A Soft Barren Aftershock

by F. Paul Wilson

  “Most of them will have to be gassed and killed, but I’ll save a few of the best for breeding purposes . . . I like to keep my working stock as strong as possible.”

  They completed the rounds of Rabb’s buildings, then moved on to Lesno’s. The novelty had worn off and the crowd was beginning to thin by the time they got around to Lesno’s third warehouse, but interest was renewed at the sound of Orz’s voice calling from within.

  “Mr. Lesno! There’s something you ought to see in here.”

  Lesno went in. Rabb, Houghton, and some of the braver members of the crowd—Jessica among them—followed.

  It looked as if a bomb had gone off inside. Every crate, every package had been torn open. Even some of the computer paneling had been torn away.

  “What happened?” Lesno cried, staggered by the destruction.

  Orz shrugged and pointed to the full cage. “I don’t know. There’s your community, caged and ready to go. But I’ve never seen anything like this before.”

  Houghton was looking over the ravaged computer.

  “Never seen a computer that looked like this,” he muttered. “Is this some new model, Aaron?”

  Rabb came up. “Looks like part of a subspace radio!”

  “Ridiculous!” Lesno sputtered. “What would I be doing with—?”

  “You’re a spy!” Houghton declared. “A Federation spy!”

  A blaster suddenly appeared in Lesno’s hand. “Don’t insult me by linking me to the Federation!”

  Houghton shrugged. “So you’re a Restructurist spy, then. Just as bad. You get twenty years either way.”

  “I’m not going to argue with you, Malcomb. Just stay where you are.”

  “You can’t escape, Aaron!” Rabb warned.

  Lesno smiled. “Of course I can,” he said and pointed the blaster at Orz. “Ratman is going to volunteer the use of his ship. He’s even going to come along for the ride to make sure no one gets trigger-happy.”

  Orz caught Jessica’s eye. She was readying to make a move, but he shook his head. They had succeeded in destroying Lesno’s effectiveness as a spy. It didn’t matter if he escaped.

  And so, with a blaster at the back of his head, Orz preceded the little man to the truck.

  “You work for the Federation, don’t you?” Lesno said as Orz drove them toward the spaceport.

  “I’m afraid I don’t have time to work for anyone other than Sam Orzechowski.”

  “Come now, Ratman. I was suspicious yesterday when I saw the way you gave Houghton’s computer a going over and this morning’s revelation confirmed it. Why deny it?”

  Orz shrugged. “Okay, I occasionally do some snooping for the Federation.”

  “How did you get on to me?” Lesno asked earnestly. “I thought I had a foolproof arrangement.”

  “Well, I wasn’t sure, but Houghton’s centralized setup started me on a new approach, I figured that if one man could centralize his computers, another could decentralize a subspace transmitter. Then it struck me that you’d have to take the transmitter apart in order to sneak it into town. And since it was already in pieces, why not leave it that way? At least that’s what I would have done. So the next thing to do was to look for the man with the slightly larger computers. You fit the bill.”

  “But how did you manage to tear the place apart?”

  “That was easy. If you could go back to that warehouse now, you’d find a tiny, high-frequency labeler attached to the door. I have a number of vandal rats trained to be specialists in making a mess out of a building. The labeler told them where to go to work.”

  Shaking his head in admiration, Lesno remarked, “You should be working for us.”

  “But I don’t want a restructured Federation,” Orz replied. “I sort of like it the way it is.”

  “But there are such inequalities in the galaxy! Some planets are drowning in their surpluses while others are starving, and the Federation does nothing.”

  “The Federation doesn’t think such matters are within its scope.”

  “They will be when we win,” he replied righteously.

  Orz knew argument was futile and allowed a shrug to be his only reply.

  Once on the ship, it was evident to Orz that Lesno knew his way around freighters. He retracted the ramp, secured the hatch, and then followed Orz to the bridge.

  He gestured to the extra seat. “You just sit there and keep out of the way, Mr. Ratman, and you won’t get hurt. I’m not a murderer. If all goes well, I’ll drop you off at the first neutral port we reach. But I won’t hesitate to shoot you if you try anything.”

  “Don’t worry,” Orz told him, “My mission was to stop you, not capture you. I don’t care if you get away.”

  Lesno’s eyes narrowed. This lack of chauvinism did not fit his conception of a Fed man. Something was up. His suspicions were reinforced when he found the console inoperable.

  “Where’s the lock?” he demanded.

  Orz pointed across the room. “By the speaker.”

  But Lesno made no move. Instead his eyes roved the room until they came to rest on the red lever. His face creased into a smile.

  “You didn’t think anyone would be fooled by that, did you?”

  Orz nearly leaped from his seat as the Restructurist reached for the lever. “Don’t touch that!”

  “Sit down!” Lesno warned, pointing the gun at Orz’s chest. “I told you before, I’m not a killer but—”

  “I know you’re not.” Orz said frantically. “Neither am I. That’s why you’ve got to leave that lever alone!”

  Lesno merely smiled and kept him covered while he released the first two safety catches.

  “Listen to me, Lesno! That lever sets off a special tone stimulus and releases every one of my rats! They’ve all been trained to attack anyone and everyone but me when they hear that tone . . . I installed it for use in a situation when it was either kill or be killed! This is not one of those situations!”

  Lesno was having some trouble with the third catch, but it finally yielded.

  “A good try, Ratman,” he said and, ignoring Orz’s cry of protest, pulled the lever.

  Faintly, from far down the corridor, came a metallic clang. A loud, wailing tone filled the ship, Lesno paled and turned anxiously toward his captive.

  “Why didn’t you listen to me!” Orz yelled.

  Lesno suddenly believed. Horror-stricken, he began to push and pull the lever back and forth but with no effect. He was still working at it when the squealing, gray-brown carpet swept through the door.

  Orz turned away and tried unsuccessfully to block out the screams and sickening sounds of carnage that filled the bridge. He had trained the rats too well . . . there would be no stopping them.

  And when all was quiet again, Orz congratulated himself on having kept his stomach in place. But then 62 leaped up to his accustomed spot on his shoulder and began with great contentment to clean his reddened claws and jowls.

  Only Jessica came to see him off. Orz had cleaned up the rat problem and the people were appreciative, but they had either seen the corpse that had been removed from his ship, or had heard about it. It hadn’t been easy to identify it as Aaron Lesno.

  “I see the red lever’s been removed,” Jessica remarked. She hadn’t been near the ship since the incident.

  Orz avoided her gaze. “Yeah. I took it out . . . can’t quite look at it.” He changed the subject abruptly. “Well, now that this thing’s been cleared up, what’ll you be doing with yourself?”

  “I’ve no intention of settling down and becoming a good Neekan citizen, you can be sure of that,” she replied. ’I’m putting in for an assignment as soon as possible. There’s too much going on out there for me to get tucked away on this rock.”

  Orz smiled for the first time in several days. “That’s funny. I was thinking of taking on an assistant. This business is getting a little too complicated for me to handle alone,”

  He paused as Jessica waited.

  “
You like rats?”

  WHEELS WITHIN WHEELS

  I

  Peter J. Paxton marveled as he moved his old body through the brand-new offices of Interstellar Business Advisers. He had played no small part in the genesis of the organization, but in the old days he and Joe Finch had operated out of a small, rented office on the far side of the city. IBA now owned the building in which it was located and many others. The firm had come a long way.

  He was on his way to the top office to see Josephine Finch. She had been a teen-ager the last time he had been on this side of Ragna; she’d be in her late twenties by now.

  “May I help you, sir?” the receptionist asked politely from behind her pearly desk.

  “Yes. Is Miss Finch busy at the moment?”

  She answered his question with another. “Do you have an appointment?” Her day book was open and her pencil was poised to check off his name.

  “No, I’m afraid not. You see—”

  “I’m very sorry,” she said, closing the book with an air of finality. “Miss Finch can see no one without an appointment.”

  Paxton rested a gnarled hand on the desk and leaned toward the girl. “Listen, dearie. You just tell her Old Pete is here. We’ll worry about appointments later.”

  The receptionist hesitated a second or two, then shrugged and pressed a button. A simple click acknowledged her call.

  “Someone named Old Pete demands to see you, Miss Finch,” she said.

  “Is this a joke?” a tiny speaker replied.

  “I really couldn’t say,” the girl answered nervously.

  “Send him in.”

  The receptionist rose to show him in, but Paxton waved her back to her seat and strode toward an ornate door of solid Maratak firewood that rippled with shifting waves of color; the name Josephine Finch was carved in the wood at eye-level and its color shifts were out of sync with the rest of the wood.

  A young woman opened the door as he reached it. She wore an azure clingsuit that highlighted the blue of her eyes and the curves of her body. Short, raven hair framed a full-lipped, fine-featured face.

  “Hello, Jo,” said Paxton, eying her up and down. “You’ve grown a bit since I saw you last.”

  The girl examined him closely, then smiled with delight. “Old Pete! It’s really you!”

  “It’s me all right,” he said as he stepped into the office and glanced around. “You’ve really taken over, haven’t you?”

  “Why not? I own controlling interest and I happen to enjoy the work.” She moved behind her desk and sat down. “But how about you? You’ve been retired and tucked away on an island in the Kel Sea for the past eight years. What brings you to IBA?”

  Old Pete smiled as he settled himself into a chair. “Beating around the bush never was a Finch trait.”

  Jo shrugged. “As second largest stockholder you should know that IBA’s being plagued with a host of imitators. You can’t beat around the bush and stay on top.”

  “True, true. So I’ll get to the point. Jo, what do you know about the Restructurist Movement?”

  She paused before answering and regarded her visitor. Why would an aging man travel halfway, around a planet just to ask her what she knew about the Restructurists? A simple call would have accomplished the same purpose with much less difficulty. Something was up.

  “It’s a political group that wants to change the Federation,” she replied. “Elson deBloise is their current leader, I believe. They want to broaden the powers of the Federation to include planetary affairs.”

  Paxton nodded slowly. “To say, `change the Federation’ is to understate their purposes by a long shot—turn the Fed inside-out is more like it! The Federation was designed to keep the lid on interplanetary affairs, but that’s not enough for the Restructurists. They think the Fed should be some sort of equalizer between planets; they want to regulate trade and aid underdeveloped planets.”

  Jo was unconcerned. “They’ll never get anywhere. The Federation Charter severely limits its activities.”

  “But there’s an emergency clause in the Charter that allows for a temporary increase in powers should the Fed, or its planets, be threatened.”

  “I’m aware of that,” Jo said. “But they’ve tried to invoke that clause many times and every time they’ve been voted down. And even if they did invoke it, so what? It’s only temporary.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong, Jo,” Paxton said gravely. “If you look at the history of old Earth, you’ll find that very seldom is any increase in governmental power temporary. The emergency clause is the key to Restructurist control; once they invoke it they’ll have their foot in the door and the Federation may never be the same again. I don’t want to see that happen, Jo. Your grandfather and I were able to make IBA a growing concern because the Federation’s policy toward a legally operating business has been strictly ‘hands off.’ We humans have got as far as we have as fast as we have because of that policy. I don’t want to see that changed. I don’t want the Federation turned into an empire, and I see the word ‘Empire’ looming in the future if the Restructurists get their way.”

  “But they won’t.”

  “I wouldn’t be too sure of that, my dear. Many of the Restructurists may be starry-eyed idealists but not a few of them are crafty plotters with power as their goal. I’ve made a study of the movement and Elson deBloise is by far its most dangerous member. He’s after empire, I’m sure of it. He’s a capable man—a mere planetary delegate ten years ago, he’s now a sector representative. And something is cooking in his circle. I don’t know exactly what it is, but a connection has been made between deBloise and a certain physicist named Denver Haas. If deBloise thinks Haas can further his aims, then both Haas and the Federation had better be on guard!”

  “Well, why not go directly to the Federation?” Jo said.

  “For the simple reason that deBloise’s affairs need looking into and to obtain the information we want we need secrecy. The Fed is a wonderful organization, but it’s too open and aboveboard in its maneuverings. A Fed investigation of deBloise would be pointless because he’d be ready when they came. But IBA has contacts as far flung as the Federation’s. I think we can move on our own to find out the connection between Haas and deBloise and then go to the Fed.”

  Jo was silent a moment. “But it’s always been a policy of IBA to stay out of politics. It’s one of our bylaws, as a matter of fact.”

  “I know,” Paxton replied, his face creasing into a smile. “I wrote it.”

  “Then why the sudden change of heart?”

  “Well, I could say it’s for the good of the company—and it is—but it goes deeper than that.” He hesitated. “You never really knew your grandfather, did you?”

  Jo’s mouth twisted. “I hardly knew my own father. But when he was still around I remember you two talking a lot about Joe, Sr. He must have been quite a man.”

  “Oh, he was!” Paxton enthusiastically agreed. “We both started out from Earth when the Federation was young and growing by leaps and bounds. The Earth government was very big, very bureaucratic then. Starting a new business was no easy matter on Earth in those days, that’s why Joe and I came to Ragna—that and, uh, other reasons. As I guess you know, your grandfather already had a successful book publishing company under his belt, though how he made it work I’ll never know. The sale of Finch House gave us enough capital to leave Earth and come to Ragna to start IBA. Yes, your grandfather was quite a man. Why . . .”

  Jo tuned the old man out momentarily and considered the situation. Joe Finch, Sr. and Old Pete had been the shrewdest pair of businessmen in the galaxy in their day; their counsel had pulled countless businesses out of the red and had started just as many others on their way. But Joe was long dead and Old Pete had carried that moniker for as long as Jo could remember. Was the current structure of the Federation really in danger, thereby endangering IBA, or was Old Pete suffering from a touch of senile paranoia?

  “I’ll tell you what we’ll do,
” she said, interrupting Paxton’s reminiscent monologue. “I’ll have someone run a check on this Denver Haas character. If we can learn something about Haas, maybe we can get an idea of what deBloise has in mind and go from there.” Catching a nod of approval from Old Pete, she went on. “We have a suite of rooms upstairs for visiting clients, it’s empty now and you can use it for as long as you like. We’d be honored to have you as a guest.”

  Jo pressed a button as she finished speaking and the receptionist came through the multi-hued door. “Take Mr. Paxton to the guest suite,” she told her. “He’ll be with us for a while.”

  “Let me know as soon as you hear anything,” Old Pete remarked, rising.

  “You’ll know as soon as I do,” Jo assured him.

  When she was alone, Jo sat behind her desk and stared at the two-dimensional painting of Joe Finch, Sr. that hung from the wall.

  “I hope your old partner is wrong, Gran’pa,” she muttered.

  II

  Old Pete appeared somewhat shaken when he entered Jo’s office a few days later.

  “I just saw a man,” he said, “walking down the hall with what looked like a space rat on his shoulder.”

  Jo smiled. “That’s just what it was. His name is Sam Orzechowski and it seems he’s tamed the space rat. I’m trying to help him work up some commercial uses.” She pointed to a chair. “Sit down. We’ve got some information on Haas and deBloise.”

  Old Pete leaned forward. “What have you found?”

  “I don’t know just yet,” Jo replied. “I put one of the best investigators in the sector on the job. He just called to say that he’s got some interesting information.”

  “Why didn’t he tell you when he called?”

  “Larry Easly rarely says anything of interest when there’s a possibility that the wrong ears might hear it.”

  “Well, then, when does he arrive?” Pete asked.

  Jo shook her head. “He doesn’t. He never comes to this building. IBA uses his services quite often and frequent visits would give away the relationship. We’re to meet him tonight at the Casino.”