‘Look,’ it said, with an unmistakable hint of hysteria, despite its faintness, ‘it’s too big.... I just can’t handle it.... This isn’t my level of responsibility.... I need a director out here at least....’
‘You know how far we are from base,’ said the other voice. ‘I can’t call them, you know.... It’ll take a week to get a message through....’
‘I haven’t got a week!’
‘I know you haven’t got a week.... That’s exactly what I mean.... Whatever you do, it’s going to be your own decision.... You’re the man on the spot.... You’ve got the responsibility.... You’ve got the rank.... You’ve got the ship up in the sky.... It’s your decision....’
‘I can’t make decisions like this.... It’s not my level.... I haven’t got the rank necessary to handle this—not Charlot, not with what Kerman has already.... All I get from him—from anyone—is garbage.... I don’t understand.... I can’t take the responsibility if I don’t know what’s going on.... We need more experts.... We need a director at least.... There’s just no way of knowing how big this thing is or even what kind of a thing it is....’
‘Look, will you for Christ’s sake shut up! What the hell do you want me to do...? I don’t rank you.... I can’t carry the can for you.... You’re the man on the ground, you tell me what to do.... But you send me home to cry for help and they’ll crucify you.... You know that.... Whether anything happens in the meantime or not, they’ll do it.... I’m your ace in the hole, and you better not forget that.... You call me down or you leave me be, that’s up to you.... But there’s nothing that can make me take one ounce of the initiative.... It’s your potato.... There’s nothing I can do, except tell you to pull yourself together.... My advice to you is that you figure this world and you figure it fast, and you figure it some way that you’ve got something on Charlot.... But get something and make it stick.... It’s no good moaning about experts because you got all the experts you got sitting in your lap.... If they can’t give you anything you better get something yourself.... But if you knuckle under you better have a damn good reason.... And if you call my boys down you better have a damn good reason for that as well....’
‘That’s what I’m trying to get across to you, you bloody fool.... There just aren’t any damn good reasons.... We just don’t know what we have...This is an alien world, damn it.... We can’t just walk in and add it up on a cash register.... Hell, I don’t even know whether we got anything that’ll sell.... I tell you....’
‘You already told me.... If you told me once you told me a hundred times.... So what am I, Sherlock Holmes...? I tell you, friend, you better stop telling me your damn problems and start handing me the recipe for some action.... Either that or start planning your excuses, which had better be good.... Now I don’t give a bugger about you, I’m signing off.... And next time be sure you have something to tell me because I sure as hell don’t want to turn my stomach over listening to your damn problems for the ninety-fifth time.... OK?’
‘OK,’ said the first voice, sounding less OK than anyone else I’d ever heard. ‘OK, damn it.... I’ll be in touch.... If there are any developments.’
‘That’s right,’ said the man in the sky, ‘developments. If I were you, I’d develop.... And fast.... Good night.’
I could imagine the man on the ground adding something pretty pithy to round out the happy little chat, but the circuit was out, and he had only himself for an audience.
‘Well, well, well,’ I said. ‘We learned a lot from that.”
‘It was Caradoc,’ said Johnny. ‘Frank Capella.’
‘Clever boy,’ I said. ‘What’s the name of the captain’s pet monkey?’
There was a pause.
‘Are you going to tell Charlot?’ asked Johnny.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. I didn’t. Tell him what? That Caradoc had a battleship hovering? That Capella had no more answers than we did? So what? We already knew that Capella was sitting on the hottest seat since the electric chair went nova.
‘I think we can buy him,’ I said suddenly.
‘Eh?’ said Johnny, who was still thinking about Charlot.
‘Capella. I think he can be bought. He doesn’t care about this world. All he cares about is his position in the company. Right now, what he wants more than anything else in the world, is something to do and a reason for doing it. He hasn’t got a reason for calling that ship down and thumbing his nose at the universe. He knows that’s what his bosses want, and he also knows that they don’t expect him to be able to provide it, even though they’ll chop him if he doesn’t. He’s got to be ready to negotiate. He’s set up like a toy duck in a shooting gallery.’
‘We’d better tell Charlot, then,’ he said. ‘Fast—before Capella goes and does something stupid.’
I took him by the shoulder, suddenly realising that he knew a little bit too much for comfort—my comfort—and I prepared to pull the old pals act. I’d pulled it once before, on Nick delArco, and if I could pull it on the captain, little Johnny ought to be a real pushover. I was his hero.
‘Look, son,’ I said to him, ‘you may just have fallen off a Christmas tree, but I didn’t. Titus Charlot isn’t the only man around here with a talent for thinking up excuses. If I can buy Capella and sell him to Charlot...’
‘So who needs you?’ said Johnny, understandably. He didn’t understand.
‘Capella does,’ I said. ‘He doesn’t know how to reach Charlot, but I do. Capella knows full well that Charlot won’t save him unless he’s forced. I can force him. I can force both of them.’
For a moment, I was quite carried away. But I brought myself back down with a bump. If I was going to make something out of this, I was going to have to be very careful. I knew something about Capella that Charlot didn’t, and something about Charlot that Capella didn’t. Theoretically, that ought to be enough to make myself some fast capital. But I was in an extremely delicate position as regards Charlot—he’d make me suffer doubly if I crossed him after he’d trusted me and let me in on his game. In addition, I had my own interest in the way things went down here—academic and emotional—and no matter how cynical you are you can’t forget an interest like that, no matter how commercial your other angles are.
For one horrible moment, I was tempted to tell Charlot everything and rely on his dubious generosity. Then I decided to hang on and think about it.
Hesitation rarely hurts.
‘Wait a minute,’ said Johnny, who had his eyes screwed up into a pensive squint, and whose attitude toward me at that particular moment was distinctly ambiguous. ‘Before you go rushing off to play, there’s something else I think you ought to see.’
‘What?’ I asked.
‘It’s outside,’ he said.
‘What is it?’ I persisted.
‘You’d better come see,’ he told me. ‘I’m not sure. It could be nothing. I didn’t figure all that was said in Charlot’s spiel last night. But if what he said about the way things are on this world is true, then there’s something that could need explaining. Bring a flash.’
‘It’s not that dark,’ I said, too taken aback by his attitude of mystery to say much else.
‘I know that,’ he said, ‘but what we want to look at is down a hole. OK?’
I shrugged. ‘Lead on, pal,’ I said. ‘If you’ve found the key to the whole problem, I personally will thank you very kindly, and we can work out together how we are going to run the show.’
I was being heavily sarcastic, of course, but I was careful not to sound aggressive about it. It had not escaped my notice that I might yet have use for Johnny’s good opinion.
We went out on to the field. It was completely deserted. All the Caradoc heavy machinery was at rest—the workers had gone home for the day. All they had done while they were actually active was to drive bulldozers and diggers around a bit, idling along in pursuit of plans whose urgency was suspended. They hadn’t even left a night watchman. Who would want to steal a bulldozer in Paradise?<
br />
As we crossed the field, my mind was still trying to balance possible courses of action. There was really only one question: could I get far enough ahead of Charlot to offer to sell him a solution? That was a pretty ambitious question. Charlot was a very, very clever man. He was also ill, a fraction narrow-minded, and attacking the problem from what might just prove to be the wrong direction. I had the feeling that if only Charlot, Capella and Holcomb could get together in a bug-free environment, we could work out a satisfactory agreement. Just a little co-operation all around.
‘Here we are,’ said Johnny.
We were right out at the edge of the field. If all went Caradoc’s way, the, main terminal would be here, and the hole into whose depths we were staring would contain the foundations of spaceport officialdom.
I shone the flash down into the hole.
‘Lousy place to dig foundations,’ I said. ‘That rock down there’s all soft and crumbling. They’ll have to dig deep.’
‘They have dug deep,’ said Johnny, as he scrambled down into the pit. He was right—it was a fair way down.
‘Are you sure we can get out again?’ I asked him.
‘I did it this afternoon,’ he reassured me. I hoped he was right, and I followed him down.
‘Here,’ he said, scraping at the wall of the pit with his fingertips. ‘Shine the light along...there, and...there....
All I could see were marks in the soft rock.
‘There must have been a lot more of it,’ said Johnny, ‘but they smashed it up with the shovel. It’ll all be up there in the rubble, but I don’t suppose there’ll be anything identifiable. But the shovel didn’t crush this bit here, you see—the face has crumbled away—the rock is very soft, like you said. This land was a lot lower once—it was probably reclaimed from the sea, very slowly. It might have been swampy once. Here, you can see what I mean just here...that line there, and that one. Here’s the foot, and over here’s the eye.’
It clicked. He was showing me petrified bones. The thing in the pit was a fossil. I shone the light over the whole length of the creature, and back again. The head part wasn’t too clear, but I could see what I needed to see. And the foot made it definite.
It was the fossil of an extinct animal.
With claws and teeth.
CHAPTER NINE
We climbed out of the pit without too much difficulty, getting very dirty in the process, and began to walk slowly back to the Hooded Swan.
‘Is it important?’ asked Johnny.
‘You bet your sweet life it’s important,’ I told him. ‘It’s so simple...the Paradise syndrome, of course, it misled us all. The perfect world, an innocent, unspoiled, young Earth. And it looked like a real Garden of Eden—created to order, fresh off the production line....
‘Only it’s not fresh. It’s not primitive. It’s not young. It’s far older than Earth. Of course there’s evolution here. It isn’t that it hasn’t started—it’s stopped. Sure, everything’s been the same for a million years or more. Sure nobody and nothing dies—now. The evolution’s over—it’s stabilised. Something’s stabilised it. Something’s run the whole of life on this world into a rut and is keeping it there. Of course there’s a selective agent—the reason we haven’t found it is because it’s not active. It has no selecting to do. Or it had none, until Caradoc....’
‘Grainger!’
The shout came from halfway across the field. Nick delArco was running to intercept us. He’d just come back from town and he’d come in a hurry. Something had happened. Things were beginning to happen all over the place.
‘You’d better get the Maiden out,’ he said, as he arrived at a distance where he didn’t have to shout. ‘We have to get into town quickly. I’ll get Charlot. Just wants him. There’s a war about to start.’
‘What happened?’ asked Johnny.
Nick had already turned, and was heading for the Swan. Almost unconsciously, we broke into a run to keep pace with him. He looked back over his shoulder, and said:
‘One of the Caradoc men murdered a native. Aegis is howling for blood. The witnesses won’t talk. Just’s sitting with his finger over a volcano. There’ll be more murder done unless Charlot can sort it out.’
By the time he had finished telling us all this we were up into the belly of the ship, and Charlot was coming out to find out what all the commotion was about.
‘Get the buggy out,’ I told Johnny, as delArco began to go through it all again. I leaned back against the bulkhead and began to wipe dirt off my hands on to my shirt.
I figured I just about had time to change my shirt.
So much for the chance to have a quiet little talk with everybody, said the wind.
A promising diplomatic career, nipped in the bud, I commented.
It’s saved you from yourself, he said. You’d have been a cast iron certainty to botch it up.
Nonsense, I replied. With you to help me out, how could I possibly have failed?
He laughed. Laughing parasites feel very strange. It really kills a conversation.
I was appointed to drive the Iron Maiden—a testimony to my position as official transportation executive rather than to my skill at ground zero driving. Nick, with his long experience of ground-hogging on Earth, might well have got us there a shade faster.
When I drive, I worry too much about other things on the road—like the four pedestrians who passed us, going the other way. They weren’t running, and they weren’t in my way, but I worried anyway. I didn’t see why anyone should be going to the field at that time of night while all the action was in town. I couldn’t see who they were, but I was suspicious.
‘Hey,’ I said. ‘Do you think we ought to have left somebody back at the Swan?’
‘Why?’ It was Johnny who questioned me—probably because he knew that if anyone had to go back it would be him.
‘Because four shadows just passed us on their way out there.’
‘They can’t get into the ship,’ Charlot assured me. ‘Even if they wanted to.’
‘We shouldn’t have left her alone,’ I said. ‘We’re on an alien world.’
‘Keep driving,’ said Charlot.
I shrugged my shoulders and kept driving. It was all a fuss about nothing, in all likelihood. Nobody on Pharos could possibly wish ill upon the Hooded Swan. The fact that there were other ships on the field, as well as a good deal of heavy equipment, didn’t really seem relevant.
We found the big confrontation scene in the bar where I’d celebrated on the first night. It was far more crowded than on that occasion—they were packed in like sardines, despite the fact that the Caradoc security men were trying to transfer people from the inside to the outside at an appreciable rate.
I made the Maiden’s brakes howl as I brought her to a halt. It was a theatrical gesture, just to make certain that we were noticed. We all piled out as if we were the riot squad come to clean up after a brawl. Johnny was eager to see and Nick pressed forward to clear the way for Charlot. Modestly, I hung back.
We were well past the scene where everyone inside was frozen into a dramatic tableau around the remains of the deceased. The deceased had been picked up and laid out on the bar. Capella was sitting on a chair, his head in his hand, his elbow only a couple of inches away from the alien’s face. He looked bored. Just was standing, and he still had his gun in his hand—which seemed to me to be a tactical error. The inner core of the crowd were all Caradoc police, except for Varly. I didn’t have to ask who done it. Eve was there, too, standing behind Capella. Nobody was talking—they were waiting for the dramatis personae to be complete before they launched into impassioned defences or whatever. There had probably been a fair amount of conversation in the crowd before we arrived, but it stopped when we invaded the scene. The only sound that we could hear as we pushed our way to the heart of the matter was the sound of betting in the poker game. It took more than murder and mayhem to stop those boys.
Charlot headed straight for Just, but I didn’t wan
t to wait for the preliminaries. I faded a few steps back into the crowd, selected the nearest guy who looked a bit responsive to intimidation, tapped him on the shoulder, and said: ‘What happened?’
He squinted at me. ‘You was in here the other night,’ he said. I had a nasty suspicion that it might not be an irrelevant remark.
‘What happened tonight?’ I said.
‘You saw what happened the night ’fore last. Well, she came back. If you hadn’t...well, anyways, you know...this time, she let him....’
‘He raped her?’ I felt sick.
‘It wasn’t rape.’
‘Here?’
‘Not here. Upstairs.’
‘Why’d he kill her?’
‘Dunno.’
‘How’d they find out?’
He shrugged. ‘Varly come down and told us. He was drunk.’
I shook my head. ‘A roomful of people,’ I said. ‘Cops too. And you all let him take her upstairs.’
‘Nobody knowed he was goin’ to kill her.’
I returned my attention to what was going on at the centre of the crowd’s attention. Someone from Aegis—not Holcomb—was screaming for a hearing, but he was over by the door and the Caradoc security men were trying to eject him. Neither Just nor Charlot objected to his being removed. They were trying to work out what was to be done. Just had arrested Varly, and wanted to lock him up somewhere under his personal supervision. The Caradoc leaders had no objection in principle, but they reckoned that practicality demanded their own men should look after the prisoner. They were prepared to be stubborn about it. It was easy to see why it mattered. The whole argument about Caradoc’s supposed treaty implied a doubt as to legal jurisdiction. There was no argument about the law—merely as to who had jurisdiction. I could see that Charlot was on the spot. Just wanted him to stop the buck, and if he did then he would be prejudging the case. Charlot didn’t want the buck passed to him.
I took one look at Capella and I knew he was working an angle. I didn’t know whether he had engineered the whole thing, or whether he was just trying to take advantage of a nasty situation, but the gleam in his eyes said perfectly clearly that he thought he was on to something.
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