Masters of the Galaxy

by Mike Resnick (ed)

  He finally shut up. The trip was uneventful—almost all trips are uneventful these days—and we touched down on Rabol sixteen hours later.

  The air was thin, the sun was so far away that it seemed like twilight even though it was midday, and the gravity was 1.23 Standard, which meant that you felt like you were carrying a forty-pound pack on your back.

  There were a few humans in the spaceport, as well as some Mollutei and a tall, long-legged Domarian, but mostly there were hundreds of little round Rabolians scurrying all over the place.

  As we approached the Customs booth, I pulled out my passport disk.

  “Put it away, Jacob Masters,” said the Rabolian working the booth. “Your passport is in order, but you have no business on Rabol. You will remain here while Andrew Vanderwycke is allowed to pass through Customs. The Gromite Crozchziim will stay here with you.”

  “You got all that out of my mind in five seconds?” I said.

  “Yes,” he replied. “I apologize for not reading it faster, but I am being bombarded by thoughts from the Customs booths on each side of me.”

  “If you’re that good, why don’t you just tell Andy what he needs to know right now, and we’ll get back on the ship before it can take off again.”

  “I would do irreparable harm to his mind if I were to probe as deeply as required,” answered the Customs officer. “He must go to an expert who can extract the necessary information without damaging him.”

  “Who do I see?” asked Andy, who was standing behind me.

  “I have already made the appointment,” came the answer. “Please pass through, and you will find an escort waiting to take you there.”

  The kid did as he was told, and Crunchtime and I went to a waiting area. Since this wasn’t a Democracy planet, humans and non-humans weren’t segregated, and we sat down together.

  “How long do you think this will take?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. But given how fast this guy read our minds, it could be just a few minutes.” I looked back at the Customs official. “I’m surprised he was so polite.”

  “Why should that surprise you?”

  “Because on a world of telepaths, why would anyone learn manners or white lies or any of the social graces when everyone knows exactly what you’re really thinking?” I replied. “I’ll bet it’s probably just a courtesy for off-worlders. They probably insulted the first few, read their minds, and figured out what was required.”

  “Why would Duristan leave Rabol to take a job in a sideshow?” mused Crunchtime.

  “Maybe Mrs. Duristan didn’t like what he was thinking every time a pretty young Rabolian twitched by,” I said. “Maybe he had an urge to cheat at poker. Maybe he just wondered what the rest of the galaxy looked like; after all, a traveling carnival sees an awful lot of it.” I got to my feet. “Wait here.”

  “Where are you going?” he asked.

  “To the subspace sending station.”

  When I got there I fed Beatrice Vanderwycke’s code into the machine, and a couple of minutes later her holograph appeared before me. It kept trying to break up but somehow preserved its integrity.

  “Mr. Masters,” she said to my image. “You were supposed to report to me at regular intervals.”

  “Every fourth or fifth day,” I said smoothly. “And here I am.”

  “I want a progress report.”

  “I’ve got him.”

  “Excellent. How soon can you have him here?”

  “Five days, maybe four,” I said. “It depends on what kind of connections I can make.”

  “Why so long?”

  “It’s very complicated. I’ll explain when we get there.”

  “I’ll see you then.”

  She broke the connection.

  “He’s in fine health,” I said sardonically to the spot where her image had been. “I was sure you’d be concerned.”

  I returned to Crunchtime and sat down next to him.

  “You’ll be pleased to know that Mrs. Vanderwycke expressed no interest in you whatsoever,” I said. “She never even mentioned your name.”

  “You contacted her?” he said, surprised.

  “Just now.”

  “But she’s been trying to have Andy killed!” he said. “Now she’ll be prepared for him when he returns to Odysseus!”

  “I told her we’d be there in four or five days,” I explained. “After I checked the flight schedule. If Andy can get back here in the next hour, we can get on a ship to Pollux IV, transfer to one bound for the Iliad system, and be there in less than a day. If she’s setting up a trap, she’s going to be three days late.”

  “I see,” he said, his eyes widening. “It’s probably just as well that we remain isolated from the Rabolian population. If telepaths cannot lie, observing the way your brain works might drive them all mad.”

  “I assume that’s a compliment,” I said dryly.

  He was silent for so long that I began wondering if it really was a compliment after all. Then he nudged me and pointed across the spaceport huge lobby. “Here he comes.”

  The kid was walking toward us, accompanied by a Rabolian, who left him at the entrance to the waiting area. Andy came over and sat down, his face an expressionless mask.

  “How did it go?” I asked.

  “It was an…unusual…experience,” he said. “I hope I never under-go anything like it again.”

  “Did it hurt much?”

  “Not the way you mean,” he said. “I learned what I needed to learn.” He shuddered. “I also learned things no one should have to know about themselves.”

  He refused to say any more about it, and we soon boarded the ship to the Pollux system. We had a four-hour layover there, and I realized I hadn’t eaten since we’d left Aristides, so we stopped at a restaurant in the spaceport. They didn’t mind that Crunchtime was with us, but the chairs couldn’t accommodate him, so he waited outside. I wanted a big, thick steak, but when I saw the prices—even mutated cattle couldn’t metabolize the stuff that passed for grass on Pollux IV, and all their beef was imported—I settled for a soya substitute instead. I kept telling myself that it tasted just like grade-A prime beef, but my stomach knew I was lying. Andy just wanted water, and when they insisted that he had to order something if he was going to sit there, I told him to order a beer and I drank it when it arrived.

  Then we waited for the boarding call, and finally clambered onto the ship that would take us back to Odysseus. After we’d been traveling for a couple of hours, I turned to Andy. A cartoon holo was running on his entertainment center, but he was staring through it, not at it.

  “Are you going to be okay, kid?” I asked.

  “Yes, I’m fine.”

  “We don’t have to go right to your home,” I continued. “We could go to the police first, maybe bring some of them along.”

  “We’ll have all the back-up we need,” said Andy. “You don’t think my father is going to let anyone kill me before I prove he didn’t commit that murder on Odysseus, do you?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “I know he doesn’t give a damn about me,” he continued. “The only reason he wants me alive is to clear him so he can go back to Odysseus and pick up whatever he left behind from some robbery.”

  “How come he never asked you to get it and bring it to him?” I asked.

  “He doesn’t trust me,” said the kid. “He doesn’t trust anyone.” He paused. “Before we touch down, I’ll have my pocket computer prepare a cube proving that my father was innocent, that my mother committed the murder he’s wanted for and a lot worse crimes as well. But—”

  “I know,” I interrupted. “I won’t turn it over to your dad until after you see your mother, or he won’t have any reason to protect you.”

  He looked relieved that we were on the same page. “Right.”

  “How are you holding up, kid?” I asked him.

  “I’m not afraid,” he said calmly. “For the first time in my life, I’m not afraid of h
er. Besides,” he added, “you saved my life at the carnival on Port Samarkand, and again at the spaceport. You’ll save it on Odysseus if you have to.”

  I wanted to deny it, but I knew deep down he was right. Maybe I wasn’t a cop any longer, but I still had an urge to see justice done. I’d do whatever I could to keep him alive, regardless of the risk. I began to really resent the guardian angel business.

  He stopped talking, and I closed my eyes. I was just going to rest them for a moment, but the next thing I knew he was nudging me and telling me that we’d entered Odysseus’ stratosphere.

  “Here,” he said, slipping a cube into my pocket. “I trust you to know when and how to use it.”

  “I appreciate your trust, but weren’t you going to make half a dozen copies and ship them to various lock boxes around the Democracy?” I asked.

  “I’ve been thinking about it,” he said. “The information the cube contains is my insurance only while it’s a threat, something to hold over her. If someone actually releases it, she’ll go to jail, but she’s vindictive enough to put a hit out on me. One cube’s as good as twenty to make her leave me alone, and it’s probably safer for me.”

  “That’s some family you got yourself, kid,” I said.

  “My father’s not so bad,” he replied.

  Hatchet Ben Jeffries, extortionist and bank robber and murderer, Hatchet Ben who considered his son a useless weakling worth keeping alive only until he could get his hands on whatever he’d left behind on Odysseus, wasn’t so bad compared to his mother. It made me understand why he didn’t have any friends, why the only thing he trusted was an alien with an unpronounceable name.

  The ship touched down in a few more minutes, and I turned to the kid as we got off. “We’re not going to your mother’s house,” I said. “It’s too dangerous.”

  “Why?” he replied. “She’s not going to do a thing until she finds out what I know and who I’ve told.”

  “Just the same, I want to meet her on neutral ground. She may have ways of extracting the information in private.”

  “A restaurant?” he suggested.

  I considered it. “No, too easy for her to pay off the owner, or plant her men at every nearby table.” I looked at the big Welcome to Odysseus screen that greeted newcomers with a list of the day’s major events. “Okay,” I said, “there’s a murderball game going on right now in the stadium. That’s about two miles from here. I’ll tell her to meet us outside the box office in”—I checked the starting time—”about an hour. The game figures to be over by then, and there’ll be thousands of people streaming out.”

  “You really think I need this kind of protection?” he asked.

  “Kid, I don’t even know if this will be adequate, but it’s better than going to your home.”

  “All right,” he consented. “You’re the boss—at least, until I see her face-to-face.”

  I went to a vidphone booth and called Beatrice Vanderwycke. When she recognized me her image registered surprise.

  “Mr. Masters,” she said. “I hadn’t expected to hear from you for three more days. Where are you?”

  “At the Odysseus spaceport.”

  “Excellent! How soon can I expect you here?”

  “There’s been a change of plans,” I said. “We’re not coming to the house.”

  “I am paying you to find my son and deliver him to me, Mr. Masters. That was our agreement.”

  “I found him, and I’m going to deliver him,” I replied. “But there was nothing in our agreement that stipulated I had to return him to your home.”

  “Where will you deliver him?”

  “The box office at the murderball stadium, one hour from now,” I said. “And Mrs. Vanderwycke?”

  “Yes?”

  “I want to be paid in cash.”

  She gave me a look that said she’d rather pay me in red-hot pokers. “I’ll be there,” she said, and broke the connection.

  Since we had an hour, we began walking to the stadium. I stopped when we were about a quarter-mile away from it.

  “What now?” asked Andy.

  “No crowd,” I pointed out. “The game hasn’t let out yet. We’d be sitting ducks if we went there now.”

  We ducked into a coffee shop. They wouldn’t serve Crunchtime at our table, but there was an alien section, and he sat there.

  “I don’t see anyone,” said Andy, staring at the stadium through a window.

  “Neither do I.”

  “You look disappointed.”

  “I am. Not surprised, just disappointed.”

  “Why to both?”

  “I assume any men your mother hired are too good to be spotted, and I know your dad’s got nothing but professionals on his payroll. So I’m not surprised that I can’t find them—but I wish I knew where they were. Your mother’s muscle may not be here yet—after all, she just found out we were on the planet forty-five minutes ago—but I have to assume your father has had some men tailing us since we came through Customs. I just want to know where everyone is so I know when and where to duck.”

  “Maybe being in a crowd will scare them off,” he said.

  “Kid, the safest place to kill someone is in the middle of a crowd,” I told him. “They’ll give the cops a hundred different descriptions of you, and that’s if they don’t start accusing each other first.”

  “I never thought of that.”

  “You never had to. And the best way to kill someone in a crowd or anywhere else is to crack his head open with a blunt instrument. Not much ballistics can do with a club or a hammer.”

  “So much for all those locked-room mysteries I used to watch,” he said with a smile.

  “They’re good entertainment,” I said. “But mighty few murders are committed by left-handed tightrope-walking midgets. They’re commit-ted by professionals who do it for a living and know all the angles.”

  Suddenly we could hear a huge roar, and then, about a minute later, the first people began leaving the stadium. Soon there were more and more, a veritable flood of Men and aliens.

  “Okay,” I said, getting to my feet. “Let me make a pit stop and then we’ll go.”

  I entered the men’s room, pulled Andy’s cube out of my pocket, and hid it inside a ventilation shaft where the wall joined the ceiling. If Beatrice Vanderwycke’s men got the drop on me, they weren’t going to find it when they frisked me.

  I returned to the table, left some money on it, told Andy to get up, and signaled Crunchtime to join us. The three of us left the restaurant and approached the stadium. Making any progress against all those people who were in such a hurry to get home was like swimming upstream against a raging river, but we finally made it.

  “I don’t see her,” said Andy as he stood in front of a ticket booth.

  “She’ll be here,” I said with absolute certainty.

  “Maybe she can’t see us where we’re standing,” he said.

  “Then she’ll find us. Stay right where you are, with your back against the booth. If anything’s going to happen, let’s make sure it happens in front of us.”

  And then, suddenly, she was there. I never saw her approaching us, but she was standing maybe six feet away, staring coldly at the kid.

  “You’ve put me to a lot of trouble, Andrew,” she said.

  “You put me to more,” he answered. “Years and years of it.” His voice quavered just a bit. He was still scared of her, but he wasn’t going to back off. I was proud of him. “But it’s over now,” he continued. “My nightmares are gone”—he forced a smile—”and yours are about to begin.”

  “I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about, Andrew,” she said. “You’re back, and that’s all that matters. Your room is ready for you. Let’s go home.”

  The crowd was getting thicker. It was difficult to hear over the noise. A man in a gray outfit jostled against me and apologized.

  “It won’t work, Mother,” he said. “I know.”

  “What do you think y
ou know?” she asked, her face reflecting her contempt for him.

  “I know who you killed, I know how you made it look like Father did it, I know where you hid the body, and I know that even after all these years there’s enough DNA evidence to convict you.”

  “That’s a very dangerous thing to say, even to a loving mother,” replied Beatrice Vanderwycke.

  “Are you threatening me, Mother?” said Andy. “Because if you are, you should know that if anything happens to me, Jake will turn everything over to the police.”

  She caught it instantly.

  You damned fool! I thought. You just told her that you and I are the only ones with the proof!

  She turned to the man in the gray outfit, who was still standing near us.

  “Kill them,” she said calmly.

  He pulled a pulse gun, but before he could fire it a laser beam caught him in the chest and hurled him backward. I looked around. It was the small guy from Jeffries’ house. Before I could nod a thanks he keeled over, and suddenly there was a small firefight going on between her men and Jeffries’ men.

  People in the crowd started screaming and running. A couple of kids got knocked down, and one got trampled pretty badly. So did an old man. There was confusion everywhere—and suddenly there was a small screecher in her hand, and it was aimed at me.

  “No!” cried Andy. He dove for the weapon, but she was already pushing the firing mechanism, and he got the full force of the solid sound on his left temple.

  He dropped like a brick, and she turned to fire at me, but I had my burner out, and I put a black bubbling hole right between her cold hate-filled eyes.

  The instant Andy and his mother fell to the ground the firefight stopped. No matter which side they were on, they seemed to know that everything was over. If they worked for Jeffries, they’d failed to save his son, and if they worked for Beatrice Vanderwycke, they hadn’t been able to protect her.

  Andy twitched feebly, and I knelt down next to him.

  “Crunchtime, he’s alive!” I yelled. “Get some help!”

  There was no answer. I turned to look for him, and saw the Gromite lying on the ground in a pool of pink blood. He’d stopped a shot that was meant for mother or son, it no longer mattered which.