“Exactly,” Clingman said. “There was no question of your loyalty or determination but the Tareegs’ methods of persuasion might cause the most stubborn man to tell more than he should. So no one who was not essential to the work was given any information whatever. Dr. Rojas applied certain medical measures which prevented Mr. Newland from recovering prematurely . . . prematurely from our point of view, that is. It did not keep you from completing your other preparations but ensured that you would not actually leave unless we believed the move had become necessary, as a last resort.”
TROY shook his head. He’d been working against some thing there had been no way of knowing about. “Was that Rojas waiting for me in the tunnel?”
“Yes. At that point, we knew we would win, and it had become safe enough to tell you. Unfortunately, you believed it was a trap.”
Troy chewed his lip. “On that home world of the Tareegs when the two factions were fighting—the losing side did something which blasted the whole planet apart?”
“Not exactly,” Clingman said. “The appearance of it is rather that the home world came apart in an almost gentle manner, section separating from section. How that could be done is something no one on Earth had worked out at the time we left. The original survey group brought back samples of the asteroid swarm for analysis. A good deal was learned from them.”
He paused, frowning at his cigarette, said slowly, “The twin worlds have developed a new scientific Tareeg caste which was considered—or considered itself—too valuable to be risked on the interstellar expedition to the Cassa system. I think that was a very fortunate circumstance for us. Even before we left Earth, even when it was believed they were all dead, what had been deduced of the Tareeg genius for destruction was more than a little disturbing. The apparent purpose of that last defensive action on the home world was to strip the surface oceans from the hostile sections of the planet. Obviously, the process got out of hand; the entire planet was broken up instead. But one can’t really doubt that—given more time—they would have learned to master the weapon.
“The killing agent developed by the opposing side evidently had been very thoroughly mastered. And again we can’t say how they did it. It can be described as a large protein molecule, but its properties can be imagined only as arising out of a very complex organization, theoretically impossible at that level of life. It is confined to water, but its method of dispersion within that medium is not understood at all. At one instant, it is here; at the next, it apparently will have moved to a point perhaps several hundred miles away.
!l is life which has no existence, hi id cannot exist, except as a weapon. Unlike a parasite, its purpose is simply to kill, quickly and efficiently, and go on at once to another victim. Having exhausted the store of victims—a short process, obviously, even in nil area of planetary dimensions it dies of something like starvation within days.
“That, of course, was as practical a limitation to those employing it as the one that it attacks only Tareegs. They did not want to be barred indefinitely from an area which had been cleansed of their enemies, and neither did they want food animals in that area to be destroyed. They . . .”
His voice trailed off, and Troy stirred restlessly. Dr. Clingman was slumped farther down in his chair now, and the pale, protruding eyes had begun to blink drowsily. He seemed about to go to sleep. Troy said, “If the thing killed the Tareegs on Cassa One inside an hour after they’d gone into the sea, then they couldn’t have had the time to start the interstellar drones back towards the twin worlds.”
Clingman’s head turned to him again. “No,” Clingman said. “Of course not.”
“And even,” Troy went on, “if they had been able to ship a couple of loads of infected water back, it would have been harmless long before it reached their worlds.”
CLINGMAN nodded. “Quite harmless. As harmless as the new ocean on Cassa One would be by this time to Tareegs who entered it.” He paused. “We’d thought, Gordon . . . as you might be thinking now . . . of sending the drones back instead with a load of asteroid ice containing the inert agent. That, of course, would not have reduced its effectiveness. Nevertheless, the scheme wouldn’t have worked.”
“Why not?” Troy asked.
“Because the drones, in the Tareeg view, were sacred messengers. They could be used only to announce in a certain prescribed manner that the Tareeg interstellar expeditionary force had discovered a water planet and taken possession of it, again with the required ceremony, for the twin worlds. The transmission of lumps of interplanetary ice would never have fitted that picture, would, in fact, have been an immediate warning that something very much out of order had occurred.
“That Tareeg insistence on exact ritualistic procedure—essentially a defensive measure in their dealings with one another—also happened to delay our own plans here very badly. Except for it, we would have been ready at least a year ago to flood Cassa One and entrap our captors.”
Troy repeated, stunned, “You would have been ready . . .”
“Yes, but consider what might have resulted from that over-hasty action. The Cassa system is much more readily accessible from the twin worlds than it is from Earth, and if we made some mistake with the drones, or if the Tareegs began to suspect for any other reason that their expeditionary force had met with disaster, they would be certain to establish themselves at once in a very strong manner here, leaving Earth confronted with a dangerously talented and implacable new enemy. No, we had to retain the appearance of helplessness until we had acquired an exact understanding of the manner in which the water-message must be prepared, and had discovered some substitute for the freezing effect on the lethal agent. That took an extra year.
Troy said carefully, “And during that year, as you knew would happen, another dozen or so men died very slow and painful deaths on the Tareeg execution benches. Any one of those men might have been you or I . . .”
“That is quite true,” Clingman said. “But it was something that could not be avoided. In that time, we did learn the necessary ritual and we did find a numbing catalyst which will hold the protein agent inert until it loses its effect by being sufficiently diluted again. So now the drones have been dispatched. Long before this ship reaches Earth again, the agent will have been introduced to the twin worlds, and except for the specimens we carry on board, the Tareeg species will be extinct. It may not be a pleasant thing to have a pair of ghost worlds forever a little on our conscience—but one does not have to fight uncertain wars with ghosts.”
Troy studied him in silence for some seconds.
“And I thought you were soft,” he said at last. “I thought you were weak and soft . . .”
THE END
1963
THE BEACON TO ELSEWHERE
The forces of the Universe met at Lion Mesa. They were represented by the rebel Terrans; by Dowland of the Interstellar Police; and by the monstrous shapes from an alien galaxy. They all sought the same thing: the time-wrenching power of . . .
IT didn’t happen twice a year that Gustavus Robert Fry, Chief Commissioner of the Interstellar Police Authority, allotted more than an hour in his working day to any one appointment. However, nobody in the outer offices was surprised to learn that the chief expected to remain in conference until noon today, and was not to be disturbed before then. The visitor who had been ushered in to him—without benefit of appointment—was Howard Camhorn, the Overgovernment’s Coordinator of Research. It was a meeting of political mastodons. Portentous events would be on the agenda.
Seated at the desk in his private office, Gus Fry, massive, strong-jawed, cold-eyed—looking precisely like the powerhouse, political and otherwise, which he was—did not feel entirely at ease. Howard Camhorn, sprawled in a chair half across the room from the Chief Commissioner, might have passed for a middle-aged, moderately successful artist. He was lanky, sandy-haired, with a lazy smile, lazier gestures. But he was, by several degrees, the bigger VIP of the two.
Camhorn said, “There’s no question at
all, of course, that the space transport your boys picked up is the one we’re interested in. But is it absolutely certain that our Ym-400 is no longer on board?”
Fry shrugged. “It’s certain that it isn’t in the compartment where it was stored for the trip—and the locks to that compartment have been forced. It’s possible that whoever removed the two YM cases has concealed them in some other part of the ship. That would be easy to do, but . . .”
Camhorn shook his head. “No,” he said. “Nobody would benefit from that. I’m afraid we’ll have to resign ourselves to the fact that the stuff has been taken.”
FRY said, “It looks like it. The police search will go on until your own investigators get there, but there’s no reason to believe anything will be found.”
“The ship’s course had been reset so that it was headed into unoccupied space?”
“Yes,” said Fry. “It was only by a very improbable coincidence that an IPA boat happened to spot it. The transport’s new course wouldn’t have brought it anywhere near a traffic lane, inhabited planet, or normal patrol route. Three weeks later, when its fuel was exhausted, the planted explosives would have blown it up without a chance that the wreckage would ever be detected.”
“How about the cargo? Have you heard about that? Was it otherwise intact?”
“As far as we can tell. The shippers will check everything in detail when the freighter gets back to port. But it’s a good guess that the Overgovernment’s Ym-400 is the only item missing.”
CAMHORN nodded. “A group which was planning to pick it up wouldn’t be very interested in ordinary loot. That seems to make it conclusive.” He wrinkled his nose reflectively. “Modus operandi?” he asked.
“Two possibilities,” Fry said. “They had themselves loaded aboard with the cargo, or they intercepted the transport en route and entered it in flight.”
“Which do you like?”
“The first. In fact, the other is hardly a possibility. Even the IPA couldn’t get aboard a modern automatic freighter between ports without setting off an explosion of alarms in every flight control station on its course. No such alarm was recorded. And there is no indication of a forcible entry.”
“So our thieves had themselves loaded on,” said Camhorn. “Now, Gus, I’ve always been under the impression that the check system which keeps stowaways out of the automatic transports was foolproof.”
The IPA Chief shrugged. “It’s been foolproof so far. But not because it was impossible to circumvent. It’s simply that circumventing the check system would add up to so enormously expensive a proposition that the total cash value of a transport and its cargo wouldn’t be worth the trouble. These people definitely were not considering expenses.”
“Apparently not,” Camhorn said. “So how did they get the Ym-400 off the ship?”
“They had a small boat loaded on board with them. That’s a supposition, so far; they left very few traces of their activities. But it’s the only way the thing could have been done. They had obtained exact information of the transport’s plotted route and time schedule. At a calculated point, they picked up the two cases of YM, rerouted the ship, timed and planted their explosives, disconnected the alarm system at the entry lock, and left in the boat. Naturally, another ship was moving along with the freighter by then, waiting to pick them up. That’s all there was to it.”
“You make it sound simple,” said Camhorn.
“The difficulty,” said Gus Fry, “would be in preparing such an operation. No matter how much money these people could lay on the line, they must have spent several months in making the necessary arrangements without once alerting the port authorities.”
“They had enough time,” Camhorn admitted reflectively. “Ym-400 has been shipped for a number of years in the same manner and over the same route.”
“I’ve been wondering,” Fry remarked, “why this manner of shipping it was selected.”
Camhorn smiled briefly. “When was the last time an automatic transport was hijacked, Gus?”
“Fifty-seven years ago,” Fry said. “And the method employed then wouldn’t have worked on a modern transport, or under the present check system.”
“Well, that’s part of your answer. Automatic shipping risks have become negligible. The rest of the answer is that we’ve avoided too obviously elaborate safeguards for Ym-400. If we put it on a battleship each time it was moved, the technological espionage brethren would hear about it. Which means that everybody who might be interested would hear about it. And once the word got out, we’d start losing the stuff regardless of safeguards to people who’d be willing to work out for themselves just what made it so valuable to the Overgovernment. As it is, this is the first sample of Ym-400 to go astray in the thirty-two years we’ve had it.”
“Two thirty-four kilogram cases,” Fry said. “Is that a significant amount?”
“I’m afraid it’s an extremely significant amount,” Camhorn said wryly.
Fry hesitated, said, “There’s something very odd about this, Howard . . .”
“What’s that?”
“I had the definite impression a few hours ago that you were almost relieved to hear about the transport.”
CAMHORN studied him for a few seconds. “As a matter of fact,” he said, “I was. Because of one thing. If this hadn’t been obviously a criminal act, humanly engineered—if the transport, say, had simply blown up en route or vanished without giving an alarm . . .”
“Vanished without giving an alarm?” Fry repeated slowly. “Without human intervention?”
“If,” said Camhorn, “any least part of the Ym-400 it was carrying had been radioactive, I wouldn’t have been surprised to learn something like that had happened. But, of course, the shipment was stable. And stable Ym-400 has shown no more disturbing potentialities to date than the equivalent amount of pig iron. If it ever develops them, the research programs connected with the substance will be indefinitely delayed. They may have to be abandoned.” He gave Fry his lazy smile. “Does that explain my apparent relief, Gus?”
“More or less,” Gus Fry said. “Would it be a calamity if those particular programs had to be abandoned?”
“The Overgovernment would consider it a calamity, yes.”
“Why?”
“If and when,” said Camhorn, “the bugs get worked out of Ym-400, it may ensure our future control of space against any foreseeable opposition.”
Fry kept his face carefully expressionless.
“So, naturally,” Camhorn went on, “we’d prefer to keep dissident groups from playing around with the substance, or becoming aware of its possibilities.”
Fry said, “There seems to be at least one dissident group which has much more complete information about Ym-400 than, for example, the Interstellar Police Authority.”
Camhorn shook his head. “We can’t say how much they really knew, Gus. The theft might have been arranged as a speculative operation. There’s enough loose money in large quantities around to make that quite possible.” Fry grunted. “Do you have any definite suspects?”
“A great many. Unfortunately, there seems to be at least some probability that the people involved won’t turn out to be among them. However, those lists will provide an immediate starting point. They’re being transferred to the IPA today.”
“Thanks,” Fry said sourly.
“I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t have to, Gus. Our Research investigators can’t begin to cope with a number like that. They will cooperate with you closely, of course.”
“Nobody else will,” said Fry. “I’ve come to the conclusion that our current populations are the least cooperative people in the history of the race.”
Camhorn nodded. “Naturally.”
“Naturally? Why should they be? Most of them are a little short of living space—unless they’re willing to put up with frontier conditions—but otherwise humanity’s never had it so good. They’re not repressed; they’re babied along—nine-tenths of the time anyway. They do
just about as they damn well please. Thirty percent of them won’t turn out a stroke of honest work from the beginning of their lives to the end.”
“True enough. And you’ve described an almost perfect setting for profound discontent. Which is being carefully maintained, by the way. We don’t want humanity to go to sleep entirely just yet. Gus, how much do you know personally about Ym-400?”
“Nothing,” said Fry. “Now and then some rumor about it comes to the IPA’s attention. Rumors of that kind go into our files as a matter of course. I see the files.”
“Well, then,” said Camhorn, “what rumors have you seen?”
“I can give you those,” Fry said, “in a few sentences. YM—or Ym-400—is an element rather recently discovered by the Overgovernment’s scientists; within the past few decades. It has the property of ‘transmuting space-time stresses’—that’s the rumor, verbatim. In that respect, it has some unspecified association with Riemann space phenomena. It has been located in a star system which lies beyond the areas officially listed as explored, and which at present is heavily guarded by Overgovernment ships. In this system is an asteroid belt, constituting the remnants of a planet broken up in an earlier period by YM action. And three,” Fry added, grinning wolfishly, “I can even bring in a factual detail. I know that there is such a guarded system, and that it contains nothing but its star and the asteroid belt referred to. I could give you its location, but I’m sure you’re familiar with it.”
Camhorn nodded. “I am. Any other rumors?”
“I think that sums them up.”
“WELL,” Camhorn said judiciously, “if the IPA is to be of much use to us in this investigation, it should be better informed than that. The rumors are interesting, though satisfactorily inaccurate. Ym-400, to begin with, is not a single element. It’s a compound of several elements of the same series. The symbol attached to it is quite meaningless . . .”
“For security reasons?”
Complete Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Page 119