Masters of Everon

by Gordon R. Dickson

  "Whisper, damn it!"

  "All right," whispered Jef. "What makes you so sure no one's listening?"

  "Just take my word for it. I had my ear to that door panel. If anyone can breath in that corridor and I can't hear him, then he's got lungs no bigger than a crawling mite's. Besides I can smell old Bill Eschak on a dark night five meters away."

  "Smell?" he echoed.

  "You can't? That's right, you're like those downcountry city people. No nose. No ears. Never mind that, though. Listen, you know why they're putting me in the bunkhouse?"

  "Uh. No," said Jef.

  "Because they don't trust me. With thirty-forty woodspeople around me, there's not much I can do. That means you're on your own."

  "They trust me?" Jef whispered.

  "Trust you? They don't trust you, they just know you can't do anything by yourself, so they don't figure to worry about you once they've got me away from you. But pay attention, now. I've done all I can for you. From here out you're on your own; and if you keep on talking about things that don't concern you, these people are going to start thinking you know a lot more than you do. So, if you haven't learned yet to keep that mouth of yours shut, you better do it now, unless you want Bill Eschak cutting your throat for you before tomorrow sunset."

  "Come on, now," said Jef. "You can't tell me he's the sort of man to do anything like that!"

  "Isn't he? Why d'you think he's Beau's first officer? These people here are all spring-pulls. Old Bill's had his blade into more people than there're teeth in your head. This is a bad group, Robini, and don't you ever forget that. —Now," she broke off suddenly, "you're on your own."

  She turned, went swiftly to the door, and pulled it open.

  "Come on in, Eschak," she said. "No need to try and sneak up. I'm ready for my own bunk, now."

  "Well, that's good," said Bill, appearing in the doorway. He looked past her to Jef. "Word just came Beau'll be in real early in the morning. He'll talk to you at breakfast. Have a good sleep."

  Bill stepped back from the doorway and Jarji followed him out. The door closed and Jef heard the sound of their footsteps die away.

  He sat down on the bed. Perfect silence surrounded him. Jarji was one of the woods ranchers herself. She ought to know what she was talking about. On the other hand, what she had been telling him about Bill was incredible. People just didn't go around knifing each other, even on the newly settled worlds—barring an occasional psychotic or badly disturbed person. The human race was just too civilized for that, nowadays. Or was it?

  He looked at the plank and log walls surrounding him, but they offered no answer. The room was dimming as the sunset died outside its one window. He looked for some way to light the candle, but could find none. Slowly, almost automatically, he got his camping light out of his pack and set it on the table by his bed. He began to undress. He was tired enough to welcome the idea of sleep, at any rate.

  He took his clean pants and put them back in his pack, spreading out the coffee-soaked ones on the table to dry. Slowly he climbed in between the rough covers of the bed and put out the camping light. The various scents of the woods of the building around him filled his nostrils and some night-creature sounds filtered to his ears through the window across the room. It was all very pleasant.

  Images of Jarji flitted through his mind. She was apparently able to irritate him with a word; but, illogically, at the same time, he continued privately certain that under her prickly exterior she was warm, friendly, and honestly concerned about him—perhaps more so than she wanted to show. On his part, for some time now he had deliberately been trying to avoid dwelling on the thought of her as female and attractive, ever since she had rescued him from Post Fifty. But the effort was beginning to be a little ridiculous, like pretending that the sun was not in the sky during daylit hours. In fact, his reaction to her seemed part—a strange part at that for someone as naturally solitary as himself—of the general good feelings he had been permeated with ever since he had stepped out on to the landing stairs of the spaceship. They were good feelings that affected him almost as strongly as a narcotic. Right now, in spite of Jarji's warning, he could not seem to summon up anything but a comfortable feeling of content with the universe. It was impossible to worry about Bill Eschak and these other people he had come among.

  Intellectually, he gave due credit to Jarji's warning that he be on guard against Beau's people, and particularly Bill Eschak. Undoubtedly she knew what she was talking about. Undoubtedly, she was right. But, emotionally, the warning did not seem to have the power to disturb him.

  It was probably these general good feelings of his that were lulling him in such a fashion. If that was so, he did not have to look far to find reasons for the way he felt. For one thing, he was healthily tired after tramping through the woods this way for several days. It was true he had been careful to exercise himself into shape before he left Earth. But the difference between practice and reality was still perceptible. He had not woken up stiff on any of these mornings, but he had slept like a log every night. His body was naturally relaxed and that was a good share of it.

  In addition, he was here at last, doing what he always wanted to do, in the research with Mikey. In effect he was finally enjoying the fruits of something he had struggled and worked for, for some years. Things were going well; and a lot of the urgency had gone out of matters that otherwise might have had him wound up tight. He was remarkably unconcerned about the Constable, for example, in spite of the fact that technically he was now a fugitive from planetary justice, with the other duty bound to bring him to book. Even the matter of Will's death, and his long-held wish to locate Will's grave, had lost a great deal of their urgency. The hurt and resentment he had always felt where his dead brother had been concerned, had largely faded. He could no longer manage to work himself up over it. Which was strange ... in fact, everything was a little strange. Give due credit to exercise and success, and there was still a large part of his present contentment unexplained.

  It had to be Everon itself, that was the cause. It was a world that seemed as if it had been waiting here for him to fall in love with, all the years of its existence. He wondered sleepily if the colonists felt, or had ever felt, the way he now did about this planet. There was no way to tell. Maybe only some of them felt it. Jarji, perhaps? He should ask her—sometime when she herself was not busy lecturing him or spilling cups of coffee on him.

  His thoughts drifted away, back to the pair of pants he had spread out on the table. Half-asleep, he found himself thinking that they should be dry enough to wear by morning. It had hardly been worthwhile, after all, putting the spare pair on.

  Chapter Twelve

  jef came suddenly and completely awake. He lay tense, not knowing what had wakened him, staring into the gloom about him. High in the room, a little distance from the bed, he thought he could see something glowing faintly, the way the eyes of certain Earth animals shine with reflected light in the dark. He blinked, but the illusion persisted, although whatever might be there was so faint that he could not be sure he was actually seeing it. For a second he wondered if he was not merely having some very vivid dream, rather than being awake.

  There was only one way to find out. He reached out with one hand to the corner of the table, found his camping lamp, and switched it on.

  The room sprang into existence around him in the sudden illumination from the little nuclear-fueled lamp—standing at the foot of his bed was Mikey.

  "Mikey!" Jef said. "Where have you been?"

  He was out of bed in an instant. At his present size Mikey loomed enormous in the small room, his head upright on his powerful neck so that his eyes would have been at the point where Jef had imagined he had seen something glowing. But it could not have been Mikey's eyes he had thought he was seeing, for these were still, as always, tightly closed.

  "How did you get in here?" asked Jef, running his hands over the massive shoulders.

  For once Mikey made no move to lower h
is head and butt his forehead against Jef in the usual fashion. Instead he stood for a second, then turned about to the door, lifted one paw, and with a surprising articulation of two of the pads of his enormous toes, seized and opened the door latch. He pushed the door open a crack and stood, turning back his head over his shoulder to Jef in invitation.

  "Where do you want to go, Mikey?" said Jef, perplexed, but remembering to keep his voice down. "Wait—I can't go anywhere until I get some boots and clothes on."

  He turned and started to dress. Mikey let go of the latch and put his forepaw back on the floor; the maolot stood waiting patiently while Jef dressed.

  "All right," said Jef at last, clipping the camping lamp to his belt. The pants that had been coffee-soaked were not completely dry yet, but their dampness was not enough to worry about. He walked toward the door himself. "Let's go."

  Mikey pushed open the door and went into the corridor. Jef followed. There was no one to be seen in the corridors and rooms they passed. Mikey led Jef to the door by which Jef had entered the building, and they went out into the night. Outside it was dark in spite of the fact that there was a moon in the sky. Clearly, the night was almost over. Mikey, however, moved as surely as if it was broad daylight and he had eyes to see with. Whatever sense it was that allowed him to get around on his native world, it was serving him as well now in the outside dark as it had inside the building a few minutes earlier.

  Jef followed Mikey among the buildings to the one closest to the clip. At its door, the maolot once more lifted a forepaw to the latch. This time, however, the latch did not lift and the door did not open. Putting his paw down again, Mikey half turned, put one broad shoulder against the door and pushed. There was a subdued snap, and the door yawned silently inward. Mikey pushed his way through; and, after a second's hesitation, Jef followed.

  Inside, this building was as black as the inside of a cave. Mikey and everything else were invisible. Jef unclipped the camping light from his belt and risked turning it on. He found himself standing in what seemed to be some sort of warehouse, piled high with sacks made out of loose-woven, reddish cloth, about one meter by a quarter of a meter in size, and stuffed, apparently, with lumpy objects.

  The ends of the bags were sewn shut. Jef felt the contents of one through the cloth and discovered the objects to be about the size and shape of mature carrots, except that each one curved in a semi-circle. Struck by a sudden suspicion, Jef leaned over the bag to sniff at it. A faint, musty, lilaclike odor came into his nostrils; and the suspicion became a certainty. This building was plainly full of the roots of the question plant, a native species growing in the upland areas of Everon. The roots contained aconitine, like the monkshood plant of Earth. The question plant was one of the few forms of vegetation native to Everon that were poisonous to Earth creatures. The plant had rated a picture, as well as a warning paragraph, in one of the books Jef had read about Everon before he had made the trip here. There must be enough of the roots in the sacks surrounding him, Jef thought, to poison a city full of people.

  —Or to poison all the dead eland the woods ranchers were complaining about?

  But why would Beau leCourboisier and his group want to poison the eland of their fellow woods ranchers? If it was the wisent they were planning to poison—of course, thought Jef. Beau and the others would be planning to kill off wisent in retaliation for the dead eland. With this much question plant, they could do it—but that was a suicidal tactic. If the two ranching groups started killing off each others' herds, what would the planet survive on after a winter or two of depleted current food stocks?

  He was still turning this over in his mind when he noticed Mikey pawing at the base of a pile of sacks against a farther wall.

  "Look out, Mikey," he whispered. "They'll all come down."

  Mikey paid no attention to the words. He hooked a thick, curved claw of his right forepaw into the lowest sack and pulled. Jef sprang forward to try and stop the stack of filled sacks on top from tumbling—but they did not. Instead, they swung out in one solid unit, revealing themselves as camouflage for a wide door. Jef found himself staring down a short, dark corridor from the very end of which a door that was slightly open sent a slice of white light into the corridor.

  Jef stared; and for the first time his ears picked up what Mikey must have already heard with his much more sensitive ears. Something could be heard, coming from beyond the lighted doorway at the corridor's end. It was the soft, steady murmuring of a man's voice, too low-pitched to be understandable at this distance.

  "Shh..." Jef breathed at Mikey. "Shh ... not a sound..."

  He stepped past Mikey and began to tiptoe down the dark corridor. As he came closer to the doorway, the sound of the murmuring grew louder; until, as Jef eased up to the very corner of the doorway to where he would be able to gaze around the door-jamb at whatever was inside, the words he was hearing at last came clear.

  "... to set up and energize incubating units," a voice was saying, "will require at a minimum thirty hours of work by a ten-man working crew, particularly if these men are untrained. The five-hour set-up time for the incubating units you were given by manual implied that the set-up crew would be trained and experienced bio-technicians. To thaw the frozen embryos and begin to process them through the birth stage—you don't want them coming out of their capsules all at once and needing to be taken care of—will take a minimum of another sixty hours. Then, when they start to be born out of capsule, you'd better have at least one person for every twenty eland foals, if these people are untrained at that, too."

  The voice broke off, interrupting itself with a comment.

  "I can't understand your needing this information all over again," it said. "A full rundown was given your people when our ship went into darkside orbit here three days ago."

  "Beau himself took the information with him," answered a voice that jarred Jef—the voice of Martin. "When he left here yesterday, he left without anyone knowing what needs to be done. Now he may not be able to get back tomorrow the way he'd planned."

  "He'd better," said the voice. "I'm not going to hang here in orbit around a Second Mortgage planet with sixty thousand variform eland embryos..."

  Jef eased forward further until he could see around the corner of the door. He looked into a room at which Martin sat in a metal chair before a full wall of equipment of the sort that Jef himself had seen many times as a boy, when he had gone to meet his father as his father was coming off duty, back at some spaceport on Earth.

  It was nothing less than the full control-tower equipment necessary to communicate with and guide a full-sized interstellar spaceship out of its parking orbit around a world like this, down to a safe landing on the surface; and what held Jef motionless for a long moment, then, was not just the amazing nature of what he had discovered, but something entirely personal. Seated with his back to Jef in a chair that slid automatically up and down the six-meter length of controls and telltales of the instrument board before him, Martin continued to work and talk with the spaceship, thousands or even hundreds of thousands of kilometers away in space. As he spoke his chair slid right and left; his hands danced skillfully and economically over dials and controls.

  "... Yes, I have you," Martin was saying, his chair pausing before the row of circular screens each with its little pinpoint, or line, of dancing light. "Orbital inclination to planetary plane is point sixty-five hundredths. Fair enough. Better plan on holding until present time minus eighty-three hours approximately—"

  "I just told you," the voice from the instrument bank interrupted him, "we're not going to sit up here in parking orbit any longer than another sixty hours, maximum. I'll jettison cargo and write the deal off before I hold any longer. Every hour gives that spaceport control down there that much more chance to notice us, out here. Sixty hours, max. Then I dump the cargo."

  "Well, now, and that would be a sweet loss to you, wouldn't it?" The mocking note, with which Jef had become familiar earlier, was in Martin's v
oice. "I've not been briefed on how this was all set up, being someone Beau brought in as an emergency replacement, as I said. But it doesn't take much of a brain to figure who'll be the big loser if those eland embryos get thrown away in space. Where would a bunch of backwoods game ranchers on a new colonial world like this one get the money for landing control equipment like this, plus the funds to import variform animal embryos on that scale? You'll have put a fair share of your own funds into this deal, Captain—ship and all; in hopes of special landing and other concessions from Everon once these game ranchers get political control, no doubt. Now give me no more arguments, there's a fine man; and I'll talk you down here, as I say, approximately four days from now."

  Martin stopped speaking, and sat waiting. But there was no further argument from the voice that had been speaking to him.

  "Well, let's break communications for now, then," Martin said finally. "Talk to you again in ten hours or thereabouts. Out."

  He reached up and touched a control on the panel. The moving dots and lines of light vanished from the circular screens. Audibly yawning, Martin leaned back in his chair and swung it lazily about so that he faced the doorway. So easily and naturally did he turn, that it was a full second before Jef realized Martin had a laser handweapon in one fist and it was pointing directly at Jef. Jef felt a touch of bitterness. Everyone, it seemed, had a weapon but himself.

  "All right, Mr. Robini," Martin said. "I'll bother you to come on in; slowly if you don't mind, and without getting excited. Also bring in your maolot, as calmly as may be."

  Jef's face and part of his body was plainly visible beyond the edge of the open doorway. But he knew that Mikey was still out of sight behind him; and he was tempted to gamble.

  "Mikey's not here," he said.

  "Come now," said Martin, and a sharp note had come into his voice, "are you expecting me to take your word for that? Stand aside."