Complete Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks)

by James H. Schmitz

  The S.A.C. stood stroking his chin and gnawing his lip. Finally he frowned.

  “Well,” he said with a sigh, “guess I’ll go see Mora.”

  The little clerk giggled brightly and jumped up. “I’ll show you to the office,” she offered. Because, as she explained afterwards, she could just feel that something exciting was up.

  That was all she had to tell. Mora sent her back to her work as soon as the two of them reached the door of the Central Communications Office. Mora didn’t look excited except that her eyes had become nearly black. One would have had to know Mora to interpret that correctly, but Holati Tate made a fair guess. Like a man who’s reached a decision, he explained his purpose almost curtly, “I want to send a personal message by long-range transmitter.”

  Mora indicated restrained surprise. “Oh . . . you’ll want privacy, I suppose?” She added, “And I’m sure you’re aware of the expense factor?” He nodded. Just getting the long transmitters started up came to around three months of his salary.

  Mora looked arch. “Perhaps congratulations are in order? A registration?”

  At that, Holati Tate chuckled nervously. “Well, I’ll say this much . . . I’ll want to use the Notary!”

  “Of course.” Mora rose from behind the desk. “I’ll attach it for you myself,” she offered graciously. She floated ahead of him down a short hall and into the communications cabinet, dealt deftly there with switches and settings, connected the Notary machine with the transmitter, floated back to the door. “It’s expensive, remember!” She smiled at him once more, almost tenderly, and closed the door behind her.

  “How’d he take it?” Gision inquired a few minutes later.

  Mora shrugged. They were in her own office and both were bent intently over a profile map of the area. On the map a small yellow dot moved out from the sprawl of Headquarters domes toward the southern swamps. Gision’s large thumb rested lightly on a button at the side of the frame. Map and attachments were his own creation. “He just clammed up completely when he discovered it was to be a canned message,” she said. “Refused to make it, of course—said he’d be back tomorrow or whenever the transmitters were working again. But I’m not even certain he was suspicious.”

  Gision grunted. “You can bet he got suspicious! The transmitters don’t cut out that often.”

  “Maybe. He’d already checked out positive on the Notary anyway. It was a registration, all right.” Mora moved a fingertip toward the thumb that rested on the button. “If you let me do that, I’ll tell you what he was going to register.”

  Gision shook his big head without looking up. “You’re too eager. And I’m not interested in what he was going to register.”

  She smiled. “You’re all scared of Ramog.”

  Gision nodded. “And so would you be,” he said, “if you had any sense.” They sat quietly a few minutes; then Mora began to fidget. “Isn’t that far enough? He’ll get away!”

  “He can’t get away—and it’s almost far enough. We want him right out over the middle of those swamps.”

  She looked at his face and laughed. “I can tell you’re going to let me do it. Aren’t you?”

  Gision nodded again. “And now’s about the time. Put the finger up here.”

  She slipped her finger over the button and wet her lips. “Like this?”

  “Like that. Now push.”

  She pushed down. The yellow dot vanished.

  “Is that all?” she said disappointed.

  “What did you expect?” Gision said. “An explosion?”

  “No,” Mora said dreamily. “But there’s not much to it. If the old boy had been a little sharper, we might have had a questioning.”

  He shrugged. Sometimes Mora gave him the chills. “Questionings are what you try when you can’t figure it out,” he explained. “In a setup like this they can get pretty risky. So the boss likes to figure it out.” He added his own basic philosophy, “When they’re dead, they’re safe.”

  Holati Tate was sweating under his clothes when he slid the hopper back out of the vehicle shelter entrance and lifted into the air. Actually, as far as he could tell, everything was rolling along very smoothly, and he could reassure himself with the thought that he was dealing with a group of people who appeared to have proved their competence at this sort of business more than once in the past. If their thinking was up to par, he would be quite safe for the next eight minutes.

  But one couldn’t be sure.

  Somewhat shakily therefore, he gave the hopper its accustomed fix on the Bio Station and put it on automatic. Then taking a coil of wire out of his pocket, he slipped its looped end over the acceleration switch, secured the loop and gave the wire a tentative tug. The hopper responded with a surge of power.

  Holati patted another pocket, which contained a package of emergency rations, and sat back to sweat out the remaining minutes. A persistent fluttering started up in the pit of his stomach. His gaze went wistfully once to the collapsed escape bubble on his left. He was getting a little old for field and track work, he thought; the bubble looked very attractive. But he had no way of knowing just how thorough Ramog’s preparations had been, and no time to check. So the bubble was out, like the grav-tubes and the heavy rifle in the hopper’s emergency locker. Field and track stuff, as if he were a downy cadet! He groaned.

  Wooded stretches passed under him and Great Gruesome’s lowlands moved into view ahead. Holati cut the hopper’s speed to a crawl, dropped to twenty feet and opened the hatch. He edged out, breathing hard and hanging on to his wire with one hand, and as they passed over the first patch of marshy ground he gave the wire a firm tug and jumped. The hopper zoomed off, slanting upward again.

  The ground was much wetter than Holati had estimated, but he floundered and waded out in three and a half minutes. A pair of hippopotamous-sized, apparently vegetarian, denizens of Great Gruesome followed him part of the way, bellowing annoyedly, but undertook no overt action.

  As he sat down on the first piece of dry earth to pour the mud out of his boots, there was a moderately bright flash in the noonday sky over the approximate center of the swamp-arm behind him. Holati didn’t look around but he grunted approvingly. Clean work! Even if someone had been interested in going hunting for fragments of the hopper, they weren’t going to invade the center of Great Gruesome to do it. Not very long.

  He worked his boots back on, stood up, sighed, and set out squishly on what was going to be a two-day hike back to the Headquarters Station.

  When the long-awaited announcement of the first artifacts of the legendary Old Galactic civilization finally was flashed from Precol’s Manon System to the Federation, the Precol home office and Academy showed an uncharacteristic lack of enthusiasm. The fact that one of their most able and respected field operators had just been lost off Manon in line of duty might have had something to do with it. In the wave of renewed high interest in space exploration which swept the Federation, this detail remained generally unnoticed.

  For the discovery was a truly king-sized strike. The riches of robotic information alone which it provided for a dozen interested branches of human science might take a century to be. fully utilized. The Old Galactic base on an obscure planetoid circling far beyond the previously established limits of the Manon System was no dead relic; it was a functioning though currently purposeless installation. The best guess was that approximately thirty-two thousand standard years had passed since the constructors of the base had last visited it. Automatically and efficiently since then the installation had continued to reap and process the cyclic abundance of plankton life from Manon’s atmosphere.

  When the ships which once had carried away its finished products no longer came and the limits of its storage facilities were reached, it piled up the accumulating excess on the little world’s lightless surface. But its processing sections remained active, and back and forth between the planetoid and Manon moved the stream of Harvesters, biological robots themselves, and performed their function
until a human discoverer set foot on the little world and human hands reached for the controlling switches in the installation that turned the Harvesters off.

  So scientists, technicians and reporters came out by the shipload to the Manon System, and for a few months Manon’s new Acting Commissioner was an extremely busy man. One day however he summoned his secretary, Trigger Argee, to his new office on what was now popularly though inaccurately known as Harvest Moon and said, “Trigger, we’re going for a little trip.”

  “You’re scheduled for three more interviews in the next six hours,” Trigger informed him.

  “Chelly or Inger can handle them,” the Acting Commissioner said.

  “Not these,” said Trigger. “Reporters. They want more details on the Space Exploits of the Gallant Scout Commander Tate in His Younger Days.”

  “Hell,” Acting Commissioner Tate said, reddening slightly, “I’m too old to enjoy being a hero now. They should have come around thirty years earlier. Let’s go.”

  So they rose presently from the surface of the dark worldlet, with Trigger at the controls of a spacecraft not much bigger than a hopper but capable nevertheless of interstellar jumps, though Trigger hadn’t yet been checked out on such maneuvers. It was, as a matter of fact, basically the ferocious little boat of the Space Scouts rebuilt for comfort, which made it a toy for the fabulously wealthy only. The Acting Commissioner, having observed recently that, on the basis of his first-discovery claims to Harvest Moon and its gadgetry, he was now in the fabulously wealthy class, had indulged himself in an old man’s whim.

  “Here’s your course-tape, pilot,” he said complacently and settled back into the very comfortable observer’s seat on Trigger’s right, equipped with its duplicate target screen.

  Trigger fed in the tape and settled back also. “Runs itself,” she said. “Practically.” She was a girl who could appreciate a good ship. “What are you looking for, out in the middle of the Manon System?”

  “You’ll see when we get there.” Trigger gave him a quick look. Then she glanced at the space-duty suit he had brought from the back of the ship and laid behind his seat. “I’m not so sure,” she said carefully, “that I’m going to like what I see when we get there.”

  “Oho!” Holati Tate reached up and tugged down on his left ear lobe. He looked reflective. After a moment he inquired, “How much of this have you got figured out, Trigger girl?”

  “Parts of it,” Trigger said. “There’re some missing pieces, too, though. I’ve been doing a little investigating on my own,” she explained.

  Manon’s Acting Commissioner cleared his throat. He reached out and made an adjustment on his target screen, peered into the screen, muttered and made another adjustment. Then he said, “What got you going on an investigation?”

  “The fact,” said Trigger, “that Precol Academy seems willing to let you get away with murder.”

  “Murder?” He frowned.

  “Yes. It didn’t take much digging to find out about the Ancient and Honorable Society of Retired Space Scouts. First I’d heard of that outfit.” She hesitated. “I suppose you don’t mind my saying it doesn’t sound like an organization anyone would take seriously?”

  “Don’t mind at all,” said Holati Tate.

  “I believe you. In fact, after I’d found there were around twelve thousand of those retired Scouts scattered through Precol—and that you happened to be their president—it occurred to me the Society might have selected that name so nobody would take it seriously.”

  “Hm-m-m.” He nodded. “Yes. Bright girl!”

  “There may be bright people at the Academy, too,” Trigger said. “Bright enough to work out that Commissioner Ramog’s departure from our midst was a well-planned execution.”

  “I’d say I like ‘execution’ better than ‘murder,’ ” Holati remarked judiciously. “But it’s still not quite the right word, Trigger girl.”

  “You prefer ‘object lesson’ ?”

  “Well . . . that’ll do for the moment. So what did you mean about it’s being a well-planned object lesson?”

  Trigger shrugged. “Wouldn’t it have been a remarkable coincidence if you’d made the Old Galactic strike at just the right instant to help close out Ramog’s account?”

  “I see.” Holati nodded again. “Yes, you’re right about that. A few of us discovered Harvest Moon almost three years ago, on a private prospecting run—” He leaned forward suddenly. “Brake her down, pilot! There’s a flock of those Harvester things ahead right now. I want to look them over.”

  She brought the ship to a stop in the middle of a widely scattered dozen of Harvesters, drifting idly through the system as they had been doing since Holati Tate had disconnected the switch that energized them, in an airless underground dome on Harvest Moon, three months before.

  Peering out against the green glare of Manon’s sun, Trigger eyed the nearest of the inert hulks with some feeling of physical discomfort. It was very considerably bigger than their ship, and it looked more like some ominously hovering dark monster of space than like an alien work-robot. She became aware that her companion’s hands were moving unhurriedly about an instrument panel on the other side of his target screen. Suddenly, first one and then another of the Harvesters was glowing throughout its length as if a greenish light had been switched on inside it. The glow darkened again, as the invisible beam that had been scanning them from the ship went on to others of the group.

  “Looks like this bunch was about four weeks out from Manon when the power went off,” Holati remarked conversationally. He cut the scan-beam off. “It would have taken them close to two months to make the run to Harvest Moon at the time.”

  Trigger nodded. “I’ve seen the figures. Shall I get us back on course?”

  “Please do. There’s nothing here.”

  Trigger remained silent until she had gone through the required operations. Then, feeling unaccountably relieved at being in motion again, she said, “I suppose it was your Society that started the rumors about the Manon System being the most likely place for an Old Galactic strike to be made.”

  “Uh-huh. Sound data back of the rumors, too. We felt that with a sharp operator like Ramog the situation we set up had better be genuine.” After a moment, he added, “There really wasn’t any way of doing it gently, Trigger girl. That Academy outfit was too cocksure of its position; it needed hard processing. One of the things they had to learn was that—away from civilization, anyway—the members of the Society can play rougher and dirtier than any commissioner they can send out. After all,” he concluded mildly, “we’ve had the training for that. Years of it.”

  Trigger looked at him curiously. “What puzzles me is that they seem to have got the idea so quickly. I wouldn’t have thought Precol Academy would let itself be impressed too much by just one—object lesson.”

  “They might have missed some of the implications,” Holati admitted. “However, we gave them a helpful hint.”

  “Oh?” she said. “What?”

  “A formal complaint from our Society, signed by its president. It listed Society members and others who had been killed on Precol Projects in the last ten years, because of the inefficiency, let’s say, of specific Project commissioners. The commissioners in question—all members of the Academy—were also listed. Ramog’s name happened to be at the head of that list . . . and they got the complaint the day after Ramog was reported lost.”

  Trigger’s eyes widened. “Well,” she acknowledged, “that’s as broad as a hint can get!”

  “We weren’t trying to be subtle. Murder gets to be hard to prove under Project conditions—there’re too many possibilities. So the Academy group is safe enough that way; we aren’t accusing anyone of anything worse than inefficiency. But the complaint suggested that the people we listed be withdrawn from active service, as they were obviously unfit for such work.”

  She smiled briefly. “And since the Society has taken the precaution of turning its president into an extremely fa
mous man, the home office can’t resort to obvious counteraction—like firing the whole twelve thousand of you from the various Projects?”

  “That would raise a terrible stink, wouldn’t it?” Holati said cheerfully. “And, who knows, we might even publish our complaint then. With additional data we could—Slow her down again, will you? We should be pretty close to course end by now.”

  “A few minutes off,” Trigger said reluctantly. “What is it—more Harvesters?”

  He was fiddling with the target screen again. “Uh-huh,” he said absently. “But we’ll move on a little farther. Slow and easy now!”

  Trigger kept it slow and easy, ignoring the dark shapes they slid past occasionally. After a while, she said, “There’s one thing the Academy must have thought of trying, though—”

  “To pin Ramog’s disappearance on me?”

  She glanced at him. “Perhaps not on you personally. There’s evidence enough you’d just started walking back from the edge of the swamps when Ramog climbed into a jet suit, took off for the Moon Belt on an undisclosed mission, and vanished. But it wouldn’t be too unreasonable for the Academy to assume that some retired, but not so decrepit Space Scouts, were waiting for him up there when he arrived.”

  “You know,” Holati said with some satisfaction, “that’s exactly how they did figure it.” He kept his eyes on the screen as he went on. “Naturally, they wouldn’t expect us to leave a body floating around, but a really capable investigator doesn’t need anything as crude as that in the line of evidence. The Academy had some very good boys combing over the Moon Belt and other parts of the system the past couple of months. There were times when we had to be careful not to trip over them.”

  “Oh?” said Trigger. “What did they find?”

  “Nothing,” Holati said. “Naturally. They gave up finally.”

  She frowned. “How do you know?”

  “I get the word. The word I got last week was that the bad eggs in Precol we named on that list are resigning in droves and heading for the Federation. And the men that are being moved up are men we like. Just today,” he added, “an Academy courier came in with an official notification for me. I’m confirmed in rank as commissioner now, in permanent charge of the Manon Project.”