Possible Tomorrows

by Groff Conklin (Ed. )

  Unexpectedly it was Helen who answered that “One in the shoulder, two in the legs, two through a lung and one in the stomach,” she said. “The best marksman in the galaxy couldn’t do that and expect the victim to live afterwards.”

  That disposed of that.

  When Lorraine wasn’t around, Helen talked more. She brought up the next point. “Could this be a Benoit City stratagem to turn us against Sedge ware?” she asked.

  Dick considered it “No,” he said. “Because obviously it won’t.”

  We got back to the house. Already there was a police guard there. Tyburn, the Sedgeware police chief, was taking no more chances.

  I saw right away when the three Uniteers who remained tried to get down to business that what Dick had said about all five being essential was all too true. There was no Unit any more—just four people, including me. Four people who could make mistakes like any other four people.

  “But we’ll get a session with Lorraine tomorrow,” said Dick.

  “No, you won’t” I retorted.

  Dick looked at me in surprise. “The fact that she’s in hospital won’t stop us,” he said. “We can sit round her bed and—”

  “So far,” I said grimly, “I’ve only got your word for it that Lorraine will live. And we’re not going to take any chances with her.”

  Dick nodded reluctantly. “Anyway she won’t take sedation so she’ll have a lot of pain for a day or two,” he said. “Might not be at her best We’ll wait a couple of days.”

  “We’ll wait more than that,” I said. “Officially I’m in charge of this Unit, remember?”

  It was decided that meantime the Unit should function as fact-finding individuals. We all carried guns and kept our eyes open.

  The difference between the kind of investigation you read of in fiction and the one we were engaged in was that in fiction the people behind the spy ring or crime cartel or whatever it is introduce themselves to the investigators in the first few hours—though not, of course, as the leaders of the spy ring or crime cartel. The fictional detective merely has to sift through the people he knows, remembering that the more harmless his suspect, the more likely he is to be the villain of the piece.

  Now with us the position was exactly the opposite. Assuming our opponents had the slightest knowledge of the capabilities of a Unit, and at least average intelligence, we knew they’d have stayed out of our way. None of the people we’d met in Benoit City or Sedgeware could possibly be involved with our enemies.

  Just as the Unit had identified Jack Kelman and Rhoda Walker they could identify people involved in the other attempt to kill Lorraine. The fact that we hadn’t done so meant that we hadn’t met any of them.

  And we weren’t going to, either. Detectives may be underrated. Few people underrate Units any more.

  During the next few days we learned almost all there was to be known about Perryon. We visited the other cities. Nineteen towns, in addition to Benoit City and Sedgeware, had more than twenty thousand inhabitants. One of us visited each of them.

  And Helen, after one such visit, came up with what might be the answer to the North-South problem.

  Benoit City and Sedgeware were the clear leaders of the two sections of Perryon, and the people of these two cities were also the leaders of the North-South squabble. But Twendon, a hundreds miles to the north of Sedgeware, and Foresthill, two hundreds miles south of Benoit City, were only a little behind them in economic and political importance. And neither Twendon nor Foresthill had ever taken much part in the dispute. Being in the south of the northern hemisphere and in the north of the southern section, they could understand both points of view, steered a middle course, and didn’t think it mattered much anyway.

  Now the Unit, once it was functioning again, could quite easily sway the balance of power and make Twendon the capital of the South and Foresthill the capital of the North. The influence and importance of Benoit City and Sedgeware would wane, and so would the importance of the issues they stood for.

  We needn’t tell anyone, even the people of Twendon and Foresthill, what we were doing.

  None of us saw any sign that Perryon was the Traders’ base, and none of our efforts to find out who had shot Lorraine bore any fruit.

  Lorraine was going to be all right, eventually. She had been so seriously injured that there was no question of her leaving hospital for some weeks, and even Dick didn’t insist on a Unit session in the hospital for four or five days.

  But at last we’d done all we could do without some guidance from the Unit as a whole, and since Lorraine herself insisted that she could take part in a brief Unit session we all went to the hospital and got busy.

  I wasn’t present this time. I was fully occupied keeping doctors and nurses out of the way. Understandably, they were all against this. I had some sympathy with their point of view. Lorraine was still in anything but good shape, and though she was by now out of danger, her body was fully occupied with healing without having to cope with a strenuous Unit session as well.

  And they are strenuous. The man who works with his brain while his body does nothing can be fully as tired at the end of a day’s work as a laborer. Fit Uniteers can work together all day—but a fit Uniteer could also walk upstairs, and it would be some time before Lorraine could do that.

  I had made Dick promise to go easy on Lorraine. He kept his promise, after a fashion. They were with her for only half an hour. But I saw her afterwards, and she was dead beat.

  “No more for another week at least, Lorraine,” I promised her.

  She managed a faint smile. “It took more out of me than I thought,” she admitted. “Another thing, Edgar—don’t trust our conclusions too much. Dick’s satisfied, but I know I wasn’t playing my full part.”

  Dick, when we got back to the residency, was jubilant “Even at half strength the Unit can get somewhere,” he said. “Edgar, you’ll have to send a new report back to UA on Earth. We’ve been barking up the wrong tree.”

  I waited.

  “Someone hired Jack Kelman to kill Lorraine,” said Dick. “The Traders, we thought—and we were right. Someone hired someone else to kill her here in Sedgeware. The Traders again, we thought—and again we were right.

  “I told you before Lorraine was shot why I thought no further attempt would be made on us. Because that would make it clear that Perryon had something to hide, and in a few weeks, even if they killed the lot of us, there would be half a dozen Units out from Earth to investigate the whole thing—and they’d get results.

  “Well, somebody did shoot Lorraine. So the first thing we considered today was how that changed the situation. The obvious answer was that all the Traders wanted was time. They wanted time to pull something off, or make their escape, or get themselves property hidden, before a properly functioning Unit got busy on Perryon. They didn’t care what happened in two months, they just didn’t want the Unit checking on than now.”

  “That makes sense,” I said with some interest “So we’ve got to get busy now and—”

  Dick was shaking his head. “We threw that out,” he said. “Four people hired to kill Lorraine. Hired, remember. We don’t know that, but it’s a safe guess. And hired by the Traders. That’s another safe guess. What does that add up to?”

  I wasn’t entering into competition with a Unit “You tell me,” I suggested.

  “That wherever the Traders’ base is, it isn’t here,” said Dick.

  The way I’ve told this, maybe that’s been obvious all along. I don’t know. But it hit me like the six shells which lad ploughed their way through Lorraine.

  All really brilliant stratagems are simple. You conceal the essential thing so that your antagonists question everything else, but never think about that. You strew the field with difficulties which they’ll solve, while the simple, ingenuous flaw is there in full view all the time. Like Poe’s purloined letter.

  The Units on Parionar would also be looking for Trader activities. But on Parionar no Uniteer
would be assassinated.

  The Traders had happened to pick on Perryon, and us. They’d had the sense not to try anything complicated or too obvious. We wouldn’t bite if it was too obvious.

  And the really clever thing about it was that the conclusions which were reached wouldn’t be reached by a Unit but by the remaining members of a Unit. Naturally we’d report that Perryon was almost certainly the Traders’ base, at any rate a spot to be investigated soon and thoroughly. Meantime the Traders, wherever they really were, “would be lying low—and not giving any Unit in their vicinity anything to work on.

  “The only thing is,” I said, “that this is completely negative. It gives us nothing positive to report.”

  “We can make a guess,” said Dick. “At one time both Jack Kelman and Rhoda Walker were on Fryon. Now the Traders must have contacted them sometime. And they wouldn’t do it on Earth if they could help it Fryon is the only world other than Earth which both Kelman and Walker visited. Rhoda Walker had been on Perryon, Kelman never. Fryon may not be the Traders’ base, of course—but it’s very probably where the contact was made.”

  I remembered scanning the information on the Violin Song’s passenger list about Kelman and Rhoda Walker. “But they were on Fryon at different times,” I objected. “And it was months ago.”

  Dick nodded. “I suspect they were recruited on Fryon, but not for any definite job. Just as people the Traders could call on. It was much later they got their instructions.”

  I wasn’t convinced about Fryon, but I didn’t have to be. If the Unit said it was so, it was my job to report it.

  4.

  One of the guards came in with a wire. He shouldn’t have left his post to deliver it but that’s typical of frontier worlds. It’s only in highly organized communities that people pay rigid attention to detail.

  The wire was from U-A on Earth—in code, of course, but I didn’t need any printed key to decipher it The name and address read: Edgar Williamson, Unit Father, Perryon. Just that And if either my name or designation had been left out I’d still have got it. At such times I felt I was somebody.

  “From U-A,” I said. “ ‘Reason here to suspect Perryon. What progress?’ ” I looked at it a shade bitterly. “That’s like U-A They know we’ve got a member badly injured, and they still expect progress.”

  I took a sheet of paper and wrote. I handed the result to Dick.

  My message read: Perryon is not Traders’ base. Williamson. Dick was frowning.

  “Something wrong with that?” I asked.

  “You can’t send this,” he said. “Remember how they’ll treat anything we send them. They’ll take it as fact and act on it. It’s only our guess that the Traders had Lorraine attacked as a red herring.”

  “But Units always work on guesses like that”

  “Yes, if they’re sure enough. Lorraine wasn’t more than fifty per cent effective when we decided that. We could be wrong.” I hesitated. My impulse was still to send the first message. It appealed to my sense of the dramatic to send a terse, unequivocal reply like that.

  Dick, however, was the real boss of the Unit not me. If he wouldn’t take the responsibility for sending that message, the Unit wouldn’t take it and I had no right to send it “All right” I said reluctantly. “‘How about this?”

  My substitute message consisted of one word: Pending. Dick nodded. “Perfect,” he said with a grin.

  Since we could do no more on the question, of the Traders meantime, we devoted our attention to that other job—settling Perryon’s North-South altercation.

  Dick, consulted by a manufacturing firm in Sedgeware, fixed things so that a big contract went to Twendon. He went to Twendon to fix up the details. He gave good reasons for his recommendation, without admitting either in Sedgeware or in Twendon that the real reason was that by this much Twendon was elevated in industrial importance and Sedgeware diminished.

  Ione, on a visit to the North—we were staying in Sedgeware while Lorraine was in hospital there—went to Foresthill instead of Benoit City. She spent some time there, for no obvious reason. We knew that every move by every one of us was closely examined for special significance, and we knew that people would be wondering what Ione’s visit to Foresthill portended. At least some people would guess that Foresthill was soon to assume a special importance.

  Helen opened a new library at Twendon. Her speech, without being blatant, hinted that Twendon was the real cultural center of the South.

  We began to be a trifle unpopular in Sedgeware. We could no longer hide the fact that we didn’t regard Sedgeware as the proper capital for the South.

  We replied apologetically that it couldn’t be helped—Sedgeware was already overdeveloped and Twendon was the coming power in the region.

  Some people thought this over, and knowing we must be right, withdrew capital from Sedgeware and invested it in Twendon. Young men and women from the smaller towns, looking for a job, no longer went to Sedgeware but to Twendon instead.

  Helen and lone began to appear in clothes which were anything but normal Earth wear. They were smart, simple, mostly in bright towelling, easy to change and wash. They were exactly right for Sedgeware’s warm, humid climate, and it might have been an accident that they were in no way like the fashions of Earth. Soon the women of Sedgeware were copying them.

  Dick and Brent and I went around in shorts. Gradually the fanatically Terran appearance of everybody and everything in Sedgeware began to change.

  In less than a week we had given the Sedgeware to Twendon change-over such a push that only we ourselves could have stopped it. It would be some months before Twendon was the acknowledged leader in the South, acknowledged even by Sedgeware, but the change could no longer be prevented.

  We completed our preliminary campaign by moving from Sedgeware to Twendon ourselves as soon as Lorraine could be moved. Though it wasn’t actually stated, we gave the impression that we believed Lorraine would get much better treatment there. It was true, anyway. Twendon realized that we were putting it on the map, and was duly grateful.

  At long range we had been taking steps to do the same thing with Benoit City and Foresthill. We had to be more subtle in this case. The second time you try a thing it isn’t so easy.

  We had one piece of good luck. Perryon needed a new spaceport. It was to be built with funds from Earth, not local funds. The merchants of Earth were always prepared to finance such schemes because, despite the local tariffs, there was still a huge volume of trade between Earth and all the planets, and even poor Perryon was worth a major spaceport.

  We got in touch with U-A on Earth and had the site of the proposed spaceport changed from Benoit City to Foresthill.

  It wouldn’t be built for some time yet, but everybody knew that it was being built at Foresthill instead of Benoit City—and nobody knew that we’d made the change.

  Gradually Foresthill began to grow in power, like Twendon. And already we could see some of the results of our labors. Sedgeware and Benoit City still fought, were still deadly rivals, but it didn’t matter so much. Soon it wouldn’t matter at all.

  A long radiogram arrived from UA, Earth. It was addressed to the Unit Fathers on Gersten, Camisac, Fryon, Parionar, Maverick, Perryon—forty-seven in all, and it read:

  Trader activity must be stopped. Three fleets are cruising in your areas and a direct call from any one of you will bring one of them to you within twelve hours. We know the Traders are based on one of your worlds. Surely it is not beyond the capabilities of the Unit on the right world to establish the presence of the Traders?

  Please send out, each of you, on the open wave, your estimation of the probability that your world is the Trader base. Impossibility, one. Complete certainty, ten. Send nothing but this figure unless you have reason to believe that the base may be on some particular world not your own. Send this in code.

  We repeat—we find this continued silence from forty-seven Units almost incredible. The Traders cannot possibly be so well hidden
that no Unit can discover them—unless they have developed a different form of interstellar travel. If any of you has heard any hint that this may be so, report h immediately.

  “Yes, it is odd at that,” Dick murmured, as he read that message. “How is it that the Traders haven’t been dis covered—by forty-seven Units?”

  He looked up at me. “Lorraine’s out of all danger now Edgar. We’ve got to have a real high-power session.”

  I nodded. The UA, like many another semi-military authority, was accepting no excuses. We had a complete Unit on Perryon, and the services of a complete Unit were expected of us—even if one of us was in hospital.

  We went to the hospital. Lorraine’s bed was moved to a small private ward and the door locked.

  “You look healthy enough now, Lorraine,” I said.

  “Yes, I’ve put on fourteen pounds—isn’t that awful?” she exclaimed. Even cleared, a woman is still a woman.

  “You could stand it,” I grinned.

  “No—three or four, maybe, but not fourteen. Let’s get started. If I can lose a few pounds in nervous energy, so much the better.”

  It was like the last session I’d seen, and I understood no more of what was going on. But though I hadn’t seen the Unit at work the last time, just after Lorraine had been shot, I could see that this was very different Lorraine lay back in bed, relaxed, yet even I could feel the vitality of her contribution.

  It’s always a guess who supplies what in a Unit. Even the Uniteers themselves don’t know. As I watched this session I got the idea that Lorraine was the real force behind this Unit. The heart if you like. Dick was the brain, undoubtedly, and as such was very important However, the brain in a human being is not the most vital thing. The heart controls the brain, not the other way round. The brain is tired when the heart makes it alert when the heart allows it to be. Death almost always comes down in the last resort to heart failure.