Picking up a felt-tipped pen, he began to go through the sheets, taking some pleasure in ruthlessly editing out some of the more fulsome phrases. He was disturbed in his task as the door opened and Lieutenant Lee Ching appeared.
Lee saluted smartly. "All correct, sir."
"Got your men?"
"Yes, sir."
"Arms?"
"Stunners, as ordered, sir."
"Good. Now you know the drill. First you call on Colonel Hitachi and tell him that we want the cooperation of his police in a search of the European sector of Central City, in the Kurile Street area."
"Hitachi knows we are coming, sir?"
"He was unavailable when I called," Bruce said. "But I spoke to his deputy, so they'll be expecting you. It seems obvious to me that, if Huygens is in hiding, he would be most likely to try to do so among his own kind, where he wouldn't be quite so conspicuous."
"And Mr. Magnus, sir?"
"Is away in New Honshu for the day. In any case, Corps discipline is my province, and I intend to make certain that it's enforced. Clear?"
"Yes, sir."
"Right—get moving."
Lee saluted and left.
Bruce returned his attention to the typescript The first three of its neat pages were now scored by a number of uncompromising black slashes. He turned over to page four, the felt pen moving once more to its task as the banal phrases leapt up at him: "glorious tradition"—slash; "brotherhood of mankind"—slash. Magnus must have known quite well that he would never stand up in public and give voice to such hog-wash. ...
Bruce stopped, the pen poised, as a disquieting thought hit him. Of course Magnus would anticipate his objections to such tub-thumping oratory, and would expect him to edit the script accordingly; to edit out the fulsome rubbish, and be left eventually with . . . with just the speech Magnus really intended him to make.
Damn Magnus! He thrust the script to one side. The man's efficiency was becoming oppressive.
... But they are somewhere.
They have to be. By all the laws of probability,
We should have met them before. There,
Long before we reached the Rim, we should have
found them.
Consider the odds. We cannot be The only men....
Kilroy: I. Kavanin
Ahead, where the massive grandeur of snow-capped northern Ayoto mountains rose abruptly from the valley floor, the buildings of the Intensive Care Pediatric Unit were still invisible behind the screening trees.
Seated beside the pilot as the copter scurried across the morning sky, Kenji Sato looked down on the deep green of the wooded valley, his drawn face somber with a familiar dread.
The site for the hospital had been carefully chosen. There were no roads, not even an isolated farmstead any nearer than sixty kilometers. All personnel and supplies were ferried in and out by this single copter which operated a shuttle service between the hospital and the small town of Ranaku, some eighty-five kilometers south. Even the inquisitive Mr. Magnus could surely find nothing to attract his interest in this virgin, wooded country, other than its scenic beauty, and Magnus was too fully occupied with more urgent matters. If isolation equated security, then the Intensive Care Unit was surely secure, and the dread which fell like a pall over Sato's thoughts had nothing to do with any doubts on that score.
More terrible than any remote possibility of prying by unwanted eyes were the memories of what he had seen here in the past, and would shortly see again; the pitiful, helpless creatures who depended entirely on the devoted care of Joni Yamaguchi and his staff; monstrous genetic sports whose very existence mocked the imagination of any God-made man. To most of the people of Kepler III, people who hid their true feelings with sayings like "catch a cold and find a monster," the Johannsen's-disease-mutated children were still mercifully only creatures of rumor; and even to those who had personal contact, through the accident of such a birth in their immediate family, that contact was a brief one, soon ended by the hurried removal of the child by discreet, white-jacketed strangers. There was no such release for Kenji Sato. As the copter arced in for its landing and the cluster of wooden buildings came into sight behind the trees, he reminded himself once again that one of the mewling, helpless animals being cared for in this sanctuary was his own grandchild.
The copter settled on the mossy grass about a hundred meters from the main building, its motors dying with a coughing whine. The pilot slid open the doors of the cabin, admitting a breeze laden with the scent of the trees of the forest and effervescent with the coolness of the mountain snows.
"You go ahead, doctor," he said. "And tell Billy Kanu to get the lead out and bring a truck over for this stuff. Like he expects I should dump it over there?" He nodded towards the pile of packaged supplies stacked at the back of the tiny cabin.
Sato smiled his assent, and stepped out onto the yielding grass. Here, with the great silence of a natural paradise broken only by the soughing of a breeze through the living green of the forest, the buildings, constructed from the wood of that same forest, merged with their surroundings, but man was still an intruder. Sato walked slowly up the gentle slope towards the main building, watching the verandah expectantly for the appearance of Yamaguchi, who must have heard the sound of the hovering copter. Yamaguchi was a brilliant young doctor, who had given up the prospect of a glittering career in Central City to take control of the Intensive Care Unit, but Sato was aware that even such dedication must falter eventually in the face of a hopeless task. If only he had been able to bring some ray of hope, some suggestion that the work of Mary Osawa and her virologists offered at least some possibility of checking the steadily growing incidence of monstrous births.
Sato stopped, frowning, as he reached the foot of the verandah steps, sensing an unusual absence of familiar noises from within the building. Usually there was the sound of a typist, the murmur of voices, or the cry of a child, but today there was nothing but a dead silence. Morale might be bad at this time, but surely someone must have heard the approach of the copter?
Quickening his pace, he walked up the wooden steps towards the open main doorway. On the verandah, his foot encountered a yielding obstacle. He looked down, and saw a child's doll lying on the bare boards. Such toys were commonplace at the hospital, where every attempt was made to bring the monstrous children into contact with normal human life.
He bent down and picked up the doll. It was dressed in a miniature green silk kimono. The head had been crushed out of all human semblance, an act which must have entailed the exertion of brutal force, considering the durability of the plastic of which it was made. A deliberate act of destruction, the heavy grinding of a heel, perhaps. Sato held the doll looking down at its ruined face, conscious of a prickling feeling of apprehension which crawled its way over his scalp.
Inside, the chair by the reception desk and switchboard usually attended by Yamaguchi's secretary was vacant. The door of the medical director's office was to the left. Sato rapped briefly and walked in. The room was empty, but Sato noticed that the pilot light of the dictating machine was still glowing, as if Yamaguchi had stepped out in the middle of a memo, and carelessly omitted to switch the machine off. But Yamaguchi was not a careless man.
Sato turned abruptly and walked out of the room, conscious of the hollow sound of his own footsteps as he moved past the reception desk down the corridor which led to Ward A. The doors swung open at his approach and he strode into the ward, where the older of Yamaguchi's charges, the three-year-olds, were kept. The room was light and airy, with pastel-painted walls dotted with the kind of pictures one might expect to see in the nursery of any human child; cartoons of animals native to Kepler III or to faraway Earth, and happy, laughing children.
The children on the walls were the only ones to be seen in the ward. The bedclothes on the ten high-sided cots, five spaced on each side of the center aisle, were rumpled in disorder, but there was no sign of their occupants. Sato stood, held in a shock of incompr
ehension, his eyes surveying the deserted ward.
Hearing the sound of heavy footsteps behind him, he wheeled as the doors opened again to admit the copter pilot. The man's round face was questioning.
"Say, what's going on here, doctor? I got a load back there in the copter . . ." He ceased speaking and looked at Sato curiously.
Sato realized belatedly that he was still holding the mutilated doll in his left hand. He placed it down on a nearby cot. "You left last night for Ranaku?"
"Yes, sure. That's the routine," said the pilot
"And there was no sign of anything unusual then?"
"No..."
"I'll take the other wards. You make a search of the living quarters," Sato ordered, moving towards the door, although he already had a feeling that the exercise was a pointless one. "I'll meet you back here in ten minutes."
In the other buildings the same enigma was repeated. There was no sign of disorder, everything appeared to be absolutely normal—save that there were no patients, or staff. Sato returned to the main building to find the copter pilot sitting on the steps of the verandah.
"Nothing, doctor, not a single human being in the whole place." The man shivered, as he looked up at Sato. "My girl, Asura, I went to her room, and there was nothing. For God's sake, what happened here?"
Sato could offer no explanation, even to himself. The entire situation was quite beyond reason. There was no obvious reason for the evacuation of the hospital; if what had happened had indeed been an evacuation. In any case, where could the people have gone? Into the forest? Or up into the mountains? Moving, as they must, on foot, because the copter, their only transport, was not available. But even if the people of the staff had done such a thing—what of the fifty helpless patients, none of whom, as far as he knew, were capable of purposeful movement on their own account? The whole thing was inconceivable—and yet it had happened. Suddenly, the monstrous children had apparently been spirited away, as if they had never existed— and with them, thirty adult human beings, twenty of whom had been trained medical staff who could ill be spared. Unless...
Sato was conscious of a dreadful, cold rage growing in his mind. To President Kido, with his ambitions for the future of the planet, the mutated children had been a burden and a possible source of embarrassment. Kido had hinted more than once that he considered the policy of preservation a wasteful and dangerous one. What more likely than that, under fear of what the scrutiny of Magnus and the Explorations Division staff might reveal, Kido had steeled himself to take the ruthless, inhuman step of removing the monstrous children to some place where they would be exterminated en masse? It was an operation well within the capabilities of the forces directly under the command of the president, and it was almost surely in time with his ruthless determination to maintain himself in power.
Under such circumstances, it was possible that Yamaguchi and his staff were unharmed, that Kido was merely intending to keep them out of sight in some safe place until the independence investigation was over. But the children—that monstrous but sacred trust...
"Take me back to Ranaku—at once!" Sato said to the copter pilot
Tom Bruce stood on a balcony of the presidential palace holding a lukewarm glass of sake in his right hand and thinking longingly of what he would give for the taste of bourbon on the rocks. The humming chatter of the thronging crowds in the palace gardens below wafted up to him, making him thankful that he had at least managed to escape with the VIP attendees of the reception to the comparative quiet of the president's lounge.
"Ah, there you are, commander. Everything all right?"
Bruce turned, to find himself looking into the sallow moon-face of President Kido. "Very comfortable, thank you, Mr. President," he said, an automatic smile creasing his craggy features.
"Good! Good!" beamed the president "I must tell you that your speeches so far have made a profound impression on our people. It is seldom that a man of action like yourself combines such powers of oratory with his other talents."
"You are too kind, Mr. President," Bruce said. That was the trouble; they were all too damned kind, and polite. Everybody on Kepler III smiled all the time, and each person he met vied with the other in the utterance of embarrassingly fulsome compliments. Despite the fact that Ichiwara, Magnus's assistant, had briefed him carefully on the Japanese habit of using speech to conceal rather than reveal one's true thoughts, Bruce found that the reality beggared the description. Social life on Kepler III was like constant total immersion in a barrel of molasses.
The president lowered his rotund body into a chair, and motioned Bruce to take another close by him. Bruce obeyed. The prospect of yet another exchange of meaningless platitudes chafed as much as his over-tight full-dress uniform, but one just didn't walk out on a president.
"I have been meaning to ask you, commander," Kido said; "is my Colonel Hitachi giving you all the cooperation you need?"
"He was been most helpful," Bruce said truthfully. "But I'm afraid results so far haven't been encouraging. The fugitives seem to have disappeared into thin air."
"Ah, well, a minor matter," Kido said, waving one fat hand on which a ring with a diamond as big as an ice cube glittered. "After all, you are better off without such people. I would wish that some of my own malcontents might disappear so conveniently."
"Malcontents, here on Kepler?"
Kido's great belly shook, jellylike, as he chuckled. "My dear commander, you look shocked. Please forgive me for mentioning the subject."
"No . . . not at all. It is merely that everyone I have met here appears to be well contented and happy."
"Ah, everyone you have met, perhaps," said the president. "But I fear that, even in paradise, there are those who would find some cause for complaint, and Kepler III, despite the efforts of three generations of our people, is still not quite a paradise."
Bruce surveyed the bland features of his host thoughtfully. It would be interesting to know just where Shanon Kido stood in the private assessment of Charles Magnus, and what plans Magnus had for the president's future if, and when, independence was granted to the planet. As far as Bruce himself was concerned, the very fact that Kido was a politician was sufficient to make him uneasy and mistrustful in the man's presence.
"An interesting point of view, Mr. President," Bruce said. "Although it seems..."
He stopped talking as a thin man wearing a dark blue zipper-suit burst through the open doorway and hurried across to Kido.
"Mr. President, I have to talk with you—now!" The man's voice crackled with tension.
A shadow of irritation passed over Kido's Buddha-like features. "Doctor Sato, please. This is hardly the time..."
"Let me be the judge of that, Mr. President. I have just returned from Minaku, and..
"Dr. Sato, you are discourteous in the extreme," ♦ Kido interrupted sharply. "I am entertaining an honored guest."
The man wheeled and saw Bruce for the first time.
"Commander Bruce, this is Doctor Sato, my Minister of Health," said Kido.
"Commander," Sato bowed slightly. "I must apologize for the intrusion."
"Dr. Sato," Bruce said, rising to his feet, noting the grayish pallor of the man's bony features, and the agitation flickering in his deep-set eyes.
"Mr. President, please . . ." Sato turned back to Kido. "I'm sure the commander will excuse us . . ."
"Gentlemen, I think it would be better if I left you to your business," Bruce said. "Obviously it is a matter of some urgency."
"No, no, Commander Bruce," said Kido, maneuvering his bulky body out of the chair in which he had been sitting. "Doctor Sato and I will retire to my study. Please make yourself comfortable."
Bruce watched curiously as the oddly assorted couple walked through the doorway into the lounge, wondering what kind of an emergency could have produced such an interruption.
"Doctor Sato, I find your suggestion that any such evacuation might have taken place under my direction slanderous, to say the least,"
President Kido said.
Kenji Sato, his first rage dissipated, sat on the edge of a chair, an increasing feeling of helplessness enveloping him as he searched the round, indignant features of the president.
Kido continued righteously: "I would remind you that the Intensive Care Unit was set up under your guidance, and run under your supervision. Therefore I suggest that whatever may have gone wrong there must be directly your own responsibility."
Sato bowed his head. "You're right, of course, Mr. President. The least I can do under the circumstances is to offer my resignation ..."
"Resignation? Nonsense, man! What possible good could that do? Kepler III needs you, Doctor Sato. Now, let us consider this matter rationally, and see if we can arrive at some explanation. You say that there was no sign of violence at the hospital, that nothing had been disturbed?"
"Apart from the broken doll, and that could have been an accident," Sato said. "It would seem that the evacuation, if that is what it was, was carried out quite peaceably, with the cooperation of Yamaguchi and his staff."
"I take it that you discard outright the idea that Yamaguchi himself might have decided for some reason to abandon the hospital?"
"Don't you?" Sato said. "Sixty kilometers to the nearest town, through densely wooded country."
"And the alternative?"
"The arrival of a well-organized force, with the necessary transport, and documents capable of proving to Yamaguchi's satisfaction that it was his duty to cooperate."
"I have already assured you that no such operation has been mounted with my knowledge."
"It could hardly have been without," Sato said.
"I'm not entirely sure of that," Kido said, frowning thoughtfully. 'There has been considerable to-and-fro-ing from Venturer Twelve, the Corps ship—especially since this business of the desertion of two of their crew members."
Sato nodded.
"Hitachi's police have been cooperating, of course. But there have also been a considerable number of flights by aircraft from the Corps ship in which our people have not been directly involved. It occurs to me that one of these search parties could have come upon the Intensive Care Unit by accident, and gone down to investigate."
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