by John Rankine
As Gara joined Max in a slow sarabande round the stationary craft, the two watchers below finned up to the surface. Koenig was already aboard the car. He leaned down and pulled Helena through the hatch, then Rhoda. He called Carter. ‘Alan. Get on the net. Don’t mention the car. Say we’re still working out here. We won’t be in for a time yet. Tell him to keep on listening watch.’
Helena Russell had taken off her face mask and was shaking out her hair. Her eyes were bright and indignant. ‘You killed those men. Did you have to do that?’
‘They would have killed us.’
‘But they’re not responsible for their actions.’
‘How would you explain that to your wandering spirit if it had been you drifting out there in the sea?’
‘I don’t know, but it still isn’t right. One wrong doesn’t make another wrong acceptable.’
It was an argument that could have gone on. The control panel spoke up. ‘Come in Car Three Nine. Pilot Gara. Report.’
Koenig scooped up the mike which Gara had left dangling. Funnelling his mouth with his hands for a muffled effect, he said, ‘Gara.’
‘Leave the underwater craft. We now know it has been mined. Take one more circuit of the Outfarers’ complex and come in. Acknowledge.’
‘Received. Out.’
Rhoda was incredulous. ‘What can it mean? Is there somebody from Caster on the inside? Why should there be a traitor amongst the Outfarers? Everybody joins from choice and conviction.’
Koenig had enough imponderables for his computer to work on. From the pilot seat of the air car, he could see the shoreline. There was still something to be made of the mission and he reckoned the car might be a worthwhile ace to hide away.
He said, ‘All hands get to work. I want the uniforms off of those zombies. Then we take both craft over to the shore, where the trees come down to the water.’
There was a slow burn from Helena Russell and a near mutiny. But finally she joined Carter and they heaved Gara into the freight bay and stripped off his black tunic and pants. In the breast pocket, he carried a folder and when she flipped it open, there was a head-and-shoulders picture of a dark, smiling girl and a caption in a round feminine hand. She passed it to Rhoda. ‘What does it say?’
‘ “I’ll be waiting, Phyllis.” ’
It was another black mark for Koenig. But he was unrepentant. He said, ‘She has my sympathy. I’m only glad we don’t have hers.’
‘You’re turning into a savage. Or perhaps you always were one under civilisation’s veneer?’
‘For every activity there is an appropriate mode.’
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘It means launch that one on the bosom of the ocean and get busy with the other one.’
When it was done, he had sorted the operating panel of the air car and was ready to move. He said, ‘Take the strike craft, Alan, and follow me in. We’ll land at the point.’
The tide was coming in and there was a metre of water right up to the tree line. With the strike craft hidden under overhanging branches, Koenig put the two women ashore. He said, ‘Give us thirty minutes by the clock. If we’re not back, go for the pens.’
Before they could argue, he was moving off with Carter beside him. He hugged the coast, with the air car at zero height. It was Pullman travel after the strike craft, and ten of his minutes had gone when he picked out the tail of Eagle Seven, still poking up from the dunes.
Carter had already shrugged into a uniform jacket and was ready to go out. He said, ‘What are we looking for, Commander?’
‘Lasers in the weapon rack. Whip out the communications panel. Victor might be able to fix it. Who knows? We might get a farewell message through to Alpha.’
They did better. In a concentrated burst, they transferred survival stores, chart manuals, the communicator module, a medical kit complete with a spectrum analyser and four heavy-duty lasers left in the rack. Koenig reckoned, soberly, it put them a little way ahead. They were that much less dependent on the goodwill of the Outfarers.
On the return leg, he gunned the motors and swept into the hideaway as Helena was checking her time disk and debating whether or not to give Genghis Khan another minute of leeway.
There was room for the car in the overhang and they moored it fore and aft. The sun was almost vertical overhead as the strike craft slipped back into the estuary and lined up for the entry channel.
Koenig called, ‘Resurge. Do you read me?’
‘Resurge. Come in.’
‘We’re on the way. Entering the channel now. Prepare to activate the lock.’
As they waited, he said, ‘Hear this, one and all. No mention of the car. No mention of the mine. Mechanical failure on one craft. With a bit of luck, the saboteur will show his hand.’
CHAPTER FIVE
Victor Bergman did his best to keep the conversation going, but it was an unusually quiet meal. Finally, he jacked it in and concentrated on his nut cutlet simulate, with two veg and a piquant heliotrope sauce. His usual ally, Helena Russell, was still pondering on Koenig’s new rise as an executioner. Tough and determined, she knew him to be; but ruthless and cold blooded was something else. She looked at him now and again as though at a stranger. When it came down to it, another person, however well known, was finally an enigma.
Rhoda was silent because she could not get over the sabotage bit. It had undermined her sense of security. Somebody she knew well had been instrumental in setting it up and she was going over the list. The vote had shown that the Alphans were not everybody’s friend, but she herself was on the home team. Who could have done that to her?
Since she was silent, Carter held his peace with a kind of instinctive sympathy. The only therapy he could think of was out of place in mixed company.
Koenig himself hardly noticed the atmosphere. He was following a complicated line of thought. The existence of a fifth column in the Outfarers’ enclave explained some things. With their overwhelming strength, the high command in Caster could have overrun the place anytime they liked to do it. But they had held off. The plant on the inside was the answer. They were prepared to let the Outfarers flourish, provided they knew what they were getting up to. It was clever stuff. If the more free-thinking community produced anything that was likely to be of value, they would get the benefit of it. In some ways, they were running an experimental farm or a control group to monitor their own manipulated society.
But who would do that? On the face of it, such an idea would be outside the scope of people who were all regimented by the authoritarian Spadec organisation. Unless Spadec was outside its own control machinery? That was too difficult to take any further and he shifted to another angle. If there was an informer, constantly in touch with Caster, how was it that Karl’s jailbreak plan had succeeded?
With an effort, he shifted over to practicalities. It was still good thinking to carry the war into the Spadec camp. The sooner the better. One thing stood out a good sea mile: the fewer people who knew about it, the better. He said to Helena, ‘You think you can crack it?’
It was a tribute to her intuition that she knew what he was on about. ‘The drug? Not a doubt. With the analyser I can cut corners.’
‘You haven’t shown that to anybody?’
‘Not yet. But whoever’s in the lab is bound to be curious. Manufacturing the neutralising agent will be the tricky part.’
‘I’d like to have it just as soon as it’s possible.’
‘Then the sooner I go to work, the better.’
He was not to be allowed an easy ride back into full-citizen status in the Russell book; but he could be stubborn himself and reckoned he had nothing to apologise for. ‘Right, then. I’ll be working at the pens. Give me a signal as soon as you like. Victor can help you with it. Alan and Rhoda with me.’
Before he went below, he made a call on Karl. The Outfarers’ leader was mobilising all hands to restore the damaged apartments. It would have been possible to leave them and shift in
to other accommodation, but it would have been bad for morale. Without being an expert, Karl was a practical psychologist of the old school and knew by instinct what was best for community health.
Koenig took him aside. ‘That foray into Caster—to spring Rhoda—took some planning. Was it a council decision?’
‘There’s a small management group. We worked it out.’
‘But everybody knew what you were doing?’
‘Most people. What are you getting at, Commander?’
‘Just following a thought. I get the feeling, after today’s trip, that Spadec might know more than you think about what goes on here. Would they know about a beamed monitor system?’
‘It means nothing to me. What would that be?’
Koenig let it pass. He went on. ‘You fixed a plan, fixed a time and carried it through?’
‘You’ve either said too much or too little. What are you getting at, Commander?’
‘Was that the way it was?’
Karl hooked his thumbs in his belt and stood four-square, a solid, capable figure. He gave Koenig a straight look. ‘Not quite like that. I knew it had to be foolproof and I was moving slowly to get everything right. Then I got anxious about what might be happening to Rhoda and I brought the whole thing forward by twenty-four hours. I only wish now it had been earlier. It might have saved her some grief. Was that what you wanted to know?’
Years of operating in the command slot told Koenig that whoever might be the plant, it was not Karl. He said, ‘That was what I wanted to know, and I believe now that if you’d waited and gone the distance, you’d have found a reception party waiting for you.’
Karl said, ‘That’s hard to accept. But I can see that you believe it to be true. There’s no harm in being on guard for the future.’ He looked thoughtfully at the Outfarers, who were busy collecting shards of plexiglass into disposal bins. If any likely names had risen in his head, he was keeping them there. He went on. ‘This has a bearing on your mission. Can you go ahead, believing that you could be walking into a trap?’
‘There is a difference. For one thing, it isn’t widely known what we intend to do. For another, there was no time set.’
‘Then we should keep it that way. Don’t even tell me.’
‘But you agree that the attempt should be made?’
‘It’s a positive step forward and might do good. I’ll defend it in the council. But you saw the vote. There’s a strong conservative element for no change. It could make you look like dangerous partners to have.’
‘We’ll take that risk. As of now, we’re going down to the pens to fuel a couple of strike craft. As soon as Doctor Russell is ready, we’ll move.’
‘Melanion will need to know or you won’t have any power down there.’
‘Just Melanion, then. With Rhoda involved, he should be safe enough.’
Karl turned away a shade too quickly and went to rejoin the chain gang.
Down at the pens, Koenig and Carter checked over four strike craft and fitted them with fuel canisters. Two they manhandled down the slipway on launching buggies; two they left on the conveyor with nothing to indicate that they had been prepared for use.
It was all they could do. The ball was in Helena’s court. The next step was up to her. Rhoda and she met them as they closed the seal to the dock complex and there was no doubt about what she had to report.
She said simply, ‘It wasn’t too difficult. As it turns out, I’ve met something very like it before. Quantities are very small. By itself it wouldn’t amount to much, but it would predispose a subject to react to suggestions.’
Carter said, ‘It sounds like a good idea.’
She ignored him, but Rhoda gave him a wide-eyed look and said ‘Only think . . .’
Helena went on. ‘It was used as a preparation for hypnosis therapy, only in a much stronger form. The way it is, I can synthesise an additive that breaks it down into two harmless components. I’d guess that they have a drip input to the protein silos. There’s no technical problem at all.’
Koenig asked, ‘When can you have the additive ready?’
‘Give me one hour and there’d be enough to neutralise a year’s supply.’
‘A year ought to be long enough. Well done, apothecary.’
‘Don’t patronise me.’
‘Nothing was further from my mind.’
Twilight on Megaron, in the seaboard zone, was a short and dramatic switch from bright day to velvet, black night. Photosensitive relays tripped in the Outfarers’ complex and house lights brightened in the living quarters. There was a tradition of making a long and leisurely evening meal. Children came in from the day-care service and the community broke down into nuclear units.
The overall atmosphere was settled and domestic and at odds with the Alphans’ preparation for a move in the hot war. Gelanor, on good-neighbour principles, had them in for supper and being a compulsive talker, was probably the only one who missed the undercurrents of strain. Melanion, dark, thin faced and given to introspection, was very different from his brother and seemed an unlikely consort for her. He listened and said little.
Victor Bergman said, ‘I can see that the Outfarers can only move slowly. But in Caster, you have the manpower and resources for an expansion programme. I don’t understand this deliberate holding back. How can a society stay static for so long?’
Karl said, ‘You have to understand the history of Megaron. In the past, we pushed to the frontiers of knowledge. When you think of it, all that could be discovered had been discovered and lost. Probably more than once. It’s a waiting time. A period of lying fallow.’
Helena said, ‘Fine, if it’s done from choice. But as we see it, this is enforced by Spadec, and Spadec isn’t too particular how it uses people. Where was the sense in the suicide attacks on our Eagle? It only needed a little communication to establish that we were on a peaceful mission.’
Breaking a long silence, Melanion said, ‘So you say. But your mission was to bring a big group of Alphans to Megaron. Who is to say whether that was for the long-term good or not?’
Koenig asked, ‘What do you believe?’
‘It is of no importance what I believe. I am saying how it could look to those being invaded by an alien craft.’
Returning to his theme, Bergman said, ‘As I understand it, the situation has been unchanged for some hundreds of years. That is a long time, even for an ancient race. Earth Planet is newly civilised by comparison with Megaron, but taking the last three centuries, we could point to a scale of change and progress that has transformed the way of life for millions of people. Once across the technological barriers, the sky’s the limit for human aspirations.’
‘But do people change so much, Victor?’ Helena was on a hobbyhorse. ‘Technology is only the tip of the iceberg. It took millions of years of development to produce homo sapiens. He can’t cut loose from his past. All his drives and instincts relate to the evolutionary period. Even here, I’d guess that there was no essential difference between the people of Caster and their ancestors who built this tower city, or, for that matter, from those who were on this site, chipping at trees with an adze.’
It could have gone on a long time. Koenig caught Karl’s eye and the Outfarer took the hint. He said, ‘I know our Alphan friends have work to do. Don’t stand on ceremony, Commander. Feel free to go. I, for one, go along with what Doctor Russell was saying. I’d go further. It seems to me that there are no real differences between Alphans and ourselves. Once intelligent life has gotten off the ground, it faces the same problems everywhere and, for the most part, comes up with the same answers.’
He joined them in their apartment and looked at the litre can of colourless liquid that Helena had brought in from the lab. ‘This is it, then?’
‘If we can get it where it will do some good.’
‘Doing good by stealth. Who knows what good is?’
Koenig said, ‘Not entirely for their good, as you understand. It puts their future back in t
heir own hands, gives them freedom to think and more to do than harass the Outfarers.’
Bergman said, ‘There’s one possibility we haven’t considered, John. Freedom to choose is freedom to choose badly. They could be more militant and not less.’
‘It hasn’t worked out that way for the Outfarers.’
‘True. But it’s a curious position in ethics. Spadec doesn’t ask whether they do want the social drug. We are not asking whether they do not want it.’
Koenig was already seeing the dark waters of the estuary and reckoned that any more philosophy would be counterproductive. He said quietly, ‘It’s tonight, Karl. We can’t afford to wait for our intentions to leak across to Caster. Who can you trust to be on standby at the pens?’
‘Do you trust me?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then I’ll be there. Who goes?’
‘Captain Carter, Doctor Russell, Rhoda, myself.’
‘Does it have to be Rhoda?’
‘She’s a volunteer. She’s had some experience with the strike craft and she knows the ground.’
‘What time?’
‘Twenty-three hundred.’
‘Very well, then.’
‘Professor Bergman will keep watch with you.’
‘Right. I’ll set it up. I find it strange, that something so important to Megaron should have to wait for strangers to carry it through.’
‘The onlooker sees most of the game.’
‘It could be so.’
To all appearances, the vast, ruined tower was deserted when the Alphans walked quietly through the corridors and dropped to the underground dock system. Karl had provided hand-powered vibrators to make up the tool kit. Koenig and Carter had lasers in the waterproof pouches of their diving gear. Helena’s litre of reagent had been divided into four handy flasks to clip on their belts.