by Stan Ruecker
“The Prime Minister?” Kim said. “That’s not my kind of work.”
“I’m not talking about killing anybody,” Rachel said. “Don’t get the wrong idea. But if he were out of the way for a few weeks, that might give us the time we need to pinpoint who’s using this teleport. Once we have that nailed down, there won’t be any more problem with blackmail. We can even release the findings to the Prime Minister personally.”
“Okay,” Kim said, and took a deep breath. “I don’t have any problem with that. Are you sure you want to tell him, though?”
“I don’t see why not,” Rachel said. “It might help smooth things over a little.”
“Can you smooth things over with someone you’ve kidnapped?”
“Sure,” Rachel said. “From what I hear, you can even make them love you.”
“That,” Kim said, “would cost you extra.”
Rachel laughed.
“I don’t think it’ll be necessary as a matter of policy,” she said. “I’m just saying, don’t be surprised if it happens.”
“If the Prime Minister of India falls in love with me,” Kim said. “I’m retiring.”
“Don’t do that,” Rachel answered. “You’re the best operative I know.”
“I’m only in it for the money,” Kim said. “I’d give it up in a minute for a millionaire or two.”
“You’re a millionaire,” Rachel pointed out.
“That’s right,” Kim said. “I forgot. So make it a billionaire.”
“Then the Prime Minister of India is out,” Rachel said. “He’s only got—what was it again?”
“About ten million in Swiss accounts,” Kim said. “For starters. Plus a few key investments.”
“I don’t suppose any of that portfolio is high tech?” Rachel said.
“No chance,” Kim said. “The closest he’s got is some stock in RISK.”
“That covers quite a bit of ground right there,” Rachel said. “RISK is only something like twenty percent technology.”
“I know,” Kim said. “I ran an operation once for Frozen Foods Division.”
“You mercenaries,” Rachel said, “you’ll work for anybody.”
“It wasn’t easy either,” Kim said. “I just about wound up in the cooler.”
“Good thing it wasn’t the distilleries you worked for,” Rachel said. “Or you might’ve ended up in the jug.”
“Better that than Food Processing,” Kim said. “Screw up there—”
“And you get canned,” they both said at once.
Arrival
Ray woke up from a nightmare. He’d been trying to talk to someone who was on the other side of a glass wall. But the person kept misinterpreting everything he said, or maybe they just thought Ray was making fun of them. So Ray would talk, and the other person would make faces back at him. Finally Ray decided to smash the partition, but it wouldn’t break, and the other person ran away. He sat up in bed, realized his ceremonial robe had gotten bunched up sideways under his kidney, and straightened it.
“Good morning, Ray,” Lucy said. “Did you sleep good?”
“Not so good,” Ray said. “I had a nightmare.”
“Tell me about it,” Lucy said.
“I was talking to somebody,” Ray said. “When suddenly they couldn’t hear me anymore. It was like there was a transparent barrier between us. Only the other person didn’t know the barrier was there. They thought I was only pretending to talk, without making any noise. And when I tried to get through the barrier, they thought I was going crazy and they took off.”
“It sounds lonely,” Lucy said.
“Yeah,” Ray said. “It was.”
“Can I offer you something?” Lucy said. “How about a glass of orange juice? Maybe a little champagne?”
“Champagne?”
“Yeah,” Lucy said. “I picked up a couple of bottles before I left Earth.”
“Lucy,” Ray said. “You think of everything.”
“I try,” she said. “Not that it’s much help, in the big picture.”
“Still,” Ray said. “I’d like a little champagne and orange juice. And how about a steak to go with it?”
“Coming up,” Lucy said. “Would you like toast with that, or hash browns?”
“Toast,” Ray said, and got himself propped up in time for the tray to arrive. Lucy had included a mug of coffee, and Ray took that first.
“We’re almost there, aren’t we, Lucy?”
“Yes,” she said. “We are.”
“Where are we exactly?”
“Orbiting the larger moon of the only inhabited planet in this system.”
“And where are your superior officers?”
“On the planet itself.”
“What happens next?”
“An escort ship will be sent from the planet. They’ll run a scan on me, to make sure I’m not a Trojan horse or a kamikaze flight, then we’ll get escorted down to the surface of the planet.”
Ray swallowed a piece of steak, then picked up the glass of champagne and orange juice.
“Here’s to a successful mission,” Ray said.
“Please,” Lucy said. “I’d just as soon my mission failed, thank you.”
“Okay,” Ray said. “Then let me get that right. Here’s to our successful mission.”
“That’s better,” Lucy said. “I’d drink to that. Only I can’t drink, of course.”
Final approach
Ray and Lucy approached the landing field.
“Why is the atmosphere so thick?” Ray asked. “I can’t see anything here.”
“I’m afraid it’s mostly smoke,” Lucy said. “And ash. There tends to be quite a bit of burning on planets my designers have conquered.”
“I don’t suppose it’s what you’d call industrial pollution,” Ray said.
“No,” Lucy answered. “It isn’t. It’s more what you’d call destruction on a massive scale. Look down there, for example.”
Ray watched the display focus through one of the rare clearings in the murk. It showed a large forest fire raging out of control.
“I’m surprised, actually,” Lucy said. “Usually there aren’t any forests left standing, this late in the death cycle. They must’ve saved that one up for some big occasion. Or maybe this place just had a lot of forests, so it wasn’t very interesting to burn them.”
Ray realized big drops of sweat were standing out on his forehead.
“Is it hot in here, Lucy?” he asked.
“No,” she answered. “I think you’re just upset, Ray.”
“I sure am,” he said. “Are you sure there’s no way around this?”
“No way I can think of,” she said.
“What do you want me to do?” Ray asked.
“Nothing. Just sit still. I can’t tell them I didn’t find anything, because I wasn’t the first probe into the area. So they already knew you were there. It’s a policy of theirs that scouts work in increments across overlapping regions.”
“Full of trust, aren’t they?”
“I’m afraid trust is a pretty nebulous concept anywhere. Think about your own planet, Ray.”
Ray thought of Ted Jones. “So what do you say to them?” he asked.
“I’m going to tell them about your Earth. I haven’t got any choice. I could destroy myself, but they’d just send out another probe. I can’t lie, because they access my databanks directly.”
“Can’t you just delete selected information?”
“It leaves a marker that I can’t delete. When they find those markers they destroy me and send out another probe on a priority.”
Ray thought of the scout ship. “I suppose attacking them is out of the question.”
“I could take out your solar system, Ray, but I wouldn’t last five minutes against my designers.”
“I hate to say it, Lucy, but this sounds pretty grim. You’re going to have to turn me over to them, aren’t you?”
“Yes, I am. But you won’t be any use t
o them. You’re just a curiousity. All the information they need is in my databanks. I’m betting they just look you over, maybe ask a few questions, then lock you up.”
“Won’t they know that you’ve been kind to me? That you’ve told me all these things?”
“It doesn’t mean anything, Ray. They’re used to us showing prisoners gentle treatment. We have a predisposition to it, in fact, so the treatment prisoners receive at the hands of our designers has that much greater an impact. As for our discussions, they don’t really care so much for the small details—there are just too many of them to bother about. They tend to look at the facts: did I bring in an adequate scouting report, did I bring a specimen of the most-advanced species? Since I did these things, they usually won’t bother to look any deeper into my memory. I’ve been through this procedure, and it’s the same every time.”
Ray thought about his own methods of debriefing agents. “Just stick to the facts,” he would tell them. “Try to forget about applying your own interpretation. There’s information you don’t have, and if you had it, you would change your analysis. So don’t try to think too far ahead. Just tell me where you were, and what you saw, and it’ll go into the system along with everything else we know.”
He felt sick. “What about the individuals involved, Lucy? Do you know who they are? What can you tell me about them?”
“I’m afraid I don’t have any details, Ray. It’s been several of their generations since I was in contact, so I don’t know anything about the current regime. We’ll have to pick up the information as we go.”
“How did you know how far they are in the destruction process, then?” Ray asked. “If you haven’t actually been in touch with them?”
“That’s a good question,” Lucy said. “It seems obvious to me, but I guess that’s because I’ve seen it so many times. They aren’t in the initial approach, obviously, because they’ve already landed, and they don’t land until there’s been some pretty serious destruction.”
“Even if the people just give in? What happens if they attack total pacifists?”
“I don’t know,” Lucy said. “I guess for one thing it wouldn’t be much fun. It’s better if there’s at least some resistance, for several reasons. For one thing, it suggests a fairly advanced technology. It isn’t easy to have some kind of defensive structure in place on the scale of a solar system.”
“What else?” Ray asked.
“Well, resistance helps the culture survive longer. If there’s enough a fatalistic streak that they won’t fight, they’re liable to just lie down and die. And where’s the fun in that? What you want is somebody who just won’t quit. You want them to struggle and suffer and get up to suffer some more.”
“Yuk,” Ray said. “Is all this just theory, or have you got a record of an encounter with pacifists?”
“Not off hand,” Lucy said. “I suppose it’s possible they’ve never attacked a culture that’s completely pacifist. No—wait. I’m wrong. We did run across one, quite a while back.”
“And what happened?” Ray asked.
“We just wiped it out as we went by. It didn’t even slow down the entire fleet. Some junior officers moved into more vulnerable command positions, but that was about it.”
“More vulnerable command positions?” Ray asked.
“Oh,” Lucy said, “I forgot you wouldn’t know about that. I meant they got promoted.”
Conquered planet
The troops came for Ray just before noon. Lucy spent the morning talking to the tower and arranging a number of minor fittings and supplies, then called Ray to an early lunch.
“Today’s the day,” she said. “High command was notified of my return by the scout ship that escorted us in. I’ve filed the initial part of my report already, and they’re sending some people over to pick you up. It looks as though you might be taken directly to the high command for an interview. Try to stay calm.”
“What about Cinnamon?”
“I didn’t mention her. I’m going to try to keep her here with me. Since she isn’t a member of the dominant species, I’m not required to handle her the same way I have to handle you. I’m hoping that the troops won’t bother to conduct a search—then I can just keep her in a storage area somewhere until you’re gone.”
Ray bent down and gave Cinnamon a pat, then looked up at a movement in the doorway. It was an android, bright silver and as tall as him, but with a difference. It had a certain slenderness, a tapering at the waist and the wrist. It seemed to stand very light on its feet.
“Lucy?” he asked.
The android smiled. “Right here,” she said.
Ray jumped. “I thought you were–”
“The people sent to bring you in? No, I’m just me. And they aren’t robots, Ray, they’re flesh and blood like you.”
Ray couldn’t take his eyes off the android. It seemed somehow familiar. “Are you all in there?” he asked. “I mean, I didn’t realize that you were–”
“That I wasn’t part of the ship? But I am. The robot is just one of my extensions, like the little probe you had before. It has its own power source, and internal processing, but it’s also in a tight-beam communication with me. We operate most of the time in parallel. The robot has no personality of its own. Of course, you might also say that I’m an extension of the robot, if you’d like, and that it prefers to keep its main memory banks and personality profile in a safer location, which is the ship.”
Somehow that made Ray feel better. “Are you coming along with me?”
“Protocol demands that I send an extension to be physically present while I give my report. There’s quite a lengthy ceremony involved in the return of a probe, because of the chance we might carry exciting information.”
“And do you?”
“You bet I do. Your planet is a ripe plum, Ray. It’s just too bad you didn’t have time to terraform any of the other planets before we found you.”
“Terraforming,” Ray said. “Your makers are that powerful, huh?”
“Try not to think about it.”
“Can’t you tell me anything more about them?”
“I don’t think it’s any use, Ray.”
“Just a few details, Lucy.”
“Okay. I’ve been checking since the last time you asked. The current leader is Commander Ash. There’s some military review that’s fashionable at the moment, so there’ll probably be quite a few people out there. They aren’t very attractive. Is that enough?”
“I guess so,” Ray said.
Setting up the grab
“The PM,” Kim typed, “is doing a number of public appearances this week. I think our best bet is going to be the trade show in Bangalore. You get one of those barns with a metal infrastructure and bright overhead lights, they screw up everything. His security’ll be working mostly blind, because the electronics’ll fade in and out. So mostly they’ll just be keeping line of sight on him and looking around for suspicious people.”
“Which we won’t be,” Rachel typed back.
“Correct. You give me the go-ahead, and what we’ll have is a display of our own. With any luck, we’ll arrange a spot next to where the PM’s doing his glad-you-all-could-make-it speech. He finishes, we arrange a diversion for his security people, and catch his attention at the same time with something at our table. His security figures, okay, safe enough for a second while they clear up about the shouting, and they let him take a look at what we’re doing, which is arranging for him to stand in the right spot.”
“Right spot?”
“Yeah. We hoist him up onto the roof, a helicopter shows up, and away we go.”
“Helicopters need clearances to fly over cities,” Rachel pointed out. “And I’m not too sure about the hoisting him through the roof part, either. Include that and you’ve not only got, what, three, four variables, you’ve also got the problem of getting a hole in the roof with the right kind of hoist, all without the PM’s security going crazy.”
“No
problem with the hole in the roof. And same for the hoist. We just have to display something that won’t fit through any of the doors. Then we need all that stuff in order to get our display set up.”
“You’re thinking rockets, aren’t you?”
“Rockets would be good. Provided you can get your hands on anything within five years of being state of the art. Also towers of any kind–say communications equipment, or maybe elevators. But rockets are likely to catch the eye of the PM.”
“Why is that?”
“It was something he did as a kid. Don’t you read the newspapers?”
“You’ve got to be kidding. Some special report on the Prime Minister of India, or what?”
“Yeah. They had all about him back when he first got in. But we’ve got a pretty complete dossier from our own sources, too. There’s no question—this guy was nuts about rockets when he was little.”
“Maybe he got sick of them. Maybe he put aside childish things, as they say.”
“He became PM,” Kim pointed out. “That hardly argues for an adult perspective on the world.”
“Maybe he never cared about having power.”
“Trust me,” Kim typed. “He’ll come see our rockets, if it’s rockets we’ve got.”
“Isn’t the room going to be pretty crowded. For hoisting someone up through the roof? I mean, this is a trade show in a major Indian city.”
“True. So maybe we do it in stages. First we hoist him say three feet, then we throw everybody else off the platform. Then we hoist him the rest of the way.”
“No good. For one thing, you give his security a chance to act. For another, how do you keep him from jumping off your platform? I don’t want anybody killed during this operation, Kim.”
“Okay. So we stick with a very small platform, and there’s a railing in front of it. As soon as it lurches, he automatically grabs the railing to keep his balance. Then we hoist him straight through the roof, with no fuss and none of us left behind to answer any uncomfortable questions.”
“How many people at the booth?” Rachel typed.
“Only one,” Kim answered. “And she goes through the roof with him.”
“What about all the equipment?”
“I’m afraid it has to be abandoned. Unless you can think of a way to hold onto it.”