“Oh, sure,” I sneered. “You were always big on tradition, weren’t you?”
Bec smiled unpleasantly. “She’s not too badly off. Look at it this way, she could have got Imnitrin.” Unconcernedly he drank from a goblet. “O.K., Klein, I’ll see you in the morning. Be at the office early, we’ve a lot of work on hand.”
The blood seemed to be drumming in my head. The gun in my holster was itching to leap into my hand. If it had been anybody else, Grale or even Reeth, I would have shot him down without a thought. As it was I was paralysed. I stood there glaring. Then without another word I walked out.
I reported early next morning, just as Bec said. He was already there. He nodded to me as I came in. The television screens that lined one wall of his office were all alive, mostly showing deserted scenes in various parts of Rheatt and at the new factory; we hadn’t inaugurated a night shift yet.
“Klein,” he said, “I’ve been thinking we ought to set up a training school for young Rheattites—”
“Cut it out,” I interrupted. “Find another whipping-boy. I’ve quit.”
He looked at me sourly. “You’re quitting, Klein? Where’re you gonna quit to?”
“I’ll worry about that. This is just to tell you. Maybe Grale’s more your man anyway.”
“Maybe he is at that. He’d know better than to lose his head over a woman.”
I looked him straight in the eye. I knew he could feel my hatred. “You did it on purpose, didn’t you?” I accused.
“What is it you want? Girls? You can have all the girls you want. I’ll get you plenty. You can have anything you want here in Rheatt, provided it’s only a one-way trade. You’re too important to me to let anything go worming into your guts. I need your undivided energy, and that means nobody goes changing your mind about anything or turns you soft.”
“Who’s going soft?” I challenged.
He snorted softly. “The Klein I first knew in Klittmann would have had Dalgo bumped off without a qualm. I knew then that you had something else besides our Big Project on your mind.”
“Project?”
“You know what I mean. What we’re doing here in Rheatt is only our platform for the real operation. Neither Rheatt nor the Rotrox are of much interest to me: they don’t have the right qualities, they’re weak punks, klugs. Killibol’s the world, the world we’re going to transform. It’s like a bomb waiting to be let off. We’re going to release all the energies pent up in those cities. We’ll make a society, an empire, where almost anything will be possible. …”
His oddly glittering eyes met my sullen stare, meeting the hatred and beating it down. He seemed to know that I found this vision of his irresistible. It was the idea of working for something bigger than yourself, something that would outlast you and be permanent. Bec also knew that I was the only one of the mob who understood this idea.
“It has to be this way, Klein,” he said. “It’s a matter of destiny. If you want a part in it then you have to belong to me, not to that woman in the tower. It’s too big a job for that. I don’t want any emotional entanglements. You can have girls but they can’t have you. Have fun, but your feelings can go in only one direction.”
“Did you have to do it this way?” I said, still surly.
“Why not, it’s as good as any other. Don’t tell me you’re going to fold up like a sack of water?” He gazed at me curiously. “It’s a funny thing, you get guys who are brave in the face of bullets, grenades, cops, anything you can name, but they haven’t got what it takes when something hits them in the gut like this. Don’t tell me you’re one of those hollow men. I hope I know character better than that.”
“I can take it.”
“I thought so.” Bec was silent for a moment. Then he cocked his head, looking at me slyly. “Tell you what I’ll do, Klein. You can have the woman back. Go on, take her. Only you’ll be out of it, like you just said. You’ll have quit. You’ll live out your life here in Rheatt and nobody will bother you. I’ll do the job on my own. Nothing can stop me now, anyway.”
I gave a deep sigh. “You know me better than that.”
“I think so.”
For a moment he looked at me with what might have been sympathy. I remembered Gelbore, the girl on the raft with us. I wondered when Bec was going to stop making emotional demands of me.
I didn’t try to see Palramara after that. Bec, however, continued visiting her regularly.
Eleven
I had just woken up when the gentle tone sounded. Becmath’s face came up in monochrome on the television screen, which was muted to suit Klittmann eyes.
He was frowning. “Can you get over here, Klein? There’s something needs attending to straight away.”
“I’ll be with you,” I said, and the image faded.
I dressed quickly, wondering what was up. I hadn’t seen Bec in the flesh for over half a year.
We’d been in operation now for something like four years. Everything had gone fairly smoothly, barring a few wrinkles here and there. The production lines were now turning out weapons, aircraft, and a modified version of the sloop. About fifty per cent of everything we made went to Merame, as well as masses of other manufactured goods and raw materials.
Rheatt was still garrisoned by Rotrox troops, but everything was quiet and their numbers grew less every year. Bec had recruited an élite organisation from among Rheattite youngsters who had never taken Blue Space, given them training in arms, concocted an ideology and indoctrinated them with it. They were contemptuous of the life styles of their parents and looked on Bec almost as a god.
Bec had done all this without so far arousing the opposition of the Council of the Rotrox. He had even persuaded them to put off their conquests of other Earth nations and continents until sufficient stocks of the new weapons had been built up.
The fact that Rheatt was running like a well-oiled machine was due entirely to Bec’s master-planning, with a little help from me and the boys. It didn’t alter the fact that we, the new masters of this country, were essentially mobsters and still thought and acted like mobsters.
We must have seemed strange, remote figures to the Rheattite population. Once things settled down we had become recluse, living in green towers dotted about the landscape. Grale and Hassmann shared a tower, otherwise each of us had had his own tower built, lacking windows and completely cut off from the outside world, where we each lived according to his own propensities. Reeth had designed the inside of his dwelling himself and had covered the walls with paintings of naked Killibollian women he had somehow got a local artist to paint from imagination. He had a different Rheattite woman every day. Tone the Taker’s place was simply a den where he kept himself in a permanently drugged condition. Harmen, apart from his private dwelling, also staffed an alchemical laboratory with about twenty Rheattite assistants. Currently, so I heard, he was trying to get a nuclear reactor built.
I had purposefully built my own tower without too much luxury. Unlike the others, who had nothing but leisure on their hands, there was still plenty for me to do. I was Bec’s liaison for the armaments programme and for training the League of Rheatt, as the youth organisation was called. Bec himself never went out now, and every day he called me on the screen for conferences and instructions.
Dressed and armed, I checked the outside. Bright light filtered through the screen of cloth I used to do this, momentarily lighting up the interior with a green glow. I judged it was mid-afternoon, took the elevator down and put on my dark goggles while I drove over to Bec’s tower.
The elevator took me in automatically. Bec was seated in a deep soft chair, a glass of hwura, an intoxicating beverage, in his hand. In Klittmann he had smoked a lot of weed, but now we couldn’t get that he drank hwura instead.
Bec was almost surrounded by television screens and piles of documents and written reports.
“Hello, Klein,” he said. “I think somebody’s trying to do a takeover. Come and look at this.”
Several of the
screens were alive. Only as I crossed the room did I see the one he was watching. It showed a number of Rotrox leaning over something. When one of them moved I could see that what they were leaning over was Tone the Taker. He was lying on his back on a couch, his features vacant. Their voices came over, blurred and indistinguishable. I strained my ears but could make out nothing.
“They’ve been trying to get Tone to tell them where the gateway to Killibol is,” Bec supplied.
“Has he told them?”
“No, but only because he’s too blocked to know what’s going on. When he needs another shot he’ll start to come round and then he’ll tell them anything.”
“Why do they want to know? Is Imnitrin trying to bypass us?”
Bec shook his head. “I don’t think so. I’ve been hearing vague rumblings for some time. There’s always been a small caucus on Merame that resented our influence and our reconstituting the Rheattic nation instead of destroying it completely. Evidently this is an action group. Their idea will be to seize the gateway, probe beyond it, and if it looks good try to gain enough support for a wholly Rotrox invasion. At the same time they’ll want us shouldered out.”
I stared at the scene. One of the Rotrox was shaking Tone. “Isn’t that somewhat rebellious? Could they pull it off? What would the Council think?”
Bec moved uneasily. “It’s a funny thing about the Rotrox. I’ve noticed that an idea or an argument can be in the air for years without anything happening. The Council might even veto it. But if somebody takes some action on their own and it begins to look as if it’s moving, they get interested. Consequently I don’t want these zealots poking into our business. Especially, I don’t want them poking around on Killibol.”
“Why not? They’d simply find a dead world.”
“That’s why it would be so bad. They could convince the Council that I’ve been lying to them. The Rotrox are expecting all kinds of loot out of Killibol.”
There was one other question I wanted to ask.
“Have you got all our towers bugged?”
“Between you and me — no. Only Tone’s and Harmen’s. I figured that would only be sensible.”
“It looks like you were right. What do you want me to do about this?”
“Take a squad over there and don’t leave anybody alive.”
“Isn’t that a bit drastic?” I asked. “The Rotrox might not like that.”
“I’ll square it. They’re not squeamish about expending their young bloods. I’ll make it look like they came in shooting and Tone’s bodyguard defended him. That might convince the action caucus that we’re more solidly entrenched than they thought we were.”
“Right.”
As I turned to go, Bec added: “By the way, when I said leave nobody alive I meant nobody. And that goes for Tone, too.”
I paused. “Is that necessary?” I said. “He is one of us.”
“He’s the only weak link in the chain and I want him out of the way. They wouldn’t dare to try this on any of the others. I seem to remember you missed Tone once before. Now’s your chance to make up for it.”
Tone’s tower was nearly two hundred miles away. I rustled up a well-armed squad of ten young Rheattites and we commandeered a fast aircraft from a nearby airfield. It could do well over four hundred miles per hour fully loaded, and we weren’t long in getting there.
Bec had told me he had counted five Rotrox in the tower, but there could well have been more. Also, they might have heard the noise of the motor as we approached. I studied the tower from behind a grove of trees, reflecting on how well that type of building was suited to withstand an assault.
However long you looked at it there was only one thing to do and that was to go in through the main entrance at ground level. By now it was evening; the sun was below the horizon and I could dispense with my eye filters. Cool, fresh perfumes drifted across the ground from the trees, grass and flowers. The squad knew its business; I gave the command and across the open ground we went, my men moving quick and lithe in their cat-suit uniforms.
We made it to the base of the tower and found the elevator empty and intact. I left three men outside and the rest of us surged upward in the confined space. In those few seconds, I knew, we were extremely vulnerable. I stopped the elevator two floors below Tone’s living quarters.
We piled out into dark, silent and empty rooms. Tone had built the fat tower much larger than his requirements. Probably without even knowing it. I led the way up staircases until we came to the occupied storey which was lit and furnished.
The first spacious room we went through, though unoccupied, bore evidence of Tone’s hobby. The furnishings were streamlined and sparse. The whole room was in blue (Earth sky-blue) and the walls were taken up with giant television screens which crawled with eye-dizzying patterns in various shades of blue.
A murmur of clipped, high-pitched Rotrox voices came from the next room. I signalled the Rheattites to move quietly. We crossed the floor to the wide doors with their hand-carved friezes. I kicked it open and we burst through.
The scene was more or less as I had seen it on the television screen in Bec’s tower. The Rotrox stood around the supine Tone, talking among themselves and waiting for him to recover consciousness sufficiently to put himself in their power.
Our repeaters blasted out without warning. The Rotrox had time to turn, to reach for their weapons, then they were skittering across the room under the impact of a hail of lead, tumbling over the furniture.
In seconds the deafening violence was over. I checked the bodies to make sure they were dead. From what I could see, Tone hadn’t been touched, I decided I had better do the next part of the job alone.
“Get back downstairs and wait for me at the base of the tower,” I ordered. They left. I looked close at Tone. His eyes were closed.
Then it struck me. There were four dead Rotrox in the room. Bec had mentioned five. There had to be another one somewhere in the tower.
There was another door at the opposite end of the room. I sidled to it, eased it open, and slipped inside. It was another blue room. In the one or two seconds that I cased it the fifth Rotrox entered by a door to my right.
We saw each other in the same moment. In his hand he had one of the short-bladed swords the Rotrox usually carried. Apparently he had no firearm. I brought up my repeater and nipped back the trigger.
And the repeater jammed.
Mentally I cursed. The repeater was Rheatt-made — despite all our efforts Rheattite workmanship still didn’t measure up to the home version. My mind leaped immediately to the handgun in my inside holster and to the guns the dead Rotrox had carried in the other room, but there was no time to do anything about either. The Rotrox came at me in a flash, sword extended, and I had just a split second to save my life.
His limbs chink-chinked as he sprang at me. Four years ago it had taken me quite a while to find out what the movable rod-like arrangement was on Rotrox legs and arms. Merame is only one-sixth the size of Earth or Killibol and its gravity is correspondingly less. The silvery rods and pistons were assists: motorised extra muscles without which the Rotrox could scarcely stand up in Earth’s heavy gravity.
I hurled myself aside, just managing to dodge his sword thrust. As his grinning grey face swept past me I took my repeater by the barrel and swung the stock at his nearside calf, smashing the rod arrangement where it junctioned with the ankle. There was a tinkling noise. The Rotrox fell heavily to the floor as his leg collapsed under him. He floundered there, trying to raise himself with his arms and his good leg. That gave me the moment I needed to draw my handgun and shoot him through the head.
I listened for any further sound in the building. There was none. I went back to where Tone lay on the couch. His eyes were open, now. He looked up at me, his pupils huge.
“They wanted information,” he said dreamily, his voice faint. “I held back. I’ve been awake for some time.”
The gun was still in my hand. When he saw it there,
the way it was pointing, he seemed to guess what was going to happen.
“I’m a risk, aren’t I?” he said, struggling to a half-sitting position. “I’m not in control of myself.”
“We have to protect ourselves,” I said stonily.
“Sure.” He stared, glazed, up into my face. “Shoot me, Klein. Go on, shoot me. Then I’ll be free, floating in Blue Space forever.”
I levelled the gun. Suddenly his face twisted wryly.
“Becmath’s hatchet-man!”
The blast sounded incongruously loud. The slug made a neat hole in his face and blew a chunk out of the back of his skull. He jerked back on to the couch, dead before he even knew it.
Quickly and efficiently I went through the other rooms to make sure there was no one else and then rejoined the squad. I wondered if Bec, watching in his tower two hundred miles away, had picked up Tone’s last remark.
Twelve
The planet Earth spins in a space filled with brilliant light. The atmosphere glows with the brightness of it. On that planet, the country of Rheatt is like one vast jewel glowing with colours, a big bowl of green grass and heady scents from the drooping trees.
Sometimes, from within my tower, I would peep at the spectacle of the setting or rising sun throwing vivid colours across the sky. Alien though it was, I could see the beauty of it.
Nine years had passed since we had first broken through the gateway from Killibol. Nine years in which we, the masters of Rheatt, had lurked invisibly in our sealed towers, rarely seen by the natives or by each other. Rheatt answered to our commands because we had organised it that way. Millions of Rheattites worked on Merame in Rotrox workshops or as household slaves. Down on Earth they manned the factories that, slowly but surely, had been turning out the weapons to equip an army. The muscles and nerves of the new order in Rheatt were supplied by a military-style élite that had never known Blue Space. They had been trained by us personally. They had their own kind of toughness, even of brutality, and they were in awe of the white men who had achieved all this.
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