The COMPLEAT Collected SFF Works, page 48
The wounded man was groaning softly on the floor. While Hedley and the others—self-consciously at first—gathered round the machine on the wall and began reading into it, Lockhart made a quick examination of the injury, then cleaned and dressed it. Carefully-chosen excerpts from Earth history, philosophy and politics droned about his ears, together with the other data which proved the extent of the Agency's crimes. It was not a very serious wound, the bullet had gone through a fleshy part of his thigh, but Lockhart took particular pains to make it a neat job. The doctor who would see it next would be an alien, and far advanced in medical science. Lockhart wanted him to think that he had been at least a good workman.
He had a brief attack of dizziness at one point. He ignored it and was just finishing off with a sedative shot when Cedric reentered the room.
With his characteristic mincing walk Cedric went over to the mechanism on the wall. He smiled apologetically at those grouped around it, then he pressed one of the buttons set on its side. A panel slid open revealing a pear-shaped plastic container which held a clear, colourless fluid like water.
It was not until Cedric walked to the opposite wall, sipping daintily at the fluid on the way, and moved aside another panel that Lockhart realised what had been done to them.
The Earth, from eighty miles up, was beautiful ...
Chapter Thirteen
THE SURFACE was receding visibly. Their acceleration must be colossal. Yet apart from that momentary dizziness—which must have been due to the take-off, Lockhart guessed—there was no sensation at all. That meant gravity control he thought, as more and more of the European land mass crawled into sight around the edge of the view-port. The dun-coloured surface was streaked and spotted with vivid orange, yellow and pink; high-flying cirrus clouds hit by the sunrise which had not yet reached the ground. It was a breath-takingly beautiful sight, but it was being spoiled by a gathering red haze.
Lockhart burst out of the lounge, a scant two yards ahead of a suddenly white-lipped Hedley, in the grip of a rage which he could not even hope to control. His hands were so tightly clenched that they hurt. Never in all his life had Lockhart been made such a fool. He had trusted Kelly ...
She would be in the control room, Lockhart told himself as he viciously pulled himself up ladders which—in the crew quarters—had replaced the spiral stairways of the passenger section. What she would be doing there, now that he knew her for the cheat and liar that she was, he did not know. But if he could only get his hands on her, he would ...
The sound of Hedley close on his heels did not register fully with him until a large, strong hand closed around his ankle.
"Where d'you think you're going?" Hedley asked, gasping.
Lockhart told him where and why. He kicked out angrily, trying to free his foot from the agent's grip, but succeeded only in losing his balance so that he dropped a rung and almost fell from the ladder.
"So she made fools of us," Hedley said, head thrown back and glaring up into Lockhart's face. "Does that mean you have to barge in when she's in the middle of a tricky situation. You don't know what exactly is going on up there, and one mistake on your part will mean curtains for everybody—and in your present frame of mind, you'll make mistakes."
"But she's on their side—"
"Don't be a fool!" Hedley was impatient as well as angry. "She's on our side, make no mistake about that. Dammit, I thought you, especially, would have been expecting this, spending so much time with her as you did. The rest of us were."
Lockhart gaped at him.
Hedley said, "There was her refusal to allow Keeler and the Professor aboard the ship—though both would have been in little danger on a purely temporary visit to the ship. And her story about recording through a lie-detector! A recording could be faked just the same as documents and would be useless as evidence.
"We were meant to go to Harla from the very first time she realised that you and the Professor were not Agency men, but Earth humans who knew, or suspected, enough to believe her when she told you who she was and what was going on."
"But why didn't she tell us?"
Hedley grimaced. "If she'd told us, I would have had to tell the department, and you can imagine the complications that would have caused. We could not have gone until a full investigation had been made, and by that time it would have been too late. I think she knew this, and decided to keep the whole truth from us until we were clear of Earth."
Lockhart's mind seemed to be doing somersaults inside his head. So Hedley knew of, and condoned, the kidnapping of eight humans from Earth! Well, not exactly eight—the Keelers being on the ship was accidental. The realisation shocked him. It also caused the blind fury which had driven him towards the control room to subside. Lockhart was angry now only because he, alone, had been made to look foolish. Everyone else had expected this, and now that he thought of it, the girl had tried to tell him, or at least hint at it, on one or two occasions. Lockhart's protest was instinctive.
"But supposing I—we—didn't want to come?"
"I hope," said Hedley quietly, "that that is a purely rhetorical question."
Looking into Hedley's level brown eyes, Lockhart made a surprising and very disquieting discovery. The agent was a fanatic, one of those hopeless, disillusioned idealists, so common after the war, who could not find anything to be idealistic about. Patriotism was these days referred to cynically as applied propaganda. But Hedley, he saw, had become a patriot again, and in the widest sense; his patriotism embraced a world and a species now, instead of merely a country and a race. Hedley had found an ideal again, one that in his quiet and matter-of-fact way the agent would not mind dying for.
Lockhart felt very proud of knowing Hedley at that moment, proud, and very much ashamed of himself.
"Doc, this is crazy," the agent said, grinning widely. "Come down where we can talk comfortably, for Pete's sake!"
Hedley and Lockhart were spread vertically along about twenty feet of ladder, with the agent hanging grimly onto his right ankle. Lockhart smiled in spite of himself and began to descend. He had just reached deck level when there was a faint scraping sound from the deck above.
There was somebody up there. Lockhart could see their outline through the open grill-work of the deck. And they had been there for some time, otherwise he would have heard their approach, which also meant that the conversation between Hedley and himself had been overheard ...
The scraping sound of shoes against metal was repeated, and a pair of legs clad in dark blue slacks began to descend the ladder. Kelly!
It was obvious from her face that she had heard everything. Lockhart deliberately looked away as she made to speak to him. He still felt angry, and an utter fool. He wanted to get his feelings under control before he risked talking to her again.
"I'm sorry I had to mislead you ..." Kelly began.
"We understand," Hedley said quickly, cutting short the apology. "But what about the Keelers. I told them to follow the main group to the lounge as a safety precaution—they would have been killed on the beach for sure. Can you have them landed again?"
Kelly shook her head. "We rendezvous with the parent ship in seventeen hours, shortly before it resumes its journey. There is no time ..."
She stopped suddenly and changed the subject without warning. She looked frightened.
"You are Agency recruits," she said quickly. "All of you with the exception of Cedric and myself, so act accordingly. The pretence will be necessary until we transfer to the parent ship, and afterwards unless I can find a trustworthy Agency official."
She darted a glance upwards, and for the first time Lockhart heard the approaching footsteps. Kelly rushed on:
"The officers of this ship know that Cedric is an Agency man, but not that he has changed sides, and he has convinced them that I am a high Agency official. Together we have made the Chief Officer believe that your group are Earthmen who have stumbled onto the Agency by accident, that you will do anything for the secret of longevity, and that your attempt to seize their ship was in the mistaken belief that the apparatus for administering the treatment was aboard. The error has now been pointed out to you by Cedric and I, and our job is to smuggle you aboard the parent ship without the other passengers knowing about it. The Agency welcomes Earth-human recruits. They are the only ones who can do efficient work on the planet. The Galactics, unless they have been conditioned into near uselessness, are 'softened' by contact with it."
She opened her mouth to say something else, then changed her mind. The ship's officer was almost beside them.
The man looked disappointingly ordinary. He had the same dark, vaguely Spanish features possessed by Kelly, but that was due to his world being populated by a single, homogenous race. Only Earth, Lockhart had discovered, was blessed—or cursed—with racial differences of colour and physique. He wore shorts and a loose blouse, with a row of badges vertically bisecting his chest. A heavy, cloak-like garment was thrown back from his shoulders, revealing the generator of his refraction field strapped to his waist. This had been one of the escorts for the new arrivals, until the shooting had brought him hurrying back to the ship.
The officer looked with sharp curiosity at Lockhart and Hedley, then his face became expressionless. Folding his arms stiffly across his chest, he bowed his head slightly to each of them in turn. He wheeled and began to remount the ladder, talking rapidly to Kelly as he climbed.
"You are to go to the control room for language impression," Kelly translated, motioning them nervously upwards. "They have two Educators there and you are to be given Galactic. He says it will save time and annoyance if you can understand what is being said to you during the transfer. And ... and ..."
Her eyes were boring into Hedley, pleading, pitying and dispairing all at once. Her face was white. "Oh, be careful," she sobbed, and turned quickly towards the ladder leading down to the passenger lounge.
Lockhart followed a pair of feet and legs, clad incongruously in calf-length boots of completely transparent plastic, past two deck levels and along a catwalk to the control room. Too much was happening too quickly, he told himself helplessly. His brain could not accept the knowledge that he was no longer on Earth. Refusal to face reality was a mentally unhealthy reaction, he knew, the first step towards catatonia. But he did not want to fight against anything that these aliens might do to him. Let Hedley and the others do the thinking and worrying, this was too big and complicated for him now.
Desperately, he wished that he could just wake up.
They were led to a couple of chairs set in the middle of the small control room, a few feet behind the control-chairs which were spaced evenly before the semi-circular instrument board. There were large vision screens facing each chair, but the only one in operation was blocked by the head and shoulders of the officer using it. Abruptly the view was further curtailed by the other occupants of the control room standing over him. One held a heavy metal helmet with straps and wires hanging from it.
Hedley watched him anxiously as they fitted the helmet tightly over his head; the agent would be next. An intolerable itching sensation began inside his skull, and Lockhart instinctively made to scratch it. But before his hand was raised six inches, everything—light, sound and feeling—switched off.
Lockhart awoke as suddenly as he had been knocked out, and because his hands were still lying in his lap he saw his watch. Two hours had passed. With an incredulous glance at the officer standing over him, he looked across at the still-unconscious Hedley. The agent's hair was awry. Lockhart guessed that he had offered some resistance to the helmet being fitted after seeing what it had done to himself.
"Attend, please!" the alien said briskly. "Go to the passenger compartment and send two more Earth-humans here for language instruction. Also—"
"But you're speaking English!" Lockhart burst out.
The officer looked impatient. "Speak Galactic," he said. "That gibberish means nothing to me."
It was only then that Lockhart realised that he was thinking—sub-vocalising, rather—in two languages instead of one. Some Educator, he thought admiringly. Aloud, he said, "Sorry."
The Galactic word for it felt awkward for his tongue, but he knew that he had pronounced it intelligibly.
"Very well."
From his general air of authority as well as the intricacy of the badges running down his blouse, Lockhart decided that this was the ship's Captain. The officer went on:
"You will also see that these men carry the body of sub-Captain Kernetsin to me here, and that the Earthmen responsible for his death accompanies them."
There were only two Educator helmets in the control room, Lockhart knew. Then what fate awaited the third man, the man who had shot this Kernetsin ...
With a tremendous effort, Lockhart kept himself from looking at Hedley. This explained Kelly's panicky warning to the agent as they were coming to the control room. But why had she not been more specific, or used her influence to protect him? He could not answer, and speculation was useless at the moment. He had to head the Captain off somehow, and quickly. Lockhart was frightened by the other's expression. One wrong word and he might witness the summary execution of Hedley by the Captain.
"But he wasn't killed—" Lockhart began quickly. He was interrupted.
"So I have been told," the Captain said harshly. "But I trust he is dead now. Despite the fact that the projectile fired into his body contained none of the lethal and painless poisons, its large size must have caused widespread damage and bleeding which is impossible to repair or control. The suffering which this crude and barbarous weapon has caused him is inexcusable."
His lips tightened, and he looked slightly sick.
"But he's all right," Lockhart repeated, and began describing the wounded officer's condition. "Why not go and see for yourself."
The Captain hesitated, then gestured for Lockhart to precede him from the control room.
When they reached the passenger lounge, Lockhart saw that the occupants were grouped around Kelly, all talking loudly. Cedric stood beside and slightly in front of the girl, as if expecting violence. Mrs. Keeler was still crying despite—or maybe because of—the awkward attempts at reassurance by her husband. The only one enjoying himself was the boy, who was having a noisy game of Space Pirates at the observation port. Silence fell as the Captain appeared behind Lockhart and strode quickly to the prostrate Kernetsin.
Kelly went pale when she saw that Hedley was not with them. Her face told Lockhart two things; she had been expecting it, and the penalty for shooting an Agency officer was severe. She thought that Hedley was already dead. Anger, a sick helpless anger began to boil up inside him, but Lockhart fought it down. He had to, for Hedley's sake.
The Captain's eyes flicked about, missing nothing; the resilient plastic cushions stripped from nearby chairs on which the wounded man lay, Kernetsin's pale but relaxed face, his slow, even breathing, and finally the neatly-bandaged thigh. He gestured angrily for the dressings to be removed.
As he gently uncovered the wound, Lockhart's mind began to work rapidly and on two levels. While describing the sleeping officer's injury and its treatment to the Captain he was arriving at an unpleasant and rather terrifying conclusion regarding Kelly. They had been depending on the girl too much. She was honestly trying to help them, he knew, and risking her life to do it, but she was no superwoman. Kelly was trusting to luck more than anything else. She had a wider knowledge than the Earth party of Galactic affairs, but her control of the present situation was practically non-existent—otherwise she would have done something to save Hedley. She had tried, probably, but without success.
To Lockhart, it was painfully evident that if they were to save their world or themselves, they, the Earth humans, would have to do it—with Kelly's assistance.
The Captain signalled for the dressing to be replaced. Straightening up, he gave Lockhart a peculiar, baffled look.
"Are you a Doctor?"
The word, in Galactic, was not quite "doctor", or "surgeon" either, but something like "medical technician". Lockhart swallowed nervously and nodded.
"The damage seems to have been ... repaired," the Captain went on. For a moment his features worked uncontrollably, and Lockhart realised with a shock that the Captain was regarding him with awe. "I've heard of such work being done on the Central Worlds, and that the injured often survive, but out here ..."
Surely, Lockhart's mind protested wildly, the Captain's words did not mean what they seemed to mean. These people possessed a fantastically advanced medical science; longevity, even immortality, perhaps. What was so awesome in a couple of neat sutures and a bandage ...?
"If you wish," the Captain said, the harsh, tight lines of his face relaxing into a smile, "you may view the landing on your satellite from the control room."
He wheeled and left the room, passing Hedley, who had just returned from the control room, at the doorway. He made no further mention of punishing the man who had been guilty of wounding sub-Captain Kernetsin. Apparently he had forgotten all about it.
Chapter Fourteen
Lockhart sat in the ridiculously tiny sick-bay of the mighty Shekkaldor, pride of the Agency passenger fleet, using the few minutes left to him before the arrival of the ship's Medical Officer to try catching his mental breath. Of course, the words "sickbay" and "medical officer" were approximations only. Nobody took sick on this ship apparently, and judging by the equipment that was in sight, the man in charge of it seemed to be more librarian than doctor ...
A sigh from the figure in the room's single bed broke into his thoughts. Though Kernetsin was doped semi-conscious, resting comfortably and in no danger at all, Lockhart had a look at him.
