David Falkayn: Star Trader (Technic Civlization)

by Poul Anderson

  "Playback," van Rijn ordered. "Now. Before you go on." He watched unblinkingly, as the blond young man spoke his piece and signed off. "By damn, you have right, Chee Lan. He should at least grin and ask you give his love to three or four girls."

  "We've been pestered by one, for certain," the Cynthian declared. "A spy set on him, who found she couldn't cope with his technique or whatever the deuce he's got. Last call, she actually admitted she'd been on a job, and blubbered she was sorry and she'd never, never, never—you can reconstruct the sequence."

  "Play her anyhow." Veronica wept. " Ja, a bouncy wench there. Maybe I interview her personal, ho-ho!

  Somebody got to. Such a chance to get a look inside whoever hired her!" Van Rijn sobered. "What happened next?"

  "We fretted," Chee said. "At last even this big lard statue of a saint here decided that enough was too furious much. We marched into the SI office itself and said if we didn't get a more satisfactory explanation, from Dave himself, we'd start disassembling their computers. With a pipe wrench. They quacked about the covenant, not to mention the civil police, but in the end they promised he'd phone us." Grimly: "He did. Here's the record."

  The conversation was long. Chee yelled, Adzel expostulated, Falkayn stayed deadpan and unshakable.

  "—I am sorry. You may never guess how sorry I am, old friends. But nobody gets a choice about how the lightning's going to strike him. Thea's my woman, and there's an end on the matter.

  "We'll probably go aroving after we get married. I'll be working for SI. But only in a technical sense. Because what we're really after, what's keeping me here, is something bigger, more fundamental to the whole future, than—no. I can't say more. Not yet. But think about making liaison with a genuinely superior race. The race that's been dreamed about for centuries, and never found—the Elders, the Wise Ones, the evolutionary step beyond us—

  "—Yes!" A flicker of irritation. "Naturally SI will refund Solar S & L's wretched payments. Maybe SI should double the sum. Because a fact that I supplied was what started our whole chain of discovery. Though what possible reward could match the service?

  "—Good-bye. Good faring."

  Silence dwelt, under the wash of sea waves and whisper of stars. Until van Rijn shook himself, animal fashion, and said, "You took into space and called me today when I got available."

  "What else could we do?" Adzel groaned. "David may be under psychocontrol. We suspect it, Chee and I. But we have no proof. For anyone who does not know him personally, the weight of credibility is overwhelming on the opposite side, so great that I myself can reach no firm conclusion about what has really happened. More is involved than Serendipity's established reputation. There is the entire covenant. Members of the League do not kidnap and drug each other's agents. Not ever!"

  "We did ask the Lunar police about a warrant," Chee said. She jerked her tail at the Wodenite. "Tin Pan Buddha insisted. We were laughed at. Literally. We can't propose a League action—strike first, argue with the law afterward—not us. We aren't on the Council. You are."

  "I can propose it," van Rijn said carefully. "After a month's wringle-wrangle, I get voted no. They won't believe either, SI would do something so bad like that, for some sternly commercial reason."

  "I doubt if we have a month, regardless," Chee said. "Think. Suppose Dave has been brainscrubbed. They'll've done it to keep him from reporting to you what he learned from their damned machine. They'll pump him for information and advice too. Might as well. But he is evidence against them. Any medic can identify his condition and cure it. So as soon as possible—or as soon as necessary—they'll get rid of the evidence. Maybe send him off in a spaceship, with his new fiançée to control him. Maybe kill him and disintegrate the body. I don't see where Adzel and I had any alternative except to investigate as we did. Nevertheless, our investigations will probably cause SI to speed up whatever timetable it's laid out for Captain Falkayn."

  Van Rijn smoked through an entire minute. Then: "Your ship is loaded for bear, also elephant and walrus. You could maybe blast in, you two, and snatch him?"

  "Maybe," Adzel said. "The defenses are unknown. It would be an act of piracy."

  "Unless he was a prisoner. In what case, we can curry ruffled fur afterward. I bet curried fur tastes terrible. But you turn into heroes."

  "What if he is there voluntarily?"

  "You turn into pumpkins."

  "If we strike, we risk his life," said Adzel. "Quite possibly, if he is not a prisoner, we take several innocent lives. We are less concerned with our legal status than with our shipmate. But however deep our affection for him, he is of another civilization, another species, yes, a wholly different evolution. We cannot tell whether he was in a normal state when he called us. He acted peculiarly, true. But might that have been due to the emotion known as love? Coupled, perhaps, with a sense of guilt at breaking his contract? You are human, we are not. We appeal to your judgment."

  "And mix me—old, tired, bothered, sorrowful me, that wants nothing except peace and a little, little profit—you mix me right in with the glue," van Rijn protested.

  Adzel regarded him steadily. "Yes, sir. If you authorize us to attack, you commit yourself and everything you own, for the sake of one man who may not even need help. We realize that." Van Rijn drew on his cigar till the end glowed volcanic. He pitched it aside. "Hokay," he growled. "Is a flousy boss does not stand by his people. We plan a raid, us, ha?" He tossed off his remaining beer and threw the tankard to the deck. "God damn," he bellowed, "I wish I was going along!"

  VII

  Adzel paused at the airlock. "You will be careful, won't you?" he asked. Chee bristled. "You're the one to worry about, running around without a keeper. Watch yourself, you oversized clatterbrain." She blinked. "Rats and roaches! Something in my eyes. Get started—out of my way."

  Adzel closed his faceplate. Encased in space armor, he could just fit inside the lock. He must wait until he had cycled through before securing his equipment on his back. It included a small, swivel-mounted automatic cannon.

  Muddlin' Through glided from him, low above soaring, jagged desolation. Mottled paint made her hard to see against that patchwork of blinding noon and ink-black shadow. When past the horizon, she climbed.

  Adzel stayed patiently put until the seething in his radio earplugs was broken by the Cynthian's voice:

  "Hello, do you read me?"

  "Like a primer," he said. Echoes filled his helmet. He was aware of the mass he carried, protective but heavy; of the smells, machine and organic, already accumulating; of temperature that began to mount and prickle him under the scales.

  "Good. This beam's locked onto you, then. I'm stabilized in position, about a hundred and fifty kilometers up. No radar has fingered me yet. Maybe none will. All check, sir?"

  " Ja. " Van Rijn's words, relayed from a hired maser in Lunograd, sounded less distinct. "I have talked with the police chief here and he is not suspecting. I got my boys set to start a fracas that will make distractions. I got a judge ready to hand out injunctions if I tell him. But he is not a very high judge, even if he is expensive like Beluga caviar, so he can't make long stalls either. Let the Lunar federal police mix in this affair and we got troubles. Ed Garver would sell the soul he hasn't got to jail us. You better be quick like kissing a viper. Now I go aboard my own boat, my friends, and light candles for you in the shrine there, to St. Dismas, and St. Nicholas, and especial to St. George, by damn." Adzel couldn't help remarking, "In my studies of Terrestrial culture, I have encountered mention of that latter personage. But did not the Church itself, as far back as the twentieth century, decide he was mythical?"

  "Bah," said van Rijn loftily. "They got no faith. I need a good fighting saint, who says God can't improve the past and make me one?"

  Then there was no time, or breath, or thought for anything except speed. Adzel could have gone quicker and easier on a gravsled or some such vehicle. But the radiations would have given him away. Afoot, he could come much near
er before detection was certain. He bounded up the Alpine slopes, over razorback ridges, down into ravines and out their other sides, around crater walls and crags. His heart slugged, his lungs strained, in deep steady rhythm. He used the forward tendency of his mass—great inertia at low weight—and the natural pendulum-periods of his legs, to drive himself. Sometimes he overleaped obstacles, soaring in an arc and landing with an impact that beat through his bones. He kept to the shade wherever possible. But pitilessly, at each exposure to sunlight, heat mounted within his camouflaged armor faster than his minimal cooling system could shed it. Glare filters did not entirely protect his eyes from the raw sun-dazzle. No human could have done what he did—hardly anyone, indeed, of any race, except the children of a fiercer star than Sol and a vaster planet than Earth. Twice he crouched where he could and let a patrol boat slip overhead. After an hour, he wormed his way from shadow to shadow, evading a watchpost whose radar and guns stood skeletal against the sky. And he won to the final peak unheralded.

  The castle loomed at the end of an upward road, black witch-hatted towers above battlemented walls. With no further chance of concealment, Adzel started openly along the path. For a moment, the spatial silence pressed in so huge that it well-nigh smothered pulse, breath, airpump, foot-thuds. Then: "Who goes there? Halt!" on the standard band.

  "A visitor," Adzel replied without slacking his even trot. "I have an urgent matter to discuss and earnestly request admittance."

  "Who are you? How did you get here?" The voice was female human, accented, and shrill with agitation.

  "Stop, I tell you! This is private property. No trespassing."

  "I humbly beg pardon, but I really must insist on being received."

  "Go back. You will find a gatehouse at the foot of the road. You may shelter there and tell me what you have to say."

  "Thank you for your kind offer." Adzel kept advancing. "Freelady . . . ah . . . Beldaniel, I believe? It is my understanding that your partners are presently at their office. Please correct me if I am wrong."

  "I said go back!" she screamed. "Or I open fire! I have the right. You have been warned."

  "Actually, my business is with Captain Falkayn." Adzel proceeded. He was quite near the main portal. Its outer valve bulked broad in the fused-stone wall. "If you will be good enough to inform him that I wish to talk to him, viva voce, we can certainly hold our discussion outdoors. Permit me to introduce myself. I am one of his teammates. My claim upon his attention therefore takes precedence over the seclusion of your home. But I have no real wish to intrude, Freelady."

  "You're not his companion. Not any more. He resigned. He spoke to you himself. He does not want to see you."

  "With profoundest regret and sincerest apologies for any inconvenience caused, I am compelled to require a direct confrontation."

  "He . . . he isn't here. I will have him call you later."

  "Since you may conceivably be in error as to his whereabouts, Freelady, perhaps you will graciously allow me to search your premises?"

  "No! This is your last warning! Stop this instant or you'll be killed!" Adzel obeyed; but within the armor, his muscles bunched. His left hand worked the cannon control. In his palm lay a tiny telescreen whose cross hairs centered on the same view as the muzzle. His right hand loosened his blast pistol in its holster.

  "Freelady," he said, "violence and coercion are deplorable. Do you realize how much merit you have lost? I beg of you—"

  "Go back!" Half hysterical, the voice broke across. "I'll give you ten seconds to turn around and start downhill. One. Two."

  "I was afraid of this." Adzel sighed. And he sprang—but forward. His cannon flung three shaped charges at the main gate. Fire spurted, smoke puffed, shrapnel flew, eerily soundless except for a quiver through the ground.

  Two energy beams flashed at him, out of the turrets that flanked the entry port. He had already bounded aside. His cannon hammered. One emplacement went down in a landslide of rubble. Smoke and dust whirled, veiling him from the other. By the time it had settled, he was up to the wall, beneath the gun's reach.

  The outer valve sagged, twisted metal. "I'm headed in," he said to Chee Lan, and fired through the chamber. A single shell tore loose the second, less massive barrier. Air gushed forth, momentarily white as moisture froze, vanishing as fog dissipated under the cruel sun.

  Inside, an illumination now undiffused fell in puddles on a disarrayed antechamber. Through its shadows, he noticed a few pictures and a brutally massive statue. The artistic conventions were foreign to anything he had encountered in all his wanderings. He paid scant attention. Which way to David, in this damned warren? Like a great steel hound, he cast about for clues. Two hallways led off in opposite directions. But one held empty rooms; the chambers fronting on the other were furnished, albeit sparsely. Hm, the builders plan on enlarging the castle's population sometime. But with whom, or what? He galloped down the inhabited corridor. Before long he encountered a bulkhead that had automatically closed when pressure dropped.

  Beldaniel's retainers were probably on the other side of it, spacesuited, expecting to give him a full barrage when he cracked through. She herself was no doubt on the phone, informing her partners in Lunograd of the invasion. With luck and management, van Rijn could tie up the police for a while. They must be kept off, because they were bound to act against the aggressor, Adzel. No matter what allegations he made, they would not ransack the castle until warrants had been issued. By that time, if it ever came, the Serendipity gang could have covered their tracks as regarded Falkayn in any of numerous ways.

  But Beldaniel herself might attempt that, if Adzel didn't get busy. The Wodenite retreated to the foreroom and unlimbered his working gear. No doubt another chamber, belonging to the adjacent airseal section, lay behind this one. Though gas-tight, the interior construction was nowhere near as ponderous as the outworks. What he must do was enter unnoticed. He spread out a plastic bubblecloth, stood on it, and stuck its edges to the wall. His cutting torch flared. He soon made a hole, and waited until air had leaked through and inflated to full pressure the tent that now enclosed him. Finishing the incision, he removed the panel he had burned out and stepped into an apartment.

  It was furnished with depressing austerity. He took a moment to pull the door off a closet—yes, female garb—and inspect a bookshelf. Many volumes were in a format and symbology he did not recognize; others, in Anglic, were texts describing human institutions for the benefit of visiting extraterrestrials. Boddhisattva! What sort of background did this outfit have, anyway?

  He opened his faceplate, removed an earplug, and cautiously stuck his muzzle out into the hall. Clanks and rattles came to him from around a corner where the bulkhead must be. Hoarse words followed. The servants hadn't closed their helmets yet. . . . They were from several scarcely civilized planets, and no doubt even those who were not professional guards were trained in the use of modern weapons as well as household machinery. Cat-silent in his own armor, Adzel went the opposite way. This room, that room, nothing. Confound it—yes, I might go so far as to say curse it—David must be somewhere near. . . . Hold! His wilderness-trained hearing had picked up the least of sounds. He entered a boudoir and activated its exterior scanner.

  A woman went by, tall, slacksuited, vigorous-looking in a lean fashion. Her face was white and tense, her breath rapid. From van Rijn's briefing, Adzel recognized Thea Beldaniel. She passed. Had she looked behind her, she would have seen four and a half meters of dragon following on tiptoe. She came to a door and flung it wide. Adzel peeked around the jamb. Falkayn sat in the chamber beyond, slumped into a lounger. The woman hurried to him and shook him. "Wake up!" she cried. "Oh, hurry!"

  "Huh? Uh. Whuzza?" Falkayn stirred. His voice was dull, his expression dead.

  "Come along, darling. We must get out of here."

  "Uhhh. . . ." Falkayn shambled to his feet.

  "Come, I say!" She tugged at his arm. He obeyed like a sleepwalker. "The tunnel to the spaceport. We'
re off for a, a little trip, my dear. But run!"

  Adzel identified the symptoms. Brainscrub drugs, yes, in their entire ghastliness. You submerged the victim into a gray dream where he was nothing but what you told him to be. You could focus an encephaloductor beam on his head and a subsonic carrier wave on his middle ear. His drowned self could not resist the pulses thus generated; he would carry out whatever he was told, looking and sounding almost normal if you operated him skillfully but in truth a marionette. Otherwise he would simply remain where you stowed him.

  In time, you could remodel his personality.

  Adzel trod full into the entrance. "Now that is too bloody much!" he roared. Thea Beldaniel sprang back. Her scream rose, went on and on. Falkayn stood hunched. A yell answered, through the hallways. My mistake, Adzel realized. Perhaps not avoidable. But the guards have been summoned, and they have more armament than I do. Best we escape while we may.

  Nonetheless, van Rijn's orders had been flat and loud. "You get films of our young man, right away, and you take blood and spit samples, before anything else. Or I take them off you, hear me, and not in so polite a place neither!" It seemed foolish to the Wodenite, when death must arrive in a minute or two. But so rarely did the old man issue so inflexible a directive that Adzel decided he'd better obey.