“Well, who’s next?”
The secretary had crossed the deck to study the phone in person. He turned about. “The agenda’s been modified, sir. Direct call, Priority Two.”
“Hum. Hum-hum.” Van Rijn scratched the pelt that carpeted his chest, set down his beer, reached for a sandwich and engulfed it. “Who we got in these parts now, authoritied for using Priority Two?” He swallowed, choked, and cleared his throat with another half-liter draught. But thereafter he sat quite still, cigar to lips, squinting through the smoke, and said with no fuss whatsoever: “Put them on.”
The screen flickered. Transmission was less than perfect, when a scrambled beam must leave a moving spaceship, punch through the atmosphere, and stay locked on the solitary station that could unscramble and relay. Van Rijn identified the control cabin of his pioneer vessel Muddlin’ Through, Chee Lan in the foreground and Adzel behind her. “You got problems?” he greeted mildly.
The pause was slight but noticeable, while electromagnetic radiation traversed the distance between. “I believe we do,” Adzel said. Interference hissed around his words.
“And we cannot initiate corrective measures. I would give much for those machines and flunkies that surround you to have allowed us a direct contact before today.”
“I’ll talk,” Chee said. “You’d blither for an hour.” To van Rijn: “Sir, you’ll remember we told you, when reporting on Earth, that we’d proceed to Lunograd and look in on Serendipity, Inc.” She described Falkayn’s visit there and subsequently to the castle. “That was two weeks ago. He hasn’t come back yet. One call arrived after three standard days. Not a real talk—a message sent while he knew we’d be asleep. We kept the record, of course. He said not to worry; he was on to what might be the most promising lead of his career, and he might be quite some time following it up. We needn’t stay on Luna, he could take a shuttleboat to Earth.” Her fur stood out, a wild aureole around her countenance. “It wasn’t his style. We had voice and somatic analysis done at a detective agency, using several animations of him from different sources. It’s Falkayn, beyond reasonable doubt. But it’s not his style.”
“Playback,” van Rijn ordered. “Now. Before you go on.” He watched unblinkingly, as the blond young man spoke his piece and signed off. “By damn, you have right, Chee Lan. He should at least grin and ask you give his love to three or four girls.”
“We’ve been pestered by one, for certain,” the Cynthian declared. “A spy set on him, who found she couldn’t cope with his technique or whatever the deuce he’s got. Last call, she actually admitted she’d been on a job, and blubbered she was sorry and she’d never, never, never—You can reconstruct the sequence.”
“Play her anyhow.” Veronica wept. “Ja, a bouncy wench there. Maybe I interview her personal, ho-ho! Somebody got to. Such a chance to get a look inside whoever hired her!” Van Rijn sobered. “What happened next?”
“We fretted,” Chee said. “At last even this big lard statue of a saint here decided that enough was too furious much. We marched into the SI office itself and said if we didn’t get a more satisfactory explanation, from Dave himself, we’d start disassembling their computers—with a pipe wrench. They quacked about the covenant, not to mention the civil police, but in the end they promised he’d phone us.” Grimly: “He did. Here’s the record.”
The conversation was long. Chee yelled, Adzel expostulated, Falkayn stayed deadpan and unshakable.
I am sorry. You may never guess how sorry I am, old friends. But nobody gets a choice about how the lightning’s going to strike him. Thea’s my woman, and there’s an end on the matter.
“. . . We’ll probably go a-roving after we get married. I’ll be working for SI. But only in a technical sense. Because what we’re really after, what’s keeping me here, is something bigger, more fundamental to the whole future, than . . . No. I can’t say more. Not yet. But think about making liaison with a genuinely superior race. The race that’s been dreamed about for centuries, and never found—the Elders, the Wise Ones, the evolutionary step beyond us—
“. . . Yes!” A flicker of irritation. “Naturally SI will refund Solar S & L’s wretched payments. Maybe SI should double the sum. Because a fact that I supplied was what started our whole chain of discovery. Though what possible reward could match the service?
“. . . Good-bye. Good faring.”
Silence dwelt, under the wash of sea waves and whisper of stars. Until van Rijn shook himself, animal fashion, and said: “You took into space and called me today when I got available.”
“What else could we do?” Adzel groaned. “David may be under psychocontrol. We suspect it, Chee and I. But we have no proof. For anyone who does not know him personally, the weight of credibility is overwhelming on the opposite side, so great that I myself can reach no firm conclusion about what has really happened. More is involved than Serendipity’s established reputation. There is the entire covenant. Members of the League do not kidnap and drug each other’s agents. Not ever!”
“We did ask the Lunar police about a warrant,” Chee said. She jerked her tail at the Wodenite. “Tin Pan Buddha insisted. We were laughed at. Literally. We can’t propose a League action—strike first, argue with the law afterward. We aren’t on the Council. You are.”
“I can propose it,” van Rijn said carefully. “After a month’s wringle-wrangle, I get voted No. They won’t believe either, SI would do something so bad like that, for some sternly commercial reason.”
“I doubt if we have a month, regardless,” Chee said. “Think. Suppose Dave has been brainscrubbed. They’ll’ve done it to keep him from reporting to you what he learned from their damned machine. They’ll pump him for information and advice, too. Might as well. But he is evidence against them. Any medic can identify his condition and cure it. So as soon as possible—or as soon as necessary—they’ll get rid of the evidence. Maybe send him off in a spaceship, with his new fiancée to control him. Maybe kill him and disintegrate the body. I don’t see where Adzel and I had any alternative except to investigate as we did. Nevertheless, our investigations will probably cause SI to speed up whatever timetable it’s laid out for Captain Falkayn.”
Van Rijn smoked through an entire minute. Then: “Your ship is loaded for bear, also elephant and walrus. You could maybe blast in, you two, and snatch him?”
“Maybe,” Adzel said. “The defenses are unknown. It would be an act of piracy.”
“Unless he was a prisoner. In that case, we can curry ruffled fur afterward. I bet curried fur tastes terrible. But you turn into heroes.”
“What if he is there voluntarily?”
“You turn into pumpkins.”
“If we strike, we risk his life,” said Adzel. “Quite possibly, if he is not a prisoner, we take several innocent lives. We are less concerned with our legal status than with our shipmate. But however deep our affection for him, he is of another civilization, another species, yes, a wholly different evolution. We cannot tell whether he was in a normal state when he called us. He acted peculiarly, true. But might that have been due to the emotion known as love? Coupled, perhaps, with a sense of guilt at breaking his contract? You are human, we are not. We appeal to your judgment.”
“And mix me—old, tired, bothered, sorrowful me, that wants nothing except peace and a little, little profit—right in with the glue,” van Rijn protested.
Adzel regarded him steadily. “Yes, sir. If you authorize us to attack, you commit yourself and everything you own, for the sake of one man who may not even need help. We realize that.”
Van Rijn drew on his cigar till the end glowed volcanic. He pitched it aside. “Hokay,” he growled. “Is a flousy boss does not stand by his people. We plan a raid, us, ha?” He tossed off his remaining beer and threw the tankard to the deck. “By damn,” he bellowed, “I wish I was going along!”
TO BE CONTINUED
Second of Four Parts. Satan’s World was impossible;
a world near absolute zero, orbit
ing less than 100 megamiles
from a blue-white super-giant star.
Which was why it was worth trillions to its possessor—
and to the alien race trying to grab it!
Illustrated by Kelly Freas
SYNOPSIS
The Polesotechnic League is theoretically just a mutual-benefit organization of interstellar companies. In practice—given the scale of its operation and the spread of laissez-faire economics—it represents a kind of super-feudalism. Its members act like nearly independent barons, dealing with entire governments on the planets, sometimes making or breaking them, dominating even the powerful nations of the Solar Commonwealth. But the League has its own problems and limitations. Space is too huge; there are too many worlds. Several score light-years from Sol begin those regions which are almost entirely unexplored. Closer in, exploration and development are still incomplete. The sheer volume of data makes it impossible to understand the total situation at any given time, or to lay rational plans for the future.
A new enterprise, Serendipity, Inc., offers a partial solution. Its computers, advanced in this respect beyond any other known machines, do more than collect and correlate information. They search their memory banks along association chains beginning with a particular client or problem, somewhat as a living brain does but with vastly greater scope. Thus many a datum, recorded but then forgotten, is found to be useful to someone. Naturally, the highly competitive merchant princes of the League are suspicious at first of an outfit which sets up to buy and sell information. But Serendipity soon proves that it favors no one, keeps the secrets entrusted to it, and renders an invaluable service. Over the years, it grows immensely. This despite the fact that the six founder-partners, though human, are of unknown background and keep strictly to themselves. After all, Technic civilization has a high regard for privacy, and eccentrics are common.
David Falkayn, born on the autonomous colony planet Hermes, takes a vacation in the Solar System. While there, he decides to visit Serendipity’s office in Lunograd on the Moon, and see if it can turn up anything for him. He is a trade pioneer for Nicholas van Rijn’s Solar Spice & Liquors Company. His job is to discover new sources and new markets in space, which can then be quietly exploited before the competition learns about them. But through various exploits, he has become somewhat prominent. A girl who calls herself Veronica has latched onto him. He can tell that she is a commercial spy, out to learn what she can about van Rijn’s operations so that the rivals of the latter can get the jump on him. Such attempts are taken for granted, along with bribery, blackmail, burglary, and much else. Falkayn isn’t worried. Competition is not literally cutthroat; it is regulated by the covenant of the League so as to protect the psychobiological integrity of the individual, hence ruling out procedures like murder, kidnapping, and brainscrub. Enjoying Veronica’s company, Falkayn simply jollies her along, and leaves her behind when he goes to Serendipity, Inc.
There he talks to Thea Beldaniel, one of the owners. She leads him to an isolation room where he consults a computer. The machine associates him with his discovery, some years ago, of planets freakishly captured by a blue giant star. No other case has ever been found. But nonhuman explorers did come upon one analogous oddity. A sunless “rogue” planet is approaching the B-type star Beta Crucis, some two hundred light-years hence. It will pass by in a tight hyperbolic orbit and recede into space. The explorers saw no significance in this cosmic accident, and their report never reached the Solar System until the ceaseless information-gathering activity of SI chanced to net it. Even then, the machine did not “think” of the matter until Falkayn’s presence “reminded” it. Now it suggests that here may be the greatest bonanza in galactic history. Absolute secrecy should be preserved. Falkayn agrees.
Emerging, he finds Thea Beldaniel friendlier than before. She invites him to visit her and her partners in their Lunar Alpine castle, to discuss a mutually profitable idea. Since no one but nonhuman guards and servants has ever been there before, and since the cenobitical owners of SI may change their minds at any moment, Falkayn leaps at the opportunity to learn something more about their by now key operation. He postpones doing anything about the rogue planet and goes straight from Lunograd, stopping only to notify the other members of his trade team.
These are nonhuman themselves: the small, quick, short-tempered Cynthian xenobiologist Chee Lan, and the gigantic, placid, dragonlike planetologist Adzel from Woden. They fret a little at the delay, but not too much. Veronica frets more, since Falkayn has stood her up; her interest in him has become personal rather than professional.
At the castle, Falkayn meets three other SI stockholders: Kim Yoon-Kun, Anastasia Herrera, and the wife of Hugh Latimer. Latimer himself, and Thea Beldaniel’s sister, are absent “on business.” Though his hosts try to prevent it, he sees the lift-off of an interstellar ship that he is certain contains those two. It becomes plain that he was invited here simply to get him out of the way while something else happens. Thea tries to allay his suspicions with a story about the background of her group—their shipwreck as children, their adoption by kindly nonhumans who want to stay outside of Technic civilization but who did send them back with a grubstake of rare metals and later supplied them with computer parts. This only makes Falkayn warier. When he declares that he will leave, he is taken prisoner.
Chee Lan and Adzel try repeatedly to call him in the following days. At last they are granted an audiovisual contact. Falkayn tells them he is quitting Solar S & L, joining SI, and marrying Thea. His comrades are convinced that he has been made a puppet by brainscrub techniques. Getting no satisfaction from the. Lunar police—who much favor well-behaved SI over the rowdy remainder of the League—they appeal to Nicholas van Rijn. He agrees that Falkayn probably is controlled. Formal action will take too long to organize. A rescue mission, therefore, will be extremely illegal. Van Rijn can stall off the authorities for a while. But Chee and Adzel must risk their own lives and liberty to get their friend back.
PART 2
VII
Adzel paused at the air lock. “You will be careful, won’t you?” he asked.
Chee bristled. “You’re the one to worry about, running around without a keeper. Watch yourself, you oversized clatterbrain.” She blinked. “Rats and roaches! Something in my eyes. Get started—out of my way.”
Adzel closed his faceplate. Encased in space armor, he could just fit inside the lock. He must wait until he had cycled through before securing his equipment on his back. It included a small, swivel-mounted automatic cannon.
Muddlin’ Through glided from him, low above soaring, jagged desolation. Mottled paint made her hard to see against that patchwork of blinding noon and ink-black shadow. When past the horizon, she climbed.
Adzel stayed patiently put until the seething in his radio earplugs was broken by the Cynthian’s voice: “Hello, do you read me?”
“Like a primer,” he said. Echoes filled his helmet. He was aware of the mass he carried, protective but heavy; of the smells, machine and organic, already accumulating; of temperature that began to mount and prickle him under the scales.
“Good. This beam’s locked onto you, then. I’m stabilized in position, about a hundred and fifty kilometers up. No radar has fingered me yet. Maybe none will. All check, sir?”
“Ja.” Van Rijn’s words, relayed from a hired maser in Lunograd, sounded less distinct. “I have talked with the police chief here and he is not suspecting. I got my boys set to start a fracas that will make distractions. I got a judge ready to hand out injunctions if I tell him. But he is not a very high judge, even if he is expensive like Beluga caviar, so he can’t make long stalls either. Let the Lunar Federal police mix in this affair and we got troubles. Ed Garver would sell the soul he hasn’t got to jail us. You better be quick like kissing a viper. Now I go aboard my own boat, my friends, and light candles for you in the shrine there, to St. Dismas, and St. Nicholas, and especial to St. George, by damn.”
Adzel cou
ldn’t help remarking, “In my studies of Terrestrial culture, I have encountered mention of that latter personage. But did not the Church itself, as far back as the twentieth century, decide he was mythical?”
“Bah,” said van Rijn loftily. “They got no faith. I need a good fighting saint, who says God can’t improve the past and make me one?”
Then there was no time, or breath, or thought for anything except speed.
Adzel could have gone quicker and easier on a grav sled or some such vehicle. But the radiations would have given him away. Afoot, he could come much nearer before detection was certain. He bounded up the Alpine slopes, over razor-back ridges, down into ravines and out their other sides, around crater walls and crags. His heart slugged, his lungs strained, in deep steady rhythm. He used the forward tendency of his mass—great inertia at low weight—and the natural pendulum-periods of his legs, to drive himself. Sometimes he overleaped obstacles, soaring in an arc and landing with an impact that beat through his bones. He kept to the shade wherever possible. But pitilessly, at each exposure to sunlight, heat mounted within his camouflaged armor faster than his minimal cooling system could shed it. Glare filters did not entirely protect his eyes from the raw sun-dazzle. No human could have done what he did—hardly anyone, indeed, of any race, except the children of a fiercer star than Sol and a vaster planet than Earth.
Twice he crouched where he could and let a patrol boat slip overhead. After an hour, he wormed his way from shadow to shadow, evading a watchpost whose radar and guns stood skeletal against the sky. And he won to the final peak unheralded.
The castle loomed at the end of an upward road, black witch-hatted towers above battlemented walls. With no further chance of concealment, Adzel started openly along the path. For a moment, the spatial silence pressed in so huge that it well-nigh smothered pulse, breath, air pump, foot thuds. Then: “Who goes there? Halt!” on the standard band.
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