Pagadan slid to her feet off the edge of the desk and surveyed him pityingly. “You poor chump! What I gave you just now was Advance Mission Information, wasn’t it? Ever hear of a time that wasn’t restricted to Zone Agent levels? Or do I have to tell you officially that you’ve just finished putting in a week as a Z.A. under orders?”
Hallerock stared at her. His mouth opened and shut and opened again. “Here, wait a—” he began.
She waved him into silence with both fists.
“Close it kindly, and listen to the last instructions I’m giving you! Ulphi’s being taken in as a Class 18 System-outpost garrison. I imagine even you don’t have to be told that the only thing not strictly routine about the procedure will be the elimination of every traceable connection between its present culture and Moyuscane’s personal influence on it—and our recent corrective operation?”
“Well, of course!” Hallerock said hoarsely. “But look here, Pag—”
“Considerable amount of detail work in that, naturally—it’s why the monitors at Central have assigned you four whole months for the job. When you’re done here, report back to Jeltad. They’ve already started roughing out your robot, but they’ll need you around to transfer basic impulse patterns and so on. A couple of months more, and you’ll be equipped for any dirty work they can think up—and I gather the Chief’s already thought up some sweet ones especially for you! So God help you—and now I’m off. Unless you’ve got some more questions?”
Hallerock looked at her, his face impassive now. If she had been human he couldn’t have told her. But, unlike most of the men of Pagadan’s acquaintance, Hallerock never forgot that the Lannai were of another kind. It was one of the things she liked about him.
“No, I haven’t any questions just now,” he said. “But if I’m put to work by myself on even a job like this, I’m going to feel lost and alone. I just don’t have the feeling that I can be trusted with Z.A. responsibility.”
Pagadan waved him off again, impatiently.
“The feeling will grow on you,” she assured him.
And then she was gone.
* * *
As motion and velocity were normally understood, the Viper’s method of homeward progress was something else again. But since the only exact definition of it was to be found in a highly complex grouping of mathematical concepts, such terms would have to do.
She was going home, then, at approximately half her normal speed, her automatic receptors full out. Pagadan sat at her desk, blinking reflectively into the big vision tank, while she waited for a call that had to be coming along any moment now.
She felt no particular concern about it. In fact, she could have stated to the minute how long it would take Hallerock to recover far enough from the state of slight shock she’d left him in to reach out for the set of dossier-plates lying on his desk. A brief section of System Chief Jasse’s recent behavior-history, with the motivation patterns underlying it, was revealed in those plates, in the telepathic shorthand which turned any normally active hour of an individual’s life into as complete a basis for analysis as ordinary understanding required.
She’d stressed that job just enough to make sure he’d attend to it before turning to any other duties. And Hallerock was a quick worker. It should take him only three or four minutes to go through the plates, the first time.
But then he’d just sit there for about a minute, frowning down at them, looking a little baffled and more than a little worried. Poor old Hallerock! Now he couldn’t even handle a simple character-analysis any more unaided!
Grimly he’d rearrange the dossier-plates, tap them together into a neat little pile, and start all over again. He’d go through each one very slowly and carefully now, determined to catch the mistake that had to be there!
Pagadan grinned faintly.
Almost to the calculated second, his search-thought came flickering after her down the curving line to Jeltad. As the Viper’s receptors caught it and brought it in, she flipped over the transmitter switch:
“Linked, Hallerock—nice reach you’ve got! What gives, my friend?”
There was a short pause; then:
“Pag, what’s wrong with her—the D.C., I mean?”
“Wrong with her?” Pagadan returned, on a note of mild surprise.
“In the plates,” Hallerock explained carefully. “She’s an undeveloped parapsychic, all right—a Telep-Three, at the least. But she’s also under a master-delusion—thinks she’s a physical monster of some kind! Which she obviously isn’t.”
The Lannai hesitated, letting a trickle of uncertainty through to him to indicate a doubtful mental search. There wasn’t, after all, anything that took quite such ticklish, sensitive handling as a parapsychic mind that had gone thoroughly off the beam.
“Oh, that!” she said, suddenly and obviously relieved. “That’s no delusion, Hallerock—just one of those typical sub-level exaggerations. No doubt I overemphasized it a little. There’s nothing wrong with her really—she’s A-Class plus. Very considerably plus, as you say. But she’s not a Vegan.”
“Not a Vegan? Well, why should—”
“And, of course, she’s always been quite sensitive about that physical peculiarity!” Pagadan resumed, with an air of happy discovery. “Even as a child. But with the Traditionalist training she was getting, she couldn’t consciously admit any awareness of isolation from other human beings. It’s just that our D.C.‘s a foundling, Hallerock. I should have mentioned it, I suppose. They picked her up in space, and she’s of some unidentified human breed that grows around eight foot tall—”
* * *
Back in the study of her mobile-unit, System Chief Jasse wiped her eyes, blew her nose, and pocketed her handkerchief decisively.
She’d blubbered for an hour after she first woke up. The Universe of the Traditionalists had been such a nice, tidy, easy-to-understand place to live in, even if she’d never felt completely at her ease there! It had its problems to be met and solved, of course; and there were the lesser, nonhuman races, to be coolly pitied for their imperfections and kept under control for their own good, and everybody else’s. But that A-Class humanity could work itself into such a dismally gruesome mess as it had done on Ulphi—that just wasn’t any part of the Traditionalist picture! They didn’t want any such information there. They could live more happily without it.
Well, let them live happily then! She was still Jasse, the spaceborn, and in return for knocking down the mental house of cards she’d been living in, the tricky little humanoid at any rate had made her aware of some unsuspected possibilities of her own which she could now develop.
She began to re-examine those discoveries about herself with a sort of new, cool, speculating interest. There were two chains of possibilities really—that silent, cold, whitely enchanted world of her childhood dreams came floating up in her mind again, clear and distinct under its glittering night-sky now that the barriers that had blurred it in her memory had been dissolved. The home-world of her distant race! She could go to it if she chose, straight and unerringly, and find the warm human strength and companionship that waited there. That knowledge had been returned to her, too.
But was that what she wanted most?
There was another sort of companionship, the Lannai had implied, and a different sort of satisfaction she could gain, beyond that of placidly living out her life among her own kind on even the most beautiful of frozen worlds. They were constructing a civilized galaxy just now, and they would welcome her on the job.
* * *
She’d bathed, put on a fresh uniform and was pensively waiting for her breakfast to present itself from the wall-butler in the study, when the unit’s automatic announcer addressed her:
“Galactic Zones Agent Hallerock requesting an interview.”
Jasse started and half turned in her chair to look at the closed door. Now what did that mean? She didn’t want to see any of them just yet! She intended to make up her own mind on the matter.
“Well . . . let him right in, please!”
The study door opened as she flipped the lock-switch on her desk. A moment later, Hallerock was bowing to her from the entrance hall just beyond it.
Jasse began to rise, glanced up at him; and then sat back suddenly and gave him another look.
“Hello, Jasse!” Hallerock said, in a voice that sounded amiable but remarkably self-assured.
Even when not set off as now by his immaculate blue and white G.Z. dress uniform, Zone Agent Hallerock undoubtedly was something almost any young woman would look at twice. However, it wasn’t so much that he was strikingly handsome with his short-cropped dark-red hair and the clear, black-green eyes with their suggestion of some icy midnight ocean. The immediate point was that you didn’t have to look twice to know that he came from no ordinary planet of civilization.
Jasse got up slowly from behind her desk and came around it and stood before Hallerock.
Basically, that was it perhaps—the world he came from! Mark Wieri VI, a frontier-type planet, so infernally deserving of its classification that only hare-brained first-stage Terrans would have settled there in the first place. Where the equatorial belt was a riot of throbbing colors, a maddened rainbow flowering and ripening, for two months of a thirty-eight month year—and then, like the rest of that bleak world forever, sheet-ice and darkness and the soundless, star-glittering cold.
Even back on Terra, two paths had been open to life that faced the Great Cold as its chosen environment. To grow squalidly tough, devoted to survival in merciless single-mindedness—or to flourish into a triumphant excess of strength that no future challenge could more than half engage.
On Mark Wieri’s world, human life had adapted, inevitably, to its relentlessly crushing environment. In the two hundred and eighty-odd generations between the last centuries of the First Stellar Migrations and the day an exploring Giant-Ranger of the Confederacy turned in that direction, it had become as much a part of its background as the trout is of its pool. And no more than the trout could it see any purpose in leaving so good a place again.
But it had not, in any sense, grown squalid.
So Jasse stood before Hallerock, and she was still looking up at him. There were nine foot three inches of him to look up to, shaped into four hundred and sixty-five lean pounds of tigerish symmetry.
The dress uniform on a duty call was a clue she didn’t miss or need. The ice of his home-planet was in Hallerock’s eyes; but so was the warm, loyal human strength that had triumphed over it and carelessly paid in then the full, final price of conquest. This son of the conquerors alone had been able to sense that the galaxy itself was now just wide and deep and long enough for man; and so he’d joined the civilization that was of a like spirit.
But he, too, had been a giant among little-people then. If his conscious thoughts wouldn’t admit it, every cell of his body knew he’d lost his own kind.
Jasse, all her mind groping carefully, questioningly out towards this phenomenon, this monster-slayer of Galactic Zones—beginning to understand all that and a good deal more—slowly relaxed again.
A kinsman of hers! Her own eyes began to smile, finally.
“Hello, Hallerock!” Jasse said.
* * *
And that was, Pagadan decided, about the right moment to dissolve the PT-cell she’d spent an hour installing in the wall just above the upper right-hand corner of Jasse’s study mirror.
Those two baby giants might be all full of emotional flutters just now at having met someone from the old home town; but they were going to start thinking of their good friend Pagadan almost immediately! And one of the very first things that would leap to Hallerock’s suspicious mind would be the possible presence of a Peeping Tommy.
Good thing those tiny units left no detectable trace!
She pulled off the PT-helmet, yawned delicately and sat relaxed for a minute, smirking reminiscently into the vision-tank.
“What I call a really profitable mission!” she informed the vision-tank. “Not a slip anywhere either—and just think how tame it all started out!”
She thought about that for a moment. The silver eyes closed slowly; and opened again.
“It’s no particular wonder,” she remarked, “that Central’s picked me for a Five-Agent job—after only five missions! When you get right down to it, you can’t beat a Lannai brain!”
The hundred thousand friendly points of light in the vision-tank applauded her silently. Pagadan smiled at them. In the middle of the smile her eyes closed once more—and this time, they stayed closed. Her head began to droop forward.
Then she sat up with a start.
“Hey,” she said in drowsy indignation, “what’s all this?”
“Sleepy gas,” the Viper’s voice returned. “If you’re headed for another job, you’re going to sleep all the way to Jeltad. You need your rest.”
“That’s a whole week!” Pagadan protested. But though she could not remember being transported there, she was in her somno-cabin by then, and flat on her back. Pillows were just being shoved under her head; and lights were going out all over the ship.
“You big, tricky bum!” she muttered. “I’ll dismantle your reflexes yet!”
There was no answer to that grim threat; but she couldn’t have heard it anyway. A week was due to pass before Zone Agent Pagadan would be permitted to become aware of her surroundings again.
Meanwhile, a dim hum had begun to grow throughout the Viper’s giant body. Simultaneously, in the darkened and deserted control room, a bright blue spark started climbing steadily up the velocity indicator.
The humming rose suddenly to a howl, thinned out and became inaudible.
The spark stood gleaming steadily then at a point just below the line marked “Emergency.”
Space had flattened out before the Viper—she was homeward-bound with another mission accomplished.
She began to travel—
1961
GONE FISHING
There is no predictable correlation between intelligence and ethics, nor is ruthlessness necessarily an evil thing. And there is nothing like enforced, uninterrupted contemplation to learn to distinguish one from another . . .
BARNEY CHARD, thirty-seven—financier, entrepreneur, occasional blackmailer, occasional con man, and very competent in all these activities—stood on a rickety wooden lake dock, squinting against the late afternoon sun, and waiting for his current business prospect to give up the pretense of being interested in trying to catch fish.
The prospect, who stood a few yards farther up the dock, rod in one hand, was named Dr. Oliver B. McAllen. He was a retired physicist, though less retired than was generally assumed. A dozen years ago he had rated as one of the country’s top men in his line. And, while dressed like an aging tramp in what he had referred to as fishing togs, he was at the moment potentially the country’s wealthiest citizen. There was a clandestine invention he’d fathered which he called the McAllen Tube. The Tube was the reason Barney Chard had come to see McAllen.
Gently raising and lowering the fishing rod, and blinking out over the quiet water, Dr. McAllen looked preoccupied with disturbing speculations not connected with his sport. The man had a secrecy bug. The invention, Barney thought, had turned out to be bigger than the inventor. McAllen was afraid of the Tube, and in the forefront of his reflections must be the inescapable fact that the secret of the McAllen Tube could no longer be kept without Barney Chard’s co-operation. Barney had evidence of its existence, and didn’t really need the evidence. A few hints dropped here and there would have made McAllen’s twelve years of elaborate precaution quite meaningless.
Ergo, McAllen must be pondering now, how could one persuade Mr. Chard to remain silent?
But there was a second consideration Barney had planted in the old scientist’s mind. Mr. Chard, that knowledgeable man of the world, exuded not at all by chance the impression of great quantities of available cash. Hi
s manner, the conservatively tailored business suit, the priceless chip of a platinum watch . . . and McAllen needed cash badly. He’d been fairly wealthy himself at one time; but since he had refrained from exploiting the Tube’s commercial possibilities, his continuing work with it was exhausting his capital. At least that could be assumed to be the reason for McAllen’s impoverishment, which was a matter Barney had established. In months the old man would be living on beans.
Ergo again, McAllen’s thoughts must be running, how might one not merely coax Mr. Chard into silence, but actually get him to come through with some much-needed financial support? What inducement, aside from the Tube, could be offered someone in his position?
Barney grinned inwardly as he snapped the end of his cigarette out on the amber-tinted water. The mark always sells himself, and McAllen was well along in the process. Polite silence was all that was necessary at the moment. He lit a fresh cigarette, feeling a mild curiosity about the little lake’s location. Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan seemed equally probable guesses. What mattered was that half an hour ago McAllen’s Tube had brought them both here in a wink of time from his home in California.
Dr. McAllen thoughtfully cleared his throat.
“Ever do any fishing, Mr. Chard?” he asked. After getting over his first shock at Barney’s revelations, he’d begun speaking again in the brisk, abrupt manner Barney remembered from the last times he’d heard McAllen’s voice.
“No,” Barney admitted smiling. “Never quite got around to it.”
“Always been too busy, eh?”
“With this and that,” Barney agreed.
McAllen cleared his throat again. He was a roly-poly little man; over seventy now but still healthy-looking, with an apple-cheeked, sunburned face. Over a pair of steel-rimmed glasses his faded blue eyes peered musingly at Barney. “Around thirty-five, aren’t you?”
“Thirty-seven.”
“Married?”
“Divorced.”
“Any particular hobbies?”
Complete Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Page 78