine," said Old Keno.
"It wouldn't keep long down here and they probably haven't any galley in
their space-can. I figured I'd smell woodsmoke when I got here the second I
noticed that a haunch of baysteer had been ripped from the drying racks outside
the guard's shack at the mine."
Trained
arduously, given the highest grades in detection, the young constable felt
insensibly lessened again. He was failing every test. He had missed an
important clue. Hurriedly he changed the subject. "How'd they cross this
gap?" he asked.
"Oh,
they're on this side of it all right," said Old Keno. "I saw their
last tracks back there about a quarter of a mile. They turned off to the left
and we're likely to find them about a quarter of a mile up the way. You'd
better shed those boots. They'll make an awful racket if we hit hard
rock."
Again
he felt like a small boy being told to do the most simple and obvious things.
He shed the boots and was instantly aware of new difficulty. His feet were in
ribbons from the terrible climb down and were chilblained by the shift in
temperature as well. And now they had to contact sand which could have roasted
eggs.
With
the first steps he felt his feet beginning to blister and tears shot into his
eyes from the pain. But Old Keno had also shed his boots and was striding
easily forward, oblivious of this new agony. The old man, thought Moffat, would
have walked through walls of fire with only an impatient backward glance to see
if Moffat was coming.
"Are we close?"
said Moffat at last and the words came out like rough pebbles, so achingly dry
had his mouth become. Each gasp of air was like swallowing the plume on a
blowtorch.
"No
need to talk low," said Old Keno. "The wind's from them to us.
They're camped by a running stream anyway and they can't hear above it. It'll
be thirty degrees cooler where they are. This valley is like that. Hear
it?"
Moffat
couldn't but Old Keno was talking again, pointing to a tiny pinpoint, which was
their fire, and the gleam, which was the space-can, beside it.
"Cover
all three from this side with your rifle. Don't shoot unless you have to. I'll
circle and approach from the water side and challenge them. Don't plug me by
mistake now!"
The
disrespect in this made Constable Moffat wince. But he took station as requested.
Lying across a frying hot rock with the night air broiling him, he laid the
searing stock of the rifle against his cheek. He trained as ordered on the
party about the fire.
He
almost didn't care about what happened to himself any more. He knew that the
rock was burning him. He knew that the rifle barrel was raising a welt on his
cheek. He felt some slight relief that his now-bleeding feet were off the
ground. But he just didn't seem to care. There was the job to be done and that
was all that mattered.
His
body had been so beaten that his mind couldn't or wouldn't look at anything but
the immediate present. All the concentration and will of his being was centered
on this task. He would accomplish his purpose if it were the last purpose he
would ever serve.
The
three men in front of the fire were laughing, oblivious of any pursuit, certain
in their security at least for the next few hours. Before dawn they would be
out of the atmosphere and beyond reach. They had a big kettle in which they
were boiling baybeef. From time to time one of them would pass another some
particularly choice bit.
For
an interminable while, it seemed to him (although in reality it was less than
three minutes) Moffat waited. At length he heard Old Keno's voice.
"Keep
yer hands clear, gents. I'm
comin' in!" The three
about the fire huddled, immobile as statues, clearly limned by the leaping
flames. Thirty paces beyond them, into the circle of radiance, stepped Old
Keno. His hands were swinging free, no weapon trained.
"I'll have to trouble
you boys to come back and take your medicine/' said Old Keno. "It ain't so
much the diamonds, it's that guard. Human bein's come high up here."
"Frontier Police!" gasped the
leader, starting to his feet. And then he realized what this meant—sure hanging!
"I wouldn't do anything foolish!" said Old Keno flatly.
The man wore a weapon, low and strapped down.
"We're not bein' took. I reckon if you're a condemned enough fool to come
after us all by yourself—"
The leader's hand, silhouetted in the firelight, flashed too fast to be
followed.
There was a blend of roars, four shots! And then it was done.
Moffat had seen something he was never likely
to forget. All three men had been on their feet. Old Keno's hands had been
entirely free from his guns. The leader had drawn first and the other two had
started to fire.
But Old Keno's left hand had stabbed across
his body and his right had gone straight down and his three shots were like one
blow. The leader's bullet went whining off on some lonesome errand amongst the
rocks. Three men were dying there, three men had been shot before the leader
had squeezed trigger.
And Constable Moffat's frozen, cut and
blistered finger had tried to close to back up the play and Constable Moffat
had not been able to fire! He stayed where he was, semi-paralyzed with the
shock of what he had seen—three men shot in something like an eighth of a
second.
The leader went down. Another man dropped
into the fire. The third stood where he was, propped against a rock, eyes wide
open and the firelight shining in them—stone dead.
Moffat looked at his hand. He had not even
been able to squeeze trigger. He, champion shot of the school, had not even
been able to fire at his first live target when his companion was in danger!
On the verge of tears Moffat came up from
cover and walked toward the dying blaze. Old Keno was bending over to retrieve
their loot.
Moffat stepped into the ring of light. And then, of a sudden, a strange
sensation came to him. It was like a yell inside his head. It was like an
automatic switch being thrown. He knew he was in danger!
With the speed of a stabbed cat young Moffat
dropped to a knee, spinning on it toward the space-can, drawing a rifle bead as
he turned. He had not heard anything. But there stood a fat Asiatic in the
passageway port, rifle leveled at Old Keno, about to shoot. He never got a
chance.
Young
Moffat fired from the hip and the bullet caught the fat one in the chest. His
weapon exploded into the night. And then without looking at that target Moffat
saw the second.
Under
the shadow of the space-can a man had come up, his arms full of firewood. This
was falling now, halfway to the ground, and a gun was in his grip, aimed at Old
Keno. The gun blazed. Moffat fired and the fifth man went down.
But he was not alone. Old Keno, the
infallible never-missing always-beforehand Senior Constable of Ooglach, was
flat on his face in the sand, motionless, victim of his own overconfidence.
Coming
quickly to the space-can port young Moffat scanned the interior with his flash.
There were five tumbled and evil smelling bunks here. He glanced back to the
fire, counting noses to make sure. Then he scouted wide, looking for strange
tracks, and in a moment knew that they had the entire outfit. Not until then
did he come back to Old Keno and there he knelt, turning the ancient patrolman
over.
To
see the wound and its extent it was necessary to remove Old Keno's shirt, for
the bullet had apparently lightly creased his back.
It
was cooler here by the side of the stream which, a few feet further plumed two
thousand feet into a chasm and which chilled the air in this cup. Young Moffat
felt himself relaxing, beat up as he was. Old Keno missing such an obvious
thing!
He
took off the patched blue shirt and then rolled Keno to his face, fumbling for
the wound. It was light, it was on the surface-Suddenly Moffat stared. He came
halfway to his feet and still stared. He took out his pocket flash and knelt
eagerly beside the fallen man. His brows knit and then began to ease. Sudden
laughter sprang from his lips, rose up the scale toward hysteria and turned
aside into an honest bellow. What he had endured for this! What he had endured!
Young
Constable Moffat sat down in the sand and held his sides. He laughed until his
shoulders shook, until his breathing pounded, until his sides caved from
labored wheezing. He laughed until the
170 space
police
very
sand around him danced. And then he looked—growing calmer and settling to a
mere chuckle—back at the fallen man.
Moffat
jumped up and went into the ship. Presently he came back with a kit and began
to patch. And in a very short while Old Keno was sitting groggily up, trying to
piece together what had happened.
The
young man watched him. Through Moffat's mind was flashing all he had gone
through—the cold, the heat, the sharp rocks, the wreck. He thought of the fight
when Old Keno had drawn and killed and he thought of the faculty Old Keno did
not have. He had lasted and come out here.
"How much do you know
of yourself?" said Moffat.
Old
Keno stared in amazement and then, eyes shifting to the blue shirt and becoming
conscious of his nakedness, slowly averted his gaze.
"Everything
you know, I guess," he mumbled. "I didn't know it at first. I came up
here for some reason I can't recall and the transport crashed near Meteorville.
I thought I just had amnesia and I went to work in the bars as a guard.
"Then
they made me marshal and finally the Frontier Patrol commissioned me a senior
constable. Twenty years and I didn't know. Then I went down to Center City,
where they built the big new prison. And they've got a gadget there to keep
weapons from going in. I couldn't pass it. That's how I found out."
"Did anybody
know?"
"I
fell and when I came around I was okay. No, I don't think so. Why?"
"I think you were out longer than you
thought," said Moffat. "By the way did you ever read this sign on
your back?" "I tried with mirrors but I couldn't."
"Well, listen."
Moffat studied it again before reading it aloud.
POLICE
SPY Pat. No. 4,625,726,867,094
THE
BIG-AS-LIFE ROBOT CO. "And twice as natural"
Motors: Carbon Instruction: Police
tough old
man 171
Attachments: Infra-red eyes
Chassis
Type: R "Our Robots Never Die" Caution: DO NOT OIL!
Made
in Detroit, Mich. U. S. A.
There was silence for a moment. Old Keno
looked scared and reached for his shirt. "You'll turn me in." He
heaved a sigh. "I'm done."
Young Moffat grinned. "Nope. Because
that isn't the only sign there. You were out a lot longer than you thought at
Center City. They must have had time to send dispatches to the Frontier Patrol.
Because there's another sign."
"Another?"
"Yep," said young Moffat with a
jubilant upsurge. "It reads very short and very sweet."
To the recruit:
You'll only locate this if
you can last, if you can't be fooled or if you're a better shot. Know then that
you now send a dispatch to headquarters for your transfer and raise in rate.
Well done, Senior Constable!
Thorpe
Commanding Section C
"I'm a trainer,"
said Old Keno.
"You showed up three," said Moffat.
"Three that couldn't take it the hard way. And you almost killed me, Keno
Martin. Froze me and broiled me and drained me of the last ounce. By golly I
never knew what I could stand until I came to Ooglach. And now-well, if they
want to train a man the hard way it's all right with me."
"And I-" fumbled
Old Keno.
"Martin,
you're better than men in a lot of ways—heat, cold and energy. But of course
your sixth sense doesn't exist. You'll have to watch for that. But you're still
Senior Constable of Ooglach and I guess you'll last forever if you don't
short-circuit from a slug.
"I
replaced the fuse that bullet blew. You'd better keep some in your pockets. So
they won't be retiring you, Keno, until you fall apart and according to your
back, that won't be until forever arrives. Okay, Senior Constable?"
Old Keno became suddenly
radiant. He looked at the boy before him and his smile grew proud. He put out
his hand for a shake. "Okay, Senior Constable
Moffat," he said.
They
shook.
8. Agent of
a service with the gahxy to police—a galaxy in
which a match spark could blaze to a planet burning if there was not an o&cer on the right spot at the right
moment —that was Zone Agent Iliff. And
even he had to be tricked into the biggest case of his career.
JAMES H. SCHMITZ
Agent of Vega
"It just happens/'
the Third Co-ordinator of the Vegan Confederacy explained patiently, "that
the local Agent—it's Zone Seventeen Eighty-two—isn't available at the moment.
In fact, he isn't expected to contact this HQ for at least another week. And
since the matter really needs prompt attention, and you happened to be passing
within convenient range of the spot, I thought of you!"
"I
like these little extra jobs I get whenever you think of me," commented
the figure in the telepath transmitter before him. It was that of a small, wiry
man with rather cold yellow eyes—sitting against an undefined dark background,
he might have been a minor criminal or the skipper of an aging space-tramp.
"After
the last two of them, as I recall it," he continued pointedly, "I
turned in my final mission report from the emergency treatment tank of my ship—
And if you'll remember, I'd have been back in my own Zone by now if you hadn't
sent me chasing wild-eyed rumor in this direction!"
He leaned forward with an obviously false air
of hopeful antici-
pation.
"Now this wouldn't just possibly be another hot lead on U-i, would
it?"
"No, no! Nothing like that!" the
Co-ordinator said soothingly. In his mental file the little man was listed as
"Zone Agent Iliff, Zone Thirty-six Oh-six; unrestricted utility; try not
to irritate—" There was a good
deal more of it, including the notation:
"U-i: The Agent's failure-shock regarding this subject has been
developed over the past twelve-year period into a settled fear-fix of
prime-motive proportions. The Agent may now be intrusted with the conclusion of
this case, whenever the opportunity is presented."
That was no paradox to the Co-ordinator who, as Chief of the Department
of Galactic Zones, was Iliff's immediate superior. He knew the peculiar
qualities of his agents—and how to make the most economical use of them, while
they lasted.
"It's my own opinion," he offered
cheerily, "that U-i has been dead for years! Though I'll admit Correlation
doesn't agree with me there."
"Correlation's often right," Iliff
remarked, still watchfully. He added, "U-i appeared excessively healthy
the last time I got near him!"
"Well, that was twelve
standard years ago," the Co-ordinator murmured. "If he were still
around, he'd have taken a bite out of us before this—a big bite! Just to tell
us he doesn't think the Galaxy is quite wide enough for him and the Confederacy
both. He's not the type to lie low longer than he has to." He paused.
"Or do you think you might have shaken some of his supremacy ideas out of
him that last time?"
"Not likely," said Iliff. The voice
that came from the transmitter, the thought that carried it, were equally
impassive. "He booby-trapped me good! To him it wouldn't even have seemed
like a fight"
The Co-ordinator shrugged. "Well, there you are! Anyway, this isn't
that kind of job at all. It's actually a rather simple assignment."
Iliff winced.
"No, I mean it! What
this job takes is mostly tact—always one of your strongest points, Iliff."
The statement was not entirely true; but the
Agent ignored it and the Co-ordinator went on serenely: ". . . so I've
homed you full information on the case. Your ship should pick it up in an hour,
but you might have questions; so here it is, in brief:
"Two
weeks ago, the Bureau of Interstellar Crime sends an operative to a planet
called Gull in Seventeen Eighty-two—that's a mono-planet system near Lycanno, just a bit off your present route. You
been through that neighborhood before?"
Iliff
blinked yellow eyes and produced a memory. "We went through Lycanno once.
Seventeen or eighteen Habitables;
population A-Class Human;
Class D politics— How far is Gull from there?"
"Eighteen
hours cruising speed, or a little less—but you're closer to it than that right
now. This operative was to make positive identification of some ex-spacer
called Tahmey, who'd been reported there, and dispose of him. Routine
interstellar stuff, but—twenty-four hours ago, the operative sends back a
message that she finds positive identification impossible . . . and that she
wants a Zone Agent!"
He
looked expectantly at Iliff. Both of them knew perfectly well that the
execution of a retired piratical spacer was no part of a Zone Agent's
job—furthermore, that every Interstellar operative was aware of the fact; and,
finally, that such a request should have induced the Bureau to recall its
operative for an immediate mental overhaul and several months' vacation before
he or she could be risked on another job.
"Give," Iliff
suggested patiently.
"The difference," the Co-ordinator
explained, "is that the operative is one of our Lannai trainees!"
"I see," said the Agent.
He
did. The Lannai were high type humanoids and the first people of their
classification to be invited to join the Vegan Confederacy—till then open only
to Homo sapiens and the interesting variety of mutant branches of that old
Terrestrial stock.
The
invitation had been sponsored, against formidable opposition, by the
Department of Galactic Zones, with the obvious intention of having the same
privilege extended later to as many humanoids and other nonhuman races as could
meet the Confederacy's general standards.
As
usual, the Department's motive was practical enough. Its king-sized job was to
keep the eighteen thousand individual civiliza-
Hons
so far registered in its Zones out of as much dangerous trouble as it could,
while nudging them unobtrusively, whenever the occasion was offered, just a
little farther into the path of righteousness and order.
It
was slow, dangerous, carefully unspectacular work, since it violated in fact
and in spirit every galactic treaty of nonintervention the Confederacy had
ever signed. Worst of all, it was work for which the Department was, of
necessity, monstrously understaffed.
The
more political systems, races and civilizations it could draw directly into the
Confederacy, the fewer it would have to keep under that desperately sketchy
kind of supervision. Regulations of membership in Vega's super-system were
interpreted broadly, but even so they pretty well precluded any dangerous
degree of deviation from the ideals that Vega championed.
And
if, as a further consequence, Galactic Zones could then draw freely on the
often startling abilities and talents of non-human peoples to aid in its
titanic project-The Department figuratively licked its chops.
The
opposition was sufficiently rooted in old racial emotions to be extremely
bitter and strong. The Traditionalists, working chiefly through the
Confederacy's Department of Cultures, wanted no dealings with any race which
could not trace its lineage back through the long centuries to Terra itself.
Nonhumans had played a significant part in the century-long savage struggles
that weakened and finally shattered the first human Galactic Empire.
That
mankind, as usual, had asked for it and that its grimmest and most powerful
enemies were to be found nowadays among those who could and did claim the same
distant Earth-parentage did not noticeably weaken the old argument, which to
date had automatically excluded any other stock from membership. In the High Council
of the Confederacy, the Department of Cultures, backed by a conservative
majority of the Confederacy's members, had, naturally enough, tremendous
influence.
Galactic
Zones, however—though not one citizen in fifty thousand knew of its existence,
and though its arguments could not be openly advanced—had a trifle more.
So the Lannai were in—on
probation.
"As
you may have surmised," the Third Co-ordinator said glumly, "the
Lannai haven't exactly been breaking their necks trying to get in with us,
either. In fact, their government's had to work for the alliance against almost
the same degree of popular disapproval; though on the whole they seem to be a
rather more reasonable sort of people than we are. Highly developed natural
telepaths, you know—that always seems to make folks a little easier to get
along with."
"What's this one doing
in Interstellar?" Iliff inquired.
"We've
placed a few Lannai in almost every department of the government by now—not, of
course, in Galactic Zones! The idea is to prove, to our people and theirs, that
Lannai and humans can work for the same goal, share responsibilities, and so
on. To prove generally that we're natural allies."
"Has it been
proved?"
"Too
early to say. They're bright enough and, of course, the ones they sent us were
hand-picked and anxious to make good. This Interstellar operative looked like
one of the best. She's a kind of relative of the fifth ranking Lannai ruler.
That's what would make it bad if it turned out she'd blown up under stress! For
one thing, their pride could be hurt enough to make them bolt the alliance. But
our Traditionalists certainly would be bound to hear about it, and," the
Coordinator concluded heatedly, "the Coordinator of Cultures would be
rising to his big feet again on the subject in Council!"
"An
awkward situation, sir," Iliff sympathized, "demanding a great deal
of tact. But then you have that!"
"I've
got it," agreed the Coordinator, "but I'd prefer not to have to use
it so much. So if you can find some way of handling that little affair on Gull
discreetly— Incidentally, since you'll be just a short run then from Lycanno,
there's an undesirable political trend reported building up there! They've
dropped from D to H-Class politics inside of a decade. You'll find the local
Agent's notes on the matter waiting for you on Gull. Perhaps you might as well
skip over and fix it."
"All
right," said Iliff coldly. "I won't be needed back in my own Zone for
another hundred hours. Not urgently."
"Lab's
got a new mind-lock for you to test," the Coordinator went on briskly.
"You'll find that on Gull, too."
There was a slight pause.
"You remember, don't
you," the Agent inquired gently then, as if speaking to an erring child,
"what happened the last time I gave one of those gadgets a field test on a
high-powered brain?"
"Yes, of course! But if this one woiks/f the Co-ordinator pointed out, almost
wistfully, "we've got something we really do need. And until I know it
does work, under ultimate stresses, I can't give it general distribution. I've
picked a hundred of you to try it out." He sighed. "Theoretically, it
will hold a mind of any conceivable potential within that mind's own shields,
under any conceivable stress, and still permit almost normal investigation.
It's been checked to the limit," he concluded encouragingly, "under
lab conditions—"
"They all were,"
Iliff recollected, without noticeable enthusiasm. "Well, I'll see what
turns up."
"That's fine!" The Co-ordinator
brightened visibly. He added, "we wouldn't, of course, want you to take
any unnecessary risks—"
For perhaps half a minute after the
visualization tank of his telepath transmitter had faded back to its normal
translucent and faintly luminous green, Iliff continued to stare into it.
Back on Jeltad, the capital planet of the
Confederacy, fourteen thousand light-years away, the Co-ordinator's attention
was turning to some other infinitesimal-seeming but significant crisis in the
Department's monstrous periphery. The chances were he would not think of Iliff
again, or of Zone Seventeen Eighty-two, until IlifFs final mission report came
in—or failed to come in within the period already allotted it by the
Department's automatic monitors.
In either event, the brain screened by the
Co-ordinator's conversational inanities would revert once more to that
specific problem then, for as many unhurried seconds, minutes or, it might be,
hours as it required. It was one of the three or four human brains in the
galaxy for which Zone Agent Iliff had ever felt anything remotely approaching
genuine respect.
"How far are we from Gull now?" he
said without turning his head.
A voice seemed to form itself in the air a
trifle above and behind him.
"A little over eight hours, cruising speed—"
"As soon as I get the reports off that pigeon from Jeltad, step it
up so we get there in four," Iliff said. "I think I'll be ready about
that time."
"The pigeon just arrived/' the voice
replied. It was not loud, but it was a curiously big voice with something of
the overtones of an enormous bronze gong in it. It was also oddly like a
cavernous amplification of IlifFs own type of speech.
The
Agent turned to a screen on his left, in which a torpedolike twenty-foot tube
of metal had appeared, seemingly suspended in space and spinning slowly about
its axis. Actually, it was some five miles from the ship—which was as close as
it was healthy to get to a homing pigeon at the end of its voyage—and following
it at the ship's exact rate of speed, though it was driven by nothing except an
irresistible urge to get to its "roost," the pattern of which had been
stamped in its molecules. The roost was on IlifFs ship, but the pigeon would
never get there. No one knew just what sort of sub-dimensions it flashed
through on its way to its objective or what changes were wrought on it before
it reappeared, but early experiments with the gadget had involved some highly
destructive explosions at its first contact with any solid matter in normal
space.
So
now it was held by barrier at a safe distance while its contents were
duplicated within the ship. Then something lethal flickered from the ship to
the pigeon and touched it; and it vanished with no outward indication of
violence.
For
a time, Iliff became immersed in the dossiers provided both by Interstellar and
his own department. The ship approached and presently drove through the
boundaries of Zone Seventeen Eighty-two, and the big voice murmured:
"Three hours to Gull."
"All right,"
Iliff said, still absently. "Let's eat."
Nearly
another hour passed before he spoke again. "Send her this. Narrow-beam
telepath—Gull itself should be close enough, I think. If you can get it
through—"
He stood up, yawned,
stretched and bent, and straightened again.
"You
know," he remarked suddenly, "I wouldn't be a bit surprised if the
old girl wasn't so wacky, after all. What I mean is," he explained,
"she really might need a Zone Agent!"
"Is
it going to be another unpredictable mission?" the voice inquired.
"Aren't
they always—when the man picks them for us? What was that?"
There was a moment's silence. Then the voice
told him, "She's got your message. She'll be expecting you."
"Fast!" Iliff said approvingly.
"Now listen. On Gull, we shall be old Trader Casselmath with his stock of
exotic and expensive perfumes. So get yourself messed up for the part—but
don't spill any of the stuff, this time!"
The
suspect's name was Deel. For the past ten years he had been a respected—and
respectable—citizen and merchant of the mono-planet System of Gull. He was
supposed to have come there from his birthplace, Number Four of the neighboring
System of Lycanno.
But
the microstructural plates the operative made of him proved he was the pirate
Tahmey who, very probably, had once been a middling big shot among the
ill-famed Ghant Spacers. The Bureau of Interstellar Crime had him on record;
and it was a dogma of criminology that microstructural identification was final
and absolute—that the telltale patterns could not be duplicated, concealed, or
altered to any major degree without killing the organism.
The
operative's people, however, were telepaths, and she was an adept, trained in
the widest and most intensive use of the faculty. For a Lannai it was natural
to check skeptically, in her own manner, the mechanical devices of another
race.
If
she had not been an expert she would have been caught then, on her first
approach. The mind she attempted to tap was guarded.
By
whom or what was a question she did not attempt to answer immediately. There
were several of these watchdogs, of varying degrees of ability. Her thought
faded away from the edge of their watchfulness before their attention was drawn
to it. It slid past them and insinuated itself deftly through the crude
electronic thought-shields used by Tahmey. Such shields were a popular
commercial article, designed to protect men with only an average degree of
mental training against the ordinary telepathic prowler and entirely effective
for that purpose. Against her manner of intrusion they were of no use at all.
But
it was a shock to discover then that she was in no way within the mind of
Tahmey! This was, in literal fact, the mind of the man named Deel—for the past
ten years a citizen of Gull, before that of the neighboring System of Lycanno.
The
fact was, to her at least, quite as indisputable as the micro-structural
evidence that contradicted it. This was not some clumsily linked mass of
artificial memory tracts and habit traces, but a living, matured mental
personality. It showed few signs of even as much psychosurgery as would be
normal in a man of Deel's age and circumstances.
But if it was Deel, why should anyone keep a
prosperous, reasonably honest and totally insignificant planeteer under
telepathic surveillance? She considered investigating the unknown watchers,
but the aura of cold, implacable alertness she had sensed in her accidental
near-contact with them warned her not to force her luck too far.
"After all," she
explained apologetically, "I had no way of estimating their
potential."
"No," Iliff agreed, "you hadn't. But I don't think that
was what stopped you."
The Lannai operative looked at him steadily
for a moment. Her name was Pagadan and, though no more human than a jellyfish,
she was to human eyes an exquisitely designed creature. It was rather startling
to realize that her Interstellar dossier described her as a combat-type
mind—which implied a certain ruthlessness, at the very least—and also that she
had been sent to Gull to act, among other things, as an executioner.
"Now what did you mean by that?" she inquired, on a note of friendly
wonder.
"I meant," Iliff said carefully, "that I'd now like to
hear all the little details you didn't choose to tell Interstellar. Let's start
with your trip to Lycannol"
"Oh, I see!" Pagadan said.
"Yes, I went to Lycanno, of course—" She smiled suddenly and became
with that, he thought, extraordinarily beautiful, though the huge silvery eyes
with their squared black irises, which widened or narrowed flickeringly with
every change of mood or shift of light, did not conform exactly to any standard
human ideal. No more did her hair, a silver-shimmering fluffy crest of
something like feathers—but the general effect, Iliff decided, remained somehow
that of a remarkably attractive human woman in permanent fancy dress.
"You're a clever little man, Zone
Agent," she said thoughtfully. "I believe I might as well be frank
with you. If I'd reported everything I know about this case—though for reasons
I shall tell you I really found out very little—the Bureau would almost
certainly have recalled me. They show a maddening determination to see that I
shall come to no harm while working for them." She looked at him
doubtfully. "You understand that, simply because I'm a Lannai, I'm an
object of political importance just now?" Iliff nodded.
"Very
well. I discovered in Lycanno that the case was a little more than I could
handle alone!" She shivered slightly, the black irises flaring wide with
what was probably reminiscent fright.
"But
I did not want to be recalled. My people," she said a little coldly,
"will accept the proposed alliance only if they are to share in your
enterprises and responsibilities. They do not wish to be shielded or protected,
and it would have a poor effect on them if they learned that we, their first
representatives among you, had been relieved of our duties whenever they
threatened to involve us in personal danger!"
"I
see," Iliff said seriously, remembering that she was royalty of a sort, or
the Lannai equivalent of it. He shook his head. "The Bureau," he
said, "must have quite a time with you!"
Pagadan
stared and laughed. "No doubt they find me a little difficult at times.
Still, I do know how to take orders! But in this case it seemed more important
to make sure I was not going to be protected again than to appear reasonable
and co-operative. So I made use, for the first time, of my special status in
the Bureau and insisted that a Zone Agent be sent here. However, I can assure
you that the case has developed into an undertaking that actually will require
a Zone Agent's peculiar abilities and equipment!"
"Well,"
Iliff shrugged, "it worked and here I am, abilities, equipment and all.
What was it you found on Lycanno?"
There
was considerable evidence to show that, during the years Tahmey was on record
as having been about his criminal activities in space, the man named Deel was
living quietly on the fourth planet of the Lycanno System, rarely even
venturing beyond its atmospheric limits because of a pronounced and distressing
liability to the psychosis of space-fear,
Pagadan
gathered this evidence partly from official records, partly and in much greater
detail from the unconscious memories of some two hundred people who had been
more or less intimately connected with Deel. The investigation appeared to
establish his previous existence in Lycanno beyond all reasonable doubt. It
did nothing to explain why it should have become merged fantastically with the
physical appearance of the pirate Tahmey.
This Deel was remembered as a big, blond,
healthy man, good-natured and shrewd, the various details of his features and
personality blurred or exaggerated by the untrained perceptions of those who
remembered him. The description, particularly after this lapse of time, could
have fitted Tahmey just as well—or just as loosely.
It was as far as she could go along that
line. Officialdom was lax in Lycanno, and the precise identification of
individual citizens by microstructural images or the like was not practiced.
Deel had been born there, matured there, become reasonably successful. Then his
business was destroyed by an offended competitor, and it was indicated to him
that he would not be permitted to re-establish himself in the System.
He had business connections on Gull; and after undergoing a lengthy and
expensive conditioning period against the effects of space-fear, he ventured to
make the short trip, and was presently working himself back to a position
comfortably near the top on Gull.
That was all. Except that—somewhere along the line—his overall physical
resemblance to Tahmey had shifted into absolute physical identity . . .
"I realize, of course, that the duplication of a living personality
in another body is considered almost as impossible as the existence of a
microstructural double. But it does seem that Tahmey-Deel has to be one or the other!"
"Or," Iliff grunted,
"something we haven't thought of yet. This is beginning to look more and
more like one of those cases I'd like to forget. Well, what did you do?"
"If there was a biopsychologist in the
Lycanno System who had secretly developed a method of personality transfer in
some form or other, he was very probably a man of considerable eminence in that
line of work. I began to screen the minds of persons likely to know of such a
man."
"Did you find him?"
She shook her head and grimaced
uncomfortably. "He found me —at least, I think we can assume it was he! I
assembled some promising leads, a half dozen names in all, and then—I find this
difficult to describe—from one moment to another I knew I was being ..« sought...
by another mind. By a mind of quite extraordinary power, which seemed fully
aware of my purpose, of the means I was employing—in fact, of everything except
my exact whereabouts at the moment. It was intended to shock me into revealing
that—simply by showing me, with that jolting abruptness, how very close I stood
to being caught!" "And you didn't reveal yourself?"
"No," she laughed nervously.
"But I went 'akaba' instead! I was under it for three days and well on my
way back to Gull when I came out of it—as a passenger on a commercial ship!
Apparently, I had abandoned my own ship on Lycanno and conducted my escape
faultlessly and without hesitation. Successfully, at any rate— But I remember
nothing, of course!"
"That was a quite a Brain chasing you
then!" Iliff nodded slowly. The akaba condition was a disconcerting
defensive trick which had been played on him on occasion by members of other
telepathic races. The faculty was common to most of them; completely
involuntary, and affected the pursuer more or less as if he had been closing in
on a glow of mental light and suddenly saw that light vanish without a trace.
The Departmental Lab's theory was that under
the stress of a psychic attack which was about to overwhelm
the individual tele-path, a kind of racial Overmind took over automatically and
conducted its member-mind's escape from the emergency, if that was at all
possible, with complete mechanical efficiency before restoring it to awareness
of itself. It was only a theory since the Overmind, if it existed, left no
slightest traces of its work—except the brief void of one of the very few forms
of complete and irreparable amnesia known. For some reason, as mysterious as
the rest of it, the Overmind never intervened if the threatened telepath had been
physically located by the pursuer.
They stared at each other thoughtfully for a moment, then smiled at the same instant.
"Do you believe now," Pagadan
challenged, "that this task is worthy of the efforts of a Vegan Zone Agent and his shipload of specialists?"
"I've been afraid of that right
along," Iliff said without enthusiasm. "But look, you seem to know a
lot more about Galactic Zones than you're really supposed to. Like that
business about our shipload of specialists—that kind of information is to be
distributed only 'at or above Zone Agent levels/ Where did you pick it
up?"
"On Jeltad—above Zone Agent
levels," Pagadan replied undisturbed. "Quite a bit above, as a
matter of fact! The occasion was social. And now that I've put you in your
place when do you intend to investigate Deel? I've become casually acquainted
with him and could arrange a meeting at almost any time."
Iliff rubbed his chin. "Well, as to that," he said,
"Trader Casselmath dropped in to see a few of Deel's business associates
immediately after landing today. They were quite fascinated by the samples of
perfume he offered them—he does carry an excellent line of the stuff, you know,
though rather high-priced. So Deel turned up too, finally. You'll be interested
to hear he's using a new kind of mind-shield now/'
She was not surprised. "They were
warned, naturally, from Lycanno. The mentality there knew I had been
investigating Deel."
"Well, it shows the
Brain wasn't able to identify you too closely, because they're waiting for you
to pick up your research at this end again! The shield was hair-triggered to
give off some kind of alarm. Old Casselmath couldn't be expected to recognize
that, of course! He took a poke at it, innocently enough—just trying to find
out how far Deel and company could be swindled."
She leaned forward, eyes gleaming black with
excitement. "What happened?"
Iliff shrugged. "Nothing at all obvious.
But somebody did come around almost immediately to look Casselmath over. In
fact, they pulled his simple mind pretty well wide open, though the old boy
never noticed it. Then they knew he was harmless and went away."
Pagadan frowned faintly.
"No," Iliff said, "it wasn't
the Brain! These were stooges, though clever ones—probably the same that were
on guard when you probed Tahmey-Deel the first time. But they've been alerted
now, and I don't think we could do any more investigating around Deel without
being spotted. After your experience on Lycanno, it seems pretty likely that
the answers are all there, anyway."
She nodded slowly. "That's what I think. So we go to Lycanno!"
Iliff shook his head. "Just one of us
goes," he corrected her. And before her flash of resentment could be
voiced he added smoothly, "That's for my own safety as much as for yours.
The Brain must have worked out a fairly exact pattern of your surface mentality
by now; you couldn't get anywhere near him without being discovered. If we're
together, that means I'm discovered, too!"
She
thought it over, shrugged very humanly and admitted, "I suppose you're
right. What am I to do?"
"You're
to keep a discreet watch—a very discreet watch—on Deel and his guardians! How
Deel manages to be Tahmey, or part of him. at the same time is something the
Brain's going to have to explain to us; and if he has a guilty conscience, as
he probably has, he may decide to let the evidence disappear. In that case,
try to keep a line on where they take Deel—but don't, under any circumstances,
take any direct action until I get back from Lycanno."
The
black-and-silver eyes studied him curiously. "Isn't that likely to be
quite a while?" Pagadan inquired—with such nice control that he almost
overlooked the fact that this politically important nonhuman hothead was
getting angry again.
"From what we know now of the Brain, he
sounds like one of
our tougher citizens," he admitted. "Well, yes____ I might be gone
all
of two days!"
There
was a moment of rather tense silence. Then Iliff murmured approvingly:
"See
now! I just knew
you could brake down on
that little old temperament!"
The
Lannai released her breath. "I only hope you're half as good as you
think," she said weakly. "But I am almost ready to believe you will
do it in two days."
"Oh,
I will," Iliff assured her, "with my shipload of specialists."
He stood up and looked down at her unsmiling. "So now if you'll give me
the information you gathered on those top biopsycholo-gists in Lycanno, I'll be
starting."
She
nodded amiably. "There are two things I should like to ask you though,
before you go. The one is—why have you been trying to probe through my
mind-shields all evening?"
"It's
a good thing to find out as much as you can about the people you meet in this
business," Iliff said without embarrassment. "So many of them aren't
really nice. But your shields are remarkably tough. I got hardly any
information at all."
Tou got nothing!" she said flatly,
startled into contradiction.
"Oh, yes. Just a little—when you were
giving me that lecture about the Lannai being a proud people and not willing to
be protected, and all that. For a moment there you were off guard—"
He
brought the captured thought slowly from his mind: the picture of a quiet,
dawnlit city—seas of sloping, ivory-tinted roofs, and towers slender against a
flaming sky.
"That
is Lar-Sancaya the Beautiful—my city, my home-planet," Pagadan said.
"Yes, that was my thought. I remember it now!" She laughed. "You
are a clever little man, Zone Agent! What information was in that for
you?"
Iliff
shrugged. He still showed the form of old Casselmath, the fat, unscrupulous
little Terran trader whose wanderings through the galaxy coincided so often
with the disappearance of undesirable but hitherto invulnerable citizens, with
the inexplicable diversion of belligerent political trends, and the quiet
toppling of venal governments. A space-wise, cynical, greedy but somehow ridiculous
figure. Very few people ever took Casselmath seriously.
"Well,
for one thing that the Lannai are patriots," he said gloomily. "That
makes them potentially dangerous, of course. On the whole, Fm rather glad
you're on our side."
She
grinned cheerfully. "So am I—on the whole. But now, if you'll forgive a
touch of malice, which you've quite definitely earned, I'd like the answer to
my second question. And that is— what sent that little shock through your
nerves when I referred to Tahmey's probable connection with the Ghant Spacers a
while ago?"
Old
Casselmath rubbed the side of his misformed nose reflectively.
"It's
a long, sad story," he said. "But if you want to know-some years
back, I set out to nail down the boss of that outfit, the great U-i, no less!
That was just after the Confederacy managed to break up the Ghant fleet, you
remember— Well, I finally thought I'd got close enough to him to try a delicate
probe at his mind—ugh!"
"I gather you
bounced!"
"Not
nearly fast enough to suit me. The big jerk knew I was after him all the time,
and he'd set up a mind-trap for me. Mechanical and highly powered! I had to be
helped out of it, and then I was psychoed for six months before I was fit to go
back to work.
"That was a long time
ago," Casselmath concluded sadly. "But when it comes to U-i, or the
Ghant Spacers, or anything at all connected with them, I've just never been the
same since!"
Pagadan studied her shining nails and smiled sweetly.
"Zone Agent Iliff, I shall bring you the
records you want—and you may then run along! From now on, of course, I know
exactly what to do to make you jump/"
He sat bulky and expressionless at his desk,
raking bejeweled fingers slowly through his beard—a magnificent, fan-shaped
beard, black, glossy and modishly curled. His eyes were as black as the beard
but so curiously lusterless he was often thought to be blind.
For the first time in a long, long span of
years, he was remembering the meaning of fear.
But the alien thought had not followed him
into the Dome— at least, he could trust his protective devices here! He reached
into a section of the flowing black outer garments he wore, and produced a
silvery, cone-shaped device. Placing the little amplifier carefully on the desk
before him, he settled back in his chair, crossed his hands on his large
stomach and half-closed his eyes.
Almost immediately the recorded
nondirectional thought impulses began. So faint, so impersonal, that even now
when he could study their modified traces at leisure, when they did not fade
away the instant his attention turned to them, they defied analysis except of
the most general kind. And yet the unshielded part of his mind had responded to
them, automatically and stupidly, for almost an hour before he realized—
Long enough to have revealed—almost anything!
The gems on his hand flashed furious fire as
he whipped the amplifier off the desk and sent it smashing against the wall of the
room. It shattered with a tiny crackle and dropped to the floor where a spray
of purple sparks popped hissing from its crumpled surfaces and subsided again.
The thought-impulses were stilled.
The black-bearded man glared down at the broken amplifier. Then, by
almost imperceptible degrees, his expression began to change. Presently, he was
laughing silently.
No matter how he had modified and adapted
this human brain for his purpose, it remained basically what it had been when
he first possessed himself of it! Whenever he relaxed his guidance, it reverted
automatically to the old levels of emotional reaction.
He had forced it to develop its every
rudimentary faculty until its powers were vastly superior to those of any
normal member of its race. No ordinary human being, no matter how highly
gifted, could be the equal of one who had had the advantage of becoming
host-organism to a parasitizing Ceetal! Not even he, the Ceetal, himself was in
any ordinary way the equal of this hypertrophied human intellect—he only
controlled it. As a man controls a machine he has designed to be enormously
more efficient than himself—
But if he had known the human breed better,
he would have selected a more suitable host from it, to begin with. At its
best, this one had been a malicious mediocrity; and its malice only expanded
with its powers so that, within the limits he permitted, it now used the mental
equipment of a titan to pamper the urges of an ape. A scowling moron who, on
the invisible master's demand, would work miracles! Now, at the first
suggestion that its omnipotence might be threatened, it turned guilt-ridden
and panicky, vacillating between brute fright and brute rages.
Too late to alter that—he was linked to his
slave for this phase of his life-cycle! For his purposes, the brute was at any
rate adequate, and it often amused him to observe its whims. But for the new
Ceetals—for those who would appear after his next Change—he could and would
provide more suitable havens!
One of them might well be the spy who had so
alarmed his human partner! The shadowy perfection of his mental attack in
itself seemed to recommend him for the role.
Meanwhile, however, the spy still had to be caught.
In swift waves of relaxation, the Ceetal's
influence spread through the black-bearded man's body and back into the calming
brain. His plan was roughly ready, the trap for the spy outlined, but his human
thought-machine was infinitely better qualified for such work.
Controlled now, its personal fears and even
the memory of them neutralized, it took up the problem as a problem—swept
through it, clarifying, developing, concluding.
It was quite simple. The trap for this spy
would be baited with the precise information he sought. On Gull, meanwhile,
Tahmey remained as physical bait for the other spy, the first one—the non-j human mind which had escaped by dint of the instantaneous
190 space
police
shock-reflex
that plucked it from his grasp as he prepared to close in. That the two were
collaborating was virtually certain, that both were emissaries of the
Confederacy of Vega was a not too unreasonable conjecture. No other
organization suspected of utilizing combat-type minds of such efficiency was
also likely to be interested in the person of Tahmey!
He was not, of course, ready to defy the
Confederacy as yet— would not be for some time. A new form of concealment for
Tahmey might therefore be necessary. But with the two spies under control, with
the information extracted from them, any such difficulties could easily be
met.
The black-bearded man's hands began to move heavily and unhurriedly
over the surface of the desk, activating communicators and recorders.
The plan took shape in a pattern of swift, orderly arrangements.
Four visitors were waiting for him when he
transferred himself to the principal room of the Dome—three men and a woman of
the tall, handsome Lycannese breed. The four faces turning to him wore the same
expression, variously modified, of arrogant impatience.
These and a few others, to all of whom the
black-bearded man was known simply as the Psychologist, had considered
themselves for a number of years to be the actual, if unknown, rulers of the
Lycannese System. They were very nearly right.
At his appearance, two of them began to speak almost simultaneously.
But they made no intelligible sound.
Outwardly, the black-bearded man had done
nothing at all. But the bodies of the four jerked upright in the same instant,
as if caught by a current of invisible power. They froze into that attitude,
their faces twisted in grotesque terror, while his heavy-lidded, sardonic eyes
shifted from one to the other of them.
"Must it always affect you like
that," he said in friendly reproach, "to realize what I actually am?
Or do you feel guilty for having planned to dispose of me, as a once-useful
inferior who can no longer further your ambitions?" He paused and studied
them again in turn, and the pleasantness went out of his expression.
"Yes, I knew about that little
plot," he announced, settling his bulk comfortably on a low couch against
the wall. He looked
agent of vega 191
critically
at his fingernails. "Normally, I should simply have made its achievement
impossible, without letting you find out what had gone wrong. But as things
stand, I'm afraid I shall be obliged to dispense with you entirely. I regret
it, in a way. Our association has been a useful and amusing one—to me, at
least! But, well—' He shook his head.
"Even
I make mistakes!" he admitted frankly. "And recent events have made
it clear that it was a mistake to involve somewhat ordinary human beings as
deeply in my experiments and plans as I involved you—and also that companion of
yours, whose absence here may have caused you to speculate. He," the Psychologist
explained good-naturedly, "will outlive you by a day or so!" He
smiled. "Oddly enough, his brief continued usefulness to me is due to the
fact that he is by far the least intelligent of you —so that I had really
debated the advisability of dropping him from our little circle before
this!"
His
smile broadened invitingly, but he showed no resentment when none of the
chalk-faced, staring puppets before him joined in his amusement.
"Well,"
he beamed, "enough of this! There are minds on our track who seem capable
of reaching you through any defense I can devise. Obviously, I cannot take that
risk! Your friend, however, will live long enough to introduce me to one of
these minds —another one of your ever-surprising species—who should eventually
be of far greater value to me than any of you could hope to be. Perhaps even as
valuable as the person you know as Tahmey! Let that thought console you in your
last moments—which," he concluded, glancing at a pearly oblong that was
acquiring a shimmering visibility in the wall behind the four Lycannese,
"are now at hand!"
Two
solidly built men came into the room through the oblong, saluted, and waited.
The black-bearded one gave them a genial nod
and jerked his thumb in the general direction of the motionless little group of
his disposed associates.
"Strangle those
four," he said, "in turn—"
He
looked on for a few moments but then grew bored. Rising from the couch, he
walked slowly toward one of the six walls of the room. It began to turn
transparent as he approached, and when he stood before it the port-city of
Lycanno IV, the greatest city in the Lycannese System, was clearly visible a
few thousand feet below.
He
gazed down at the scene almost affectionately, savoring a mood of rich
self-assurance. For he was, as he had just now proved once more, the city's
absolute master—master of the eight million human beings who lived there; of
the two billion on the planet; of the sixteen billion in the System. Not for
years had his mastery been seriously challenged!
His
lusterless black eyes shifted slowly to Lycanno's two suns, moving now toward
their evening horizon. Scattered strategically through the galaxy, nearly a
thousand such suns lighted as many planetary systems, each of which was being
gathered slowly into a Ceetal's grasp. The black-bearded man did not entertain
the delusion that Lycanno by itself was an important conquest—no more than each
of those other fractional human civilizations. But when the time came finally—
He
permitted himself to lapse into a reverie of galactic conquest. But curiously,
it was now the human brain and mind which indulged itself in this manner. The
parasite remained lightly detached, following the imaginings without being
affected by them, alert for some new human foible which it might turn some day
to Ceetal profit.
It
was, the Ceetal realized again, an oddly complicated organism, the human one! His
host fully understood the relationship between them, and his own subordinate
part in the Ceetal's plans. Yet he never let himself become conscious of the
situation and frequently appeared to feel an actual identity with the parasite.
It was strange such a near-maniac species could have gained so dominant a
position in this galaxy!
There
was a sudden minor commotion in the center of the room, harsh snoring sounds
and then a brief, frenzied drumming of heels on the carpeted floor.
"You
are getting careless," the Psychologist said coldly, without turning his
head. "Such things can be done quietly!"
The
small yellow-faced man with the deep-set amber eyes drew a good number of
amused and curious stares during the two days he was registered at the Old
Lycannese Hotel.
He
expected nothing else. Even in such sophisticated and galactic-minded
surroundings, his appearance was fantastic to a rather indecent degree. The
hairless dome of his head sloped down comically into a rounded snout. He was
noseless and apparently earless, and in animated moments his naked yellow scalp
would twitch vigorously like the flanks of some vermin-bitten beast.
However,
the Old Lycannese harbored a fair selection of similarly freakish varieties of
humanity within its many-storied walls—mutant humanity from worlds that were,
more often than not, only nameless symbols on any civilized star-map. Side by
side with them, indistinguishable to the average observer, representatives of
the rarer humanoid species also came and went—on the same quest of profitable
trade with Lycanno.
The
yellow-faced man's grotesqueness, therefore, served simply to classify him. It
satisfied curiosity almost as quickly as it drew attention; and no one felt
urged to get too sociable with such a freak. Whether mutant human or humanoid,
he was, at any rate, solvent and had shown a taste for quiet luxury. The hotel
saw that he got what he wanted, pocketed his money and bothered its managerial
head no further about him.
This
curiosity-distracting effect, the yellow-faced man considered, as he strolled
across the ground-floor lobby, was almost as satisfactory when it was applied
to those who had reason to take a much sharper practical interest in any
stranger! Two members of the Psychologist's bodyguard, behind whom he was
heading toward an open elevator which led to the roof-terraces, had scrutinized
him swiftly in passing a moment before—but only long enough to re-establish his
identity beyond any doubt. They had checked that in detail the previous day—a
Talpu, Humanoid, from a system of the Twenty-eighth Median Cluster, dealing in
five varieties of gems—three of them previously unknown to Lycanno.
Queer-looking little duck, but quite harmless.
The
Psychologist's bodyguard took few chances, but they were not conditioned to
look for danger in so blatantly obvious a shape.
The
Psychologist himself, whose dome-shaped dwelling topped one section of the Old
Lycannese Hotel, was taking no chances at all these days. From the center of
the moving cluster of his henchmen he gave the trailing humanoid's mind a
flicking probe and encountered a mind-shield no different than was to be
expected in a traveler with highly valuable commercial secrets to preserve— a
shield he could have dissolved in an instant with hardly any effort at all.
However,
so sudden an operation would have entailed leaving a small yellow maniac
gibbering in agony on the floor of the lobby behind him—a complication he
preferred to avoid in public. He dropped the matter from his thoughts, contemptuously.
He knew of the Talpu—a base, timid race, unfit even for slavery.
A
secondary and very different shield, which the more obvious first one had
concealed from the Psychologist's probe, eased cautiously again in the
yellow-faced man's mind, while the Talpu surface thoughts continued their vague
quick traceries over both shields, unaffected either by the probe or by the
deeper reaction it had aroused.
As
the Psychologist's group reached the automatic elevator, the humanoid was
almost side by side with its rearmost members and only a few steps behind the
dignitary himself. There the party paused briefly while one of the leading
guards scanned the empty compartment, and then stood aside to let the
Psychologist enter. That momentary hesitation was routine procedure. The
yellow-faced man had calculated with it, and he did not pause with the
rest—though it was almost another half-second before any of the Psychologist's
watch-dogs realized that something had
just passed with a shadowy unobtrusiveness through their ranks.
By
then, it was much too late. The great man had just stepped ponderously into the
elevator; and the freakish little humanoid, now somehow directly behind him,
was entering on his heels.
Simultaneously, he
performed two other motions, almost casually.
As
his left hand touched the switch that started the elevator on its way to the
roof, a wall of impalpable force swung up and outwards from the floor-sill
behind him, checking the foremost to hurl themselves at this impossible
intruder—much more gently than if they had run into a large feather cushion but
also quite irresistibly. The hotel took no chances of having its patrons
injured on its premises; so the shocked bodyguards simply found themselves
standing outside the elevator again before they realized it had flashed upward
into its silvery shaft.
As it began to rise, the yellow-faced man
completed his second motion. This was to slip a tiny hypodermic needle into the
back of the Psychologist's neck and depress its plunger.
One
could not. of course, openly abduct the system's most influential citizen
without arousing a good deal of hostile excitement. But he had, Iliff
calculated, when the elevator stopped opposite his apartments near the top of
the huge hotel, a margin of nearly thirty seconds left to complete his getaway
before any possible counterattack could be launched. There was no need to
hurry.
A
half dozen steps took him from the elevator into his rooms, the Psychologist
walking behind him with a look of vague surprise on his bearded face. Another
dozen steps brought the two out to an open-air platform where a rented fast
planecar was waiting.
At
sixty thousand feet altitude, Iliff checked the spurt of their vertical ascent
and turned north. The land was darkening with evening about the jewellike
sparkle of clustered seaboard cities, but up here the light of Lycanno's
primary sun still glittered greenly from the car's silver walls. The speeding
vehicle was shielded for privacy from all but official spy-rays, and for
several more minutes he would have no reason to fear those. Meanwhile, any
aerial pursuer who could single him out from among the myriad similar cars
streaming into and out of the port city at that hour would be very good indeed.
Stripping
the vivo-gel masks carefully from his head and hands, he dropped the frenziedly
twitching half-alive stuff into the depository beside his seat where the car's
jets would destroy it.
The
Psychologist sat, hunched forward and docile, beside him —dull black eyes
staring straight ahead. Up to this point, the new Vegan mind-lock was
conforming to the Third Coordinator's expectations.
Interrogation
of the prisoner took place in a small valley off the coast of an uninhabited
island, in the subpolar regions. A dozen big snake-necked carnivores scattered
from the carcass of a still larger thing on which they had been feeding as the
planecar settled down; and their snuffing and baffled howls provided a
background for the further proceedings which Iliff found grimly fitting. He had
sent out a fear-impulse adjusted to the beast-pack's primitive sensation-level,
which kept them prowling helplessly along the rim of a hundred-yard circle.
In the center of this circle Iliff sat
cross-legged on the ground, watching the Quizzer go about its business.
The
Quizzer was an unbeautiful two-foot cube of machine. Easing itself with
delicate ruthlessness through the Psychologist's mental defenses, it droned its
findings step by step into Iliff's mind. He could have done the work without
its aid, since the shield had never been developed that could block a really
capable investigator if he was otherwise unhampered. But it would have taken a
great deal longer; and at best he did not expect to have more time than he
needed to extract the most vital points of information. Besides, he lacked the
Quizzer's sensitivity; if he was hurried, there was a definite risk of doing
irreparable injury to the mind under investigation—at that stage, he hadn't
been able to decide whether or not it would be necessary to kill the
Psychologist.
The
second time the Quizzer contacted the Ceetal, he knew. The little robot
reported an alien form of awareness which came and went through the Quizzer's
lines of search as it chose and was impossible to localize.
"It
is the dominant consciousness in this subject. But it is connected with the
organism only through the other one."
The
Quizzer halted again. It was incapable of surprise or confusion, but when it
could not classify what it found it stopped reporting. It was bothered, too, by
the effects of the mind-lock— an innovation to which it was not adjusted. The
chemical acted directly on the shields, freezing those normally flexible
defensive patterns into interlocked nets of force which isolated the energy
centers of the nervous system that produced them.
"Give me anything you
get on it!" Iliff urged.
The machine still
hesitated. And then:
"It
thinks that if it could break the force you call the mind-lock and energize the
organism it could kill you instantly. But it is afraid that it would cause
serious injury to the organism in doing so. Therefore it is willing to wait
until its friends arrive and destroy you. It is certain that this will happen
very quickly now."
Iliff
grunted. That was no news to him, but it gave him an ugly thrill nevertheless.
He'd found it necessary to cut his usual hit-and-run tactics very fine for this
job; and so far he had got nothing he could use out of it.
"Does this primary consciousness/' he
inquired, "know what you're trying to do and what you're telling me?"
"It
knows what I'm trying to do/' the machine responded promptly. "It does not
know that I'm telling you anything. It is aware of your presence and purpose
but it can receive no sense impression of any kind. It can only think."
"Good
enough/' Iliff nodded. "It can't interfere with your activity then?"
"Not
while the mind-lock keeps it from arousing its energy sources."
"What of the other
one—the human consciousness?"
"That
one is somnolent and completely helpless. It is barely aware of what is
occurring and has made no attempt to interfere. It is only the mind-lock that
blocks my approach to the information you require. If you could dissolve that
force, there would be no difficulty."
Iliff
wasted a baleful look on his squat assistant. "Except," he pointed
out, "that I'd get killed!"
"Undoubtedly,"
the machine agreed with idiotic unconcern. "The energy centers of this
organism are overdeveloped to an extent which, theoretically, should have
drained it of its life-forces many years ago. It appears that the alien
consciousness is responsible both for the neural hypertrophy and for the fact
that the organism as a whole has been successfully adapted to meet the
resultant unnatural stresses—"
Towards
the end of the next half-hour, the pattern of information finally began to take
definite shape—a shape that made Iliff increasingly anxious to get done with
the job. But which showed also that the Third Co-ordinator's hunch had been
better than he knew!
Lycanno was long overdue
for a Zone Agent's attentions.
He
should, he supposed, have been elated; instead, he was sweating and shivering,
keyed to nightmarish tensions. Theoretically, the mind-lock might be
unbreakable, but the Ceetal, for one, did not believe it. It did fear that to
shatter lock and shields violently might destroy its host and thereby itself;
so far, that had kept it from making the attempt. That, and the knowledge it
shared with its captor—that they could not remain undiscovered much longer.
But at each new contact, the Quizzer
unemotionally reported an increase in the gathering fury and alarm with which
the parasite observed the progress of the investigation. It had been coldly
contemptuous at first; then the realization came slowly that vital secrets were
being drawn, piece by piece, from the drugged human mind to which it was
linked—and that it could do nothing to check the process!
By
now, it was dangerously close to utter frenzy, and for many minutes Iliff's
wrist-gun had been trained on the hunched and motionless shape of the
Psychologist. Man and Ceetal would die on the spot if necessary. But even in
its death-spasms, he did not want to be in the immediate neighborhood of that
mind and the powers it could unleash if it broke loose. Time and again, he drew
the Quizzer back from a line of investigation that seemed too likely to provide
the suicidal impulse. Other parts of the pattern had been gained piecemeal, very
circumstantially.
It
was tight, carefully balanced work. However, there were only a few more really
important points left now. There might be just time enough—
Iliff
jerked upright as a warning blared from an automatic detector he had installed
in the planecar the day before, raising a chorus of furious carnivore yells
from the rim of the hundred-yard fear-circle.
"Two planetary craft approaching at low
cruising speeds," it detailed. "Sector fourteen, distance eighty-five
miles, altitude nineteen miles. Surface and psyche scanners are being
used."
And, an instant later:
"You have been
discovered/"
The rescuers were several minutes earlier
than he'd actually expected. But the warning gave him the exact margin
required for his next action, and the uncertainty and tension vanished from his
mind.
He snapped a command to the
Quizzer:
"Release the
subject—then destroy yourself!"
Freed
from invisible tentacles, the Psychologist's body rolled clumsily forward to
the turf, and at once came stumbling to its feet. Behind it, the Quizzer flared
up briefly in a shower of hissing sparks, collapsed, liquefied, and fused again
into metallic formlessness.
Seconds later, Iliff had lifted the planecar
over the valley's tree-top level. The vehicle's visiglobe was focused
locally—every section of the dark little valley appeared as distinct in it as
if flooded with brilliant daylight. Near its center, the figure of the
Psychologist was groping through what to him was near-complete blackness down
into the open ground. Whether the alien mind understood that its men had
arrived and was attempting to attract their attention, Iliff would never know.
It
did not matter, now. The planecar's concealed guns were trained on that figure;
and his finger was on the trigger-stud.
But
he did not fire. Gliding out from under the trees, the lean, mottled shapes of
the carnivore-pack had appeared in the field of the globe. Forgetting the
intangible barrier of fear as quickly as it ceased to exist, they scuttled back
toward their recently abandoned feast—and swerved, in a sudden new awareness,
to converge upon the man-form that stumbled blindly about near it.
Iliff
grimaced faintly, spun the visiglobe to wide-range focus and sent the planecar
hurtling over the shoreline into the sea. The maneuver would shield him from
the surface scanners of the nearest pursuers and give him a new and now
urgently needed head-start.
It would please his scientific colleagues
back on Jeltad, he knew, to hear that the Ceetal had been mistaken about the
strength of their mind-lock! For the brief seconds it survived in the center of
the ravening mottled pack, that malevolent intellect must have put forth every
effort to break free and destroy its attackers.
It had been quite
unsuccessful.
Near dawn, in the fifth-largest city of
Lycanno IV, a smallish military gentleman proceeded along the docks of a minor
space port towards a large, slow-looking, but apparently expensive craft he had
registered there two days before. Under one arm he carried a bulging brief
case of the openly spy-proof type employed by officials of the Terran embassy.
The
burden did not detract in the least from his air of almost belligerent
dignity—an attitude which still characterized most citizens of ancient Earth in
the afterglow of her glory. The ship he approached was surrounded by a
wavering, globular sheen of light, like a cluster of multiple orange halos,
warning dock attendants and the idly curious from coming within two hundred
feet of it.
Earthmen were notoriously
jealous of their right to privacy.
The
military gentleman, whose size was his only general point of resemblance to
either Iliff or the yellow-faced man who had been a guest of the Old Lycannese
Hotel not many hours earlier, walked into the area of orange fire without
hesitation. From the ship, a brazen, inhuman voice boomed instantly at him,
both audibly and in mental shock-waves that would have rocked the average
intruder back like a blow in the face:
"Withdraw
at once! This vessel is shielded from investigation in accordance with existing
regulations. Further unauthorized advance into the area defined by the
light-barrier—"
The voice went silent
suddenly. Then it continued, subvocally:
"You
are being observed from a strato-station. Nothing else to report. We can leave
immediately."
In
the strato-station, eighty miles above, a very young, sharp-faced fleet
lieutenant was turning to his captain:
"Couldn't that
be-?"
The captain gave him a
sardonic, worldly-wise smile.
"No,
Junior," he said mildly, "that could not be. That, as you should
recall, is Colonel Perritaph, recently attached to the Terran Military
Commission. We checked him through this port yesterday morning. But," he
added, "we're going to have a little fun with the colonel. As soon as he's
ready to take off, he'll drop that light-barrier. When he does, spear him with
a tractor and tell him he's being held for investigation, because there's a
General Emergency out!"
"Why not do it now?
Oh!"
"You
catch on, Junior—you do catch on!" his superior approved tolerantly.
"No light-barrier is to be monkeyed with, ever! Poking a tractor-beam into
one may do no harm. On the other hand, it may blow up the ship, the docks, or,
just possibly, our cozy little station up here—all depending on what stuff
happens to be set how! But once the colonel's inside and has the crate under
control, he's not going to blow up anything, even if we do hurt his tender
Terran feelings a bit."
"That way we find out what he's got in
the ship, diplomatic immunity or not/' the lieutenant nodded, trying to match
the captain's air of weary omniscience.
"We're
not interested in what's in the ship," the captain said softly, abashing
him anew. "Terra's a couple of hundred years behind us in construction and
armaments—always was!" This was not strictly true; but the notion was a
popular one in Lycanno, which had got itself into a brief, thunderous argument
with the aging Mother of Galactic Mankind five hundred years before and limped
for a century and a half thereafter. The unforeseen outcome had, of course,
long since been explained—rotten luck and Terran treachery—and the whole
regrettable incident was not often mentioned nowadays.
But,
for a moment, the captain glowered down in the direction of the distant
spaceport, unaware of what moved him to malice.
"We'll
just let him squirm around a bit and howl for his rights," he murmured.
"They're so beautifully sensitive about those precious privileges!"
There
was a brief pause while both stared at the bulky-looking ship in their globe.
"Wonder
what that G.E. really went out for," the lieutenant ventured presently.
"To
catch one humanoid ape—as described!" the captain grinned. Then he
relented. "I'll tell you one thing—it's big enough that they've put out
the Fleet to blast anyone who tries to sneak off without being
identified!"
The
lieutenant tried to look as if that explained it, but failed. Then he
brightened and announced briskly: "The guy's barrier just went off!"
"All right. Give him
the tractor!"
"It's-"
Up
from the dock area then, clearly audible through their instruments, there rose
a sound: a soft but tremendous WHOOSH! The
cradle in which the slow-looking ship had rested appeared to quiver violently.
Nothing else changed. But the ship was no longer there.
In
white-faced surprise, the lieutenant goggled at the captain. "Did ... did it blow up?" he whispered.
The captain did not answer. The captain had
turned purple, and seemed to be having the worst kind of trouble getting his
breath.
"Took
off—under space-drive/" he gasped suddenly. "How'd he do that without
wrecking— With a tractor on him!"
He
whirled belatedly, and flung himself at the communicators. Gone was his aplomb,
gone every trace of worldly-wise weariness.
"Station 1222 calling Fleet!" he yelped. "Station 1222 calling—"
While
Lycanno's suns shrank away in the general-view tank before him, Iliff rapidly
sorted the contents of his brief case into a small multiple-recorder. It had been a busy night—to those equipped to
read the signs the Fourth Planet must have seemed boiling like a hive of
furious bees before it was over! But he'd done most of what had seemed
necessary, and the pursuit never really got within minutes of catching up with
him again.
When
the excitement died down, Lycanno would presently discover it had become a
somewhat cleaner place overnight. For a moment, Iliff wished he could be around
when the real Colonel Perritaph began to express his views on the sort of
police inefficiency which had permitted an impostor to make use of his name
and position in the System.
Terra's embassies were always ready to give a representative of the Confederacy a helping hand, and no questions
asked; just as in any all-out war, its tiny, savage fleet was regularly found
fighting side by side with the ships of Vega—though never exactly together
with them. Terra was no member of the Confederacy; it was having no foreigners
determine its policies. On the whole, the Old Planet had not changed so very
much.
When
Iliff set down the empty brief case, the voice that had addressed him on his
approach to the ship spoke again. As usual, it was impossible to say from just
where it came; but it seemed to boom out of the empty air a little above
Iliff's head. In spite of its curious resemblance to his own voice, most people
would have identified it now as the voice of a robot.
Which
it was—for its size the most complicated robot-type the science of Vega and her
allies had yet developed.
"Two
armed space-craft, Lycannese destroyer-type, attempting interception!" it
announced. After the barest possible pause, it added: "Instructions?"
Iliff grinned a little without raising his head. No one else would
agentofvega ' 203
have
noticed anything unusual in the stereotyped warning, but he had been living
with that voice for some fifteen years.
"Evasion,
of course, you big ape!" he said softly. "You'll have had all the
fighting you want before you're scrapped!"
His
grin widened then, at a very convincing illusion that the ship had shrugged its
sloping and monstrously armored shoulders in annoyed response. That, however,
was due simply to the little leap with which the suns of Lycanno vanished from
the tank in the abruptness of full forward acceleration.
In
effect, the whole ship was the robot—a highly modified version of the deadly
one-man strike-ships of the Vegan battle fleet, but even more heavily armed and
thus more than qualified to take on a pair of Lycannese destroyers for the
split-second maneuverings and decisions, the whole slashing frenzy of a
deep-space fight. Its five central brains were constructed to produce, as
closely as possible, replicas of Iliff's own basic mental patterns, which made
for a nearly perfect rapport. Beyond that, of course, the machine was
super-sensed and energized into a truly titanic extension of the man.
Iliff did not bother to observe the whiplash
evasion tactics which almost left the destroyers' commanders wondering whether
there had been any unidentified spaceship recorded on their plates in the first
place. That order was being carried out much more competently than if he had
been directing the details himself; and meanwhile there was other business on
hand—the part of his job he enjoyed perhaps least of all. A transmitter was
driving the preliminary reports of his actions on Lycanno Four across nearly
half the galaxy to G.Z. Headquarters Central on the planet of Jeltad.
There,
clerks were feeding it, in series with a few thousand other current
intermission reports, into more complex multiple-recorders, from which various
sections were almost instantaneously disgorged, somewhat cut and edited.
"She has not responded to her personal
beam," the robot announced for the second time. "Sure she just
wasn't able to get back at us?" "There is no indication of
that."
"Keep it open
then—until she does answer," Iliff said. Personal telepathy at
interstellar ranges was always something of an experiment, unless backed at
both ends by mechanical amplifiers of much greater magnitude than were at
Pagadan's disposal.
"But
I do wish," he grumbled, "I'd been able to find out what made the
Ceetal so particularly interested in Tahmey! Saving him up, as host, for the
next generation, of course. If he hadn't been so touchy on that point—" He
scowled at the idly clicking transmitter before him. Deep down in his mind,
just on the wrong side of comprehension, something stirred slowly and uneasily
and sank out of his awareness again.
"Correlation
ought to call in pretty soon," he reassured himself. "With the fresh
data we've fed them, they'll have worked out a new line on the guy."
"Departmental
Lab is now attempting to get back on transmitter," the robot informed
him. "Shall I blank them out till you've talked with Correlation?"
"Let
them through," Iliff sighed. "If we have to, we'll cut them
off-"
A staccato series of clicks conveying an
impression of agitated inquiry, rose suddenly from the transmitter. Still
frowning, he adjusted light-scales, twisted knobs, and a diminutive voice came
gushing in mid-speech from the instrument. Iliff listened a while; then he
broke in impatiently.
"Look,"
he explained. "I've homed you the full recorded particulars of the
process they used! You'll have the stuff any minute now, and you'll get a lot
more out of that than I could tell you. The man I got it from was the only one
still alive of the group that did the job; but he was the one that handled the
important part— the actual personality transfer.
"I
cleared his mind of all he knew of the matter and recorded it, but all I
understood myself was the principle involved—if that!"
The
voice interjected a squeaky, rapid-fire protest. Iliff cut in again quickly:
"Well,
if you need it now— You're right about there not having been any subjective
switching of personalities involved, and I'm not arguing about whether it's
impossible! These people just did a pretty complete job of shifting everything
that's supposed to make up a conscious individual from one human body to
another.
From
any objective point of view, it looks like a personality transfer.
"No,
they didn't use psychosurgery," he went on. "Except to fill in a
six-months sequence of memory tracts to cover the interval they had Tahmey under
treatment. What they used was a modification of the electronic method of
planting living reflex patterns in robot brains. First, they blanked out
Tahmey's mind completely-neutralized all established neural connections and so
on, right down to the primary automatic reflexes."
"The 'no-mind'
stage?" Lab piped.
"That's
right. Then they put the Lycannese Deel in a state of mental stasis. They'd picked him because of his strong physical
resemblance to Tahmey."
"That,"
Lab instructed him sharply, "could have no effect on the experiment as
such. Did they use a chemical paralyzing agent to produce the stasis?"
"I think so. It's in
the report—"
"You—Zone Agents! How long did they keep
the two nerve systems linked?" "About six months."
"I
see. Then they broke the flow and had a complete copy of the second subject's
neural impulse paths stamped into the first subject's nervous system.
Re-energized, the artificial personality would pick up at the exact point it
entered mental stasis and continue to develop normally from there on. I see, I
see, I see . . . but what happened to the second subject—Deel?"
"He
died in convulsions a few seconds after they returned him to
consciousness."
Lab
clicked regretfully. "Usual result of a prolonged state of mental
stasis—and rather likely to limit the usefulness of the process, you know. Now,
there are a few important points—"
"Correlation!"
the robot said sharply into Iliff's mind.
The
squeaky voice thinned into an abrupt high whistle and was gone.
"I'm
here, Iliff! Your friend and guide, Captain Rashallan of Correlation, himself!
You haven't started to close in on that Tahmey bird yet, have you? You aren't
anywhere near him yet?"
"No/' Iliff said. He squinted down at
the transmitter and was surprised by a sudden sense of constriction in his
throat. "Why?"
The
Correlation man took about three minutes to tell him. He ended with:
"We've
just had a buzz from Lab—they were trying to get back to you, but couldn't—and
what they want us to tell you fits right in—
"The neutralization of a nervous system
that produces the no-mind stage is an effect that wears off completely within
two years! Normally, the result is the gradual re-establishment of the original
personality; but, in this case, there can be no such result because all energy
centers are channeling constantly into the Deel personality.
"However,
there's no reason to doubt that 'Tahmey' is now also present in the
system—though unconscious and untraceable because unenergized! Obviously, the
Ceetal could have no reason to be interested in a commonplace mentality such as
Deel's.
"Now
you see how it ties in! Whether it was the Ceetal's intention or not—and it's
extremely probable, a virtual certainty, that it was—the whole artificial
creation remains stable only so long as the Deel personality continues to
function!
"The
instant it lapses, the original personality will be energized! You see what's
likely to happen to any probing outsider then?"
"Yes," Iliff
said, "I see."
"Assuming it's been arranged like
that," said Captain Rashallan, "the trigger that sets off the change
is, almost certainly, a situational one—and there will be a sufficient number
of such triggered situations provided so that any foreseeable emergency pattern
is bound to develop one or more of them!
"The
Ceetal's purpose with such last-resort measures would be, of course, to
virtually insure the destruction of any investigator who had managed to
overcome his other defenses, and who was now at the point of getting a direct
line on him and his little pals!
"So
you'll have to watch . . . well, Zones wants to get through to you now, and
they're getting impatient. Good luck, Iliff!"
Iliff
leaned forward then and shut off the transmitter. For a moment or so after
that, he sat motionless, his yellow eyes staring with a hard, flat expression
at something unseen. Then he inquired:
"Did you get
Pagadan?"
"ThereVe been several blurred responses
in the past few minutes/' the robot answered. "Apparently, she's unable
to get anything beyond the fact that you are trying to contact her—and she is
also unable to amplify her reply to the extent required just now! Do you have
any definite message?"
"Yes,"
Iliff said briskly. "As long as you get any response from her at all, keep
sending her this: 'Kill Tahmey! Get off Gull!' Make it verbal and strong! Even
if the beam doesn't clear, that much might get through."
"There's
a very good chance of it," the robot agreed. It added, after a moment,
"But the Interstellar operative is not very likely to be successful in
either undertaking, Iliff!"
There was another pause
before Iliff replied.
"No,"
he said then. "I'm afraid not. But she's a capable being-she does have a
chance."
FOR DISTRIBUTION AT AND ABOVE ZONE AGENT LEVELS
Description:
. . . mind-parasite of
extragalactic origin, accidentally introduced into our Zones and now widely
scattered there ... In its free state
a nonmaterial but coherent form of conscious energy, characterized by high
spatial motility.
. .
. basic I. Q. slightly above A-type human being. Behavior . . . largely on
reflex-intuition levels. The basic procedures underlying its life-cycle are not
consciously comprehended by the parasite and have not, at present, been
explained.
Cycle:
. . . the free state,
normally forming only a fraction of the Ceetal life-cycle, may be extended
indefinitely until the parasite contacts a suitable host-organism.
Oxygen-breathing life-forms with neural mechanisms in the general class of the
human nervous system and its energy areas serve this purpose.
On
contacting a host, the Ceetal undergoes changes in itself enabling it to
control the basic energizing drives of the host-organism. It then develops the
host's neural carriers to a constant point five times beyond the previous absolute emergency overload.
In
type-case Ceetal-Homo—Lycanno S-4,1782—a
drastic localized hypertrophy of the central nerve tissue masses was observed,
indicating protective measures against the overload induced in the organism.
The advantages to the parasite of developing
a host-organism of such abnormal potency and efficiency in its environment is
obvious, as it is indissolubly linked to its host for the major part of its
long parasitic stage and cannot survive the host's death. Barring accidents or
superior force, it is, however, capable of prolonging the host's biological
life-span almost indefinitely.
At
the natural end of this stage, the Ceetal reproduces, the individual parasite
dividing into eight free-stage forms. The host is killed in the process of
division, and each Ceetal is freed thereby to initiate a new cycle—
chief g.z.: from correlation
F. . . . The numerical strength of the original swarm of free-stage
Ceetals can thus be set at approximately forty-nine thousand. The
swarm first contacted the Toeller Planet and, with the exception
of less than a thousand individuals, entered symbiosis with the
highest life-form evolved there.
The
resultant emergency of the "Toeller-Worm," previously regarded as
the most remarkable example known of spontaneous mental evolution in a species,
is thereby explained. The malignant nature of the Super-Toeller mirrors the
essentially predatory characteristics of the Ceetal. Its complete
extermination by our forces involved the destruction of the entire Ceetal
swarm, excepting the individuals which had deferred adopting a host.
G. Practical chances of a similar second swarm of these parasites
contacting our galaxy are too low to permit evaluation.
H. The threat from the comparatively few remaining Ceetals de-
rives from the survivors' decision to select their hosts only from
civilized species with a high basic I.Q., capable of developing and
maintaining a dominating influence throughout entire cultural sys-
tems.
In the type-case reported, the Ceetal not
only secured a complete political dominance of the Class-Twelve System of
Lycanno but extended its influence into three neighboring systems.
Since
all surviving Ceetals maintain contact with each other and the identity and
location of one hundred and eighteen of these survivors was given in the
Agent's report, it should not be too difficult to dispose of them before their
next period of reproduction— which would, of course, permit the parasite to
disperse itself to a dangerous extent throughout the galaxy.
The
operation cannot be delayed, however, as the time of reproduction for the
first Ceetals to adopt hosts of human-level I.Q. following the destruction of
the Toeller Worms can now be no more than between two and five
years—standard—in the future. The danger is significantly increased, of course,
by their more recent policy of selecting and conserving hosts of abnormally
high I.Q. rating well in advance of the "change."
The
menace to civilization from such beings, following their mental hypertrophy and
under Ceetal influence, can hardly be overstated!
The
problem of disposing of all surviving Ceetals—or, failing that, of all such
prospective super-hosts—must therefore be considered one of utmost urgency.
"They're
telling me!" the Third Co-ordinator said distractedly. He rubbed his long
chin, and reached for a switch.
"Psych-tester?"
he said. "You heard them? What are the chances of some other Ceetal
picking up U-i?"
"It
must be assumed," a mechanical voice replied, "that the attempt will
be made promptly. The strike you have initiated against those who were revealed
by the Agent's report cannot prevent some unknown survivor from ordering U-i's
removal to another place of concealment, where he could be picked up at will.
Since you are counting on a lapse of two days before the strike now under way
will have yielded sufficient information to permit you to conclude the
operation against the Ceetals, several of them may succeed in organizing their
escape—and even a single Ceetal in possession of such a host as U-i would
indicate the eventual dominance of the species! Galactic Zones has no record
of any other mentality who would be even approximately so well suited to their
purposes."
"Yes," said the Co-ordinator.
"Their purposes— You think then if U-i got their treatment, being what he
is, he could take us?" "Yes," the voice said. "He
could."
The
Co-ordinator nodded thoughtfully. His face looked perhaps a little harsher, a
little grayer than usual.
"Well, we've done what we can from
here," he said presently. "The first other Agent will get to Gull in eleven hours, more or less. There'll be six of
them there tomorrow. And a fleet of destroyers within call range—none of them
in time to do much good, I'm afraid!"
"That is the
probability," the voice agreed.
"Zone
Agent Iliff has cut communication with us," the Coordinator went on.
"Correlation informed him they had identified Tahmey as U-i. He would be,
I suppose, proceeding at top velocities to Gull?"
"Yes, naturally."
"Interstellar
reports they have not been able to contact their operative on Gull. It
appears," the Coordinator concluded, rather bleakly, "that Zone Agent
Iliff understands the requirements of the situation!"
"Yes," the voice said, "he
does."
"G.Z.
Headquarters is still trying to get through," the robot said. After a
moment, it added, "Iliff, this is no longer a one-agent mission!"
"You're
right about that! Half the Department's probably blowing its jets trying to
converge on Gull right now! They'll get there a little late, though. Meanwhile
they know what we know, or as much of it as is good for them. How long since
you got the last sign from Pagadan?"
"Over two hours."
Iliff
was silent a moment. "You might as well quit working her beam," he
said finally. "But keep it open, just in case. And pour on that power till
we get to Gull!"
It
did not take long after his landing on that planet to establish with a
reasonable degree of certainty that if Pagadan was still present, she was in
no condition to respond to any kind of telepathic message. It was only a very
little later—since he was working on the assumption that caution was not a
primary requirement just now—before he disclosed the much more significant fact
that the same held true of the personage who had been known as Deel.
The
next hour, however—until he tapped the right three or four minds—was a dragging
nightmare! Then he had the additional information that the two he sought had
departed from the planet, together, but otherwise unaccompanied, not too long
after he had sent Pagadan his original message.
He flashed the information back to the docked
ship, adding:
"It's a question, of course, of who took
whom along. My own guess is Pagadan hadn't tripped any triggers yet and was
still in charge—and U-i was still Deel—when they left here! The ship's a
single-pilot yacht, shop-new, fueled for a fifty-day trip. No crew; no
destination recorded.
"Pass
it on to Headquarters right away! They still won't be able to do anything about
it; but anyway, it's an improvement."
"That's done,"
the robot returned impassively. "And now?"
"I'm
getting back to you at speed—we're going after them, of course."
"She
must have got the message," the robot said after a moment, "but not
clearly enough to realize exactly what you wanted. How did she do it?"
"Nobody
here seems to know—she blasted those watch-dogs in one sweep, and Gull's been
doing flip-flops quietly ever since! The Ceetal's gang is in charge of the
planet, of course, and they think Deel and his kidnapers are still somewhere
around. They've just been alerted from Lycanno that something went wrong there
in a big way; but again they don't know what.
"And
now they've also begun to suspect somebody's been poking around in their minds
pretty freely this last hour or so."
The
two men in the corridor outside the Port Offices were using mind-shields of a
simple but effective type. It was the motor tension in their nerves and
muscles that warned him first, surging up as he approached, relaxing
slightly—but only slightly—when he was past.
He drove the warning to the
ship.
"Keep
an open line of communication between us, and look out for yourself. The hunt's
started up at this end!"
"The
docks are clear of anything big enough to matter," the robot returned
instantly. "I'm checking upstairs. How bad does it look? I can be with you
in three seconds from here."
"You'd
kill a few thousand bystanders doing it, big boy! This section's built up. Just
stay where you are. There are two men following me, a bunch more waiting behind
the next turn of this corridor. All wearing mind-shields—looks like government
police."
A
second later: "They're set to use paralyzers, so there's no real danger.
The Ceetal's outfit wants me alive, for questioning."
"What will you
do?"
"Let
them take me. It's you they're interested in! Lycanno's been complaining about
us, and they think we might be here to get Deel and the Lannai off the planet.
How does it look around you now?"
"Quiet,
but not good! There're some warships at extreme vision range where they can't do
much harm; but too many groups of men within two hundred miles of us are
wearing mind-shields and waiting for something. I'd say they're ready to use
fixed-mount space guns now, in case we try to leave without asking again."
"That would be it—
Well, here go the paralyzers!"
He
stepped briskly around the corridor corner and stopped short, rigid and
transfixed in flickering white fountains of light that spouted at him from the
nozzles of paralyzer guns in the hands of three of the eight men waiting there.
After
a fifth of a second, the beams snapped off automatically. The stiffness left
Iliff's body more slowly; he slumped then against the wall and slid to the
floor, sagging jaw drawing his face down into an expression of foolish
surprise.
One
of the gunmen stepped toward him, raised his head and pried up an eyelid.
"He's safe!" he announced with
satisfaction. "He'll stay out as long as you want him that way."
Another man spoke into a wrist-phone. "Got him! Orders?"
"Get him into the ambulance waiting at
the main entrance of the building!" a voice crackled back. "Take him
to Dock 709.
We've got to investigate
that ship, and we'll need him to get inside."
"Thought
it would be that," Iliff's murmur reached the ship. "They'll claim I
was in an accident or something and ask to bring me in." The thought
trailed off, started up again a moment later: "They might as well be using
sieves as those government-issue mind-shields! These boys here don't know
another thing except that I'm wanted, but we can't afford to wait any longer.
We'll have to take them along. Get set to leave as soon as we're inside!"
The
eight men who brought him through the ship's ground lock —six handling his
stretcher, two following helpfully—were of Gull's toughest; an alert,
well-trained and well-armed group, prepared for almost any kind of trouble.
However, they never had a chance.
The lock closed soundlessly, but
instantaneously, on the heels of the last of them. From the waiting ambulance
and a number of other camouflaged vehicles outside concealed semiportables
splashed wild gusts of fire along the ship's flanks—then they were variously
spun around or rolled over in the backwash of the take-off. A single monstrous
thunderclap seemed to draw an almost visible line from the docks towards the
horizon; the docks groaned and shook, and the ship had once more vanished.
A
number of seconds later, the spaceport area was shaken again— this time by the
crash of a single fixed-mount space gun some eighty miles away. It was the only
major weapon to go into action against the fugitive on that side of the planet.
Before
its sound reached the docks, two guns on the opposite side of Gull also spewed
their stupendous charges of energy into space, but very briefly. Near the pole,
the ship had left the planet's screaming atmosphere in an apparent head-on
plunge for Gull's single moon, which was the system's main fortress. This cut
off all fire until, halfway to the satellite, the robot veered off at right
angles and flashed out of range on the first half-turn of a swiftly widening evasion spiral.
The
big guns of the moon forts continued to snarl into space a full minute after the target had faded beyond
the ultimate reach of their instruments.
Things could have been much worse, Iliff
admitted. And presently found himself wondering just what he had meant by
that.
He
was neither conscious nor unconscious. Floating in a little Nirvana of
first-aid treatment, he was a disembodied mind vaguely aware of being hauled
back once more—and more roughly than usual—to the world of reality. And as
usual, he was expected to be doing something there—something disagreeable.
Then
he realized the robot was dutifully droning a report of recent events into his
mind while it continued its efforts to rouse him.
It really wasn't so bad! They weren't
actually crippled; they could still outrun almost anything in space they
couldn't outfight-as the pursuit had learned by now. No doubt, he might have
foreseen the approximate manner in which the robot would conduct their escape
under the guns of an alerted and a sizable section of that planet's war
fleet—while its human master and the eight men from Gull hung insensible to
everything in the webs of the force-field that had closed on them with the
closing of the ground lock.
A
clean-edged sixteen-foot gap scooped out of the compartment immediately below
the lock was, of course, nobody's fault! Through the wildest of accidents,
they'd been touched there, briefly and terribly, by the outer fringe of a bolt
of energy hurled after them by one of Gull's giant moon-based guns.
The
rest of the damage—though consisting of comparatively minor rips and
dents—could not be so simply dismissed! It was the result, pure and simple, of
slashing headlong through clusters of quick-firing fighting ships, which could
just as easily have been avoided.
Dreamily, Iliff debated taking a run to
Jeltad and having the insubordinate electronic mentality put through an
emotional overhaul there. It wasn't the first time the notion had come to him,
but he'd always relented. Now he would see it was attended to! And at once—
With that, he was suddenly awake and aware of
the job much more immediately at hand. Only a slight sick fuzziness remained
from the measures used to jolt him out of the force-field sleep and counteract
the dose of paralysis rays he'd stopped. And that was going, as he bent and
stretched, grimacing at the burning tingle of the stuff that danced like frothy
acid through his arteries. Meanwhile, the robot's steel tentacles were lifting
his erstwhile captors, still peacefully asleep, into a lifeboat which was then
launched into space, came round in a hesitant half-circle and started
resolutely back towards Gull.
"Here's our next move," Iliff
announced as the complaining hum of the lifeboat's "pick-me-up"
signals began to fade from their instruments. "They didn't get much of a
start on us—and in an ordinary stellar-type yacht, at that! If they're going
where I think they are, we might catch up with them almost any moment. But
we've got to be sure, so start laying a global interception pattern at full
emergency speeds—centered on Gull, of course! Keep detectors full on and
telepath broadcast at ultimate non directional range. Call me if you get the
faintest indication of a pickup on either line."
The muted brazen voice stated: "That's
done!"
"Fine. The detectors should be our best
bet. About the telepath: we're not going to call Pagadan directly, but we'll
try for a subconscious response. U-i's got to be in charge by now, unless Correlation's
quit being omniscient, but he might not spot that—at least, not right away!
Give her this—"
Events
had been a little too crowded lately to make the memory immediately accessible.
But, after a moment's groping, he brought it from his mind: the picture of a
quiet, dawnlit city—seas of sloping, ivory-tinted roofs and slender towers
against a flaming sky.
The pickup came on the
telepath an hour later.
"They're
less than half a light-year out. Shall I slide in and put a tractor on
them?"
"Keep sliding in, but no tractors! Not
yet." Iliff chewed his lower lip thoughtfully. "Sure she didn't
respond again?"
"Not
after that first subconscious reply. But the yacht may have been blanked
against telepathy immediately afterwards!"
"Well,
anyway, she was still alive then," Iliff said resignedly. "Give
Headquarters the yacht's location, and tell them to quit mopping their brows
because U-i's on his own now—and any Ceetal that gets within detection range of
him will go free-stage the hard way. Then drop a field of freezers over that
crate! I want her stopped dead. I guess I'll have to board—"
He
grimaced uncomfortably and added, "Get in there fast, fella, but watch the
approach! There couldn't be any heavy armament on that yacht, but U-i's come up
with little miracles before this! Maybe that Ceetal was lucky the guy never got
back to Lycanno to talk to him! It's where he was pointed, all right."
"Headquarters
is now babbling emotional congratulations!" the robot reported, rather
coldly. "They also say two Vegan destroyers will be able to reach the
yacht within six hours."
"That's
nice!" Iliff nodded. "Get just a few more holes punched in you, and
we could use those to tow you in."
Inclosed
in a steel bubble of suit-armor, he presently propelled himself to the lock.
The strange ship, still some five minutes' flight away in fact, appeared to be
lying motionless at point-blank range in the port-screens—bow and flanks
sparkling with the multiple pinpoint glitter of the freezer field which had
wrapped itself around her like a blanket of ravenous, fiery leeches. Any ripple
or thrust of power of which she was capable would be instantly absorbed now and
dissipated into space; she was effectively immobilized and would remain so for
hours.
"But the field's not flaring/' Iliff
said. He ran his tongue gently over his lips. "That guy does know his
stuff! He's managed to insulate his power sources and he's sitting there
betting we won't blast the ship but come over and try to pry him out! The
trouble is, he's right."
The
robot spoke then, for the first time since it had scattered the freezer field
in the yacht's path. "Iliff," it stated impersonally and somewhat
formally, "regulations do not permit you to attempt the boarding of a
hostile spaceship under such suicidal conditions. I am therefore
authorized—"
The
voice broke off, on a note of almost human surprise. Iliff had not shifted his
eyes from the port-screen below him. After a while, he said dryly:
"It
was against regulations when I tinkered with your impulses till I found the set
that would let you interfere with me for my own good. You've been without that
set for years, big boy—except when you were being overhauled!"
"It
was a foolish thing to do!" the robot answered. "I was given no power
to act against your decisions, even when they included suicide, if they were
justified in the circumstances that formed them. That is not the case here! You
should either wait for the destroyers to come up or else let me blast U-i and
the yacht together, without any further regard for the fate of the
Interstellar operative—though she is undoubtedly of some importance to civilization."
"Galactic Zones thinks so!" Iliff
nodded. "They'd much rather she stays alive."
"Obviously,
that cannot compare with the importance of destroying U-i the instant the
chance is offered! As chief of the Ghant Spacers, his murders were counted,
literally, by planetary systems! If you permit his escape now, you give him
the opportunity to resume that career."
"I haven't the slightest intention of permitting
his escape," Iliff objected mildly.
"My
responses are limited!" the robot reminded him. "Within those limits
I surpass you, of course, but beyond them I need your guidance. If you force an
entry for yourself into that ship, you may logically expect to die, and because
of the telepathic block around it I shall not be aware of your death. You
cannot be certain then that I shall be able to prevent a mind such as that of U
1 from
effecting his escape before the destroyers get here!"
Iliff
snarled, suddenly white and shaking. He checked himself with difficulty, drew a
long, slow breath. "Fm
scared of the guy!" he
complained, somewhat startled himself by his reaction. "And you're not
making me feel any better. Now quit giving good advice, and just listen for a
change!"
He went on carefully:
"The
Lannai's quite possibly dead. But if she isn't, U-i isn't likely to kill her
now until he finds out what we're after. Even for him, it's a pretty desperate
mess—he'll figure we're Vegan, so he won't even try to dicker! But he'll also
figure that as long as we think she's alive, we'll be just a little more
cautious about how we strike at him.
"So
it's worth taking a chance on trying to get her out of there. And here's what
you do! In the first place, don't under any circumstances get any closer than
medium beaming range to that crate! Then, just before I reach the yacht, you're
to put a tractor on its forward spacelock and haul it open. That will let me in
close to the control room, and that's where U-i's got to be.
"Once
I'm inside, the telepath block will, of course, keep me from communicating. If
the block goes down suddenly and I start giving you orders from in there,
ignore them! The chances are I'll be talking for U-i. You understand that—I'm giving you an order now to ignore any
subsequent orders until you've taken me back aboard again?"
"I understand."
"Good.
Whatever happens, you're to circle that yacht for twenty minutes after I enter,
and at the exact end of that time you're to blast it. If Pagadan or I, or both
of us, get out before the time is up, that's fine. But don't pick us up, or let
us come aboard, or pay attention to any instructions we give you until you've
burned the yacht. If U-i is able to control us, it's not going to do him any
good. If he comes out himself—with or without us, in a lifeboat or armor—you
blast him instantly, of course! Lab would like to study that brain all right,
but this is one time I can't oblige them. You've got all that?"
'Tve got it, yes."
"Then
can you think of any other trick he might pull to get out of the squeeze?"
The
robot was silent a moment. "No," it said then. "I can't. But U-i
probably could!"
"Yes,
he probably could," Iliff admitted thoughtfully. "But not in twenty
minutes—and it will be less than that, because's he's going to be a terribly
occupied little pirate part of the time, and a pretty shaky one, if nothing
else, the rest of it! I may not be able to take him, but I'm sure going to make
his head swim!"
It
was going wrong before it started—but it was better not to think of that.
Actually,
of course, he had never listed the entering of a hostile ship held by an
experienced and desperate spacer among his favorite games. The powers that
hurled a sliver of sub-steel alloys among the stars at dizzying multiples of
the speed of light could be only too easily rearranged into a variety of
appalling traps for any intruder.
U-i naturally, knew every trick in the book
and how to improve on it. On the other hand, he'd been given no particular
reason to expect interception until he caught and blocked their
telepath-beam—unless he had managed, in that space of time, to break down the
Lannai's mind-shields without killing her, which seemed a next to impossible
feat even for him.
The
chances were, then, that the spacer had been aware of pursuit for considerably
less than an hour, and that wasn't time enough to become really well prepared
to receive a boarding party —or so Iliff hoped.
The
bad part of it was that it was taking a full four minutes in his armor to
bridge the gap between the motionless, glittering yacht and the robot, which
had now begun circling it at medium range. That was a quite unavoidable safety
measure for the operation as a whole—and actually U-i should not be able to
strike at him by any conceivable means before he was inside the yacht itself.
But his brief outburst on the ship was the clearest possible warning that his
emotional control had dropped suddenly, and inexplicably, to a point just this
side of sanity!
He'd
lived with normal fear for years—that was another thing; but only once before
had he known a sensation comparable to this awareness of swirling, white-hot
pools of unholy terror—held back from his mind now by the thinnest of brittle
crusts! That had been long ago, in Lab-controlled training tests.
He
knew better, however, than to try to probe into that sort of phenomenon just
now! If he did, the probability was that it would spill full over him at about
the moment he was getting his attack under way—which would be, rather
definitely, fatal!
But
there were other methods of emotional control, simple but generally effective,
which might help steady him over the seconds remaining:
There
was, for example, the undeniably satisfying reflection that not only had the
major disaster of a Ceetal-dominated galaxy been practically averted almost as
soon as it was recognized, but that in the same operation—a bonus from Lady
Luck!—the long, long hunt for one of civilization's most ruthless enemies was
coming to an unexpectedly sudden end! Like the avenging power of Vega personified
was the deadly machine behind him, guided by a mind which was both more and
less than his own, as it traced its graceful geometrical paths about the doomed
yacht. Each completed circle would presently indicate that exactly one more
minute had passed of the twenty which were the utmost remaining of U-i's life.
Just
as undeniable, of course, was the probability that Pagadan's lease on life
would come to an end even sooner than that—if she still lived!
But there wasn't much he could do about it.
If he waited for the Vegan destroyers to arrive, the Lannai would have no
chance at all. No normal being could survive another six hours under the kind
of deliberately measured mental pressure U-i would be exerting on her now to
drain every possible scrap of information through her disintegrating protective
patterns.
By
acting as he was, he was giving her the best chance she could get after he had
sent her in to spring the trap about U-i on Gull, In the circumstances, that,
too, had been unavoidable. Ironically, the only alternative to killing U-i
outright, as she no doubt had tried to do, was to blunder into one of the
situational traps indicated by Correlation, and so restore that grim spacer to
his own savage personality—which could then be counted on to cope with any
Ceetal attempt to subordinate him once more to their purposes!
Waiting the few hours until he could get
there to do the job himself might have made the difference between the survival
or collapse of civilization not many decades away! If he had hesitated, the
Department would have sent the Interstellar operative in, as a matter of
course—officially, and at the risk of compromising the whole Lannai alliance as
a consequence.
No,
there hadn't been any real choice—the black thoughts rushed on—but just the
same it was almost a relief to turn from that fact to the other one that his
own chances of survival, just now, were practically as bad! Actually, there was
no particular novelty in knowing he was outmatched. Only by being careful to
remain the aggressor always, consciously and in fact, by selecting time and
place and method of attack, was he able regularly to meet the superiority of
the monstrous mentalities that were an Agent's most specific game! And back of
him had been always the matchless resources of the Confederacy, to be drawn on
as and when he needed them.
Now
that familiar situational pattern was almost completely reversed. U-i, doomed
himself as surely as human efforts could doom him, had still been able to
determine the form of the preliminary attack and force his enemy to adopt it!
So,
as usual, the encounter would develop by plan, but the plan would not be
Iliff's! His, for once, was to be the other role, that of the blundering,
bewildered quarry, tricked into assault, then rushed through it to be struck
down at the instant most favorable to the hunter.
Almost
frantically, he tore his mind back from the trap! But it was just a little
late—the swirling terror had touched him, briefly, and he knew his chances of
success were down by that further unnecessary fraction.
Then
the two-hundred-foot fire-studded bulk of the yacht came flashing toward him,
blotting out space; and as he braked his jets for the approach he had time to
remind himself that the quarry's rush did, after all, sometimes carry it
through to the hunter! And that, in any event, he'd thought it all out and
decided he still disliked an unfinished job—and that he had liked Pagadan.
Swinging
himself up to the yacht's forward space lock, every weapon at the ready, he
caught the robot's brief thought:
"He's waiting for you!
All locks have been released from inside!"
Iliff's "Hm-m-m!"
was a preoccupied salute to his opponent's
logic. The lock had swung gently open before
him—there was, of course, no point in attempting to hold it closed against a
more powerful ship's sucking tractors; it would, simply, have been destroyed.
Gingerly, he floated up to and through the opening, rather like a small balloon
of greenish steel-alloy in his bulky armor.
No
force-field gripped at his defenses, no devastating bolts of radiant energy
crashed at him from the inner walls. That spectral, abnormal terror of a moment
ago became a dim sensation which stirred somewhere far down in his mind—and was
gone!
He was on the job.
He
drove through the inner transmitter, and felt the telepathic barrier that had
blanked out the yacht dissolve and reform again behind him. In that instant, he
dropped his shields and sent his mind racing full-open through the ship's
interior.
There
was the briefest of flickering, distorted thought-images from Pagadan. No
message, no awareness of his presence—only the unconscious revelation of mind,
still alive but strained to the utmost, already marked by the incoherence of
ultimate exhaustion! As he sensed it, it vanished. Something had driven
smoothly, powerfully, and impenetrably between—something that covered the
Lan-nai's mind like a smothering fog.
Iliff's
shields went up just in time. Then he himself was swaying, physically, under as
stunning a mental attack as he had ever sustained.
Like
the edge of a heavy knife, the impalpable but destructive force sheared at
him—slashed once, twice, and was flicked away before he could grip it, leaving
his vision momentarily blurred, his nerve-centers writhing.
A wash of corrosive atomic fire splashed
blindingly off the front of his armor as he appeared in the control-room
door—through it twin narrow-beam tractor rays came ramming in reversed,
brain-jarring thrusts at his face-piece. He drove quickly into the room and let
the tractors slam him back against the wall. They could not harm him. They were
meant to startle and confuse, to destroy calculation before the critical
assault.
The
fire was different. For perhaps a minute, his armor could continue to absorb
it, but no longer. He was being hurried into the attack from every side. There
had been no serious attempt to keep
him from getting to the control room—he was
meant to come to it.
He
saw Pagadan first then, as he was meant to see her. Halfway down the narrow
room, she sat facing him, only a few feet from the raised control platform
against the wall, across which the projector fire came flashing in bluish twelve-inch
jets. She was in an ordinary spacesuit—no armor. She sat rigid and motionless,
blocking his advance down that side of the room because the suit she wore would
have burst into incandescence at the first splash of the hellish energies
pouring dangerously past her.
U-i
made the point obvious—since he was here to get his ally out of the trap, he
could not kill her.
He
accepted the logic of that by flicking himself farther along the opposite wall,
drawing the fire behind him. As he did so, something like a giant beetle
shifted position beyond the massive steel desk on the control platform and
dipped from sight again, and he knew then that U-i was in armor almost as
massive as his own-armor that had been a part of Pagadan's Interstellar equipment.
To the end, that was the only glimpse he had of the spacer.
There
remained then only the obvious frontal attack with mind-shields locked—across
the platform to bring his own powerful projectors to bear directly on his
opponent's armor!
If
he could do that, he would very likely win almost instantly, and without
injuring Pagadan. Therefore, whatever was to happen to him would happen in the
instant of time he was crossing the room to reach the spacer.
And
his gamble must be that his armor would carry him through it.
Some eight seconds had passed since he
entered the room. A stubby tentacle on the front of his chest armor now raised
a shielded projectile gun and sprayed the top of the desk beyond which U-i
crouched with a mushrooming, adhesive blanket of incendiaries. The tractor
rays, their controls smothered in that liquid flaring, ceased to be a
distraction; and Iliff launched himself.
The furious glare of U-i's projectors winked
out abruptly.
The
force that slammed Iliff down on the surface of the platform was literally
bone-shattering.
For
an endless, agonizing instant of time he was in the grip of the giant power
that seemed to be wrenching him down into the solid hull of the ship. Then,
suddenly released, he was off the edge
of the platform and on the floor beside it.
Momentarily, at least, it took him out of the spacer's line of fire.
But
that was about all. He felt bones in his shattered right arm grinding on each
other like jagged pebbles as he tried to reach for the studs that would drive
him upward again. Throughout his body, torn muscles and crushed nerve-fibers
were straining to the dictates of a brain long used to interpret physical pain
as a danger signal only; but to activate any of the instruments of the miniature
floating tank that incased him was utterly impossible.
He
was doubly imprisoned then—in that two-and-a-half-ton coffin, and in ruined
flesh that jerked aimlessly in animal agonies or had gone flaccid and
unfeeling. But his brain, under its multiple separate protective devices,
retained partial control; while the mind that was himself was still taut as a
coiled snake, bleakly unaffected by the physical disaster.
He
knew well enough what had happened! In one titanic jolt, the control platform's
gravity field had received the full flow of the projector's energies. It had
burned out almost instantaneously under that incalculable overload—but not
quite fast enough to save him.
And
now U-i's mind came driving in, probing for the extent of his enemy's
helplessness, then coldly eager for the kill. At contact range, it would be
only a matter of seconds to burn through that massive but no longer dangerous
armor and blast out the life that lingered within!
Dimly,
Iliff felt him rise and start forward. He felt the probing thoughts flick about
him again, cautious still, and then the mind-shields relaxing and opening out
triumphantly as the spacer approached. He dropped his own shields, and struck!
Never
before had he dared risk the sustained concentration of destructive energy he
hurled into U-i's mind—for, in its way, it was an overload as unstable as that
which had wrecked the gravity field! Instantly, the flaring lights before his
face-piece spun into blackness. The hot taste of gushing blood in his mouth,
the last sensation of straining lungs and pain-racked twitching nerves vanished
together. Blocked suddenly and completely from every outward awareness, he had
become a bodiless force bulleting with deadly resolution upon another.
The attack must have shaken even U-i's battle-hardened
soul to
its core. Physically, it stopped him in
mid-stride, held him rigid and immobilized with nearly the effect of a
paralysis gun. But after the first near-fatal moment of shock, while he
attempted automatically and unsuccessfully to restore his shields before that
rush of destruction, he was fighting back—and not with a similar suicidal fury
but with a grim cold weight of vast mental power which yielded further ground
only slowly if at all.
With
that, the struggle became so nearly a stalemate that it still meant certain
victory for the spacer. Both knew the last trace of physical life would drain
out of Iliff in minutes, though perhaps only Iliff realized that his mind must
destroy itself even more swiftly.
Something
tore through his consciousness then like jagged bolts of lightning. He thought
it was death. But it came again and again —until a slow, tremendous surprise
welled up in him:
It
was the other
mind which was being torn!
Dissolving now, crumbling into flashing thought-convulsions like tortured
shrieks, though it still struggled on against him—and against something else,
something which was by then completely beyond IlifFs comprehension.
The
surprise dimmed out, together with his last awareness of himself—still driving
relentlessly in upon a hated foe who would not die.
The voice paused briefly, then added:
"Get that part to Lab. They'll be happy to know they hit it pretty close,
for once."
It
stopped again. After a moment the bright-looking young man in the Jeltad
Headquarters office inquired, not too deferentially:
"Is there anything
else, sir?"
He'd
glanced up curiously once or twice at the vision tank of the extreme-range
communicator before him, while he deftly distributed Iliff's after-mission
report through the multiple-recorders. However, it wasn't the first time he'd
seen a Zone Agent check in from the Emergency Treatment Chamber of his ship,
completely inclosed in a block of semisolid protective gel, through which he
was being molded, rayed, dosed, drenched, shocked, nourished and psychoed back
to health and sanity.
With the irreverence of youth, the
headquarters man considered that these near-legendary heroes of the Department
bore on such occasions, when their robots even took care of heartbeat and
breathing for them, a striking resemblance to damaged and bad-tempered
embryos. He hoped suddenly no one happened to be reading his mind.
"Connect
me," IlifFs voice said, though the lips of the figure in the vision tank
did not move, "with Three for a personal report."
"IVe
been listening," came the deep, pleasantly modulated reply from an
invisible source. "Switch off, Lallebeth—you've got all you need. All
clear now, Iliff—and once more, congratulations!" And the picture of the
tall, gray-haired, lean-faced man, who was the Third Co-ordinator of the Vegan
Confederacy, grew slowly through the telepath-transmitter into the mind of the
small, wiry shape—half restored and covered with irregular patches of new pink
skin—in the ship's Emergency Treatment Chamber.
"Back
in the tank again, eh?" the Co-ordinator observed critically. "For
the second day after a mission, you don't look too bad!" He paused,
considering Iliff closely. "Gravity?" he inquired.
"Gravity!"
admitted the embryo.
"That
will mess a fellow up!" The Co-ordinator was nodding sympathetically, but it seemed to Iliff that his superior's mind was on other matters, and more pleasing ones.
"Lab's
just going to have to design me a suit," Three ran on with his usual
chattiness, "which will be nonreactive to any type of syntheti-gravs,
including tractors! Theoretically impossible, they say, of course! But I'm sure
the right approach—"
He interrupted himself:
"I
imagine you'll want to know what happened after she got you back to your ship and contacted the destroyers?"
"She
left word she was going to get in touch with you on her way back to
Jeltad," Iliff said.
"Well,
she did that. A remarkably energetic sort of person in a quiet way, Iliff!
Fully aware, too, as I discovered, of the political possibilities in the
situation! I persuaded her, of course, to take official credit for the death of
U-i, and the termination of that part of the Ceetal menace—and, incidentally,
for saving the life of one of our Department Agents."
"That wasn't so incidental," Iliff
remarked.
"Only in comparison with the other, of
course. She really did it then?"
"Oh, she did it all right! I was on my
way out fast when she burned him down. Must have been a bad shock to U-i. I
understand he hadn't released her mind for more than three or four seconds
before she was reaching for his projector."
The
Co-ordinator nodded. "The mental resiliency of these highly developed
telepathic races must be really extraordinary! Any human being would have
remained paralyzed for minutes after such pressures—perhaps for hours! Well,
he wasn't omniscient, after all. He thought he could just let her lie there
until he was finished with you."
"How long had he been
pouring it on her?"
"About
four hours! Practically ever since they hit space, coming out from Gull."
"She didn't crack at
all?" Iliff asked curiously.
"No, but she thinks she couldn't have
lasted more than another hour. However, she seems to have had no doubt that you
would arrive and get her out of the mess in time! Rather flattering, eh?"
The agent considered.
"No," he said then. "Not necessarily."
His
superior chuckled. "At any rate, she was reluctant to take credit for U-i.
She thought, if she accepted, you might feel she didn't fully appreciate your
plunging in to the rescue "
"Well,
you seem to have reassured her. And now, just what are the political results
going to be?"
"It's
too early to say definitely, but even without any help from us they'd be pretty
satisfactory. The Ceetal business isn't for public consumption, of course—the
boys made a clean sweep of that bunch a few hours back, by the way!—but
there've always been plenty of idiots building U-i up into a glamorous figure.
The Mysterious Great Bandit of the Spaceways and that sickening kind of stuff!
They'll whoop it up just as happily now for the Champion of Vegan Justice who
sent the old monster on his way, to wit— the Lannai Pagadan! It won't hurt
either that she's really beautiful. And through her, of course, the glamour
reflects back on her people, our nonhuman allies."
Iliff said thoughtfully: "Think they'll
stay fashionable long' enough to cinch the alliance?"
The Co-ordinator looked
rather smug. "I believe that part of it can be safely left to me!
Especially/' he added deliberately, "since most of the organized
resistance to said alliance has already collapsed!"
Iliff
waited and made no comment, because when the old boy got as confidential as all
that, he was certainly leading up to something. And he did not usually bother
to lead up to things without some good reason—which almost always spelled a lot
of trouble for somebody else.
There was nobody else
around at all, except Iliff.
"I
had an unexpected visit three days ago," the Co-ordinator continued,
"from my colleague, the Sixteenth Co-ordinator, Department of Cultures!
He'd been conducting, he said, a personal investigation of Lannai culture and
psychology—and had found himself forced to the conclusion there was no
reasonable objection to having them join us as full members of the Confederacy.
'A people of extraordinary refinement . . . high moral standards—' Hinted we'd
have no further trouble with the Traditionalists either. Remarkable change of
heart, eh?"
"Remarkable!"
Iliff agreed, watchfully.
"But
can you imagine," inquired the Co-ordinator, "what brought Sixteen—between
us, mind you, Iliff, as pig-headed and hidebound an obstructionist as the
Council has been hampered by in centuries—to this state of uncharacteristic
enlightenment?"
"No," Iliff said,
"I can't."
"Wait
till you hear this then! After we'd congratulated each other and so on, he
brought the subject back to various Lannai with whom he'd become acquainted. It
developed presently he was interested in the whereabouts of one particular
Lannai he'd met in a social way right here on Jeltad a few weeks before. He
understood she was doing some work—"
"All right,"
Iliff interrupted. "It was Pagadan."
The
Co-ordinator appeared disappointed. "Yes, it was. She told you she'd met
him, did she?"
"She
admitted to some circulating in our upper social levels," .Iliff said.
"What did you tell him?"
"That
she was engaged in highly confidential work for the Department at present, but
that we expected to hear from her within a few days—I had my fingers crossed
there!—and that I'd see to it she heard he'd been inquiring about her.
Afterwards, after he'd gone, I sat down and sweated blood until I got her
message from the destroyer!"
"You
don't suspect, I suppose, that she might have psychoed him?"
"Nonsense, Iliff!" the Co-ordinator
smiled blandly. "If I had the slightest suspicion
of that, it would be my duty to investigate immediately. Wouldn't it? But now,
there's one point—your robot, of course, made every effort to keep Pagadan from
realizing there was no human crew manning the ship. However, she told me
frankly she'd caught on to our little Department secret and suggested that the
best way to keep it there would be to have her transferred from Interstellar to
Galactic. As a matter of fact, she's requested Zone Agent training! Think she'd
qualify?"
"Oh,
she'll qualify!" Iliff said dryly. "At that, it might be a good idea
to get her into the Department, where we can try to keep an eye on her. It
would be too bad if we found out, ten years from now, that a few million Lannai
were running the Confederacy!"
For
an instant, the Co-ordinator looked startled. "Hm-m-m," he said
reflectively. "Well, that's hardly likely. However, I think I'll take your
advice! I might send her over to your Zone in a week or so, and—"
"Oh,
no," Iliff said quietly. "Oh, no, you don't! I've been waiting right
along for the catch, and this is one job Headquarters is going to swing without
me!"
"Now, Iliff-"
"It's
never happened before," Iliff added, "but right now the Department
is very close to its first case of Zone Agent mutiny!"
"Now,
Iliff, take it easy!" The Co-ordinator paused. "I must disapprove of
your attitude, of course, but frankly I admire your common sense. Well, forget
the suggestion—I'll find some other sucker."
He became pleasantly official.
"I suppose you're on
your way back to your Zone at present?"
"I
am. In fact, we're almost exactly in the position we'd reached when you buzzed
me the last time. Now, there wouldn't happen to be some little job I could
knock off for you on the way?"
"Well—"
the Co-ordinator began, off guard. For the shortest fraction of a second, he
had the air of a man consulting an overstuffed mental file.
Then he started and blinked.
"In your condition? Nonsense, Iliff!
It's out of the question!"
On
the last word, IlifFs thought and image flickered out of his mind. But the
Third Co-ordinator sat motionless for another moment or so before he turned off
the telepath transmitter. There was a look of mild surprise on his face.
Of
course, there had been no change of expression possible in that immobilized and
anaesthetized embryonic figure—not so much as the twitch of an eyelid! But in
that instant, while he was hestitat-ing, there had seemed to flash from it a
blast of such cold and ferocious malignity that he was almost startled into
flipping up his shields.
"Better
lay off the little devil for a while!" he decided. "Let him just
stick to his routine. Ill swear, for a moment there I saw smoke pour out of his
ears."
He reached out and tapped a
switch.
"Psych-tester? What do
you think?"
"The
Agent requires no deconditioning," the Psych-tester's mechanical voice
stated promptly. "As I predicted at the time, his decision to board U-i's
ship was in itself sufficient to dissolve both the original failure-shock and
the artificial conditioning later connected with it. The difficulties he
experienced, between making the decision and his actual entry of the ship, were
merely symptoms of that process and have had no further effect on his mental
health."
The Co-ordinator rubbed his chin reflectively.
"Well,
that sounds all right. Does he realize I . . . uh . . . had anything to
do—?"
"The
Agent is strongly of the opinion that you suspected Tahmey of being U-i when
you were first informed of the Interstellar operative's unusual report, and
further, that you assigned him to the mission for this reason. While approving
of the choice as such, he shows traces of a sub-level reflection that your
tendency towards secretiveness will lead you to . . . out-fox . . . yourself so
badly some day that he may not be able to help you."
"Why-"
"He
has also begun to suspect," the Psych-tester continued, undisturbed,
"that he was fear-conditioned over a period of years to the effect that
any crisis involving U-i would automatically create the highest degree of
defensive tensions compatible with his type of mentality." The Coordinator
whistled softly.
"He's
caught on to that, eh?" He reflected. "Well, after all," he
pointed out, almost apologetically, "it wasn't such a bad idea in itself!
The boy does have this tendency to bull his way through, on some short-cut or
other, to a rather dangerous degree! And there was no way of foreseeing the
complications introduced by the Ceetal threat and his sense of responsibility
towards the Lannai, which made it impossible for him to obey that urgent mental
pressure to be careful in whatever he did about U-i!"
He paused invitingly, but
the Psych-tester made no comment.
"It's
hard to guess right every time!" the Co-ordinator concluded defensively.
He
shook his head and sighed, but then forgot Iliff entirely as he turned to the
next problem.
9- What of the future "private eye?"
If the policeman's lot is
not a happy one, can the private detective in a galactic civilization hope for a
life of ease? Magnus Ridolph had some ideas of his own concerning crime and punishment —and he was always
open to hire.
JACK VANCE
The Sub-Standard Sardines
Banish Evil from the world? Nonsense!
Encourage it, foster it, sponsor it. The world owes Evil a debt beyond
imagination. Think! Without greed ambition falters. Without vanity art becomes
idle musing. Without cruelty benevolence lapses to passivity. Superstition has
shamed man into self-reliance and, without stupidity, where would be the savor
of superior understanding?
Magnus
Ridolph
Magnus Ridolph lay on a deck-chair, a green and orange
umbrella bearing the brunt of the African sunlight. The table beside him supported
a smouldering cigar, Shemmlers News Discussions turned
face downward, a glass containing ice and a squeezed half-lime. In short, a
picture of relaxation, idyllic peace. . . . The transgraf clanged from within.
After
a restless interval Magnus Ridolph arose, entered the apartment, took the
message from the rack. It read:
232 space
police
Dear Magnus,
My
chef's report on tomorrow's dinner—broiled grouse with truffles and compote of
Marchisand cherries, Queen Persis salad, Sirius Fifth artichokes. A subsidiary
report of my own—wines from three planets, including an incredible Fragence
claret, a final course of canned sardines.
If
you are free, I'd like your verdict on the menu—especially the sardines, which
are unusual.
Joel Karamor.
Magnus Ridolph returned to the deck-chair,
re-read the invitation, folded it, laid it on the table beside him. He rubbed
his short white beard, then, leaning back in his deck-chair, half-closed his
eyes, apparently intent on a small sailboat, white as the walls of Marrakech,
plying the dark blue face of Lake Sahara.
He
arose abruptly, crossed into his study, seated himself at his Mnemiphot, keyed
the combination for Sardines.
For
several minutes information played across the screen. Very little seemed
significant and he found no notes of his own on the topic. The Sardinia pilchardus, according to the Mnemiphot, belonged
to the herring family, swam in large shoals and fed on minute pelagic animals.
There were further details of scale pattern, breeding habits, natural enemies,
discussion of variant species.
Magnus
Ridolph wrote an acceptance to the invitation, ticked off Joel Karamor's
address code, dropped the message into the transgraph slot.
Karamor was a large healthy man with a big
nose, a big chin, a brush of brindle-gray hair. He was an honest man and
conducted his life on a basis of candor, simplicity and good-will. Magnus
Ridolph, accustomed to extremes of deception and self-interest, found him a
refreshing variant.
The
dinner was served in a high room paneled in Congo hardwoods, decorated with
primitive masks hung high in the shadows. One glass wall opened up on a
magnificent expanse of clear blue twilight and, twenty miles south, the loom of
the Tibesti foothills.
The
two sat at a table of burnished lignum vitae, between them a centerpiece of
carved malachite which Magnus Ridolph recognized for a Three-Generation Work
from the Golwana Coast of the planet Mugh—a product of father, son and son's
son, toiled over a hundred
years to the minute.*
The
dinner surpassed Karamor's usual standard. The grouse was cooked to a turn, the
salad beyond exception. The wines were smooth and brilliant, rich but not
cloying. Dessert was a fruit ice, followed by coarse crackers and cheese.
"Now,"
said Karamor, watching Magnus Ridolph slyly, "for our sardines and
coffee."
Magnus
Ridolph obliged with the wry face he knew to be expected of him. "The
coffee, at least, I shall enjoy. The sardines will have to be of spectacular
quality to tempt me."
Karamor
nodded significantly. "They're unusual." He arose, slid back the
panel of a wall-cabinet, returned to the table with a flat can, embossed in red, blue and yellow.
"It's
yours," and Karamor, seating himself, watched his guest expectantly.
The label read: Premier
Quality. Select Sardines
in oil. Packed by
Chandaiia Canneries, Chandaiia.
Magnus
Ridolph's fine white eyebrows rose. "Imported from Chandaria? A long way
to bring fish."
"The
sardines are top-grade," said Karamor. "Better than anything on
earth—delicacies of prime quality and they bring a premium price."
"I
still should not, at first thought, imagine it profitable," was Magnus
Ridolph's doubtful comment.
"That's
where you're wrong," declared Karamor. "Of course you must understand
the cannery expenses are very low, and compensate for the shipping costs. And
then spacefreight is not especially expensive. Actually we're doing very
well."
Magnus Ridolph looked up from the can.
"We?"
"George
Donnels, my partner in the canning business, and myself. I financed the
proposition, and I look after the sales. He runs the cannery and fishing
operations."
"I see," said Magnus Ridolph
vaguely.
* The catalogue of Pomukka-Dhen, last of the
Golwana emperors, listed seven thousand Century pieces, 136 Millennium pieces, and fourteen Ten-Thousand-Year pieces. A rumor had
reached Magnus Ridolph of a Hundred-Thousand-Year work nearing completion in
the Backlands, a gigantic carved tourmaline.
" A few months ago/' continued Karamor,
frowning, "he offered to buy me out. I told him I'd consider it. And
then—' Karamor gestured toward the can. "Open it."
Magnus
Ridolph bent over the can, raising a tab, pressing the lid-release button. . .
. Bang! The lid flew high in the air, the contents of the can sprayed in all
directions.
Magnus
Ridolph sat back, raising eyebrows mutely at Karamor. He felt his beard,
combing out the fragments of fish which had become entangled in the hairs.
"Spectacular
indeed," said Magnus Ridolph. "I agree. What were the other tests you
wished me to make?"
Karamor rose to his feet, circled the table. "Believe me, Magnus,
that surprised me as much as it did you. I expected nothing like
that____ "
"What
did you expect?" inquired Magnus Ridolph drily. "A flight of
birds?"
"No, no, please believe me, Magnus. You
must know I wouldn't indulge in a stupid joke of that sort!"
Magnus Ridolph wiped his face with a napkin.
"What is the explanation for the—" he licked his lips—"the
occurrence?"
Karamor
returned to his seat. "I don't know. I'm worried. I want to find out. I've
opened a dozen cans of sardines in the last week. About half were in good
condition. The rest—all tampered with, one way or another.
"In
one can the fish were threaded with fine wires. In another the flesh tasted of
petroleum. Another gave off a vile odor. I can't understand it. Someone or
something wants to ruin Chandaria Cannery's reputation."
"How widespread is
this tampering?"
"Only the last shipment, so far as I
know. We've had nothing but compliments on the product up to now."
"Whom do you suspect?"
Karamor
spread out his big hands. "I don't know, Donnels couldn't benefit, that's
certain—unless he figured he could scare me into selling and I think he knows
me better than that. I thought you might investigate—act for me."
Magnus
Ridolph considered a moment. "Well—at the moment, so it happens, I'm
free."
Karamor relaxed, smiled. "The import
seals were all intact/' he told his guest, "And they are applied at the
cannery?" "Right"
"Then,"
said Magnus Ridolph, "it is evident that the mischief occurs on
Chandaria."
Magnus
Ridolph rode the passenger packet to City of the Thousand Red Candles, on
Rhodope, Fomalhaut's fourth planet, where he took a room at the Ernst Delabri
Inn.
He
enjoyed a quiet dinner in the outdoor dining room, then hired a barge and let
the boatman paddle him along the canals till long after dark.
Next
morning Magnus Ridolph assumed a new character. Ignoring his white and blue
tunic, he buttoned himself into a worn brown work-suit, pulled a gray cloth cap
over his ruff of white hair. Then, crossing the King's Canal and the Panalaza,
he threaded the dingy street of the Old Town to the Central Employment Pool.
Here
he found little activity. A few men, a few nervous torn-tickers, a knot of
Capellan anthropoids, one Yellowbird, a few native Rhodopians listlessly
watched the call-screen. Prominent on the wall was a sign reading:
CANNERY WORKERS! WANTED ON CHANDARIA!
—a notice which excited little attention.
Magnus
Ridolph strolled to the assignment window. The velvet-skinned Rhodopian clerk
bobbed his head courteously, lisped, "Yes, sir?"
"I'd like to try the cannery on
Chandaria," said Magnus Ridolph. The Rhodopian flicked him a seal-brown
glance. "In what capacity?" "What positions are open?"
The
Rhodopian glanced at a list. "Electrician—three hundred munits;
integrator-feed mechanic—three hundred twenty munits; welder—two hundred ninety
munits; laborer—two hundred munits."
"Hm," said Magnus Ridolph. "No
clerical work?"
"At the present,
no."
Til try the electrician job."
"Yes,
sir," said the Rhodopian. "May I see your Union Journeyman
Certificate?"
"My word," said
Magnus Ridolph. "I neglected to pack it."
The
Rhodopian showed blunt pink teeth. "I can send you out as a laborer. The
steward will sign you up on the job."
"Very well,"
sighed Magnus Ridolph.
A
cargo freighter conveyed the cannery recruits to Chandaria—a thick wobbly shell
permeated through and through with the reek of hot oil, sweat and ammonia.
Magnus Ridolph and a dozen others were quartered in an empty hold. They ate in
the crew's mess and were allowed two quarts of water a day for washing. Smoking
was forbidden.
Little need be said of the voyage. Magnus
Ridolph for years afterward labored to expunge the memory from his brain. When
at last the passengers filed, blinking, out on Chandaria, Magnus Ridolph looked
his part. His beard was unkempt and dirty, his hair hung around his ears and he
blended completely with his fellows.
His
first impression of the planet was dismal watery distance, drifting patches of
fog, wan maroon illumination. Chandaria was the ancient planet of an ancient
red sun and the land lay on a level with the ocean—prone, a gloomy peneplain
haunted with slow-shifting mists.
In
spite of its age Chandaria supported no native life more advanced than reeds
and a few fern trees. Protozoa swarmed the seas and, with no natural enemies,
the twenty thousand sardines originally loosed into the waters throve
remarkably well.
As
the passengers alighted from the hold of the freighter a young man with a long
horse-like yellow face, very broad shoulders, very narrow hips, stepped
forward.
"This way, men,"
he said. "Bring your luggage."
The
newcomers obediently trooped at his heels, across ground that quaked underfoot.
The path led into fog and, for a quarter-mile, the only features of the
landscape were a few rotten trees thrusting forlorn branches through the mist,
a few pools of stagnant water.
The
mist presently thinned, revealing a huddle of long buildings and, beyond, an
expanse of reeds and the glint of water.
"This is the bunkhouse for those of you
who sleep/' and the young man jerked his finger at the men and the anthropoids.
"You go in and sign with the house-captain. You, Yellowbird, you, Portmar,
and you, Rhodope, this way."
Magnus
Ridolph ruefully shook his head as he mounted the soggy steps into the
bunkhouse. This was probably the low point in his career. Two hundred munits a
month, grubbing among the intimate parts of fish. He made a wry grimace,
entered the bunkhouse.
He found an empty cubicle, threw his
duffel-bag on the cot, strolled into the recreation room, which smelled of
fish. Unpainted plyboard covered the walls, which were spanned by bare aluminum
rafters. A cheap telescreen at the end of the room displayed a buxom young woman, singing and contorting her
body with approximately equal vehemence.
Magnus
Ridolph sighed once more, inquired for the house-captain.
He was assigned to the No. 4 Eviscerator. His duties were simple. At intervals of about three minutes
he pulled a lever which raised a gate.
From a pond outside came a rush of water and thousands of sardines swam
serenely into the machine, where fingers, slots and air jets sorted them for
size, guided them against flashing knives, finally flung them through a spray
and out on a series of belts, where, still flapping feebly, they were tucked
into cans by a line of packers.
These
packers were mostly Banshoos from nearby Thaddeus XII—bulbous gray torsos with
twenty three-fingered tentacles, an eye and a sub-brain at the tip of each
tentacle.
From
the packers the cans were fitted with lids, conducted through a bank of
electronic cookers and finally stacked into crates, sealed and ready for
export.
Magnus
Ridolph considered the process with a thoughtful eye. An efficient and
well-organized sequence of operations, he decided. The Banshoo packers were the
only nonmechanical stage in the process and, watching the swift play of
tentacles over the belt, Magnus Ridolph thought that no machine could work as
quickly and flexibly.
Somewhere along this line, he reflected, the
sardines had been, and possibly were being, adulterated. Where? At the moment
no answer presented itself.
He
ate his lunch in an adjoining cafeteria. The food was passable—precooked on
Earth, served in sealed trays. Returning toward his post at Eviscerator No. 4 he noted a doorway leading out on a plank walk.
Magnus
Ridolph paused, stepped outside. The walk, supported on piles driven into the
morass, ran the length of the plant. Magnus Ridolph turned toward the ocean,
hoping to catch a glimpse of the cannery's fishing fleet.
The
mist had lifted somewhat, revealing endless miles of reed-covered mud-flats and
a stagnant sea. The land proper was distinguishable from the mud-flats only by
an occasional cycad which showed a dull frond to the great somber sun. It was a
landscape bleak and inexpressibly dreary, a world without hope or joy.
Magnus
Ridolph rounded the corner of the plant, came upon the concentration pond from
which the fish were channeled to the eviscerators. He looked right and left
but—except for a neat aluminum dinghy—not a boat of any sort was visible. How
then was the cannery supplied with fish?
He
turned his attention to the concentration pond, a shallow concrete basin, fifty
feet by twenty, with a break in the wall facing the sea three feet square.
Magnus Ridolph, stepping closer, saw that a set of long transparent bristles
pointed through the opening, permitting fish to swim in, but preventing their
escape.
And
as he watched, the dull surface of the ocean rippled. He caught the sheen of a
thousand small fins, and into the basin darted first one fish, then a hundred,
then a thousand and further thousands until the basin seethed and spattered
with concentrated life.
Magnus
Ridolph felt eyes on him. Lifting his head he saw standing across the pond the
broad-shouldered young man with the long yellow face. He wore puttees, high
field boots of nulastic, a tan jacket, and now he came striding around the pond
toward Magnus Ridolph.
"You supposed to be
out here? Or at work?"
"I
am employed, yes," said Magnus Ridolph mildly. "I supervise
a"—he coughed—"an eviscerator. But now, I have only just finished my
lunch."
The young man's mouth curled. "The
whistle blew half an hour ago. Get in motion. Pop, because we didn't bring you
three light-years out here to see the sights."
"If,
as you say, the whistle has blown, I shall certainly return to my duties.
Er—whom have I the pleasure of addressing?"
"My name's Donnels. I
sign your check."
"Ah,
yes. I see," said Magnus Ridolph, nodding. He thoughtfully returned to the
eviscerator.
His
duties were light but monotonous. Open the gate, shut it; open the gate, shut
it—occasionally break up a jam of frantic silvery bodies in front of the segregators.
Magnus Ridolph found ample time for reflection.
An explanation for the mysterious
adulterations seemed as far away as ever. The man who could accomplish the
mischief most easily was George Donnels but so far as Magnus Ridolph could see,
the plant seemed completely efficient. True, Donnels wanted to buy out
Karamor's interest, but why should he endanger the reputation of his own
product?
Especially
when he had such admirable raw material—for the fish, so Magnus Ridolph noted,
were larger and more plump than the specimens displayed by his Mnemiphot.
Evidently conditions on Chandaria agreed with them or possibly Donnels had
stocked the world with only the most select fish.
Open
the gate, close it. And he noted that the surge of fish down the chute formed a
recurring pattern. First one fish—rather larger, this one, perhaps the leader
of the shoal—then the thousands, dashing helter-skelter after him into the
knives. There was never any hesitation. The instant the gate opened, in surged
the shoal-leader, followed by the eager thousands.
The races most numerously represented at the
cannery were the Banshoos, Capellan anthropoids, men and Cordovan toricles, in
that order. Each had its separate bunkhouse and mess-hall— though bunkhouse was
perhaps a misnomer for the tanks of warm broth in which the Banshoos wallowed,
or the airtight barracks of the Capellans.
After
a shower and his evening meal, Magnus Ridolph wandered into the recreation
room. The telescreen was for the moment lifeless and a pair of card games were in progress. Magnus Ridolph took a seat beside a stocky bald man with plump cheeks and little blue pig-eyes, who was
reading the afternoon news-facsimile.
After
a moment he laid the sheet to the side, stretched pudgy arms, belched. Magnus
Ridolph with grave courtesy offered him a cigarette.
"Thanks, don't mind if I do," said
the stocky man cheerfully.
"Rather dull, isn't it?" said
Magnus Ridolph.
"Sure
is," and his new friend blew a plume of smoke into the already hazy
atmosphere. "Think I'll take outa this jungle next ship."
"You'd
think the company would provide better recreation facilities," said Magnus
Ridolph.
"Oh,
they don't care for anything but making money. These are the worst conditions
I've ever worked in. Bare union minimum, no extras at all, whatever."
"A matter has been puzzling me—"
began Magnus Ridolph.
"Lots of stuff puzzling me,"
sniffed his friend.
"How are the fish supplied to the
cannery?"
"Oh,"
the man exhaled a wise cloud of smoke, "they're supposed to have bait in
that pond. There's so many fish and they're so hungry they bite for anything.
Donnels sure saves that way-gets the fish free, so to speak. Don't cost him a cent, far's I can see."
"And where does Donnels live?"
inquired Magnus Ridolph. "He's got him a nice little cabin over behind the
laboratory," "Oh—the laboratory," mused the white-bearded sage.
"Arid where is the laboratory? I hadn't noticed it."
"She's off along the trail a little
ways, down the shore." "I see."
Magnus
Ridolph presently rose to his feet and wandered around the room a moment or so.
Then he slipped out into the night.
Chandaria
had no moons and a heavy mist shrouded the face of the planet from the stars.
Ten steps took Magnus Ridolph into utter darkness. He switched on his pocket
flash, picked his way gingerly over the soggy ground, at last came upon the
trail to the laboratory—a graveled path, dry and solid.
Once fairly on the path he doused the flash,
halted, strained his ears for sound. He heard a far waver of voices from the
direction of the cannery, a phonograph faintly squeaking Capellán music.
He
continued along the path, guiding himself by the feel of the gravel, stopping
often to listen. He walked an interminable time, through blackness so dense
that it seemed to stream back from his face as he walked. Suddenly a row of
lighted windows glowed through the fog. Magnus Ridolph moved as close as
feasible to one of these windows, stood on his tiptoes, stared.
He
was looking into a room equipped as a biological laboratory. Donnels and a
slight dark man in a white smock stood talking beside a coffin-shaped crate.
As
he watched Donnels took a pair of cutters, snapped the bands of metal tape
binding the crate. The fiber sides fell away, wadding was torn aside, and now a
factory-new diving-suit stood revealed—a semirigid shell with a transparent
dome, oxygen generator and propulsion unit.
Donnels
kicked aside the rubbish, stood viewing the gear with evident satisfaction.
Magnus Ridolph strained to catch a word of the conversation. Impossible—the
window was insul-glass. He trotted to the door, inched it open.
"—ought
to be a good outfit, four hundred and fifty munits worth," came Donnels'
flat voice.
"The question is—is it
what we need?"
"Sure."
Donnels sounded confident, cocksure. "There's no current to speak of. In
five minutes I can circle the colony, and before they know what's going on, the
stessonite will kill 'em off like flies."
"Ha,
hmph," the technician coughed. "They'll see you coming —ha, hmph—just
as when you tried to blast them."
"Curse
it, Naile," crowed Donnels, "you're a pessimistl I'll come in along
the bottom. They won't see the suit like they did the boat. The suit can hit as
fast as they can swim; no chance of word getting on ahead. Well, we'll try
anyway. No harm trying. How're your pupils coming along?"
"Good,
very good indeed. Two in D tank are ready for the fifth chart and in H
tank—that big fellow—he's into the eighth chart."
Magnus
Ridolph straightened slightly, then bent closer. "The Barnett
Method?" He heard Donnels' voice. "And how about that fellow—in the
tank by himself?"
"Ah/' said Naile, "that's the wise
one! Sometimes I think he knows more than I do."
"That's
the boy that'll make millionaires out of both of us," said Donnels, a
singing lilt in his voice. "Provided I can buy out Karamor."
There was a silence. Then Magnus Ridolph heard a faint movement of feet. He ducked
back to the window, in time to see Donnels' broad-shouldered figure leaving the
laboratory.
Naile
came obliquely toward him, bent forward with mouth loosely open, staring at an
object out of Magnus Ridolph's vision. Magnus Ridolph chewed his lip, fingered
his beard. Hypotheses formed in his mind, only to be defeated by their eventual
implications. Naile left the room through a door at the rear. Evidently he had
his quarters in an annex to the laboratory.
Magnus
Ridolph stirred himself. Further information must be collected. He marched to
the door and, almost insolently casual, entered the laboratory.
Standard
equipment—permobeam projector and viewer, radio-activator, microscopes—visual
and quantumnal—balances, automatic dissectors, gene calibrators, mutation
cradles. These he dismissed with a glance. At his shoulder stood the
diving-suit. First things first, thought Magnus Ridolph. He inspected the suit
with appreciation.
"Excellent
apparatus," he said to himself. "Admirable design, conscientious
workmanship. A shame to defeat the purpose of so much effort." He
shrugged, reached inside, and detached the head of the seam-sealer—a small
precisely-machined bit of metal, without which the suit could not be made
water-tight.
Movement
flickered across the room. Nailei Magnus Ridolph quietly stepped toward the
door. The motion caught the technician's eye.
"Hey!"
he cried. "What are you up to?" He bounded forward. "Come back
here!" But Magnus Ridolph was away into the Chandaria night.
A
beam of light tore a milky rent through the fog, rested a moment on Magnus Ridolph.
"You!"
roared Naile. For so slight a man,
thought Magnus Ridolph, his voice was remarkably powerful. He heard the thud of
Naile's feet. The man also appeared to be agile, swift.
Magnus Ridolph groaned once, then—as the thud
of feet grew louder—he jumped off the path into the swamp.
He
sank to his knees in cool slime, crouched, threw himself prone. The beam of
Naile's flash passed over his head, the steps pounded past. Darkness returned,
Magnus
Ridolph struggled through the muck back to the path, proceeded cautiously.
The
mist wandered away, vague as a sleepwalker. Magnus Ridolph saw the lights of
his bunkhouse, a hundred yards distant. But as he watched they were obscured by
something prowling the road in front. Naile?
Magnus
Ridolph turned, trotted as fast as his old legs would carry him, skirted far
around to the left. Then he closed in to the rear of the bunkhouse. He made
directly for the washroom, showered, rinsed out his clothes.
Returning
to the recreation hall he found the stocky bald man sitting exactly where he
had left him an hour previously.
Magnus
Ridolph took a seat. "I understand," he said, "that Donnels was
blasting out in the ocean."
The
plump man guffawed. "Yes, sir, he surely was. What in the Lord's name for,
I'm sure I can't tell you. Sometimes I think he's— well, he flies off the
handle, like. A little excitable."
"Possibly
he wished to kill some fish?" suggested Magnus Ridolph.
His
friend shrugged, pushed plump lips out around his pipe-stem. "With
hundreds of tons of fish swarming of their own free will into his cannery he
wants to go out and kill more? I hardly think so. Unless he's crazier'n I
think."
"Just where was he
blasting?"
His
friend darted him a glance from little blue pig-eyes. "Well, I'll tell
you—though I don't see what difference it makes. He was right off the point of
land that sticks into the ocean—the one with the three tall trees on it. About
a mile down the shore."
"Strange,"
mused Magnus Ridolph. He pulled the small metal part from his pocket, fingering
it thoughtfully. "Strange. Sardines flinging themselves headlong into
cans—Donnels and Naile applying the Barnett Method to something in a
tank—Donnels blasting, poisoning something in the ocean—and, too, the
adulteration of the canned sardines. . . .
He reported to work at the eviscerator with a
theory looming vague at the portals of his mind, like one of the fern trees
through the Chandaria mist. He bent over the chute, eyes under the frosty
eyebrows sparking with as much excitement as he ever permitted himself.
Open
the gate—the surge of fish. Close the gate. Open the gate— the chute running
thick with glinting silver crescents. Close the gate. Open the gate—the fish,
first one, then the ranks behind. Close the gate.
Magnus
Ridolph noted that always a lone sardine led the way down the chute, a swarm of
followers close on his tail. And peering after them into the bowels of the
eviscerator Magnus Ridolph noticed an inconspicuous side-channel into which the
first fish ducked while his fellows poured on to their deaths.
Magnus
Ridolph thoughtfully found a rag, reached far down, wadded shut the
side-channel. Open the gate. The lead fish plunged down the chute—after him
came the blind finny horde. He reached the side-channel, butted the rag
frantically. The thrust of the others caught him. With desperate flapping of
tail, he vanished into the knives. Close the gate. Open the gate. And the lead
fish, thwarted in his escape by the wadded rag, was carried to death by his
fellows.
Six
times the sequence was repeated. Then, when Magnus Ridolph opened the gate,
there was no rush of fish. He reached down, removed the rag, sat peering with
an innocent eye up the chute.
A
foreman presently bustled forward. "What's the trouble? What's wrong up
here?"
"The
fish evidently have learned the danger of the chute," said Magnus Ridolph.
The foreman gave him a scornful glance. "Keep working the gate." He
turned away.
Ten
minutes later, when Magnus Ridolph opened the gate, fish poured down the chute
as before. The foreman came to watch a moment, assured himself that the fish
were running as usual, then departed. Magnus Ridolph replaced the rag in the
side-passage. Six operations later the opened gate again drew blank. Magnus
Ridolph immediately pulled out the rag.
The
foreman came on the run. Magnus Ridolph shook his head ruefully, framed an
apologetic smile behind his beard.
"We can't have this—we can't have
this!" bawled the foreman. "What's going on here?"
He ran off, came back with
a rock-eyed Donnels.
Donnels
peered down the chute, felt into the side escape. He drew back, straightened,
glanced sharply at Magnus Ridolph, who blandly returned the gaze.
"Throw
another unit into the tank," said Donnels to the foreman. "Keep an
eye on 'em. See what's happening."
"Yes, sir." The
foreman hurried off.
Donnels turned to Magnus Ridolph, his long
yellow face set hard, his mouth pulled far down at the corners. "You come
out on the last ship?"
"Why,
yes," said Magnus Ridolph. "A dismal voyage. The quarters were
cramped, the food was miserable."
The thin mouth quivered. "Where did you
sign up?"
"On Rhodope. I
remember it perfectly, it was—"
"Fine,
fine," said Donnels. After a short pause, "You look like a pretty
smart man."
"Ahr,
ahem," said Magnus Ridolph. "Are you suggesting a promotion? I'd be
delighted to have a more responsible position, something clerical
perhaps."
"If
you're smart," said Donnels in an edged even tone, "you'll keep your
mind on your work—and nothing
else."
"Just as you
say," said Magnus Ridolph with dignity.
The
foreman returned. Donnels signaled Magnus Ridolph to raise the gate and fish
once more flushed the chute.
Donnels
stood close at hand for twenty minutes and the foreman remained ten minutes
after Donnels had stalked away.
The
rest of the shift Magnus Ridolph performed his duties well and
skillfully—though by way of diversion he found it amusing to reach down and
cuff the Judas fish as it passed, until at last the fish learned to keep to the
far side of the chute. Magnus Ridolph could pursue his sport only with
inconvenient exertion and so desisted.
Magnus Ridolph sat on the clammy bench before
the bunkhouse, looking out over the landscape. There was little to see. Low in
the sky hung the giant red sun, fitfully obscured by the shifting vapors. Ahead
stretched the mud-flats and the leaden ocean, to his left rose the cannery and
the warehouse. To his right the laboratory was visible, two hundred yards down
the gravel path.
Magnus
Ridolph reached for a cigar, then remembered that he had packed none in his
meager luggage—and the brand sold at the commissary offended rather than
soothed his palate.
Movement
at the laboratory. Magnus Ridolph sat straighter on the bench. Donnels and
Naile emerged, followed by two Capellan laborers, carrying the diving-suit.
Magnus
Ridolph pursed his lips. Evidently the absence of the seam-sealer had not been
discovered.
He
watched impassively as the party turned toward the cannery wharf—Donnels darted
him a long level stare as he strode by.
As
soon as the group had passed Magnus Ridolph rose, jauntily set off down the
path toward the laboratory. He found the door unlocked and, entering, turned
directly to the wall which had been out of his vision when he stood at the
window.
Tanks lined the wall, tanks full of
fish—sardines. Some swam placidly to and fro, others hung close to the glass,
staring out with intent eyes. Magnus Ridolph became aware of differences.
Some
had monstrous tails, lizard-like heads. Others resembled tadpoles, with
rudimentary fins and tail barely moving hyper-developed crania. Eyes bulged at
Magnus Ridolph—eyes like bubbles, eyes flame red, eyes coal-pit black. One fish
trailed a bridal-train of fins, another wore an antler-like head-growth.
Magnus
Ridolph surveyed the array without emotion. He had seen like sights in other
biological laboratories, freak distortions of every description. In the infamous
clinic on the planet Pandora— Magnus Ridolph returned to the case at hand,
sought a fish in a tank by himself— 'the wise one."
There
he was, at the far end—a fish normal except for a slightly enlarged head.
"Well,
well," said Magnus Ridolph. "Well, well." He bent forward,
peered into the tank and the sardine, eyes unwinking, expressionless, stared
back. Magnus Ridolph turned, sought around the room. There they were—the twenty
charts comprising the Barnett Method for Establishing Communication with Alien
Intelligences.
Magnus Ridolph fanned out the master chart
before the tank, and the fish pressed closer to the glass.
"Opening communication/' Magnus Ridolph
signaled and waited. The fish plunged to the bottom of the tank, returned with
a bit of metal in its mouth. It tapped on the glass—once, twice, once.
Magnus
Ridolph had no need to refer to the chart. "Proceed," was the
message.
He
bent over the chart, selected the symbols with care, pausing frequently to
assure himself that the fish was following him.
"Instructor-man
... of you . . . desire .
. . utilize . . . you . . . purpose . . . injury . . . class of you. I . . . know (negative) . . • method."
The fish tapped on the glass: 5—3—5, 4—3—2. 5—6—1, 2-6-3-4.
Magnus
Ridolph followed the code on the chart. "Class of me . . . exists . . . place (indefinite, interrogative)?"
Magnus
Ridolph signaled back. "Large (emphatic) . .. extension . . . water . . . exists .
. . exterior. Plurality
(emphatic) . . . class of you . . . exists Class of instructor-man .
. . kill . . . class of you . . . eat .
. . class of you."
"Purpose
(interrogative) ... of you?" was the fish's pointed signal.
"Complex
mixture," signaled Magnus Ridolph. "Constructive. You . . . desire (interrogative) .
. . depart . . . tank . . . converge . . . plurality . . . class of you?"
The fish rattled his bit of
metal indecisively. "Food?"
"Plurality,"
returned Magnus Ridolph. "Swim .
. . extension (emphatic) . . . barriers (negative)."
The
fish twitched his fins, retired to a dark corner. Presently, as Magnus Ridolph
was becoming restive, the fish swam out in front once more, tapped twice on the
glass.
Magnus
Ridolph sought around the laboratory, found a bucket. He dipped it into the
tank, but the fish nervously skittered out of reach. Magnus Ridolph scooped him
out willy-nilly and, stuffing the Barnett charts into his pocket, he left the
laboratory.
Briskly
he traversed the path, turned toward the wharf. Now he spied Donnels and Naile
coming toward him, lines dividing Donnels' yellow face into hard segments.
Magnus Ridolph prudently set the bucket beside the bunkhouse, and was placidly
seated on the bench when Donnels and Naile passed.
"—slider was there and working last
night, I'm sure," Magnus Ridolph heard Naile say. Donnels shook his head
curtly.
As
soon as they had passed Magnus Ridolph took the bucket, continued toward the
wharf.
The
diving-suit stood at the edge of the pier, ready for use— except for the
missing seam-sealer. The Capellan laborers stood dully nearby, watching without
interest.
Magnus
Ridolph rubbed his chin. Suit—seam-sealer—why not? He changed his mind about
throwing the fish into the ocean; instead he approached the suit, looked it
over carefully. Two dials on the breastplate; one controlled the drive-unit,
the other the air generator. Simplicity itself.
He
fitted the seam-sealer into place and, with a side-glance at the two Capellans,
stepped into the suit, slid the seam-sealer home. The Capellans shifted
uneasily, brains roiling at a sight which they knew to be unnatural—and yet
which they had no orders to prevent. As an afterthought Magnus Ridolph unsealed
the suit, transferred the Barnett charts to the exterior pouch, sealed himself
into the suit once more.
At
his belt hung a knife, an axe, a flashlamp. Another lamp was set at the top of
the transparent head-dome. He reached to the breastplate, assured himself that
the dials moved easily, set the air-generator in operation.
He
looked over his shoulder. Motion near the laboratory. He floated the bucket on
the sluggish water, lurched off the dock, A last glimpse of the rear showed him
George Donnels running in his direction, face twisted in a contortion of rage.
Behind him scampered Naile, white smock flapping.
Magnus
Ridolph tapped the side of the bucket, unsure of the code, hoping for the best.
"Swim .. . proximity ... me." Then he overturned the
bucket. The fish darted out, away. Magnus Ridolph himself sank under the
surface.
He
twisted the propulsion dial. Water was sucked into the unit, spewed astern.
Magnus Ridolph drove headlong through the water. And something tore hissing
past the head-dome, made a vague clap in his ears.
Magnus
Ridolph wrenched at the dial, and the water buffeted his suit.
Two or three minutes later he slowed, rose to
the surface. The wharf was a quarter-mile to the rear and he could see Donnels'
taut frame searching across the water. Magnus Ridolph chuckled.
The
point of land with the three tall trees sloped into the ocean at his left.
Turning on his head-lamp, fixing the direction by a compass set in the rim of
the dome, he submerged, drove forward.
The
water was emerald-green, clearer than it seemed from the surface. He swam into
a gigantic underwater forest—sea-trees with delicate silver fronds pinned to
the bottom by the slenderest of stalks, sea-vines rising straight as pencils of
light from the depths, with shining globes spaced along the stalks.
These
might not be true plants, thought Magnus Ridolph, but possibly groups of polyps
like the anemones of Earth. And, recalling the sting of the Portuguese
man-of-war, he gave the sea-vines a wide berth.
Everywhere
swam sardines, shoal upon shoal, sardines by the millions, and the light in the
head-dome glinted on the flitting silver sides like moonlight along a
wind-ruffled lake.
Magnus
Ridolph looked about to see if possibly the fish he had liberated were near. If
so he was indistinguishable among his fellows.
On
he drove, suspended between the mirroring under-surface and the gloom of the
depths, past shoulders of quiet mud, across sudden deeps, threading the groves
of the sea-trees.
He
rose once more to the surface, adjusted his course. The cannery was a
ramshackle huddle far back along the gray shore. He submerged, continued.
A
white wall glimmered ahead. He veered, slowed and saw the barrier to be a
submarine dyke, a rampart of felsite or quartzite, striding mightily across the
ocean floor. He drifted close to the wall, rose to the top face—a flat course
of rock fifteen feet below the surface.
Magnus
Ridolph floated quietly, considering. This was approximately where Donnels had
blasted, possibly a little further out to sea. He turned, swam slowly through
the lime-green water, just above the flat white rock-face. He halted, floated
motionless.
Below
him several score bubbles clung to the stone, large globes arrayed in ordered
rows. They seemed flexible, swayed slightly to random currents. Within, Magnus
Ridolph glimpsed small intricate objects and a lurid flickering light came from
several.
Magnus Ridolph suddenly became aware of the
press of fish, thicker than anything he had seen to date. They were pushing
slowly in upon him and now, noting the hyperdeveloped crania, the bulging eyes,
the careful purposive movements, Magnus Ridolph felt that he knew a great deal
about the Chandaria cannery.
He
also experienced a sense of uneasiness. Why were several of the fish nudging a
weighted bubble in his direction?
He
whipped out the Barnett charts, found number one, gesticulated to the sequence
which conveyed the notion of friendly intent.
Several of the fish darted close, followed
his motions carefully. One of them—no different, so far as Magnus Ridolph could
tell, from the multitude—came close, tapped on head-dome.
1—2—1— "opening communication."
Magnus
Ridolph sighed, relaxed in the diving suit, indicated symbols on the charts.
"I . . . come . . .
purpose . . . help . . . class of you."
"Doubt. Class of you .
. . destructive (interrogative)?"
"Class
of me ... in building . . . friends
(negative) of me. I . . . constructive. Friend . . . class of you."
"Class of you . . .
purpose . . . kill . . . class of us."
Magnus
Ridolph struggled with the elemental concepts. Valuable as the charts were,
conveying an exact sense was like repairing a watch with a pipe-wrench.
"Complex
. . . thought. Class of me . . . carry . . . you . • . this place. Construct .
. . thinking ... of you . . .
stronger."
A
sudden small movement flurried through the throng, silver sides twinkled.
Magnus Ridolph listened—the hum of a propeller. He rose to the surface. Not a
hundred yards distant was the row-boat, propelled by an outboard motor. The man
in the boat sighted Magnus Ridolph, swerved. In one hand he carried a long tube
with a shoulder stock. Magnus Ridolph submerged quickly.
The
propeller droned louder, closer. The black underbody of the little boat plunged
directly at him.
Magnus Ridolph threw the
propulsion dial hard to its stop.
Water
blasted back from the jet, scattering the fish, and Magnus Ridolph dove off at
an angle.
The
boat turned with him, following swiftly. The propeller halted, the boat slowed.
Under the surface came the tube, pointing at Magnus Ridolph. It twitched,
ejected a little projectile which bubbled fast toward him.
Magnus Ridolph doubled fast to the side and
the spew of his drive caught the missile, diverted it slightly. From behind
came a tremendous explosion—jarring Magnus Ridolph like a hammer blow. And the
boat was once more after him.
Magnus
Ridolph blinked, shook his head. He twisted, dove up at a slant for the boat.
Up under the light boat he came, the head-dome under one side of the hull. Full
power on the thrust-unit— up and over went the boat. Sprawling into the water
toppled an awkward dark shape and the rocket-tube plunged steeply into the
darkness below. The boat filled with water, settled into the gloom.
Magnus
Ridolph surfaced, placidly watched Naile, the laboratory technician, paddling
for land. He was a clumsy swimmer and the shore was a mile distant. If he
reached the shore, there would still be several miles of morass to traverse
back to the cannery. After a moment Magnus Ridolph sunk below the surface,
returned to the great white underwater rampart.
Joel Karamor strode back and forth, hands
behind his back, forehead furrowed. Magnus Ridolph, at his ease in an
old-fashioned leather armchair, sipped a glass of sherry. This was Joel
Karamor's business office, high in the French Pavilion Tower—one of the landmarks
of Tran, the miracle-city on the shores of Lake Sahara.
"Yes," muttered Karamor, "but
where was Donnels all this time? Where is he now?"
Magnus Ridolph coughed slightly, touched his
white beard, this once more crisp, well-cropped.
"Ah, Donnels," he
mused. "Did you value him as a partner?"
Karamor
froze stock-still, stared at his visitor. "What do you mean? Where is
Donnels?"
Magnus Ridolph touched the tips of his
fingers together. "Ill continue my report. I returned to the dock and as
it was somewhat after sunset, very dull and gloomy, I fancy I was not observed.
A large number of the intelligent fish. I may add, accompanied me for reasons of
their own, into which I did not inquire.
"I
assumed that Donnels would be standing on the wharf, probably armed and
emotionally keyed to shoot without permitting me to present my authority from
you. I believe I have mentioned that the wharf provided the only access from
the cannery to the ocean— the shore being an impassable swamp.
"If
Donnels were standing on the wharf, he would completely dominate the ground. My
problem then was to find a means to reach solid ground without being perceived
by Donnels."
Karamor resumed his pacing.
"Yes," he muttered. "Go on."
Magnus
Ridolph sipped his sherry. "A suitable expedient had occurred to me.
Understand now, Joel, I could not, at the risk of my life, climb boldly up on
the wharf."
"I understand
perfectly. What did you do?"
"I
swam through the trap into the concentration pond. But I still would be exposed
if I tried to emerge from the water, so ..."
"So?"
"So
I swam to the gate into the cannery, waited till it opened and propelled myself
into the chute toward the eviscerator."
"Hah!"
snorted Joel Karamor. "Just the grace of God I'm not opening a can of
sardines and finding you. Canned Magnus. Canned Ridolph!"
"No,"
said the white-bearded sage. "There was little danger of the eviscerator.
The chute is set at a gentle slope ...
As you may imagine, the operator of the machine was startled when I appeared
before him. Fortunately for me he was a Capellan, excellent at routine tasks,
short on initiative, and he raised no special outcry when I rose from the
chute.
"I
removed the diving suit, explained to the Capellan that I was testing the slope
of the channel—which seemed to satisfy him— and then I strolled out on the
wharf.
"As
I expected, Donnels was standing there, watching across the water. He did not
hear me—I walked rather quietly. It now occurred to me that inasmuch as Donnels
was young and athletic, of choleric disposition and furthermore carried a
hand-weapon, my bargaining position was rather poor. Accordingly I pushed him
into the water."
"You did! Then
what?"
Magnus Ridolph put on a
doleful countenance.
"Then what, confound
it?" bawled Karamor.
"A tragic occurrence," said Magnus
Ridolph. He shook his head. "I might have foreseen it had I thought. You
remember, I mentioned the fish following me back from the dike."
Karamor stared. "You
mean?"
"Donnels drowned," said Magnus
Ridolph. "The fish drowned him. Feeble individually, in the mass they
drove him away from the wharf, pulled him under. A distressing sight. I was
very upset."
Karamor
paced once, twice, across the room, flung himself into a chair opposite Magnus
Ridolph.
"An
accident, hey? Poor unfortunate Donnels, hey? Is that the story? The trouble
is, Magnus, I know you too well. The whole thing sounds too precise. These—ah,
intelligent sardines"—he made a sardonic mouth—"had no idea Donnels
would be pushed into the water?"
"Well,"
said Magnus Ridolph thoughtfully. "I did mention that he would probably be
waiting on the wharf. And the Bamett charts, though very useful of course, are
not infallible. I suppose it's not impossible that the fish assumed—"
"Never mind, never mind,"
said Karamor wearily.
"Look
at it this way," suggested Magnus Ridolph easily. "If Donnels had not
attempted to blast and poison the fish they would not have drowned him. If
Donnels had not sent Naile to blast me out of the water and had not been waiting
on the dock for the honor of shooting me personally, I would not have pushed
him in."
"Yes,"
said Karamor, "and if you hadn't stolen his suit he probably wouldn't
have been waiting for you."
Magnus
Ridolph pursed his lips. "If we pursue the matter of ultimate
responsibility to the limit we might arrive at you, who, as Donnels' partner,
is legally responsible for his actions."
Karamor sighed. "How
did the whole thing start?"
"A
natural evolution," said Magnus Ridolph. "Donnels and Naile, in
stocking Chandaria with sardines, naturally selected the best sardines
possible. Then in the laboratory, while waiting for the fish to multiply, they
encouraged mutations to improve the stock even further.
"One of these mutations proved highly
intelligent, and I fancy this gave Donnels his big idea. Why not breed a strain
of intelligent fish which could be trained to work for him, like sheep-dogs or
better, like the Judas-goat which leads the sheep into the abattoir?
"They
set to work breeding, cross-breeding, and indeed a very intelligent sardine
resulted. Those which would cooperate with Donnels rendered very valuable
service, enabling him to can fish without going to the trouble of catching them
himself.
"A
few of the fish, the most intelligent, preferred freedom and founded a colony
near the dike. Donnels soon learned of this colony because all but the most
servile of his Judas fish swam off and joined their brothers.
"Taming
these fish, teaching them, was a laborious task and Donnels decided to
exterminate the colony. He also feared that the intelligent fish might
outnumber the normal ones and refuse to be led blindly into his concentration
pond. He tried blasting and poison from the surface but was unsuccessful, as
the fish could see him coming. So he ordered a diving-suit from Rhodope.
"Meanwhile
the fish had launched a counter-offensive. They had no weapons—they could not
attack Donnels directly. But they knew the purpose of the cannery, that it
packed sardines for human consumption.
"They
developed the skill to build the bubbles on the dike—a secretion, I believe—and
prepare a series of offensive substances. Then a great number of ordinary
sardines were captured, packed with these substances, sent into the cannery to
be canned and exported."
Joel
Karamor rose abruptly to his feet, once more paced the glossy floor. "And
what happened to Naile?"
"He showed up a day
later. A mere tool."
Karamor
shook his head. "I suppose the plant is a total loss. Did you make
arrangements to evacuate the help?"
Magnus
Ridolph widened his eyes in surprise. "None whatever. Was I supposed to do
so?"
"I
gave you full powers," snapped Karamor. "You should have seen to
it."
A
buzzer sounded. Karamor pushed the button. A soft voice spoke. Karamor's
brindle-gray hair rose in a startled ruff.
"Cargo
of canned sardines? Hold on." He turned to Magnus Ridolph. "Who
dispatched the sardines? What's going on here— and there?"
Magnus
Ridolph shrugged. "The cannery is functioning as before —under new
management. Using my powers I made the necessary arrangements. Your share of
the profits shall be as before/'
Karamor
halted in mid-stride. "So? And who is my partner? Naile?"
"By
no means/' said Magnus Ridolph. "He has nothing to offer." "Who
then?" bellowed Karamor.
"Naturally,
the colony of intelligent sardines I told you about." "What/"
"Yes,"
said Magnus Ridolph. "You are now associated commercially with a shoal of
sardines. The Sardine-Karamor Company."
"My word," husked
Karamor. "My word/"
"The
advantages to all concerned are obvious," said Magnus Ridolph. "You
are assured of efficient management with high-grade raw material guaranteed.
The sardines receive whatever civilized amenities they desire."
Karamor
was silent for some minutes. He turned a narrow eye on the bland Magnus Ridolph.
"I
detect the Ridolph touch in this scheme. The characteristic lack of principle,
the calculated outing of orthodox practice. . . ."
"Tut, tut," said Magnus Ridolph.
"Not at all, not at all."
Karamor
snorted. "Do you deny that the whole program was your idea?"
"Well,"
said Magnus Ridolph carefully, "I admit that I pointed out to the fishes
the advantages of the arrangement."
Andre Norton was born in Cleveland, Ohio, where she now
resides. She is editor of the Gnome Press teen-age science-fiction department,
as well as author and editor of more than a dozen books of mystery, adventure,
and science fiction. World has published her edition of Malcolm Jameson's
Bullard of the Space Patrol, and Space Service and Space Pioneers, which with
Space Police comprise a trilogy of science-fiction anthologies. Miss Norton was
a children's librarian at the Cleveland Public Library, and is an avid student
and collector of science fiction.