“Would you?” Abrams asked.
“Why—” Flandry straightened at his desk. “Hell, yes. Right now I feel as if every library in the universe should be bombed. But you need me here … I suppose.”
“I do. This is a baldpated ruse to cripple me still worse. However, you can go.”
“You mean that?” Flandry gasped.
“Sure. We’re stalled here. You just might discover something.”
“Thank you, sir!” Flandry rocketed out of his chair.
“Whoa there, son. Won’t be any vacation for you. You’ve got to play the decadent Terran nogoodnik. Mustn’t disappoint their expectations. Besides, it improves your chances. Keep your eyes and ears open, sure, but forget the rule about keeping your mouth shut. Babble. Ask questions. Foolish ones, mainly; and be damned sure not to get so inquisitive they suspect you of playing spy.”
Flandry frowned. “Uh … sir, I’d look odd if I didn’t grab after information. Thing to do, I should guess, is be clumsy and obvious about it.”
“Good. You catch on fast. I wish you were experienced, but—Nu, everybody has to start sometime, and I’m afraid you will not run into anything too big for a pup to handle. So go get yourself some experience.”
Abrams watched the boy bustle off, and a sigh gusted from him. By and large, after winking at a few things, he felt he’d have been proud to have Dominic Flandry for a son. Though not likely to hit any pay dirt, this trip would further test the ensign’s competence. If he proved out well, then probably he must be thrown to the wolves by Abrams’ own hand.
Because events could not be left on dead zero as long as Brechdan wished. The situation right now carried potentials which only a traitor would fail to exploit. Nonetheless, the way matters had developed, with the mission detained on Merseia for an indefinite period, Abrams could not exploit them as he had originally schemed. The classically neat operation he had had in mind must be turned into an explosion.
And Flandry was the fuse.
Like almost every intelligent species, the Merseians had in their past evolved thousands of languages and cultures. Finally, as in the case of Terra, one came to dominate the others and slowly absorb them into itself. But the process had not gone as far on Merseia. The laws and customs of the lands bordering the Wilwidh Ocean were still a mere overlay on some parts of the planet. Eriau was the common tongue, but there were still those who were less at home in it than in the languages they had learned from their mothers.
Perhaps this was why Lannawar Belgis had never risen above yqan—CPO, Flandry translated—and was at the moment a sort of batman to the group. He couldn’t even pronounce his rating correctly. The sound rendered by q, approximately kdh where dh = th as in “the,” gave him almost as much trouble as it did an Anglic speaker. Or perhaps he just wasn’t ambitious. For certainly he was able, as his huge fund of stories from his years in space attested. He was also a likeable old chap.
He sat relaxed with the Terran and Tachwyr the Dark, whose rank of mei answered somewhat to lieutenant j.g. Flandry was getting used to the interplay of formality and ease between officers and enlisted personnel in the Merseian service. Instead of the mutual aloofness on Terran ships, there was an intimacy which the seniors led but did not rigidly control, a sort of perpetual dance.
“Aye, foreseers,” Lannawar rumbled, “yon was a strange orb and glad I was to see the last of it. Yet somehow, I know not, ours was never a lucky ship afterward. Nothing went ever wholly right, you track me? Speaking naught against captain nor crew, I was glad for transfer to the Bedh-Ivrich. Her skipper was Runei the Wanderer, and far did he take us on explores.”
Tachwyr’s tailtip jerked and he opened his mouth. Someone was always around to keep a brake on Lannawar’s garrulousness. Flandry, who had sat half drowsing, surged to alertness. He beat Tachwyr by a millisecond in exclaiming: “Runei? The same who is now Fodaich on Starkad?”
“Why … aye, believe so, foreseer.” Eyes squinched in the tattooed face across the table. A green hand scratched the paunch where the undress tunic bulged open. “Not as I know much. Heard naught of Starkad ere they told me why you Terrans is come.”
Flandry’s mind went into such furious action that he felt each of the several levels on which it was operating. He had to grab whatever lead chance had offered him after so many fruitless days; he must fend off Tachwyr’s efforts to wrench the lead away from him, for a minute or two anyhow; at the same time, he must maintain his role. (Decadent, as Abrams had suggested, and this he had enjoyed living up to whenever his escorts took him to some place of amusement. But not fatuous; he had quickly seen that he’d get further if they respected him a little and were not bored by his company. He was naïve, wide-eyed, pathetically hoping to accomplish something for Mother Terra, simultaneously impressed by what he saw here. In wry moments he admitted to himself that this was hardly a faked character.) On lower levels of consciousness, excitement opened the sensory floodgates.
Once more he noticed the background. They sat, with a bench for him, in a marble pergola intricately arabesqued and onion-domed. Tankards of bitter ale stood before them. Merseian food and drink were nourishing to a Terran, and often tasty. They had entered this hilltop restaurant (which was also a shrine, run by the devotees of a very ancient faith) for the view and for a rest after walking around in Dalgorad. That community nestled below them, half hidden by lambent flowers and deep-green fronds, a few small modern buildings and many hollowed-out trees which had housed untold generations of a civilized society. Past the airport lay a beach of red sand. An ocean so blue it was nearly black cast breakers ashore; their booming drifted faint to Flandry on a wind that smelled cinnamon. Korych shone overhead with subtropical fierceness, but the moons Wythna and Lythyr were discernible, like ghosts.
Interior sensations: muscles drawn tight in thighs and belly, bloodbeat in the eardrums, chill in the palms. No feeling of excess weight; Merseian gravity was only a few percent above Terra’s. Merseian air, water, biochemistry, animal and plant life, were close parallels to what man had evolved among. By the standards of either world, the other was beautiful.
Which made the two races enemies. They wanted the same kind of real estate.
“So Runei himself was not concerned with the original missions to Starkad?” Flandry asked.
“No, foreseer. We surveyed beyond Rigel.” Lannawar reached for his tankard.
“I imagine, though,” Flandry prompted, “from time to time when space explorers got together, as it might be in a tavern, you’d swap yarns?”
“Aye, aye. What else? ’Cept when we was told to keep our hatches dogged about where we’d been. Not easy, foreseer, believe you me ’tis not, when you could outbrag the crew of ’em save ’tis a Naval secret.”
“You must have heard a lot about the Betelgeuse region, regardless.”
Lannawar raised his tankard. Thereby he missed noticing Tachwyr’s frown. But he did break the thread, and the officer caught the raveled end deftly.
“Are you really interested in anecdotes, Ensign? I fear that our good yqan has nothing else to give you.”
“Well, yes, Mei, I am interested in anything about the Betelgeuse sector,” Flandry said. “After all, it borders on our Empire. I’ve already served there, on Starkad, and I daresay I will again. So I’d be grateful for whatever you care to tell me.”
Lannawar came up for air. “If you yourself, Yqan, were never there, perhaps you know someone who was. I ask for no secrets, of course, only stories.”
“Khr-r-r.” Lannawar wiped foam off his chin. “Not many about. Not many what have fared yonderways. They’re either back in space, or they’ve died. Was old Ralgo Tamuar, my barracks friend in training days. He was there aplenty. How he could lie! But he retired to one of the colonies, let me see now, which one?”
“Yqan Belgis.” Tachwyr spoke quietly, with no special inflection, but Lannawar stiffened. “I think best we leave this subject. The Starkadian situation is an unfortunate one. We are tr
ying to be friends with our guest, and I hope we are succeeding, but to dwell on the dispute makes a needless obstacle.” To Flandry, with sardonicism: “I trust the ensign agrees?”
“As you wish,” the Terran mumbled.
Damn, damn, and damn to the power of hell! He’d been on a scent. He could swear he’d been. He felt nauseated with frustration.
Some draughts of ale soothed him. He’d never been idiot enough to imagine himself making any spectacular discoveries or pulling off any dazzling coups on this junket. (Well, certain daydreams, but you couldn’t really count that.) What he had obtained now was—a hint which tended to confirm that the early Merseian expeditions to Starkad had found a big and strange thing. As a result, secrecy had come down like a candlesnuffer. Officers and crews who knew, or might suspect, the truth were snatched from sight. Murdered? No, surely not. The Merseians were not the antlike monsters which Terran propaganda depicted. They’d never have come as far as this, or be as dangerous as they were, had that been the case. To shut a spacefarer’s mouth, you reassigned him or retired him to an exile which might well be comfortable and which he himself might never realize was an exile.
Even for the post of Starkadian commandant, Brechdan had been careful to pick an officer who knew nothing beforehand about his post, and could not since have been told the hidden truth. Why … aside from those exploratory personnel who no longer counted, perhaps only half a dozen beings in the universe knew!
Obviously Tachwyr didn’t. He and his fellows had simply been ordered to keep Flandry off certain topics.
The Terran believed they were honest, most of them, in their friendliness toward him and their expressed wish that today’s discord could be resolved. They were good chaps. He felt more akin to them than to many humans.
In spite of which, they served the enemy, the real enemy, Brechdan Ironrede and his Grand Council, who had put something monstrous in motion. Wind and surfbeat sounded all at once like the noise of an oncoming machine.
I haven’t found anything Abrams doesn’t already suspect, Flandry thought. But I have got for him a bit more proof. God! Four days to go before I can get back and give it to him.
His mouth still felt dry. “How about another round?” he said.
“We’re going for a ride,” Abrams said.
“Sir?” Flandry blinked.
“Little pleasure trip. Don’t you think I deserve one too? A run to Gethwyd Forest, say, that’s an unrestricted area.”
Flandry looked past his boss’s burly form, out the window to the compound. A garden robot whickered among the roses, struggling to maintain the microecology they required. A secretary on the diplomatic staff stood outside one of the residence bubbles, flirting boredly with the assistant naval attache’s wife. Beyond them, Ardaig’s modern towers shouldered brutally skyward. The afternoon was hot and quiet.
“Uh … sir—” Flandry hesitated.
“When you ‘sir’ me in private these days, you want something,” Abrams said. “Carry on.”
“Well, uh, could we invite Donna d’Io?” Beneath those crow’s-footed eyes, Flandry felt himself blush. He tried to control it, which made matters worse. “She, uh, must be rather lonesome when his Lordship and aides are out of town.”
Abrams grinned. “What, I’m not decorative enough for you? Sorry. It wouldn’t look right. Let’s go.”
Flandry stared at him. He knew the man by now. At least, he could spot when something unadmitted lurked under the skin. His spine tingled. Having reported on his trip, he’d expected a return to desk work, dullness occasionally relieved after dark. But action must be starting at last. However much he had grumbled, however sarcastic he had waxed about the glamorous life in romantic alien capitals, he wasn’t sure he liked the change.
“Very good, sir,” he said.
They left the office and crossed aboveground to the garages. The Merseian technics reported periodically to inspect the luxury boat lent Abrams, but today a lone human was on duty. Envious, he floated the long blue teardrop out into the sunlight. Abrams and Flandry boarded, sealed the door, and found chairs in the saloon. ” Gethwyd Forest, main parking area,” Abrams said. “Five hundred KPH. Any altitude will do.”
The machine communicated with other machines. Clearance was granted and lane assigned. The boat rose noiselessly. On Terra, its path could have been monitored, but the haughty chieftains of Merseia had not allowed that sort of capability to be built in for possible use against them. Traffic control outside of restricted sections was automatic and anonymous. Unless they shadowed a boat, or bugged it somehow, security officers were unable to keep it under surveillance. Abrams had remarked that he liked that, on principle as well as because his own convenience was served.
He groped in his tunic for a cigar. “We could have a drink,” he suggested. “Whisky and water for me.”
Flandry got it, with a stiff cognac for himself. By the time he returned from the bar, they were leveled off at about six kilometers and headed north. They would take a couple of hours, at this ambling pace, to reach the preserve which the Vach Dathyr had opened to the public. Flandry had been there before, on a holiday excursion Oliveira arranged for Hauksberg and company. He remembered great solemn trees, gold-feathered birds, the smell of humus and the wild taste of a spring. Most vividly he remembered sunflecks patterned across Persis’ thin gown. Now he saw the planet’s curve through a broad viewport, the ocean gleaming westward, the megalopolitan maze giving way to fields and isolated castles.
“Sit down,” Abrams said. His hand chopped at a lounger. Smoke hazed him where he sprawled.
Flandry lowered himself. He wet his lips. “You’ve business with me, haven’t you?” he said.
“Right on the first guess! To win your Junior Spy badge and pocket decoder, tell me what an elephant is.”
“Huh, sir?”
“An elephant is a mouse built to government specifications. Or else a mouse is a transistorized elephant.” Abrams didn’t look jovial. He was delaying.
Flandry took a nervous sip. “If it’s confidential,” he asked, “should we be here?”
“Safer than the Embassy. That’s only probably debugged, not certainly, and old-fashioned listening at doors hasn’t ever quite gone out of style.”
“But a Merseian runabout—”
“We’re safe. Take my word.” Abrams glared at the cigar he rolled between his fingers. “Son, I need you for a job of work and I need you bad. Could be dangerous and sure to be nasty. Are you game?”
Flandry’s heart bumped. “I’d better be, hadn’t I?”
Abrams cocked his head at the other. “Not bad repartee for a nineteen-year-old. But do you mean it, down in your bones?”
“Yes, sir.” I think so.
“I believe you. I have to.” Abrams took a drink and a long drag. Abruptly:
“Look here, let’s review the circumstances as she stands. I reckon you have the innate common sense to see what’s written on your eyeballs, that Brechdan hasn’t got the slightest intention of settling the squabble on Starkad. I thought for a while, maybe he figured to offer us peace there in exchange for some other thing he really wants. But if that were the case, he wouldn’t have thrown a triple gee field onto the parley the way he has. He’d have come to the point with the unavoidable minimum of waste motion. Merseians don’t take a human’s glee in forensics. If Brechdan wanted to strike a a bargain, Hauksberg would be home on Terra right now with a preliminary report.
“Instead, Brechdan’s talkboys have stalled, with one quibble and irrelevancy after another. Even Hauksberg’s getting a gutful. Which I think is the reason Brechdan personally invited him and aides to Dhangodhan for a week or two of shootin’ and fishin’. Partly because that makes one more delay by itself; partly to smooth our viscount’s feelings with a ‘gesture of goodwill.’ ” The quotes were virtually audible. “I was invited too, but begged off on grounds of wanting to continue my researches. If he’d thought of it, Brechdan’d likely have broken custom
and asked Donna Persis, as an added inducement for staying in the mountains a while. Unless, hm, he’s provided a little variety for his guests. There are humans in Merseian service, you know.”
Flandry nodded. For a second he felt disappointment. Hauksberg’s absence when he returned had seemed to provide a still better opportunity than Hauksberg’s frequent exhaustion in Ardaig. But excitement caught him. Never mind Persis. She was splendid recreation, but that was all.
“I might be tempted to think like his Lordship, Brechdan is fundamentally sincere,” he said. “The average Merseian is, I’m sure.”
“Sure you’re sure. And you’re right. Fat lot of difference that makes.”
“But anyhow, Starkad is too important. Haven’t you told that idi—Lord Hauksberg so?”
“I finally got tired of telling him,” Abrams said. “What have I got to argue from except a prejudice based on experiences he’s never shared?”
“I wonder why Brechdan agreed to receive a delegation in the first place.”
“Oh, easier to accept than refuse, I suppose. Or it might have suited his plans very well. He doesn’t want total war yet. I do believe he originally intended to send us packing in fairly short order. What hints I’ve gathered suggest that another issue has arisen—that he’s planning quite a different move, not really germane to Starkad—and figures to put a better face on it by acting mild toward us. God alone knows how long we’ll be kept here. Could be weeks more.”
Abrams leaned forward. “And meanwhile,” he continued, “anything could happen. I came with some hopes of pulling off a hell of a good stunt just before we left. And it did look hopeful at first, too. Could give us the truth about Starkad. Well, things have dragged on, configurations have changed, my opportunity may vanish. We’ve got to act soon, or our chance of acting at all will be mighty poor.”
This is it, Flandry thought, and a part of him jeered at the banality, while he waited with hardheld breath.
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