J. F. Bone, page 8
Back at my office I had a tearful session with Sofra who kept insisting that she loved me, that I shouldn’t go out into the dangers of the Outlands, that she was sorry she had hurt my feelings, that it wasn’t right of her after I had been so good and that I ought to beat her for acting so badly. I kept telling her that I loved her too, that she wasn’t right about hurting my feelings, that I had to go or I wouldn’t feel like a man, that I wasn’t nearly as good as she thought, and that the last thing in the world I would do was beat her. Finally I gave up and tried kissing her. It worked like a charm.
* * *
CHAPTER IX
« ^ »
There was the usual confusion at the gate. The airlock-type entrances to a dome aren’t designed to be inspection stations, and the recently imposed cargo inspection ordinance turned the normal flow of inbound traffic into confusion compounded with chaos. Big sausage-wheeled rolligons, the standard Outland vehicle, and more conventional trucks from the air terminal were stacked outside the gate while harried cops tried to act like customs inspectors.
I flagged a couple of porters and sent them to my apartment to collect my gear. I didn’t dare go back and meet Sofra again. All my good intentions might go flitting down the tube.
I watched the police search the incoming vehicles. They checked each cargo with standard Patrol inspection probes. From where I stood, it looked as though the only additional thing they could do was tear every bale and carton apart. Maybe they’d have to do just that if they were going to find the drug that was getting into the dome.
My porters and Joe Riker came along together. Joe was sitting behind the wheel of the biggest sand wagon I had ever seen. It towered above me on its eight outsized flotons. It was a rig capable of negotiating almost any terrain Arthe could offer. Its rollers gave it immense traction and flotation, and its armor was proof against anything short of a semiportable projector. I waved up at him and he waved back.
“See ya decided to come,” he shouted. “But what’s that screwball rig you’re wearing?”
I treated the remark with the contempt it deserved as the two porters came staggering up with my gear sacks Riker’s eyes opened wide as he saw the size of the load “All that stuff yours?” he asked.
“What did you think I was going to do up at that place of yours? Make my own drugs, instruments and reference books? It takes equipment to run a clinic “
“Okay, sorry I asked.” Riker turned away and did something inside the cab, and a sliding door rolled up along the side of the cargo body of the wagon. “Have your men store your gear inside,” Riker said.
I paid the men after they had stowed the sacks to my satisfaction, and climbed up the ladder to the cab. Riker drove to the gate and in a couple of minutes we were outside and on our way to the Phargan Canal. The gate inspection consisted of a wave of the hand by one of the officers. “Some inspection,” I remarked as I looked back at the receding gate.
“They seldom check you when you’re going out, but they sure give you a bad time going in. You got any idea what they’re looking for?”
“They didn’t tell me,” I said.
“They didn’t tell me either, but when I came in they really went through the freight. A big rig is a standing invitation to snoopy gate guards. I guess it makes them feel important.”
“Could be,” I said. I thought that if Riker was going to play dumb, I could play just as dumb, and in this sort of one-upmanship I had the advantage that I wasn’t supposed to know anything about gate inspections.
Riker fed fuel to the turbines and it didn’t take us long to reach the rim of the vertical sidewall of the canal, where we could look over a kilometer straight down, and over two kilometers to the opposite sidewall. The enormous artificial rift stretched straight as an arrow to the north and south, disappearing to a point in the distance. Riker turned north and followed the edge of the canal for several kilometers, then grunted with satisfaction as he swung the rig onto the corrugated surface and over the edge of the sidewall. We floated down the narrow track carved out of the living rock millennia ago. It was a hair raising road that descended along a steady six percent grade to the floor of the canal. I had an excellent view since my side of the cab faced the canal. I felt a touch of vertigo, and quickly shifted my eyes to the opposite wall of the canal. The ramparts of the watercourse rose abruptly from the level floor cut into curlicue patterns by the meandering loops of a vegetation choked stream.
The old explorers were right when they called these rifts canals, and they were equally right when they ascribed them to the work of intelligent beings. Certainly their technology was superior. Even today, no race in the Confederation has the ability to carve such gashes in a planet’s surface. At this point the canal was about two kilometers wide because it was passing through a low range of hills, but past the hills it widened to five or six kilometers. As we floated down the sidewall I could see that Riker was tense and sweating, and looked as though he expected trouble at any moment. Finally, when we reached the bottom he gave a sigh of relief and grinned weakly.
He wiped his forehead, and then switched on the autocontrol. “That grade gets me,” he confessed wryly. “I keep thinking it’s a perfect place for an ambush, but somehow the natives don’t think so. At any rate they don’t take advantage of it. Maybe it’s because the Shambra built it.”
“Are you having trouble with the natives?”
“No more than usual. They’re a treacherous and murderous lot and they hate our guts, but one can’t spend all the time worrying about them. Either they get you or they don’t. The only time I worry is when I go down that sidewall. I think I’m afraid of falling.”
I nodded and turned my attention to the landscape. The dark olive drab vegetation choking the watercourse slowly drew nearer until Riker twisted the wheel and the van turned ponderously on its rollers and headed north.
I had never seen a canal at close range, and it fascinated me, for in these gigantic rifts in Arthe’s crust lie the life forms that once may have filled this world. Near the water narrow-leaved plants interspersed with gnarled Calpa and Ko trees lift horny limbs into the thin air, and form hiding places for animal life. The viciously competing jungle along the stream banks thins rapidly as it gets farther from the water, becoming stunted scrubby growth which gives way to grasses and then to barren sand a few hundred meters from the stream. The ryks and gorrons prefer the jungle and the outlying scrub is the domain of the smaller animals and man.
At intervals a cluster of deadwood marks an old strangled oxbow loop where water had once been. Less tangled growth outlines the water trails and new stream beds carved by the summer freshets. The gradient of the canal is so slight that the stream course constantly changes during the summer months when the melting polar icecap brings the lifegiving water to Arthe’s surface.
The resource and ecological balance developed ages ago is still so good that life on Arthe will survive indefinitely. But the enormous effort to keep the world alive must have done something to the canal builders, perhaps destroyed the vitality that is needed for a race to build achievement upon achievement until it finally reaches godhead. Apparently everything after the canals was secondary. The first inhabitants of Arthe went no further. The canals have an air of finality about them, of ultimate achievement beyond which nothing more was possible.
They apparently did not have spaceflight, or if they did, they did not have the hyperdrive. Had they discovered 4th space they would have been everywhere, and their race would not have come to an end. They were confined in the temporospatial trap of threespace. It was a lucky accident that gave humanity the knowledge that made star travel cheap and practical. And it was that knowledge, perhaps, that kept us from boredom and the fate of the Shambra. With the whole universe in our pockets, how could we ever become tired? But the way to hyperspace is possibly a unique discovery, and so humans live and the ancient Artheans have died. Perhaps that is the way of it.
I shook my head. There was no end to speculation about the Shambra. They were the enigma to end enigmas. With an effort I stopped thinking about them and focussed my attention on the route we were travelling. Like a stuck solidograph reel the repetitive landscape came into view before us and slipped steadily to the rear. There was an essential grimness to the view that weighed upon the spirit.
The soothing hypnotic drone of the turbines filled the cab, but I had the strangest impression that we were floating in a sea of silence, that the noise of our passage was swallowed and dissipated in the brooding hush around us. There was danger here—and death. I could feel it. The whole landscape lay waiting expectantly for an opportunity to strike.
Riker looked at me, a sly grin twisting his face. “Gets you, doesn’t it?” he asked drily.
“It’s too quiet. It feels wrong.”
“It always feels wrong. There’s nothing right about the Outlands. That’s the trouble with Arthe. There’s too much wrong.”
Riker pulled a stubby black pipe from his jumper, stoked it with native weed and blew a cloud of acrid smoke at the regenerator. He leaned back in his seat and wriggled into a more comfortable position. I sat quietly looking out the window and feeling ever more uneasy. “Doc,” Riker said, “you’d make a pretty good Outlander if it wasn’t for your lungs. You’ve got a feeling for the land. You’re right; it is dangerous and it is deadly, but you have to wait until the danger comes out of hiding before you can do anything.” He grinned at me. “Sometimes it never comes out of hiding,” he finished.
I looked across the cab at Riker. He certainly wasn’t my idea of a boss pusher, or even a supplier, but who can tell anything about looks. He seemed busy with his thoughts, and except for the alertness of his eyes he could have been asleep. I didn’t have the least idea what his thoughts might be, but mine were focussed on Arthe. And thinking about Arthe led to thinking about the people who inhabited her, and thinking about the people led to thinking about the past, and thinking about the past led inevitably to… I sighed. I’d been over that road before.
Something clicked in the autocontrol, and things began to happen with rapidity. The brakes slammed on, the wheel spun, and suddenly we were sliding to a stop facing at right angles to the direction we had been travelling. The drive linkage clunked deep in the belly of the wagon and the turbines hummed quietly under no-load.
“That’s it,” Joe said. “Now you can worry.” He grabbed for the gun controls of the upper remote semiportable mounted on the roof of the cab. “Get your magnum out and stick it in that gunport beside you,” he said. “We may be in trouble.”
“What’s up?” I asked.
He didn’t speak. He touched the arming button of the semiportable and let the blaster speak for him. Set on continuous projection and minimum aperture, the energy tore and slashed at the line of scrubby vegetation beside us. With a crash that was thunderous in the silence a section of what appeared to be solid topsoil vanished into a deep pit spanning our line of travel. Clouds of dust rose into the air, and when they settled I looked into a hole big enough to bury two wagons the size of ours.
“The natives are restless,” Riker said. His face creased into a thin smile. “They keep trying. They probably used the whole tribe to dig this pitfall. I suppose they marked my track coming down, and they knew the truck would take the same path coming back. What they didn’t know is that autocontrol is designed to guard against this sort of thing.
“Anyway, they won’t try this trick again. They gradually learn what’s profitable and what ain’t. They got a couple of old vans last year with pitfalls and mines, but they don’t have a chance against the new rigs. Well, this bunch won’t make that mistake again.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m not positive but I’ll give you odds of two to one.”
“Won’t they attack anyway?”
“Why? We outgun them, and the weapons they have won’t get through our armor. They know what they can do and what we can do, and the odds aren’t in their favor.”
I couldn’t help thinking of the labor and hate that had gone into the construction of that pit. There must have been plenty and the futility of their effort must rankle. They were probably watching and the sight of us rolling off into the distance must have been wormwood to their souls. I wondered what it would take to discourage them completely.
There was altogether too much hate in this world. No one was secure enough to be tolerant. Even the domes had memories of the nuclear explosions that had wiped out four of their number, and the possibility of a tonocaine attack was giving those in the know some very unpleasant feelings. I shivered at the thought of what could happen. Tonocaine could destroy Arthe even more effectively than triatomate, for when the panic and the shooting was over there would be nothing left. If the natives succeeded in poisoning the domes, the Patrol had a legal right to intervene. They’d probably call in the Armed Forces and when the smoke cleared Arthe would have reaped the whirlwind.
Artheans didn’t know the charred hell that could be made of a planet with modern weapons. And since they were confined to the terrain corridors of the canals they would be sitting ducks for air strikes. They hadn’t seen Kardon with nearly 90% casualties, or Gakan, where one in every twenty lizards was left alive. They hadn’t seen the scorched pockmarked wreck that a mere police action could make of a world. Here such an assault could literally destroy everything. Ignorance, I thought bitterly, might be bliss somewhere in the universe, but not on Arthe.
A nagging thought that I wasn’t thinking straight gnawed at the corner of my mind. There was something wrong with the picture I was painting. And then there was light. Ignorance? Artheans weren’t ignorant. They had already had experience with overwhelming force, and had casually been slapped down by a handful of troopers. They had previous experience, and they never made the same mistake twice. Riker wasn’t the only one to remark on this. The trait was also a ‘breed characteristic.
It wouldn’t be overt force that would be used against the domes the next time around. The attack would be far more subtle. They wouldn’t use techniques that had been tried and found wanting. They simply couldn’t be plotting massacre. It was too crude, too direct, too open, and too out of character.
But if someone else wanted to make patsies out of the natives, that was a different thing entirely. Someone, maybe, like the unknown who gave them the idea how to make nuclear bombs and brought on the punitive expedition. That person knew how the Confederation would react to the nuclear explosives. He was probably an agent provocateur for the Companies, but the Companies had all they wanted now, and there was no need to destroy the natives. Although tonocaine could be made to look like another verse in the same old song, the music was subtly wrong. Whoever was setting the natives up this time had something entirely different in mind.
It fitted. I was as certain of it as I was that I was sitting in the cab of Riker’s sand wagon. I could have kicked myself for being so stupid. I wondered why I had never considered the affair to be anything other than a native plot to clean out the domes. Certainly I should have at least given a passing thought to the idea that someone might want to clean out the natives. I had been running on the wrong track for months. I wondered how many other agents were running on the wrong track, and what happened to those who ran on the right one.
If the natives were not behind this, all the parameters were different and all the picture was changed. A complete kill of the domes would be neither desirable nor necessary. There only need be enough to arouse the Confederation. And the motive could be almost anything from revenge to commercial war, to political plot. There were all sorts of motives.
My thoughts left me confused and uncertain. They didn’t point out any well-marked path to follow. They merely replaced fear with uncertainty, and in the end failed to abate the fear. I didn’t know the answers, and I had the grisly feeling that I might not have enough time to get them. I grinned mirthlessly. Whatever else this trip might accomplish, it had at least opened my eyes. I wondered if it was better to die with one’s eyes open or shut.
* * *
CHAPTER X
« ^ »
We reached Trader’s Roost after three days of travel during much of which I reviewed what I knew and what I didn’t know. I suppose I was bad company for Riker, but that couldn’t be helped. My ideas about “H-Day” didn’t change much. I couldn’t do anything about it anyway. That decision was in other hands. As for the rest, I would get word to HQ as soon as possible and in the meantime I’d try to collect more evidence.
Trader’s Roost was shabby and pitted with the dome itself badly in need of new plastic facets. A class IV structure that could have dated back before the punitive expedition, it was located on a low bare hill and was about one-quarter the size of Dunkelburg. It seemed small and unimpressive until I saw the armament. Most of the weaponry was concealed from casual inspection, but I had been in the Service long enough to know the true nature of those innocent-looking plasticone covered lumps and bulges along the rimwall. I whistled softly between my teeth. Whatever was inside must be pretty valuable.
We went in through the nearest of the two airlocks and past a battery of Patrol-type detectors. The folks who ran the place weren’t taking any more chances than they could help, and contrary to Dunkelburg police, they were efficient. A polite guard confiscated my magnum with a smile. “We don’t allow these in here, mister—at least not in private hands. I’ll store it for you until you’re ready to leave.” He put a tag through the trigger guard and wrote my name and ID on it. “If you don’t own one already, you can buy a small handgun at the gunshop if you don’t feel comfortable unarmed,” he added as an afterthought. “And as for you, Joe,” he said to Riker, “the Boss wants to see you as soon as you get cleared. Now get going.”
Riker looked puzzled. “Now what went wrong this time?” he asked of no one in particular.
