Collected Short Fiction, page 336
Ridgeley moistened his lips and said, “There’s no way off the planet, then?”
“Not yet. Wait a couple of decades and maybe we’ll develop space travel.”
“Decades?”
“Or centuries. Science has never been our long suit here. It’s going to take a while before we reach the other planets of this solar system, let alone build a ship capable of getting you back to Earth. You better forget about that wife and family of yours. You aren’t going to see them ever again, Ridgeley.” He chuckled coldly. “Welcome to Bardin’s Fall—Bosfal, we say. You’re our first new colonist in five centuries.”
“Of all the planets I had to crashland on,” Ridgeley began. “It had to be this one! So I’m marooned?”
“It looks that way.” Ben lifted the statuette from his desk and lovingly rubbed his fingertips over its sleek white surface. “We ought to and some use for you here in Chago, though. What do you do back on Earth?”
Ridgeley took a deep breath.
“I was a space-drive technician,” he said quietly. “I helped design interstellar vessels.”
One look at the shocked, startled, dazzled expression that crossed Ben’s face told him that he had scored a direct hit, square on target.
TEN minutes later, he had become Ben’s Hale Ridgeley of Chago. It was a simple ceremony. Ben called back the guard Kessler and said, “We’re swearing this man into fealty. Stand witness.”
Glancing at Ridgeley he said, in the now-familiar regal tone, “Fold your arms and repeat after me: I, Ben’s Hale Ridgeley . . .”
I, Ben’s Hale Ridgeley. . . .”
“Do on this day solemnly swear fealty. . . .”
“Do on this day solemnly swear fealty. . . .”
“To Ben V, Boss of Chago. . . .”
“To Ben V, Boss of Chago. . . .”
“And do likewise swear to uphold. . . .”
“And do likewise swear to uphold. . . .”
“The laws of Chago and to remain loyal to my Boss.
“The laws of Chago and to remain loyal to my Boss.”
Ben leaned back. “Okay, that’s it. You’re now a citizen of Chago, with all full privileges, and when a stranger asks you your name remember that you’re Ben’s Hale Ridgeley.” A crafty gleam entered Ben’s eyes and he added, “There are other Bosses on this planet. They may be interested in you when they find out about you. But remember that an oath of fealty’s sacred. We take them very seriously here.
Ridgeley nodded. He had come down to Bardin’s Fall with the preconceived notion that he’d be entering a world where sheer lawlessness prevailed—but he was seeing already how wrong he had been. Well, he thought, it’s not beyond understanding. A state of lawless anarchy could hardly last for five hundred years; some form of government would have to arise, some code of ethics.
“Don’t worry about my loyalty. I’m interested in just one thing: getting back to Earth. And it looks like I can best serve my interests by serving your interests, Ben. I’m with you.”
The Boss smiled bleakly. “I think we’re going to get along well, Ridgeley. And I hope for both our sakes that it won’t be long before you get off Bardin’s Fall. We want off just as badly as you do.” He turned to the guard. “Kessler, take this man out and get him set up somewhere. I want to see him again tomorrow morning at this time. Oh—Ridgeley.”
“Yes?”
“I appreciate promptness. Please try to oblige.”
THEY gave him a room in a tall residential building belonging to the Boss—that was Ben’s only title, Ridgeley soon learned.
The system of government here was an interesting one, he was to discover. In the beginning, of course, there had been anarchy; every man for himself, with the strongest-muscled of the castaway criminals gathering a band of followers about him. But such a social pattern is of necessity short-lived. The gangs grew into aggregations, the aggregations into towns, the towns into cities.
As the newcomers continued to arrive from space, they were forced to assimilate into one or the other of the growing cities; there was no chance for new gangs to be formed except within the frameworks of the old, and the city leaders—the bosses—took quick steps to prevent any potential rivals from gaining much power.
After 2412, the cut-off date for deportation of criminals, Bardin’s Fall was left to its own devices. And, over the passing centuries, a well-knit civilization emerged.
There were perhaps a billion people on the planet now, spread widely over six continents; the largest cities had populations of several millions. Each was ruled by a hereditary Boss, who owed his throne to the conquests of his remote ancestors.
As for crime, there was neither any more nor any less than there was on any other world that lacked the televector tracking techniques. Bardin’s Fall was far from a lawless world; crude, perhaps, its people tough-minded and self-seeking, but those were inheritances from the original unwilling settlers.
In five hundred years, a planet having no contact with the outworlds is bound to attain cultural equilibrium, Ridgeley realized.
In those first few days in Chago, Ridgeley was something of a sensation. Travel even between cities was limited and infrequent—there was definite coldness between Chago and its nearest rival, the almost equally large city of Yawk forty miles to the east and to have a newcomer from off-planet entirely was unheard-of.
Ridgeley was surrounded by eager Chagans, from the Boss himself down through the members of the court. More of his preconceptions shattered as he met local psychologists, poets, artists, athletes. Somehow he had thought of Bardin’s Fall solely as a world of gunmen. Perhaps that had been so at the start—but five hundred years is a long time, on the cultural timeclock. Worlds change.
On the fourth day, though, he entered Ben’s office-cum-throneroom, and found there, seated at Ben’s left, the man he had been waiting to see—the man whose work he had come to thwart.
“This is Dr. Herschel,” Ben said crisply. “He’s our leading spaceflight authority. You and he are going to work together.”
Herschel was a tall, spindly man with round greenish eyes and a lopsided, awkward kind of grin. He stood up as Ridgeley approached and said, in a soft voice, “I’ve heard so much about you. You’re truly a spacedrive technician?”
“Truly I am. And very anxious to help you build a ship that will get me back to my wife and children.” The lie comes easily to my lips, Ridgeley thought bitterly. The wife and children were as mythical as the spaceship he was going to help build. He glanced at Ben. “I’m ready to begin work immediately. As soon as my wrist-band is restored, that is.”
Smiling, the Boss slid open a desk panel and drew out the wrist-band. He handed it to Ridgeley. “Dr. Herschel says this thing doesn’t have any concealed weapons in it. He also says he can’t figure out what it docs do, though.”
Ridgeley casually fastened the wrist-band in place, letting his sigh of relief at having it back remain inward. “I promise I’ll show you how this works,” he said. “After Herschel and I have built the ship.”
LATER that afternoon he accompanied Herschel to a dome-shaped building some miles further into the city, a building patrolled by gray-clad guards of Ben’s private police force. Handing Ridgeley an identification tag, Herschel said, “You’ll have to wear this any time you want to enter the lab. We have to be very careful.”
“Of whom?”
“Yawk. They’re working on a spaceship project too. They’d love to steal our model and get there first.”
Interesting, Ridgeley noted silently. So there was rivalry between the city-states over which one was to reach space first? That might be useful information, Ridgeley thought.
“Shall we go in?” he asked.
The building was virtually hollow. The great dome held a winding strip of offices spiralling up to the uppermost level, but the dome’s interior was completely empty—except for the towering hulk of what Ridgeley thought at first was an extremely clumsy one-family dwelling, but which he realized a moment later was actually an attempt at building a spaceship.
“That’s our pilot model,” Hersche! said. There was uncontrollable pride in his voice. “Not completed yet, of course.”
Ridgeley squinted up at the monstrous thing and said, keeping as much of the scorn from his voice as he could, “What happens when it’s actually completed? Are you going to lift the top off this dome, or just let the ship blast its way out through the roof?”
Herschel chuckled. “Hardly. This ship you see is only the mock-up. When we’re ready to get her off the ground, we’ll build an entirely new one outside, at the landing field. We’ve been constructing the model indoors so we can work all year round—the winters are nightmares here—and to minimize the security aspects. Besides, until you came we weren’t sure how long it would take to build a spacegoing vessel. If we left our pilot model exposed to the elements for decades—”
“Decades?” Ben had used that term too. “I thought you were virtually on the verge of space-travel.”
Herschel looked at him strangely. “Where’d you get that idea? As of this morning I don’t foresee it in my lifetime—though, of course, your coming has changed all that.”
Ridgeley realized he had blundered. The secret message that had been intercepted had implied space travel was virtually a fait accompli on Bardin’s Fall—but evidently the official public policy was to deny that, to insist that it was still dozens of years away.
Or was that the truth? Looking at the awkward thing in the clearing before him, Ridgeley wondered who was doing the deceiving. Perhaps Herschel was telling the truth; in that case—
He shrugged. One thing at a time, he decided; there was nothing to gain by leaping wildly to conclusions when the facts were available.
“The best place for us to begin,” Ridgeley said, “is for me to know exactly what progress you have made. Then I can make the necessary suggestions that will help you to attain your goal.”
“Of course. Suppose we go to my office. I’ll show you the specifications there.”
HERSCHEL’S office was a dusty cubicle high up in the dome, overlooking the snout of the model spaceship. Ridgeley took a seat in the least filthy corner, and waited while Herschel bustled around gathering together sheafs of blueprints, design charts, and schematics. Finally, he dumped them on a workbench in front of Ridgeley.
“There it is. Our entire space project.”
Ridgeley blew dust off the uppermost sheet of paper and bent forward over it. It was a set of hull specifications, painstakingly written out in a near-microscopic hand. Squinting, Ridgeley peered down a long column of figures, up the next—
“ Basically an aluminum hull,” Herschel said.
“Ah—yes. Here.” Ridgeley repressed a bewildered cough. Aluminum? Were they crazy? An aluminum hull would last about nine seconds at any decent speed, after which time they’d have a fine supply of aluminum oxide and not much else. Surely they were considering some bonded-molecule hull, in the manner of the early Terran space pioneers, if not actually some ceramic derivative.
But no. Aluminum, actually.
He glanced at the schematics for hull design—the lovingly-drawn, utterly useless atmospheric vanes that had been rendered in all their clumsy bulk on the giant model outside. The flaring wings; the stubby snout.
He looked further—at the impossible fuel mixture, the tangled maze of feed lines that was theoretically expected to deliver fuel to the jets under no-grav conditions, the gimbals for imparting spin to the ship—they lacked governors, and were just as likely to send the ship into a ten-g longitudinal whirl as the one-g spin that was intended—and at the million other cockeyed off-base specifications that Herschel and his assistants had strung together in hopes of getting a ship into space.
Finally Ridgeley looked up. Herschel was beaming proudly down at his handiwork. This is too much, Ridgeley thought. With maximum restraint he said, “Have you tested any of these things?”
Sadly Herschel shook his head. “Some. Not all. We’ve had very little success, you know. But we’re getting there. It’s only a decade or two since we developed internal-combustion engines, you know.”
In that case, Ridgeley thought, a hodgepodge like this was more understandable. It represented simple trial-and-error engineering, with little understanding of basic theory; given an ample supply of cash, an army of skilled engineers, a flock of suicide volunteer pilots, and about fifty years of patient tinkering, Herschel would probably succeed in getting a ship off the ground. But it would be a wobbly job that would barely reach escape velocity, and it might or might not get as far as the dim little moon and back.
If these charts were any representative specimens of the current state of Bardin’s Fall scientific advancement, Ridgeley thought, then the galaxy was in little danger for a goodly while to come.
But still, that intercepted message—“. . . we expect to develop interplanetary flight in the next year or two—and it shouldn’t be too long before we can reach the stars again.”
Hoax? Or were they hoaxing him now, letting him believe they were incompetent in order to lull the galaxy into a false sense of security?
“Well?” Herschel asked, practically simpering. “What do you think of the setup?”
Ridgeley forced a strained smile. “Some of these things—ah—show a great deal of promise. But—if this is the closest you’ve come to developing a functional space-craft, then I’m afraid it may be a couple of years more before you’re ready to enter space.”
Department of understatements, Ridgeley added silently.
Herschel looked mildly wounded. “Of course,” he said. “We—we’re aware of our shortcomings. Naturally you’ll be able to help us out, making suggestions for improvement in those few places where we most need help.”
Those few places? Ridgeley struggled to keep from telling Herschel the truth, that there were so many places in need of improvement that he wouldn’t know where to begin.
Instead, he said, “I’ll do my best. Mind if I studied these specs in a little greater detail, first? I’ll prepare a schedule of suggestions when I’ve gone over the entire project.”
ALONE, he paced up and down in the room that had been allotted to him, trying to think things through. Back at Galactic Control, they had impressed on him the fact that he would have little time for making decisions on this mission. He would have to think clearly, but he would have to think fast.
He had spent five hours with Herschel. That was enough time to convince anyone that Herschel had only a rudimentary grasp of spaceflight theory.
A series of agonizingly devious questions had got him nowhere. Ridgeley had tried to discover if any other space-flight research were under way in Chago, but the only way he could interpret Herschel’s replies was negative.
That left two paths. Either Ben had divined the nature of his mission and was using Herschel as a blind to conceal the actual spaceflight research being carried on in Chago, or else Herschel actually represented the best Chago had to offer in the way of engineering skill.
Ridgeley walked to the window and stared out over the busy city, at the faintly blue-tinted moon hanging like a bright splinter above. He had forgotten all about the extra grav-drag and about the atmosphere’s acrid taste by now. He stood for a moment with his hands gripping the balcony rail. The metal felt cold and unfriendly.
He reached his first conclusion: “I’m wasting my time in Chago. I’d better get moving. Swiftly his mind marshalled reasons to back up the conclusion:
If Herschel’s the best they’ve got, then I’d better move on to some other city. Maybe Yawk sent that message. Maybe they’re ahead of Chago in spaceflight research.
And if Ben is carrying on secret research somewhere and knows he has to protect its nature from me, then I can’t stay here and snoop for it; they’ll be on guard all the time. Belter move on.
Where to?
Maybe Yawk sent the message picked up on Vega. Yawk lay forty miles to the east. Yawk was Chago’s major rival.
I’ll go to Yawk, Ridgeley decided.
When?
Tonight. Time’s wasting.
And suppose Yawk is no further advanced toward spaceflight than Chago?
Then I try some other city. I have to assume the message wasn’t a hoax.
He turned, away from the balcony window, slamming it shut with a fitful motion. All the decisions had been made, now. He would go to Yawk.
But I ought to cover my tracks here. An oath of fealty was a sacred thing, Ben had said. It wouldn’t be wise simply to abscond to Yawk. A fake kidnapping was in order, Ridgeley decided.
IT took just a few minutes to wreck the apartment, to dump the bed over, upset the nightstand, pull down the light-globe. He ripped the building communicator bodily from the wall, grinning at the flickering display of electricity that shot forth as the line broke.
He tore some strips from the bedclothes and stuffed them in his pocket; that would make it seem that he had been bound. He scribbled a hasty note: Help, they’re breaking down the door! I think they’re from—
He ended the note at that tantalizing point, crumpled the sheet into a ball, tossed it in the corner where the “kidnappers” would be likely to overlook it. He glanced around the apartment; it was properly demolished. He had put up a good fight, even in a losing cause.
Finally he stepped out into the hall, making sure no one was watching. He locked his front door, then smashed it in with three jarring blows of his shoulder. It was stout wood, but it gave readily enough.
So much for the kidnapping. Now for Yawk.
He dashed down the hall toward the rear dropshaft, clambered in, and plunged down eleven stories to ground level. There, he sprinted through a back exit. The street was dark; ineffectual streetlamps—incandescent bulbs in them—gave little light, nor did the pale moon illuminate the scene more efficiently. Few were out, and those few would not notice him.
