The Outposter

by Gordon R. Dickson

  "Cover Stein!" snapped Mark to Paul.

  He stepped quickly to the bed and took the gun from Brot. Brot's face was white with ex­haustion and he sagged back against his pil­lows as the gun left his hand. But the exhaus­tion had not reached that grim inner core of his.

  "Told you..." he whispered to Mark, "send Paul, Orv ... not come ... self ..."

  "Easy, Brot," said Mark.

  He turned and went to the still figure of Race, but as he knelt by the downed man, Race stirred and tried to sit up, putting a hand to his head.

  "I just gun-whipped him," said Stein. "He'll be all right except for a headache."

  Mark got to his feet, facing Stein. "What happened?"

  "I gave Brot a chance to take charge at the station here, again," Stein said. "He told Race to take my gun. I clipped Race instead. Turned out Brot had a gun under his pillow."

  Race was on his feet now, if somewhat un­steady there. He turned to Stein.

  "Sorry, Race," Stein said. "Seems we've ended up on different sides after all."

  Race reached for the gun in his own holster.

  "Never mind," said Mark swiftly. Race's hand fell to his side. "Insubordination ..." whispered Brot. "Shoot, Paul..."

  "No," said Race thickly. Paul had not moved. "Brot, you know we can't do that."

  "No," said Stein. He kept his eyes on Mark. "It's up to you, Mark. Turn the station back to Brot or over to Race. Otherwise, I'm going back to Sector Headquarters to charge Brot with incompetence and ask to have him re­placed. The way he's cut up they won't hesi­tate, particularly when they hear the wild things you're trying to do here. One way or another you've got to be stopped. You're play­ing games with ten thousand lives at this station."

  "They've been informed at Sector," Mark said. "The daily reports have gone in on schedule ever since I landed."

  "Don't talk like a colonist, Mark," said Stein. "You know I know how long it takes for anything from the daily reports to attract attention at the command level over at Sector.

  They're more than half Navy there."

  He dropped his hands from his shoulders.

  "Last chance, Mark," he said.

  He walked toward the door.

  "My gun ... give me ..." husked Brot.

  "No," said Mark. Stein disappeared through the bedroom door. "Paul you stay with Brot. Race—"

  He looked at the assistant station master.

  "I'm all right," said Race. His voice was clearer.

  "If you're up to it, then, come along," said Mark.

  "Mark—" Brot called huskily from the bed. "Mark!"

  "Brot," said Race, "you know there's no other way. Make him lie back and rest, Paul. Give him a hypo if you have to. Go ahead, Mark. I'll witness."

  Mark went out the bedroom door and across the living room, followed by the loose-jointed brown man. They went out the front door together and saw Stein perhaps sixty yards away from the building, heading toward a small airhopter. Race stopped, and Mark walked out from the Residence a half-dozen steps.

  "Stein!" he called.

  Stein turned, jerking out his side arm as he spun about. Mark was already diving toward the ground arid drawing his own gun. A heavy fist struck him while he was still in midair, slamming him against the hard earth. Mist seemed to flood in around the blurring figure of Stein, and Mark felt the gun buck in his hand, as he got off at least a single shot...

  He woke to a vision of whiteness that slowly resolved itself into the view of a ceiling. He felt exhausted to the point of strengthless­ness, and the area of his left shoulder and chest was heavy and uncomfortable. He reached for it with his right hand and found himself thick with bandaging there.

  He lowered his gaze, digging his chin into his chest to look level, and saw the foot of his bed and then Brot's hospital bed, with Brot sitting up in it, and Race, Paul, and Orv all standing about. All four men were watching him.

  "Stein?" Mark asked, hearing his voice come out almost as husky as Brot's.

  "Killed," said Race. "Through the neck. A clean shot."

  Mark felt a sudden, unexpected surge of emptiness and self-hatred wash through him. All at once, reasonlessly, he remembered Stein and another outposter whose name he could not now remember taking turns carry­ing him about on their shoulders when he had been very young.

  "I was aiming at his head," he said faintly.

  "Clean shots both ways." Race's voice seemed to boom in his ears. "He got you from above on your way down—the slug went in just by your left shoulder blade, then down and out just above your left hipbone in front. No important organs holed on the way through. You'll be up in a week or so. I gave it my witness—a fair and private dispute."

  "I was aiming at his head..." whispered Mark. Whispering, he fell asleep.

  He was up and around, as Race had predic­ted, in eight days, but he wore bandages for another two weeks. Meanwhile, Race had briefed the colonists on the changes that were taking place. Paul, who had been back at the Earth-City the most recently of any of them except Mark, had helped on the briefing.

  The colonists had taken these sessions well. There was a minority—older people mainly, Paul told Mark—who were fearful of what was being planned and done. But most of the colonists had revealed a deep-lying hunger for change, any change, in their outcast situation. It was a little startling to Paul, even after six years on Post, to realize how the chance-dic­tated brutality of deportation from the Earth of their birth had rankled unchanged in some of the colonists for as much as three-quarters of a lifetime.

  As for Mark, he found that something had happened to him as a result of the death of Stein. He had lived with his determination to deal with the Meda V'Dan as long as he could remember. In all that time he had imagined all sorts of contingencies. But he had not imagined having to shoot Stein. Lying on his bed that first eight days, and later while walk­ing around still bandaged, he faced the fact that, if necessary, he would do the same thing again. But in some hidden part of his inner self there was now scar tissue where there had formerly been life and sensitivity.

  Luckily, he soon had other matters to think about. His bandages had barely come off for good when Jarl came searching for him, to take him back to the comptroller's building.

  The building was now re-roofed, walled, fin­ished, and furnished. A large tank-type inte­grator, back to back with a wide chart table, took up the centre of the room. A few chairs and lesser calculators helped fill the remain­ing space between these two large items and the walls, which were hung with files of all types, from microspool through image cubes to chart and graph. Just at the moment, a clutter of papers and books hid the surface of the chart table, and on top of these were a number of small objects of straw, wood, or native stone. It was to these that Jarl directed Mark's attention.

  "There's your answer," Jarl said. "Native handiwork."

  Mark picked up the nearest object, which was the crudely carved wooded figure of a man sitting on a stump and sharpening an axe. Mark turned it over in his hand, examining it from different angles, and then put it down again.

  "Answer to what?" Mark asked.

  "You wanted something to trade to the Meda V'Dan," Jarl said. The big man was sur­prisingly enthusiastic. "It's not only the ideal sort of trade stuff for us, it's the only thing we can afford to trade, I tore this colony apart economically—past, present, and future, right down to every nail in every building and every potato in every potato field. It can't afford to trade its old shoes, if it comes down to doing business in hard goods, the

  kind of thing the Meda V'Dan raid Outpost Stations for, according to your records. All the light and heavy machinery, the instru­ments, the agricultural and industrial chemi­cals—trade any of that and we'll be in trouble. We not only don't have any to spare, we don't have enough for ourselves right now. But"— he gestured to the objects on the table—"this stuff!"

  "What makes this so good?" Mark asked.

  Jarl looked at him curiously. "You really don't
know?"

  "I've got an idea," said Mark. "But you're the one who has to sell me on whatever notion you've come up with. So tell me why."

  "Well, look at it!" said Jarl. "All of it to­gether hasn't got the value of a credit dollar. In short, it costs us nothing in real terms. Only the time and labour of the colonists who carve or build or weave it. But we can trade it to the Meda V'Dan for the same things we're short of."

  "Why?"

  "Why?" Jarl stared at him.

  "If there's no real value in it, why would the Meda V'Dan want it?"

  "Because there's an unreal value in it—an art value!" Jarl said. "The Meda V'Dan may not have any use for it themselves, judging by the way the records say they've reacted as individuals visiting the Earth-City, when they were introduced to human art back there. But they can turn around and trade these things off again at a profit to the Unknown Races farther in toward the galaxy's centre!"

  "And what makes you think that any of the Unknown Races would want these things?"

  "Because somewhere in there, there's a race which appreciates art and deals in it!" said Jarl impatiently. "You've seen the sort of little gadgets the Meda V'Dan give as gifts to the brass at Navy Base. Stuff like that sparkle-cube, or whatever it was, Ulla had around her neck on the ship coming out here. Every time the Meda V'Dan have actually traded with the Colonies, they've traded the things the outposters or the Navy asked for— tools, instruments, metals, practical things. When they raid Outpost Stations that's the sort of thing they take. But when they give gifts, they give trinkets like Ulla's cube. Don't you see? They don't make the trinkets, or they'd be using them as a trade stuff with us. But they know some race that does, maybe several races. So they deal in their trinkets, and they'll deal in ours. Down toward Galac­tic Centre there are bound to be aliens as interested in our native handiwork as we are in theirs."

  He stopped talking at last, and stood watch­ing Mark, waiting for him to answer. But Mark looked again at the handiwork on the chart table before speaking.

  "Maybe," he said, after a moment.

  Temper flared in the big man's eyes.

  "Maybe!" Jarl echoed. "Here I turn this colony's assets inside out for you and come up with something out of nothing that's damn near a miracle—"

  "I said maybe." Mark cut him short. "Nine out of ten guesses about the Meda V'Dan have been wrong from the start, usually because whoever was guessing couldn't help assuming human reactions in alien minds. Maybe this is a wrong guess, too. All right, we'll try it out on the Meda V'Dan, but I'll believe it's working when I see it actually happening. Not before."

  He went off, leaving Jarl fuming. But once outside the comptroller's building, he turned to hunt up Lily Betaugh. He found her in the underground records room with one of the three assistants—the sociologist—that she had so far chosen to help her. Mark took her aside to tell her privately about Jarl's idea.

  "What do you think of it from what you've been able to put together about the. Meda V'Dan so far?" Mark asked.

  "I haven't put together much of anything yet," said Lily. "What you asked me to do isn't something anyone can come up with over­night, or something I'd be sure enough about to announce without a lot of checking."

  "All right," said Mark. "Then give me your opinion without being sure. What's your guess about the Meda V'Dan trading for our handiwork?"

  She hesitated.

  "There are indications they do a lot of trad­ing," she said, after a second. "And of course the more they trade, the more likely they'd be to trade in all sorts of different things."

  He looked at her for a moment, thought­fully.

  "I think," he said at last, "the academic outlook you had back at Belgrade is slowing you down too much. This isn't a scholarly re­search project where you can take as many years as you want to work up conclusions. I want guesswork I can act on tomorrow—if not today. So suppose you forget everything else for a minute and give me the picture of the Meda V'Dan as you see them, now, with­out having all the evidence you'd like to con­sider."

  Still, she hesitated.

  "If you can't do this," he said, and heard a hardness of threat in his own voice that, un­reasonably, started him thinking about Stein again, "you're no use to me here."

  She lifted her small face to him.

  "If I have to," she said, "all right, then. The Meda V'Dan claim to look on us as primitive compared to them. They look down their noses at us. If they were humans, there'd be some reason to think that such an attitude was at least in part compensatory, and so not entirely justified. But they're not human and maybe this is a case where the human rule doesn't work. We know they're not very inter­ested in spending any time at our Earth-City —even though a number of them have visited it with red-carpet treatment—and they defi­nitely don't want any humans cluttering up their own world, or worlds. Also, they evi­dently can get along with a number of differ­ent races and cultures, since they trade with the Unknown Races as well as with us. But they seem to have no morals or ethics where their treatment of humans is concerned—witness their frequent raids on these Outpost Stations, which their spokesmen immediately disavow. On the other hand, in order to sur­vive as a civilization, they must have some internal rules system of their own. But no one seems to have any clue to what it is."

  She broke off.

  "Shall I go on?" she asked. "It's all like that. One bit of evidence almost contradicting another."

  "No," Mark said. He was thoughtful again. "But get to work writing it up—as much as you can in the next three days—and I'll read it as I go."

  She frowned up at him.

  "Go where?"

  "To talk to the Meda V'Dan themselves."

  "You can't be serious—" she was beginning, but he was already on his way out.

  He went to the Residence to announce the same intention to Race, who stared at him and reacted with words parallel to, if not identical with, Lily's.

  "Go now?" asked Race.

  "Why not?" said Mark. "Spal tells me he's got his Wild Bunch crews ready to lift and gun a couple of the scout ships, and Maura Vols can navigate for both ships if we stay close together. Meanwhile her students can learn by doing."

  "But," said Race, "when they hear about this at Sector—" He looked out a window of the Residence at the green fields and the darker green of variform oak trees beyond. "The summer's going fast and I don't want to have to fight Meda V'Dan and winter weather at the same time. We'll get started right away."

  Chapter Eight

  It was not a troublesome flight to the solar system under a GO star code-named K39, where the Meda V'Dan were known to have at least one inhabited world. It was only slow, as Maura Vols agonized over her decisions and insisted on checking and rechecking her work each time before they made a position shift— five of which were required to bring the two scout ships to the periphery of K39. Maura was proving unexpectedly stubborn about details. But she had shed her black wig and, in spite of this, looked fifteen years younger under the natural grey of her own hair. It was not an unusual transformation among the colonists as Mark knew. The rate of male die-off in a lottery shipment, once the Colonies were reached, was three times that of the female, and among the women who survived, several often showed evidence of such an ap­parently reasonless rejuvenation.

  Within three minutes of accomplishing shift into position by the K39 system, how­ever, they were challenged by Meda V'Dan ships.

  "I'm the commander of Abruzzi Station Fourteen, Garnera Six," answered Mark in human speech as soon as the laser talk-light beam between his ship and the invisibly dis­tant Meda V'Dan ship was stabilized. "Out-poster Mark Ten Roos. I'm here to give your Most Important Person a chance to try and establish trading patterns with our indepen­dent colony."

  There was a short silence at the other end. Then the loudspeaker before Mark rattled in the heavy-syllabled Meda V'Dan tongue.

  "I don't like your attitude," said Mark. "I'll make a point of complaining about it to y
our Most Important Person when I talk to him. You don't seem to realize whom you're talk­ing to. I suppose I can't blame you. You Meda V'Dan have never encountered humans from an independent colony before. If you know what's good for you, you'll take me to meet your Most Important Person without any more delay, and with a decent amount of courtesy from now on."

  The talk-light beam was broken abruptly from the other end. A moment later, six Meda V'Dan ships, each one several times the size of the two scout ships Mark had brought, appeared around them. Two of the alien vessels flanked the scout ships, the other four clustered behind. All six Meda V'Dan ships began to move forward slowly.

  "We're under escort," Mark said to the other scout ship over his intership circuit. "Start moving, and keep together."

  They moved off as a unit, the alien ships guarding the smaller human vessels like a trout escorting minnows.

  Turning from the screen, Mark caught sight of the face of Lily Betaugh staring up at him.

  "You can't talk to the Meda V'Dan like that," Lily whispered, glancing around to see that none of the others in the scout ship com­mand cabin was close enough to overhear. "It's just asking for trouble."

  He looked back down at her, a little grimly.

  "Don't anthropomorphize," he answered. "They've got no way of knowing how important I am. All they know about human rank and authority is what other humans have told them—at the Navy Base and back at the Earth-City. But the Meda V'Dan them­selves don't tell the truth except when it suits them. How do they know the other humans told them everything—and told it right?"

  She stood for a moment. Then she shook her head.

  "It's still an awful risk," she said.

  "Maybe," said Mark. "But something that needs to be done has risk in it. And there's something you ought to keep in mind. They really don't know us any better than we know them, so anything's possible on both sides. Will you go ask Paul Trygve to join me up here from the rear gun post?"

  Lily went. A few minutes later, Paul showed up in the command room. He was the only other outposter Mark had brought along.