by Sam Smith
On the third evening police headquarters phoned the bar, told Alger and Drin that they were both required immediately. They ran to their ship. When they arrived the Director told them that he was preparing a report on the events on Happiness.
“Yes?” Alger panted.
“In light of what we now know I want one of you to sympathetically interview Belid Keal again. Get the whole story out of her.”
“One of us?” Alger said.
“Yes.”
“Now? It’s evening here.”
“Tomorrow morning will be fine. Put it on record, then I can consult it at my leisure.”
“Do we take the ship?”
“No. Leave that at headquarters. One of you take a police plane. My orders. Goodbye.”
Alger looked to Drin with round-eyed amazement at the order.
“Split up a team?” he shook his head. “Split up a team? Oh well,” he slapped his hands on his knees and stood, “that’s the orders. But I’m telling you the sooner this is over the better. I’ve never heard the like. Split up a team.” So Alger continued for several more minutes. Finally he decided that Drin should be the one to go while he, the senior officer, remained with the ship.
Headquarters arranged for a police plane that was going in the direction of the Keal farm to give Drin a lift. Drin was happy to go. So the next morning, while Alger — muttering about planetary madness — made his way to the bar, Drin took his seat behind the two police officers in their plane.
The two police officers were a man and woman team. The woman Sergeant didn’t say much. The younger Constable pointed out places of possible interest to Drin.
The Keal farm was an hour’s flight from the capital. After half an hour the Sergeant asked Drin if he’d like to pilot the plane. She had been in the bar when Alger had been scoffing at the notion that there was any expertise involved in piloting a mere plane. Out of loyalty to Alger Drin accepted the challenge.
He and the Constable exchanged seats. Drin found the control column familiar enough. Gravity was not. Nor was the sensation of speed, though paradoxically they were travelling at far slower speeds than he was used to in the ship. However, after a few sudden soarings, a stomach wrenching drop and a dizzying roll, he mastered the small craft, acquitted himself with honour and upheld the prestige of the Space police. The two police officers, though laughing at his initial falterings, were pleased with his prowess. At the Keal farm they parted on amicable terms. They were to collect him on their return in the evening.
Drin was left alone on the apron. The apron was surrounded by trees. Every single heart-shaped leaf on every single tree was still. So too was the house. What should he do if the Keals were not at home, he wondered. An animal at the rear of the house was making an aggressive noise. A face appeared briefly at an upstairs window. Drin realised that they had not yet risen. The different local times were new to his thinking. Reassuringly tapping the recorder at his breast, Drin straightened himself into Constable Ligure and strode at a measured pace over to the house.
As he mounted the wooden steps the door opened and Belid Keal’s father, hair awry from bed, greeted him. Drin apologised for waking him so early, confessed his confusion about local times. The farmer waved the apology aside, beckoned him into the house. Belid Keal and her mother were coming down the stairs. The mother was still in her night-clothes. She recognised Drin from his previous visit.
“Forget something?” she asked in all seriousness. Drin smiled, told them that in light of the near certainty that there were Nautili on the planet he had been sent to interview Belid again.
Drin thought that he had explained the purpose of his visit sympathetically, but Belid Keal cursed and hit the stair-rail.
“Dammit,” she said. Her father mildly reproached her.
“I was going to ride up Copper Hill today,” she told him. Her mother began to remonstrate with her over her lack of manners, but Drin said,
“That’s alright, I’ve got all day. I’ll come with you.”
Belid stared at him in surprise, glanced to her two parents.
“Can you ride?” she asked him. Drin, roused by his success with the police plane, said,
“I expect I can manage it.”
The three Keals looked to one another and laughed.
“On an animal?” Belid said.
Drin had thought she had meant one of the two-wheeled ground vehicles he had seen in the capital. Again he felt that the prestige of Spacers was being called into question. Pride had him answer,
“If you show me how.”
“You’re on,” Belid said. And with the whole family chattering around him he was ushered through into the kitchen.
Over their breakfast the Keals animatedly discussed which animal Drin should ride. Drin, bemused by their excited gabble, managed to learn that each animal had, like people, its own name. And he was surprised, too, how this day Belid Keal seemed a different girl. Her large round eyes were not, as on his previous visit, flicking this way and that with uncertainty and apprehension. This day she bubbled with well-being.
While she went running out to prepare the animals, her father leant Drin a pair of leggings, which Drin pulled on under his tunic. Then he joined Belid at the rear of the house by some low outbuildings.
The four-legged animals were taller than Drin, and seemed — to Drin — to regard his person with open sneers of contempt. On their backs were secured seats of a kind. Other smaller animals came sidling up to sniff Drin. Belid’s father instructed Drin how to steer the animal, how to make it go, how to make it stop. The animal had pieces of cord attached to its muzzle. Belid’s father assured Drin that this particular animal was very docile. To Drin it looked extremely wild. It also stank.
Finally, following Belid’s example, he climbed onto the beast, sat astride the animal’s back and took the two pieces of cord in his hands. The animal stamped one of its forefeet, sending a pneumatic shudder up through Drin’s backbone. Belid spoke to her animal and it moved off, with Belid’s dark curly hair bobbing to the rhythm of the animal’s pace. The farmer slapped Drin’s beast and it followed, with Drin clutching the seat and being bounced about on its wide back. This, thought Drin, is a highly dangerous mode of transport. Then he became aware of Belid riding alongside him and giving him instructions.
As they rode up a long green road between green trees under a blue sky Drin attempted to follow Belid’s instructions, managed to co-ordinate his movements to that of the beast’s. After an hour and several more green roads he believed that he had mastered the basic technique, began to relax and look about him.
Copper Hill lay ahead of them, named, Belid told him, after its colour and not any mineral that had been mined there. Because of a unique symbiotic system comprising lichen, lizards and termites, Belid informed him, the hill and its immediate environs were a designated wilderness in the very midst of the farm.
Their general conversation having thus begun Drin loosed upon her all his pent up curiosity about planetary life — questions which he hadn’t dared ask in the bar for fear, his being allied with Alger, the other patrons would crow over his ignorance. He asked Belid what the inhabitants of Happiness did with their time,
“I’ve heard about gardening.”
Belid said that almost everyone gardened, told him about the old crafts which had been resurrected — furniture makers, weavers, potters... That accounted for many of the strange fabrics and utensils Drin had seen. But it was more the lives of the people that interested him.
Belid laughed at only a few of his misconceptions, for the rest she was as glad of an audience to whom she could justify her minority preference for planetary life as he was grateful to have explained to him those aspects of planetary life which had been a mystery to him. He was, however, no easy convert to a planetary life.
“Look about you,” Belid said as their beasts plodded slowly up the sides of Copper Hill. “Tell me of anything more wonderful in the entire universe.”
; Below the red slopes of the hill were her father’s ordered orchards, beyond them the ragged edge of a large area of wilderness. Two dark birds, their wings outstretched, were soaring in silent circles about the summit of the hill. Drin had to admit that the scene did cause a certain elation, but his main preoccupation was in not falling off his swaying beast. And the backs of his hands had been stung by an insect. And the uncomfortable heat of the sun was making him sweat. And the dust roused by their passage stuck to his sweaty skin. And the beast stank.
Belid’s mother had packed a lunch for them. Below the round summit of the hill they dismounted and Drin stretched his sore and aching legs. As they began eating Drin recalled the reason for his being there and questioned Belid about the two ships that she had seen explode.
“I’m not trying to prove anything. I just want to know exactly what you saw.”
Belid told the whole story, without tears this time, from her takeoff to her landing in the lumber yard. Drin questioned her closely about what she had seen, and what she had not seen, in the seconds prior to the ships exploding. But, believing now that he understood her way of thinking, he didn’t press her about why she hadn’t followed the flight path the Senate had given her.
The interview closed they remounted and he returned to talking generally of life on the planet, of the other animals of which Belid claimed to be fond. Belid confessed to him how inconsolably lonely she had been on XE2. So they continued on their ride back to the farm.
When the house was in sight Belid, warning Drin not to copy her, kicked her beast into a run.
Drin was not in the least tempted to emulate her. His beast was. The entire length of that last long green road he had to hold it in check. By the time he reached the farmhouse not only his legs but his arms, his hands, his back and his head were hurting.
Belid’s father, chuckling over Drin’s stiffness, helped him dismount and suggested that he take a shower. Drin concurred, returned his breeches to him. The shower did not remove the cloying stink of the animal.
He then ate with the family, and afterwards, while awaiting the return of the police plane, he was introduced to Belid’s other pet animals. Most, he was told, had been found injured or abandoned and she had reared them herself. Drin’s fear of the sharp-toothed cold-eyed creatures amused Belid. She was familiar with their harmless habits.
When the police plane landed the family all earnestly invited him to come again and to stay longer, stood on the apron to wave goodbye to him. The two police officers, aware of the stink of his tunic, were impressed by his having ridden. Their praise of such a primitive accomplishment profoundly puzzled Drin.
Back at headquarters Drin divested himself of his tunic, had another shower and composed his report. He included in that report his estimate of the exact part homesickness had played in all of Belid Keal’s actions and perceptions. His report filed, he phoned the bar to inform Alger of his return, told him that he was going to bed early. As he laid his aching body upon his bunk he wondered at the strange euphoria glowing within him — a euphoria at odds with the discomforts of the day.
The following morning the Director called Alger, told him that he had better leave or those on XE2 would be getting worried by the absence of news from Happiness. Nothing had happened on or near the Nautili road. With Alger grumbling that they had become little more than a mailship, they unconcernedly left Happiness’s atmosphere.
Chapter Thirty-Three
The day after Jorge Arbatov and Tulla Yorke had left for Happiness, the first of the news-sleuths had arrived on XE2. Clue by clue they had picked up the signposts to a possible story, and all those signposts had pointed towards XE2.
Several shipping companies had been voicing their concern at freighters being overdue. Each of those overdue freighters’ last port of call had been at a planet within the Department of XE2. The news-sleuths, independently, had discovered that that particular planet was being held incommunicado. On top of that it had been learnt that Hambro Harrap had left the city for XE2; and that one company, a mysteriously owned subsidiary of a subsidiary, had copyrighted all news from the planet in that Department. For a story to be copyrighted meant that there had to be a story. News-sleuths compete for scoops. They are also adept at infringing copyrights without appearing so to do.
The news has to compete for media time. In order therefore to present the news as drama news-sleuths seek out controversy and conflict, scandal and calamity. On XE2, however, the news-sleuths met with the obduracy of Nero Porsnin’s ‘decline to comment’. To whatever question he was asked, be it as to why the Departmental Director should have gone to Happiness, or even what Nero’s own last posting was, Nero declined to comment.
Nor did a covert examination of XE2’s Service records enlighten the news-sleuths. Indeed it says much of the mentality of news-sleuths that they chose to crack only the ‘Most Confidential’ Service codes, none of which concerned events on Happiness, those events all being kept on open record. Not one of the news-sleuths examined the open Service records; although it has to be said that quantity alone may have deterred them.
Be that as it may, all that they were able to discover was that a State of Emergency had been instituted on Happiness, that its moon had gone missing, and that Hambro Harrap was down there.
When, after three days, Nero Porsnin, Acting Director, made himself unavailable for comment the news-sleuths took themselves off to adjacent Departments in the hope that someone there would know what was happening on Happiness. So two of those news-sleuths arrived on Torc and, discovering that Eldon Boone was the Inspector of Police on XE2, they sought to interview him. After finding out what they knew Inspector Eldon Boone, too, declined to comment.
But Inspector Eldon Boone did find this sudden media interest disquieting. With so many amateur detectives about, many of them illicitly offering cash for information, his prosecution of the fraud could be accidentally uncovered before he had made one single arrest. Consequently, although he had not yet acquired sufficent incriminating evidence to be able to charge every suspect, Inspector Eldon Boone set into motion a prearranged plan for the apprehension of all those known to be involved in the fraud.
On receipt of his signal undercover police on processing plants, on platforms, in factories, and on freighters when they docked, revealed their true identity and arrested the suspects. Other detectives called on businessmen in their offices, off-duty freighter crews in their apartments in the city, on Torc, on Ben, on XE2 and other stations, and escorted the suspects to police cells. With the result that, five days after Inspector Eldon Boone had dispatched the password ‘Open Lid’, 583 people found themselves under arrest. A large enough number one would have thought, especially when the confessions of some of those detained led to another 133 arrests, yet Inspector Eldon Boone was later to claim that having been forced to act prematurely had cost him at least a further 200 arrests.
The people arrested ranged from platform technicians and freighter skippers to company directors, to two celebrated cavalier businessmen, three Service Directors of Communication, one of Supply, a Chief Superintendent of Police, and two City Senate Members. And with those arrests the media lost all interest in a possible story on Happiness; indeed the general impression was that events there had somehow been connected with the fraud.
For this was no petty fraud, of the kind known in police jargon as ‘thumbweight’, where a load may be rounded up or down to suit the nefarious profits of small time embezzlers. No, in this widespread and long-standing fraud, whole consignments had been going ‘missing’. Consequently, among the news-sleuths, the matter of a few freighters reported missing at this time didn’t raise any suspicions. Added to which the workings of the fraud were so complex that it took all the cognitive powers of the news-sleuths to condense it to a publicly comprehensible form. Any residual suspicions of doubtful happenings on Happiness were, therefore, pushed swiftly to one side. Indeed the only tenuous connection with Happiness was that the ex-Director of
Communications on Torc, whose post Jorge Arbatov had temporarily filled, was one of those arrested. And to that end it must be stated clearly here, lest it be misunderstood, that neither Hambro Harrap nor Anton Singh were in any way associated with the fraud, although media pundits at the time did link Hambro Harrap’s name with the fraud.
On his second return to XE2 Sergeant Alger Deaver was not at all pleased to learn of the arrests connected with the fraud; arrests about which the station police on XE2 were insufferably jubilant.
“In the meantime,” Alger said to Drin, “while they’re doing real police work, we’ve become a couple of errand boys for a bunch of dirt diggers.” Such a sentiment, however, didn’t prevent Alger purchasing, during his hurried day on XE2, the long list of goods requested by Happiness’s dirt diggers.
The police ship also took back to Happiness the news, or rather the absence of it, confirming Hambro Harrap’s failure to arrive in the city. Jorge Arbatov, therefore, officially declared him missing. But, as the police ship remained in Happiness’s capital, the universe beyond Happiness remained unaware that Senator Hambro Harrap was deemed officially missing; nor, being preoccupied with the scandalous fraud, was Space in the least perturbed by Hambro Harrap’s continuing absence from the City Senate.
Because of the Safety Order diverting all ships from Happiness Jorge Arbatov knew that the planet was free from interference for several weeks yet. Therefore, having noted the other items of news that the police ship had brought back with it, Jorge continued with his preparation of the report he had begun on the completion of the road.
Apart from a daily visit to the road, flown there in their plane by the Spokesman or his wife, Jorge spent his days inside his converted freighter. The only other time of the day he emerged was to cross the apron to the farmhouse and take his evening meal with the Spokesman and his family.