Fiction Complete, page 69
“Partly. I would be your slavemaster when you send your people to make a . . . colony.”
“Okay!” snarled Richter. “Maybe that was in the backs of our minds; shall we tell your people you were willing?”
“Hah!” said Myru. “Which you will tell, in your language?”
That silenced them, till Kean rallied with a new thought.
“You have won this trick,” he admitted, “but you will be more foolish to lose the advantage. We have much to teach you.”
MYRU LEANED back and stared at him. “You are telling me again that knowledge is power?”
“Obviously!” said Kean. “Look at what it did for you today!”
“Today proves only that I had one kind of knowledge and you another; perhaps mine made power.”
Kean looked angry and disbelieving.
“Your weapons helped,” said Myru, “but better was your advice which you often gave me—to observe and learn against the time when knowledge would be useful. I observed you!”
The Terrans were all silent again, and he saw that they did not like him to say such things. They were star-travellers, accustomed to gather, not yield, knowledge.
“I told you of the kuugh in the hills, but there is no animal called ‘kuugh.’ See my people! Do they know the word?”
Kean did not look at the Vunorians in the throne chamber, but watched Myru intently, waiting.
“Then I told you about Vunorians becoming little animals, but they do not believe so. I showed you the temple, but it was just an old ruin with stolen statues.”
“So it was all a trick!” snorted Kean disgustedly. “Well, you should hardly sneer if the knowledge you gave us was false!”
“Did you tell me all truth?” asked Myru, beckoning to the guards. “You know so much, you forget simple ways of thought. I think maybe you have gone to planets having animals stranger than my kuugh. You maybe saw many worlds with strange temples and many peoples with strange beliefs, so that nothing is new to you. Even, maybe, you found among the stars, those who would sell their own kind to do what you say.”
He could not read the expression on the faces of the Terrans, but he hoped it was shame. That would make it easier for Myru to do what he had to do.
“You have seen that any thing is possible,” he finished, “so—you believed anything I told you. You can do all things except see simple truth in open daylight. Do you call that knowledge power?”
They flung hard, defiant looks at him as the guards led them away, but there was nothing they could do. Myru was sad for them—for they were great in their way—until he stepped out on an upper balcony later, for air. Then he saw the stars beginning to glitter in the moonless dusk of Vunor’s sky, and he forced down the pity that might weaken him.
“So they would make Vunor their ‘colony’ !” he murmured, staring upward into the heavens. “Not while Myru e Chib lives! We will be ready for the next ones!”
1953
The Compleat Collector
Medford was a mild-looking fellow, quite nondescript, in fact. Who would suspect that he carried an arsenal of lethal equipment with him, or that he needed It? But a bill-collector is never a candidate for popularity-prizes. On the contrary!
VASHI, SEEN from Terra by such as might guess exactly where to look, appeared as a small, nondescript, yellowish star in the constellation of Sagittarius. Vashi IV, discernable only from a much closer viewpoint, was about the size of Terra; but to the Vashians it was the fastest growing little colony in that volume of space. Sol, they liked to say, looked pretty dim from Vashi, if you turned things around.
Thus, it was perhaps fitting that the Vashian customs-guard in the big, bare shed at the big, bare, spaceport outside Center City should be a large man; for the Terran at whose papers he squinted seemed no more important than the distant sun he claimed as home.
“Hey, Bill!” yelled the guard.
“Gimme a hand here a minute!”
Two other officials, idle now that most of the tourists from the sleek inter-stellar ship had passed a cursory inspection, stopped their talk and approached.
“Check me on this description,” requested the first guard, reading from the passport in his hand. “ ‘John P. Medford, commercial traveler. Height five feet seven, weight one-forty. Hair brown, eyes gray, complexion tanned.’ That right?”
Under their combined regard, meanwhile, the Terran stood stiffly erect, as if displeased at having attention called to his moderate stature. His loose-hanging jacket was draped as casually as current fashion demanded along the borders of Terra’s expanding space-empire, and his full trousers were tucked into calf-high boors with the prescribed jauntiness. Despite all this, despite even the ornately heavy silver buckle of the wide belt holding up the trousers, Medford managed to exude an air of formal dignity. His jacket, pants, and shirt were all of varying shades of gray.
“ ‘Bout right,” agreed one of the guards colleagues. “Don’t mind Vergil, Mr. Medford; it’s just that he’s color-blind.”
“There ain’t enough of anythin’ to go around, quite,” added the other helper, “let alone fellers to be customs-men. We take what we kin get.”
The original examiner glared at him, looked again at the passport, and said “What’s the ‘P’ for?”
The Terran hesitated. A faint expression of distaste formed on his features, as if the question rattled bones inside a scrupulously kept closet. It seemed a choice of causing less sensation by giving or by withholding an answer. For all the detail of the passport-description and its worn photograph he might as well be anonymous; hair called “brown” can be a sandy mixture that may be turning gray, or may always have been the same nondescript shade; eyes called “gray” can be underestimated because of definite pouches under them; skin called “tanned” can be leathery enough to make the date of birth meaningless at a distance of a few dozen lightyears.
“Pluto,” said Medford finally.
“Pluto?”
“It happens to be the ninth planet of Sol. I was born there.”
The guard looked up to discover his companions studying Medford speculatively. After a moment, he thrust the papers at the visitor and pointed toward a nearby exit. “Ground taxis to the city out there,” he offered.
“Ship goes out just after local dawn, remember.”
“Where can I get an aircar?” asked Medford.
“Can’t—we ain’t had time to import all the luxuries of civilizaton, so air transport only works between cities.”
“We got a jet factory goin’,” said one of his friends, “but, like I say, there ain’t enough to go around yet. Not enough of anythin’, except maybe yannaine.”
“Yannaine,” murmured Medford.
“Sounds familiar. Isn’t that the stuff those furry things over on Yanna 2 are always chewing? We stopped over there a day.”
“That’s right,” confirmed the guard. “I hear it doesn’t hurt them kangaroos, but if anybody offers you a plug around Center City, be careful; it’ll knock ya into a week of dreams if you ain’t used to it. It’s about the only thing we got more of than we need here.”
“How is that?”
The guard shrugged. “Don’t ask me—long’s I don’t see any come past here, I dunno anythin’ about it.”
“Smugglers?” asked Medford.
“That’s a dirty word,” retorted the other. “Yanna’s only three lightyears away.”
MEDFORD nodded and started slowly toward the wide doorway. As he walked, he pushed back his left sleeve to finger what looked like an elegant, gold-cased wrist visor. It was rather large for a good instrument, presenting an oval dial perhaps two inches long. Outside, in the noon light of Vashi, Medford paused to shade the screen with his hand; an image shimmered into focus.
The guard, Bill, was shown speaking into the microphone-grill of a televisor whose screen revealed only a swirl of colors in a privacy pattern. Medford heard him say, “Yeah, yeah, he gave the name of Medford plain as you please. No, didn’t say he was here on business . . . but I remembered you said to report, Ted—”
Medford adjusted the tiny knob slightly, and presently picked up another image. The first guard was also on a visor. When he discovered, in another moment, that the third man was engaged in a similar manner, he listened only long enough to assure himself that the three conversations seemed to be with very different people. A glint came into his gray eyes.
“Official salaries here must be low,” he murmured. “Or am I better known than I hoped?”
Ignoring the curious regard of a taxi-driver parked at the end of the concrete walk, he reached into an inner pocket for a small sheet of paper, and scanned the note written on it in neat script: “Vashi IV—
Thedar Brog. C60,000,000 to Moran Space yards—Teresa Soray C2,250,000 to Alpha Export—Orville ‘Red’ Jenkins, C500-000 to ‘Big Joe’ Kyraj.”
“Might as well try the big one first,” he told himself. “Sixty million credits isn’t stardust.”
He switched off the wrist “visor,” returned the slip of paper to his pocket, and drew out an antique pocket watch that filled the palm of his hand. It must have run down, for Medford fiddled with the stem, changed the setting, and looked up, as if judging the time of day. He frowned briefly as one of the drooping shrubs outside the customs-shed rustled. Then Medford continued his interrupted stroll toward the ground car at the end of the sidewalk.
He ran his eye over the broad horizontal stripes of blue and yellow, and inquired, “Taxi?”
The driver’s face froze slightly as he jabbed a button on his dashboard to swing tlie rear door open. He nodded in silence to the Terran’s request to be taken to a good hotel. Medford hesitated, as if unfamiliar with the type of sliding door the cabbie had opened for him. His right hand groped absently in the air for a moment before slipping briefly under his jacket. Finally, after standing clear of the door a second or two, he climbed in and sat down.
THE DRIVER slid the door closed impatiently and started off. Medford sighed contentedly as he eyed the depression in the nap of the carpeted floor near his feet.
The ride to the city proper—a distance of about four miles—was made in good time. Center City itself, Medford noted, had already begun to sprawl outward from a cluster of older buildings that must have been the first settlement. It was bustling, spacious over-new, and functionally unbeautiful.
A few of the buildings grudgingly pointed out by the driver, such as the governor’s palace, were obviously recent-constructions, in poor but ornate taste to fit the growing importance of the colony.
At the hotel, apparently the only one accustomed to visitors from space, Medford took advantage of the hospitality to have a message sent to the Vashian governor, asking for an appointment. He then disengaged from the manager’s little speech against spacelines which did not allow passengers to stop long enough to patronize the hotel, and followed the bell-hop up to his room. He seemed curiously preoccupied, especially entering elevators and turning corners, so that the bell-hop’s being a girl was wasted upon him.
“Will you see that any messages for me are brought right up?” he requested, handing over a tip that should ensure promptness, even in bustling Center City.
Left alone, Medford waited a few minutes before pulling the ornate pocket watch from his pocket and flipping the case open. Once again, he touched the area about the stem delicately with his fingertips, his eyes half-closed in concentration.
Gradually, a misty outline condensed in mid-air before him, about the size of a small suitcase.
Medford relaxed and watched it solidify into a bag seemingly of dark, grained leather, approximately one foot by two by six inches. When it was at last clearly visible, he manipulated the controls of the “watch” to lower the foot of the bed. He finished by clicking a tiny switch after which the nap of the carpet surrounding the bag lost its flattened-out look.
With the field turned off, the Terran sat on the edge of the bed and leaned forward to open the now-visible case. He pressed a hidden catch, causing the upper half to unfold into two sections. The lower six inches for the whole length remained a completely enclosed unit, which Medford found slightly warm to the touch of his hand. In the two open sections nestled a surprising number of tiny gadgets.
Some gleamed metallically; others were as dark as the silky black lining upon which they rested; still others by their tininess would have escaped the notice of any bystander, until Medford used a pair of tweezers to pick one up.
He chose a jeweler’s lens from an instrument-compartment and examined the mechanism held in the tweezers Satisfied, he set the gadget down and took up the control-box that looked like a watch. He opened the side of its case opposite to the one previously used; under the tiny telescreen revealed, were several little dials which he touched gently.
An image of his own knees appeared upon the miniature screen. He continued to adjust the controls, causing the mechanism to rise into the air until it hovered by the door a good deal less conspicuously than a Terran house fly. Then he closed the “suitcase” and parked it invisibly in a corner of the room above the bed.
“When in Vashi,” he murmured, recalling the telecalls from the spaceport, “do as the Vashians do—whether with spies or spy-eyes.”
Shortly hereafter, having received a surprisingly prompt invitation to call upon the governor, he left his lunch in the hotel dining room and went—but not alone. The tiny spy-eye drifted along twenty feet above his head, out of sight.
AT THE palace, Medford was passed rapidly along a chain of guard, receptionists, secretaries junior and senior, and a quartet of gaudily-uniformed bodyguards.
Governor Brog welcomed him with homely affability. “Always happy to see someone from the home system,” he boomed. “We colonists lose touch with the latest news . . . we so seldom have the leisure to keep up with the rest of the galaxy.”
Medford smiled politely while the governor boomed out a lengthy performance, designed to make himself seem a simple son of the interstellar frontier. He accepted a handful of cigars of the governor’s own tobacco—descended from a strain imported direct from Terra—and sat in a rather uncomfortable chair of swamp-cane which was praised as being of original clean-lined Vashian design. There he listened quietly and sipped at a glass of wine pressed upon him with apologetic pride in the fact that the grapes had been grown on the governor’s own extensive plantation.
Thedar Brog was about what should have been expected of a system which permitted the governor to be nominally an appointee of the Terran Colonial Administration by approval of the local populace. On dozens of outlying planets, Medford had seen that the most grasping and powerful freebooter was generally elected “freely and democratically.”
Brog’s beefy red face perfectly suited his bulky body. The Terran guessed that if the man had stood behind his vast desk, It would have towered more than six feet. He must have weighed nearly two hundred and fifty pounds Terran; even his hands were beefy, with thick, powerful lingers suggesting that this man knew how to grab, and knew even better how to hang oh.
At last, Thedar Brog ran out of genial boasts concerning the rapid growth of the Vashian settlements; he looked at Medford expectantly. The Terran pulled out the slip of paper he had referred to previously, as well as a small black notebook.
“I have been commissioned by the Moran Space Yards of Callisto, Sol,” he said pleasantly, “to inquire what plans you have for settling your account. According to their figures, only the down-payment of twenty million credits has been received for the construction of four new spaceships delivered recently to the Vashian Government. The balance is sixty million.”
Brog’s face turned even more ruddy. He quivered in his chair.
“Why y-y-you cheap little . . . spy! What do you mean by coming in here like this?”
“It’s my business,” said Medford. “I understand that the Moran people have exhausted all the normal means of getting in touch with you; protests lodged with the Colonial Administration have disappeared into space, and other messages have likewise gone unanswered.”
“I don’t have time for that sort of thing!” Brog waved that sort of thing aside with a large gesture. “We need those ships to prevent smuggling around Vashi. As soon as we get those ships armed—”
“The idea is,” Medford slipped in, “that the builders are considering asking to have them returned.”
“They can’t do that!” Brog gripped the edge of his desk with such a convulsive clutch that Medford thought the big hands must surely leave indentations. “And as for you— I’ve had enough of this . . . this . . . Williams!”
One of the uniformed guards thrust his head inside the doorway from the corridor.
“This is the Medford we thought it might be,” Brog sneered. “Throw him out the back way!”
“Yes, sir!” said Williams.
The four guards entered with an eager rush. Medford had time only to rise before they surrounded him and literally lifted him from his tracks. With his toes barely dragging along the thick carpet, he was borne from the governor’s presence, through the short corridor connecting the offices of Brog’s suite, and out through the reception room toward the rear of the building.
“Down the stairs quietly,” ordered the chief guard, tightening his hold upon Medford’s left forearm.
TWO OF his companions obeyed, but the third suddenly grunted and dropped out of the human mass at the head of the steps. White-faced, he hopped on one foot as he held the other ankle; it seemed to have been stamped upon.
The three guards and Medford thrashed their way down the first flight in a melee of waving hands and feet. At the landing another guard had the misfortune to catch a flying heel in the groin; he doubled over in a corner of the landing with his face a twisted mask.
Williams yanked the harder on Medford’s elbow. The three remaining men surged down four steps, bounced off the balustrade to the left, staggered another half dozen steps lower before caroming off the wall to their right. Immediately thereafter, Williams’ colleague found a third foot between his and lost his balance. It almost seemed, for a moment, that he would succeed in keeping his feet; but the pulling of his chief on the Terran’s other arm tipped the scales. The three of them, still maintaining a relative quiet, finished the flight in a rolling, churning tumble.
