He sat there, saying nothing, until Sid Jakes’ grinning face appeared on the screen.
“Hi, Ronny.” He chuckled. “On Phrygia, eh? How’s that redskin coming along?”
Ronny said, “That redskin is evidently a one-man task force. He’s dug up the fact that Baron Wyler controls Interplanetary News and is evidently prettying up a scheme to unite UP…”
“Well, isn’t that what we want to do?”
“… under his leadership. Possibly, I should say, under his dictatorship.”
The supervisor scoffed. “Neat trick, if he could pull it off.”
“Evidently, he has some reason to believe he can.”
Sid Jakes looked at him thoughtfully. “Get a complete report on this, soonest, Ronny.”
“Phil Birdman’s just about got it finished. Meanwhile, would it be possible for you to put through an order making me a plenipotentiary extraordinary from UP to the Supreme Commandant of Phrygia?”
“Have you gone drivel-happy, old boy?”
“No. The Baron’s got his heavies out looking for me. I want to face him, but not on the kind of basis he evidently has in mind. I want some weight to throw around.”
Jakes thought about it some more. “All right. Within twenty-four hours, you’ll be a special mission from the President of UP to Baron Wyler. You’ll have to play it from there. Dream up your own idea of what the mission is. Wyler won’t dare touch you, with such a commission.” He grinned. “This oughta be a neat trick.”
He faded from the screen.
Ronny turned back to his companion.
Birdman said, “I’m not sure I like this. Wyler’s feeling his oats. He’s getting near the point where he’s ready to take action. I don’t think he’s afraid of the Commissariat of Interplanetary Affairs.”
Ronny shrugged. “The way you brought me here, to his hideout, I couldn’t find it again. So even though he slips me Scop, I can’t betray you. For myself, I’m no big loss. If I don’t get away from him, again, there’s not much he can get out of me that he doesn’t already know. Now, let’s get about the job of outfitting me properly to be a plenipotentiary from the President to the Baron. Sid is going to radio through to Wyler that I am to appear.”
VII
If Ronny Bronston had thought the surface buildings of the nadirscraper, which housed the Interplanetary News in Greater Washington, were ostentatious, he could only admit he had had little upon which to base his opinion—comparatively.
Baron Wyler’s official residence was some ten kilometers outside the Phrygia city limits. At first, the Section G agent couldn’t place the theme; but it began to come to him, when his limousine—driven by a United Planets Space Forces marine, in dress uniform, with another seated beside him—was stopped at a gate by a squad of men in an armor of yesteryear and in short linen tunics. They were armed with spears, swords buckled to their sides.
The driver said from the side of his mouth, “You’re getting the full official greeting, sir. Ordinarily, we could’ve driven inside.”
Six of the guards stood at rigid attention, spear butts grounded. An officer, his breastplate of gold, approached the heavy hovercar, and came to the salute.
He said, “Hail the Plenipotentiary from the United Planets!”
Maintaining his dignity, Ronny nodded.
The officer said, “If your Excellency will alight, you will be conducted to audience with the Supreme Commandant.”
Evidently, his two marines were going to be left here at the gate. Ronny mentally shrugged. He was already in the Baron’s hands. Let them bounce the ball. He left the car.
In a clatter and a small cloud of dust, a chariot, pulled by three enormous white horses, came speeding forth. Ronny blinked at it. He had seen chariots in illustrations, and in historic Tri-Di shows, but never in actuality.
The driver pulled the horses to a rearing halt, only a few feet from him.
The officer said, not a flicker of expression on his face, “If His Excellency will mount…”
Ronny Bronston looked at his marines from the side of his eyes. They remained expressionless as well. He wondered vaguely if they would have pulled this gimmick had he been an eighty year old man. Well, there was nothing for it. He jumped up into the wheeled vehicle and grasped the edge, next to the driver.
They were off in a clatter.
The setting was beginning to come to him. The double-headed ax motif, the bulls in fresco and statuary. Once, as a boy, his father had taken him to the so-called Palace of Minos, at Knossos on Crete. Baron Wyler had obviously drawn upon the reconstructions of Sir Arthur Evans in building his residence. The British archaeologist had notoriously exercised his imagination in the reconstruction; but many a Cretean must have turned in his grave at this version of a palace of the four thousand year old civilization.
They clattered up a broad ramp, Ronny Bronston hanging on for life, and came to a rearing halt before an entrada flanked with highly colorful columns, which started narrow at the bottom and widened at the roof.
There was another guard unit, clad in the costume of Knossos, at the entry. A full twenty of them here. They came to the salute.
An officer stepped forward, came to attention.
“The Supreme Commandant sends greetings to His Excellency, the Plenipotentiary from United Planets.”
Ronny stepped down from the chariot, looked at the driver bitterly. Inaudibly he muttered. “Do you have a license to operate that thing?”
“Thanks,” he said to the officer. “I would like to see the Baron immediately.”
“His instructions are to bring you to his quarters upon arrival, Your Excellency.”
He turned and marched, stiff legged, into the building. Ronny followed.
As at the Interplanetary News building in Greater Washington, the resemblance to the ancient past fell off immediately in the interior. The officer’s costume seemed doubly ludicrous among the hosts of guards, messengers, secretaries and officials, all garbed in modern dress.
Two guards, fish-cold of eye, stood before an elevator door, one behind a device of switches and screens. Ronny assumed he was being given an electronic frisk. Well, they’d find him clean. It would have been ridiculous to think he could approach the ruler of Phrygia armed.
The elevator opened and the officer accompanying him gestured. Ronny entered alone, the door closed and the car dropped.
Then the door reopened, and even before Ronny Bronston could step out, the tall, heavy-set man there—his face beaming—reached for his hand.
“Ronald Bronston!” he said heartily. “Your Excellency, I’ve been waiting for you!”
He was at least as tall as Phil Birdman, but would have outweighed the Indian by fifty pounds. He carried his weight well; gracefully, might be the word. He moved as a trained pugilist moves, or perhaps one of the larger cats. His charm reached out and embraced you, all but suffocatingly. His face was open, friendly; his eyes, blue and wide-set; his nose, the arched Hapsburg nose, giving an aristocratic quality that only his overwhelming friendliness could dissipate.
He could only be , Ronny realized, Baron Wyler, Supreme Commandant of the Planet Phrygia, and, were Phil Birdman correct, would-be dictator of this sector of the galaxy .
Ronny let his hand be pumped, admittedly taken aback. He realized now that, although he had never seen even a photo of the Baron, he had built up a ficticious picture of him. Yes, the picture, he admitted in sour realization, had nothing to do with reality. Among other things, far from being middle-aged or even an elderly Prussian type, the Baron was little older than Ronny, himself.
Ronny Bronston hated to be touched by another man—other than perhaps a quick handshake—however, he suffered now his host to place an arm around his shoulders and lead him to as comfortable a room as the Section G agent could remember ever having been in. It was a man’s room. A small but complete bar to one side. A number of large, well-used chairs and couches. Racks of books that, even at a distance, looked interesting
and oft-handled. Good, well-chosen, not necessarily expensive, paintings on the walls. A fireplace.
A fireplace, Ronny thought. At this distance down into the Earth’s crust ? He wondered vaguely what effort must have gone into devising a manner of dispelling smoke and fumes.
The Baron was at the bar. “May I suggest this departure on the wines of the Rhine and Moselle? One of my ancestors imported the Riesling grape to Phrygia. Local soil conditions were somewhat different; but I trust you will find a lightness and bouquet not at all unpleasing.” Even as he spoke, he was pouring from a very long necked bottle into two delicate crystal glasses.
Ronny found himself seated in one of the chairs, glass in hand. The Baron was across from him and now picked up a small sheaf of papers from a coffee table.
He read aloud. “Ronald Meredith Bronston, 32. Born in Luana, Hawaii. Parents, Michael L. Bronston, and Pauline Meredith. Studied, ummm, ummm, finished education at University of Stockholm… ummm, ummm, at age of twenty-six took position at New Copenhagen in the Population Statistics Department. Was discovered by Bureau of Investigation scouts and jockeyed into Section G…”
Ronny stared at him. ” Jockeyed,” he protested. “I applied for a position that would take me overspace and was lucky…”
Baron Wyler chuckled at him magnanimously. “My dear Bronston, no luck is involved in getting into our friend Metaxa’s Section G. Not one human being in a million qualifies. Were you a bit more privy to the inner workings of your ultra-ultra cloak and dagger organization, you would know that at any given time at least a hundred of Metaxa’s picked men are scouting out potential agents. You were probably selected as far back as when you were in high school.”
Wyler’s eyes went back to the report. “But to go on with it. Given first assignment with Supervisor Lee Chang Chu and, as a result, was made full agent… Umm, umm, worked with distinction on the planets Kropotkin, Avalon and Palermo. Has become one of Supervisor Jakes’ most trusted field men. Height, weight, ummm, fingerprints, eye pattern, skull measurements.” The Baron looked up. “Some of these statistics come directly from Section G files.”
“All right,” Ronny said in resignation. “You’ve made your point. You have a rather complete dossier on me.”
The Baron put down the report and turned on his charm with a smile. “So we can dispense with preliminaries and get to the point.”
Ronny said, “The point being that the Supreme Commandant of the Planet Phrygia is ambitious to encroach upon the sovereignty of fellow worlds belonging to the United Planets.”
“Which is one way of putting it.” The Baron nodded agreeably. “Tell me, Bronston, what is the eventual goal of this United Planets to which you have devoted your life?”
“The advancement of the human race!”
“Neatly summed up in but six words. But, my dear Bronston, man has made his advances down through the ages in a wide variety of methods. Your knowledge of history must be such that you recognize the contributions of strongmen who have arisen in time of need. The democratic principle does not always apply.”
Ronny said sharply, “My studies have led me to believe that man makes his greatest advances under conditions of freedom.”
“An example?”
The Section G agent groped for a good one. “The Athens of the Golden Age. The Athenian democracy nourished a culture such as had never been seen before, nor since.”
Baron Wyler chuckled. “My dear Bronston, have you never heard of the strongman, Pericles? Besides, calling the Athenian society a democracy is somewhat stretching a point, is it not? For every Athenian citizen free to pursue the arts and sciences, there were a dozen slaves, or more, kept in complete subjugation. Come now, do you contend that if these slaves—who did the drudgery necessary to maintain the leisure of the Athenian citizens—had been given their freedom, been given complete equality, that the Golden Age could have been?”
Ronny looked at him. The Baron was obviously no fool.
The Baron got up, brought the bottle from the bar and refreshed the glasses. The Section G agent was no connoisseur of wine, but, admittedly, this was the most pleasant beverage he could remember drinking. He wondered if it was available on Earth.
The Baron said, “Let me use a somewhat more recent example of strongman versus the mob.”
“I wasn’t exactly advocating mob rule.”
“Indeed? However, remember when the Egyptian Nasser seized power in his country, oh, somewhere about the middle of the 20th Century? His nation had been a backward one, dominated by the big powers, ignored in the world’s councils. When he took over the Suez Canal, all prophesied that the waterway would soon be silted up and impassable. Instead, within a few years, traffic had doubled. Borrowing, begging, securing funds and techniques from every source he could find, he began to industrialize, to irrigate, to find new potentials in his desert country. His soldiers were sent out to fill up the wells in thousands of native communities, supposedly a crime beyond understanding in a desert land. They filled them up and forced the fellahin to dig new wells in places where the water would not be contaminated with sewage. He sent soldiers out and rounded up the children and forced them into schools. Children that otherwise would have been taught nothing further than a few suras from the Koran. These were but a few things done by strongman Nasser.”
Ronny was scowling at him.
The Baron twisted his mouth in deprecation. “At the same time, and on the same continent, the newly emerged nation, the Congo, seemed unable to find an equivalent of Nasser. Instead, in an atmosphere of pseudo-democracy, they went from one barbarism to the next, going backward, rather than progressing. Come now, Citizen Bronston, don’t you think conditions sometimes call for a strongman?”
Ronny put his glass down. Thus far, he had been satisfied to hold his peace, if only to see just how the other was going to bounce the ball.
Now he said, “Interpreting history isn’t my field. I do know this, as Metaxa said, the human race is in the clutch. This is not the time for would-be strongmen to try to seize control of worlds other than their own. We can’t afford the time, nor the energies involved in interplanetary war. And, please don’t attempt to put over the idea that you, or anyone else, could form an empire from the largely individualistic United Planets, without war. Baron Wyler, you saw that charred body of the intelligent alien life form. You heard what Ross…”
The Baron held up a hand to restrain him. He nodded, still agreeable. “Indeed I did. And I was surprised that the estimable Commissioner was in possession of it. However, we could have shown him better examples.”
“Better examples?”
The Baron reached out and touched a switch on the coffee table. One wall of the room clouded, then became a giant screen.
The Baron fiddled with a small dial set into the table.
On the screen, there faded in an extensive laboratory. At least a dozen white-smocked men were working about an operating table. The Baron turned another dial, zooming in on the scene.
Ronny sucked in his breath. Those on the screen were dissecting two bodies of what were obviously specimens of the tiny life form Metaxa had deep frozen.
Another turn of the dial. A new room, more extensive than the last. At least several thousand men—technicians and mechanics—were working away at various benches, on various pieces of equipment: the nature of which, Ronny couldn’t even guess.
The Baron said wryly, “They’re trying to figure out the use of some of the devices, weapons or whatever, that we’ve gleaned from the alien planets.” He snorted his deprecation. “What if you took a squad of Neanderthal men and set them down in a 25th Century laboratory in the midst of all the products that century produced? What do you think they might accomplish?”
Ronny, his eyes bugging still, said, “Is there that much difference?”
“At least,” the Baron told him. “However, as our good Metaxa pointed out at the conference, this culture is not the one we must confront. This culture wa
s destroyed by one beyond.”
Ronny nodded. “That is the basic point, Baron Wyler. That is why the human race doesn’t have the time to bother with ambitious men of the caliber of the Supreme Commandant of Phrygia. We know nothing at all about the culture beyond.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” the Baron said easily. “A taste more wine?”
He had Ronny staring again. “What do you mean by that?”
The Baron waggled a finger at him. “You see, my dear Bronston, we are far, far beyond Section G and its well-intentioned plans to preserve the race. Some time ago, long before the Space Forces exploration force located the alien planets, Phrygian cruisers had found them. Properly masked, of course, we were able to descend and explore. My laboratories have been working on the equipment, and even the bodies of the aliens, as you have seen. We found a few under conditions which had preserved them.”
“But you said something about the power beyond.”
The Baron nodded. “Yes. Our little aliens left enough in the way of photographs to indicate part of what we’re up against.”
“Photographs?”
“Both still photographs and also a tape that one of my more brilliant young men has been able to project. It would seem that our little aliens actually landed upon at least one of the beyond culture’s planets.”
For the last half hour the Baron had been throwing curves faster than Ronny Bronston found himself capable of catching. Now he blurted, “What in the world is the other culture like?”
“Fantastically advanced. Among other items, it would seem they have matter conversion units that can make anything out of anything else. It would seem they have fusion reactors, and, hence, unlimited power. Oh yes, an unbelievably advanced technology.”
“What do they look like?”
The Baron paused. “Just a moment.” He played with his screen dials again, said something into an order box. The screen clouded, went clear once more.
On it was an incredibly handsome man. He was dressed in nothing more than brief shorts and sandals. He had a golden-brown coloration, was of bodily perfection seldom seen, and then only among physical culture perfectionists who spend a lifetime achieving it. There was no indication that he was aware of being photographed.
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