Escape Velocity

by Christopher Stasheff

  Dar stopped, turning his head from side to side, and saw nothing. He strained his ears, but all he heard was a hiss of wind.

  “Over there.” Sam pointed towards a shopfront a block to her left. “Come on.”

  She set off toward the shop. After the episode in the jail-tunnels, Dar wasn't about to dispute her hearing. He followed.

  They had come into a shabbier section of Haskerville. The houses were big, but they were simple frame dwellings—no half-timbering and stucco—and looked somewhat infirm. Most of them were overdue for a coat of paint—the older part of town, at a guess, built before the planet had enough surplus to worry about aesthetics in architecture.

  Someone came out of the shopfront they were heading for, and turned down the street away from them. He/she was bald, and wore a gray, loose coverall.

  “I think,” Sam said, with a catch to her voice, “we've struck paydirt.”

  Dar could see her point—and now he could hear the trace she'd picked up: a low mutter of conversation, underscored by the ripple of a string instrument and a flute.

  Sam swung the door open. They stepped into a room decorated in Late-Modern Junkyard. The wails were plain pastel-painted plastiboard, decorated with hangings of knotted, brightly colored twine, some of which held potted plants. The tables were plastic delivery drums, and the “chairs” were tree stumps, somewhat leveled off on the bottom. There was a counter against one wall; Dar recognized a section of it—it had “Wolmar” rolled across it. The far end was topped by an arcane plastic contraption that gave off clouds of steam and a rich, spicy aroma.

  Most of the tables were filled, and all the patrons had shaved heads and loose gray coveralls. So, for that matter, did the people behind the counter. The musicians, on a small raised platform at the far end, wore the same attire.

  Dar paused just inside the doorway, feeling a prickling along the back of his neck. He couldn't help it; he felt as though he'd just stepped into a village populated by a tribe he hadn't met, who might or might not be hostile.

  “Don't worry,” Sam murmured, “you're with me.”

  She sauntered over to the counter. A girl who looked enough like her to make Dar rub his eyes, came over and said, “Yeah?” in a neutral tone.

  “Two cups,” Sam said, and Dar felt in his purse for nails. The girl turned to the arcane contraption, picked up a cup, and pressed a valve; then she turned back to them with two steaming mugs. “New here.”

  “Am,” Sam confirmed. “Just in from Wolmar.”

  Panic jammed Dar's stomach up toward his throat. Why not just send up a rocket that'd explode into the words, “Here're the suspects!”

  But the girl's face came alive. “The prison planet? Where they're oppressing the natives? Hey, tell me about it!”

  “Yeah, me too!” A tall, lanky man lounged up to lean on the bar beside Sam.

  “Wolmar? I want to hear this!”

  “Hey! The real word?”

  In thirty seconds, they were surrounded by a small crowd. Dar kept trying to edge closer and closer to the counter, and to glance over both shoulders at once; but Sam launched happily into an account of her tour of Wolmar. Dar was amazed at her accuracy; under equivalent conditions, he couldn't have resisted the temptation to color the tale a little, probably putting in a bevy of scantily clad maidens and a hair-raising escape from a bloodthirsty tribe or two; but Sam stuck to reporting what she'd seen and heard, introducing Dar as her guide, which won him a look of respect, then glares of scorn when she mentioned his being a trader, then looks of awe when she explained his teaching function.

  “You mean it's not really a prison colony?”

  Sam shrugged. “Depends on how you look at it. They've all been sentenced to go there.”

  “They're not really oppressing the natives?” The asker sounded almost disappointed.

  “No—but look what they are doing!” Sam fairly glowed with missionary fervor as she went into an explanation of Cholly's educational program. Dar listened, enthralled. He hadn't known he was that much of a hero.

  “Hey—it sounds like heaven,” said one Hume, with a shaky laugh.

  “Yeah. What crime do I have to commit to get sent there?” another joked; but the laughter that followed had a rather serious echo.

  “Well, don't jump too soon.” Sam leaned on the counter and pushed her cup over for a refill. “The Bureau of Otherworldly Affairs sent out a new governor.”

  Dar was delighted at the groan.

  “Bastards always gotta foul up something good when they find it,” muttered one Angry Young Man.

  “Establishments can't stand progress,” growled another.

  “Yeah, but BOA didn't figure on Shacklar.” Sam sipped her refill with relish.

  “Why? What could he do?” The AYM frowned.

  “Well, the new governor's credentials kinda got, uh, ‘lost,' before he could show them to Shacklar. And by the time Shacklar got done with him, he'd decided to resign and join the colony.”

  The room rocked with a hoot of laughter. The AYM smote the counter gleefully. “Go, General! The Organic Will Grow, in spite of the defoliators!”

  Sam nodded. “Dar and I got the job of carrying his resignation back to Terra. But the new ex-governor's lefthand man didn't like the whole idea, so he set out to sabotage us.”

  “How?” The AYM scowled. “What could he do?”

  “Well, first off, he seems to have wrangled himself in as the pilot of the courier ship that brought us here—and he sicced a bunch of pirates on us as soon as we broke out of H-space.”

  A low mutter of anger ran around the crowd.

  “Oh, it was okay—we got out of it, all right, and got picked up by a patrol cruiser. But when we got here, we found out he'd told the Haskerville government that one of us was a telepath and was a threat to social order.”

  “You?” a voice hooted. “You're the witches they're hunting?”

  “What've they got against telepaths, anyway?” the AYM grumbled. “They're not hurting anybody.”

  “Especially when they aren't really telepaths,” Sam agreed. “But the House of Houses got wind of it, too, and tried to 'script us. So we're on the run two ways, and running out of hideouts.”

  A chorus of protest filled the room, and a dozen Humes thrust forward with offers of sympathy.

  “Sons o' sobakas,” the AYM growled. “Just let one person try do do something decent, and they throw every roller they can in your way! Come on! We'll hide you!”

  And the whole crowd swirled them out with a chorus of agreement. Dar started to dig in his heels in alarm, then noticed Sam whirling by with a delighted grin. He relaxed, and let himself be borne by the current.

  It deposited them in the street outside, with only the AYM and a few other Humes.

  “Come on!” the AYM declared, and he set off down the street. Dar had to hurry to catch up.

  “Lucky bumping into you,” Sam was saying as he came up with them.

  “Not all that much luck. This's the ideal place for us—they leave us alone.”

  Dar could see why. The townsfolk would want to stay as far away as they could from the drab Humes and their shoestring existence. Of course, the shortage of radio communication and police might have had something to do with it, too—if the system was rigged to stay out of the way of the taxpayers' pleasures, it wouldn't be able to bother anyone else much, either.

  The AYM led them into an old building that looked as though it had been an office collection in its youth, but had been converted to dwelling purposes. The liftshaft still operated, and took them up to the third level.

  “Got to exploring one day.” The AYM ran his fingers over the bas-reliefs that decorated the wall at the end of the corridor. “I was doing a rubbing here, and I must have pressed just hard enough on the right thing, because . . .”

  Something clicked; a hum sprang up; then, slowly, a portion of the wall retracted, to leave a doorway about two meters high.

  Dar stared. Then,
slowly, he nodded. “A very interesting suite.”

  “Yeah, isn't it?” The AYM grinned. “I don't know what kind of business the office had in the old days, but they must've had some kind of a security problem. Import-export trade, at a guess.”

  Dar stooped through the doorway. “Don't suppose it comes equipped with little luxuries like light.”

  “Try the wall-plate.”

  It hadn't occurred to Dar that there might be one. He slid his hand over the wall until he felt the smoother rectangle. It responded to his skin temperature by glowing a small, dim plate in the ceiling into life.

  Sam stepped through, too. “You knew we were coming?”

  “No, but I had a notion I might need it someday.” The AYM pointed to a few boxes of sealed packets and demijohns against the lefthand wall. “Made a deposit every time I could scrounge a little extra. There's a week's supply in here, at least. Pretty plain—biscuit and fruit, and some meat, and nothing to drink but water—but it'll keep you alive.” He pointed to a neat stack of blankets just beyond the two straight chairs. “That's all I could scrounge for sleeping and sitting. But all I promised was a hideout.”

  “The way we are right now, this is a palace.” Sam clasped his hand. “No way I can thank you, really, grozh.”

  “No need. Who knows? You may be doing the same for me someday.” He squeezed her arm. “Enjoy what you can. I'll check in every now and then.” He stepped back through the doorway, and the wall-segment rolled back into place.

  “Of course,” Dar observed, “you realize we can't get out now.”

  “Lesser of two evils.” Sam settled herself on one of the hard chairs. “We can get him to tell us when the next ship lands, and duck out to the port.”

  “A month in this crackerbox?”

  “This one, or one like it, maintained by the authorities.” Sam shrugged. “Your choice. Personally, I'll take this one.”

  “No contest,” Dar sighed, flopping down onto the other chair. “I didn't know your tribe was so widespread.”

  “There're a lot of us—an awful lot. Oh, there always have been some, at least as far back as the late nineteenth century—but they're always a minority, unless something's going wrong in the government. When a political system has engine trouble, alternative cultures spread.”

  “Until the engine starts running again?”

  Sam nodded. “But the numbers have been on the increase, steadily, for more than a hundred years now.”

  “I always seem to come in on the end of things,” Dar sighed.

  “And the beginning.” Sam's face lit with a rare, dazzling smile. “That's what comes after the end, you know.”

  The monster in his dream was knocking on his head with a very loud, hollow sound. Dar waded up out of the morass of slumber to check on the objectivity of the knocking.

  Sure enough, it was objective—but in the drab reality of their roomlet, it sounded only as a tapping, not a booming pounding.

  Dar frowned. Why would the AYM tap? He knew how to open the door!

  Therefore, the tapper didn't know how.

  Therefore, it wasn't the AYM.

  Dar reached out and squeezed Sam's ankle. Her head came up slowly, eyes squinting painfully. “What . . . ?”

  “Sh.” Dar laid a finger across her lips, then pointed toward the wall/door.

  She turned toward the tapping, irritated. He could virtually see her brain waking up as her eyes widened and her mind traced the same path of logic his had.

  “Double-crossed?” Dar whispered.

  “Can't be!” Sam scrambled to her feet. “I just won't believe it!”

  The door/wall began to hum.

  “Uh oh.” Dar tried to get between Sam and the entryway. “He found the right leaf.”

  The door rolled back to show a segment of a man.

  It was sort of the center stripe of a personality. Dar could see the man's face, and a little of his shoulders to either side (he had no neck), a slice of chest and belly, one knee and the other thigh, and the middle of the front of an armchair. The rest of both the man and the armchair went on to either side of the doorway and, from the look of him, went on for quite a distance. If the average Falstavian was fat, he was enormous. His face was a beachball with four chins and a blob of nose over a thin-lipped, tight mouth. But the eyes, tiny as currants in a vat of dough, were sharp and alive, quick with intelligence, chill with shrewdness. His chest and belly had been cast in one piece and, if there was a ribcage beneath, it was sunk full fathom five. His legs were sections of whale, and his foot was the whaleboat.

  The chair floated a good eighteen inches off the floor—anti-gravity, no doubt; and the connection sparked in Dar's mind: the man couldn't get out of the chair. He couldn't move without it. That fat.

  “Greetings,” Gargantua said. “I am Myles Croft.”

  “Uh—a pleasure. I suppose.” Dar was willing to take a chance on it; after all, the man couldn't get in. “Let me guess—you're the landlord, and it's the first of the month.”

  “Closer than you intended.” The mouth didn't smile, but the eyes twinkled. “I have the honor to be mayor of Haskerville.”

  Dar levered his jaw back in place and swallowed.

  “We're doing better than I thought,” Sam said behind him. “The Humes're getting chummy with the mayor.”

  “Not particularly.” The irony in Croft's voice had to be humor. “No one needed to tell me where you were hidden. Once I'd heard that you'd escaped from the House of Houses, it was obvious you'd be somewhere back in Haskerville—and, since I knew the lady of the party was a Hume, it was logical to conclude you'd seek refuge in this quarter.”

  Sam nodded. “All right, so far as it goes—but how'd you know about the two of us? . . . Hold on, cancel that! Of course. If the police knew, you'd know. But how'd you know we'd been taken to Sard, let alone that we'd escaped?”

  “I have my sources.”

  “Interesting, interesting.” Dar nodded slowly. “But how'd you know which building to look in?”

  “If anyone had hidden you, it would logically be Anthony Marne, who's as much of a leader as the Humes have.”

  “Angry-young-man type?”

  “I thought you'd met. Therefore, you'd probably be hidden in his building—so I surveyed the establishment floor by floor, until I realized one hall was noticeably shorter than the others. Beyond that, I believe you heard my search for the activating control.”

  Dar just stared.

  Then he gave his head a quick shake. “Did you ever consider taking up detective work?”

  “Frequently, young man—and I frequently do. The mayor should know something about the goings-on in his own city.”

  “But if you know all that, the House shouldn't be able to get away with anything, and ninety percent of your citizens ought to be in jail.”

  The huge face smiled into waves of fat. “You are observant, young man. I leave it to your imagination to determine why all are still at large. Suffice it to say that I have some rather elaborate plans, which are working rather well in practice; but they result in a delicate balance, which could very easily be upset by a new and random factor.”

  Dar's spine turned into an icicle. “You mean us.”

  Croft nodded. “It is in my interest to see that you're removed from my planet as quickly as possible.”

  “Shouldn't you have brought along a little protection on this jaunt?” Sam asked grimly.

  “I think not. I've discussed you with a friend of mine, and he seems to have high regard for you.”

  “Well, it's nice to have a good reference.” Dar was wary. “Who's our yea-sayer?”

  “A Mr. Tambourin; he styles himself ‘Whitey the Wino.' And, too, I think, all things considered, that the best way to remove you from circulation is to assist you in your progress.”

  “You mean you'll get us out of here?” Dar pounced on it.

  “I had that in mind, yes. You've certainly done nothing meriting permanent incarcera
tion; but the longer you're here, the more disruptive you'll be. And I don't relish having two police forces on my planet.”

  “Two?” Now it was Sam who pounced. “Where'd the second one come from?”

  “A gentleman named Canis Destinus, I believe. He came to me yesterday morning, bearing a letter ‘To Whom It May Concern,' from the Secretary for Internal Security for the I.D.E., requesting the reader to aid Mr. Destinus in any way possible. But the Secretary, as you may know, is head of the reactionary LORDS party . . .”

  “I didn't,” Sam said, “but I'm glad to.”

  “Mr. Destinus seems to be more than he appears,” Dar said softly.

  “Really? I thought his appearance quite indicative; looks somewhat like a rat.”

  “I take it you don't quite approve of the LORDS?”

  “Not germane.” Croft dismissed the point with a wave of his hand. “Fortunately, in such circumstances, the letter of the law requires a planetary official, such as myself, to make certain lengthy verifications of the applicant's bona fides, including the Secretary's signature; so I explained to Mr. Destinus that I would probably be able to accord him my full cooperation early next week.”

  “As I said.” Dar grinned. “You don't approve of the LORDS.”

  “Be that as it may; Mr. Destinus did not seem disposed to wait. So I assumed, when I began to receive reports of pairs of police officers who were definitely not among those I had employed, that Mr. Destinus had induced my cooperation by his own initiative, possibly with Sard's assistance.”

  “He hired some bullyboys from the House to impersonate cops,” Dar translated. “But I can see your problem; the longer we're around, the longer you've got a second, but illegal, police force.”

  “Of course, I have ways of making such an enterprise prohibitively expensive for Mr. Sard—but not while the LORDS' bottomless purse is open to him. However if you depart. Mr. Destinus will leave in pursuit of you.”

  “Makes excellent sense,” Dar agreed, “from your point of view.”

  “And from yours, I should think.”

  “As far as it goes,” Sam said cautiously. “Problem is, when we do leave, we're a little picky about where we're going.”