“Captain!” Petrovich yelped the realization. “They’re going to board us!”
“Name of Judas!” van Rijn’s breastplate clashed on the deck. “Must I do all your thinking for you? What use is our pressor if not to swat off unwelcome guests?” He threw back his head and bellowed with laughter. “Let them try, let them try! Our drive field envelops theirs, so it does not matter whether they use their engines or not—and we are stronger, nie? We can drag them with us even if they fight it. All my life I have been a deep-sea fisherman. And now, full speed ahead to Antares with this little minnow that thought it was a shark!”_
A hypervid call to Antares as soon as they were in range brought a League carrier out to meet them. Van Rijn turned the Gantok over to her and let Torres pilot the battered Mercury in. Himself, he wanted only to sleep.
Not that the Borthudians had tried any further stunts, after their boarding party was so cold-bloodedly shoved into deep space. Rentharik was sensible enough to know when he was beaten, and had passively let his ship be hauled away. But the strain of waiting for any possible resistance had been considerable.
Torres had wanted to communicate with the prisoned crew, but Van Rijn would not allow it. “No, no, my boy, we demoralize them more by refusing the light of our eyes. I want the good Captain Rentharik’s fingernails chewed down to the elbow when I see him.”
That was, in the governor’s mansion, in Redsun City. Van Rijn had appropriated it for his own use, complete with wine cellar and concubines. Between banquets he had found time to check on local prices and raise the tag on pepper a milli-credit per gram. The colonists would grumble, but they could afford it; if it weren’t for him, their meals would be drab affairs, so didn’t he deserve an honest profit?
After three days of this, he decided it was time to see Rentharik. He lounged on the governor’s throne, pipe in one hand.
Rentharik advanced across the parquet floor, gaunt and bitter under the guns of two League gentlemen. He halted before the throne.
“Ah, so there you are!” Van Rijn beamed and waved the bottle. “I trust you have had the pleasant stay? Redsun City jails are much recommended, I am told.”
“My government will take measures,” spat the Borthudian. “You will not escape the consequences of this piracy.”
“Your maggoty little kinglet will do nothing of the sort,” declared Van Rijn. “If the civilized planets did not dare fight when he was playing buccaneer, he will not when it is the other way around. He will accept the facts and leam to love them.”
“What do you plan to do with us?”
“Well, now, it may be we can collect a little ransom for you, perhaps, eh? If not, the local iron mines are always short of labor. But out of the great goodness of my heart, I let you choose one man who may go home freely and report what has happened. After that we negotiate.”
Rentharik narrowed his lids. “See here, I know how your filthy trading system works. You won’t do anything that doesn’t pay you. And to equip a vessel like yours—one able to capture a warship—costs more than the vessel could ever hope to earn.”
“Quite so. It costs just about three times as much.”
“So . . . we’ll ruin the Antares route for youl Don’t think we’ll give up our patrols in our own sovereign territory. We can outlast you, if you want a struggle of attrition.”
“Ahl” Van Rijn waggled his pipestem. “That is what you cannot do, my friend. You can reduce our profit considerably, but you cannot eliminate it; therefore, we can continue the route indefinitely under present conditions. You see, each voyage nets a thirty per cent profit.”
“And it costs three hundred per cent of your profit to outfit a ship—”
“Indeed. But we are only so equipping every fourth ship. That means we operate on a smaller margin, yes, but a little arithmetic should show you we can still scrape by in the black ink.”
“Every fourth—I” Rentharik shook his head, frankly puzzled. “But what will you gain? Out of every four encounters, we will win three.”
“Just so. And by those three victories,, you will capture twelve slaves. The fourth time, we rope in twenty Borthudian spacemen. Naturally, you will never know beforehand which ship is going to be the one that can fight back. You will either have to give up your press gangs or see them whittled away.” Van Rijn rubbed his homy palms together. “So you see, by damn, always I operate on the statistics, and always I load the statistics. My friend, you have had it edgewise.”
Rentharik crouched where he stood and blazed at his captor: “I learned, here, that your union will not travel through the Kossaluth. Do you think reducing the number of impressed men by one fourth will change their minds?”
Van Rijn grinned. “If I know my spacemen—why, of course. Because if you do continue to raid us, you will soon reduce yourselves to so few crews as to be helpless. Then you will have to deal with us, and our terms will include freeing of all the slaves, deconditioning, and good fat indemnities. Any man worth his salt can stand a couple years’ service, even on your moldy rustbuckets, if he knows he will then be freed and paid enough to retire on.”
He cleared his throat, buttered his tone, and went on: “So is it not wise that you make terms at once? We will be very lenient if you do. You will have to release and indemnify all your present captives, and stop raiding, but you can send students to our academies at not much more than the usual fees. We will want a few minor trade concessions as well, of course—”
“And in a hundred years you’ll own us!” It was a snarl.
“If you do not agree, by damn, in three years we will own you. The choice is yours. You must have a continuously expanding supply of spacemen or your economy collapses. You can either let us train them in civilized fashion, and give us a wedge by which we ruin you in three generations, or you can impress them and be ruined inside this decade. Pick your man; we will let him report to your king-pig. And never forget that I, Nicholas van Rijn of the Polesotechnic League, do nothing without very good reason. Even the name of my ship could have warned you.”
“The name—?” whispered Rentharik.
“Mercury,” explained van Rijn, “was the god of commerce, gambling—and thieves.”
THE LIVE COWARD
by Poul Anderson
THE FUGITIVE ship was pursued for ten light-years. Then, snapping in and out of subspace drive with a reckless disregard of nearby suns and tracer-blocking dust clouds, it shook the Patrol cruiser.
The search that followed was not so frantic as the danger might seem to warrant. Haste would have done no good; there are a million planetary systems affiliated with the League, and their territory includes several million more too backward for membership. Even a small planet is such a wilderness of mountains, valleys, plains, forests, oceans, icefields, cities, and loneliness—much of it often quite unexplored—that it was hopeless to ransack them meter by meter for a single man. The Patrol knew that Varris’ boat had a range of three hundred parsecs, and in the course of months and man-years of investigation it was pretty well established that he had not refueled at any registered depot. But a sphere two thousand light-years across can hold a lot of stars.
The Patrol offered a substantial reward for information leading to the arrest of Samel Varris, human, from the planet Caldon (No. so-and-so in the Pilots’ Manual), wanted for the crime of inciting to war. It circulated its appeal as widely as possible. It warned all agents to keep an eye or a feeler or a telepathic organ out for a man potentially still capable of exploding a billion living entities into radioactive gas. Then it waited.
A year went by.
Captain Jakor Thymal of the trading ship Ganash, operating out of Sireen in the primitive Spiral Cluster area, brought the news. He had seen Varris, even spoken to the fellow. There was no doubt of it. Only one hitch: Varris had taken refuge with the king of Thunsba, a barbarous state in the southern hemisphere of a world known to the Galactics— such few as had ever heard of it—as Ryfin’s Planet. He had gotten
citizenship and taken the oath of service as a royal guardsman. Loyalty between master and man was a powerful element in Thunsban morality. The king would not give up Varris without a fight.
Of course, axes and arrows were of small use against flamers. Perhaps Varris could not be taken alive, but the Patrol could kill him without whiffing very many Thunsbans. Captain Thymal settled complacently back to wait for official confirmation of his report and the blood money. Nothing ever occurred to him but that the elimination of Varris would be the simplest of routine operations.
Like hell!
Wing Alak eased his flitter close to the planet. It hung in cloudy splendor against a curtain of hard, needle-sharp spatial stars, the Cluster sky. He sat gloomily listening to the click and mutter of instruments as Drogs checked surface conditions.
“Quite terrestroid,” said the Galmathian. His antennae lifted in puzzlement above the round, snouted face and the small black eyes. “Why did you bother testing? It’s listed in the Manual.”
“I have a nasty suspicious mind,” said Alak. “Also an unhappy one.” He was a thin, medium-tall human with the very white skin that often goes with flaming red hair. His Patrol uniform was as dandified as regulations allowed.
Drogs hitched three meters of green, eight-legged body across the cabin. His burly arms reached out to pick up the maps in three-fingered hands. “Yes . . . here’s the Thunsba. kingdom and the capital city . . . what’s it called? . . . Waina-bog. I suppose our quarry is still there; Thymal swore he didn’t alarm him.” He sighed. “Now I have to spend an hour at the telescope and identify which place is what. And you can sit like my wife on an egg thinking beautiful thoughts!"
"The only beautiful concept I have right now is that all of a sudden the Prime Directive was repealed.”
“No chance of that, I’m afraid . . . not till a less bloodthirsty race than yours gets the leadership of the League.” “Less? You mean more, don’t you? ‘Under no circumstances whatsoever may the Patrol or any unit thereof kill any intelligent being.’ If you do—” Alak made a rather horrible gesture. “Is that blood-thirsty?”
“Quite. Only a race with as gory a past as the Terrans would go to such extremes of reaction. And only as naturally ferocious a species could think of making such a commandment the Patrol’s great top secret . . . and bluffing with threats of planetwide slaughter, or using any kind of chicanery to achieve its ends. Now a Galmathian will run down a farstak in his native woods and jump on its back and make a nice lunch while it’s still running . . . but he wouldn’t be able to imagine cold-bloodedly sterilizing an entire world, so he doesn’t have to ban himself from honest killing even in self-defense.” Drogs’ caterpillar body hunched itself over the telescope.
“Get thee behind me, Satan . . . and don’t push!” Alak returned murkily to his thoughts. His brain was hypnotically stuffed with all the information three generations of traders had gathered about Thunsba. None of it looked hopeful.
The king was—well, if not an absolute monarch, pretty close to being one, simply because the law had set him over the commons. Like many warlike barbarians, the Thunsbans had' a quasi-religious reverence for the letter of the law, if not always for its spirit. The Patrol had run head-on into two items of the code: (a) the king would not yield up a loyal guardsman to an enemy, but would fight to the death instead; (b) if the king fought, so would the whole male population, unmoved by threats to themselves or their mates and cubs. Death before dishonor! Their religion, which they seemed quite fervent about, promised a roisterous heaven to all who fell in a good cause, and suitably gruesome hell for oath-breakers.
Hm-m-m . . . there was a powerful ecclesiastical organization, and piety had not stopped a good deal of conflict between church and throne. Maybe he could work through the priesthood somehow.
The outworld traders who came to swap various manufactured articles for the furs and spices of Ryfin’s Planet had not influenced the local cultures much. Perhaps they had inspired a few wars and heresies, but on the whole the autochthones were content to live in the ways of their fathers. The main effect of trading had been a loss of superstitious awe—the strangers were mighty, but they were known to be mortal. Alak doubted that even the whole Patrol fleet could bullyrag them into yielding on so touchy a point as Varris’ surrender.
“What I can’t understand,” said Drogs, “is why we don’t just swoop down and give the city a blanket of sleep-gas.” This mission had been ordered in such tearing haste that he had been given only the most nominal briefing; and on the way here, he had followed his racial practice of somnolence— his body could actually “store” many days’ worth of sleep.
His free hand gestured around the flitter. It was not a large boat, but it was well equipped, not only with weapons—for bluffing—but with its own machine shop and laboratory.
“Metabolic ^difference,” said Alak. “Every anaesthetic known to us is poisonous to them, and their own knockout chemicals wQuld kill Varris. Stun beams are just as bad— supersonics will scramble a Ryfinnian’s brain like an egg. I imagine Varris picked this world for a bolthole just on that account.”
“But he didn’t know we wouldn’t simply come down and shoot up the den.”
“He could make a pretty shrewd guess. It’s a secret that we never kill, but no secret that we’re reluctant to hurt innocent bystanders." Alak scowled. “There are still a hundred million people' on Caldon who’d rise—bloodily—against the new government if he came back to them. Whether he succeeded or not, it’d be a genocidal affair and a big loss of face to the Patrol.”
“Hm-m-m ... he can’t get far from this world without more fuel; his tanks must be nearly dry. So why don’t we blockade this planet and make sure he never has a chance to buy fuel?”
“Blockades aren’t that reliable,” said Alak. Drogs had never been involved in naval operations, only in surface work. “We could destroy his own boat easily enough, but word that he’s alive is bound to leak back to Caldon now. There’d be attempt after attempt to run the blockade and get him out. Sooner or later, one would succeed. We’re badly handicapped by not being allowed to shoot to hit. No, damn it, we’ve got to lift him, and fast!”
His eyes traveled wistfully to the biochemical shelves. There was a potent drug included, a nembutal derivative, hypnite. A small intramuscular injection could knock Varris out; he would awaken into a confused/ passive state and remain thus for hours, following any lead he was given. Much useful information about his conspiracy could be extracted. Later, this drug and other techniques would be used to rehabilitate his twisted psyche, but that was a job for the specialists at Main Base.
Alak felt more handcuffed than ever before in his pragmatist life. The blaster at his waist could incinerate a squad of Thunsban knights—but their anachronistic weapons weren’t so ridiculous when he wasn’t allowed to use the blaster.
“Hurry it up,” he said on a harsh note. “Let’s get moving —and don’t ask me where!”
A landing field had been made for the traders just outside the walls of Wainabog. Those bulked thick and gray, studded with turrets and men-at-arms, over a blue landscape of rolling fields and distant hills. Here and there Alak saw thatch-roofed hamlets; two kilometers from the town was a smaller community, also fortified, a single great tower in its middle crowned with a golden X. It must be the place mentioned in the trader narratives. Grimmoch Abbey, was that the name?
It was not too bad a mistranslation to speak of abbeys, monks, knights, and kings. Culturally and technologically, Thunsba was fairly close to medieval Europe.
Several peasants and townsfolk stood gaping at the flitter as Alak emerged. Others were on their way. He swept his gaze around the field and saw another spaceboat some distance off—must be Varris’, yes, he remembered the description now. A dozen liveried halberdiers guarded it.
Carefully ignoring the drab-clad commons, Alak waited for the official greeters. Those came out in a rattle of plate armor, mounted on yellow-furred animals with
horns and shoulder humps. A band of crossbowmen trotted in their wake and a herald wearing a scarlet robe blew his trumpet in their van. They pulled up with streaming banners and thunderous hoofs; lances dipped courteously, but eyes had a watchful stare behind the snouted visors of their helmets.
The herald rode forth and looked down at Alak, who was clad in his brightest dress uniform. “Greeting to you, stranger, from our lord Morlach, King of all Thunsba and Defender of the West. Our lord Morlach bids you come sup and sleep with him.” The herald drew a sword and extended it hilt first. Alak ran hastily through his lessons and rubbed his forehead against the handle.
They were quite humanoid on Ryfin’s Planet—disturbingly so, if you hadn’t seen as many species as Alak. It was not the pale-blue skin or the violet hair or the short tails which made the difference: always, in a case like this, the effect was of a subtler wrongness. Noses a shade too long, faces a trifle too square, knees and elbows held at a peculiar angle—they looked^ like cartoon figures brought to life. And they had a scent of their own, a sharp mustardy odor. Alak didn’t mind, knowing full well that he looked and smelled as odd to them, but he had seen young recruits get weird neuroses after a few months on a planet of “humanoids to six points of classification.”
He replied gravely in the Thunsban tongue: “My lord Morlach has my thanks and duty. I hight Wing Alak, and am not a trader but an envoy of the traders’ king, sent hither on a mission most delicate. I pray the right to see my lord Morlach as soon as he grant.”
There was more ceremony, and a number of slaves were fetched to carry Alak’s impressive burden of gifts. Then he was offered a mount, but declined—the traders had warned him of this little joke, where you put an outworlder on a beast that goes frantic at alien smells. With proper haughtiness he demanded a sedan chair, which was an uncomfortable and seasick thing to ride but had more dignity. The knights of Wainabog enclosed him and he was borne through the gates and the cobbled avenues to the fortresslike palace.
Un-Man and Other Novellas Page 13