As swift as any vessel in that near-infinitesimal droplet of the galaxy which we have slightly explored, Muddlin' Through reached Earth almost simultaneously with the first messengers from the embattled Mirkheim expedition, whose survivors would not come limping in for two or more weeks. Traffic Control kept her hours in orbit. Her crew did manage to swap a few radioed words with Nicholas van Rijn. "I will meet you at Ronga," the merchant said—and little else, when communication was surely being monitored.
The likelihood of war had evidently thrown the bureaucrats in charge of space safety into a blue funk. But clearance finally came. Ship and pilot were licensed to set down anywhere on the planet that adequate facilities existed. Muddlehead got orders to make for a certain atoll in the South Pacific Ocean.
Approached from above, the scene was impossibly lovely. The waters shone in a thousand shades of blue and green, sunlight sparkling over their wrinkled vastness; breakers burst silvery on the coral necklace of the island, within whose arc a lagoon lay like an amethyst; tall clouds massed in the west, their purity shaded azure, while elsewhere heaven was a dome of light. We have so few places like this left on Earth, David Falkayn thought fleetingly. Is that—not ambition, not adventure, no, the longing for a peace which only our genes remember—is that what really sends us out into the universe?
Feather-softly, landing jacks touched the surface of a small paved field. The main personnel lock opened and its gangway extruded. Falkayn had been waiting there, but Chee Lan darted between his legs and reached ground first, bounced in the air, sped to the adjacent beach, and rolled on warm white sand. He followed more sedately, until he saw who came to meet him. Then he also ran.
"Davy, oh, Davy!" Coya flung herself at him and they kissed for an unbroken minute or better, while Adzel paraded discreetly by. Waves rushed and murmured, seabirds cried.
"I tried to call you right after the boss," Falkayn stammered. What a poor greeting words gave.
"He'd already contacted me, told me to come here," she said, leaning happily against him.
"How're Juanita and X?" He saw, as he had felt, the growth of the child within her during the weeks of his absence.
"Fat and sassy. Look over yonder. C'mon." She tugged his arm.
Van Rijn stood at the border of the field, holding his great-granddaughter by the hand. As the newcomers reached them, the girl released herself, flew to Daddy to be hugged, then from his embrace looked up at Adzel and chirped, "Ride?"
The dragon set her on his back and all started for the house. Palms soughed in a wind whose salt was sweetened by odors of jasmine; hibiscus and bougainvillea glowed ardent in arbors. "Welcome home, by damn," van Rijn boomed. "Was a poxy long wait, not knowing if you was chopped into cutlets or what."
Falkayn broke stride. A chill blew across his joy. "Then you didn't get our dispatch?" he said. "We sent a torp from the neighborhood of Mogul."
"No, nothings. Our data bank stayed bare as a mermaid's bottom."
Falkayn's grip tightened around Coya's waist. That time had surely been, for her, the frozen ninth circle of hell. "I was afraid you might not," he said slowly.
"You mean somebody snaffled it?" Coya asked.
"Ja," van Rijn growled. "The Space Service, who elses? Plain to see, they got secret orders to take anything for me to somebody different."
"But that's illegal!" she protested.
"The Home Companies is behind it, of course, and in a case like this they don't give snot whether it's illegal or well eagle. I hope you used cipher, Davy."
"Yes, naturally," Falkayn said. "I don't think they can have broken it."
"No, but you see, they kept me from getting maybe an advantage in this diarrhea-fluid situation we got. I seven-point-three-tenths expected it . . . . Here we are." The party climbed the steps, crossed a verandah, and entered an airily furnished room where stood a table covered with drinks and snacks.
Chee soared to a chair, crouched on it, and chattered, "You've heard about a battle commencing at Mirkheim, I gather. We were there. Earlier, the wan-yao jan-gwo chai reng pfs-s-st Baburites jailed us—" Her native phrase gave a succinct description of their ancestors, morals, personal cleanliness, and fate if she could have her way.
"Oh, no," Coya breathed.
"Hold, hold," van Rijn commanded. "I decree first we snap some schnapps, with a little liter or so of beer in tow and maybe a few herring filets or such for ballast. You do not want your new baby should become an adrenalin addict, ha?"
"Nor this young lady," said Adzel, for Juanita's giggles had given place to a worried silence. He reached around, lifted her off his shoulders, and started juggling her from hand to enormous hand. She squealed in delight. Her parents didn't mind; she was safer with him than with anybody else they knew, including themselves.
"Well—" Falkayn could not quite yield to pleasure. "What's been happening at home?"
"Nothing, except the bomb going ticktacktoe," van Rijn said. "Bayard Story, he made one last try to get me in combination with the Seven, what meant putting me under their orders. I told him to paint it green, and he left the Solar System. Otherwise, only rumors, and news commentators who I would like to do a hysteria-ectomy on."
"Who's Bayard Story?" Chee inquired.
"A director of Galactic Developments, delegate to the meeting at Lunograd," van Rijn told her. "He was pretty much the spokesman for the Seven. In fact, I suspect he was the wheelsman."
"Mmm, yes, I remember now, I happened to see his arrival on a newscast," Falkayn put in. "I admired his skill in giving the reporter a brief, crisp, straightforward statement that didn't say a flinkin' thing." He turned to Coya. "No matter. Haven't you anything special to relate, darling?"
"Oh, I was offered a contract by Danstrup Cargo Carriers," she answered, referring to an independent within the League. Since she stopped trade pioneering, she had worked out of her home as a high-powered free-lance computer programmer. "They wanted an analysis of their best strategy in case of war. Everybody is terrified of war, nobody knows what the consequences would be, nobody wants it, but still we drift and drift . . . . It's horrible, Davy. Can you imagine how horrible?"
Falkayn brushed a kiss across her hair. "Did you take the job?"
"No. How could I, not being sure what had become of you? I've filled in the time with routine-type stuff. And—and I've played a lot of tennis, that sort of thing, to help me sleep." She shared his distrust of chemical consolations.
In a way, van Rijn did too. He used alcohol not as a crutch but as a pogo stick. "Drink, you slobberwits!" he roared. "Or do I have to give it to you with a hypochondriac needle? You got home safe, that's what matters first. So crow about it; then look at this nice table of goodies and raven."
Adzel set Juanita down. "Come," he said, "let us go off in a corner and have a tea party." She paused to pet Chee. The Cynthian submitted, merely switching her tail.
Yet it was impossible to pretend for long that no universe existed beyond the blue overhead. Soon the Muddlin' Through trio were relating their experiences. Van Rijn listened intently, interrupting less often than Coya with questions or exclamations.
At the end: "This equipment you salvaged from the warship, did you learn anything about it on your way home?" he asked.
"Very little." Falkayn rubbed the back of his neck. "And damned puzzling. Most of what we saw, as well as what we took away, is modeled on Technic designs, as you'd expect. But certain transistors—we can't figure out how they were manufactured in a hydrogen atmosphere. Hydrogen would poison the semiconductors."
"Maybe they're produced off Babur, like on a satellite," Coya suggested.
"Maybe," Falkayn said. "Though I can't see why. Alternative kinds of transistor exist which don't require going to that much trouble. Then there's a unit which we guess to be a containment field-strength regulator. It involves a rectifier operating at a high temperature. Okay. But this particular rectifier is cupric oxide. Hydrogen reduces that stuff when it's hot; you get copper and water. Oh, yes, the piece is inside an iron shell to protect it. But hydrogen leaks through iron. So what the Baburites have got is a part less reliable, more often in need of replacement, than necessary."
"Bad engineering as a result of haste," Coya offered with a quirked smile. "Not the first time in history."
"True," Falkayn said. "But—Look, the Baburites have had offplanet help. That much was admitted to us; and we identified an oxygen-breather colony on one of their moons, you recall; and there are those foreign mercenaries, also oxygen-breathing. Obviously they hired such outsiders to help them with research, development, and production of their military machine. Why didn't the outsiders do a better job?"
Van Rijn stumped about, worrying his goatee and crunching bites off a Spanish onion. "More interesting is how the Baburites found those people, and how paid them as well as the other costs," he opined. "Babur is not a rich world nor very populous, proportional to its size, even allowing for industrial backwardness. Too much of it is desert, for lack of liquid ammonia. What has it to pay with?"
"It did do some interstellar trade in the past," Falkayn reminded. "Possibly somebody made contact or—I don't know. You're right, it's tough to find an economic explanation for everything they've managed to accomplish."
"Or any kind of explanation for their actions, by billy damn. I never sent you off expecting the kind of gumblesnatch you got into. No, I thought sure the Baburites would talk at you, probably not tell you much but anyhows talking. The sensible thing from their viewpoint should be, if they going to butt heads with the Commonwealth, they stay friends with the League, or at least not make it also an activated enemy. Nie?"
"They seemed, from what microscopic contact we had with them, they seemed contemptuous of the League. They certainly know it's divided against itself."
"How can they be so cock-a-doodle sure of that? Do we savvy the ins and outs of their politics? And why not try to take advantage of our divisions? For instance, they might get the Seven and the independents bidding competitive for business with them . . . if they treat the representatives halfway decent."
"Could you simply have run into an overzealous official?" Coya wondered.
Falkayn shook his head. "From what smidgen we know of the Baburites, hardly," he replied. "They don't appear to be organized that way. They don't have hierarchies of individuals holding positions. In their dominant culture, if not in all, it's a matter of whole Bands overlapping. So-and-so many single beings may each be responsible for a fraction of a job, and confer about it with their mates; a given being can be on several different teams."
"That makes for fewer contradictions," Adzel added, "though likewise, I suspect, less imagination and a lower speed of reaction to developments."
"Which suggests it was a policy agreed on beforehand, that any strangers who arrived would promptly be thrown in the freezer," Chee said. "Oh, we three have had plenty of time to speculate."
"Have you speculated about companies of the Seven possibly maintaining quiet relationships with Babur?" Coya asked.
"Yes." Falkayn shrugged. "If so, under present circumstances you wouldn't expect them to advertise the fact, would you? They could easily have been kept in the dark for decades about the intentions of the Imperial Band."
"Are you positive, dear?"
"Well, what can such a relationship actually have amounted to? Occasional visits by one or a few agents to a strictly limited region of a planet with more than twenty-two times Earth's area—a much bigger proportion of it dry land, at that."
"Still," Chee murmured, "the section where significant action has been taking place isn't necessarily huge." A phone chimed. "Kai-yu! Of every tyranny you humans have ever saddled yourselves with, that thing has got to be the most insolent."
"Nobody knows I am here but my top secretary," said van Rijn. His bare feet slap-slapped across the tatami to the instrument. When he pressed accept, it announced, "Edward Garver wishes to speak to you personally, sir. What shall I tell him?"
"What I would like you to tell him is not anatomically possible," van Rijn grunted. "Put him on. Uh, the rest of you stand back from the scanner. No sense handing out free information."
Square shoulders, bald head, and pugdog face sprang into simulacrum. "You're on Ronga, I believe, where your snoopship is," said the Commonwealth's Minister of Security without preamble.
"You got told about her, ha?" van Rijn replied, quiet as the center of a hurricane.
"I issued standing orders the day I learned she'd left." Garver hunched forward, as if to thrust himself past the vitryl. "You've been a special interest of mine for an almighty long while."
Falkayn—still more, perhaps, Adzel, who had once been arrested after a certain incident—remembered. Since the years when he was chief law enforcement officer of the Lunar Federation, Garver had hated van Rijn. His terms in the Commonwealth Parliament had put a fresh edge on that. It was an oddly pure passion. Because of the particular encounters they chanced to have had, he saw the merchant as an archetype of everything he abominated about the Polesotechnic League.
"I want to know where the crew have been, what they've done, and why," he said. "I'm calling personally so you'll know I mean this . . . personally."
"Go ahead and want as much as you feel like." Van Rijn beamed. "Wallow in it. Scrub your tummy with it. Blow bubbles. Try different flavors." Behind his back, he crooked a finger. Falkayn in turn gestured to Chee and Adzel, who went quickly out. The younger man stayed by Coya. His partners could remove the log and Baburite apparatus—to which the health inspector had paid no particular attention prior to their descent—from Muddlin' Through before a search party arrived with a warrant.
Another log would remain, which had been faked as a matter of routine. He'd better brief his wife and his grandfather-in-law fast.
"—no more of your apishness," Garver was rasping. "I presume you know about the Baburite attack on our ships. It means war, I guarantee. Parliament will meet, by multiway phone, inside the next hour. And I know what the vote will be."
I do too, Falkayn thought sadly, while silent tears started forth in Coya's eyes. Not that we should do nothing about the killing of our men. But this haste—? Well, the Home Companies see a vital interest in Mirkheim. Let the Commonwealth possess it, and that will be their foothold in space, against the Seven.
"And the war will purify us," Garver said.
It will give the government powers over free enterprise that it never had before. You can't consider the Home Companies free enterprises any longer. No, they're part of the power structure. He loathes us because we've never either joined or toadied to the coalition of cartels, politicians, and bureaucrats. To him, we represent Chaos.
Garver checked himself from orating. With iron joy, he went on: "Meanwhile, as of an hour back, the Premier has declared a state of emergency. Under it, my department takes authority over all spacecraft. We'll be commandeering, van Rijn; and no ship will move without our permission. I've called you like this in the faint hope that'll make you comprehend the gravity of the situation, and what'll happen to you if you don't cooperate."
"How sweet of you to tell me," the merchant replied expressionlessly. "Was there more? Hokay, pippity-pip." He switched off.
Turning to the rest, he said, "I would not give him the satisfaction." He jumped up and down. The floor thundered. He pummeled the air with his fists. "Schijt, pis, en bederf!" he bellowed. "God throw him in Satan's squatpot! His parents was brothers! May he wish to become decent! Make us a four-letter Angular-Saxon language just for him! Ga-a-a-ah—"
Adzel, reentering the house, dropped his load to cover Juanita's ears. Chee scuttled past him, carrying the log reel, in search of a good hiding place for it. Coya and Falkayn caught at each other. A whine rose outside as two Central Police vehicles came over the horizon and turned downward for a landing.