The H. Beam Piper Megapack

by H. Beam Piper

  “You seem to have had a hectic trip from the spaceport, Mr. Ambassador. What happened?”

  Thrombley began accusing our driver of trying to murder the lot of us. Hoddy brushed him aside and explained:

  “Just after we’d took off, two other cars took off after us. We speeded up, and they speeded up, too. Then your fly-boy, here, got fancy. That shook ’em off. Time we got into the city, we’d dropped them. Nice job of driving. Probably saved our lives.”

  “Shucks, that wasn’t nothin’,” the driver disclaimed. “When you drive for politicians, you’re either good or you’re good and dead.”

  “I’m surprised they started so soon,” Stonehenge said. Then he looked around at my fellow-passengers, who seemed to have realized, by now, that they were no longer dangling by their fingernails over the brink of the grave. “But gentlemen, let’s not keep the Ambassador standing out here in the hot sun.”

  So we went over the arches at the side of the patio, and were about to sit down when one of the Embassy servants came up, followed by a man in a loose vest and blue Levis and a big hat. He had a pair of automatics in his belt, too.

  “I’m Captain Nelson; New Texas Rangers,” he introduced himself. “Which one of you-all is Mr. Stephen Silk?”

  I admitted it.

  The Ranger pushed back his wide hat and grinned at me.

  “I just can’t figure this out,” he said. “You’re in the right place and the right company, but we got a report, from a mighty good source, that you’d been kidnapped at the spaceport by a gang of thugs!”

  “A blond source?” I made curving motions with my hands. “I don’t blame her. My efficient and conscientious chargé d’affaires, Mr. Thrombley, felt that I should reach the Embassy, here, as soon as possible, and from where she was standing, it must have looked like a kidnapping. Fact is, it looked like one from where I was standing, too. Was that you and your people who were chasing us? Then I must apologize for opening fire on you…I hope nobody was hurt.”

  “No, our cars are pretty well armored. You scored a couple of times on one of them, but no harm done. I reckon after what happened to Silas Cumshaw, you had a right to be suspicious.”

  I noticed that refreshments, including several bottles, had been placed on a big wicker table under the arched veranda.

  “Can I offer you a drink, Captain, in token of mutual amity?” I asked.

  “Well, now, I’d like to, Mr. Ambassador, but I’m on duty…” he began.

  “You can’t be. You’re an officer of the Planetary Government of New Texas, and in this Embassy, you’re in the territory of the Solar League.”

  “That’s right, now, Mr. Ambassador,” he grinned. “Extraterritoriality. Wonderful thing, extraterritoriality.” He looked at Hoddy, who, for the first time since I had met him, was trying to shrink into the background. “And diplomatic immunity, too. Ain’t it, Hoddy?”

  After he had had his drink and departed, we all sat down. Thrombley began speaking almost at once.

  “Mr. Ambassador, you must, you simply must, issue a public statement, immediately, sir. Only a public statement, issued promptly, will relieve the crisis into which we have all been thrust.”

  “Oh, come, Mr. Thrombley,” I objected. “Captain Nelson’ll take care of all that in his report to his superiors.”

  Thrombley looked at me for a moment as though I had been speaking to him in Hottentot, then waved his hands in polite exasperation.

  “Oh, no, no! I don’t mean that, sir. I mean a public statement to the effect that you have assumed full responsibility for the Embassy. Where is that thing? Mr. Gomez!”

  Gomez gave him four or five sheets, stapled together. He laid them on the table, turned to the last sheet, and whipped out a pen.

  “Here, sir; just sign here.”

  “Are you crazy?” I demanded. “I’ll be damned if I’ll sign that. Not till I’ve taken an inventory of the physical property of the Embassy, and familiarized myself with all its commitments, and had the books audited by some firm of certified public accountants.”

  Thrombley and Gomez looked at one another. They both groaned.

  “But we must have a statement of assumption of responsibility…” Gomez dithered.

  “…or the business of the Embassy will be at a dead stop, and we can’t do anything,” Thrombley finished.

  “Wait a moment, Thrombley,” Stonehenge cut in. “I understand Mr. Silk’s attitude. I’ve taken command of a good many ships and installations, at one time or another, and I’ve never signed for anything I couldn’t see and feel and count. I know men who retired as brigadier generals or vice-admirals, but they retired loaded with debts incurred because as second lieutenants or ensigns they forgot that simple rule.”

  He turned to me. “Without any disrespect to the chargé d’affaires, Mr. Silk, this Embassy has been pretty badly disorganized since Mr. Cumshaw’s death. No one felt authorized, or, to put it more accurately, no one dared, to declare himself acting head of the Embassy—”

  “Because that would make him the next target?” I interrupted. “Well, that’s what I was sent here for. Mr. Gomez, as Secretary of the Embassy, will you please, at once, prepare a statement for the press and telecast release to the effect that I am now the authorized head of this Embassy, responsible from this hour for all its future policies and all its present commitments insofar as they obligate the government of the Solar League. Get that out at once. Tomorrow, I will present my credentials to the Secretary of State here. Thereafter, Mr. Thrombley, you can rest in the assurance that I’ll be the one they’ll be shooting at.”

  “But you can’t wait that long, Mr. Ambassador,” Thrombley almost wailed. “We must go immediately to the Statehouse. The reception for you is already going on.”

  I looked at my watch, which had been regulated aboard ship for Capella IV time. It was just 1315.

  “What time do they hold diplomatic receptions on this planet, Mr. Thrombley?” I asked.

  “Oh, any time at all, sir. This one started about 0900 when the news that the ship was in orbit off-planet got in. It’ll be a barbecue, of course, and—”

  “Barbecued supercow! Yipeee!” Hoddy yelled. “What I been waitin’ for for five years!”

  It would be the vilest cruelty not to take him along, I thought. And it would also keep him and Stonehenge apart for a while.

  “But we must hurry, Mr. Ambassador,” Thrombley was saying. “If you will change, now, to formal dress…”

  And he was looking at me, gasping. I think it was the first time he had actually seen what I was wearing.

  “In native dress, Mr. Ambassador!”

  Thrombley’s eyes and tone were again those of an innocent spaniel caught in the middle of a marital argument.

  Then his gaze fell to my belt and his eyes became saucers. “Oh, dear! And armed!”

  My chargé d’affaires was shuddering and he could not look directly at me.

  “Mr. Ambassador, I understand that you were recently appointed from the Consular Service. I sincerely hope that you will not take it amiss if I point out, here in private, that—”

  “Mr. Thrombley, I am wearing this costume and these pistols on the direct order of Secretary of State Ghopal Singh.”

  That set him back on his heels.

  “I…I can’t believe it!” he exclaimed. “An ambassador is never armed.”

  “Not when he’s dealing with a government which respects the comity of nations and the usages of diplomatic practice, no,” I replied. “But the fate of Mr. Cumshaw clearly indicates that the government of New Texas is not such a government. These pistols are in the nature of a not-too-subtle hint of the manner in which this government, here, is being regarded by the government of the Solar League.” I turned to Stonehenge. “Commander, what sort of an Embassy guard have we?” I asked.

  “Space Marines, sergeant and five men. I double as guard officer, sir.”

  “Very well. Mr. Thrombley insists that it is necessary for me t
o go to this fish-fry or whatever it is immediately. I want two men, a driver and an auto-rifleman, for my car. And from now on, I would suggest, Commander, that you wear your sidearm at all times outside the Embassy.”

  “Yes, sir!” and this time, Stonehenge gave me a real salute.

  “Well, I must phone the Statehouse, then,” Thrombley said. “We will have to call on Secretary of State Palme, and then on President Hutchinson.”

  With that, he got up, excused himself, motioned Gomez to follow, and hurried away.

  I got up, too, and motioned Stonehenge aside.

  “Aboard ship, coming in, I was told that there’s a task force of the Space Navy on maneuvers about five light-years from here,” I said.

  “Yes, sir. Task Force Red-Blue-Green, Fifth Space Fleet. Fleet Admiral Sir Rodney Tregaskis.”

  “Can we get hold of a fast space-boat, with hyperdrive engines, in a hurry?”

  “Eight or ten of them always around New Austin spaceport, available for charter.”

  “All right; charter one and get out to that fleet. Tell Admiral Tregaskis that the Ambassador at New Austin feels in need of protection; possibility of z’Srauff invasion. I’ll give you written orders. I want the Fleet within radio call. How far out would that be, with our facilities?”

  “The Embassy radio isn’t reliable beyond about sixty light-minutes, sir.”

  “Then tell Sir Rodney to bring his fleet in that close. The invasion, if it comes, will probably not come from the direction of the z’Srauff star-cluster; they’ll probably jump past us and move in from the other side. I hope you don’t think I’m having nightmares, Commander. Danger of a z’Srauff invasion was pointed out to me by persons on the very highest level, on Luna.”

  Stonehenge nodded. “I’m always having the same kind of nightmares, sir. Especially since this special envoy arrived here, ostensibly to negotiate a meteor-mining treaty.” He hesitated for a moment. “We don’t want the New Texans to know, of course, that you’ve sent for the fleet?”

  “Naturally not.”

  “Well, if I can wait till about midnight before I leave, I can get a boat owned, manned and operated by Solar League people. The boat’s a dreadful-looking old tub, but she’s sound and fast. The gang who own her are pretty notorious characters—suspected of smuggling, piracy, and what not—but they’ll keep their mouths shut if well paid.”

  “Then pay them well,” I said. “And it’s just as well you’re not leaving at once. When I get back from this clambake, I’ll want to have a general informal council, and I certainly want you in on it.”

  On the way to the Statehouse in the aircar, I kept wondering just how smart I had been.

  I was pretty sure that the z’Srauff was getting ready for a sneak attack on New Texas, and, as Solar League Ambassador, I of course had the right to call on the Space Navy for any amount of armed protection.

  Sending Stonehenge off on what couldn’t be less than an eighteen-hour trip would delay anything he and Hoddy might be cooking up, too.

  On the other hand, with the fleet so near, they might decide to have me rubbed out in a hurry, to justify seizing the planet ahead of the z’Srauff.

  I was in that pleasant spot called, “Damned if you do and damned if you don’t.…”

  CHAPTER IV

  The Statehouse appeared to cover about a square mile of ground and it was an insane jumble of buildings piled beside and on top of one another, as though it had been in continuous construction ever since the planet was colonized, eighty-odd years before.

  At what looked like one of the main entrances, the car stopped. I told our Marine driver and auto-rifleman to park the car and take in the barbecue, but to leave word with the doorman where they could be found. Hoddy, Thrombley and I then went in, to be met by a couple of New Texas Rangers, one of them the officer who had called at the Embassy. They guided us to the office of the Secretary of State.

  “We’re dreadfully late,” Thrombley was fretting. “I do hope we haven’t kept the Secretary waiting too long.”

  From the looks of him, I was afraid we had. He jumped up from his desk and hurried across the room as soon as the receptionist opened the door for us, his hand extended.

  “Good afternoon, Mr. Thrombley,” he burbled nervously. “And this is the new Ambassador, I suppose. And this—” He caught sight of Hoddy Ringo, bringing up the rear and stopped short, hand flying to open mouth. “Oh, dear me!”

  So far, I had been building myself a New Texas stereotype from Hoddy Ringo and the Ranger officer who had chased us to the Embassy. But this frightened little rabbit of a fellow simply didn’t fit it. An alien would be justified in assigning him to an entirely different species.

  Thrombley introduced me. I introduced Hoddy as my confidential secretary and advisor. We all shook hands, and Thrombley dug my credentials out of his briefcase and handed them to me, and I handed them to the Secretary of State, Mr. William A. Palme. He barely glanced at them, then shook my hand again fervently and mumbled something about “inexpressible pleasure” and “entirely acceptable to my government.”

  That made me the accredited and accepted Ambassador to New Texas.

  Mr. Palme hoped, or said he hoped, that my stay in New Texas would be long and pleasant. He seemed rather less than convinced that it would be. His eyes kept returning in horrified fascination to my belt. Each time they would focus on the butts of my Krupp-Tattas, he would pull them resolutely away again.

  “And now, we must take you to President Hutchinson; he is most anxious to meet you, Mr. Silk. If you will please come with me…”

  Four or five Rangers who had been loitering the hall outside moved to follow us as we went toward the elevator. Although we had come into the building onto a floor only a few feet above street-level, we went down three floors from the hallway outside the Secretary of State’s office, into a huge room, the concrete floor of which was oil-stained, as though vehicles were continually being driven in and out. It was about a hundred feet wide, and two or three hundred in length. Daylight was visible through open doors at the end. As we approached them, the Rangers fanning out on either side and in front of us, I could hear a perfect bedlam of noise outside—shouting, singing, dance-band music, interspersed with the banging of shots.

  When we reached the doors at the end, we emerged into one end of a big rectangular plaza, at least five hundred yards in length. Most of the uproar was centered at the opposite end, where several thousand people, in costumes colored through the whole spectrum, were milling about. There seemed to be at least two square-dances going on, to the music of competing bands. At the distant end of the plaza, over the heads of the crowd, I could see the piles and tracks of an overhead crane, towering above what looked like an open-hearth furnace. Between us and the bulk of the crowd, in a cleared space, two medium tanks, heavily padded with mats, were ramming and trying to overturn each other, the mob of spectators crowding as close to them as they dared. The din was positively deafening, though we were at least two hundred yards from the center of the crowd.

  “Oh, dear, I always dread these things!” Palme was saying.

  “Yes, absolutely anything could happen,” Thrombley twittered.

  “Man, this is a real barbecue!” Hoddy gloated. “Now I really feel at home!”

  “Over this way, Mr. Silk,” Palme said, guiding me toward the short end of the plaza, on our left. “We will see the President and then…”

  He gulped.

  “…then we will all go to the barbecue.”

  In the center of the short end of the plaza, dwarfed by the monster bulks of steel and concrete and glass around it, stood a little old building of warm-tinted adobe. I had never seen it before, but somehow it was familiar-looking. And then I remembered. Although I had never seen it before, I had seen it pictured many times; pictured under attack, with gunsmoke spouting from windows and parapets.

  I plucked Thrombley’s sleeve.

  “Isn’t that a replica of the Alamo?”

&
nbsp; He was shocked. “Oh, dear, Mr. Ambassador, don’t let anybody hear you ask that. That’s no replica. It is the Alamo. The Alamo.”

  I stood there a moment, looking at it. I was remembering, and finally understanding, what my psycho-history lessons about the “Romantic Freeze” had meant.

  They had taken this little mission-fort down, brick by adobe brick, loaded it carefully into a spaceship, brought it here, forty two light-years away from Terra, and reverently set it up again. Then they had built a whole world and a whole social philosophy around it.

  It had been the dissatisfied, of course, the discontented, the dreamers, who had led the vanguard of man’s explosion into space following the discovery of the hyperspace-drive. They had gone from Terra cherishing dreams of things that had been dumped into the dust bin of history, carrying with them pictures of ways of life that had passed away, or that had never really been. Then, in their new life, on new planets, they had set to work making those dreams and those pictures live.

  And, many times, they had come close to succeeding.

  These Texans, now: they had left behind the cold fact that it had been their state’s great industrial complex that had made their migration possible. They ignored the fact that their life here on Capella IV was possible only by application of modern industrial technology. That rodeo down the plaza—tank-tilting instead of bronco-busting. Here they were, living frozen in a romantic dream, a world of roving cowboys and ranch kingdoms.

  No wonder Hoddy hadn’t liked the books I had been reading on the ship. They shook the fabric of that dream.

  There were people moving about, at this relatively quiet end of the plaza, mostly in the direction of the barbecue. Ten or twelve Rangers loitered at the front of the Alamo, and with them I saw the dress blues of my two Marines. There was a little three-wheeled motorcart among them, from which they were helping themselves to food and drink. When they saw us coming, the two Marines shoved their sandwiches into the hands of a couple of Rangers and tried to come to attention.

  “At ease, at ease,” I told them. “Have a good time, boys. Hoddy, you better get in on some of this grub; I may be inside for quite a while.”