Space Service

by Andre Norton

  Alen did. Blackbeard swiftly stripped him, tore and knotted his clothes into ropes and bound and gagged him. The others got the same treatment in less than ten minutes.

  The trader bolstered the gun and rolled the watchmen out of the line of sight from the door of the chamber. He recovered his knife and wiped it on the judge’s shirt. Alen had to help him prop the body behind the throne’s high back.

  “Hide those clubs,” blackbeard said. “Straight faces. Here we go.”

  They went out, single file, opening the door only enough to pass. Alen, last in line, told one of the liveried guards nearby: “His honor, Judge Krarl, does not wish to be disturbed.”

  “That’s news?” asked the tipstaff sardonically. He put his hand on the Herald’s arm. “Only yesterday he gimme a blast when I brought him a mug of water he asked me for himself. An outrageous interruption, he called me, and he asked for the water himself. What do you think of that?”

  “Terrible,” said Alen hastily. He broke away and caught up with the trader and the engineer at the entrance hall. Idlers and loungers were staring at them as they headed for the waiting wagon.

  “I wait!” the driver, told them loudly. “I wait long, much. You pay more, more?”

  “We pay more,” said the trader. “You start.”

  The driver brought out a smoldering piece of punk, lit a pressure torch, lifted the barn-door section of the wagon’s floor to expose the pottery turbine and preheated it with the torch. He pumped squeakily for minutes, spinning a flywheel with his other hand, before the rotor began to turn on its own. Down went the hatch, up onto the seats went the passengers.

  “The spaceport,” said Alen. With a slate-pencil screech the driver engaged his planetary gear and they were off.

  Through it all, blackbeard had ignored frantic muttered questions from Chief Elwon, who had wanted nothing to do with murder, especially of a judge. “You sit up there,” growled the trader, “and every so often you look around and see if we’re being followed. Don’t alarm the driver. And if we get to the spaceport and blast off without any trouble, keep your story to yourself.” He settled down in the back seat with Alen and maintained a gloomy silence. The young Herald was too much in awe of this stranger, so suddenly competent in assorted forms of violence, to question him.

  They did get to the spaceport without trouble, and found the crew in the Customs shed, emptied of the gems by dealers with releases. They had built a fire for warmth.

  “We wish to leave immediately,” said the trader, to the port officer. “Can you change my Lyran currency?”

  The officer began to sputter apologetically that it was late and the vault was sealed for the night—

  “That’s all right. We’ll change it on Vega. It’ll get back to you. Call off your guards and unseal our ship.”

  They followed the port officer to Starsong’s dim bulk out on the field. The officer cracked the seal on her with his club in the light of a flaring pressure lamp held by one of the guards.

  Alen was sweating hard through it all. As they started across the field he had seen what looked like two closely spaced green stars low on the horizon towards town suddenly each jerk up and towards each other in minute arcs. The semaphore!

  The signal officer in the port administration building would be watching too—but nobody on the field, preoccupied with the routine of departure, seemed to have noticed.

  The lights flipped this way and that. Alen didn’t know the code and bitterly regretted the lack. After some twenty signals the lights flipped to the “rest” position again as the port officer was droning out a set of take-off regulations: bearing, height above settled areas, permissible atomic fuels while in atmosphere—Alen saw somebody start across the field toward them from the administration building. The guards were leaning on their long, competent-looking weapons.

  Alen inconspicuously detached himself from the group around Starsong and headed across the dark field to meet the approaching figure. Nearing it, he called out a low greeting in Lyran, using the noncom-to-officer military form.

  “Sergeant,” said the signal officer quietly, “go and draw off the men a few meters from the star-travelers. Tell them the ship mustn’t leave, that they’re to cover the foreigners and shoot if—”

  Alen stood dazedly over the limp body of the signal officer. And then he quickly hid the bludgeon again and strolled back to the ship, wondering whether he’d cracked the Lyran’s skull.

  The port was open by then and the crew filing in. He was last. “Close it fast,” he told the trader. “I had to—”

  “I saw you,” grunted blackbeard. “A semaphore message?” He was working as he spoke, and the metal port closed.

  “Astrogator and engineer, take over,” he told them.

  “All hands to their bunks,” ordered Astrogator Hufner. “Blast-off immediate.”

  Alen took to his cubicle and strapped himself in. Blast-off deafened him, rattled his bones and made him thoroughly sick as usual.

  After what seemed like several wretched hours, they were definitely space-borne under smooth acceleration, and his nausea subsided.

  Blackbeard knocked, came in, and unbuckled him.

  “Ready to audit the books of the voyage?” asked the trader.

  “No,” said Alen feebly.

  “It can wait,” said the trader. “The books are the least important part, anyway. We have headed off a frightful war.”

  “War? We have?”

  “You wondered why I was in such haste to get off Lyra, and why I wouldn’t leave Elwon there. It is because our Vegan gems were most unusual gems. I am not a technical man, but I understand they are actual gems which were treated to produce a certain effect at just about this time.”

  Blackbeard glanced at his wrist chronometer and said dreamily: “Lyra is getting metal. Wherever there is one of our gems, pottery is decomposing into its constituent aluminum, silicon, and oxygen. Fluxes and glazes are decomposing into calcium, zinc, barium, potassium, chromium, and iron. Buildings are crumbling, pants are dropping as ceramic belt-buckles disintegrate—”

  “It means chaos!” protested Alen.

  “It means civilization and peace. An ugly clash was in the making.” Blackbeard paused and added deliberately: “Where neither their property nor their honor is touched, most men live content.”

  “ ‘The Prince,’ Chapter 19. You are—”

  “There was another important purpose to the voyage,” said the trader, grinning. “You will be interested in this.” He handed Alen a document which, unfolded, had the seal of the College and Order at its head.

  Alen read in a daze: “Examiner 19 to the Rector—final clearance of Novice—”

  He lingered pridefully over the paragraph that described how he had “with coolness and great resource” foxed the battle cruiser of the Realm, “adapting himself readily in a delicate situation requiring not only physical courage but swift recall, evaluation and application of a minor planetary culture.”

  Not so pridefully he read: “—inclined towards pomposity of manner somewhat ludicrous in one of his years, though not unsuccessful in dominating the crew by his bearing—”

  And: “—highly profitable disposal of our gems; a feat of no mean importance since the College and Order must, after all, maintain itself.”

  And: “—cleared the final and crucial hurdle with some mental turmoil if I am any judge, but did clear it. After some twenty years of indoctrination in unrealistic non-violence, the youth was confronted with a situation where nothing but violence would serve, correctly evaluated this, and applied violence in the form of a truncheon to the head of a Lyran signal officer, thereby demonstrating an ability to learn and common sense as precious as it is rare.” And, finally, simply: “Recommended for training.”

  “Training?” gasped Alen. “You mean there’s more?”

  “Not for most, boy. Not for most. The bulk of us are what we seem to be: oily, gun-shy, indispensable adjuncts to trade who feather our n
est with percentages. We need those percentages and we need gun-shy Heralds.”

  Alen recited slowly: “Among other evils which being unarmed brings you, it causes you to be despised.”

  “Chapter 14,” said blackbeard mechanically. “We leave such clues lying by their bedsides for twenty years, and they never notice them. For the few of us who do—more training.”

  “Will I learn to throw a knife like you?” asked Alen, repelled and fascinated at once by the idea.

  “On your own time, if you wish. Mostly it’s ethics and morals so you’ll be able to weigh the values of such things as knife-throwing.”

  “Ethics! Morals!”

  “We started as missionaries, you know.”

  “Everybody knows that. But the Great Utilitarian Reform—”

  “Some of us,” said blackbeard dryly, “think it was neither great, nor utilitarian, nor a reform.”

  It was a staggering idea. “But we’re spreading utilitarian civilization!” protested Alen. “Or if we’re not, what’s the sense of it all?” Blackbeard told him: “We have our different motives. One is a sincere utilitarian; another is a gambler—happy when he’s in danger and his pulses are pounding. Another is proud and likes to trick people. More than a few conceive themselves as servants of mankind. I’ll let you rest for a bit now.” He rose.

  “But you?” asked Alen hesitantly.

  “Me? You will find me in Chapter Twenty-Six,” grinned blackbeard. “And perhaps you’ll find someone else.” He closed the door behind him.

  Alen ran through the chapter in his mind, puzzled, until—that was it.

  It had a strange and inevitable familiarity to it as if he had always known that he would be saying it aloud, welcomingly, in this cramped cubicle aboard a battered starship:

  “God is not willing to do everything, and thus take away our free will and that share of glory which belongs to us.”