Petrical, until very recently, could hardly complain about being overworked during his tenure as first adjutant. At the moment, however, he wished he had studied finance rather than military science. Then he would be stretched out on the recliner like Bilxer, watching someone else pace the floor.
"Well, there goes the Tark theory," Bilxer said from his repose. "Not that anyone ever truly believed they were behind the incidents in the first place."
"Incidents! That's a nice way of dismissing cold, calculated slaughter!"
Bilxer shrugged off Petrical's outburst as semantic nitpicking. "That leaves the Broohnins."
"Impossible!" Petrical said, flicking the air with his hand. He was agitated, knew it, and cursed himself for showing it. "You heard the report. The survivors in that Tark village—"
"Oh, they're leaving survivors now?" Bilxer interjected. "Must be mellowing."
Petrical glared at his guest and wondered how they had ever become friends. He was talking about the deaths of thousands of rational creatures and Bilxer seemed to assign it no more importance than a minor devaluation of the Tark erd.
Something evil was afoot among the planets. For no apparent reason, people were being slaughtered at random intervals in random locations at an alarming rate. The first incidents had been trifling—trifling, at least, on an interstellar scale. A man burned here, a family destroyed there, isolated settlements annihilated to a man; then the graduation to villages and towns. It was then that reports began to filter into Fed Central and questions were asked. Petrical had painstakingly traced the slaughters, reported and unreported, back over seven decades. He had found no answers but had come up with a number of questions, the most puzzling of which was this: If the marauders wanted to wipe out a village or a settlement, why didn't they do it from the atmosphere? A single small peristellar craft could leave a charred hole where a village had been with little or no danger to the attackers. Instead, they arrived on-planet and did their work with antipersonnel weapons.
It didn't make sense ... unless terror was part of the object. The attack teams had been very efficient— they had never left a witness. Until now.
"The survivors," Petrical continued in clipped tones, "described the marauders as vacuum-suited humanoids—no facial features noted—appearing out of nowhere amid extremely bizarre atmospheric conditions, and then methodically slaughtering every living thing in sight. Their means of escape? They run toward a certain point and vanish. Granted, the Broohnins are unbalanced as far as ideology goes, but this just isn't their style. And besides, they don't have the technology for such a feat."
"Somebody does."
Petrical stopped pacing. "Yeah, somebody does. And whatever they've got must utilize some entirely new physical principle." He stepped behind his desk and slumped into the seat. His expression was gloomy as he spoke. "The Tarks are demanding an emergency meeting of the General Council."
"Well, it's up to you to advise the director to call one. Do you dare?"
"I don't have much choice. I should have pushed for it some time ago, but I held off, waiting for these slaughters to take on a pattern. As yet, they haven't. But now that the Tarks have been hit, I'm up against the wall."
Bilxer rose and ambled toward the door. "It's fairly commonly accepted that the Federation is dead, a thing of the past. A nice noisy emergency session could lay that idea to rest."
"I'm afraid," Petrical sighed, "that the response to this emergency call will only confirm a terminal diagnosis."
XVII
Josif Lenda inventoried the room as he awaited Mr. Mordirak's appearance. The high, vaulted ceiling merged at its edges with row upon row of sealed shelves containing, of all things, books. Must be worth a fortune. And the artifacts: an ornately carved desk with three matching plush chairs, stuffed animals and reptiles from a dozen worlds staring out from corners and walls, interspersed with replicas of incredibly ancient weapons for individual combat... maybe they weren't replicas. The room was windowless with dusky indirect lighting and Lenda had that feeling that he had somehow been transported into the dim past.
In spite of—and no doubt because of—his almost pathological reclusiveness, Mr. Mordirak was probably Clutch's best-known citizen. A man of purportedly incredible wealth, he lived in a mansion that appeared to have been ripped out of Earth's preflight days and placed here upon a dizzy pinnacle of stone amid the planet's badlands. As far as anyone could tell, he rarely left his aerie, and when he did so, he demonstrated a remarkable phobia for image recorders of any type.
Lenda felt a twinge of apprehension as he heard a sound on the other side of the pair of wooden doors behind the desk. He desperately needed the aid of a man of Mordirak's stature, but Mordirak had remained studiously aloof from human affairs since the day, nearly a half century ago, when he had suddenly appeared on Clutch. Rumors had flashed then that he had bought the planet. That was highly unlikely, but there grew up about the man an aura of power and wealth that persisted to this day. All Lenda needed was one public word of support from Mordirak and his plans for a seat in the Federation Assembly would be assured.
And so the apprehension. Mordirak never granted interviews, yet he had granted Lenda one. Could he be interested? Or was he toying with him?
The doors opened and a dark-haired, sturdy-looking man of approximately Lenda's age entered. He seated himself smoothly at the desk and locked eyes with the man across from him.
"Why does a nice young man like you want to represent Clutch at the Federation Assembly, Mr. Lenda?"
"I thought I was to see Mr. Mordirak personally," Lenda blurted, and regretted his words as he said them.
"You are," was the reply.
Despite the fact that he had expected him to be older, had expected a more imposing appearance, Lenda had recognized this man as Mordirak from the moment he'd entered the room. The man's voice was young in tone but held echoes of someone long familiar with authority; his demeanor alone had beamed the message to his subconscious instantly, yet the challenge had escaped of its own accord.
"Apologies," he sputtered. "I've never seen an image of you."
"No problem," Mordirak assured him. "Now, how about an answer to that question?"
Lenda shrugged off the inexplicable sensation of inadequacy that this man's presence seemed to thrust upon him and spoke. "I want to be planetary representative because Clutch is a member of the Federation and should have a say in the Assembly. No one here seems to think the Fed is important. I do."
"The Federation is dead," Mordirak stated flatly.
"I beg to differ, sir. Dying, yes. But not dead."
"There has not been a single application for membership in well over three centuries, and more than half of the old members can't stir up enough interest in their populations to send planetary reps, let alone sector reps. I call that dead."
"Well, then," Lenda said, jutting out his jaw, "it must be revived."
Mordirak grunted. "What do you want of me?"
"Your support, as I'm sure you are well aware."
"I am politically powerless."
"So am I. But I am also virtually unknown to the populace, which is not true in your case. I need the votes of more than fifty per cent of the qualified citizens of Clutch to send me to Fed Central. To get those votes, all I require is your endorsement."
"You can't get them on your own?"
Lenda sighed. "Last election, I was the only candidate in the running and not even half the qualified population bothered to vote. The Federation Charter does not recognize representatives supported by less than half their constituents."
Mordirak's sudden smile seemed ill-fitted to his face. "Doesn't that tell you something, Mr. Lenda?"
"Yes! It tells me that I need someone who will get them out of their air recliners and over to their vid sets to tap in a simple 'yes' or 'no' during the hour that the polls are open next month!"
"And you think I'm that man?"
"Your name is magic on this planet, Mr. M
ordirak. If Clutch's famous recluse thinks representation is important enough to warrant endorsement of a candidate, then the voters will think it important enough to warrant their opinion."
"I'm afraid I can't endorse you," Mordirak said, and his tone held an unmistakable tone of finality.
Lenda tried valiantly to hide his frustration. "Well, if not me, then somebody else. Anyone ... just to get things moving."
"Sorry, Mr. Lenda, but I've never had much to do with politics and politicians, and I don't intend to begin now." He rose and started to turn.
"Damnit, Mordirak!" Lenda cried, leaping to his feet "The human race is going to hell! We're degenerating into rabble! A group here doing this, a faction there doing that, out-of-touch, smug, indifferent! We've become a bunch of fragments with a common genetic background as our only link. I don't like what I see happening and I want to do something about it!"
"You have passion, Mr. Lenda," Mordirak said with a touch of approval. "But just what is it you think you can do?"
"I ... I don't know as yet," he replied, cooling rapidly. "First I have to get to Fed Central and work from there—from the inside out. The Federation in its prime was a noble organization with a noble record. I hate to think of it dying of attrition. All the work of men like LaNague and—"
"LaNague ..." Mordirak murmured as his face softened momentarily. "I came of age on his home planet."
"So you're a Tolivian," Lenda said with a sudden nod of understanding. "That would explain your disinterest in politics."
"That's a part of it, yes. LaNague was born on Tolive and is still held in high regard there. And I hold a number of late Tolivians in high regard."
For the first time during their meeting, Lenda felt as if he was talking to a fellow human being. The initial void between them had diminished appreciably and he pressed to take advantage of the proximity. "I visited Fed Central not too long ago. It would break LaNague's heart if he could see—"
"That tactic won't work," Mordirak snapped, and the void reasserted itself.
"Sorry. It's just that I'm at a loss as to what to do."
"I can see that. You're frustrated. You want desperately to be elected but can't even find an election in which to run."
"That's unfair."
"Is it? Why then do you want to go to the seat of power? 'Born to rule,' perhaps?"
Lenda was silent He resented the insinuation but it struck a resonance within the bowels of his mind. He had often questioned his political motives and had never been entirely satisfied with the answers. But he refused to accept the portrait Mordirak was painting for him.
"Not to rule," he replied. "If that were my drive, I'd rejoice at the downfall of the Federation. No one ever went to Fed Central to rule unless he was a Restructurist." He paused and averted his eyes. I'm a romantic, I guess. I've spent most of my adult life studying the Federation and know the way it was in the days before the war. I've seen the old vid recordings of the great debates and decisions. In all sincerity, if you knew the Federation as I know it and could see it now, you would weep."
Mordirak remained unmoved.
"And there's another thing," Lenda pressed. "These slaughters, these senseless attacks on random planets, are accelerating. The atrocities are absolutely barbaric in themselves, but I fear the final outcome will be much worse. If the Federation cannot make an adequate response, I foresee the Terran race—in fact, this entire arm of the galaxy—entering a long and perhaps endless period of interstellar feudalism!"
Mordirak's gaze did not flicker. "What is that to me?"
Lenda sagged visibly but made a final attempt to reach him. "Come to Fed Central with me ... see the decay for yourself."
"If you wish," Mordirak said. "Perhaps next year."
"Next year!" Lenda was astounded at his own inability to convey any sense of urgency to the man. "Next year will be too late! The General Council is in emergency session right now."
Mordirak shrugged. "Today, then. we'll take my tourer."
In a fog of bewilderment at the turn of events and at Mordirak's total lack of a sense of time, Lenda allowed himself to be led down the dim halls and into the crystalline mountaintop sunlight. They boarded a sporty flitter, lifted, then plunged through the tenuous layer of clouds below on a direct course for the coast. No words were spoken as they set down on the bench and entered a cab in the down-chute of the submarine tube. Their momentum grew slowly until the angle steepened and they shot off the continental shelf toward the bottom of the undersea cavern that held the largest of Clutch's three Haas gates.
The Haas gates had revolutionized interstellar travel a millennium before by allowing ships to enter warp within a star's gravity well. For the first half of their existence, the gates had been placed in interplanetary space. Attempts at operation within a planet's atmosphere had met with tragic results until someone decided to try a deep-pressure method on the ocean floor. It worked. The pressure cushioned the displacement effects and peristellar and interstellar travel was rerevolutionized by eliminating escape-velocity requirements. The orbital gate, however, remained an obvious necessity for incoming craft, since contact with anything other than vacuum at the velocities obtained during warp drive would prove uniformly disastrous.
Lenda said nothing as they entered the sleek tourer, and Mordirak appeared disinclined to break the uncomfortable silence, seemed oblivious to it, in fact. But after the craft had been trundled toward the bronze-hued pillars that represented the gate and had shuddered into warp in the field generated between them, Lenda felt compelled to speak.
"If I may be so bold to ask, Mr. Mordirak, what moved you to change your mind and travel to Fed Central?"
Mordirak, the only other occupant of the tourer's passenger compartment, did not seem to realize he had been spoken to. Lenda waited for what he considered a reasonable period of time and was about to rephrase his question when Mordirak replied.
"I have a horrid fascination for the process of government. I am repulsed by all that it implies and yet I am drawn to discussions and treatises on it. You say the Federation is dying. I want to see for myself." He then leaned back in the seat and closed his eyes.
Further attempts at conversation proved fruitless and Lenda finally resigned himself to silence for the rest of the trip.
After flashing through the Fed Central gate and setting up orbit around the planet, Lenda was unpleasantly surprised at the short wait for seats on the down-shuttle. He muttered his apprehensions.
"The Fed must be in even worse shape than I'd imagined. The call for an emergency session should have crammed the orbits with incoming representatives and the shuttles should be running far behind."
Mordirak nodded absently, lost in his own thoughts.
"From your impassioned description," Mordirak said as they strolled through the deserted, polished corridors of the Assembly Complex, "I half expected to see littered streets and cracked walls."
"Oh, there's decay all right. The cracks are there but they're metaphysical. These halls should be crowded with reporters and onlookers. As it is ..." His voice trailed off as he caught sight of a dejected-looking figure farther down the corridor.
"I think I know that man," he said. "Mr. Petrical!"
The man looked up but gave no sign of recognition. "No interviews now, I'm afraid."
Lenda continued his approach and extended his hand. "Josif Lenda. We met last year during my clerkship."
Petrical smiled vaguely and murmured, "Of course." After being introduced to Mordirak, who responded with a barely perceptible nod, he turned to Lenda with a grim expression.
"You still sure you want to be a representative?"
"More than ever," he replied. Then, with a glance up and down the deserted corridor, "I only hope there's something left of the Federation by the time I manage to get elected."
Petrical nodded. "That's a very real consideration. Let me show you something." He led them through a door at the far side of the corridor into an enclosed gall
ery overlooking the huge expanse of the General Council assembly hall. A high podium with six seats was set at the far end of the room. Five of the seats were empty. The lower podium in front of it was designated for sector representatives, and only seven of the forty seats were occupied. The immense floor section belonged to the planetary reps and was virtually deserted. A few lonely figures stood about idly or sat in dejected postures.
"Behold the emergency meeting of the General Council of the Federation of Planets!" Petrical intoned in a voice edged with disgust. "Hear the spirited debates, the clashing opinions!"
There followed a long silence during which the three men looked down upon the tableau, their individual reactions reflected in their faces. Petrical's jaw was thrust forward as his eyes squinted in frustrated anger. Lenda appeared crushed and there was perhaps a trace more fluid in his eyes than necessary for lubrication alone. Mordirak's face was set in its usual mask and only for the briefest instant did a smile twitch at the corners of his mouth.
Finally, Lenda whispered, "It's over, isn't it," and it was a statement, not a question. "Now we begin the long slide into barbarism."
"Oh, it's not really that bad," Petrical began with forced heartiness which faded rapidly as his eyes met Lenda's. There was no sense playing word games with this young man. He knew. "The slide has already begun," he said abruptly. "That just ..." he waved his hand at the all-but-deserted assembly hall, "just makes it official."
Lenda turned to Mordirak. "I'm sorry I asked you here. I'm sorry I bothered you at all today."
Mordirak looked up from the scene below. "I think it's quite interesting."
"Is that all you can say?" Lenda rasped through his teeth. He felt sudden rage clutching at his throat. This man was untouchable! "You're witnessing not only the end of the organization that for fifteen hundred years has guided our race into a peaceful interstellar civilization, but the probable downfall of that very civilization as well! And all you can say is it's 'interesting'?"
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