The Collected Stories of Frank Herbert

by Frank Herbert

  “Just a minute!” Marmon shouted. He hitched his chair closer to the table. “Bunch of crepe hangers. Where’s y’r common sense? We got the goods on a whole bunch of bums! Have you any idea how much that’s worth?”

  From down the table to his left came one explosive word: “Blackmail?”

  Latchley looked at Sabantoce with a raised-eyebrows expression that said clearly: “See? I told you so.”

  “Why not?” Marmon demanded. “These bums have been blackmailing us f’r centuries. ‘B’lieve what I tell y’, man, or we’ll pull y’r arms outa their sockets!’ That’s what they been tellin’s … telling us.” He rubbed his lips.

  Sabantoce stood up, moved around the table and rested a hand lightly on Marmon’s shoulder. “Okay. We’ll let Dr. Marmon be the devil’s advocate. While he’s talking, Dr. Latchley and I will go out and get the film and equipment for the little demonstration we’ve prepared for you. It should give you a clear understanding of what we’re up against.” He nodded to Latchley, who arose and joined him.

  They crossed to the door, trying not to move too fast. Sabantoce rapped twice on the panel. The door opened and they slipped out between two uniformed guards, one of whom closed and locked the door behind them.

  “This way, please,” the other guard said.

  They moved up the hall, hearing Marmon’s voice fade behind them: “The bums have always controlled the history books and the courts and the coinage and the military and every…”

  Distance reduced the voice to an unintelligible murmur.

  “Damn’ Commie,” one of the guards muttered.

  “It does seem such a waste,” Latchley said.

  “Let’s not kid ourselves,” Sabantoce said as he started up the stairs to the building’s side exit. “When the ship’s sinking, you save what you can. I think the Bishop explained things clearly enough: God’s testing all men and this is the ultimate test of faith.”

  “Ultimate test, certainly,” Latchley said, laboring to keep up with Sabantoce. “And I’m afraid I must agree with whoever it was said this would produce only chaos—unsettled times … anarchy.”

  “Obvious,” Sabantoce said, as he stepped through the outer door being held by another guard.

  Latchley and the escort followed.

  At once, Sabantoce noted that all the campus lights had been extinguished. The contrived power failure, he thought. They probably switched Meade to an emergency circuit so we wouldn’t notice.

  One of their guards stepped forward, touched Latchley’s arm, said: “Take the path directly across the quad to the Medical School. Use the back door into Vance Hall. You’ll have to hurry. There isn’t much time.”

  Sabantoce led the way down the steps and onto the dark path away from Meade Hall. The path was only a suggestion of lighter gray in the darkness. Latchley stumbled into Sabantoce as they hurried, said: “Excuse me.”

  There was an impression of many moving dark shapes in the shadows around them. Once a light was flashed in their faces, immediately extinguished.

  A voice came from the dark corner of a building: “Down here. Quickly.”

  Hands guided them down steps, through a door, past heavy draperies, through another door and into a small, dimly lighted room.

  Sabantoce recognized it—a medical storeroom that appeared to have been emptied of its supplies rather quickly. There was a small box of compresses on a shelf at his right.

  The room was heavy with tobacco smoke and the odor of perspiration. At least a dozen men loomed up in the gloom around them—some of the men in uniform.

  A heavy-jowled man with a brigadier’s star on his shoulder confronted Sabantoce, said: “Glad to see you made it safely. Are they all in that building now?”

  “Every last one,” Sabantoce said. He swallowed.

  “What about the formula for your Compound 105?”

  “Well,” Sabantoce said, and allowed a smirk to touch his lips: “I took a little precaution about that—just to keep you honest. I mailed a few copies around to…”

  “We know about those,” the brigadier said. “We’ve had the mails from this place closed off and censored for months. I mean those copies you typed in the bursar’s office.”

  Sabantoce turned white. “Well, they’re…”

  Latchley interrupted, saying: “Really, what’s going on here? I thought we…”

  “Be quiet!” the brigadier snapped. He returned his attention to Sabantoce. “Well?”

  “I … ahh…”

  “Those are the ones we found under the floor of his rooms,” said a man by the door. “The typeface is identical, sir.”

  “But I want to know if he made any other copies,” the brigadier said.

  It was clear from the expression on Sabantoce’s face that he had not. “Well … I…” he began.

  Again, Latchley interrupted. “I see no need to…”

  The loud cork-popping sound of a silenced revolver cut him off. The noise was repeated.

  Latchley and Sabantoce crumpled to the floor, dead before they hit it. The man by the door stepped back, holstering his weapon.

  As though punctuating their deaths, the outside night was ripped by an explosion.

  Presently, a man leaned into the room, said: “The walls went in the way we planned, sir. Thermite and napalm are finishing it. Won’t be a trace of those dirty Commies.”

  “Good work, captain,” the brigadier said. “That will be all. Just keep civilians away from the immediate area until we’re sure.”

  “Very good, sir.”

  The head retreated and the door was closed.

  Good man, the brigadier thought. He fingered the lone remaining copy of Compound 105’s formula in his pocket. They were all good men. Hand picked. Have to use a different screening process to pick the men for the next project, though: the investigation of possible military uses in this Compound 105.

  “I want those bodies burned practically to ash,” he said, gesturing with a toe at Sabantoce and Latchley. “Deliver them with those you pick up from the building.”

  From the shadowed rear of the room came a heavy, growling voice: “What’ll I tell the senator?”

  “Tell him anything you want,” the brigadier said. “I’ll show him my private report later.” And he thought: There’s an immediate use for this compound—we have a senator right in our pockets.

  “Damn’ nigger lovers,” the growling voice said.

  “Speak not unkindly of the dead,” said a smooth tenor from the opposite corner of the room.

  A man in a black suit pushed himself through to the open area around the bodies, knelt and began praying in a soft, mumbling voice.

  “Tell me as soon as that fire’s out,” the brigadier said.

  THE PRIMITIVES

  I

  The sinking of the Soviet propaganda ship for the sole purpose of stealing the Mars diamond was a typical Conrad Rumel (alias Swimmer) crime: a gigantic nose-thumbing for profit. And Swimmer had the gigantic nose for it, plus a hair line that crowded his eyebrows, small gray-green eyes, a chin that almost vanished into his neck and a wide thick-lipped mouth like a hungry sea bass.

  When he was seventeen, Swimmer had decided his physical ugliness left him only one suitable career—crime. He came from a family noted for professional specialists—mathematicians, surgeons, physicists, teachers, biochemists. It was no surprise then that Swimmer chose to specialize. His specialty was underwater crime.

  He’d had his first gill mask and equalizer suit at the age of five (the gift of a father who preferred him out of sight) and there’d soon been no doubt that Swimmer was at home in his chosen element.

  Good breeding had marked him, though: he drew the line at bloodshed and murder. If there was any single modus operandi stamp on Swimmer’s crimes (beyond touches that betrayed physical cowardice) it was bizarre humor. It’s noteworthy that he sank the Soviet ship in shallow water when only five men of the anchor watch were aboard (the others being ashore at an official Me
xican fiesta-reception) and the five were all on deck. Swimmer had thoughtfully provided an open carton of a product called “Flotation Falsies” which bobbed to the surface and provided the bouyancy on which the five Russians made their way safely to a nearby beach.

  By the nature of the crime and his subsequent actions, Swimmer had hoped to involve a professional mobster named Bime Jepson. Disposal of the Mars diamond was going to be no easy matter and Swimmer’s sense of honor insisted he owed this to Jepson. Their last mutual enterprise had gone exceedingly sour, costing Jepson a bundle which he quoted at $288,764.51.

  Jepson’s reaction then came as a surprise.

  * * *

  “This is a diamond?” he sneered, staring at the object in his hands. The stone was bluish-white, cloud-surfaced, about the size and shape of a medium cantaloupe. “Are you nuts or something?” Jepson demanded. “This is … is…” His one-track mind struggled for a suitable word. “This is a rock. This is a chunk of nothing!” His narrow blue eyes glared with anger.

  They stood in the bedroom of Jepson’s suite on the 324th floor of the Mazatlan Hilton. Corner windows opened to a view of the ocean and city, colors blaring and gaudy in the bright Mexican afternoon.

  Jepson lifted his attention from the stone. He fixed his gaze on the dark-haired oversize gnome of a man who had brought this unpleasantness. The man was a walking reminder of their last encounter—all that money sunk into an invention by one of Swimmer’s professional uncles, Professor Amino Rumel.

  Uncle Professor’s project was a time machine of uncertain function. Apprised of the device by Swimmer, Jepson had conceived the idea of a sortie into the past backed by a crew with modern arms, the object being to raid the treasury of Knossos. (One of Jepson’s mistresses had read a work of fiction in which this treasure figured.)

  After all those megabucks, Uncle Professor had pronounced the machine as requiring “much more development.”

  “It didn’t work,” was Jepson’s summation. And he was a man who did not like to be thwarted. Only the fact that Uncle Professor was “one of them” (legitimate) and the latent hope that the device might yet be made to work had prevented Jepson from committing bloody violence. Now, here was this creep-nephew, Swimmer, back with more trouble.

  Swimmer had read the signs of anger. He said: “Jep, I swear that’s…”

  “You swear nothing! This ain’t no diamond! A diamond’s something with … something you can…”

  “Jep, let me explain about…”

  “Ain’t you been warned never to interrupt me, Swimmer?”

  Swimmer retreated a short step toward the door. “Now, don’t go getting excited, Jep.”

  Jepson threw the stone onto the unmade bed behind him. “A diamond!” he sneered.

  “Jep, that rock’s worth…”

  “Sharrup!”

  His heart pounding, Swimmer took two steps backward, stood pressed against the door facing Jepson. This was not going at all as he had anticipated.

  “I should call in the boys and teach you a little manners,” Jepson growled. “How many times I gotta tell you don’t interrupt?” Jepson scowled. “Only reason the boys let you in was you told ’em you heisted a diamond too hot for you to handle. Everybody knows how big hearted I am. I’m here to help my friends with little matters like that. But I ain’t here to help my friends with … with … I ain’t here to be woke up every time some beachbum finds a big pebble what’s good for nothing but tying around somebody’s neck so they should sink!”

  * * *

  “Can I say something, Jep?” Swimmer pleaded.

  “Say anything you want, but say it somewhere else. I want you should get outa here and—”

  “Jep!” Swimmer pleaded.

  “Interrupt me once more, Swimmer, and I lose my temper.”

  By its lack of inflection. Jepson’s voice managed to convey a profound menace.

  Swimmer nodded silently. He hadn’t anticipated instant rage from Jepson. Everything depended on being able to explain.

  “You think I don’t recognize this rock?” Jepson asked.

  Swimmer shook his head from side to side.

  “This is the Mars diamond,” Jepson said. “Diamond! It’s the rock them Ruskies brung back in their spaceship. It was in their floating museum out in the harbor just yesterday. I seen it there myself. Does that answer all your questions, Swimmer?”

  “But it’s worth maybe ten million dollars!” Swimmer blurted. “Everybody said…”

  “It ain’t worth ten Mexican cents! Didn’t you see all them charts and things in with it?”

  Swimmer patted a breast pocket of his permadry suit and a dollop of water trapped there spurted out onto the rug. He gulped, said: “I brought them, too. The diagrams, everything.”

  “Then you shoulda known better,” Jepson snarled. “There ain’t no diamond cutter in the world’d touch this thing. Ain’t no cutter wouldn’t recognize it in the first place. And in the second place, them charts show why this diamond can’t be cut without it breaks into chips worth maybe two-bits apiece. It’s impossible to cut this thing, you dumbhead! And in the third place, this is what they call a cultural relic of Mars what the Ruskies and every cop in the world’s gonna be looking for soon’s they find it missing. And you hadda bring it here!”

  For Jepson, this was a long speech. He stopped to collect his thoughts. Stupid creep Swimmer!

  Swimmer stood trembling with the desire to speak and the fear of what might happen if he did.

  Jepson looked out the window, returned a speculative stare to Swimmer. “How’d you heist it?”

  “I sank the boat. While everybody was splashing around topside, I went in with a gill mask and burner, opened the case and took off across the bay. It was easy.”

  Jepson slapped his forehead with the heel of his right hand. “You sunk the boat!” He sighed. “Well, I’m gonna do you a favor. Not because I wanta, but because I hafta. I’m gonna see this rock finds its way back into the bay near the Rusky boat like maybe it fell overboard. And you ain’t never gonna mention this thing again, right?”

  “Jep,” Swimmer said, speaking with desperate urgency, “maybe I know a cutter.”

  * * *

  Jepson studied him, interested in spite of the lessons from past experiences with Swimmer. “A cutter who could handle this rock? A cutter who’d even try it?”

  “She’ll work any rock, Jep. And she won’t recognize it and she won’t care where it came from.”

  “She?”

  Swimmer wiped his forehead. He had Jepson’s interest now. Maybe Jepson would come along after all.

  “That’s right, she,” Swimmer said. “And there isn’t a cutter in this world can hold a candle to her.”

  “I never heard of no dame cutter,” Jepson said. “I didn’t think they had the nerves for it.”

  “This is a brand new one, Jep.”

  “A new cutter,” Jepson mused. “A dame. Is she a looker?”

  “I doubt it, but I’ve never seen her.”

  “You’ve never seen her, but you’ve got her?”

  “I’ve got her.”

  “Awwww,” Jepson said. He shook his head. “I find it interesting you have a new cutter on the string, but nobody can cut this rock. You seen them charts. The Ruskies don’t make mistakes like that. This rock is for nobody. It can’t be cut.”

  “I think this cutter can do it,” Swimmer said.

  The stubborn set to Swimmer’s mouth whetted Jepson’s interest. It was like Swimmer to be stubborn in the face of determined opposition.

  “Where you got this cutter?” Jepson asked.

  Swimmer wet his lips with his tongue. This was the ticklish part, Jepson’s temper being what it was. “You remember my uncle Amino and his advice for you to be patient about…”

  “Ahhh, hah!” Jepson barked. He pointed to the door. “Out! You hear me, creep? Out!”

  “Jep, the time machine works!”

  * * *

  Silence d
ragged out for a dozen heartbeats while Swimmer wondered if he had timed that revelation correctly, and while Jepson reminded himself that this possibility was one of the reasons he hadn’t obliterated Swimmer.

  Presently, Jepson said: “It works?”

  “I swear it, Jep. It works, but the controls aren’t too … well, accurate. Sometimes my uncle says it balks and … it doesn’t go precisely where you want.”

  “But it works?” Jepson demanded.

  “It brought back this cutter,” Swimmer said. “From perhaps twenty or thirty thousand years ago.”

  A muscle twisted on Jepson’s left cheek and his jaw line went hard. “I thought you said your cutter dame was an expert.”

  Swimmer took a deep breath, wondering how he could explain paleolithic culture to a man like Jepson. The patois of the underworld didn’t fit the job.

  “You ain’t got nothing to say?” Jepson asked.

  “I’m quoting my uncle, who’s a very truthful man,” Swimmer said. “According to my uncle, the people of this dame’s culture made all their tools out of stone. They have what my uncle calls an intuition about stones and working with them. He’s the one said she could cut the Mars diamond.”

  Jepson frowned. “Did Uncle Professor fall off the legit? He put you up to this job?”

  “Oh, no! None of my family know how I … ahh, make my living.”

  Jepson groped backward with one foot, found the edge of the bed, sat down. “How much more loot does Uncle Professor need to fix his machine?”

  “You have it all wrong, Jep. It isn’t a matter of loot. My uncle says there are local anomalies and force-time variations and that it very likely will be impossible ever to steer the machine very close to a time mark.”

  “But it works?”

  “With these limitations.”

  “Then why ain’t I heard about it? Thing like this, seems it’d be more important than any Mars diamond. Why ain’t it big news?”

  “My uncle’s trying to determine if his force-time variation theory is correct. Besides, he has a plan to present his stone-age woman before a scientific meeting and he’s collecting supporting evidence. And he says he’s having trouble teaching her how to talk. She thinks he’s some kind of god.”