“Now. I do not know where you went. That is your business. All you—”
“I went to Denver,” Stanton said.
“And you found?”
“Nothing,” Stanton said. “Absolutely nothing.”
“What were you looking for?”
“I don’t know. Something about my past. Something about myself. I don’t know.”
“Ah. You went to look up your family. You were trying to fill the holes in your memory. Eh?”
“Yes.”
“And you did not succeed.”
“No. No. There wasn’t anything there that I didn’t remember. In general, I mean. I found the files in the Bureau of Statistics. I know how my father died now, and how my mother died. And what happened to my brother. But all that didn’t tell me anything. I’m still looking for something, and I don’t know what it is. I was stupid to have gone. I suppose I should have asked you or Dr. Farnsworth or the colonel.”
“But you thought we wouldn’t answer,” Yoritomo said.
“I guess that’s about it. I should have asked you.”
Yoritomo shook his head. “Not necessarily. It was actually better that you looked for yourself. Besides, we could not have given you any answer if you yourself do not know the question. We still can’t.”
“I have a feeling,” Stanton said, “that you know the question as well as the answer.”
“Perhaps. Perhaps not. But there are some things that every man must find out for himself. You were right to do as you did. If you had asked Colonel Mannheim for permission, he would have let you go. He would not have asked you to go to Government City with him. We—”
“That’s the whole damned trouble!” Stanton snapped. “I’m the star boarder around here, the indispensable man. So I’m babied and I’m coddled, and when I goof off I’m patted on the back.”
“And just how did you goof off?” Yoritomo asked.
“I should have been here, ready to go with the colonel.”
“Very well. Suppose you had gone. Do you think you could have saved his life? He could have saved his own life if he’d wanted to. Instead, he specifically ordered the guard not to shoot under any circumstances. If you had been there, the results would have been the same. He would have forbidden you to do anything at all. The time is not yet ripe for you to face the Nipe. You would not have been able to protect him without disobeying his orders.”
“I might have done just that,” said Stanton.
Yoritomo was suddenly angry. “Then it is better that you were in Denver, young fool! Colonel Walther Mannheim believed that no single human life is worth the loss of the knowledge in that alien’s mind! He proved that by sacrificing his own life when that became necessary. I like to think that I would have done the same thing myself. I am certain Dr. Farnsworth would. We would rather all be dead than allow that fund of data to be lost to the rest of humanity!”
“But—but who will carry on, with him dead?” Stanton asked. “He was the one who co-ordinated everything. You and Farnsworth aren’t cut out for that sort of thing. Nor am I.”
“No,” Yoritomo said. “But that has already been taken care of. Mannheim had a replacement ready. A message is being sent out in Mannheim’s name, since we are keeping the colonel’s death secret for the time being. You are the only indispensable man, Stanton. The rest of us can easily be replaced. The lives of dozens of human beings have been sacrificed—five years of your own life have been sacrificed—to put you in the right place at the right time. And the job you are to do does not and never has included acting as bodyguard for Colonel Mannheim or anyone else. Understand?”
Stanton nodded slowly. “I understand, George. I understand.”
CHAPTER 18
The detective pushed his way out of the crowded courtroom before the rest of the crowd started to move. The members of the jury were still filing in, and he knew that no one else would leave the room until the verdict was in.
He didn’t care. He knew what the verdict ought to be. He knew also that juries had occasionally been swayed by histrionics on the part of the defense counsel, and had been persuaded to free guilty men. He knew, too, that prosecutors had railroaded innocent men. But such things as that didn’t happen often in the Belt. A man doesn’t live too long in the Belt unless he’s capable of recognizing Truth when he sees it.
But even if the wrong verdict had been brought in, there would have been nothing he could do about it now. He had done his part. He had done everything he could. He had brought them in. He had testified. All the rest of it was up to the Jury and the Court—those two enigmatic halves of Justice and Judgment.
The point was that this was the perfect time to leave the courtroom. When he reached his office, he could, if he wanted—and, he thought ruefully, he probably would want to, in spite of his pretended indifference—call up to find out what the verdict had been. But, during these few moments, all eyes were on the jury box. No one was watching who left quietly by the side door of the big courtroom.
He moved silently and with assurance in the fractional-gee field of the planetoid. One of the uniformed guards looked at him and smiled, throwing him an informal salute.
The detective returned both. “If any of those news reporters ask which way I went,” he said amiably, “tell ’em I went thataway.” He gestured over his shoulder with a thumb.
“I ain’t even seen you, Mr. Martin,” said the guard.
The detective waved his thanks and kept going. It wasn’t that he disliked newsmen. Most of them were fairly intelligent, pleasant people. But he didn’t want to be asked any questions right now. He had given them interviews aplenty during the trial, and they could use those, now that the end of the trial had lifted the news ban. They had plenty of quotations from Stan Martin without asking him what he thought of the verdict itself.
Ten minutes later, he was in his own office in the Lloyd’s Area. Helen, his secretary, was just cutting off the phone as he walked into the outer office. She flashed him a big smile.
“They just gave the verdict, Mr. Martin! Guilty all the way down the line—conspiracy, extortion, kidnapping, and all the others. The only ‘not guilty’ verdict was a minor one. They decided that Hedgepeth wasn’t involved in the actual kidnapping itself, and therefore wasn’t guilty of the physical assault of the guard.”
“They’re probably right,” the detective said, “but, as you said, it’s a minor point. It doesn’t much matter whether he was physically present at the time the boy was taken or not; he was certainly in on the plot.” He paused, frowning. “That’s over and done with, except for a possible appeal. And it’s unlikely that that would involve us, anyway. Get Mr. Pelham on the phone, will you? I’ll take it in my office.”
“The Morton case?” she asked.
“Yeah. There’s something fishy about the wreck of the spaceship Morton, and I want Pelham to let me work on it.”
He went on into his office and had barely sat down when the phone hummed. “Yes?” he said, depressing the switch.
“Mr. BenChaim would like to speak to you, sir,” Helen said formally.
“Oh?” In order to have gotten here so quickly, BenChaim, too, must have left before the verdict was delivered. He was hardly more than a minute behind the detective. And that was unusual in a man who was waiting at the trial of the kidnappers of his own son. Still, Moishe BenChaim was an unusual man.
“Tell him to come right on in,” the detective said. “Oh, and Helen…hold off on that Pelham call for a little while.” He didn’t want to be talking business while BenChaim was in the office.
“Yes, sir,” she said.
A few seconds later, the door opened, and Moishe BenChaim came in. He was not a big man, but he was broad of shoulder and broad of girth, built like a wrestler. He had a heavy, graying beard, and wore it with a patriarchal air. He was breathing rather heavily as he came through the door, and he stopped suddenly to pull a handkerchief from his pocket. He began coughing—harsh, racking, painful co
ughs that shook his heavy frame.
“Sorry,” he said after a moment. “Damn lungs. Shouldn’t try to move so fast.” He wiped his lips and put the handkerchief away.
The detective didn’t say anything. He knew that Moishe BenChaim had injured his lungs eighteen years before. An accident in space had ruptured his spacesuit, and the explosive decompression that had resulted had almost killed him. He had saved his own life by holding the torn spot with one hand and turning up the air-tank valve full blast with the other. The rough patch job had held long enough for him to get back inside his ship, but his lungs had never been the same, and his eyes were eternally bloodshot from the ruptured and distended capillaries.
“I noticed you’d slipped out of the courtroom,” he went on. “I hope you don’t mind my following you.”
“Of course not, Mr. BenChaim,” the detective said. “Sit down.”
BenChaim sat in the chair across the desk from the detective. “I didn’t wait for the verdict,” he said. “I knew the conviction was certain after you testified.”
“Thanks. My secretary got the news just before you came in. Guilty straight across the board. But your son’s testimony was a lot more telling than mine.”
“Guilty,” BenChaim repeated with satisfaction. “Naturally. What else? I admit my son’s testimony was good,” he continued; “Little Shmuela told his story like a little man up there in the witness-box. Never looked scared, never got mixed up. But Shmuela’s testimony was your testimony too, Mr. Martin. If it hadn’t been for you, he wouldn’t be here to testify, for which I’m grateful to God.” Then he leaned back and spread his hands apart in a gesture of dismissal.
“But that’s all over and done with,” he said. “I came about a different matter.” Again he paused, as if picking his words carefully. “Do you know a man named Barnabas Nguma?”
“Nguma? Yes; I met him once. Why?”
“He was in the courtroom today. He came to see me just before court convened.”
“Oh?” the detective said noncommittally.
“Yes. He claims to represent an organization on Earth which has been trying to hire you for a job there. Is that right?”
“That’s right,” the detective said warily. “What did he want with you?”
“Now, that’s a funny thing,” BenChaim said. “It seems that he’s under the impression that you turned down his job to take on this kidnapping. Is that right?”
“Not exactly,” the detective said tightly. “I was working on your son’s case before he and a couple of other men came out here to talk to me. But they’d written to me long before that.” He wondered what BenChaim was getting at. He didn’t owe any explanations to the industrialist, but, on the other hand, he couldn’t be impolite to him.
“I see,” BenChaim said, nodding his head slowly. “Like most Earthies, Mr. Nguma is suffering under a misapprehension. He seems to think that I have some sort of hold over you, that I was the one who made you turn down his job, so that you’d take my case.”
“Oh? Was he angry because you’d put your own selfish interests ahead of his unselfish ones?” the detective asked with a trace of hard sarcasm in his voice.
“Oh, no,” said BenChaim. “Oh, no. Not at all. He said he understood perfectly. But he wondered if, now that my boy had been returned safely, I might not put a little pressure on you to get you to take his case.”
“And what did you say?”
Moishe BenChaim scowled. “I told him exactly where he could head in. I told him that I had no power over you whatever, that I hadn’t hired you at all, that I didn’t even know that you were working on the case until after you rescued Shmuel. I told him that even if I held the power of life and death over you I would never lift so much as a finger against you. I told him that it was just the other way around, in fact. I told him that you have such a power over me because of what you did for Shmuel that it is I who will jump through your hoop if ordered, not the other way around. I was quite angry.” BenChaim relaxed a little before going on. “Actually, I’m sorry I blew up. He’s a well-meaning man, I think.”
“No doubt,” the detective said. “Did he tell you what the job was?”
“With most heart-rending particulars,” said BenChaim. “I was told all about how this Nipe has been killing and eating people, as if I didn’t know already. But it wasn’t until I heard him talk that I realized how scared people are back there on Earth. You know, Martin, we’re insulated out here. We don’t feel that terror, even when we read about it or see the reports on the newscasts. If everybody on Earth is as scared as that Mr. Nguma is, it’s a wonder they haven’t all panicked and taken to running around in circles.”
“As a matter of fact, Mr. BenChaim,” the detective said levelly, “they have begun to do just that. Mr. Nguma and his friends have been after me for a long time to take their job. They have pulled every trick they can think of—including this last one with you—to get me to go back to Earth and find that monster. I have refused them so often and so firmly that they are convinced I’m afraid to tackle the Nipe. They are convinced that I know I’ll fail. And yet they keep after me. If that isn’t running around in circles, it’ll do until a better example comes along.”
“They’re out of their minds,” BenChaim said flatly. “Of course no man in his right mind would try to face down that thing! It would be as silly as trying to outrun a bullet or do arithmetic faster than a computer. That’s common sense. That’s showing a healthy respect for the Nipe—not fear. At least, not fear in the way that those men are afraid.”
Suddenly the detective knew why the industrialist had come. He knew that Moishe BenChaim wanted to reassure Stanley Martin, to tell him that he was doing the sensible thing in turning down so dangerous an assignment. He could almost have predicted word for word what BenChaim was going to say next.
“Nguma may be here at any minute,” said the industrialist. “He told me that he was going to come as soon as the trial was over. What are you going to tell him this time? I know it’s none of my business, but I’m asking, just the same.”
“I’m going to tell him no,” the detective said. “I will not return to Earth for any reason whatever.”
“Good,” said BenChaim. “Good. That’s the smart thing to do. And don’t let him buffalo you. We know you out here in the Belt, Martin. I’ve been out here for thirty years, and I know what kind of guts it takes to do the things you’ve done. Those men don’t understand space. Nobody understands space until he’s lived in it and worked in it, and had cold death only a fraction of an inch away from his skin for hours and days at a time. No matter what those Earthies say, we know you’ve got more guts than anybody else in the Belt—to say nothing of those stay-at-homes on Earth.”
“Thank you. I appreciate that,” the detective said. But they were only words. He knew that BenChaim meant exactly what he said—or thought he meant it. But he also knew that BenChaim and others would always wonder why he had turned the job down.
God! he thought, I wish I knew! The thought was only momentary. Then, as it had done so many times before, his mind veered away from the dangerous subject.
Moishe BenChaim stood up. “Well, that’s all I had to say, Mr. Martin. I just wanted to warn you that that man might be coming around and to tell you how I felt. Remember what I said about jumping through a hoop. Any time you need me, for anything at all, you just say so. Understand?”
“I understand,” the detective said, forcing a smile. He rose and shook the industrialist’s outstretched hand. “And thanks again,” he added.
After BenChaim had gone, the detective sat thinking, toying with a pencil on his desk. Moishe BenChaim, like so many others in the Belt, had come out with nothing but his brain and his two hands and the equipment necessary to keep him alive. In thirty years, he had parlayed that into one of the biggest fortunes in the Solar System. It was men like that whose respect he valued, and, on the surface, he apparently had that respect. But refusing the Nipe job would dull
the bright sheen of that respect, and he knew it. BenChaim had talked about how foolish it would be to try to beat the Nipe in a face-to-face encounter, but he hadn’t meant it. He knew perfectly well that all Stanley Martin would be expected to do would be to find out where the Nipe’s hideout was. Once that had been accomplished, men and machines—most especially machines—could wipe the monster from the face of the Earth. One well-placed bomb would do it, if the authorities only knew where to place that bomb. If only—
Again his mind veered away, refusing to consider the Nipe too carefully or too closely.
The intercom on his desk hummed, and he pressed the switch.
“Yes, Helen?”
“That Mr. Nguma was here while Mr. BenChaim was with you, Mr. Martin. I followed your instructions and told him that you would not see him.”
“Fine. Thanks, Helen.”
“Also, there’s a radiogram for you from Earth.”
“If it’s from one of Nguma’s colleagues,” the detective said, “I don’t want to see it. File it in the cylindrical file—under W.”
“I don’t think it is,” the secretary said doubtfully. “I can’t make any sense out of it. I’d better bring it in.”
“Okay. And then put that call through to Pelham. I want to get going on that Morton spaceship wrecking. I’m getting itchy for action.”
She brought in the radiogram and put it on his desk before calling Pelham. She had already read it, of course. It was her job to read such things.
The detective picked up the sheet of paper and read it.
THE OPERATION IS ABOUT TO BEGIN. I NEED THE OTHER HALF OF MY FORCEPS. COME HOME AND JOIN THE BIG PARADE.
MANNHEIM
It took a second for the words to really impress themselves on his mind. He read them over again.
And the veil began to drop from the closed-off part of his mind.
Memories began to swarm back into his mind—memories that had been walled off and kept away from his conscious mind by the hypnotic suggestion implanted so long ago.
The Randall Garrett Megapack Page 87
