Collected Short Fiction, page 448
McDermott shrugged. “You have me there. I’ll take you.”
“Let’s go, then. Now.”
“It’s late. Can’t you wait till morning? It’ll be dark by the time we get there.”
“Now,” Hassolt said.
“How about the girl?”
“She stays here,” Hassolt said. “I just want to get away myself. The two of you can stay here. I’m not going to take any more chances. That she-devil wrecked the other ship.”
“So I guide you to my ship and let you blast off, and I stay here and face the music?”
“You’ll have the girl. Come on now,” Hassolt said. His face was drawn and terror-pale.
“Okay,” McDermott said. “I’ll take you to the ship.”
HE could understand Hassolt’s jittery impatience. The natives might not like their king taking a runout powder, and Hassolt intended to get out while he still could. His ransom project didn’t matter, now; having found out what the real function of the king was on this planet, he wanted off in a hurry, at any cost.
Which, McDermott reflected, leaves me and the girl here. And I’m the substitute king.
And a boiling volcano waiting for me at the end of my year-long reign, he thought.
They left the girl behind in the village and slipped off into the thick jungle as the first shadows of night began to descend. McDermott led, and Hassolt, following behind him, made it plain that he was keeping the gun not very far from the small of McDermott’s back all the time. The Corpsman hacked stolidly forward into the jungle, retracing his steps.
“It was only three miles, you say?”
“Maybe four,” McDermott replied. “Don’t worry, Hassolt. I’ll take you to the ship. I’d rather be a live coward than a dead hero.”
They pressed on. After a while they passed the lifeship and the wreckage of the mother ship, and McDermott knew they were on the right path. The sun dropped below the horizon; the sky darkened, and two small jagged moons, bright and pitted, drifted into the sky. The air was cooler now. McDermott thought of the girls back at the village. And of the volcano.
“You thought you had a pretty good deal, eh, Hassolt? Servants and food and booze and a girl, all set up for the rest of your life. You don’t think you might have gotten tired of it after a while?”
“Shut up.”
“But then they let you know what was waiting for you, and you decided to run out. Lucky for you that I came along with my nice shiny ship,” McDermott said. He was thirsting for a drink of any kind.
Half an hour later, they reached the ship. McDermott turned and saw Hassolt staring at it almost lovingly. He said, “You know how to operate it?”
“I’ll manage. You come aboard and show me.”
They boarded the ship, which stood silently in the forest as night descended. Hassolt prowled around, looking at the controls. It was obvious to McDermott that the kidnapper was not familiar with the XV-110 model.
He turned to Hassolt and said, “Look here—you don’t know how to run this ship and I do. Why don’t you let me stay on board as pilot?”
Hassolt chuckled. “You think I’m crazy? Take a Corpsman aboard? Look, that girl wrecked the other ship, and I’m going to travel in this one alone. Show me which button to push and then clear off.”
“That’s definite, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay. Come here.”
He led Hassolt to the control panel and gave him a brief rundown on the operation of the ship. The beady-eyed kidnapper took it all in with deep interest.
The rum-bottle was still sitting in the grav-holder next to the pilot’s seat, where McDermott had left it for consumption on the return journey. In the darkened ship, it looked like some control lever to the left of the chair.
“Now, this lever over here,” McDermott said.
He grasped the bottle firmly as if it were a control. Suddenly he ripped it from its holder and in the same motion swung it back into Hassolt’s skull. The bottle broke with a loud crack, and Hassolt dropped to the ground as if poleaxed. McDermott bent over him and took the blastgun gun from his hands. Hassolt was still breathing.
Tenderly he scooped Hassolt up and dragged him out of the ship, across the clearing, and propped him up against a tree outside of the firing-range. Then McDermott stood for a long moment, thinking.
It was dark now. Jungle-beasts honked and hooted in the night. It was a seven-mile hike round trip back to the village to get the girl, and when he got there he probably would be swarmed over immediately and held. By now the natives probably had discovered that their king and the newcomer had vanished. They wouldn’t let him slip out of sight a second time.
McDermott shook his head regretfully. He climbed back into the ship and readied it for blastoff.
Too bad about the girl, he thought. But it was suicide to go back to get her.
He thought: it wouldn’t be such a bad life—for a while. He’d be waited on hand and foot, and there’d be plenty of that pungent liquor, and of course he would have the girl. But at the end of the year there would be the volcano waiting for both of them.
Better that one of us should escape, he thought. Too bad about the girl. I’ll tell Davis that the lifeship blew up on landing, and that both of them were killed and their bodies beyond salvage.
You ought to go back and get her, something said inside him. But he shook his head and began setting up the blasting pattern. If he went back, he’d never get a second chance to escape. No boy-scout stuff, McDermott; you’re too old for that. Pull out while you can.
And Hassolt and the girl would meet the volcano in a year. He shrugged sadly and jabbed down on the button that activated the jets.
The ship sprang away from Breckmyer IV. McDermott felt a pang of sadness for the girl, and then forgot her. The rescue mission had failed; leave it at that. His chief regret was that he had needed to use the bottle of rum to club down Hassolt. It was the last bottle. It was going to be a long dry voyage back to Albireo, McDermott thought mournfully.
THE END
The Untouchables
It takes all kinds of planets, all kinds of customs to make a universe.—But who would have believed the odd reason behind Dyrain’s rigid and inhuman caste system?
THE planet was a sort of half-way house, lying in the vaguely-defined neutral zone between the warring spheres of influence of Earth and Deneb. Its name was Dyrain. It was Earthtype, inhabited by intelligent alien beings, and was a favorite tourist-world for well-heeled Terran travellers.
It was also the center of a Denebian spy-chain.
At least, that was the way it looked to Terra Intelligence, and that was how Lloyd Malin came to pay a visit to Dyrain.
Malin was an eight-year veteran of Terra Intelligence’s outworld branch, and that meant he was just about eligible for a pension; he was one of less than half a dozen men who had survived eight years of the job and still came back for more. He had been doing a job on Canopus VII, where the mean temperature was 110 in the shade and the gravity better than 1.5 Earthnorm, when he received a subspace communication telling him to turn over the Canopus job to another staff man and report at once for reassignment to Dyrain.
All in all, Special Agent Malin felt pretty good about the transfer. He was trained not to care what sort of environment his work took him to—but still, it was only human to prefer a balmy vacation-world to one where sweat ran in rivers down a man and it was a struggle just to walk down the street.
The instructions did not say “report to Dyrain.” They said “report to Earth Central for reassignment to Dyrain,” and so Malin boarded a starship heading to Earth from Canopus VII, and four weeks later had made his landing. He went immediately to Earth Central, the nerve-center of Terra Intelligence: a squat, chunky, archaic building in the downtown section of Milwaukee.
The door screened him and admitted him. He was met by a tall man in the uniform of the Terran Military Forces who conducted him up the gravshaft into the main offices of Intelligence. Most of the faces were new; it was two years since Malin had last been here, or anywhere else on Earth, and in that time a great many personnel transfers had taken place.
One member of the staff had not changed, though. That was OMNIVAC—General Omnivac, some of the officers called him. The sprawling, many-levelled computer who served as master control force for the unnumbered galaxy-wide tentacles of Terra Intelligence.
Malin was conveyed into a private cubicle that had direct access to the speech chambers of OMNIVAC. There he was left, in a glass-walled room, alone with the speaker-grid that connected with the complex mind far below him in the depths of the building.
THE computer’s astonishingly human voice said, “I’ve received your report on the Canopus situation, Malin. You did a good job there.”
“Thank you, sir.” Like everyone else in Terra Intelligence, Malin had come by now to regard the great synthetic brain as a human being. It was easier on the nerves to personify OMNIVAC that way.
“I’ve pulled you off the Canopus job for several reasons. One was that the probability was overwhelming that you’d be detected within the next several months. I didn’t want to lose you so fast.”
“I took every precaution to keep my identity hidden, sir.”
“Naturally. But the probability was building. There was a slip somewhere, and I don’t mean to imply that you committed any errors. It’s simply that we’ve been suffering tremendous information leaks. The Denebians are finding out too many of our supposedly secret plans.”
Malin remained silent, staring at the enamelled speaker grid. In his mind’s eye he held a mental image of the computer—as a youngish general, with clipped hair, a stubby mustache, cold iron-gray eyes.
The computer went on, “We’ve narrowed the vector of this spy-leak considerably. We think it’s centering on Dyrain. Naturally, since Dyrain is a neutral planet, we have to exercise great discretion in our investigations. If a Terran investigator should be uncovered on Dyrain, the Denebians would have a powerful propaganda-weapon to use against us in winning the affection of other neutral worlds throughout the galaxy.”
“I understand, sir. It’s risky to do any spying on a neutral world.”
“Of course. On the other hand, we can’t afford to allow this spy-chain to continue in operation. We’ll have to take certain risks if we’re going to smash it—you see that, don’t you, Malin?”
“Of course, sir.”
“Very good. There’s a spaceship leaving for Dyrain in two days, from Starport in Antarctica. It’s a tourist ship, first class. We’ve arranged for you to be aboard. We have an entrance visa for you, all the necessary papers, a full supply of the sort of literature a tourist might be expected to carry. We’ve worked out a complete biography for you; it’s been taped and you can pick it up hypnopedically along with any information on the planet you may need.”
“Yes, sir.”
“One word of caution: if you’re caught, we’ll have to disown you. We won’t lift a finger in your defense. It has to be that way, you see—since Dyrain is a neutral world.”
Malin smiled. The computer’s words did not disturb him. It had always been his private feeling that an Intelligence man who got caught did not deserve to be bailed out by his planet.
He simply said, “I’ll do my best, sir.”
THAT night Malin stayed at a residence club maintained by Terra Intelligence for agents paying short-term visits to Earth. He retired early and adjusted the hypnopedic mechanism that would feed information to him while he slept.
It murmured gently through the night. When he woke, he carried with him not only a false identity but considerable Information about the planet of Dyrain.
He was now Paul O’Connor, age 35, an unmarried and fairly wealthy stockbroker, who lived in that part of Connecticut known to some as South Boston and to others as Upper New York City. He had saved up his annual vacations and now was taking a year’s leave, most of which he planned to spend vacationing on Dyrain. This was his third trip into space; he had visited Sirius and Procyon on business trips—Sirius five years ago, in 2780, and Procyon two years after that.
As for Dyrain, he learned that it was an Earthtype world 8100 miles in diameter, fifth in orbit around a warm reddish-gold sun. Because of its small angle of declination from its ecliptic, it had little seasonal variation. Its polar regions were cold and impassable all the year round; most of the rest of the planet was semi-tropical in nature, with pleasant winds and not excessive humidity.
The inhabitants were humanoid and probably descended from simian stock; they were advanced enough to have developed a homogenous planetary culture whose most important facet was its rigid division into castes—an administrative caste, a priestly caste, a merchant caste, a common caste (by far the largest numerically) and an untouchable caste, pariahs who lived in absolute poverty.
The Dyrainna, as they called themselves, maintained strict neutrality in the conflict between Earth and its unruly colony on Deneb’s four worlds; they allowed both Earthmen and Denebians to enter the planet as tourists, though they steadfastly refused to permit either side to establish any kind of military or other official outpost on their soil.
Life on Dyrain was easy and gentle. The Dyrainna did not wish to involve themselves in other people’s arguments. Nevertheless, it looked apparent that Dyrain was serving as a channel-point for Denebian spy couriers. Malin had the tough job of smashing the spy-ring without offending the neutrality of the Dyrainna.
It was the toughest job he had ever had, in eight years of Intelligence work. He was looking forward to it eagerly.
A day later he caught an afternoon jet for Antarctica, where Earth’s biggest spaceport had been built on what had once been a useless, frozen continent. The trip took less than half an hour; he travelled aboard a hundred-seater that rose straight up, plunged two hundred miles into space, and re-entered the atmosphere over Antarctica after travelling at fantastic speeds.
The Starport covered better than a hundred square miles, but it was efficiently patrolled and Malin had no trouble finding his way to the departure deck for the Dyrain ship. He was carrying a suitcase filled with the sort of things a vacationing young stockbroker would be likely to carry—light reading, fancy clothes, and the like. Terra Intelligence ha I made up the suitcase for him. Like all outworld agents, Malin had no home, no personal property. He felt no need for it.
He presented the papers belonging to “Paul O’Connor” at the proper desks and was passed through; his ticket had been bought by Intelligence through an intricate four-way deal, to avoid any possibility of a trace. It entitled him to one first-class cabin aboard the starship Song of Altair, round trip, cost four thousand Galactic credits.
A conveyor-belt took his luggage aboard. He was told that checkdown for departure would begin in two hours, and he spent the time roaming around the spaceport, behaving as any departing tourist would. Intelligence had supplied him with ten thousand credits in travellers’ checks, for him to use as expense-money.
He bought ten credits’ worth of flight insurance, naming a mythical aunt in Wisconsin as his beneficiary. She would collect a hundred thousand credits if the Song of Altair failed to reach its destination. He browsed in the bookstore and purchased two tapes, both of them recent and trivial novels, to take with him.
His next stop was the Universe Bar, famed throughout the galaxy as a place where almost every alcoholic beverage known to the cosmos could be had—for a price. Summoning his sleep-learned knowledge of Dyrain, he called loudly for a kiezz—the fiery green wine of Dyrain.
He expected the bartender to look blankly at him and ask for a repeat, but the fame of the Universe Bar was upheld; the barkeep merely said, “Five credits,” and punched out the order on the dial before him.
A moment later a crystal beaker filled with cloudy green liquid slid down the ramp and landed in front of Malin. He sipped cautiously; it was strong stuff. Around him, people were drinking the cocktails of a hundred worlds, and paying a stiff price for the privilege.
The loudspeaker boomed, “Checkdown beginning for flight to Dyrain aboard Song of Altair. Passengers please take their places aboard ship.” The barkeep grinned at Malin and said, “Guess that call’s for you, pal. Go easy on the kiezz when you get there.” Malin winked leeringly. “If it’s five credits a shot there, you bet I’ll go easy!”
“Give you a tip: it’s half a buck a quart there. The rest’s overhead and profit. Want another before you go on board, sucker?”
Malin shook his head. “One fiver’s enough, thanks. I’ll wait till I get there for the next shot.”
He weaved away from the bar and found the aisle that led to the departure deck. Ten minutes later he was on his way aboard the Song of Altair, bound for Dyrain with a full cargo of wealthy tourists. As he stepped aboard, he deliberately blotted out the identity of Lloyd Malin. From here on he was Paul O’Connor of South Boston, out for a joyride on Dyrain.
TAKING one thing after another, Malin thought on the eighth day of the two-week cruise through hyperspace, life on a luxury interstellar liner wasn’t so bad at all. The food was superb, the accommodations plush and lavish, the nightly entertainment excellent. There was a well-stocked bar aboard ship, a recreation deck, a library, a video room whose programs originated from within the ship itself. The cost of a one-way trip was twenty-five hundred credits, but you got your money’s worth.
He had mingled with the crowd of tourists on board, gotten to know them fairly well. There were four hundred passengers on the giant ship. Most of them were middle-aged couples taking the big trip of their lives; the first-trippers could be spotted by the way they stood goggle-eyed in front of the hundred square feet of the main viewplate, staring through its crystal sleekness at the unfathomable star-specked depths of space all around. In hyperspace the sky seemed to be frozen and unmoving. It was an overpowering sight the first time, and retained some of its wonder for Malin even after hundreds of space voyages.
