by Andre Norton
His body had been so beaten that his mind couldn’t or wouldn’t look at anything but the immediate present. All the concentration and will of his being was centered on this task. He would accomplish his purpose if it were the last purpose he would ever serve.
The three men in front of the fire were laughing, oblivious of any pursuit, certain in their security at least for the next few hours. Before dawn they would be out of the atmosphere and beyond reach. They had a big kettle in which they were boiling baybeef. From time to time one of them would pass another some particularly choice bit.
For an interminable while, it seemed to him (although in reality it was less than three minutes) Moffat waited. At length he heard Old Keno’s voice.
“Keep yer hands clear, gents. I’m comin’ in!” The three about the fire huddled, immobile as statues, clearly limned by the leaping flames. Thirty paces beyond them, into the circle of radiance, stepped Old Keno. His hands were swinging free, no weapon trained.
“I’ll have to trouble you boys to come back and take your medicine,” said Old Keno. “It ain’t so much the diamonds, it’s that guard. Human bein’s come high up here.”
“Frontier Police!” gasped the leader, starting to his feet. And then he realized what this meant—sure hanging!
“I wouldn’t do anything foolish!” said Old Keno flatly.
The man wore a weapon, low and strapped down. “We’re not bein’ took. I reckon if you’re a condemned enough fool to come after us all by yourself—”
The leader’s hand, silhouetted in the firelight, flashed too fast to be followed.
There was a blend of roars, four shots! And then it was done.
Moffat had seen something he was never likely to forget. All three men had been on their feet. Old Keno’s hands had been entirely free from his guns. The leader had drawn first and the other two had started to fire.
But Old Keno’s left hand had stabbed across his body and his right had gone straight down and his three shots were like one blow. The leader’s bullet went whining off on some lonesome errand amongst the rocks. Three men were dying there, three men had been shot before the leader had squeezed trigger.
And Constable Moffat’s frozen, cut and blistered finger had tried to close to back up the play and Constable Moffat had not been able to fire! He stayed where he was, semi-paralyzed with the shock of what he had seen—three men shot in something like an eighth of a second.
The leader went down. Another man dropped into the fire. The third stood where he was, propped against a rock, eyes wide open and the firelight shining in them—stone dead.
Moffat looked at his hand. He had not even been able to squeeze trigger. He, champion shot of the school, had not even been able to fire at his first live target when his companion was in danger!
On the verge of tears Moffat came up from cover and walked toward the dying blaze. Old Keno was bending over to retrieve their loot.
Moffat stepped into the ring of light. And then, of a sudden, a strange sensation came to him. It was like a yell inside his head. It was like an automatic switch being thrown. He knew he was in danger!
With the speed of a stabbed cat young Moffat dropped to a knee, spinning on it toward the space-can, drawing a rifle bead as he turned. He had not heard anything. But there stood a fat Asiatic in the passageway port, rifle leveled at Old Keno, about to shoot. He never got a chance.
Young Moffat fired from the hip and the bullet caught the fat one in the chest. His weapon exploded into the night. And then without looking at that target Moffat saw the second.
Under the shadow of the space-can a man had come up, his arms full of firewood. This was falling now, halfway to the ground, and a gun was in his grip, aimed at Old Keno. The gun blazed. Moffat fired and the fifth man went down.
But he was not alone. Old Keno, the infallible never-missing always-beforehand Senior Constable of Ooglach, was flat on his face in the sand, motionless, victim of his own overconfidence.
Coming quickly to the space-can port young Moffat scanned the interior with his flash. There were five tumbled and evil smelling bunks here. He glanced back to the fire, counting noses to make sure. Then he scouted wide, looking for strange tracks, and in a moment knew that they had the entire outfit. Not until then did he come back to Old Keno and there he knelt, turning the ancient patrolman over.
To see the wound and its extent it was necessary to remove Old Keno’s shirt, for the bullet had apparently lightly creased his back.
It was cooler here by the side of the stream which, a few feet further plumed two thousand feet into a chasm and which chilled the air in this cup. Young Moffat felt himself relaxing, beat up as he was. Old Keno missing such an obvious thing!
He took off the patched blue shirt and then rolled Keno to his face, fumbling for the wound. It was light, it was on the surface—
Suddenly Moffat stared. He came halfway to his feet and still stared. He took out his pocket flash and knelt eagerly beside the fallen man. His brows knit and then began to ease. Sudden laughter sprang from his lips, rose up the scale toward hysteria and turned aside into an honest bellow. What he had endured for this! What he had endured!
Young Constable Moffat sat down in the sand and held his sides. He laughed until his shoulders shook, until his breathing pounded, until his sides caved from labored wheezing. He laughed until the very sand around him danced. And then he looked—growing calmer and settling to a mere chuckle—back at the fallen man.
Moffat jumped up and went into the ship. Presently he came back with a kit and began to patch. And in a very short while Old Keno was sitting groggily up, trying to piece together what had happened.
The young man watched him. Through Moffat’s mind was flashing all he had gone through—the cold, the heat, the sharp rocks, the wreck. He thought of the fight when Old Keno had drawn and killed and he thought of the faculty Old Keno did not have. He had lasted and come out here.
“How much do you know of yourself?” said Moffat.
Old Keno stared in amazement and then, eyes shifting to the blue shirt and becoming conscious of his nakedness, slowly averted his gaze.
“Everything you know, I guess,” he mumbled. “I didn’t know it at first. I came up here for some reason I can’t recall and the transport crashed near Meteorville. I thought I just had amnesia and I went to work in the bars as a guard.
“Then they made me marshal and finally the Frontier Patrol commissioned me a senior constable. Twenty years and I didn’t know. Then I went down to Center City, where they built the big new prison. And they’ve got a gadget there to keep weapons from going in. I couldn’t pass it. That’s how I found out.”
“Did anybody know?”
“I fell and when I came around I was okay. No, I don’t think so. Why?”
“I think you were out longer than you thought,” said Moffat. “By the way did you ever read this sign on your back?”
“I tried with mirrors but I couldn’t.”
“Well, listen.” Moffat studied it again before reading it aloud.
POLICE SPY
Pat. No. 4,625,726,867,094
THE BIG-AS-LIFE ROBOT CO.
“And twice as natural”
Motors: Carbon Instruction: Police
Attachments: Infra-red eyes
Chassis Type: R
“Our Robots Never Die”
Caution: DO NOT OIL!
Made in Detroit, Mich.
U.S.A.
There was silence for a moment. Old Keno looked scared and reached for his shirt. “You’ll turn me in.” He heaved a sigh. ‘Tm done”
Young Moffat grinned. “Nope. Because that isn’t the only sign there. You were out a lot longer than you thought at Center City. They must have had time to send dispatches to the Frontier Patrol. Because there’s another sign.”
“Another?”
“Yep,” said young Moffat with a jubilant upsurge. “It reads very short and very sweet.”
To the recruit:
You’ll only locate this if you can last, if you can’t be fooled or if you’re a better shot. Know then that you now send a dispatch to headquarters for your transfer and raise in rate. Well done, Senior Constable!
Thorpe
Commanding Section C
“I’m a trainer,” said Old Keno.
“You showed up three,” said Moffat. “Three that couldn’t take it the hard way. And you almost killed me, Keno Martin. Froze me and broiled me and drained me of the last ounce. By golly I never knew what I could stand until I came to Ooglach. And now, well, if they want to train a man the hard way it’s all right with me.”
“And I—” fumbled Old Keno.
“Martin, you’re better than men in a lot of ways—heat, cold and energy. But of course your sixth sense doesn’t exist. You’ll have to watch for that. But you’re still Senior Constable of Ooglach and I guess you’ll last forever if you don’t short-circuit from a slug.
“I replaced the fuse that bullet blew. You’d better keep some in your pockets. So they won’t be retiring you, Keno, until you fall apart and according to your back, that won’t be until forever arrives. Okay, Senior Constable?”
Old Keno became suddenly radiant. He looked at the boy before him and his smile grew proud. He put out his hand for a shake. “Okay, Senior Constable Moffat,” he said.
They shook.
8. Agent of a service with the galaxy to police—a galaxy in which a match spark could blaze to a planet burning if there was not an officer on the right spot at the right moment—that was Zone Agent Iliff. And even he had to be tricked into the biggest case of his career.
JAMES H. SCHMITZ
Agent of Vega
“IT JUST happens,” the Third Co-ordinator of the Vegan Confederacy explained patiently, “that the local Agent—it’s Zone Seventeen Eighty-two—isn’t available at the moment. In fact, he isn’t expected to contact this HQ for at least another week. And since the matter really needs prompt attention, and you happened to be passing within convenient range of the spot, I thought of you!”
“I like these little extra jobs I get whenever you think of me,” commented the figure in the telepath transmitter before him. It was that of a small, wiry man with rather cold yellow eyes—sitting against an undefined dark background, he might have been a minor criminal or the skipper of an aging space-tramp.
“After the last two of them, as I recall it,” he continued pointedly, “I turned in my final mission report from the emergency treatment tank of my ship—And if you’ll remember, I’d have been back in my own Zone by now if you hadn’t sent me chasing wildeyed rumor in this direction!”
He leaned forward with an obviously false air of hopeful anticipation. “Now this wouldn’t Just possibly be another hot lead on U-1, would it?”
“No, no! Nothing like that!” the Co-ordinator said soothingly. In his mental file the little man was listed as “Zone Agent Iliff, Zone Thirty-six Oh-six; unrestricted utility; try not to irritate—” There was a good deal more of it, including the notation:
“U-1: The Agent’s failure-shock regarding this subject has been developed over the past twelve-year period into a settled fear-fix of prime-motive proportions. The Agent may now be intrusted with the conclusion of this case, whenever the opportunity is presented.”
That was no paradox to the Co-ordinator who, as Chief of the Department of Galactic Zones, was Iliff’s immediate superior. He knew the peculiar qualities of his agents—and how to make the most economical use of them, while they lasted.
“It’s my own opinion,” he offered cheerily, “that U-1 has been dead for years! Though I’ll admit Correlation doesn’t agree with me there.”
“Correlation’s often right,” Iliff remarked, still watchfully. He added, “U-1 appeared excessively healthy the last time I got near him!”
“Well, that was twelve standard years ago,” the Co-ordinator murmured. “If he were still around, he’d have taken a bite out of us before this—a big bite! Just to tell us he doesn’t think the Galaxy is quite wide enough for him and the Confederacy both. He’s not the type to lie low longer than he has to.” He paused. “Or do you think you might have shaken some of his supremacy ideas out of him that last time?”
“Not likely,” said Iliff. The voice that came from the transmitter, the thought that carried it, were equally impassive. “He booby-trapped me good! To him it wouldn’t even have seemed like a fight”
The Co-ordinator shrugged. “Well, there you are! Anyway, this isn’t that kind of job at all. It’s actually a rather simple assignment.”
Iliff winced.
“No, I mean it! What this job takes is mostly tact—always one of your strongest points, Iliff.”
The statement was not entirely true; but the Agent ignored it and the Co-ordinator went on serenely: “. . . so I’ve homed you full information on the case. Your ship should pick it up in an hour, but you might have questions; so here it is, in brief:
“Two weeks ago, the Bureau of Interstellar Crime sends an operative to a planet called Gull in Seventeen Eighty-two—that’s a mono-planet system near Lycanno, just a bit off your present route. You been through that neighborhood before?”
Iliff blinked yellow eyes and produced a memory. “We went through Lycanno once. Seventeen or eighteen Habitables; population A-Class Human; Class D politics—How far is Gull from there?”
“Eighteen hours cruising speed, or a little less—but you’re closer to it than that right now. This operative was to make positive identification of some ex-spacer called Tahmey, who’d been reported there, and dispose of him. Routine interstellar stuff, but—twenty-four hours ago, the operative sends back a message that she finds positive identification impossible . . . and that she wants a Zone Agent!”
He looked expectantly at Iliff. Both of them knew perfectly well that the execution of a retired piratical spacer was no part of a Zone Agent’s job—furthermore, that every Interstellar operative was aware of the fact; and, finally, that such a request should have induced the Bureau to recall its operative for an immediate mental overhaul and several months’ vacation before he or she could be risked on another job.
“Give,” Iliff suggested patiently.
“The difference,” the Co-ordinator explained, “is that the operative is one of our Lannai trainees!”
“I see,” said the Agent.
He did. The Lannai were high type humanoids and the first people of their classification to be invited to join the Vegan Confederacy—till then open only to Homo sapiens and the interesting variety of mutant branches of that old Terrestrial stock.
The invitation had been sponsored, against formidable opposition, by the Department of Galactic Zones, with the obvious intention of having the same privilege extended later to as many humanoids and other nonhuman races as could meet the Confederacy’s general standards.
As usual, the Department’s motive was practical enough. Its king-sized job was to keep the eighteen thousand individual civilizations so far registered in its Zones out of as much dangerous trouble as it could, while nudging them unobtrusively, whenever the occasion was offered, just a little farther into the path of righteousness and order.
It was slow, dangerous, carefully unspectacular work, since it violated in fact and in spirit every galactic treaty of nonintervention the Confederacy had ever signed. Worst of all, it was work for which the Department was, of necessity, monstrously understaffed.
The more political systems, races and civilizations it could draw directly into the Confederacy, the fewer it would have to keep under that desperately sketchy kind of supervision. Regulations of membership in Vega’s super-system were interpreted broadly, but even so they pretty well precluded any dangerous degree of deviation from the ideals that Vega championed.
And if, as a further consequence, Galactic Zones could then draw freely on the often startling abilities and talents of nonhuman peoples to aid in its titanic project—
The Department figura
tively licked its chops.
The opposition was sufficiently rooted in old racial emotions to be extremely bitter and strong. The Traditionalists, working chiefly through the Confederacy’s Department of Cultures, wanted no dealings with any race which could not trace its lineage back through the long centuries to Terra itself. Nonhumans had played a significant part in the century-long savage struggles that weakened and finally shattered the first human Galactic Empire.
That mankind, as usual, had asked for it and that its grimmest and most powerful enemies were to be found nowadays among those who could and did claim the same distant Earth-parentage did not noticeably weaken the old argument, which to date had automatically excluded any other stock from membership. In the High Council of the Confederacy, the Department of Cultures, backed by a conservative majority of the Confederacy’s members, had, naturally enough, tremendous influence.
Galactic Zones, however—though not one citizen in fifty thousand knew of its existence, and though its arguments could not be openly advanced—had a trifle more.
So the Lannai were in—on probation.
“As you may have surmised,” the Third Co-ordinator said glumly, “the Lannai haven’t exactly been breaking their necks trying to get in with us, either. In fact, their government’s had to work for the alliance against almost the same degree of popular disapproval; though on the whole they seem to be a rather more reasonable sort of people than we are. Highly developed natural telepaths, you know—that always seems to make folks a little easier to get along with.”
“What’s this one doing in Interstellar?” Iliff inquired.
“We’ve placed a few Lannai in almost every department of the government by now—not, of course, in Galactic Zones! The idea is to prove, to our people and theirs, that Lannai and humans can work for the same goal, share responsibilities, and so on. To prove generally that we’re natural allies.”
“Has it been proved?”
“Too early to say. They’re bright enough and, of course, the ones they sent us were hand-picked and anxious to make good. This Interstellar operative looked like one of the best. She’s a kind of relative of the fifth ranking Lannai ruler. That’s what would make it bad if it turned out she’d blown up under stress! For one thing, their pride could be hurt enough to make them bolt the alliance. But our Traditionalists certainly would be bound to hear about it, and,” the Co-ordinator concluded heatedly, “the Co-ordinator of Cultures would be rising to his big feet again on the subject in Council!”
