Quarantine: The Complete Stories, page 25
“You don’t owe me anything.” She flushed and stiffened, as if offended. “I helped Mr. King because I thought he was a refugee who had given up everything to strike out for freedom. I’m glad to know he’s not in danger, but I don’t want your money.” Something shone in her dark eyes. “I helped him because I know the worth of freedom,” she added softly. “Since my free people have been captured and enslaved.”
The prince saw her sadness, and suddenly he wanted to help her out of her own captivity. If he and the count could smuggle her past that dark tower in the motor cart—but that was impossible. The Covenants prohibited such meddling with native affairs; he knew the count would never allow it.
“Jim and I are both deeply grateful, anyhow, Miss Machar.” The count smiled and bowed. “Your generosity is a thing we won’t forget, but we’ve a long way to drive tonight. We must go.”
“Tonight?” Urgency hushed her voice again. “Don’t forget that Jim needs medical attention at once. Dr. Stuben says he ought to have X-rays taken right away, and I’m afraid his head injury may turn out to be worse than it looks.”
“I’ll attend to that,” the count assured her blandly. “I’ll take care of everything. Now, Jim, do you feel like walking to the car?”
The prince stood up uncertainly. The girl saw his momentary weakness and reached quickly to steady him, and he clung to her fingers for an instant, feeling sick and grim in spite of himself because he knew his future consort would never sink to any such show of unwomanly sympathy.
Suddenly, he wanted to say something to her, some little word of parting, that she might recall when he was gone. He caught his breath, but before he could speak he saw the count’s stern frown, reminding him that his moment of freedom was spent. A dangerous habit, and difficult to break. He checked that rash impulse obediently. He smiled at her wistfully and dropped her hand and turned to go.
“Wait.” She turned quickly to the count. “He needs clothing before he goes out. We can find him something—”
“That’s all right,” the count broke in firmly. “Very kind of you, but I have his bag at the Great Plains hotel. We’ll leave the robe and slippers there at the desk for you. I’ll take care of him.”
The prince was hesitating, still somehow reluctant to leave, but the count took his arm and led him firmly on ahead of the natives toward the waiting carts. He went silently, until he saw the long warning finger of the tower beyond.
“You’re certain?” he whispered suddenly. “Certain we can get out?”
“Why not?” The count snapped off the translator and dropped his voice. “What’s in the way?”
“For one thing, the watchtower yonder. How am I to pass the guards, without some weapon of position?”
“What guards?” The count stared at him, and then grinned faintly. “This isn’t our world, you remember. These savages haven’t yet invented any civilized social order—not in this tribe, anyhow. These simple children of nature are still free to go about pretty much as they please. We don’t need any arms of identification.”
“Huh?” The prince blinked again at that frowning tower. “Isn’t this a forced labor camp? Or some sort of prison?”
“So that tower worries you?” The count’s lean grin widened. “It does look amazingly like the guard turrets on Her Majesty’s farms. I admit that it rather upset me at first glance, before I knew what it was.”
“You mean it isn’t—”
“We’re in another culture, remember. Actually, in spite of its grim appearance, that turret wasn’t built to house spy screens or neutrionic guns. You’ll be relieved to know that it’s really only a harmless part of the Great Plains municipal water works.”
“But those fighting men I challenged?” The prince peered unbelievingly after the two armed natives departing in their own cart. “Aren’t they tower guards?”
“State cops,” the count said. “And I’m afraid they misunderstood your challenge. We aren’t at home, remember. There’s no code of honor here. Not as we know honor. These timid folk have no heart for civilized combat. No decent respect for good killers. Instead of fighting as men should, they bribe these cops to defend their rights and lives. And even the cops—if you can imagine such an outlandish culture—even the cops disapprove of killing.”
“You mean I wasn’t in danger?” The prince caught his breath. “Not until I challenged them?”
The count nodded. “Yet that one gesture of decency almost destroyed you. The cops have a revolting custom of blood-revenge, so I was warned at the station. If you had killed one of them, the service couldn’t have saved you. Let’s get off this barbarous planet while we can.”
The prince turned thoughtfully back to look at the three remaining natives, the doctor and his wife and Eliska Machar, who were walking slowly now from the dwelling hut toward the doctor’s cart. In spite of the man’s fantastic dress and the mannish skirts the women wore, they were suddenly human beings. He felt the count’s imperative fingers on his arm, and slowly shook his head.
“I’m not going,” he blurted abruptly. “I want to stay here.”
“Your Highness!” The count was shocked. “You can’t.”
“I think I can.” The prince swung to face him, breathlessly grave. “You brought all those documents to prove that I’m a native named Jim King. Why can’t I stay Jim King?”
“You know the Covenants forbid migration.”
“But you can say you found me dead just as the commandant expected,” the prince whispered quickly. “You can say you left the papers to explain the body. You’re an old hand in the service; you can arrange things so that I won’t be discovered.”
“Perhaps I could.” The old nobleman stood scowling at him reproachfully. “But just think of—everything! All the fine future your mother schemed and I fought to arrange for you. The crown princess. Your place at her knees. Would you turn your back on the throne—on our whole civilization—for nothing at all?”
“Not quite for nothing.” The prince looked away toward the gully in the bridge, where he had lain hidden in the weeds waiting for Eliska Machar. “How did she put it? I want to strike for freedom?” His voice sank huskily, as the three natives came nearer. “Tell them I’m staying.”
“Your Highness—consider!” The count’s hard fingers dug painfully into his good arm. “If you stay here now, you’ll never have a chance to change your mind. I can’t come back, and you’ll have no way out. You’ll live and die here like a savage.”
“But at least a free savage.”
“Even that wouldn’t be so easy,” the count whispered grimly. “You’d have to adjust yourself to these grotesque tribal customs. You’d have to learn to speak their barbarous dialects and train yourself to earn some kind of living—all without the use of any outside knowledge or devices that might betray you to the station. Is freedom worth all that cost and effort?”
He nodded.
“Your mother would never approve.” The old duelist squinted at him, shrugging sadly. “But your will is my honor. If you are certain you know what you are doing—”
“I know,” he said. “Tell them.”
“Your Highness—”
The old man’s voice seemed to hang. He stood motionless for a moment and then sighed and straightened and strode firmly toward the three natives standing beside the other cart, fingering at his hearing aid.
“Dr. Stuben—” His bluff old voice seemed to falter for an instant, but then it went on clearly. “I’ve been trying to talk to Jim, and I’m afraid he’s worse off than I thought. He still can’t talk—not even much of our private dialect—but I believe he wants to stay here. I can’t stay with him because I’ve a long trip to make. I’d like to leave him in your care.”
“Good.” The doctor nodded, smiling gravely. “He does need immediate attention. I doubt that he’s in shape to travel far, at least for several days.”
“I won’t be back soon.” The old man’s voice thinned and cracked. “In view of my own failing health, perhaps not even at all. If I don’t get back, and if it does turn out that Jim has a long convalescence, I want to know he’s in good hands.”
“I’ll help him.” The girl spoke out impulsively. “Before you came, I had started working with him. His speech was coming back.” She turned anxiously to the doctor. “Couldn’t we let him have the hired man’s job? I mean, if he’s going to be here long. The work needn’t be more than he feels like doing, and I think it would be good for him to be here while he’s getting over all that’s happened to him.”
“Servant to savages!” the count muttered faintly.
“Please,” the prince whispered, but the count ignored him.
“Jim has money,” the stern old man said stiffly. “Here with his papers in this brief case. Enough at least to pay for his care until he is able to look for some proper employment. He won’t have to take such menial work—”
The prince silenced him at last, with an imperative gesture. Bleak-featured with the effort to control his agitated emotions, the proud old fighting man glanced at his native timepiece and gripped the prince’s hand in the native way of parting and got nastily into his own cart. It lurched away at once, in a reek of fumes from the primitive engine, driven rather blindly.
“Come along, Mr. King.” The doctor opened the door of the other cart. “We’ve some X-rays to make.”
The prince shrank back, crouching to shield his arm again.
“Don’t be afraid, Jim,” Eliska whispered quickly. “You’ll soon be all right again.”
He couldn’t help staring at her fearfully, for the untranslated words were strange again. He was cut off from all the world he knew, even from the enigmatic kindness he had found in her, forever marooned and alone. The finality of his isolation stunned him. His frightened glance fled after the departing outsider, and found that distant tower.
Not a guard turret, but only the village water tank. This simple work was not his own, but suddenly he felt at home. Even if he had to go unarmed as these childlike natives did, even if he had to work with his hands to live, he had found something greater than the throne of the matriarchy. He straightened to inhale the sweet air of Earth, and smiled at Eliska and the doctor, and stepped hopefully into the cart.
III
The first disturbing experiments with rockets intended to leave the Earth had been undertaken by a bold native named Goddard. His work was rewarded with feeble support, brief ridicule, and a crushing indifference. He died unknown, never aware that he had been defeated by agents assigned to forestall any premature contact with the watchers in space.
“THE PRINCE is still on Earth,” Coral Fell whispered quickly in the dome on the moon, when that transcription ended.
“He is living there as a native doctor. He has married that native girl. When Mark recognized him, a few years ago, he refused again to leave. He says that his native village is worth more than all the matriarchy.”
“A touching display of sentimental primitivism,” Penwright scoffed. “But the outcome is not surprising when you come to consider the dubiously human status of Altair II, which itself very narrowly escaped condemnation for our signal project.”
“Don’t you see that his native friends are as fully human as he is?” Coral turned desperately to Scarlet. “Your Equity, you simply can’t let the blinker kill them.”
Scarlet was watching the doorway for Flintledge and the banker, scowling with a puzzled impatience at their tardiness. Coral’s urgency spurred him only to a noncommittal grunt.
Scarlet turned his carefully irascible frown upon old Mark Whitherly, who was wildly waving another bright psionic tape.
A sudden stir among the worried quarantine people huddled at the door gave him a moment of hope that the trader had come with his bribe, but the man who entered was only Newbolt, bringing a curt report that the savage rocket was now near the moon.
“Your Equity, we can wait no longer.” The commander’s muscular shoulders lifted majestically, as if tossing off his tattered respect for Scarlet. “Our own safety demands either that we recognize this contact and welcome our visitors into civilization—or else that we deny their human status and allow the signal project to proceed.”
“I’ll decide,” Scarlet rasped unpleasantly. “When I have weighed all the evidence.”
He looked again for Flintledge and decided that the trader was waiting to drive a harder bargain in another private meeting. His narrow jaws set stubbornly. Unless he got his price, Earth could burn.
“The inquiry is recessed,” he rapped. “Clear the chamber.”
“Wain, wait!” Coral snatched Whitherly’s tape and rippled toward the bench. “Scan this before you decide.” Bright excitement cascaded from the moons in her hair. “It’s better than proof that these people are human. It is proof that they are our own ancestral race. It’s the clue that led Mark to the site of that prehistoric spaceport on Mars. Do take time to scan it!”
Ignoring the signals of contempt and alarm that were flickering between the cool signal officer and the boiling commander, Scarlet let Coral place the tape in the scanner. It picked up an explorer on his way to Earth. He was a worn little wisp of a man, with a bald spot and a stubborn chin and a burning eagerness in his pale, nearsighted eyes. He came to the moon on the yearly supply flyer and was met by a frosty welcome.
“I’m looking for Atlantis,” he told the hulking quarantine inspector who received his credentials. “The forgotten place, however you render the name, where our interstellar culture was born. I expect to find it here.”
They were standing in the cramped and cheerless undercover office at the station. Earth itself was still a quarter-million miles away, but against the long light-centuries which the explorer had already crossed, such a distance was nothing at all.
“Atlantis, huh?” The inspector squinted painfully at the psionic films, and tossed them to his desk with a bored contempt. A soft clumsy man, somewhat too bulky for his blue uniform, he had adjusted himself to the simple details of watching the spy screens and filling out reports in triplicate and waiting for promotion, and any interruption of that routine annoyed him.
“There never was such a place,” he stated flatly. “It’s nothing but a silly myth.” His bulging, lead-colored eyes blinked with a faint hostility. “Though some fool is always coming to look for it—I don’t know why.”
“Perhaps the name is only a legend.” The explorer spoke mildly, trying hard to be agreeable. “But human civilization has been spreading out through the galaxy at an average rate of half the speed of light, for at least twenty thousand years. It must have begun somewhere.”
“What if it did?”
The slight man straightened thoughtfully, puzzled at this ponderous obstinacy and already alarmed by it. He understood the working of the quarantine service and knew that he couldn’t visit Earth without the aid of the inspector, who headed the undercover staff.
“I’m a scientist.” He chose the words with care, trying to penetrate the big man’s stolid skepticism. “I’m looking for the cradle of civilized mankind, but also and chiefly for the truth. It seems a tragedy that our forefathers, in their haste to reach the stars, somehow lost their own beginnings. Our mislaid past is what I hope to recover. But even if I only found that the people of Sol III are wanderers themselves, as we are, from some unknown human homeland, that fact would fill one more gap in scientific knowledge.”
“If Atlantis ever existed anywhere, it wasn’t here.” The inspector’s loud voice seemed oddly belligerent. “I’ve been down to Sol III on undercover missions. A filthy pesthole, crawling with verminous savages so backward they actually think they’re the only people anywhere. They can’t build neutrionic fliers today. What makes you think they could twenty thousand years ago?”
“The first interstellar ships were probably built by people who wanted to leave the planet,” the explorer answered mildly. “I suppose they did.”
“You theorists!” The inspector snorted scornfully. “Looking for the beginnings of civilization among savages who never heard of it, while every civilized people for a hundred light-years around can show you the site of Atlantis on one of their own planets.”
“I know.” The explorer’s bent shoulders drooped wearily. “I’ve been looking for Atlantis nearly all my life. The search has taken me to several hundred worlds where the legend still lives—and cost me so far too much objective time, wasted on the flights between them.” He sighed. “Now I’m displaced and alone, with nothing left to do but keep on looking.”
“But still you haven’t found it.”
“Not yet.” The grizzled little man nodded patiently. “The legend was there, but I always found evidence that it had come from somewhere else, carried by some forgotten migration.”
“Would people remember such a myth?” The fat man’s dull eyes blinked with a heavy skepticism. “Even after they had forgotten the actual history of interstellar migrations? “There are plenty of planets where stories of the early migrations have survived,” the explorer told him. “The trouble is that few accounts are specific enough to help identify the places from which the legendary starships came.
“Those first interstellar pioneers must have found life pretty hard, don’t you see? They lacked psionics, and nearly all the neutrionic devices we can use to tame new worlds today. Whole colonies perished—more, probably, than didn’t. The severe struggle for survival forced most back toward savagery. Only now and then did the settlers keep the science of neutrionic flight alive, so that they could start new waves of migration, such as spread out from Denebola VII.”
“From that sinkhole?” The inspector sniffed. “I’ve been there, from our Denebola base. A handful of pitiful savages, as backward as these, scrabbling to keep alive on a desert planet. If that’s such a fountainhead of culture, why must it be quarantined?”
