J. F. Bone, page 21
“I can raise an ungodly amount of noise.”
He smiled. “Providing you’re alive to do it.” He laughed softly and stood up, towering over me. “Sam,” he went on, “You’re the living example of a man who should keep his mouth shut. Not that it would have done you much good because I had already decided to kill you.” He stood there, lean and erect, as fine a figure of a man as might be found in an entire quadrant of the Confederacy—and the cold inhuman hell that was his soul crept from his eyes and hung between us like a curtain.
Lantham looked at me with clinical detachment. “The perfect patsy,” he mused. “Emotional, violent, superficial, psychotic—every fatal quality in a police officer, and yet—” His voice dwindled to silence and he stood looking at me with his hell-ridden eyes. “Yet you killed the entire operation.”
“How did you do it?” There was honest curiosity in the rhetorical question. He rubbed his jawline and kept looking at me, and for the first time I could remember, I felt the bitter chill of fear. It was not so much of death as of the man who would deliver it.
“It was luck,” I said.
He nodded. “It had to be.”
I felt like laughing. The ego of the man amused me. “You know, you’ll have to kill me,” I said. “You can’t delegate the job to anyone else.”
He nodded. “It would have been better had you waited instead of forcing the issue. In Thermopolis you would have died quickly and easily. As it is, it may be messy.” He shrugged. “You place me in an impossible position. You force me to behave like a villain in a cheap melodrama. Had you waited, everything would have been much cleaner, and I wouldn’t have had the distasteful job of liquidating your woman.” His words had all the emotion of so much ice water.
Sofra moved. The blanket slipped from her arm, revealing a Kelly. “Don’t move, Mr. Lantham,” she said.
Deliberately Lantham turned to face her. “Why, you have a gun,” he murmured. There was no surprise in his voice. He had known it all along.
Sofra’s breath caught in her throat as she saw his face. “Don’t move,” she said unsteadily, “or I’ll fire!”
“You probably would, my dear, if there was a charge in that weapon,” Lantham said smoothly. He reached into his jacket, pulled out a stat pistol and emotionlessly rayed her down.
At the first nerve-jolting throb of the statter, I was out of my seat and scrambling towards him.
Sofra jerked, rose on her toes stiffly erect, straining, and crashed rigidly to the padded floor.
Lantham whirled, the statter pointing at my chest. “Sit down,” he said.
I sat. There was no use doing anything else. But I wasn’t afraid of him now. I was furious. “Damn you,” I said softly.
I sank back in the seat, forcing my muscles to relax. There was no percentage charging statter at close range. I didn’t have a chance now, but maybe if I stayed whole and alive, I’d get a break later. Lantham kicked the release on the next seat forward and flipped the back so that the seat faced me. He looked at his watch.
“Not yet,” he said. “We have about half an hour to kill.”
“How nice,” I replied. “A time and place for everything. How do you plan to do it?”
“What—” He frowned, “Oh—I see—kill. That’s not a nice play on words, but about what I might expect from you. I’ve already given you the scenario for your death. In about ten minutes I shall get the body and lay it in the aisles. After that I shall shoot your inamorata and the pilot. Then I shall bail out.”
“How nice,” I said. “You are certainly a planner. It’s too bad your plans couldn’t have been more successful.”
“You can’t beat luck,” he said, “but I’m not beaten yet.”
He wasn’t. In fact, he still had a fair chance of getting away with it. The statter never wavered from my direction, and I wasn’t about to force him to shoot. I wanted to stall for time. I knew exactly how Sofra must have felt in that cage in the temple—anything to keep the executioner from doing his task.
I wondered how I could keep him occupied until his guard relaxed. I might not get an opportunity, but I had to try.
* * *
CHAPTER XXI
« ^
“Tell me,” I said, “what was the reason for all this?”
Lantham looked at me and shrugged. “If you don’t know by now you’re an idiot,” he said.
I guessed what was passing through his mind. He had to talk to someone, and since I would be dead and unable to talk to anyone else, he might as well talk to me. If he had succeeded, this would not have been necessary. Success itself would have fed his ego. But since he failed he dared not talk to anyone—and he needed the catharsis; so who would be a better listener than his intended victim?
“Humor me,” I said. “I ought to get something out of this.”
Lantham’s eyes glittered. “I did it for power,” he said, “more power than any man held—Supreme Power! I did it for power to rule the galaxy, to put the Confederacy in my pocket, to rule, to control.” His voice died to a murmur. “I did it for The Power!”
He reminded me of Kate. The same rapacity. The same cruelty. The same ignorance. He confused power with happiness. He should know better. Power merely whets the appetite for more. And what it brings isn’t satisfaction. Fear, envy, greed, hatred, duty, and responsibility are the main corollaries of power.
What good would power do Lantham if he had it? He could do nothing with it except destroy. He couldn’t build. His knowledge wouldn’t be sufficient. He couldn’t organize—same limitation. He couldn’t conquer because he couldn’t administer. He couldn’t rule because no one would obey him unless he could enforce his laws, and he couldn’t enforce unless he could visit every world in the Confederacy simultaneously to see that he was obeyed. He was not an omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent God and he never would be. He couldn’t visit every world if he lived a dozen lifetimes. Numbers and distance would destroy any effort he could make. All that The Power could do for Latham was to give him the ability to destroy—and even that would be limited.
Could this be what he wanted? If so there was only one definition for John Lantham. He was as mad as the proverbial March hare, a capering, gibbering figure of low comedy against the awesome backdrop of the galaxy. But I couldn’t laugh. He could do untold damage before he was stopped by time and space. He could become a figure of horror in galactic history. But he would never be anything except a failure.
Lantham’s monologue was still going on and I turned my attention to what he was saying.
“I did it for The Power. It’s real! The Legends are truth. There is The Power—and the natives have it. It’s in those little shrines the tribes carry with them—all the little pieces of it. Each tribe has a piece. One is missing, but that tribe was exterminated during the first Punitive Expedition.”
“What happened to their part?” I asked, knowing the answer but feeling that I must say something.
“I have it,” Lantham said. “A little segment, like a half slice of watermelon. It’s tiny—but the things it can do!”
I nodded. I, too, had felt The Power, and I could see where a sliver of it might give a man ideas. I had half of it in my hands and it nearly drove me mad.
“Put microwatts into one end—kilowatts come out the other,” burbled Lantham. “Aim it at an energy source and receive the source augmented. Aim the receiver at the sun and melt a planet. It may have other functions than just power. The Legends say it does and I believe them.” His eyes shone with feral brilliance as he looked at me. “You’ll never know how much I want it, you dull, stupid clod. With the piece I have tasted godhead and I want it all—all—all!”
His voice died and I was silent. He didn’t really know what he wanted, or what it would do to him. He was insane now—but with the thing in his hand he’d be a slavering madman the like of whom the Universe had never seen.
“It’s marvelous,” Lantham said. “It’s nothing a human could build. It made me believe the Shambra.”
“You could do worse,” I said. “The Shambra make a good model. They minded their own business and they fragmented their Power.”
He scowled fleetingly at me, and then his face smoothed. “I’m going to have it all,” he said. “The stupid natives worship The Power instead of using it. It was a legacy, and if the natives had united, they could have dominated the Universe, but they never did.
“It’s frustrating to think that so potent an instrument should be in the possession of a few hundred thousand savages!” He shook his head. “Of course, there is only one thing to do—”
“Sure,” I said, “kill them and take the shrines off their dead bodies!”
“Even to you it’s obvious,” Lantham said drily. “But today is not the days of Empire. Nowadays the chicken-hearted slobs with consciences run things.” He snorted. “They won’t hurt anyone of they can help it, and particularly not on worlds of the Confederacy. Luckily Arthe isn’t Confederacy status yet. There’s all sorts of legal problems before that gets settled. While I could move in and take the shrines, I didn’t have the power to do so and there was no way to generate it since the planetary council would never let me exterminate the natives. A couple of centuries ago I could have done it, but not today. And I couldn’t wait for Arthe to make member status which would automatically keep the Patrol and the Service out, and let me maneuver the natives into their own destruction. I simply didn’t have the time of the force. I needed something to smash the natives completely and only the Patrol or the Service had that power. The Confederation had to be maneuvered into killing the natives.
“It took years to set this up. The real break came when the Geeks tried to peddle tonocaine in the Confederacy. The drug was ideal for what I had in mind, and the Gakan War showed me how it could be used. I had every contingency covered except the impossibly bad luck that brought you into the picture. I never worried about you, not even when the Commissioner had me send you to Dunkelburg. You couldn’t have solved a problem if it had bit you. You were too busy feeling sorry for yourself. And so what do you do?—you put together a mess of guesswork, romance, wishful thinking and half truth and come up with the answer!”
His eyes put Kate’s to shame. “I’m not beaten yet,” he said. “I’ll start again—and next time I won’t fail!” There was no doubt about it. He was mad. And he would fail.
Lantham looked at his watch. “You’ve heard enough.” he said. He squeezed the grip of the statter and my muscles froze into a rigid tetany. I was encased in a coffin of motionless flesh.
He eyed me with mild disinterest. “You may find it interesting to observe an aircraft crash first hand, but I doubt it,” he said.
So did I, but there was nothing I could do about it. I breathed, but my diaphragm was doing all the work. My heart was beating, my viscera were twitching, but that was all. I could not move a single voluntary muscle.
I stared at him with frozen eyes.
“Goodbye, Sam,” he said. It was his fatherly voice, the one he always used when there was some particularly dirty work to be done. He placed his hands on the armrests of his chair and started to push himself out of his seat, and the seat folded around him like a cocoon! For a second his eyeballs shone while from behind the transparent shield rose around his face. He screamed with sudden realization of failure!—and then he was gone!
Air swished out of the pressurized cabin into the square of blackness where his seat had been, and then the skin of the ship closed swiftly over the opening leaving an empty space on the cabin floor. He’d been jettisoned! The pilot had dropped him through the escape hatch that was a part of the seat. I had completely forgotten about those civilian safety devices that were standard equipment in all nonmilitary craft—the seat that became a foolproof escape cell capable of lowering the most panicky passenger safely to ground in case of trouble with the ship.
Lantham would be safe enough, but he wouldn’t be going anywhere except into the arms of the Patrol. The seat would protect him, but he’d be forced to stay in the escape cell until he was picked up since he didn’t have a respirator, and he wasn’t a Type C. They’d find him easily enough by the homing device that was already sending out loud electronic cries for help. I chuckled grimly inside my mind. It would serve him right if the natives found him first.
I found that I could move my eyes; so I focussed on the aisle and watched Sofra come down it, supported by the pilot. I felt pleased with myself. I hadn’t given Lantham the least idea of what was going on behind his back. I hadn’t let him know that Sofra had recovered while he was talking. I had kept him occupied. But the pride I felt in myself was nothing compared with the pride I had in her. She had really done the job.
Then I saw the pilot.
I did a mental doubletake and waited until the surprise had died. Life was just one damn thing after another. If anyone had told me that Joe Riker was piloting Lantham’s ship, I’d have laughed in his face.
Riker grinned at me, the same grin I knew so well. “Hi, Doc,” he said. I had the overwhelming desire to laugh hysterically, and wished that I could. In my life on Arthe, people never were what I expected—Pete Krasna, John Lantham, and now Joe Riker! I wondered if I’d spend all my life being surprised.
He bent over me, rolled my eyelids back, and squinted at my pupils. Then he turned and nodded to Sofra. “He’s all right. It’s just a second degree paralysis. He’s conscious but he can’t move.” Joe shrugged, reached into his tunic, extracted his reeking stub of a pipe and lighted it. He looked down at me, still grinning. “You can thank whatever God you worship,” he said, “that you managed to make me worry about you. Even so, we might all have died if it hadn’t been for your girl friend.”
I tried to tell him that Sofra was my wife. Somehow it seemed important he should know.
“You know, he just might have gotten away with it. We never figured him for the big fellow. He checked out clean right down the line. But I didn’t feel good about you. I told you once I had a feeling for things that were wrong, and nothing about you felt right. You were hit bait.” He grinned at me. “Besides, I owe you something for saving my life.”
“Sam forced his hand,” Sofra said. “I don’t know why…”
“Maybe he got mad. He has a habit of doing things like that. No patience at all unless he’s paralyzed.”
If I had been mobile, I’d have made him eat those words. No patience—indeed! Joe stopped grinning and looked at me soberly. “Take my advice, Doc. Stop trying to be a cop. Stick to medicine. You’re a lot better at it. I’ll admit you accomplished more in your awkwardly murderous fashion than I did with all my nosing around. You immobilized the natives, stopped a riot, and smoked the big fellow out of his hole. But it was just luck that Kronfeld heard you in Lantham’s office. Coming on top of what I’d told him, it was enough for intervention. Even so, it goes to prove that there’s a special providence that watches over fools and amateurs, and with this mess over, you’ve lost your amateur standing.”
“He will not be with the police any more,” Sofra said. “I promise you that.”
“Good,” Riker said. “Stay after him and see that he stays out. I don’t want to go to his funeral. As for Lantham, he’ll get what’s coming to him.”
“What about The Power?” I croaked. The stat was wearing off and it was about time.
“We’re looking for it. We’ve got search parties out all over the polar area, and we’re going to take the rest of it from the southern tribes. One way or another, we’ll get it all. We can’t have a thing like that in unfriendly hands.” He fell silent, and his lined leathery face became remote and introspective as though he was looking on an unpleasant future. “It’s a good thing Arthe doesn’t have full Confederation status,” he said. “We can do things here we wouldn’t dare to on a member world.”
“Are you a police officer?” Sofra asked curiously. “I thought you were a trader.” She was being stupid, I thought. It was obvious that Riker was a patrolman, but what was obvious to me might not be obvious to her. Women are funny that way.
“Great Lord, no!” Riker exploded. “I’m Captain Joseph Riker, Special Branch, Galactic Patrol.” His thin, pigeon-chested figure seemed to grow larger as he stood there. Behind him—almost invisible—was the power of the Confederacy. I relaxed and let returning sensation creep through my nerves. With sensation came pain, but even that felt good. It was all over. The relief from fear and tension was indescribable.
Lantham and Riker were both right when they said I was no cop. I wanted no more of it. I wanted to practise medicine and forget that I had ever listened to Valkyr’s song. I had enough of fighting. I was deconditioned at last.
Some day I would build a clinic with branches in the domes and along the canals—places where natives, ‘breeds and Confeds could come for help and receive it in equal measure. It shouldn’t be too hard to do. I had money enough to lay the foundation stones and since I was a hero, a popular appeal should bring good response. Undoubtedly, the Patrol would cooperate, and the Confederation might follow suit. I could see the places in my mind’s eye—low, white and beautiful with a tall central spire gleaming toward the sky—a place where mutual respect and trust could have a beginning.
And from that beginning might come other things—and perhaps some day there would be a true comradeship among the humans of Arthe and peace would come to stay.
Legacy, J. F. Bone
