Gilpin's Space, page 19
I sat there listening to him, and suddenly it was almost as though I was outside myself. There was no escaping the mental and spiritual miasma of Old Earth, that Earth on which I, Geoffrey Cormac, had been bom and raised, where I had studied and made love and sailed the seas and built ships. I could feel it, and I could feel how it possessed even men as sane as Kwei and Placek, how it possessed me before I passed through the Far Reaches and then experienced the cleanliness of Laure’s World. I knew that, before our mission was accomplished, we would have to contend with men whom it possessed totally, men like Whalen Borg, whom we had thought safely dead.
“Well,” I said finally, “that seems to be the kernel of our problem—how to do what we have to do and still stay free. Steve, you and Henry know a lot more about the world as it’s become than we do. What steps do you think we ought to take?”
Placek scratched his head. “You tell ’em, Mr. Kwei. You’re the man who’s really kept my head out of the noose.”
“Not entirely,” Kwei answered, smiling, “but I trust I helped. It seems to me, Commander Cormac, that the first thing we must be is thorough, no matter how impatient delays may make us. We must avoid false steps. That’s critical. For the time being, you’re safe here, especially on the ships. We on Taiwan feel very strongly about our right to sail the seas of space. No word of your arrival will be permitted to leak out. Even though they spout the same line as the Security Council, our mainland commies are too frightened of Breck and his cozying up to the Kremlin to want to help him in any way, and they’d be most likely to hear about you first—and we have moles over there who’d let us know. Your main problems will come when you start going about your business.”
Laure nodded.
“Therefore,” he went on, “I’d suggest that neither you, Commander, nor Laure undertake any missions personally, and plans must be made to give those of you who’ll have to travel puncture-proof new identifies. I can arrange all that. Disguise in really a rather simple art, and the passports and other documents I can obtain are as authentic as the originals would be. Of course, nothing is ever completely foolproof, so even the contingency of being identified must be provided against. However, there’ll be a lot of people helping out—people who won’t even need to know it’s you they’re helping. When the powers started trying to suppress any space travel but their own, underground Free Space organizations started springing up everywhere, and some genius began coordinating them. Now in a lot of smaller countries they operate openly; in some others, almost openly. They have cells everywhere, even behind the Iron Curtain. They know that if they help us, we’ll help them. They’ll save you from having to take a lot of chances. Oddly enough, too, the fact that Borg’s alive may be insurance for you.”
“Come again?” I said.
“It almost certainly guarantees that assassination, so hard to guard against, will not be used in your case. Because of what he is, Borg will not want you dead. Nor will he, as long as you and Mrs. Endicott elude him, want to have any of the rest of you killed without questioning you. Not a pleasant subject, I know, but anything that limits his methods works to your advantage.”
“You’ve summarized the situation beautifully,” Laure said. “Can we discuss it in detail later on?”
He smiled. “I’d be hurt and offended if you didn’t.”
“Thank you, Henry. Now would you like to hear about Owl’s flight, and our new world?”
“Can I bring Sousa and a couple of the others aboard, Mrs. Endicott?” Placek asked. “Sousa especially’ll want to know you’re safe and hear where you’ve teen.”
“Of course,” Laure told him; and in less than a minute he was back with Sousa and with Latouiette, who had also worked for Underseas, Ltd.
Laure and I shook hands with them, and I could see their eagerness to hear her on their faces.
“We’ve named our planet Laure’s World,” I told them. I motioned them to chairs, and sat down with them.
And Laure began.
2
Laure told them the whole story of Owl’s flight, of the inhospitable worlds we’d visited and the creatures they had spawned, of our journey through the Far Reaches and the demonic emotions which had done their best against us while we slept. She described the methods we had used so successfully— even though most of us hadn’t realized how successfully—to combat them. She told them about Rhonda, and that there were bound to be many other people who just couldn’t cope. Finally, vividly and poetically, she painted a word-picture of Laure’s World, of its beauty, its freshness, and of a new ambience holding neither living hatreds nor the not-yet dead residue of all our ancient cruelties. And the ship’s screens accompanied her with their recorded realities: seas and continents, our picnic on the meadow, the beings of the reef. When her relations ended, even I, thoroughly familiar with it all, was surprised to find that she had been talking for two and a half hours, during which no one had interrupted her, not even with a question.
For moments, there was total silence. Then Placek, his deep voice breaking, said, “Mrs. Endicott, I—I think you’re going to find a lot of people, people like me and Sousa here, trying to join you.”
“And their wives,” whispered Sally Placek.
“And their Chinese friends,” said Henry Kwei.
“Would you come, Henry? Would you really come?” exclaimed Laure.
“I’m too old, Laure,” he answered sadly, “too involved with this world. I was thinking of my second son, Chris—you remember him, don’t you? He’s married now, with a couple of teenagers. He’s a marine biologist, with a vessel of his own, designed for his profession. She’s only a few feet shorter than your Owl. We haven’t installed a Gilpin drive in her—not yet—but we can in days. He’s a space freak, too, and if you won’t let him join you, he’ll probably stow away. Besides—well, I’d like to see Chris and his family at least away from Earth during the next few years.”
“They’ll be very welcome, Henry,” Laure said. “All of you will.”
“But what of those of us who can’t cope?” Sousa asked.
“Please believe me, all of you. Something happened to me in those Far Reaches of Gilpin’s Space. I am confident that I can tell those who can’t from those who can—I and Geoff and Franz and probably all of us who, as Geoff put it, have been there and back again.”
When she included me, I was surprised; then I examined the new self I had brought back from her new world and realized that very probably I could.
“As for those who can’t, well, the kindest thing would be never to let them try. Captain Placek, what happened to those men of yours who had to be restrained to get them home?”
“They leveled off okay, but you’d never get them out there again. They were good men, and they signed aboard one of Mr. Kwei’s fleet after he promised they’d never have to go that far again. Talk with them though, and you’d start believing all that garbage Breck and his boys are putting out, and naturally their wives and kids—both of them are married—feel the same way.”
“At this stage,” I said, “it’s probably just as well. We’re going to have to vet everybody very carefully before we even extend an invitation, except for those whom we already know well enough to judge instinctively. And that also goes for anyone aboard Pussycat who got into the Far Reaches and didn’t get too shaken up. Right, Placek?”
“Right, Commander. It wasn’t any fun, but Sally and I and the kids felt maybe we could’ve handled it, though we’d sure like to have had a few pointers. There are more honor stories going round than there are cockroaches in New York. The talk is all of vessels vanishing, highjacking by their crews, diving slam-bang into planets or even suns, and of whole shiploads of brand-new lunatics hurrying back to Earth to assassinate our heroic leaders.”
“Speaking of that,” Kwei interjected, “one of the first things the powers thought of, naturally, was that a Gilpin ship was the perfect terrorist weapon, not just for them, but for all their enemies, home-grown and foreign. And of course that helped to touch off the paranoia. But the odd thing is that there’ve been very few such terrorist attacks, and none have been too successful. Perhaps it’s because once you have your own Gilpin ship you begin to see its true potential, and start wondering whether it might not be more fun and more profitable to fish for strategic minerals among the asteroids or dig for diamonds on planets no one ever visited before. We know that a great number of official ships have simply disappeared, and not just in what you call the Far Reaches. I haven’t heard of any commercial vessels having that trouble—if they have, it’s been far out—but then most owners have had sense enough to work their ships on shares, the way your Boston and New Bedford whalers did way back when.”
My estimate of the situation was taking shape rapidly. In certain respects, it was more favorable than I’d expected— none of us had foreseen the degree of disorganization reigning in the world, the bold intransigence of smaller nations determined to assert their right to the freedom of space, and the rapid and apparently highly effective growth of a Free Space underground. One factor only went a long way to canceling out the obvious advantages—Whalen Borg was still alive and now had more power than ever. It helped to explain the persistent propaganda emphasis on Laure and her role in giving Saul’s drive to the world, and told us that nowhere on Earth would we be completely out of danger, and that incessant vigilance would be the minimum price of our survival.
Henry Kwei must have read my mind. “The Republic of China has keen eyes, excellent ears, and—” He smiled. “— very sharp teeth, much sharper than the rest of the world knows. However, to cany out your mission—our mission—we’re going to have to act swiftly, for the wider we cast our nets, the greater will the chances be of their coming to the notice of the wrong people. With your permission, Laure, I’d like to start disguising Owl immediately. In a couple of days, you won’t know your ship. Ordinarily, I’d invite all of you to have dinner with me this evening, and I’d invite the President of the Republic and Admiral Leong, who’s head of all our space activities. But these are not ordinary circumstances, and I feel you’ll be safer keeping as low a profile as possible and staying aboard.”
“But surely there’s no reason why you can’t have dinner with us here, is there, Henry? You can invite Chris and his wife, and Captain Placek can bring those of his people who used to work for me at Underseas. You’ll be the first people Earthside to eat fish from another world—believe me, it’s delicious. You can manage, can’t you, Linda?”
Linda, justly proud of her kitchen skills, blushed and nodded, and Jamie and Sally Placek volunteered to help her.
“I’d be delighted to,” said Kwei. “Perhaps tomorrow evening we can have a repeat performance, but with a Chinese feast brought in.” He stood. “And now I’d better go ashore and get things moving. I’ll be back in half an hour, and we’ll still have the better part of the afternoon to work in.”
By the time he returned, Laure and I and Franz had assembled our various lists, and he went to work with us directly. Item by item, he checked and rechecked the supplies we were sure we’d need, making suggestions, explaining why some might be a little difficult to obtain, why others would have to be purchased through the underground to avoid suspicion, and how his own Gilpin ships could pick some up in distant ports and places and deliver them to Taiwan in a matter of minutes.
“Supplies and equipment are going to be the least of your worries,” he said finally. “There’s very little on your lists that all sorts of non-space-traveling people don’t use. The danger’s going to start when you begin recruiting. Just how do you plan to go about it?”
“I’m afraid there’s no alternative to direct contact in most cases,” I answered. “Especially in today’s atmosphere, people aren’t going to come running when messages arrive second-or third-hand. For instance, Linda certainly is going to have to get to her big Swede personally, and we know that Jamie will have to deliver his father’s microflexes to his uncle. Alec Macartney’s a high-tech man with a lot to lose, and he’s going to have to be shown what his brother’s offering. We’ve prepared one-time videoflexes of Laure’s World. They’re automatically wiped after playing or if anybody tries to mess with them, and so are the straight message flexes. Then there are a couple of Bess Mayhew’s friends to contact, plus others in California, and a relative of Tammy Uemura’s and his family, together with another couple in Hawaii.”
“They’re going to be my job, and afterwards I’ll get in touch with the final one in Colorado.” Franz grinned. “Do I get to wear a great gray beard and travel with a Lower Slobovian passport?”
Kwei laughed. “No gray beard, and probably something like a Canadian passport for a starter—but I’m afraid that moustache is going to have to go.”
Franz moaned.
“Now don’t feel bad, Franz,” soothed Laure. “It’s a crying shame after all the years you’ve devoted to it, but they do grow back eventually if properly nurtured.”
“Unlike heads,” said Kwei grimly.
I’d been considering everything from our new perspective, and now suddenly I thought of an approach that might insure us against unforeseen pitfalls. “Would it be possible,” I asked, “for your Free Space people to check out some of the names we’ve listed? Especially regarding their attitude to Freedom of Space, and who owes what to whom, and who has reason to fear the IPP. Most of them we—or at least some of us—know personally, but even there things can change. Could they do that for us?”
“Certainly, Commander. They know me well enough so that they won’t even want to know who needs the information. A lot of them are people who’d be out in Gilpin’s Space themselves if they weren’t too old or didn’t have family ties to hold them here, and who are willing to take risks to help others realize their dream. How long it’ll take them to report, I don’t know—probably we’ll start hearing in just a day or two—but don’t get impatient if a couple of weeks go by before you have reports on all of them.”
“Henry, of course we will,” said Laure, with a smile. “Perhaps we’d better start with those whom Franz is going to have to contact personally, so we can shave off his adornment and send him on his way. Oh yes, and also that big lumbeijack of Linda’s—”
“He’s not a lumbeijack, Mrs. Endicott,” Linda broke in. “He takes care of all their big machines—you know, fixes them when they break down and all that. He even fixes radios.” She flushed. “But he’s a real good tree-topper too,” she added proudly.
I was surprised. Somehow, we’d all rather stupidly pictured Lars as a not-too-bright Paul Bunyan type swinging a double-bitted axe. It was nice to know that he was turning out to be a big timber jack-of-all-trades. New planets can always use blacksmiths and mechanics and general fixer-uppers.
“If you and Mr. Andradi will give me a list of those you want to know about as soon as possible, I’ll get things rolling,” Kwei promised. “As for this young lady’s friend, I’m sure a phone call or two can at least locate him.” He stood up. “I’ll go ashore now and get the cosmetic work started on Owl. Commander Cormac, will you come with me? I’d like to have you check things over before we start in case there’s anything you object to. But I can promise you no harm will come to Owl. Half the vessels we get in here are in for a thorough facelifting, and my men are real experts.”
“Henry,” Laure said, “we’re going to have to make arrangements regarding payment. I’m certain all my property in the United States has been seized long since, but my Swiss accounts are still intact, and I have strong reserves here on Taiwan and in Brazil.
“All in good time,” he replied. “Even if you didn’t have a penny, Laure, we all owe it to you. Money is no problem.” “And that goes double, Mrs. Endicott,” declared Placek. “First thing I did after we’d satisfied our curiosity about Mars and Venus and one or two close stars was head right back to that wreck I located—remember, Narwhal?—and Pussycat burgled into her strongroom for us. Her safe was still intact and we hauled it aboard. Mrs. Endicott, it held close to two hundred grand in U.S. minted gold, even some of those fifty-dollar California private mintings. Believe me, they traded for a raft of Krugerrands. Even after paying the crew their shares, I’ve got more than enough for a few installments on my debt to you.”
“Steve Placek,” Laure said, “I gave you Pussycat.”
“I know,” he answered, “but that doesn’t mean I don’t owe you something in return, like shopping for you maybe.”
He grinned at her, and she smiled back. Then Henry Kwei and I took off, and five minutes later we were going over a set of sketches for the alterations he’d made in Pussycat, and he swiftly indicated with a draftsman’s pencil what he had in mind for Owl—and the changes were purely cosmetic, as he’d promised. The silhouette of the control tower was subtly changed; its viewports were made to appear narrower and, oddly, more numerous; a stub mast was added where there’d been none before; and a bold set of curlicues surrounding a fake registration number altered the entire feel of her forward. And none of it was even skin deep. The only genuine structural change was in her servos. Kwei said he’d remove their claws and substitute new ones of his own design, which were, he assured me, far more versatile and far stronger—compliments of the house. Then he called in his dock superintendent and a shop foreman, and went over everything again very quickly in Chinese. I could tell that it was all old hat for them, and as we made our way back to the ship, I saw men already hustling tools along the dock.
Laure had our lists ready for him when we returned. ’Tomorrow,” he said, “those of you who’ll do the traveling can start getting measured for your disguises and your passports. Right now, before I start the ball rolling, I’m going to stop off at my office and call Chris. He’ll want to come over right away, I know.”
