The H. Beam Piper Megapack

by H. Beam Piper

“Hold it!” I yelled at them. “You’ve been cleared of killing a politician, but you still have killing a Solar League Ambassador to answer for. Now get your hands full of guns, if you don’t want to die with them empty!”

  The crowd of sympathizers and felicitators simply exploded away from the Bonney brothers. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Sidney and a fat, blowsy woman with brass-colored hair as they both tried to dive under the friends-of-the-court table at the same place. The Bonney brothers simply stood and stared at me, for an instant, unbelievingly, as I got my thumbs on the release-studs of my belt. Judge Nelson’s gavel was hammering, and he was shouting:

  “Court–of–Political–Justice–Confederate–Continent–of–New–Texas–is–herewith–adjourned–reconvene–0900–tomorrow. Hit the floor!”

  “Damn! He means it!” Switchblade Joe Bonney exclaimed.

  Then they all reached for their guns. They were still reaching when I pressed the studs and the Krupp-Tattas popped up into my hands, and I swung up my right-hand gun and shot Jack-High through the head. After that, I just let my subconscious take over. I saw gun flames jump out at me from the Bonneys’ weapons, and I felt my own pistols leap and writhe in my hands, but I don’t believe I was aware of hearing the shots, not even from my own weapons. The whole thing probably lasted five seconds, but it seemed like twenty minutes to me. Then there was nobody shooting at me, and nobody for me to shoot at; the big room was silent, and I was aware that Judge Nelson and his eight associates were rising cautiously from behind the bench.

  I holstered my left-hand gun, removed and replaced the magazine of the right-hand gun, then holstered it and reloaded the other one. Hoddy Ringo and Francisco Parros and Commander Stonehenge were on their feet, their pistols drawn, covering the spectators’ seats. Colonel Hickock had also drawn a pistol and he was covering Sidney with it, occasionally moving the muzzle to the left to include the z’Srauff Ambassador and his two attachés.

  By this time, Nelson and the other eight judges were in their seats, trying to look calm and judicial.

  “Your Honor,” I said, “I fully realize that no judge likes to have his court turned into a shooting gallery. I can assure you, however, that my action here was not the result of any lack of respect for this court. It was pure necessity. Your Honor can see that: my government could not permit this crime against its Ambassador to pass unpunished.”

  Judge Nelson nodded solemnly. “Court was adjourned when this little incident happened, Mr. Silk,” he said.

  He leaned forward and looked to where the three Bonney brothers were making a mess of blood on the floor. “I trust that nobody will construe my unofficial and personal comments here as establishing any legal precedent, and I wouldn’t like to see this sort of thing become customary…but…you did that all by yourself, with those little beanshooters?… Not bad, not bad at all, Mr. Silk.”

  I thanked him, then turned to the z’Srauff Ambassador. I didn’t bother putting my remarks into Basic. He understood, as well as I did, what I was saying.

  “Look, Fido,” I told him, “my government is quite well aware of the source from which the orders for the murder of my predecessor came. These men I just killed were only the tools.

  “We’re going to get the brains behind them, if we have to send every warship we own into the z’Srauff star-cluster and devastate every planet in it. We don’t let dogs snap at us. And when they do, we don’t kick them, we shoot them!”

  That, of course, was not exactly striped-pants diplomatic language. I wondered, for a moment, what Norman Gazarian, the protocol man, would think if he heard an Ambassador calling another Ambassador Fido.

  But it seemed to be the kind of language that Mr. Vuvuvu understood. He skinned back his upper lip at me and began snarling and growling. Then he turned on his hind paws and padded angrily down the aisle away from the front of the courtroom.

  The spectators around him and above him began barking, baying, yelping at him: “Tie a can to his tail!” “Git for home, Bruno!”

  Then somebody yelled, “Hey, look! Even his wrist watch is blushing!”

  That was perfectly true. Mr. Gglafrr Ddespttann Vuvuvu’s watch-face, normally white, was now glowing a bright ruby-red.

  I looked at Stonehenge and found him looking at me. It would be full dark in four or five hours; there ought to be something spectacular to see in the cloudless skies of Capella IV tonight.

  Fleet Admiral Sir Rodney Tregaskis would see to that.

  FROM REPORT OF SPACE-COMMANDER STONEHENGE TO SECRETARY OF AGGRESSION, KLÜNG:

  …so the measures considered by yourself and Secretary of State Ghopal Singh and Security Coördinator Natalenko, as transmitted to me by Mr. Hoddy Ringo, were not, I am glad to say, needed. Ambassador Silk, alive, handled the thing much better than Ambassador Silk, dead, could possibly have.

  …to confirm Sir Rodney Tregaskis’ report from the tales of the few survivors, the z’Srauff attack came as the Ambassador had expected. They dropped out of hyperspace about seventy light-minutes outside the Capella system, apparently in complete ignorance of the presence of our fleet.

  …have learned the entire fleet consisted of about three hundred spaceships and reports reaching here indicate that no more than twenty got back to z’Srauff Cluster.

  …naturally, the whole affair has had a profound influence, an influence to the benefit of the Solar League, on all shades of public opinion.

  …as you properly assumed, Mr. Hoddy Ringo is no longer with us. When it became apparent that the Palme-Silk Annexation Treaty would be ratified here, Mr. Ringo immediately saw that his status of diplomatic immunity would automatically terminate. Accordingly, he left this system, embarking from New Austin for Alderbaran IX, mentioning, as he shook hands with me, something about a widow. By a curious coincidence, the richest branch bank in the city was held up by a lone bandit about half an hour before he boarded the space-ship.…

  FINAL MESSAGE OF THE LAST SOLAR AMBASSADOR TO NEW TEXAS

  STEPHEN SILK

  Copies of the Treaty of Annexation, duly ratified by the New Texas Legislature, herewith.

  Please note that the guarantees of non-intervention in local political institutions are the very minimum which are acceptable to the people of New Texas. They are especially adamant that there will be no change in their peculiar methods of insuring that their elected and appointed public officials shall be responsible to the electorate.

  DEPARTMENT ADDENDUM

  After the ratification of the Palme-Silk treaty, Mr. Silk remained on New Texas, married the daughter of a local rancher there (see file on First Ambassador, Colonel Andrew Jackson Hickock) and is still active in politics on that planet, often in opposition to Solar League policies, which he seems to anticipate with an almost uncanny prescience.

  Natalenko re-read the addendum, pursed his thick lips and sighed. There were so many ways he could be using Mr. Stephen Silk.…

  For example—he looked at the tri-di star-map, both usefully and beautifully decorating his walls—over there, where Hoddy Ringo had gone, near Alderbaran IX.

  Those were twin planets, one apparently settled by the equivalent descendants of the Edwards and the other inhabited by the children of a Jukes-Kallikak union. Even the Solar League Ambassadors there had taken the viewpoints of the planets to whom they were accredited, instead of the all-embracing view which their training should have given them.…

  Curious problem…and, how would Stephen Silk have handled it?

  The Security Coördinator scrawled a note comprehensible only to himself.…

  THE END

  GRAVEYARD OF DREAMS (1958)

  Standing at the armor-glass front of the observation deck and watching the mountains rise and grow on the horizon, Conn Maxwell gripped the metal hand-rail with painful intensity, as though trying to hold back the airship by force. Thirty minutes--twenty-six and a fraction of the Terran minutes he had become accustomed to--until he’d have to face it.

  Then, realizing tha
t he never, in his own thoughts, addressed himself as “sir,” he turned.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  It was the first officer, wearing a Terran Federation Space Navy uniform of forty years, or about ten regulation-changes, ago. That was the sort of thing he had taken for granted before he had gone away. Now he was noticing it everywhere.

  “Thirty minutes out of Litchfield, sir,” the ship’s officer repeated. “You’ll go off by the midship gangway on the starboard side.”

  “Yes, I know. Thank you.”

  The first mate held out the clipboard he was carrying. “Would you mind checking over this, Mr. Maxwell? Your baggage list.”

  “Certainly.” He glanced at the slip of paper. Valises, eighteen and twenty-five kilos, two; trunks, seventy-five and seventy kilos, two; microbook case, one-fifty kilos, one. The last item fanned up a little flicker of anger in him, not at any person, even himself, but at the situation in which he found himself and the futility of the whole thing.

  “Yes, that’s everything. I have no hand-luggage, just this stuff.”sHe noticed that this was the only baggage list under the clip; the other papers were all freight and express manifests. “Not many passengers left aboard, are there?”

  “You’re the only one in first-class, sir,” the mate replied. “About forty farm-laborers on the lower deck. Everybody else got off at the other stops. Litchfield’s the end of the run. You know anything about the place?”

  “I was born there. I’ve been away at school for the last five years.”

  “On Baldur?”

  “Terra. University of Montevideo.” Once Conn would have said it almost boastfully.

  The mate gave him a quick look of surprised respect, then grinned and nodded. “Of course; I should have known. You’re Rodney Maxwell’s son, aren’t you? Your father’s one of our regular freight shippers. Been sending out a lot of stuff lately.” He looked as though he would have liked to continue the conversation, but said: “Sorry, I’ve got to go. Lot of things to attend to before landing.” He touched the visor of his cap and turned away.

  The mountains were closer when Conn looked forward again, and he glanced down. Five years and two space voyages ago, seen from the afterdeck of this ship or one of her sisters, the woods had been green with new foliage, and the wine-melon fields had been in pink blossom. He tried to picture the scene sliding away below instead of drawing in toward him, as though to force himself back to a moment of the irretrievable past.

  But the moment was gone, and with it the eager excitement and the half-formed anticipations of the things he would learn and accomplish on Terra. The things he would learn--microbook case, one-fifty kilos, one. One of the steel trunks was full of things he had learned and accomplished, too. Maybe they, at least, had some value.…

  The woods were autumn-tinted now and the fields were bare and brown.

  They had gotten the crop in early this year, for the fields had all been harvested. Those workers below must be going out for the wine-pressing. That extra hands were needed for that meant a big crop, and yet it seemed that less land was under cultivation than when he had gone away. He could see squares of low brush among the new forests that had grown up in the last forty years, and the few stands of original timber looked like hills above the second growth. Those trees had been standing when the planet had been colonized.

  That had been two hundred years ago, at the middle of the Seventh Century, Atomic Era. The name of the planet--Poictesme--told that: the Surromanticist Movement, when the critics and professors were rediscovering James Branch Cabell.

  * * * *

  Funny how much was coming back to him now--things he had picked up from the minimal liberal-arts and general-humanities courses he had taken and then forgotten in his absorption with the science and tech studies.

  The first extrasolar planets, as they had been discovered, had been named from Norse mythology--Odin and Baldur and Thor, Uller and Freya, Bifrost and Asgard and Niflheim. When the Norse names ran out, the discoverers had turned to other mythologies, Celtic and Egyptian and Hindu and Assyrian, and by the middle of the Seventh Century they were naming planets for almost anything.

  Anything, that is, but actual persons; their names were reserved for stars. Like Alpha Gartner, the sun of Poictesme, and Beta Gartner, a buckshot-sized pink glow in the southeast, and Gamma Gartner, out of sight on the other side of the world, all named for old Genji Gartner, the scholarly and half-piratical adventurer whose ship had been the first to approach the three stars and discover that each of them had planets.

  Forty-two planets in all, from a couple of methane-giants on Gamma to airless little things with one-sixth Terran gravity. Alpha II had been the only one in the Trisystem with an oxygen atmosphere and life. So Gartner had landed on it, and named it Poictesme, and the settlement that had grown up around the first landing site had been called Storisende. Thirty years later, Genji Gartner died there, after seeing the camp grow to a metropolis, and was buried under a massive monument.

  Some of the other planets had been rich in metals, and mines had been opened, and atmosphere-domed factories and processing plants built. None of them could produce anything but hydroponic and tissue-culture foodstuffs, and natural foods from Poictesme had been less expensive, even on the planets of Gamma and Beta. So Poictesme had concentrated on agriculture and grown wealthy at it.

  Then, within fifty years of Genji Gartner’s death, the economics of interstellar trade overtook the Trisystem and the mines and factories closed down. It was no longer possible to ship the output to a profitable market, in the face of the growing self-sufficiency of the colonial planets and the irreducibly high cost of space-freighting.

  Below, the brown fields and the red and yellow woods were merging into a ten-mile-square desert of crumbling concrete--empty and roofless sheds and warehouses and barracks, brush-choked parade grounds and landing fields, airship docks, and even a spaceport. They were more recent, dating from Poictesme’s second brief and hectic prosperity, when the Terran Federation’s Third Fleet-Army Force had occupied the Gartner Trisystem during the System States War.

  * * * *

  Millions of troops had been stationed on or routed through Poictesme; tens of thousands of spacecraft had been based on the Trisystem; the mines and factories had reopened for war production. The Federation had spent trillions of sols on Poictesme, piled up mountains of stores and arms and equipment, left the face of the planet cluttered with installations.

  Then, ten years before anybody had expected it, the rebellious System States Alliance had collapsed and the war had ended. The Federation armies had gone home, taking with them the clothes they stood in, their personal weapons and a few souvenirs. Everything else had been left behind; even the most expensive equipment was worth less than the cost of removal.

  Ever since, Poictesme had been living on salvage. The uniform the first officer was wearing was forty years old--and it was barely a month out of the original packing. On Terra, Conn had told his friends that his father was a prospector and let them interpret that as meaning an explorer for, say, uranium deposits. Rodney Maxwell found plenty of uranium, but he got it by taking apart the warheads of missiles.

  The old replacement depot or classification center or training area or whatever it had been had vanished under the ship now and it was all forest back to the mountains, with an occasional cluster of deserted buildings. From one or two, threads of blue smoke rose--bands of farm tramps, camping on their way from harvest to wine-pressing. Then the eastern foothills were out of sight and he was looking down on the granite spines of the Calder Range; the valley beyond was sloping away and widening out in the distance, and it was time he began thinking of what to say when he landed. He would have to tell them, of course.

  He wondered who would be at the dock to meet him, besides his family. Lynne Fawzi, he hoped. Or did he? Her parents would be with her, and Kurt Fawzi would take the news hardest of any of them, and be the first to blame him because it was bad.
The hopes he had built for Lynne and himself would have to be held in abeyance till he saw how her father would regard him now.

  But however any of them took it, he would have to tell them the truth.

  * * * *

  The ship swept on, tearing through the thin puffs of cloud at ten miles a minute. Six minutes to landing. Five. Four. Then he saw the river bend, glinting redly through the haze in the sunlight; Litchfield was inside it, and he stared waiting for the first glimpse of the city. Three minutes, and the ship began to cut speed and lose altitude. The hot-jets had stopped firing and he could hear the whine of the cold-jet rotors.

  Then he could see Litchfield, dominated by the Airport Building, so thick that it looked squat for all its height, like a candle-stump in a puddle of its own grease, the other buildings under their carapace of terraces and landing stages seeming to have flowed away from it. And there was the yellow block of the distilleries, and High Garden Terrace, and the Mall.…

  At first, in the distance, it looked like a living city. Then, second by second, the stigmata of decay became more and more evident. Terraces empty or littered with rubbish; gardens untended and choked with wild growth; windows staring blindly; walls splotched with lichens and grimy where the rains could not wash them.

  For a moment, he was afraid that some disaster, unmentioned in his father’s letters, had befallen. Then he realized that the change had not been in Litchfield but in himself. After five years, he was seeing it as it really was. He wondered how his family and his friends would look to him now. Or Lynne.

  The ship was coming in over the Mall; he could see the cracked paving sprouting grass, the statues askew on their pedestals, the waterless fountains. He thought for an instant that one of them was playing, and then he saw that what he had taken for spray was dust blowing from the empty basin. There was something about dusty fountains, something he had learned at the University. Oh, yes. One of the Second Century Martian Colonial poets, Eirrarsson, or somebody like that:

  The fountains are dusty in the Graveyard of Dreams;