by Isaac Asimov
Biron shrugged.
Jonti said, “He may even recognize your new adulthood to the point of putting you to use. You are conveniently here on Earth and it is not unlikely you may be combining your education with a definite assignment. An assignment, perhaps, for the failure of which the Tyranni are ready to kill you.”
“That’s silly melodrama.”
“Is it? Let it be so, then. If the truth will not persuade you now, events will later. There will be other attempts on your life, and the next one will succeed. From this moment on, Farrill, you are a dead man.”
Biron looked up. “Wait! What’s your own private interest in the matter?”
“I am a patriot. I would like to see the Kingdoms free again, with governments of their own choosing.”
“No. Your private interest. I cannot accept idealism only, because I won’t believe it of you. I am sorry if that offends you.” Biron’s words pounded doggedly.
Jonti seated himself again. He said, “My lands have been confiscated. Before my exile it was not comfortable to be forced to take orders from those dwarfs. And since then it has become more imperative than ever to become once again the man my grandfather had been before the Tyranni came. Is that enough of a practical reason for wanting a revolution? Your father would have been a leader of that revolution. Failing him, you!”
“I? I am twenty-three and know nothing of all this. You could find better men.”
“Undoubtedly I could, but no one else is the son of your father. If your father is killed, you will be Rancher of Widemos, and as such you would be valuable to me if you were only twelve and an idiot besides. I need you for the same reason the Tyranni must be rid of you. And if my necessity is unconvincing to you, surely theirs cannot be. There was a radiation bomb in your room. It could only have been meant to kill you. Who else would want to kill you?”
Jonti waited patiently and picked up the other’s whisper.
“No one,” said Biron. “No one would want to kill me that I know of. Then it’s true about my father!”
“It is true. View it as a casualty of war.”
“You think that would make it better? They’ll put up a monument to him someday, perhaps? One with a radiating inscription that you can see ten thousand miles out in space?” His voice was becoming a bit ragged. “Is that supposed to make me happy?”
Jonti waited, but Biron said nothing more. Jonti said, “What do you intend doing?”
“I’m going home.”
“You still don’t understand your position, then.”
“I said, I’m going home. What do you want me to do? If he’s alive, I’ll get him out of there. And if he’s dead, I’ll–I’ll–”
“Quiet!” The older man’s voice was coldly annoyed. “You rave like a child. You can’t go to Nephelos. Don’t you see that you can’t? Am I talking to an infant or to a young man of sense?
Biron muttered, “What do you suggest?”
“Do you know the Director of Rhodia?”
“The friend of the Tyranni? I know the man. I know who he is. Everyone in the Kingdoms knows who he is. Hinrik V, Director of Rhodia.”
“Have you ever met him?”
“No.”
“That is what I meant. If you haven’t met him, you don’t know him. He is an imbecile, Farrill. I mean it literally. But when the Ranchy of Widemos is confiscated by the Tyranni–and it will be, as my lands were–it will be awarded to Hinrik. There the Tyranni will feel them to be safe, and there you must go.”
“Why?”
“Because Hinrik, at least, has influence with the Tyranni; as much influence as a lickspittle puppet may have. He may arrange to have you reinstated.”
“I don’t see why. He’s more likely to turn me over to them.”
“So he is. But you’ll be on your guard against it, and there is a fighting chance you may avoid it. Remember, the title you carry is valuable and important, but it is not all-sufficient. In this business of conspiracy, one must be practical above all. Men will rally about you out of sentiment and respect for your name, but to hold them, you will need money.”
Biron considered. “I need time to decide.”
“You have no time. Your time ran out when the radiation bomb was planted in your room. Let us take action. I can give you a letter of introduction to Hinrik of Rhodia.”
“You know him so well, then?”
Your suspicion never sleeps very soundly, does it? I once headed a mission to Hinrik’s court on behalf of the Autarch of Lingane. His imbecile’s mind will probably not remember me, but he will not dare to show he has forgotten. It will serve as introduction and you can improvise from there. I will have the letter for you in the morning. There is a ship leaving for Rhodia at noon. I have tickets for you. I am leaving myself, but by another route. Don’t linger. You’re all through here, aren’t you?”
“There is the diploma presentation.”
A scrap of parchment; Does it matter to you?”
“Not now.”
“Do you have money?”
“Enough.”
“Very well. Too much would be suspicious.” He spoke sharply. “Farrill!”
Biron stirred out of what was nearly a stupor. “What?”
“Get back to the others. Tell no one you are leaving. Let the act speak.”
Biron nodded dumbly. Far away in the recesses of his mind there was the thought that his mission remained unaccomplished and that in this way, too, he failed his dying father. He was racked with a futile bitterness. He might have been told more. He might have shared the dangers. He should not have been allowed to act in ignorance.
And now that he knew the truth, or at least more of it, concerning the extent of his father’s role in conspiracy, there was an added importance to the document he was to have obtained from Earth’s archives. But there was no time any longer. No time to get the document. No time to wonder about it. No time to save his father. No time, perhaps, to live.
He said, “I’ll do as you say, Jonti.”
Sander Jonti looked briefly out over the university campus as he paused on the steps of the dormitory. Certainly there was no admiration in his glance.
As he stepped down the bricked walk that wound unsubtly through the pseudo-rustic atmosphere affected by all urban campuses since antiquity, he could see the lights of the city’s single important street gleam just ahead. Past it, drowned in daytime, but visible now, was the eternal radioactive blue of the horizon, mute witness of prehistoric wars.
Jonti considered the sky for a moment. Over fifty years had passed since the Tyranni had come and put a sudden end to the separate lives of two dozen sprawling, brawling political units in the depths beyond the Nebula. Now, suddenly and prematurely, the peace of strangulation lay upon them.
The storm that had caught them in one vast thunderclap had been something from which they had not yet recovered. It had left only a sort of twitching that futilely agitated a world here and there, now and then. To organize those twitchings, to align them into a single well-timed heave would be a difficult task, and a long one. Well, he had been rusticating here on Earth long enough. It was time to go back.
The others, back home, were probably trying to get in touch with him at his rooms right now.
He lengthened his stride a bit.
He caught the beam as he entered his room. It was a personal beam, for whose security there were as yet no fears and in whose privacy there was no chink. No formal receiver was required; no thing of metal and wires to catch the faint, drifting surges of electrons, with their whispered impulses swimming through hyperspace from a world half a thousand light-years away.
Space itself was polarized in his room, and prepared for reception. Its fabric was smoothed out of randomness. There was no way of detecting that polarization, except by receiving. And in that particular volume of space, only his own mind could act as receiver; since only the electrical characteristics of his own particular nerve-cell system could resonate to the vibrations of
the carrier beam that bore the message.
The message was as private as the unique characteristics of his own brain waves, and in all the universe, with its quadrillions of human beings, the odds against a duplication sufficiently close to allow one man to pick up another’s personal wave was a twenty-figured number to one.
Jonti’s brain tickled to the call as it whined through the endless empty incomprehensibility of hyperspace.
“… calling … calling … calling … calling …”
Sending was not quite so simple a job as receiving. A mechanical contrivance was needed to set up the highly specific carrier wave that would carry back to the contact beyond the Nebula. That was contained in the ornamental button that he carried on his right shoulder. It was automatically activated when he stepped into his volume of space polarization, and after that he had only to think purposefully and with concentration.
“Here I am!” No need for more specific identification.
The dull repetition of the calling signal halted and became words that took form within his mind. “We greet you, sir. Widemos has been executed. The news is, of course, not yet public.”
“It does not surprise me. Was anyone else implicated?”
“No, sir. The Rancher made no statements at any time. A brave and loyal man.”
“Yes. But it takes more than simply bravery and loyalty, or he would not have been caught. A little more cowardice might have been useful. No matter! I have spoken to his son, the new Rancher, who has already had his brush with death. He will be put to use.”
“May one inquire in what manner, sir?”
“It is better to let events answer your question. Certainly I cannot foretell consequences at this early date. Tomorrow he will set off to see Hinrik of Rhodia.”
“Hinrik! The young man will run a fearful risk. Is he aware that–”
“I have told him as much as I can,” responded Jonti sharply. “We cannot trust him too far until he has proved himself. Under the circumstances as they exist, we can only view him as a man to be risked, like any other man. He is expendable, quite expendable. Do not call me here again, as I am leaving Earth.”
And, with a gesture of finality, Jonti broke the connection mentally.
Quietly and thoughtfully, he went over the events of the day and the night, weighing each event. Slowly, he smiled. Everything had been arranged perfectly, and the comedy might now play itself out.
Nothing had been left to chance.
Three: Chance and the Wrist Watch
THE FIRST HOUR of a space-ship’s rise from planetary thralldom is the most prosaic. There is the confusion of departure, which is much the same in essence as that which must have accompanied the shoving off of the first hollowed-out tree trunk on some primeval river.
You have your accommodations; your luggage is taken care of; there is the first stiff moment of strangeness and meaningless hustle surrounding you. The shouted last-moment intimacies, the quieting, the muted clang of the air locks, followed by the slow soughing of air as the locks screw inward automatically, like gigantic drills, becoming airtight.
Then the portentous silence and the red signs flicking in every room: “Adjust acceleration suits.... Adjust acceleration suits.... Adjust acceleration suits.”
The stewards scour the corridors, knocking shortly on each door and jerking it open. “Beg pardon. Suits on.”
You battle with the suits, cold, tight, uncomfortable, but cradled in a hydraulic system which absorbs the sickening pressures of the take-off.
There is the faraway rumble of the atom-driven motors, on low power for atmospheric maneuvering, followed instantly by the giving back against the slow-yielding oil of the suit cradle. You recede almost indefinitely back, then very slowly forward again as the acceleration decreases. If you survive nausea during this period, you are probably safe from space sickness for duration.
The view-room was not open to the passengers for the first three hours of the flight, and there was a long line waiting when the atmosphere had been left behind and the double doors were ready to separate. There were present not only the usual hundred-percent turnout of all Planetaries (those, in other words, who had never been in space before), but a fair proportion of the more experienced travelers as well.
The vision of Earth from space, after all, was one of the tourist “musts.”
The view-room was a bubble on the ship’s “skin,” a bubble of curved two-foot-thick, steel-hard transparent plastic. The retractile iridium-steel lid which protected it against the scouring of the atmosphere and its dust particles had been sucked back. The lights were out and the gallery was full. The faces peering over the bars were clear in the Earth-shine.
For Earth was suspended there below, a gigantic and gleaming orange-and-blue-and-white-patched balloon. The hemisphere showing was almost entirely sunlit; the continents between the clouds, a desert orange, with thin, scattered lines of green. The seas were blue, standing out sharply against the black of space where they met the horizon. And all around in the black, undusted sky were the stars.
They waited patiently, those who watched.
It was not the sunlit hemisphere they wanted. The polar cap, blinding bright, was shifting down into view as the ship maintained the slight, unnoticed sidewise acceleration that was lifting it out of the ecliptic. Slowly the shadow of night encroached upon the globe and the huge World-Island of Eurasia-Africa majestically took the stage, north side “down.”
Its diseased, unliving soil hid its horror under a night-induced play of jewels. The radioactivity of the soil was a vast sea of iridescent blue, sparkling in strange festoons that spelled out the manner in which the nuclear bombs had once landed, a full generation before the force-field defense against nuclear explosions had been developed so that no other world could commit suicide in just that fashion again.
The eyes watched until, with the hours, Earth was a bright little half coin in the endless black.
Among the watchers was Biron Farrill. He sat by himself in the front row, arms upon the railing, eyes brooding and thoughtful. This was not the way he had expected to leave Earth. It was the wrong manner, the wrong ship, the wrong destination.
His tanned forearm rubbed against the stubble of his chin and he felt guilty about not having shaved that morning. He’d go back to his room after a while and correct that. Meanwhile, he hesitated to leave. There were people here. In his room he would be alone.
Or was that just the reason he should leave?
He did not like the new feeling he had, that of being hunted; that of being friendless.
All friendship had dropped from him. It had shriveled from the very moment he had been awakened by the phone call less than twenty-four hours earlier.
Even in the dormitory he had become an embarrassment. Old Esbak had pounced upon him when he had returned after his talk with Jonti in the student lounge. Esbak was in turmoil; his voice overshrill.
“Mr. Farrill, I’ve been looking for you. It has been a most unfortunate incident. I can’t understand it. Do you have any explanation?”
“No,” he half shouted, “I don’t. When can I get into my room and get my stuff out?”
“In the morning, I am sure. We’ve just managed to get the equipment up here to test the room. There is no longer any trace of radioactivity above normal background level. It was a very fortunate escape for you. It must have missed you only by minutes.”
“Yes, yes, but if you don’t mind, I would like to rest.”
“Please use my room till morning and then we’ll get you relocated for the few days remaining you. Umm, by the way, Mr. Farrill, if you don’t mind, there is another matter.”
He was being overly polite. Biron could almost hear the egg-shells give slightly beneath his finicky feet.
“What other matter?” asked Biron wearily.
“Do you know of anyone who might have been interested in–er–hazing you?”
“Hazing me like this? Of course not.”
“What are your plans, then? The school authorities would, of course, be most unhappy to have publicity arise as a result of this incident.”
How he kept referring to it as an “incident”! Biron said dryly, “I understand you. But don’t worry. I’m not interested in investigations or in the police. I’m leaving Earth soon, and I’d just as soon not have my own plans disrupted. I’m not bringing any charges. After all, I’m still alive.”
Esbak had been almost indecently relieved. It was all they wanted from him. No unpleasantness. It was just an incident to be forgotten.
He got into his old room again at seven in the morning. It was quiet and there was no murmuring in the closet. The bomb was no longer there, nor was the counter. They had probably been taken away by Esbak and thrown into the lake. It came under the head of destroying evidence, but that was the school’s worry. He threw his belongings into suitcases and then called the desk for assignment to another room. The lights were working again, he noticed, and so, of course, was the visiphone. The one remnant of last night was the twisted door, its lock melted away.
They gave him another room. That established his intention to stay for anyone that might be listening. Then, using the hall phone, he had called an air cab. He did not think anyone saw him. Let the school puzzle out his disappearance however they pleased.
For a moment he had caught sight of Jonti at the space port. They met in the fashion of a glancing blow. Jonti said nothing; gave no sign of recognition, but after he had passed by, there were in Biron’s hand a featureless little black globe that was a personal capsule and a ticket for passage to Rhodia.
He spent a moment upon the personal capsule. It was not sealed. He read the message later in his room. It was a simple introduction with minimum wordage.
Biron’s thoughts rested for a while upon Sander Jonti, as he watched Earth shrivel with time there in the view-room. He had known the man very superficially until Jonti had whirled so devastatingly into his life, first to save it and then to set it upon a new and untried course. Biron had known his name; he had nodded when they passed; had exchanged polite formalities occasionally, but that was all. He had not liked the man, had not liked his coldness, his overdressed, overmannered personality. But all that had nothing to do with affairs now.