The H. Beam Piper Megapack

by H. Beam Piper

  “And hate us more deeply with each new benefit,” Blount added. “They resent everything we’ve done for them.”

  “Yes, this spaceport proposition of King Orgzild of Keegark looks like it, now doesn’t it?” Harrington retorted. “He hates and resents us so much that he’s offered us a spaceport at his city.…”

  “What’s it going to cost him?” Blount asked. “He furnishes the land—sequestered from the estate of some noble he executed for treason—and the labor—all forced. We furnish the structural steel, the machine-equipment, the engineering. We get a spaceport we don’t really need, and he gets all the business it’ll bring to Keegark. Considering the fact that Rakkeed is a welcome guest at his embassy here, and at the Royal Palace at Keegark, I’m beginning to wonder if he isn’t fomenting trouble for us here at Konkrook to make us willing to move our main base to his city.”

  He made a move. Instantly, Harrington slashed out from the middle of the board with one of his heavy-duty, all-purpose pieces and took a piece, then moved again.

  “Now look whose king’s threatened!” he crowed.

  “Yes, I see.” Blount brought a piece clockwise around the board and took the threatening piece, then moved again. “I hope you see whose king’s threatened, now.”

  Harrington swore, reached out to move a piece, and then jerked his hand back as though the piece were radioactive. For a while, he sat puffing his pipe and staring at the board.

  “In fact, Orgzild’s so sure that we’re going to accept his offer that he’s started building two new power-reactors, to handle the additional power-demand that’ll result from the increased business,” Blount continued.

  “Where’s he getting the plutonium?” von Schlichten asked.

  “Where can he get it?” Harrington replied. “He just bought four tons of it from us, off the City of Pretoria.”

  “That’s a hell of a lot of plutonium,” Blount said. “I wonder if he mightn’t have some idea of what else plutonium can be used for, beside generating power.”

  “Oh, God, I hope not!” Harrington exclaimed. “You’re going to get me started seeing burglars under the bed, next.…”

  “Maybe there are burglars,” Blount said, pointing with his cigarette-holder to Harrington’s threatened king. “Can’t you do something about that, Sid?” Then he turned to von Schlichten. “Before we get off the subject, how about those letters the Rev. Keeluk gave to the Quinton girl?”

  “All addressed to Skilkans known to be Rakkeed disciples and rabidly anti-Terran,” von Schlichten replied. “We radioed the list to Skilk; Colonel Cheng-Li, our intelligence man there, teleprinted us back a lot of material on them that looks like the Newgate Calendar. We turned the letters themselves over to Doc Petrie, the Ulleran philology sharp, who is a pretty fair cryptanalyst. He couldn’t find any indications of cipher, but there was a lot of gossip about Keeluk’s friends and parishioners which might have arbitrary code-meanings. I’m going to explain the situation to Miss Quinton, and advise her to have nothing to do with any of the people Keeluk gave her letters to.”

  Harrington had gotten his king temporarily out of danger, losing a piece doing it.

  “Think she’ll listen to you?” he asked. “These Extraterrestrials’ Rights Association people are a lot of blasted fanatics, themselves. We’re a gang of bloody-handed, flint-hearted, imperialistic sons of bitches in their book, and anything we say’s sure to be a Hitler-sized lie.”

  “Oh, they’re not as bad as all that. I never met the girl before today, but old Mohammed Ferriera’s a decent bloke. And their association’s really done a lot of good. For one thing, they put an end to the peonage system on Yggdrasill, and I know what conditions were like, there, before they did.”

  A calculating look came into Harrington’s eye. He puffed slowly at his pipe and slid a piece from the center toward the sector of the board nearest him. Blount whistled softly and made a quick re-arrangement.

  “Carlos, did you say she told you she was going to Skilk, in the near future?” Harrington asked. “Well, look here; you’re going up that way, yourself, with that battalion of Kragans, on the Aldebaran. Why don’t you invite her to make the trip with you? You can be quite attractive to young ladies, when you try, and she’ll be grateful for that rescue this afternoon, which is always a good foundation. Maybe you can plant a couple of ideas where they’ll do the most good. She’s only been here for three months—since the Canberra got in from Niflheim. You know and I know and we all know that there are a lot of things up there at the polar mines that would look like hell to anybody who didn’t understand local conditions.…”

  “Well, Miss Quinton’s company won’t be any particularly heavy cross for me to bear,” von Schlichten replied. “I won’t guarantee anything, of course.…”

  The intercom-speaker on the table whistled several times. Harrington swore, laid down his pipe, and got up, brushing ashes from the front of his coat. He flipped a switch and spoke into the box.

  “Governor,” a voice replied out of it, “there’s a geek procession just landed from a water-barge in front, and is coming up the roadway to Company House. A platoon of Jaikark’s Household Guards, with rifles; the Spear of State; a royal litter; about thirty geek nobles, on foot; a gift-litter; another platoon of riflemen, if you say the last syllable quick enough.”

  “That’ll be Gurgurk, coming to tell us how unhappy his Sodden and Inebriated Geekship is about that fracas on Seventy-second Street,” Harrington said. “The gift-litter will contain the customary indemnity, at the current market quotation. Have Gurgurk and party admitted, all but the rifle-platoons; give him an honor guard of our Kragans, and keep his own gun-toters outside. Take them to the Reception Hall, and hold them there till I signal from the Audience Hall, and then herd them in.”

  He came back and made a move. Immediately, Blount took one of his pieces, moved again, took another, and made the third move to which he was entitled.

  “I’ll mate you in four moves,” he predicted. “Want to play it out, before we go down?”

  “Sure; what’s time to a geek? Gurgurk’d think we were worried about something if we didn’t keep him waiting.… Good Lord! You do have me over a barrel, Eric!”

  III.

  Four-and-Twenty Geek Heads

  Governor-General Sidney Harrington sat on the comfortably upholstered bench on the dais of the Audience Hall, flanked by von Schlichten and Eric Blount. He didn’t look particularly regal, even on that high seat—with his ruddy outdoorsman’s face and his ragged gray mustache and his old tweed coat spotted with pipe-ashes, he might have been any of the dozen-odd country-gentleman neighbors of von Schlichten’s boyhood in the Argentine. But then, to a Terran, any of the kings of Uller would have looked like a freak birth in a lizard-house at a zoo; it was hard to guess what impression Harrington would make on an Ulleran.

  He took the false palate and tongue-clicker, officially designated as an “enunciator, Ulleran” and, colloquially, as a geek-speaker, out of his coat pocket and shoved it into his mouth. Von Schlichten and Blount put in theirs, and Harrington pressed the floor-button with his toe. After a brief interval, the wide doors at the other end of the hall slid open, and the Konkrookan notables, attended by a dozen Company native-officers and a guard of Kragan Rifles, entered. The honor-guard advanced in two columns; between them marched an unclad and heavily armed native carrying an ornate spear with a three-foot blade upright in front of him with all four hands. It was the Konkrookan Spear of State; it represented the proxy-presence of King Jaikark. Behind it stalked Gurgurk, the Konkrookan equivalent of Prime Minister or Grand Vizier; he wore a gold helmet and a thing like a string-vest made of gold wire, and carried a long sword with a two-hand grip, a pair of Terran automatics built for a hand with six four-knuckled fingers, and a pair of matched daggers. He was considerably past the Ulleran prime of life—seventy or eighty, to judge from the worn appearance of his opal teeth, the color of his skin, and the predominantly reddish tint of his quart
z-speckles. An immature Ulleran would be a very light gray, white under the arms, and his quartz-specks would run from white to pale yellow. The retinue of nobles behind Gurgurk ran through the whole spectrum, from a princeling who was almost oyster-gray to old Ghroghrank, the Keegarkan Ambassador, who was even blacker and more red-speckled than Gurgurk. All of them carried about as much ironmongery as the Prime Minister—the pistols were all Terran, and the swords and daggers were mostly made either on Terra or at the Terran-operated steel-works on Volund.

  Four slaves brought up the rear carrying an ornately inlaid box on poles. When the spear-bearer reached the exact middle of the hall, he halted and grounded his regalia-weapon with a thump. Gurgurk came up and halted a couple of paces behind and to the left of the spear, and all the other nobles drew up in two curved lines some ten paces to the rear, with considerable pushing and jostling and a sotto voce argument, with overtones of weapon-fingering, about precedence. All, that is, but Ghroghrank and another noble, who came up and planted themselves beside Gurgurk. Von Schlichten regarded the assemblage sourly through his monocle. Maybe Sid Harrington did look regal, after all.

  The Governor-General rose slowly and descended from the dais, advancing to within ten paces of the Spear, von Schlichten and Blount accompanying him. Out of the corner of his eye, von Schlichten watched a couple of Kragan mercenaries with fifty-shot machine-rifles move unobtrusively to positions from whence they could, if necessary, spray the visitors with bullets without endangering the Terrans.

  “Welcome, Gurgurk,” Harrington gibbered through his false palate. “The Company is honored by this visit.”

  “I come in the name of my royal master, His Sublime and Ineffable Majesty, Jaikark the Seventeenth, King of Konkrook and of all the lands of the Konk Isthmus,” Gurgurk squeaked and clicked. “I have the honor to bring with me the Lord Ghroghrank, Ambassador of King Orgzild of Keegark to the court of my royal master.”

  “And I,” Ghroghrank said, after being suitably welcomed, “am honored to be accompanied by Prince Gorkrink, special envoy from my master, his Royal and Imperial Majesty King Orgzild, who is in your city to receive the shipment of power-metal my royal master has been honored to be permitted to purchase from the Company.”

  More protocol about welcoming Gorkrink. Then Gurgurk cleared his throat with a series of barking sounds.

  “My royal master, His Sublime and Ineffable Majesty, is prostrated with grief,” he stated solemnly. “Were his sorrow not so overwhelming, he would have come in His Own Sacred Person to express the pain and shame which he feels that people of the Company should be set upon and endangered in the streets of the royal city.”

  If he weren’t doped to the ears, von Schlichten substituted mentally. There was a native drug which had, on its users, the combined effects of hashish, heroin and yohimbine; Jaikark and all his court circle were addicts. He probably hadn’t even heard of the riot.

  “The soldiers of His Sublime and Ineffable Majesty came most promptly to the aid of the troops of the Company, did they not, General von Schlichten?” Harrington asked.

  “Within minutes, Your Excellency,” von Schlichten replied gravely. “Their promptness, valor, and efficiency were most exemplary.”

  Gurgurk spoke at length, expressing himself as delighted, on behalf of his royal master, at hearing such high praise from so distinguished a soldier. Eric Blount then contributed a short speech, beseeching the gods that the deep and beautiful friendship existing between the Chartered Uller Company and His Sublime etcetera would continue unimpaired, and that His Sublime etcetera would enjoy long life and peaceful reign, managing, by a trick of Konkrookan grammar, to imply that the second would be conditional upon the first. The Keegarkan Ambassador then spoke his piece, expressing on behalf of King Orgzild the deepest regret that the people of the Company should be so molested, and managing to hint that things like that simply didn’t happen at Keegark.

  The Prince Gorkrink then spoke briefly, in sympathy for the great and good friend of all Ulleran peoples, Mohammed Ferriera, who had been injured, and hoping that he would soon enjoy full health again. He also managed to convey King Orgzild’s pleasure at having obtained the plutonium. Von Schlichten noticed that a few of his more recent quartz-specks were slightly greenish in tinge, a sure sign that he had, not long ago, been exposed to the fluorine-tainted air which men and geeks alike breathed on Niflheim. When a geek prince hired out as a laborer for a year on Niflheim, he did so for only one purpose—to learn Terran technologies.

  Gurgurk then announced that so enormous a crime against the friends of His Sublime etcetera had not been allowed to go unpunished, signaling behind him with one of his lower hands for the box to be brought forward. The slaves carried it to the front, set it down, and opened it, taking from it a rug which they spread on the floor. On this, from the box, they placed twenty-four newly severed opal-grinning heads, in four neat rows. They had all been freshly scrubbed and polished, but they still smelled like crushed cockroaches.

  The three Terrans looked at them gravely. A double-dozen heads was standard payment for an attack in which no Terran had been killed. Ostensibly, they were the heads of the ringleaders: in practice, they were usually lopped from the first two-dozen prisoners or over-age slaves at hand, without regard for whether the victims had even heard of the crime which they were expiating. If the Extraterrestrial’s Rights Association were really serious about the rights of these geeks, they’d advocate booting out all these native princes and turning the whole planet over to the Company. That had been the Terran Federation’s idea, from the beginning; why else give the Company’s chief representative the title of Governor-General?

  There was another long speech from Gurgurk, with the nobles behind him murmuring antiphonal agreement—standard procedure, for which there was a standard pun, geek chorus—and a speech of response from Sid Harrington. Standing stiffly through the whole rigamarole, von Schlichten waited for it to end, as finally it did.

  They walked back from the door, whence they had escorted the delegation, and stood looking down at the saurian heads on the rug. Harrington raised his voice and called to a Kragan sergeant whose chevrons were painted on all four arms.

  “Take this carrion out and stuff it in the incinerator,” he ordered. “If any of you think you can clean up this rug and this box, you’re welcome to them.”

  “Wait a moment,” von Schlichten told the sergeant. Then he disgorged and pouched his geek-speaker. “See that head, there?” he asked, rolling it over with his toe. “I killed that geek, myself, with my pistol, while Them and Hid were getting Ferriera into the car. Miss Quinton killed that one with the bolo; see where she chopped him on the back of the neck? The cut that took off the head was a little low, and missed it. And Hid O’Leary stuck a knife in that one.” He walked around the rug, turning heads over with his foot. “This was cut-rate head-payment; they just slashed off two-dozen heads at the scene of the riot. I don’t like this butchery of worn-out slaves and petty thieves any better than anybody else, but this I don’t like either. Six months ago, Gurgurk wouldn’t have tried to pull anything like this. Now he’s laughing up his non-existent sleeve at us.”

  “That’s what I’ve been preaching, all along,” Eric Blount took up after him. “These geeks need having the fear of Terra thrown into them.”

  “Oh, nonsense, Eric; you’re just as bad as Carlos, here!” Harrington tut-tutted. “Next, you’ll be saying that we ought to depose Jaikark and take control ourselves.”

  “Well, what’s wrong with that, for an idea?” von Schlichten demanded. “Don’t you think we could? Our Kragans could go through that army of Jaikark’s like fast neutrons through toilet-paper.”

  “My God!” Harrington exploded. “Don’t let me hear that kind of talk again! We’re not conquistadores; we’re employees of a business concern, here to make money honestly, by exchanging goods and services with these people.…”

  He turned and walked away, out of the Audience Hall, leaving
von Schlichten and Blount to watch the removal of the geek-heads.

  “You know, I went a little too far,” von Schlichten confessed. “Or too fast, rather. He’s got to be conditioned to accept that idea.”

  “We can’t go too slowly, either,” Blount replied. “If we wait for him to change his mind, it’ll be the same as waiting for him to retire. And that’ll be waiting too long.”

  Von Schlichten nodded seriously. “Did you notice the green specks in the hide of that Prince Gorkrink?” he asked. “He’s just come back from Niflheim. Not on the Pretoria, I don’t think. Probably on the Canberra, three months ago.”

  “And he’s here to get that plutonium, and ship it to Keegark on the Oom Paul Kruger,” Blount considered. “I wonder just what he learned, on Niflheim.”

  “I wonder just what’s going on at Keegark,” von Schlichten said. “Orgzild’s pulled down a regular First-Century-model iron curtain. You know, four of our best native Intelligence operatives have been murdered in Keegark in the last three months, and six more have just vanished there.”

  “Well, I’m going there in a few days, myself, to talk to Orgzild about this spaceport deal,” Blount said. “I’ll have a talk with Hendrik Lemoyne and MacKinnon. And I’ll see what I can find out for myself.”

  “Well, let’s go have a drink,” von Schlichten suggested, consulting his watch. “About time for a cocktail.”

  IV.

  If You Read It in Stanley-Browne

  Von Schlichten and Blount entered the bar together—the Broadway Room, decorated in gleaming plastics and chromium in enthusiastic if slightly inaccurate imitation of a First Century New York nightclub. There were no native servants to spoil the illusion, such as it was: the service was fully automatic. Going to a bartending machine, von Schlichten dialed the cocktail they had decided upon and inserted his key to charge the drinks to his account, filling a four-portion jug.

  As they turned away, they almost collided with Hideyoshi O’Leary and Paula Quinton. The girl wore a long-sleeved gown to conceal a bandage on her right wrist, and her face was rather heavily powdered in spots; otherwise she looked none the worse for recent experiences.