H. Beam Piper - Federation 02, page 16
“Is that the Kivelson boy’s father?” the Sikh asked me, and when I nodded, he lifted the phone to his lips again. “Captain Kivelson,” the loudspeaker said, “your son is alive and under skin-grafting treatment here at the spaceport hospital. His life is not, repeat not, in danger. The men you are after are here, under guard. If any of them are guilty of any crimes, and if you can show any better authority than an armed mob to deal with them, they may, may, I said, be turned over for trial. But they will not be taken from this spaceport by force, as long as I or one of my men remains alive.”
“That’s easy. We’ll get them afterward,” Joe Kivelson shouted.
“Somebody may. You won’t,” Ranjit Singh told him. “Van Steen, hit that ship’s boat first, and hit it at the first hostile move anybody in this mob makes.”
“Yes, sir. With pleasure,” another voice replied.
Nobody in the Rebel Army, if that was what it still was, had any comment to make on that. Lieutenant Ranjit turned to me.
“Mr. Boyd,” he said. None of this sonny-boy stuff; Ranjit Singh was a man of dignity, and he respected the dignity of others. “If I admit you to the spaceport, will you give these people the facts exactly as you learn them?”
“That’s what the Times always does, Lieutenant.” Well, almost all the facts almost always.
“Will you people accept what this Times reporter tells you he has learned?”
“Yes, of course.” That was Oscar Fujisawa.
“I won’t!” That was Joe Kivelson. “He’s always taking the part of that old rumpot of a Bish Ware.”
“Lieutenant, that remark was a slur on my paper, as well as myself,” I said. “Will you permit Captain Kivelson to come in along with me? And somebody else,” I couldn’t resist adding, “so that people will believe him?”
Ranjit Singh considered that briefly. He wasn’t afraid to die—I believe he was honestly puzzled when he heard people talking about fear—but his job was to protect some fugitives from a mob, not to die a useless hero’s death. If letting in a small delegation would prevent an attack on the spaceport without loss of life and ammunition—or maybe he reversed the order of importance—he was obliged to try it.
“Yes. You may choose five men to accompany Mr. Boyd,” he said. “They may not bring weapons in with them. Sidearms,” he added, “will not count as weapons.”
After all, a kirpan was a sidearm, and his religion required him to carry that. The decision didn’t make me particularly happy. Respect for the dignity of others is a fine thing in an officer, but like journalistic respect for facts, it can be carried past the point of being a virtue. I thought he was over-estimating Joe Kivelson’s self-control.
Vehicles in front began grounding, and men got out and bunched together on the street. Finally, they picked their delegation: Joe Kivelson, Oscar Fujisawa, Casmir Oughourlian the shipyard man, one of the engineers at the nutrient plant, and the Reverend Hiram Zilker, the Orthodox-Monophysite preacher. They all had pistols, even the Reverend Zilker, so I went back to the jeep and put mine on. Ranjit Singh had switched his radio off the speaker and was talking to somebody else. After a while, an olive-green limousine piloted by a policeman in uniform and helmet floated in and grounded. The six of us got into it, and it lifted again.
The car let down in a vehicle hall in the administrative area, and the police second lieutenant, Chris Xantos, was waiting alone, armed only with the pistol that was part of his uniform and wearing a beret instead of a helmet. He spoke to us, and ushered us down a hallway toward Guido Fieschi’s office.
I get into the spaceport administrative area about once in twenty or so hours. Oughourlian is a somewhat less frequent visitor. The others had never been there, and they were visibly awed by all the gleaming glass and brightwork, and the soft lights and the thick carpets. All Port Sandor ought to look like this, I thought. It could, and maybe now it might, after a while.
There were six chairs in a semicircle facing Guido Fieschi’s desk, and three men sitting behind it. Fieschi, who had changed clothes and washed since the last time I saw him, sat on the extreme right. Captain Courtland, with his tight mouth under a gray mustache and the quadruple row of medal ribbons on his breast, was on the left. In the middle, the seat of honor, was Bish Ware, looking as though he were presiding over a church council to try some rural curate for heresy.
As soon as Joe Kivelson saw him, he roared angrily:
“There’s the dirty traitor who sold us out! He’s the worst of the lot; I wouldn’t be surprised if—”
Bish looked at him like a bishop who has just been contradicted on a point of doctrine by a choirboy.
“Be quiet!” he ordered. “I did not follow this man you call Ravick here to this … this running-hot-and-cold Paradise planet, and I did not spend five years fraternizing with its unwashed citizenry and creating for myself the role of town drunkard of Port Sandor, to have him taken from me and lynched after I have arrested him. People do not lynch my prisoners.”
“And who in blazes are you?” Joe demanded.
Bish took cognizance of the question, if not the questioner.
“Tell them, if you please, Mr. Fieschi,” he said.
“Well, Mr. Ware is a Terran Federation Executive Special Agent,” Fieschi said. “Captain Courtland and I have known that for the past five years. As far as I know, nobody else was informed of Mr. Ware’s position.”
After that, you could have heard a gnat sneeze.
Everybody knows about Executive Special Agents. There are all kinds of secret agents operating in the Federation—Army and Navy Intelligence, police of different sorts, Colonial Office agents, private detectives, Chartered Company agents. But there are fewer Executive Specials than there are inhabited planets in the Federation. They rank, ex officio, as Army generals and Space Navy admirals; they have the privilege of the floor in Parliament, they take orders from nobody but the President of the Federation. But very few people have ever seen one, or talked to anybody who has.
And Bish Ware—good ol’ Bish; he’sh everybodysh frien’—was one of them. And I had been trying to make a man of him and reform him. I’d even thought, if he stopped drinking, he might make a success as a private detective—at Port Sandor, on Fenris! I wondered what color my face had gotten now, and I started looking around for a crack in the floor, to trickle gently and unobtrusively into.
And it should have been obvious to me, maybe not that he was an Executive Special, but that he was certainly no drunken barfly. The way he’d gone four hours without a drink, and seemed to be just as drunk as ever. That was right—just as drunk as he’d ever been; which was to say, cold sober. There was the time I’d seen him catch that falling bottle and set it up. No drunken man could have done that; a man’s reflexes are the first thing to be affected by alcohol. And the way he shot that tread-snail. I’ve seen men who could shoot well on liquor, but not quick-draw stuff. That calls for perfect co-ordination. And the way he went into his tipsy act at the Times—veteran actor slipping into a well-learned role.
He drank, sure. He did a lot of drinking. But there are men whose systems resist the effects of alcohol better than others, and he must have been an exceptional example of the type, or he’d never have adopted the sort of cover personality he did. It would have been fairly easy for him. Space his drinks widely, and never take a drink unless he had to, to maintain the act. When he was at the Times with just Dad and me, what did he have? A fruit fizz.
Well, at least I could see it after I had my nose rubbed in it. Joe Kivelson was simply gaping at him. The Reverend Zilker seemed to be having trouble adjusting, too. The shipyard man and the chemical engineer weren’t saying anything, but it had kicked them for a loss, too. Oscar Fujisawa was making a noble effort to be completely unsurprised. Oscar is one of our better poker players.
“I thought it might be something like that,” he lied brazenly. “But, Bish … Excuse me, I mean, Mr. Ware…”
“Bish, if you please, Oscar.”
“Bish, what I’d like to know is what you wanted with Ravick,” he said. “They didn’t send any Executive Special Agent here for five years to investigate this tallow-wax racket of his.”
“No. We have been looking for him for a long time. Fifteen years, and I’ve been working on it that long. You might say, I have made a career of him. Steve Ravick is really Anton Gerrit.”
Maybe he was expecting us to leap from our chairs and cry out, “Aha! The infamous Anton Gerrit! Brought to book at last!” We didn’t. We just looked at one another, trying to connect some meaning to the name. It was Joe Kivelson, of all people, who caught the first gleam.
“I know that name,” he said. “Something on Loki, wasn’t it?”
Yes; that was it. Now that my nose was rubbed in it again, I got it.
“The Loki enslavements. Was that it?” I asked. “I read about it, but I never seem to have heard of Gerrit.”
“He was the mastermind. The ones who were caught, fifteen years ago, were the underlings, but Ravick was the real Number One. He was responsible for the enslavement of from twenty to thirty thousand Lokian natives, gentle, harmless, friendly people, most of whom were worked to death in the mines.”
No wonder an Executive Special would put in fifteen years looking for him. You murder your grandmother, or rob a bank, or burn down an orphanage with the orphans all in bed upstairs, or something trivial like that, and if you make an off-planet getaway, you’re reasonably safe. Of course there’s such a thing as extradition, but who bothers? Distances are too great, and communication is too slow, and the Federation depends on every planet to do its own policing.
But enslavement’s something different. The Terran Federation is a government of and for—if occasionally not by—all sapient peoples of all races. The Federation Constitution guarantees equal rights to all. Making slaves of people, human or otherwise, is a direct blow at everything the Federation stands for. No wonder they kept hunting fifteen years for the man responsible for the Loki enslavements.
“Gerrit got away, with a month’s start. By the time we had traced him to Baldur, he had a year’s start on us. He was five years ahead of us when we found out that he’d gone from Baldur to Odin. Six years ago, nine years after we’d started hunting for him, we decided, from the best information we could get, that he had left Odin on one of the local-stop ships for Terra, and dropped off along the way. There are six planets at which those Terra-Odin ships stop. We sent a man to each of them. I drew this prize out of the hat.
“When I landed here, I contacted Mr. Fieschi, and we found that a man answering to Gerrit’s description had come in on the Peenemünde from Odin seven years before, about the time Gerrit had left Odin. The man who called himself Steve Ravick. Of course, he didn’t look anything like the pictures of Gerrit, but facial surgery was something we’d taken for granted he’d have done. I finally managed to get his fingerprints.”
Special Agent Ware took out a cigar, inspected it with the drunken oversolemnity he’d been drilling himself into for five years, and lit it. Then he saw what he was using and rose, holding it out, and I went to the desk and took back my lighter-weapon.
“Thank you, Walt. I wouldn’t have been able to do this if I hadn’t had that. Where was I? Oh, yes. I got Gerrit-alias-Ravick’s fingerprints, which did not match the ones we had on file for Gerrit, and sent them in. It was eighteen months later that I got a reply on them. According to his fingerprints, Steve Ravick was really a woman named Ernestine Coyón, who had died of acute alcoholism in the free public ward of a hospital at Paris-on-Baldur fourteen years ago.”
“Why, that’s incredible!” the Reverend Zilker burst out, and Joe Kivelson was saying: “Steve Ravick isn’t any woman….”
“Least of all one who died fourteen years ago,” Bish agreed. “But the fingerprints were hers. A pauper, dying in a public ward of a big hospital. And a man who has to change his identity, and who has small, woman-sized hands. And a crooked hospital staff surgeon. You get the picture now?”
“They’re doing the same thing on Tom’s back, right here,” I told Joe. “Only you can’t grow fingerprints by carniculture, the way you can human tissue for grafting. They had to have palm and finger surfaces from a pair of real human hands. A pauper, dying in a free-treatment ward, her body shoved into a mass-energy converter.” Then I thought of something else. “That showoff trick of his, crushing out cigarettes in his palm,” I said.
Bish nodded commendingly. “Exactly. He’d have about as much sensation in his palms as I’d have wearing thick leather gloves. I’d noticed that.
“Well, six months going, and a couple of months waiting on reports from other planets, and six months coming, and so on, it wasn’t until the Peenemünde got in from Terra, the last time, that I got final confirmation. Dr. Watson, you’ll recall.”
“Who, you perceived, had been in Afghanistan,” I mentioned, trying to salvage something. Showing off. The one I was trying to impress was Walt Boyd.
“You caught that? Careless of me,” Bish chided himself. “What he gave me was a report that they had finally located a man who had been a staff surgeon at this hospital on Baldur at the time. He’s now doing a stretch for another piece of malpractice he was unlucky enough to get caught at later. We will not admit making deals with any criminals, in jail or out, but he is willing to testify, and is on his way to Terra now. He can identify pictures of Anton Gerrit as those of the man he operated on fourteen years ago, and his testimony and Ernestine Coyón’s fingerprints will identify Ravick as that man. With all the Colonial Constabulary and Army Intelligence people got on Gerrit on Loki, simple identification will be enough. Gerrit was proven guilty long ago, and it won’t be any trouble, now, to prove that Ravick is Gerrit.”
“Why didn’t you arrest him as soon as you got the word from your friend from Afghanistan?” I wanted to know.
“Good question; I’ve been asking myself that,” Bish said, a trifle wryly. “If I had, the Javelin wouldn’t have been bombed, that wax wouldn’t have been burned, and Tom Kivelson wouldn’t have been injured. What I did was send my friend, who is a Colonial Constabulary detective, to Gimli, the next planet out. There’s a Navy base there, and always at least a couple of destroyers available. He’s coming back with one of them to pick Gerrit up and take him to Terra. They ought to be in in about two hundred and fifty hours. I thought it would be safer all around to let Gerrit run loose till then. There’s no place he could go.
“What I didn’t realize, at the time, was what a human H-bomb this man Murell would turn into. Then everything blew up at once. Finally, I was left with the choice of helping Gerrit escape from Hunters’ Hall or having him lynched before I could arrest him.” He turned to Kivelson. “In the light of what you knew, I don’t blame you for calling me a dirty traitor.”
“But how did I know…” Kivelson began.
“That’s right. You weren’t supposed to. That was before you found out. You ought to have heard what Gerrit and Belsher—as far as I know, that is his real name—called me after they found out, when they got out of that jeep and Captain Courtland’s men snapped the handcuffs on them. It even shocked a hardened sinner like me.”
There was a lot more of it. Bish had managed to get into Hunters’ Hall just about the time Al Devis and his companion were starting the fire Ravick—Gerrit—had ordered for a diversion. The whole gang was going to crash out as soon as the fire had attracted everybody away. Bish led them out onto the Second Level Down, sleep-gassed the lone man in the jeep, and took them to the spaceport, where the police were waiting for them.
As soon as I’d gotten everything, I called the Times. I’d had my radio on all the time, and it had been coming in perfectly. Dad, I was happy to observe, was every bit as flabbergasted as I had been at who and what Bish Ware was. He might throw my campaign to reform Bish up at me later on, but at the moment he wasn’t disposed to, and I was praising Allah silently that I hadn’t had a chance to mention the detective agency idea to him. That would have been a little too much.
“What are they doing about Belsher and Hallstock?” he asked.
“Belsher goes back to Terra with Ravick. Gerrit, I mean. That’s where he collected his cut on the tallow-wax, so that is where he’d have to be tried. Bish is convinced that somebody in Kapstaad Chemical must have been involved, too. Hallstock is strictly a local matter.”
“That’s about what I thought. With all this interstellar back-and-forth, it’ll be a long time before we’ll be able to write thirty under the story.”
“Well, we can put thirty under the Steve Ravick story,” I said.
Then it hit me. The Steve Ravick story was finished; that is, the local story of racketeer rule in the Hunters’ Co-operative. But the Anton Gerrit story was something else. That was Federation-wide news; the end of a fifteen-year manhunt for the most wanted criminal in the known Galaxy. And who had that story, right in his hot little hand? Walter Boyd, the ace—and only—reporter for the mighty Port Sandor Times.
“Yes,” I continued. “The Ravick story’s finished. But we still have the Anton Gerrit story, and I’m going to work on it right now.”
* * *
20
FINALE
They had Tom Kivelson in a private room at the hospital; he was sitting up in a chair, with a lot of pneumatic cushions around him, and a lunch tray on his lap. He looked white and thin. He could move one arm completely, but the bandages they had loaded him with seemed to have left the other free only at the elbow. He was concentrating on his lunch, and must have thought I was one of the nurses, or a doctor, or something of the sort.
“Are you going to let me have a cigarette and a cup of coffee, when I’m through with this?” he asked.
“Well, I don’t have any coffee, but you can have one of my cigarettes,” I said.
Then he looked up and gave a whoop. “Walt! How’d you get in here? I thought they weren’t going to let anybody in to see me till this afternoon.”
