Interstellar Caveman

by Karl Beecher

  “Do yourself a favour, Spudge. Leave these off-worlders alone. They’ll be gone soon enough and they’ll take their fancy ways with them. But you’ll still be here.”

  The old man drained his mug and wandered off, leaving Spudge to consider the latest lecture. These world-weary pep talks from the seniors were getting more frequent as Spudge grew older.

  He always tried to stay optimistic in face of the gloom and doom, but it was getting harder the more it went on. He wondered: would end up surrendering to it and then become just like them?

  31

  Tiffin brushed his hand down the long, white lab coat. He couldn’t believe that wearing it was such a simple way to blend in.

  As he stood in the corridor, dozens of people dashed past him constantly—doctors, nurses, patients, janitors—but Tiffin attracted not one suspicious look. Nobody even gave him a second glance. Everyone was totally uninterested in him.

  It was like his childhood all over again.

  “So far, so good,” Tiffin whispered without moving his lips.

  His words were picked up by the tiny audio transceiver in his ear and then beamed to a communicator in the basement storage room. It was in there—a huge space filled with rows of coats, uniforms, and laundry, but practically devoid of people—that he and Mokk had set up a base of operations. Mokk was presently occupying the communicator.

  “Where are you, Inspector?” Mokk’s voice buzzed through the earpiece.

  “Second floor,” Tiffin whispered, keeping his lips motionless and his voice below the surrounding hubbub. He didn’t want to risk stirring up suspicion by being observed talking to himself. “I need directions. I just hassed the ortho-haedics de-hartment.”

  “The what?”

  “Ortho-haedics,” said Tiffin as loudly as he dared.

  “I don’t understand what you’re saying.”

  “Ortho… oh, never rind, I’ll find another hoint of reference.”

  Tiffin proceeded down the corridor, observing the signs above each door he passed. The first read ‘Ophthalmology.’ He didn’t hold out much hope of pronouncing that surreptitiously. The next sign along read ‘Microbiology.’ Finally, he came to ‘Prenatal Obstetrics and Maternal Monitoring’ and gave up.

  “Oh, huck this,” he said. He covered his mouth as innocently as he could. “I just passed Obstetrics. Tell me how to get from there to Neurology.”

  “Okay,” said Mokk. “Checking the map now.”

  Mokk directed him along a few more corridors (and down a couple of dead ends) until he finally made it to a door marked ‘Neurology Department.’

  The doorway led into another corridor, a much quieter one with fewer people buzzing around. This meant he was more conspicuous. It was even more important now to act like he belonged here, as though he were a doctor going about his daily routine.

  On the wall hung a map of the department. Some of the rooms had handwritten names beside them, indicating they were the patients’ rooms. One name stood out:

  DOUGLASS, C.

  Tiffin oriented himself. That room turned out to be just around the next corner.

  Excitement flared up inside Tiffin. He now knew exactly where his target was likely to be most of the time. In fact, the Inspector’s prey might have been sitting a few dozen metres away at that very moment.

  Tiffin’s original plan had been to scope out the area in preparation for a seizure later: establish the layout, check entrances and exits, visibility, security sensors, and all that. But being so close to his quarry tempted him.

  Could he make the seizure right now?

  He felt the stun gun through the lining in his trouser pocket. It was the tiny version, barely the size of a lipstick and designed for covert operations. It might have been good for only a few shots, but one was enough to put the target to sleep until he could be whisked back to the spaceport.

  “I’m going to check out Douglass’s room,” Tiffin whispered. “Radio silence for a while.”

  “Understood, sir,” replied Mokk.

  Tiffin made his way further along the corridor, striding confidently, avoiding the gazes of passing staff without appearing to avoid them. He was good at being ignored. He’d been doing it all his life.

  As he turned the corner onto Douglass’s corridor, he spotted someone there who didn’t seem to fit in: a large fellow, well-dressed but brutish-looking with a scar over one eye. The man was busy in conversation with a young nurse, but he took a brief moment to glance at the Inspector.

  Tiffin wondered who the man could be. A visitor? Unlikely. It wasn’t visiting time. Security guard? No, he wasn’t in uniform. A private guard? Perhaps. He certainly had the size and the swagger. Colin had attained some kind of vague celebrity status on Procya, so it wasn’t beyond the realms of probability they’d put a guard on him.

  He hesitated instinctively before remembering his discipline. Look natural! Stopping and turning back right now was an option, but that would have looked suspicious. He had to keep going, not giving the guard a second glance.

  And so he soldiered on. As he approached them, Tiffin could tell the stranger and the giggling nurse were deep in shallow conversation. From the looks of things, Tiffin wasn’t the only one fixated on his prey. He whistled a little tune and kept his eyes fixed on the ground as he passed the lovebirds. Neither of them paid him any heed.

  Huh! Some guard.

  The Inspector finally came to the right door. On the wall beside it hung a small board with ‘Douglass’ written on it. Back down the corridor, the would-be lovers were still busy chatting.

  Tiffin took a deep breath, pushed the door release button, and stepped into the room.

  It was empty.

  Well, it wasn’t empty empty. It contained everything a typical hospital room would—bed, closet, table, a general air of despondency—and it was still occupied, judging from the rumpled bedclothes and the remains of a meal sitting on the table. But there was nobody here. That, along with the guard outside, put an end to any notion of a quick and easy seizure.

  Still, this gave him the opportunity to execute another part of his plan. He reached into a pocket and brought out a small, round case. It fit easily into the palm of his hand, but it contained a very sophisticated and very expensive bugging device. He opened the case.

  It was empty.

  And this time, ‘empty’ meant empty. Totally, spotlessly empty.

  His stomach sank.

  “Mokk,” he said. “Do you hear me?”

  “Right here, sir,” came Mokk’s voice.

  “Where’s the bug?”

  “Sir?”

  “The bug. The one in the small, round case. You remember the case? I asked you to hand it to me earlier, because it had the bug in it.”

  “I remember the little case, sir,” replied Mokk. “But you said that it was for the bug…”

  “Yes.”

  “… meaning that you hadn’t put the bug inside it yet.”

  “No, the bug had always been inside it.”

  “But it was empty when I checked it.”

  “You opened the case?” Tiffin’s stomach, already sunk, now threatened to fall out of his body altogether via the nearest available orifice. “And it was empty?”

  “Yeah. Well, actually, there was a hair in it, so I cleaned it out, but there was nothing else.”

  Fury spread through Tiffin’s body like a petrol fire igniting. He clenched his fists tightly together and briefly daydreamed about pounding those fists repeatedly into Mokk’s gormless face.

  “The hair strand was the bug!” he screamed. “The bug is disguised as a strand of hair!”

  “Ah,” said Mokk. “I didn’t realise that.”

  Tiffin took a deep breath and remembered his training, the three C’s: keep calm, composed and clear-headed, no matter what problems arise. But then another c-word popped into his head.

  “You empty-headed, flat-footed, shit-brained cretin!” Tiffin began to pace the room. “What am I going to
do now? How am I going to listen in on the targets? I don’t have another bug we can use! How can we hear what’s going on in this roo—”

  Tiffin stopped. The solution was staring him in the face… or rather, in the ear.

  He threw up his hands. “How can we hear what’s happening in this room. The earpiece. It’s so obvious!”

  “Sir?”

  “My earpiece has a microphone in it.”

  Mokk coughed. “You’re going to have to run that one by me once more, sir.”

  Tiffin ground his teeth and made a mental note to submit Mokk for remedial training as soon as they returned to Erd. “Just shut up for a moment.”

  He pondered. He could hide the earpiece in the room, keep the channel open, and listen in that way. However, it was too big simply to be left out in the open.

  He glanced around the room for a suitable hiding place. Under the bed? No, they probably swept up every day. Inside the closet? No, the doors would probably muffle the voices. On top of the closet? Yes, that was more like it. It would be nicely out of sight up there. He just hoped the microphone was sensitive enough to pick up all the sounds in the room.

  “All right,” said Tiffin, walking over to the closet. “I’m going to take out my earpiece right now then return to base.”

  “Very good, sir,” said Mokk.

  “Whereupon—and unless I undergo a very radical shift in my mood in the meantime—I’m going to beat you to death with your own boots.”

  “Very good, sir,” Mokk repeated, albeit much less enthusiastically.

  Tiffin plucked out the earpiece, reached up and gently placed it atop the closet.

  Just as he satisfied himself that it wasn’t visible, he heard the door to the room slide open. He spun round to find two people entering, a woman and a man. Neither was an Abraman.

  The man—if ‘man’ was indeed the correct term—was thin and pasty-skinned with slick, dark hair, and an air of quiet poise about him. As out-of-place as he appeared, the woman had ‘foreign’ written all over her. On a planet where women wore long garments of the most conservative elegance, this one dressed like an explorer who’d just returned from the jungle. Whereas an Abraman lady would habitually keep her head down and her shoulders forward, this one held her shoulders back and looked you dead in the eye. Tiffin, who possessed a fine nose for sniffing out the unconscious signals from people, found they reeked of suspicion.

  She didn’t hesitate getting to the point.

  “Who are you?” she barked in a tone registering somewhere between unfriendly and belligerent.

  Tiffin was intrigued. Was this Colin’s friend from the Alliance? He thought back to the other name he’d spied on the spaceport roster.

  “Ah, hello,” he replied, keeping his own tone courteous. He jumped into his cover story. “I’m Doctor Tiffin. You must be Ms. Jak?”

  “Doctor Jak,” she said, coming further into the room. The man behind her followed. “Tyresa Jak.”

  “Very gratified to meet you,” greeted Tiffin. Then he looked at her companion.

  She nodded to the man behind her. “This is my andr— my husband, Ade.”

  The husband bowed his head in greeting.

  Yeah right, thought Tiffin. Not unless she’d married an appliance, although that kind of thing was probably permitted in the Alliance. The backward dolts on Procya might not be able to spot it, but he knew an android when he saw one.

  “Is there something you need in here?” asked the woman.

  “Nothing important,” replied Tiffin. “Just doing my rounds. I was going to put a few routine questions to Mister Douglass, but I see he’s stepped out for the moment.”

  “Ah,” she said, “so you must be the duty doctor?”

  Tiffin decided to play along. “That’s right. Would you happen to know where Mister Douglass is right now?”

  “You should know. You’re on duty.”

  “Yes, that’s right…” Tiffin’s undercover training swooped into action. He quickly conjured up an excuse in his mind. Nothing too elaborate. Jak didn’t look too difficult to fool. “… but, as you might observe, I don’t have my tablet with me. I put the damned thing down somewhere, and now I’m unable to find it. So, concerning Mister Douglass—”

  “I thought Doctor Peamud was on duty today.”

  “He was.” This wasn’t going quite as smoothly as he’d hoped. She liked to question things, this one. “He was briefly called away on an emergency. I stepped in at short notice.”

  Just then, she did something strange. She smiled. It wasn’t a big smile, but it was a knowing one. The kind of smile that could mean things were either about to get really good, or really bad.

  “It’s a funny name, isn’t it?” she finally said. “Peamud.”

  He laughed politely. “It is rather.”

  She took a step forward. For someone like Tiffin, who treasured his personal space, she had become uncomfortably close.

  “Did you know,” she said, still smiling, “that ‘Peamud’ is an anagram of ‘made up’?”

  “Oh, really?” He laughed again, feigning interest.

  Then he stopped laughing. Made up. The name was made up. There was no Doctor Peamud. As the smile dropped from his face, she nodded.

  “That’s right,” she said. Now it was her turn to stop smiling. “Now tell me: who are you really?”

  Tiffin desperately sought another excuse. Unfortunately, his training seemed to have suddenly deserted him. It couldn’t have been intimidation, of course not. His hand-to-hand combat skills were more than sufficient to deal with her. Admittedly, she was rather tall. And, even below those layers of clothing, it was clear she was fit and strong. Other men might find her intimidating, but not him. He stood his ground.

  He had no choice. His back was pressed right up against the closet.

  He hoped that, if he just started talking, his improvisation skills would spontaneously come to his rescue. “Now… Ms. Jak… I…”

  “Doctor Jak.”

  “Doctor Jak, yes, Doctor Jak. Now listen… please… I… I really think that we… started on the wrong foot—”

  “Actually, don’t bother,” she said. “I know who you are.”

  That couldn’t be true, could it? Was it so obvious? Or had his cover been blown somehow? Slowly, he drew up his hand, feeling the stun gun in his pocket.

  “You do?” he said.

  “Yeah.” She pointed at the window. “You’re one of these crazy, messiah-seeking spectators.”

  Tiffin followed her hand and looked through the glass. He saw a group of about thirty or so Abramans outside, standing around on the grass. He didn’t know who they were, but right now, he didn’t care. Being mistaken for one of them was preferable to having his cover blown. He looked back at Tyresa Jak.

  “You got me,” he said in a withered voice of resignation. His acting skills were good, even if he said so himself.

  “I thought so,” she said.

  In one swift movement, she grabbed his arm and twisted it around his back. His wrist, still sore from the encounter with the technician, erupted in pain. She may have been fast, but she could count her lucky stars that Tiffin had decided to restrain his razor-sharp, police-trained reflexes.

  “Out you go!” she said, frog-marching him to the open door.

  “Do you require assistance, ma’am?” asked the ‘husband.’

  “No thanks, darling,” she replied. “I got this one.”

  At the doorway, she gave Tiffin a shove, and he stumbled into the corridor.

  “Get this through your head,” she yelled. “He’s not your messiah, he’s a very poorly boy! Go tell the rest of your friends outside to leave Colin alone and go home, all of you!”

  Tiffin scuttled off down the corridor, gripping his wrist.

  Let her have her way, for now, he thought. He’d done what he came to do.

  32

  Brock T. Hanson Jr loved to write articles.

  For him, the pleasure lay in the pro
cess. That’s why he dictated them all. It gave him immense satisfaction to pontificate loudly on every subject imaginable and have his words appear before him. As an added bonus, dictating by himself to a computer meant no meddlesome questions and suggestions from an audience.

  “… and I feel secure in pronouncing,” he said, speaking as though preaching to a prayer meeting despite being alone in his office, “that this recent election is a turning point in the illustrious history of our movement.”

  As he spoke, his words appeared on a giant screen that filled almost an entire wall of his office. Each word materialised in three-inch-high letters, displayed in a gorgeously elaborate typeface.

  He went on. “I feel confident the job of pushing for…” He paused. “No, erase that.”

  The last sentence vanished from the wall.

  “I feel confident the burden of pushing for cultural change, a burden this society has gladly shouldered with all the strength given us by the Creator (Grant Unto Him Glory), will now be taken up by the victors of that election, who will begin implementing the reforms demanded by this society.” He smiled and muttered to himself, “If they know what’s good for them.”

  He watched as the words “if they know what’s good for them” appeared on-screen.

  “No, no,” he said hurriedly. “Erase last sentence.”

  The computer duly obliged, and the indiscreet remark disappeared.

  Pleased with the article, he decided to take a short break from the fatiguing task of crafting exalted speeches. He took a careful sip from his china cup and soaked in his surroundings. Hanson liked his office and had spent years carefully building it up its décor: the shagpile carpet you could lose a cat in, the intricately decorated desk made of the finest dark mahogany, intimidating carvings of the rocktoothed eagle, as well as endless rows of photos featuring Hanson shaking hands with famous people.

  And it had all been paid for out of the generous contributions from the kind and loyal members of his society.

  The True Origin Society.

  He eased back in his leather chair and rested his feet upon the huge desk before him. It was a hard life being the controlling genius behind a revolutionary movement.