Star Well

by Alexei Panshin

  “No,” said Homygold.

  “On second thought, I believe I’ll join you,” Shirabi said. He thrust the gun at Levi. “It’s the man who killed Mr. Godwin, Levi. Point the gun at him and pull the trigger.”

  He and Homygold ducked into the hold of the ship and turned right for the control room. Hornygold’s two crewmen were on their heels.

  Villiers ran low through the warehouse, Adams at his right hand, Josiah behind them and even lower. The warehouse was a high rock-ceilinged cavern. There were huge open doors at the far end and beyond them a clutter of men and machines at the hold of a ship in cradle.

  A man at the controls of a grasshopper saw them, called and then jumped down and made a dash for the warehouse doors. He found the controls and started the doors down.

  Josiah yelled, “Achdut Haavodal Stop! Mapai, Rafi! It’s the Navy. Take terms.”

  The doors continued inexorably downward with all deliberate gravity. Villiers increased his speed, leaving the other two behind him. He hit the ground, rolled under the doors, thereby doing twice the damage of Henry’s roll under the bed, with half the regret, and on one knee put his gun on Haavoda. Adams hit the ground and rolled too late. He bounced off the bottom of the door with an unhappy thump.

  Haavoda looked at the curdler in Villiers’ hand and very sensibly—he was no fighting man; he was a machine operator (two varieties)—said, “Terms.”

  “Terms,” said Villiers, and immediately turned his attention to the other men. If you wonder how he dared, well, if somebody says, “Terms,” and then doesn’t quit, nobody will play with him anymore. Both Villiers and Haavoda knew this.

  There was a thump, the might of intention behind it, on the other side of the warehouse doors. They rang absentmindedly.

  There was a final flicker of motion in the hold. Three men had their backs and shoulders to a cold cart in the last few feet of the extensor. The central one of the three was Levi Gonigle, holding in his two hands a gun that he was still trying to trace the origin and meaning of.

  If somebody says, “Terms,” and then doesn’t quit, he may roam as he likes for the rest of his life, and all will turn away as he passes. The people will point and say, “He said ‘Terms,’ and then he din’t quit. He’s a cheat. Don’t have nothing to do with him.” His only company will be rascals of his own stripe. It’s silly, I will be ready to agree—but then it’s no more silly than any other common convention.

  ‘‘Terms,” said Mapai, stepping to one side. “Terms,” said Rafi, stepping to the other side.

  “Terms,” said Villiers.

  Behind him there was news of an arrival. Adams’ voice said with boyish firmness, “All right, you, there. I’ve got you.”

  “I’ve already agreed to terms,” Haavoda apologized.

  But Levi didn’t say “Terms,” and step to the side. He didn’t know you could do that. Levi continued to hold the gun in his right hand. With the heel of that right hand and his left hand on the bar of the cart, he put his shoulders against the metal and lifted. He went, “Uhhh-tth,” and the wheel was free.

  A bell rang twice inside the hold of the ship. The hold doors gave a warning click and began to slide shut.

  Levi didn’t hear. He concentrated on getting the cart that held Mr. Godwin within the ship. He pushed hard to save Mr. Godwin.

  The doors came smartly against the sides of the cart as it rolled forward, and held it tightly. It wouldn’t move.

  Levi didn’t know what was happening. Too much information for him to handle was flooding over him— carts that wouldn’t go, ringing bells, shouts, people moving. Like a statesman faced with complexity, he turned to the simplest solution, which is to say, violence. He pointed the curdler in his hand and fired.

  Haavoda was struck. He cried out in shock and then curled into a crying ball on the floor. Did Levi intend that?

  Mapai, at Levi’s left, hit the floor. He covered his red head with his hands and didn’t look up. Rafi, at Levi’s right, continued to stand. But he said in the most irritated of voices, “Dammit, Levi. Don’t be stupid.”

  Villiers fired. Adams fired. Levi fell to the floor, the curdler popping from his hand as it slapped against the rock. Poor Levi—he understood consequences no better than Torve the Trog, and lacked Torve’s alternative. And he was dead—whatever that means in this era.

  Villiers and Adams ran forward toward the ship. They dodged past the body. Mapai and Rafi stood well out of their way. They went to ground on the left side of the cart, Villiers in front, Adams just behind.

  “What now, sir?” he asked. “Isn’t that all?”

  “No. I saw some of them inside the ship.”

  “Oh,” Adams said. “Well, I guess we’ll have to dig them out.”

  Villiers said, “The control room should be up there.” He gestured with his right thumb.

  Adams said, “Respectfully, sir. One of us has to go forward. I’d like to volunteer.”

  Villiers allowed Adams full room to pop through the hole under the cart. “Right you are. It’s your profession.” “And maybe my promotion,” Adams said, and went knees, belly and then elbows through the hole.

  He left Villiers with a greater impression of possibility than he ever had before. Villiers gave him a fair count to be out of the way inside, and then went under the cart himself.

  He pushed through and found himself short of the lee of a cold box. He wriggled and ducked into shelter. Then he brought his head up gingerly.

  Through two hatchways and some intervening clutter, he saw parts of Adams going under cover in the control room. He heard the hair-prickling sound of curdler fire.

  Adams called back, “They’re not up here. Somebody’s shooting at me outside in the corridor, though.”

  “Nobody’s in the ship?”

  “No, sir.”

  Villiers rose, looked for a local switch for the hold doors, found one, and tripped it. The doors began to open. He put hands on the end of the cart, pushed, pushed, pushed it free, retripped the doors and turned away. The doors came to a stop, bells rang gravely and then the doors began to close again.

  Villiers said, “If you don’t want to be shot, close the doors up there.”

  The doors behind him banged together.

  “Yes, sir,” said Adams. He kept his head down and duck-walked around the control room. After some moments he found his switch and closed the door. And they were alone inside the closed ship.

  Villiers brushed himself off, his clothes disordered for the second time in the evening. He looked around at the contents of the hold. When Adams appeared at the control room door, Villiers was turning away.

  Adams said slowly, “Sir? I’ve been thinking. Haven’t we trapped ourselves? They’ve all escaped. If we try to get out, all they have to do is wait by the doors.”

  “On the contrary,” Villiers said, “we’ve won.”

  “But, no, sir. We’re trapped.”

  “Mr. Adams, do I understand you to believe that we are trapped here?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Mr. Adams, here is a spaceship.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Star Well is a piece of rock. We are a spaceship. We are on the outside. We are the universe. They are inside, and we have them surrounded.”

  “Oh,” said Adams. “Yes, sir.”

  Villiers smiled. “You did well, Mr. Adams. Mr. Srb is lucky to have you.”

  And as we know, Srb was lucky. If Srb hadn’t had an assistant with enough initiative to prowl about on his own, Shirabi and his thumbs might well have slipped off into the universal night. Luck was what made Srb so successful an Inspector General. Sitting under that apple tree waiting for that top apple to drop. As it always did.

  Adams was looking pale. “Did I do well, Mr. Villiers? I shot a man.”

  Villiers held his hand out, palm down. There was a barely perceptible tremble.

  “See?” he said. “Don’t worry. You did do well. All right?”

  Adams nodd
ed his head.

  Villiers said, “By the way, Mr. Adams. Now that we are alone, would you favor me with the answer to a question of dress that has been puzzling me?”

  “Certainly, sir,” Adams said.

  An hour later, with the bonds to Star Well cut and the ship in orbit around the rock, Villiers was sitting in the control room watching Adams trace linkages. This was Adams’ area of competence. On background, he had been able to operate the ship. Now, model manual in hand, he was trying to understand it.

  Villiers rose. Adams didn’t notice him leave the control room. There were cold boxes in racks in the hold, and two abandoned on the floor. On impulse, Villiers knelt down beside the one he had used for cover on entering the ship and opened it. A cold box cover served two purposes. One was protection from the box’s field, which was strong enough to disconcert, and the other was esthetics. Most cold box cases were unattractive for any of several reasons. Villiers kept his fingers well back and the healthy-looking body within did not disturb him.

  Louisa had been correct in having reservations about climbing inside a box. Some five per cent of the people put in cold boxes were simply not revivable—no matter, of course, to a thumb-runner, who never intended to revivify. At one time, a full ten per cent had been denied life, but the responsibility was found to be linked to a gene already being eliminated throughout the Empire as undesirable.

  Villiers closed the cover and went to the next box. He continued on to the racked cold boxes. He opened and closed the covers. At the sixth box, he stopped. It was Louisa within.

  The light overhead threw her face partly in shadow. Villiers looked down at her for a long moment, his finger touching the switch in its protective recess. But the question, after all, was already decided. He turned the switch off and cut the field.

  People differ in their versions of passage in a cold box. Some are tossed in the billowing conflux of endless black clouds. Some spread glistening wings and fly. In almost all cases, people emerging suffer dissociation.

  Louisa looked up and smiled. She knew enough to say, “Hello, Tony.”

  He said, “You’ve been rescued after a fashion. Come on down from there.”

  He helped her out of the box, and she clung to his arm. If she had still been terrified, she would have grabbed as much of him as she could get her arms around. If she had been calm and completely present, she would have taken charge of her own hands. As it was, she clung to his arm and her eyes lingered where they touched him.

  Villiers explained what had happened in as unalarming tones as he could manage and he gradually got the feeling that she was with him.

  At last he said, “Are your legs steady enough to walk on?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Well, come on out and meet your other rescuer.”

  Adams was in a pantry off the control room. He emerged and set a number of edibles on a little table.

  “They aren’t very tidy, but they have some very nice things to eat. As long as were waiting, I thought . . . Who’s this, sir?”

  “Miss Parini, meet, if you will, Mr. Adams of the Emperor’s Naval Forces. Mr. Adams, Miss Louisa Pa-

  • • >7

  mu.

  Adams salaamed, but with a question hotly held. He finished his gesture, and asked, “Where did she come from?”

  Villiers said, “She was in one of the cold boxes.”

  “She was? Well. Uh, sir. Since we’re going to be here until the cruiser arrives, could I wake somebody up, too? I mean, it would make the numbers even.”

  Villiers said, “Just one. You’d better take your time over your choice.”

  Adams nodded and saluted. “Yes, sir.” He hurried back into the hold.

  Villiers waved Louisa to a seat by the tiny table. “Would you like some . . .” He read a label. “Would you like a porde roe sandwich? Say, Adams was right. I know this brand. I’ve seen this brand.”

  “Let’s make one and split it,” Louisa said.

  “Fair enough.”

  Villiers hunted around, came up with a spoon, rejected it, and found another. He cut two fine slices of bread, buttered them lightly, spooned out the white eggs, and spread them. Was it only that evening they had eaten dinner? He fitted the sandwich together and then sliced it neatly apart.

  He handed Louisa half. “Necessary skills,” he said. “I was just thinking that it seems a long time since this evening.”

  Shyly, Louisa asked, “Will you answer a question?”

  “Yes. Of course.”

  She set her sandwich down. “Have you been thinking about—you know, about what we said?”

  Villiers nodded. “Yes—whenever I had a free moment. I think I will go from here to Yuten. If all goes well, I may find my three month old money there. But you, I think, should go to Miss McBurney’s Seminary.” “Don’t ask me to do that,” Louisa pleaded. “Do you want me out of the way because I caused so much trouble?”

  Villiers leaned over and gripped her hands. “Louisa, don’t think that. I don’t want you out of the way. I do sincerely doubt my ability to be the master confidence man you would have me be.”

  “Oh, you could do it, Tony,” Louisa said.

  “Oh, yes, possibly,” Villiers said, smiling at the thought. “But it would mean such an extreme change in my way of life—dropping old connections and old habits, and making new ones. I’m not up to that.”

  ^You mean you don’t want to do it,” Louisa said. Villiers was unsure of his ability to make clear the difference between not wanting to become a professional confidence man and rejecting her. He thought there must be one.

  “Let me ask you a question, then.”

  “All right.”

  “Can you outact the girl you saw at dinner?”

  “The one in the black coronet braid?”

  Villiers thought back. “I believe it was, yes.”

  “I think so,” Louisa said defensively.

  “How much?”

  “Well, some.”

  Villiers said, “I didn’t follow the note that she sent me. Do you remember? It wasn’t because I knew what she and Henry Maurice had in mind. It was because she didn’t play a lady well enough to convince me.” “And I couldn’t convince you?”

  “No, Louisa. I don’t think so.”

  “Oh.”

  “I think they’ll teach you at Miss McBurney’s. I think that’s what your father has in mind."

  She rose without saying anything. She walked some feet away and gave Villiers her back to look at for some moments. He couldn’t tell whether she was controlling herself or just thinking.

  After a time, she said, in a calm little voice, “Tony, what are fardels?”

  Just as there are frightening dreams in a late October night, there are leaping dreams of the possible that live in May. If May isn’t your season, this isn’t your story.

  Alice Tutuila had passed her time inside the cold box in a happy puddle. She awoke feeling slow and drowsy. She stretched her arms. Then she looked up into the eyes of a large, presentable young man sho was leaning over her. Her heart distinctly bounced, and she didn’t even know as yet that he was a Navy man.

  The young man turned and called, “Sir? Sir? I’ve picked one.”

  12

  Adams bade his farewell to Alice at the end of Phibbs’ counter, but Villiers continued to walk beside Louisa in Mrs. Bogue’s line. Mrs. Bogue was not pleased about his presence, but chose to say nothing. Control had slipped away from her on the night of the seventeenth and for the moment she was content to accept what she was given until she had her complete power again.

  Louisa said, “And you promise you will see me if you come to Nashua?”

  “If you are there, I will see you,” Villiers said.

  Last act curtain lines are either extremely clear or extremely equivocal. Louisa didn’t want either total uncertainty or total certainty. She was willing to take moderate ambiguity and call it a first act curtain.

  She said, “Well, g
oodbye, then, Tony.”

  He took her hand. “Goodbye, then.”

  Then he turned away. He walked back toward Adams, who had a hand half-raised in final farewell.

  “Mr. Villiers.”

  It was Bledsoe, one of those bound out on the present ship. He nodded with deliberation as he spoke.

  “Mr. Bledsoe.”

  Bledsoe held a card out to Villiers. “For you, sir. My card.”

  Villiers looked at it. Bledsoe said, “May I compliment you, sir, on your good advice to Miss Parini? It was excellently in order.”

  The name on the card was not Bledsoe. It was Pavel Branko, described as an entrepreneur. Branko!

  Villiers said, “A cousin?”

  “A second cousin, doing a favor. On the other side of the card is an address you may have interest in. For Jack the Hand. Good day, sir.”

  Louisa woke that night in the ship when a warm dream spilled into consciousness. The dream was made of pure feeling. She lay awake thinking about it. It was a very specific dream.

  This room was larger than the room in the Orion. Alice was overhead, firmly asleep. Louisa stared at the bottom of the bed half the length of an outstretched arm above her.

  Her mind was busy, busy, busy. First act, only.

  It was raining on Yuten when Villiers and Torve left the Navy cruiser there. It was the rain of early summer, cool and peltering, and it made splashing circles, quickly gone, on the hard white surface of the field. The rain was wind-driven and irregular. Torve’s fur began to mat as it grew wetter.

  “It feels good, doesn’t it?” Villiers said, as he bent against the wind.

  A constant absence of weather is bound to be a bore. After several weeks in travel, it always seems pleasant to feel wind and rain, to see the lightest of gray skies and dark little moving cloud ghosts, to walk on muddy ground and have the mud stick to your shoes.

  They were the only passengers to depart. The rain was slackening as they reached the port terminal. The sun poured through a rent in the gray fabric and lit the tented world from within. The grayness of the world had a momentary glow and the puddles glistened.

  There was the usual delay in Torve’s clearance, settled in the usual way, at the usual cost in time. While they were waiting Villiers was recognized by Lord Hawkwood’s cheetah.