Masters of Everon

by Gordon R. Dickson

  "What's going on here?" Jef asked.

  The man stopped with the attaché case half open.

  "Who—who're you?" he demanded, with the Everon dialectical halt in his voice very evident. He closed the case quickly and went on before Jef could answer. "I'm Doctor Chavel. What're you doing here?"

  "This is my room," said Jef. "What are you doing here?"

  "I—Constable Armage asked me to look at your maolot—"

  "You're a veterinarian?"

  "I am. Avery—the Constable wanted to be sure that beast hadn't brought in any animal infections or diseases that might affect our native stock. You're quite lucky the Constable called me in like this. Otherwise your maolot would have had to have been impounded and taken down to the local menagerie house for examination when the schedule permitted—a wait of at least three weeks—"

  "Mikey doesn't have any diseases," Jef said. "There's a veterinarian's certificate from Earth in my papers. The constable must have seen that."

  "If he did, he didn't mention it to me. Now—" Chavel had been opening his attaché case as he talked. Abruptly he produced a small, green, pressure syringe. "There's no need to make a fuss about this. I'll just give your beast a prophylactic injection—"

  "You're not giving Mikey anything," said Jef. "He doesn't need a prophylactic injection."

  "I'd advise you not to stop me." Chavel turned toward Mikey.

  "I'd advise you not to try it!" said Jef. "Mikey!"

  The maolot was suddenly on his feet at the new sound in Jef's voice. His blind head swung to aim its muzzle at Chavel, and a drone began to issue from his throat. Chavel was pale.

  "If—if I must use a tranquilizer gun—"

  "Don't take it out of your case," said Jef. "I can get to you long before you could get it out and aimed. So can Mikey."

  "This is—outrageous." Chavel backed away toward a nearby table on which a desk phone sat. Still keeping Mikey in view, he reached down and punched it on. "Constable Armage! Avery—"

  The screen did not light up. But after a second Armage's voice came from it.

  "Well?"

  "I—there's someone here that won't let me do my job. The beast's owner, I think..."

  "I'll be right up." The phone fell silent.

  "Now you'll see," said Chavel thinly to Jef.

  Jef's mind spun; but no helpful ideas were thrown up. He was bluffing about letting Mikey attack the veterinarian; that would be a sure way to get the maolot killed, eventually if not immediately. Chavel did not seem to see through him. But the back of Jef's head was cold with the feeling that Armage would.

  He was still trying to think of something when the door to the room slid aside and the big Constable stepped in.

  "What's the matter, Doctor?" he said almost gently, ignoring Jef.

  "This gentleman refuses to let me give his maolot a prophylactic shot."

  "Oh?" Armage turned at that, and smiled at Jef. "It's for your animal's own good, you know."

  "I don't believe it," said Jef.

  "Nor indeed," said the voice of Martin, "do I."

  The door was opening once more; and this time it was Martin who stepped into the room.

  "There you are, Jef," he said. "First you disappear and then our host here does likewise. I began to feel lost with not one familiar face about me. And now I hear that our Mikey must be given some medication for his own good. But you know, I wonder. How much do we really know about maolot metabolism? Mightn't this medication have some unwished for, even fatal side effects?"

  "Sir!" said Chavel stiffly. "We're quite familiar with maolots here on Everon—on their native world."

  "To be sure. But you see, this isn't an Everon maolot. He's grown up on Earth, and perhaps that makes a difference. Who can tell for sure? But, in any case my dear Doctor—it is Doctor, isn't it—you haven't answered my question. I asked if it wasn't possible that such a medication might not turn out to have some unforeseen, even fatal, side effects."

  "Ah—" said Chavel, and stopped. He threw a glance at Armage; but Armage merely raised his eyebrows interestedly and said nothing. "Ah, naturally, in choosing a drug we don't anticipate—"

  "Yes," said Martin softly, "or no, Doctor?"

  "Who knows?" cried Chavel furiously. "We don't even understand all the differences in human beings. How can I give you a guarantee this maolot might not have some individual, farfetched, bad reaction—"

  "Exactly," said Martin. "And, seeing that's so, and the maolot being important, as I've mentioned to the Constable here, perhaps it's best that no such thing be given Mikey. Wouldn't you say so, Constable?"

  He looked at Armage.

  "I quite agree," said Armage, and smiled a small cold smile at Chavel. "We don't want to take any risks with this valuable beast, Doctor."

  "All—right!" Chavel was getting his attaché case closed again, but his fingers fumbled and made a clumsy job of it. When the closure was finally made, he nodded abruptly to them all.

  "Good evening..."

  He was gone before the sound of his voice had died on the ear. "And now, back down to the dinner?" Martin said to Armage. "By all means," said the Constable.

  Armage led the way out of the room. Behind the big man's back Martin paused to wink at Jef, before he followed. Jef turned to go too, but Mikey made a small, questioning, humming sound deep in his throat. Turning back, Jef saw the maolot standing in the center of the room, his head seeking blindly from side to side. A shivering motion trembled the massive shoulders.

  "It's all right," said Jef. He came back to Mikey and put his hand on the maolot's head. "I'm not going. I'll stay here with you."

  Mikey shoved his blunt muzzle gratefully against Jef, almost knocking him over. Jef sat down on a chair and let the maolot drop his head on one knee.

  "They can send me up a sandwich—I hope," said Jef.

  It turned out that something more than a sandwich could be sent up. Tibur rolled in a wheeled table with the same dinner the rest would be sitting down to below in about half an hour.

  Jef ate, and fed Mikey with the wisent meat Tibur had provided for the maolot. Afterwards, however, sitting listening to the faint sound of voices filtering up from the dining room on the floor below, he found himself back mulling an old problem. Once more Martin had come to the rescue, this time with a glib explanation of Jef's reason for being here with the maolot.

  It was not that these efforts of Martin's were not welcome. It was just that they had become too frequent to be comfortable and the unanswered question of why he should exercise himself in this way was becoming a clamor in the back of Jef's mind. If the reason was a good or honest one, why had Martin been so shy about giving it, when Jef had asked? A deep-felt suspicion that there was something less than right about Martin had been solidifying in Jef's mind for some time now.

  If only there was some way he could find out more about the man. Jef got up and paced the floor of the room, causing Mikey to lift his head and follow the sound of Jef's movements with it.

  "I'll be right back," Jef said to the maolot after a few minutes. "I'm just going to look next door."

  He stepped out the door of his own room, locking it behind him, and walked to the door of Martin's suite. But, as he had expected, it was also firmly locked. When he put his hand on the door panel and pushed on it, it did not open—but it did move slightly, making a clunking sound.

  Jef lifted his hand away, then pushed again. Once more there was the sound. He tried pushing this way several times, and found that not merely the door, but the frame and door moved slightly when he pushed on it. A little further investigation gave the reason. For all of its colonial impressiveness, Armage's house had been put together either hastily or carelessly. The door was a unit taken from some space-going cargo vessel. But it had evidently been set in a frame in the wall of the corridor that had been cut just a little too large.

  Jef checked the amount of looseness. The door could be lifted almost enough to free the latch-bar from its
socket in the frame. But not quite. It held just enough to keep him barred from Martin's room. For a second, as he stood staring at the door, he was struck with the incongruity of his sense of outrage that some inanimate object should be frustrating his attempt to make an unlawful entry. Then common sense was put aside. He must get in, somehow.

  He could lift the door, using the very tips of his fingers—which were all that could get a purchase on the barely raised ornamental molding that crossed the door panel halfway up. But the minute he lifted it more than a centimeter, the angle of his fingertips became such that his hold slipped. If he could somehow lift, let go and grab for the handhold he had just made available by lifting the bottom edge of frame and door clear of the floor...

  He tried. It was impossible. Frustration increased. It was not that the door was too heavy to lift. It was the fact that he could not get a good grip on it.

  He was about to give up, when inspiration struck. He went back to open the door of his own room and call Mikey out. He lifted the door, explaining to Mikey all the while.

  "... See Mikey? If you can get your claws under the bottom edge of the door when I lift it. Here, let me have your paw. Like this—no, I don't want to play—"

  Mikey had flopped down on his side, when Jef had taken one of his paws and gently tried to turn it over.

  "All right, then lie there. And when I lift the door, you slide your claws—and your whole paw, if you can, underneath the door and lift. Try it, now, Mikey."

  Jef tried lifting the door several times. Mikey lay watching him, obviously puzzled. The maolot was extremely perceptive and very bright; but he had never shown an ability to respond to words directly, the way a dog or some trained Earth animal might. Eventually, he usually achieved a remarkable understanding of what Jef would try to tell him; but he managed this by some method, or in some terms, that Jef had never been able to identify certainly, although emotion and empathy clearly had a great deal to do with what way he did. In this case the maolot seemed aware, after the first moment, that Jef was not playing at all but engaged in some serious attempt. Clearly, however, Mikey was having difficulty understanding exactly what was wanted.

  Jef went on talking and trying to lift the door. He was conscious of being studied—but he had gotten used to Mikey's doing that. The studying process was not something anyone else would have been able to recognize, but Jef had learned to read the almost invisible signals from the maolot that announced it. He continued, therefore; and after a few minutes he was rewarded.

  Mikey reached out with one paw, as Jef lifted the door for the fifth time, and placed the pads of that paw, not into the crack Jef had produced, but flat against the panel of the door. Friction alone was the bond between his paw and the door-panel, but with the powerful muscles of his foreleg behind it, he managed to hold the door up.

  "Good!" said Jef energetically. He reached down, hooked his own fingers into the space between the door's bottom edge and the floor, which Mikey's pressure was keeping open, and lifted. With a small squeak, followed by a click of the latch-bar coming free from its socket, the door was unlocked.

  "All right, Mikey, let it down."

  Mikey took his paw away and Jef himself let go. The door dropped back down on to the carpeting beneath it, that ran from the hallway into Martin's room. Jef opened the door and a second later was inside himself, followed by Mikey.

  Martin was evidently a light traveler. The sitting room of the suite showed nothing of his. The bedroom held a single piece of luggage, a reinforced suitcase with a few pieces of all-purpose clothing and a toiletries bag. Jef was beginning to reclose the luggage, preparatory to leaving the room, when Mikey's head pushed past his elbow and nosed the inside front cover of the suitcase top.

  "What is it, Mikey?" Jef's fingers probed the corner but could feel nothing there but the hard plate anchoring the suitcase's reinforcing metal inner frame. Mikey's paw unexpectedly pushed in beside his fingers and a claw hooked on the covering fabric.

  "Look out, Mikey. You'll tear—" But the fabric was not tearing so much as peeling back from an invisible line dividing the fabric at the point where the back of the lid met the edge at a ninety-degree angle. Revealed was the dull metal of the plate—with something of a dark red color showing beneath it.

  Jef took hold of the edge of dark red and pulled. An identification folder slid out.

  "That's his papers, Mikey," said Jef. "But I thought the Constable took them, along with the papers of all the rest of us who were red-flagged. Maybe Armage gave them back?"

  Jef pulled the papers out of the folder. They were not the papers of a John Smith of the Ecolog Corps. They showed a picture of Martin, but identified him as Martin Curragh, a mining engineer on loan from an Earth-based corporation, to Seagirt—a newly planted world of a solar system ten light years from this one containing Comofors. Jef stared at the pages in his hands. If Martin was indeed a John Smith, it stood to reason that he would have a number of cover identifications. But while the John Smith papers Jef had seen Martin hand over to Armage had been spuriously new and clean, these identification papers had obviously been unfolded, refolded, and handled a number of times.

  Jef stood there, holding the Martin Curragh identification. All identifications were readily checkable within a few weeks, merely by sending a query back to the identifying authority on Earth who had issued them, since all such papers originated on Earth. In fact the time for the query to make the round trip by spaceship was the smaller part of the time necessary to check an identification. The delay, if any, came from the bureaucratic process of comparing it with the records back on Earth.

  False identification was therefore a waste of time; it was so easily checkable, and any identification was checked frequently. In the normal course of things any papers, except perhaps those of a John Smith, would be checked. But who could imagine anyone brazen enough to pretend to be a John Smith?

  Possibly just such a strange and verbally quick character as Martin.

  It was all conjecture on his part, Jef thought, standing there and weighing the Martin Curragh identification in his hand. But in spite of that self-caution, he was aware of a sinking feeling that Martin was indeed Martin Curragh, only, and no John Smith at all.

  Unfortunately, his strange liking for the man still persisted. He could have wished to turn up any evidence but this, which showed Martin to be at least an impostor, and almost certainly involved in some deeper illegality. All at once, like the single added piece of a jigsaw puzzle that suddenly reveals the whole pattern of the puzzle, Martin's motives in aiding Mikey and himself fitted all too well with another set of observations and deductions.

  Something rotten was clearly operating undercover here on Everon. That much was obvious in the unusual actions of the Constable, in the gathering downstairs where everyone was flaunting the latest Earth fashions, and in the construction as well as the appearance of this house. The whole situation reeked of special interests and the possibility of corruption in the governing areas of this newly planted world. If Martin was himself on the wrong side of the law it made only too good sense that he should be here to cut himself a slice of whatever unorthodox profits were available.

  Seen from that angle, his help to Jef and Mikey made an entirely different sort of sense. It could well be that it was not a case of his seeing that they needed him, but of his needing them to help establish his position. Jef's papers were beyond question. Martin's establishing himself as a defender of the someone who was carrying such papers would support the authenticity of the John Smith image in no small way. What better method for Martin to put his authority beyond question, than to act as if it was wide enough to protect others beside himself?

  And, indeed, what in fact had Martin done for Mikey and himself? Nothing, really, but use that quick tongue of his to recommend caution and moderation to those who seemed to threaten Jef and the maolot. In no sense, at any time, had he actually invoked the powers that would have been his as a John Smith to aid t
hem directly.

  If all these things were added to his exceedingly slippery response to every question Jef had asked him, and above all, to his very unlikeliness as a John Smith—it would take a very stupid or trusting person indeed to go on believing in him. Jef did not consider himself either stupid or particularly trusting.

  Carefully he tucked the identification papers back where he had found them and pressed the lining of the suitcase back into place. The hole Mikey's claw had made was small and hardly noticeable. With luck, Jef could count on Martin not noticing it, at least, not for some time. On the other hand, when he did discover it, Jef was prepared to tell the other bluntly why he had investigated, what he had found, and what the certainty of his suspicions were.

  He closed the suitcase now and led Mikey out of the bedroom. But at the door of the suite, he found his conscience troubling him. He hesitated. After a second, however, he went on out, setting the latch so it would lock behind him, stepping through the door with Mikey and closing it quietly but firmly behind him. The latch clicked into place.

  Still he hesitated. No matter what else Martin was, no matter what his motives of self-gain or self-protection might have been in speaking up, the fact remained he had done both the maolot and Jef a great favor by doing so. And, damn it, Jef could not dislike him, in any case. It nagged at Jef that, clever as his deductions might be, they might also be somewhat lacking in charity to someone who had at least acted as a friend.

  After a moment, on impulse, Jef went back into his own room, got a notepad and wrote a brief note to Martin.

  Dear Martin:

  Mikey and I are indebted to you for what you've done for us. We'll be leaving for the upcountry and the mountains early tomorrow. But I wanted you to know that if there's anything in our power to do to help you in your turn, or repay you, let me know.

  Sincerely,

  Jef Aram Robini

  He took the note out and pushed it under the door to the suite. Coming back to his own room, he felt the peace of a settled mind. If Martin was actually involved in something either illegal or unconscionable—or both—he had been offered what help Jef could give to get him out of it. The note was not specific on the point of the help to be given; but Jef could be plain about what he would or would not do if Martin came to him for help. And if Martin never did—well, the offer had been made. Jef could now, in his conscience, stop worrying about what might happen to the other.