The Continent Makers and Other Tales of the Viagens

by L. Sprague De Camp

###

  The little squadron of W.F.D.I. automobiles purred slowly over Barnegat Bay, barely visible below as a paler strip against the blackness of the land. Graham could see the other cars only by their flying lights.

  He finished his account of his experiences, saying: “What did I do wrons this time?”

  “You did pretty good, considering. For a man without special trainink you’re a pretty keen absorber, which I would not suspect from that dopey absent-minded look of yours. That man in the nudery being a member of the gank was just a bad break. I don’t think I’d have tried to rescue the girl too, but then you are yonk and romantic. One rizzon I sent Varnipaz to South America was that he is too damn romantical for this kind of work.”

  “Then you don’t think he’ll accomplish anything?”

  Sklar made a rattling noise in his throat. “That gloop? Naw. He don’t know his way around Earth good enough, for one think, even if he has been here a couple years. Didn’t want an argument, so the easiest way to get rid of him was to send him off chasing wild geeses. But you now, maybe with a few years’ trainink and experience we could make a constable out of you. Would you be interested?”

  “I doubt it,” said Graham. “After all I’ve put a good many years on getting to be a geophysicist.”

  “Sure, and you don’t want to throw that away. I wish I knew who that ‘One’ that The’erhiya talked about was. If we knew that . . . You sure he said ‘One’? ”

  “Yes; at least it sounded like ‘One.’ Of course with that accent it might have been almost anything to begin with.”

  “Sure,” said Sklar. “You can’t expect those lizards to spick good Enklish, like me for instance, because they ain’t got human focal organs. ‘One,’ huh? Say, how many of the other Gamanovia brains do you know?”

  Graham thought. “I know all the scientists on the job here at Columbia, and I’ve met a good many of those at Rio. I was down there last winter, and met Souza, the big chief, and Benson, and Nogami, and Abdelkader, and van Schaak . . . That’s all the names I can remember just now.”

  “You keep trying,” said Sklar. “Now, here we are. Remember, if we get close to quarters with this Osirian, don’t let him look you in the eyes.”

  The cars maneuvered with clockwork precision. While three of them hovered over the Aurelio house, the other four dropped into the streets nearby. As the swish of their rotors died away, uniformed men issued from them and filed silently around the intervening corners towards the house.

  Sklar and Graham followed hard behind the uniformed men. Sklar whispered: “Now don’t get excited and shoot one of your own pipple in the back. Very bad for morals. Don’t shoot nobody unless to save your life or to kip them from gettink away.”

  “I won’t,” promised Graham.

  “Now we got to wait,” said Sklar. “You’ll find the suspension of waitink is much worse than a fight.”

  Graham waited, heart pounding.

  Nothing happened for at least a quarter-hour. Out of sight around the nearest house, the surf boomed lazily. Overhead the rotors of the hovering cars still burbled.

  Then a whistle split the silence. At once lights came on everywhere: a searchlight in each of the hovering cars, a parachute flare, several more lights that had been set up on the ground. Then came a crackle of shots and the sound of smashed methacrylate windows like the tinkle of broken glass but duller.

  Then silence again while the lights still played on the house. Here and there came the sound of windows opening in other houses and voices calling questions into the night.

  “What is it?” said Graham.

  “Gas,” said Sklar, looking at his watch. “I’m afraid our pipple have flown the kite, gone, though. Okay, in we go. Here, stick these up your nose, and don’t breathe through your mouth unless you want to be laid out cold like a turnkey.”

  There was a rending of wood as the men broke in the front door. By the time Graham arrived in Sklar’s wake, the house resounded (despite its extensive sound-proofing) to the tramp of heavy feet, upstairs and down. The lights were already switched on. The gas made Graham’s eyes sting.

  “Nobody here,” said a man in uniform.

  For half an hour, Graham had nothing to do but keep out of the way of the men, who took impressions of fingerprints, turned over furniture, and otherwise busied themselves in the search for clues.

  He said to Sklar: “Say, it just occurred to me they might have—er—booby-trapped the house.”

  Sklar, puffing his usual cigarette, shrugged. “Sure, we all knew that when we first came in. Got to teck chances in my business sometimes, you know.”

  Graham, increasingly bored and restless, wandered upstairs. The body of Edwards had been removed, though when, whither, and by whom Graham did not know. His broken drawing board still lay where he had dropped it.

  He strolled into the room that had been occupied by Jeru-Bhetiru. Perhaps he could find some trace of the girl that had been overlooked by the W.F. troopers.

  But this room was as bare of tangible relics as all the others. The bed had been tipped up against the wall and the rug thrown back by the searchers, who had then gone on to other business.

  Graham gave the room a good looking-over nevertheless. When he examined the floor, a slight streaky discoloration on the part that had been covered by the rug drew his attention.

  By moving his head until he got a highlight from the room’s one light bulb to coincide with the discoloration, he saw that it consisted of a word written on the floor with some pigment almost but not quite the same as the color of the boards. The word was: RIO

  “Hey, Sklar!” yelled Graham. “Come here!”

  Sklar saw it at once, and stooped closely over it, playing a pocket flashlight on the stains.

  “Blood,” he said. “Your girlfriend must have cut herself and written this for us to find. Good kid. Hey, who was in charge of searchink this room?”

  After a pause a very large trooper explained in a very small voice: “I was, sir.”

  “Your name?” said Sklar ominously.

  “Schindelheim, Trooper, first class.”

  “That,” said Sklar, “will go on your fitness report . . . What is it now?”

  “Mr. Sklar,” said somebody else, “one of these local cops has put tickets on all our cars for parking in the street with rotors attached.”

  Sklar made an impatient motion. “You take charge and take care of that, Roth. We’re goink back to the city and then on to Rio. Come, Graham. How lunk will it take you to pack for a trip to South America, huh? Can you mit me at the airport at sixtin hunderd tomorrow? Good.”

  VII.

  As the airliner banked with the ponderous aerial dignity of a condor, the great bay of Guanabara came into view through the window at which Gordon Graham sat. Although he had been to Sao Sebastião do Rio de Janeiro before, Graham never failed to get a thrill out of the approach to the world’s most beautiful metropolis.

  Below and in front of them the bay spread out like an immense fan, with clusters of islands in the foreground and behind them the scalloped line of sub-bays. Then the city, running along the edge of the scallop and trailing off into the valleys extending up into the mountains like the teeth of a comb. As the ’plane dropped lower the Corcovado and other peaks thrust themselves up against the skyline.

  Even Reinhold Sklar, whom Graham would have thought to be about as aesthetically sensitive as one of Teófilo March’s turtles, said: “Boy, ain’t that somethink!”

  Now the white line of the beach could be made out, and back of it the sharp diagonals of the avenidas with their rows of shining skyscrapers. Before them the vast airport thrust out into the bay like a welcoming hand. As they sank towards it, the map effect flattened out of sight. Graham found he was confronted by a solid wall of buildings, throwing back the pinkish-white light of the rising sun, and below them the green of the seashore parkways, along which he could see the movement of thousands of shiny dots: automobiles. In another traffic lane
, to their left, convertibles were buzzing in to the airport to leave their rotors, like queen ants shedding their wings, while their owners drove them to work.

  The landing ’chute blossomed behind them and they drew up to the ramp. As they walked down the companionway and into the reception building they met a tall, broad-shouldered, bushy-haired, smiling young man with a rather Oriental look. After a moment of uncertainty, Graham recognized Varnipaz bad-Savarun, still in his Earthly disguise.

  Shaking hands, Varnipaz asked: “Have you eaten yet?”

  “No,” said Sklar. They went into the restaurant and ordered.

  “Well,” said Sklar, “what have you found out, pal?”

  Varnipaz said: “I reported to headquarters as you ordered me. Then I tried to follow the logical course. If the gang used a cult for a cover in North America, it seemed to me that it might use a similar organization in South America. Therefore I have been going around the city attending the meetings of all the queer little societies and cults—the Cosmotheists, the Brazilo-Israelites, the Hindu Center of Absolute Truth, the Society for the Abolition of Coffee, and so on.” He shook his head. “You Earthmen may call us Krishnans backward, but you have some of the most irrational . . . Well, anyway, I have membership lists of several of them.” He brought out a thick mass of papers. “I thought that if you could compare the membership of these with the list of engineers and technicians employed on the Gamanovia Project, you might find something.”

  “I apologize to you,” said Sklar, leafing through the papers.

  “For what?”

  “For sayink you’d never make a W.F. constable. Your name ought to be Sherlock bad-Holmes. Any time you want to sign up for the candidate school . . . Here, Graham, you know who’s who on the project.”

  “I don’t know all of ’em,” said Graham, “but I’ll glance through these anyway.” He too began running down the lists, and presently exclaimed: “Homer Benson! Why, old Homer’s the second man to Souza; I know him w-well. That is, if this is the same Benson.”

  “It probably is,” said Sklar. “There wouldn’t be many men with a name like that in Rio. What list is that?”

  Graham looked at the heading. “Soci—How do you pronounce it?”

  Sklar looked: “Sociedade Homagem ao Cortereal. Society for Homage to Cortereal. Who’s he?”

  Varnipaz said: “João Vaz Corte-Real, an explorer who some people here think discovered the Americas before Columbus. They take it very seriously, though why anybody cares, when as I understand some Norwegian found the continents long before either, I fail to comprehend.”

  Sklar asked Graham: “Any more project pipple on that list?”

  Graham sat in silence, running down the list. When almost at the end he said: “I think I recognize two here: Vieira and Wen.”

  “Who are they?”

  “Gaspar Vieira is one of the local people, a chemist, and Wen Pandjao is a Chinese mathematician. I met ’em both when I was down last year. I don’t really know them, though.”

  Sklar drummed with his fingers on the tabletop. “Come on, you two. I should go through the local poliss, but we ain’t got the time.”

  They piled into a taxi. Sklar directed the driver to the Gamanovia Building, on the Praia do Flamengo out towards Botafogo Bay. As they rolled he told Graham: “Kip lookink through those lists. There might be others.”

  One of Rio’s notorious traffic jams held them up for half an hour, enabling Graham to complete his scrutiny. He said: “I d-don’t see any more, but that doesn’t prove anything. We need the complete list of employees from Gamanovia’s Personnel Department, to check against all of these.”

  “Hokus dokus,” said Sklar. “Here we are.”

  ###

  They piled out, gave their names at the registration desk, and a few minutes later were in Souza’s office. Meanwhile Souza’s private secretary and six other girls were going over the lists in the adjoining room.

  While waiting, Souza and his visitors engaged in small talk. Graham had great difficulty in following this, for while Sklar’s Portuguese was fast and fluent if badly pronounced, and that of Varnipaz was, like his English, painfully correct and formal, Graham could only read the language and speak it a little. When somebody rattled a string of nasal vowels at him he was helpless.

  Presently Souza’s secretary came back with the pile of papers. “Senhor Paulo,” she said, “we found the name of Senhor Gjessing on the list for Mechanosophical Society.”

  “What?” said Sklar.

  Varnipaz explained: “Those are the ones who worship the Machine. You should go to one of their services. An altar with a machine on it, all wheels and levers and colored lights. As far as I could see it does nothing but go round and round while they kneel and pray to it, but somehow it works them into a state of ecstasy. You Earthmen . . .”

  “Is that all?” said Sklar.

  “That is all,” said the secretary.

  “Good. That little metapolygraph in my suitcase has attachments for only four people. Senhor Paulo, will you get Senhores Benson, Gjessing, Vieira, and Wen?”

  While these employees were being summoned, Sklar employed himself with setting up his metapolygraph. He asked Souza: “You don’t mind if I put the box on your desk?”

  “So-no.”

  “Obrigado. I hope this will crack the case, because nothing short of deep hypnosis can beat this little machine.”

  One by one the experts appeared. Benign old Benson doddered in, and after him the hulking Wen with his perpetual grin. Then fat little Vieira, and lastly a bald man with a handlebar mustache whom Graham did not know.

  Souza introduced each one as he arrived: “These are Mr. Sklar, Mr. Graham, and Mr. Muller” (for that was Varnipaz’s alias). When the last man appeared, he introduced him as “Dr. Gjessing,” pronouncing it “zhessing” as if it had been Portuguese.

  The owner of the name promptly corrected his boss by murmuring “yessing.”

  Wen’s perpetual grin widened. “Roald always wants us to pronounce him as in Norwegian,” he said. “Now me, I have given up trying to make people pronounce my name. It is really ‘wun’ but they all insist on saying ‘wen.’ ”

  “Then why do you spell it ‘wen’?” asked Vieira.

  “Because in Chinese, the ‘eh’ sound is always ‘uh’ except when it follows or precedes an ‘ee’ sound . . .”

  Sklar cleared his throat in a marked manner and broke in: “Now, gentlemen, we’ll discuss the science of fanatics later. With your permission I am going to attach this metapolygraph to you and ask you some questions about an urgent matter. You understand that you don’t have to answer, or even put on the attachments. But as loyal employees of the World Federation I’m sure you want to cooperate, don’t you?” The last words held the faintest hint of menace.

  There being no objections, Sklar fastened the leads of the machine to the four men’s head, wrists, and ankles. Then he sat behind Souza’s desk and began asking questions.

  “Do any of you know anything about a group, headed by extra-terrestrials, that wants to interfere with the Project?”

  Graham, craning his neck a little, could see that the needles on the four dials remained steady as the men answered “Não” in turn.

  “Have you ever been in contact with such a group?”

  “Não.”

  “Do you know of any secret group opposed to the Gamanovia Project?”

  “Não.”

  “Have you heard of any plan for firing the maggots ahead of time?”

  “Não.”

  Still no telltale movement of the needles. After half an hour Sklar gave up and removed the attachments.

  “Wrong track,” he said. “Looks as if the next person we’d have to interview would be Teófilo March, the turtle man. Would he be on Ascension Island now?”

  “Oh,” said Souza, “you will not be dealing with Senhor March.”

  “Why not? Is he dead?”

  “No, he has sold out. An Amer
icano do Norte named Aurelio bought the Rock, and March’s contract along with it. I believe March keeps his turtle farm, as the cable employees keep their farms on Green Mountain, but . . .”

  Sklar’s sharp glance crossed that of Graham, in whose mind a sudden light shone. “Hey!” said Graham. “This is the man they t-t-t- . . .”

  “Try again,” said Sklar.

  “T-t-t . . .”

  “Whistle it.”

  “The man the gang was talking about. You remember they said they’d heard from ‘One’? They meant Dr. W-wen, of course, since that’s how he pronounces . . .”

  “Stop him!” yelled Sklar, reaching for his holster.

  They might as well have tried to stop a rhinoceros. The big Chinese straight-armed Gjessing out of the way and plunged through the door, slamming it behind him. As they rushed for it they heard his feet pounding along the corridor, and they got it open just in time to see him disappearing around a corner.

  “He seems to be headed for the control room,” said Souza.

  Graham, the youngest man present, outran the others. He knew where the control room was from his previous visits. They tore along the corridor, around a couple of bends, and up a single flight of stairs.

  The control door was both closed and locked when they got to it.

  “Who’s got a key?” snapped Sklar.

  Souza arrived late, puffing like an asthmatic porpoise, and produced a key. It worked the lock, but the door, when they tried to open it, moved only a centimeter or two. Inside they could hear furniture being dragged across the room and placed against the door.

  Then came a loud clank. Souza cried: “Mãe do Deus, he’s throwing the maggot switches!”

  Sklar said: “Gordon, you and Gjessing are the biggest. You push.”

  Graham and Gjessing threw their shoulders against the door, which moved a few centimeters more. Inside, another switch went clank.

  “Again,” grunted Gjessing, and under the impact the door opened a little wider.

  “Duck,” said Sklar, thrusting his pistol through the crack. Graham, rubbing his battered shoulder, got out of the way.