by Jerry
“Aiieeeee!”
At his banshee signal, the other men took up the cry. Somebody kicked the banked coals of stuck in a handful of twisted grass torches, then moved from man to man, handing them opt. The men screamed again, touched their torches to the overhanging of the huts, then tore down the hangings and leaped through the doors, torches flaming a path.
The interiors of the huts leaped to life. Forms hurtled by the men and into the night as the pitch-caulked thatching blazed into an inferno. The rightful inhabitants of the huts crashed into the tall grass of the surrounding plains, the sounds of their passage quickly dying away as fear lent wing to their rapidly fleeing heels.
The fires quickly burned through the thatching, sending little fingers of flame dancing along the lashed saplings that supported the roofs. Luke took one last look around the interior of his hut and started to leave, when he spotted something wriggling under a pile of skins.
Crossing the room in three strides, he tore away the coverings and grabbed the native child by the scruff of its neck. He wheeled on one heel and retraced his passage. He got out of the door just as the saplings gave up the ghost and the fiery mass crashed to the ground.
Luke whistled and wiped sweat from his brow. The bronze head of the axe caught and reflected the fires from its myriad beaten facets. Using the head, he beat out several sparks that had landed on his clothes, then turned his attention to the child who still dangled from his other hand.
The child’s eyes were rolled nearly into his head with his fright. Luke grinned, baring his teeth. He brought the child up until their noses were less than an inch apart. The fetid smell of the child’s breath made him choke. Yelping, the child twisted free and ran after its already-departed parents.
Luke laughed and turned his attention to his team.
The men were all out now, watching the huts crack under the intense heat within. One shuddered, then collapsed inward, sending up choking clouds of dust as it smothered the flames. After a moment, Luke whistled. Half of the men melted into the grass and followed the natives, while the others gathered around him, squatting and resting their axes on the ground. Luke waited until the others returned to report no further sign of the villagers, then he squatted himself, and accepted a canteen from someone. He drank his fill, gasped, wiped the back of his hand across his mouth and handed the canteen back.
“It’s hot,” he said, conversationally.
“It’ll be hotter before we’re done,” said one of the team. They were all dressed in rough-cured skins and leather moccasins. The axes were the only tool they carried. Faces thick with war paint and grime, it was impossible to tell them from natives.
“Anybody hurt?” asked Luke. Disclaimers came from the various members of the group. “Good.” He stood up and stretched. “Well, gentlemen, shall we be on our way?”
“Might as well.”
Luke took his axe, twisted the unfinished handle a quarter-turn in his socket, then held the head to his lips. “Team B,” he said. “Mission accomplished.” He twisted the handle back and slipped the axe into his belt. A few moments later, the soft chatter of rotors cut through the air, and a copter dropped into the clearing by the cooking fire.
The team mounted by the dying glow of the fires. As soon as the last man was in, the door swung shut and the copter took off into the night.
SAM CARTER eased the scratchy material of the ruffed collar away from his neck, then shot his cuffs to return them to the socially acceptable halfinch showing beyond his jacket sleeve. He sighed, placed his hands on his knees and glanced for the umpteenth time at the armored soldiers guarding the door between the anteroom and Prince Kahl’s private chambers. The afternoon sun dipped below the level of the high window-slits, sending shadows scampering up the walls.
Sam had been waiting since noon. His stomach was repeating its rumbled protests against that interrupted meal. Prince Kahl had sent word that Sam might wait upon his pleasure; quieting misgivings, Carter had rushed to do just that.
He sighed again, and stifled a yawn. From the corner of his eye, he watched the shadow line marching up the wall. When it touched the cobwebby corner of the ceiling, a slave came in and lighted a pair of oil lamps. The soot-heavy smoke they gave off quickly had Sam wishing the room had been left in darkness.
Another interminable hour passed, during which he several times repeated the operation with collar and cuffs, all the while envying the guards their ability to remain in one position like frozen statues, seemingly carved from the living rock of the palace. At last, just when he had resigned himself to the probability of spending the night in the anteroom, the inner door swung open and a chamberlain beckoned.
“Prince Kahl will grant you a moment now.”
Sam bowed his thanks, and followed the man into Kahl’s chambers.
“Ah, my friend from the southern kingdoms!”
Prince Kahl was a lean, saturnine individual, uncomfortably aware that the prime of life was slipping through his grasp while his father obstinately held onto the throne. It was Kahl’s considered opinion that the old man had lived long enough. It rankled him to realize that he had held the same opinions as a youth barely out of his teens. The thirty intervening years had been spent devising and trying methods to assure his succession; unfortunately his father had twenty years before that to safeguard his own rule.
“How go the southern kingdoms, my friend?” Kahl waved a particularly enticing fruit as Carter stopped short, a dozen paces away.
“Tolerably well, your graciousness.” He neglected to add that it had been nearly a year since he had visited the supposed lands of his birth. Kahl was fully aware how long Carter had been kept cooling his heels. Palace protocol dictated how long foreign visitors might be kept waiting. But even visiting royalty could not hope for an audience in less than a month’s time. In his role as ambassador, Carter was happy that a year was all he had been kept waiting.
“YOUR lord and master’s gifts were received,” said Kahl. “You may inform him of my royal gratitude.”
“My humble thanks, your graciousness.” Sam’s mouth watered as Kahl polished off the one fruit and selected another from a platter born by a manservant. Despite his now-long stay on the planet, Sam still could not understand why women were given no role at all in society, even as slaves.
“Not at all, not at all,” said Kahl. “Now tell me. What is it that brought you so far from your home lands to grace my humble presence?”
“The usual business of politic, your graciousness,” said Sam, growing weary of the necessity to repeat the title with every reply to Kahl’s words. He also wished for a chair, despite the fact that he had been sitting all afternoon. He felt like a naughty school-child, standing always in the man’s presence. “Trade treaties, mutual armament pacts, the like.”
“Ummm, so. You’ve discussed them with my ministers?”
“They have permitted me this honor and, if I may be so bold, found a great deal to our mutual liking. Our countries are indeed far separated, and the journey between arduous. I find much in your provinces in the way of technology and armaments that we totally lack. By the same token, I have thought of a few inconsequential things which might serve to ease your royal burdens, if but brought from my lands.”
“Possible, possible,” said Kahl. “Of course, I have a large college of tinkerers and mechanics who probably would have produced the little toys you speak of in their own good time. But why duplicate effort, eh? They are lazy dolts who grumble at my royal largesse as it is.” He chortled lustily, although Sam could see nothing even remotely humorous in his statement. But he was well-schooled in the idiocies of diplomacy; he laughed dutifully.
“But come!” said Kahl. “Enough of childish prattle! You carry another load in your thoughts, my southern friend. Have out with it!”
“Your graciousness?”
“You needn’t pretend,” he said, chortling again. “My ministers are like the winds. They cannot keep a single thing to themselves,
but instead need spread it over the far reaches of the entire world. You’ve been talking—foolishly perhaps—but I have perceived a certain sense within your nonsense, and I must confess that your words have aroused my interest. You have a plan to see me king. Now out with it, lest I make you a gift of you to my torturer. He can remove anything—including stubborn vocal cords!”
“You do me undeserved honor, graciousness,” said Sam.
“Undoubtedly. And you begin to weary me.”
“Very well.” Sam sighed. “I must admit that my tongue is too loose for my own general welfare.
It is true that I once thought of something mildly amusing while passing long evening hours with one of your ministers. But it was mere idle dreaming, no more.”
“You prattle long, southerner.” Kahl’s eyelids lowered suspiciously. He picked up a silver knife and began paring his nails, scattering the shavings suggestively in Sam’s direction. “Perhaps you do not want to see me king?”
“There is none so deserving of the honor as you,” said Sam. “But while you laugh at the utter childishness of my ideas, please remember that you insisted . . .”
THE Ehrlan delegate to the Central Worlds Conference was well past the entrance to the Park when the pudgy little man caught up with him, sides heaving from the unaccustomed strain of running.
“Citizen Lund!” he cried, panting. “Please wait!”
Lund turned and eyed the little man suspiciously. The fellow was a stranger, and therefore automatically under suspicion. “Yes?”
“A moment of your valuable time, Citizen. Please? I assure you, you have nothing to fear from me. I am not a Yanoian.” The name spattered out acidly.
“Indeed?” said Lund. “And just who, then, are you?” There was a vague sensation of familiarity troubling the back of his mind. The omnipresent watchdog in his subconscious pounced instantly on the feeling, magnifying it, turning it inside out and shaking it around, but drawing no satisfaction from the act.
“A friend, Citizen. You must believe that. I can’t explain further right now—time is too precious.” He grabbed Lund’s arm and started tugging him back towards the Park entrance. “Please? I beg you, come.”
“Oh—very well.” He gave in ungraciously, following the man until they were just inside the Park. Then Lund stopped, digging his heels into the gravel of the walk. The man looked back at him.
“Please, Citizen!” he urged. “We don’t have much time!”
“So far as I’m concerned, you don’t have any time at all, unless you tell me right now who you are and what this is all about.”
“Not here!” he cried, aghast, as he glanced nervously around at the many people entering and leaving the Park. A pair of Conference monitors stopped just outside the gate, fingering their stun-beamers as they eyed the actions of the two men. They started to move into the violable hundred-foot circle this side of the gate. The little man moved quickly, grabbing Lund again and forcibly pulling him beyond the protection of the monitors. Their skins tingled as they went through the shimmering haze of the force screen. The monitors stopped just in time to avoid touching the screen, while Lund and the little man hurried down a path that wound into a copse of widdy trees from Lund’s own homeworld, Ehrla.
The widdy tendrils stopped their aimless flowing through the trees and curved down and around the two men, tips melting into the ground and tendrils broadening into wide blades that sheltered and shielded the pair from possible watchers.
“Now!” said Lund, shaking the other man’s hand from his angrily. “Perhaps you will do me the honor of telling me who you are and just what in the name of the Seven Holy Suns this idiocy is all about?”
“A matter of the gravest urgency, Citizen! You must not present your plans for redistribution of Sector protectorates to this Conference!”
“What?” Lund stared at him in disbelief. “And just how did you learn of the plans I intend to present to the Conference—I will present, at this afternoon session? Something smacks of treachery!”
“Never mind how I learned, Citizen. The important thing is the Yano delegation also knows!
They plan to scuttle you before you have a chance to speak. After that, they’ll cut you into little pieces and devour you!”
“You’re insane, man!” Lund started to reach for the widdy tendrils.
“Don’t! You must not present your plans to the Conference, Citizen.”
A new tone had crept into the man’s voice: a strength that belied the pudginess and general clownishness of the figure. Lund turned slowly, and found himself staring at a stunner, the winking red of the telltale showing that it was set to lethal bands.
“Wha . . .” He gulped his adam’s apple back down into his throat. “How did you get that into the Park? The force screens aren’t supposed to pass weapons.
“There are ways, Citizen, the man said, grinning. No longer did he seem clownish. “Many so-called impossible things are quite simple, if only you have access to the proper people and controls.”
“What do you really want. Lund tried to hide his fright, but he was uncomfortably certain that it was radiating out from him, broadcasting to the entire world that Citizen Lund was scared silly.
“I told you, Citizen. You must not present your plans to the Conference.”
“But why?” he wailed, in frustration. “Give me a logical reason!”
“The greater good, Citizen.” With those cryptic words, the man pressed the stud of the beamer. Lund gasped, as a giant hand closed around his heart, then collapsed to the ground in a strange dying parody of slow motion. Just before the clouds of eternity shut away his vision, he at last recognized the man.
Himself!
II
JOHN REILLY was tired, intensely tired, beyond any feeling of exhaustion he had ever known.
The clock in his desk chimed once. He sighed and picked up his lecture notes, stuffing them into a scarred and battered case that he had been carrying since his student days at the Academy. He cast one weary glance around the cluttered office, then steeled himself into a passable imitation of military carriage as he left for the lecture hall.
The Cadet Sergeant-Major outside his door leaped to attention only a little less quickly than his regular service counterpart. Reilly returned their salutes and fell in behind them. The lecture hall—gymnasium, really; the Academy was perenially overcrowded—was crowded, as usual. The eager young cadets filled the fifty rows of backless benches, while the overflow squatted and stood at the rear until it was impossible for a midget to find room to thread his way through the crowd. Reilly’s class was well-tended for its honest popularity, not just because it was compulsory. There were many “compulsory” lectures in the curriculum that counted themselves proud to find half their audience in attendance.
Reilly stopped in the wings of the stage, listening for a moment to the comfortable discordances of the student band tuning their instruments. The regular service non-com peered through the hangings, catching the bandmaster’s eye. The tuning stopped, and the band swung into a medley of old Academy drinking songs. Reilly smiled, as he remembered happier days when he had participated lustily in the drinking that went along with such music.
From the drinking songs, the band struck up the National Anthem. The noise the cadets made in rising nearly drowned out the music. After the last strains had been permitted to fade away, the bandmaster raised his baton once more and the opening bars of Hail to the Chief! filled the hall. The Sergeants-Major stepped out onto the stage, Reilly following, case clasped loosely between elbow and side.
They passed in front of the half-dozen visitors and moved to either side of the podium, turning until they were facing each other, the regular service man on the right. They snapped into a salute, followed by the entire audience. Reilly lay his case on the podium, turned and bowed to the visitors, then faced the audience again and returned the salute.
Immediately two thousand arms dropped to their owners’ sides and the cadets resum
ed their seats.
Reilly unzipped his case and drew out his notes.
He arranged them carefully on the podium, although he knew that at no time during the next hour would he so much as glance at them again. The case stowed away under the podium, he took a deep breath and placed his hands flat on the podium’s surface. Technicians in the control booth over the far end of the hall trained parabolic mikes on his lips, waiting for him to begin the lecture as he had begun hundreds of other preceding lectures, before audiences much like this. The faces might change; the uniforms were the same, and so were the underlying feelings of the wearers of the uniforms, year in and year out.
“The greater good for the greater number!”
The cadets let out a mutual sigh, none aware that breath had been held.
“A motto, gentlemen: merely a motto. Like Ad Astra per Aspera, E Pluribus Unum or Through These Portals Pass the Most Wonderful Customers in the Galaxy.” An appreciative titter ran through the audience.
“But what is a motto?” continued Reilly, warming to his subject, overly familiar though it was. “It’s more than just a snappy way of stringing words together. It has a meaning. Often the meaning, such as in the commercial example I just gave, is on the frivolous side. But more often there is something intently serious behind a motto. Ad Astra—‘To the Stars.’ For centuries this has been almost a religion for men, as our ancestors broke the bonds of a single planet and spread out into the galaxy. Libraries have been written of the heartbreaks and joys, the sorrows and jubilations that have been found in the far reaches of space.
“E Pluribus Unum—‘United We Stand.’ Even older and, if possible, dearer to the hearts of men. Our very government is based on the essential concept contained in these three words from the past.
“ ‘The greater good for the greater number’. If government runs on one motto, then civilization is based on this!”
TEAM B was dead on its feet when the copter finally returned to Base with the first rosy glow of dawn lightening the horizon. They stumbled to the ground, as sorry a looking group as Luke Royceton had ever seen. Their masquerade of grime and war paints was nearly obscured by an honest layer of general dirt. They filed into wardrobe and stripped off their clothes, leaving them in ragged piles on the floor. Then they hit the showers, luxuriating under the needle sprays and the caress of soap sliding over their skin.
