Un-Man and Other Novellas

by Poul Anderson

  Only—only—Naysmith’s heart leaped wildly within him. He looked away from the chauffeur-guard, up into the eyes of Arnold Besser.

  “Now, then.” The chief stood before his prisoners, hands on hips, staring impersonally at them but with a faint shiver running beneath his pale skin. “I want to know you people’s real motive in giving yourselves up. I’ve studied your ’vised dossiers, such as they are, on the way here, so you needn’t repeat the obvious. I want to know everything else.”

  ‘The quality of mercy is not strained.’ ” murmured Lampi. Naysmith’s mind continued the lovely words. He needed their comfort, for here was death.

  “The issues are too large and urgent for sparring,” said Besser. There was a chill in his voice as he turned to Lewin. "We have four of them here, and presumably each of them knows what the others know. So we can try four different approaches. Suggestions?”

  “Lobotomy on one,” answered the physician promptly. "We can remove that explosive detonator at the same time, of course. But it will take a few days before he can be questioned, even under the best conditions, and perhaps there has been some precaution taken so that the subject will die. We can try physical methods immediately on two of them, in the presence of each other. We had better save a fourth—just in case.”

  “Very well.” Besser’s gaze went a white-jacketed man behind the prisoners. “You are the surgeon here. Take one away and get to work on his brain.”

  The doctor nodded and began to wheel Martinez’ chair out of the room. Lewin started a chlorine generator. The chauifeur-guard leaned against a table, watching with flat blank eyes.

  The end? Goodnight, then, world, sun and moon and wind in the heavens. Goodnight, Jeanne.

  A siren hooted. It shrilled up and down a saw-edged scale, ringing in metal and glass and human bones. Besser whirled toward a communicator. Wade stood heavy and paralyzed. Jennings screamed.

  The room shivered, and they heard the dull crumping of an explosion. The door opened and a man stumbled in, shouting something. His words drowned in the rising whistle and bellow of rocket missiles.

  Suddenly there was a magnum gun in the chauffeur’s hand. It spewed a rain of slugs as he crouched, swinging it around the chamber. Naysmith saw Besser’s head explode. Two of the guards had guns halfway out when the chauffeur cut them down.

  The communicator chattered up on the wall, screaming something hysterical about an air attack. The chauffeur was already across to the door switch. He closed and locked the barrier, jumped over Wade’s body, and grabbed for a surgical saw. It bit at the straps holding Naysmith, drawing a little blood. Lampi, Martinez, and Villareal were whooping aloud.

  The chauffeur spoke in rapid Brazilo-Portuguese: “I’ll get you free. Then take some weapons and be ready to fight. They may attack us in here, I don’t know. But there will be paratroops landing as soon as our air strength has reduced their defenses. We should be able to hold out till then.”

  It had worked. The incredible, desperate, precarious plan had worked. Besser, in alarm and uncertainty, had gone personally to his secret headquarters. He had been piloted by his trusted gunman as usual. Only—Fourre’s office would long have known about that pilot, studied him, prepared a surgically disguised duplicate from a Brazilian Un-man and held this agent in reserve. When Christian’s message came, the chauffeur had been taken care of and the Un-man had replaced him—and been able to slip a radio tracer into Besser’s jet—a tracer which the Rio-based U.N. police had followed.

  And now they had the base!

  Naysmith flung himself out of the chair and snatched a gun off the floor. He exchanged a glance with his rescuer, a brief warm glance of kinship and comradeship and belongingness. Even under the disguise and the carefully learned mannerisms, there had been something intangible which he had known—or was it only the fact that the deliverer had moved with such swift and certain decision?

  “Yes,” said the Brazilian unnecessarily. “I too am a Brother.”

  THERE WAS one morning when Naysmith came out of his tent and walked down to the sea. This was in Northwest National Park, the new preserve which included a good stretch of Oregon’s coast. He had come for rest and solitude, to do some thinking which seemed to lead nowhere, and had stayed longer than he intended. There was peace here, in the great rocky stretch of land, the sandy nooks between, the loneliness of ocean, and the forest and mountains behind. Not many people were in the park now, and he had pitched his tent remote from the camping grounds anyway.

  It was over. The job was finished. With the records of Besser’s headquarters for clues and proof, Fourre had been in a position to expose the whole conspiracy. Nobody had cared much about the technical illegality of his raid. Several governments fell—the Chinese had a spectacularly bloody end—and were replaced with men closer to sanity. Agents had been weeded out of every regime. In America, Hessling was in jail and there was talk of disbanding Security altogether. The U.N. had a renewed prestige and power, a firmer allegiance from the peoples of the world. Happy ending?

  No. Because it was a job which never really ended. The enemy was old and strong and crafty, it took a million forms and it could never quite be slain. For it was man himself—the madness and sorrow of the human soul, the revolt of a primitive animal against the unnatural state called civilization and freedom. Somebody would try again. His methods would be different, he might not have the same avowed goal, but he would be the enemy and the watchers would have to break him. And who shall watch the watchmen?

  Security was a meaningless dream. There was no stability except in death. Peace and happiness were not a reward to be earned, but a state to be maintained with toil and grief.

  Naysmith’s thinking at the moment concerned personal matters. But there didn’t seem to be any answer except the one gray command: Endure.

  He crossed the beach, slipping on rocks and swearing at the chill damp wind. His plunge into the water was an icy shock which only faded with violent swimming. But when he came out, he was tingling with wakefulness.

  Romeo, he thought, toweling himself vigorously, was an ass. Psychological troubles are no excuse for losing your appetite. In fact, they should heighten the old reliable pleasures. Mercutio was the real hero of that play.

  He picked his way toward the tent, thinking of bacon and eggs. As he mounted the steep, rocky bank, he paused, scowling. A small airboat had landed next to his own. Damn! I don’t feel like being polite to anybody. But when he saw the figure which stood beside it, he broke into a run.

  Jeanne Donner waited for him, gravely as a child. When he stood before her, she met his gaze steadily, mute, and it was he who looked away.

  “How did you find me?” he whispered at last. He thought the fury of his heartbeat must soon break his ribs. “I dropped out of sight pretty thoroughly.”

  “It wasn’t easy,” she answered, smiling a little. “After the U.N. pilot took us back to the States, I pestered the life out of everyone concerned. Finally one of them forgot privacy laws and told me—I suppose on the theory that you would take care of the nuisance. I’ve been landing at every isolated spot in the park for the last two days. I knew you’d want to be alone.”

  “Rosenberg—?”

  “He agreed to accept hypno-conditioning for a nice payment—since he was sure he’d never learn the secret anyway. Now he’s forgotten that there ever was another Stefan Rostomily. I refused, of course.”

  “Well—” His voice trailed off. Finally he looked at her again and said harshly: “Yes, I’ve played a filthy trick on you. The whole Service has, I guess. Only it’s a secret which men have been killed for learning.”

  She smiled again, looking up at him with a lilting challenge in her eyes. “Go ahead,” she invited. .

  His hands dropped. “No. You’ve got a right to know this. I should never have—oh, well, skip it. We aren’t complete fanatics. An organization which drew the line nowhere in reaching its aims wouldn’t be worth having around.”

  �
��Thank you,” she breathed.

  “Nothing to thank me for. You’ve probably guessed the basis of the secret already, if you know who Rostomily was.”

  “And what he was. Yes, I think I know. But tell me.”

  “They needed a lot of agents for the Service—agents who could meet specifications. Somebody got acquainted with Rostomily while he was still on Earth. He himself wasn’t trained, or interested in doing such work, but his heredity was wanted—the pattern of genes and chromosomes. Fourre had organized his secret research laboratories. That wasn’t hard to do, in the Years of Madness. Exogenesis of a fertilized ovum was already an accomplished fact. It was only one step further to take a few complete cells from Rostomily and use them as—as a chromosome source for undifferentiated human tissue. Proteins are autocatalytic, you know, and a gene is nothing but a set of giant protein molecules.

  “We Brothers, all of us, we’re completely human. Except that our hereditary pattern is derived entirely from one person instead of from two and, therefore, duplicates its prototype exactly. There are thousands of us by now, scattered around the Solar System. I’m one of the oldest. There are younger ones coming up to carry on.”

  “Exogenesis—” She couldn’t repress a slight shudder.

  “It has a bad name, yes. But that was only because of the known experiments which were performed, with their prenatal probing. Naturally that would produce psychotics. Our artificial wombs are safer and more serene even than the natural kind.”

  She nodded then, the dark wings of her hair falling past the ivory planes of her cheeks. “I understand. I see how it must be—you can tell me the details later. And I see why. Fourre needed supermen. The world was too chaotic and violent—it still is—for anything less than a brotherhood of supermen.”

  “Oh—look now!”

  “No, I mean it. You aren’t the entire Service, or even a majority of it. But you’re the crack agents, the sword-hand.” Suddenly she smiled, lighting up the whole universe, and gripped his arm. Her fingers were cool and slender against his flesh. “And how wonderful it isl Remember King Henry the Fifth?”

  The words whispered from him:

  “And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,

  From this day to the ending of the world,

  But we in it shall be remembered,

  We few, we happy few, we band of brothers After a long moment, he added wryly: “But we can’t look for fame. Not for a long time yet. The first requirement of a secret agent is secrecy, and if it were known that our kind exists half our usefulness would be gone.”

  “Oh, yes. I understand.” She stood quiet for a while. The wind blew her dress and hair about her, fluttering them against the great clean expanse of sea and forest and sky. “What are you going to do now?” she asked.

  “I’m not sure. Naturally, we’ll have to kill the story of a wanted murderer answering our description. That won’t be hard. We’ll announce his death resisting arrest, and after that—well, people forget. In a year or two the memory will be gone. But of course several of us, myself included, will need new identities, have to move to new homes. I’ve been thinking of New Zealand.”

  “And it will go on. Your work will go on. Aren’t you ever lonely?”

  He nodded, then tried to grin. “But let’s not go on a crying jag. Come on and have breakfast with me. I’m a hel-luwa good egg frier.”

  ‘‘No, wait.” She drew him back and made him face her. “Tell me—I want the truth now. You said, the last time, that you loved me. Was that true?”

  "Yes,” he said steadily. “But it doesn’t matter. I was unusually vulnerable. I’d always been the cat who walks by himself, more so even than most of my Brothers. I’ll get over it.”

  “Maybe I don’t want you to get over it,” she said.

  He stood without motion for a thunderous century. A sea gull went crying overhead.

  “You are Martin,” she told him. “You aren’t the same, not quite, but you’re still Martin with another past. And Jimmy needs a father, and I need you.”

  He couldn’t find words, but they weren’t called for anyway.

  MARGIN OF PROFIT

  by Poul Anderson

  IT WAS an anachronism to have a human receptionist in this hall of lucent plastic, among the machines that winked and talked between jade columns soaring up into vaulted dimness—but a remarkably pleasant one when she was as long-legged and red-headed a stun-blast as the girl behind the desk. Captain Torres drew to a crisp halt, and a gauntleted hand went to his gilt helmet. Traveling down sumptuous curves, his eye was jarred by the small needier at her waist.

  “Good day, sir,” she smiled. “One moment, please, I’ll see if Freeman van Rijn is ready for you.” She switched on the intercom and a three-megavolt oath bounced out. “No, he’s still conferring on the vid. Won’t you be seated?”

  Before she turned it off, Torres caught a few words: "... By damn, he’ll give us the exclusive franchise or do without our business. Who do these little emperors think they are? All right, so he has a million soldiers under arms. You can tell him to take those soldiers, with field artillery and hobnailed boots, by damn, and—” Click.

  Torres wrapped his cape about the deep-blue tunic and sat down, laying one polished boot across the other knee of his white culottes. He felt out of his depth, simultaneously overdressed and naked. The regalia of a Lodgemaster in the Federated Brotherhood of Spacemen was stiff with gold braid, medals, and jewelry, far removed from the gray coverall he wore on deck or the loungers of planet leave. Worse, the guards in the tower entrance, a kilometer below, had not only checked his credentials and retinal patterns, but had unloaded his sidearm.

  Blast Nicholas van Rijn and the whole Polesotechnic League! Good saints, drop him on Pluto without his under-wearl

  Of course, a merchant prince did have to be wary of assassins—and most of them went to great lengths to avoid formal duels, though Van Rijn himself was supposed to be murderously fast with a handgun. Nevertheless, arming your receptionist was not a high-bom thing to do—

  Torres wondered, rather wistfully, if she was one of the old devil’s mistresses. Perhaps not; but with the trouble between the Company—no, the whole League—and the Brotherhood, she’d have no time for him, being doubtless bound by a contract of personal fealty. His gaze went to the League emblem on the wall, a golden sunburst afire with opals, surrounding an ancient-style rocketship of the Caravel model, and the motto: All the traffic will bear. That could be taken two ways, he reflected sourly. Beneath it was the trademark of Van Rijn’s own outfit, the Solar Spice & Liquors Company.

  The girl turned on the intercom again and heard the vido-phone being switched off; there followed a steady rumble of obscenities. “Go on in now, sir,” she said, and into the speaker: “Captain Rafael Torres, representing the Brotherhood.”

  The spaceman straightened himself and went through the inner door. His lean dark face clamped into careful lines. It would be a new experience, meeting his ultimate boss; for ten years, as captain of a ship and Lodgemaster of the union local, he had not called anyone “sir.”

  The office was big, with an entire side transparent, overlooking a precipitous vista of Batavia’s towers, green landscape, hot with tropical gardens, and the molten glitter of the Java Sea. The other walls were lined with the biggest referobot Torres had ever seen, with shelves of extraterrestrial curios, and—astonishingly—a thousand or more old-type folio books, exquisitely bound in tooled leather and looking well-wom. The room and the desk were littered, close to maximum entropy, and the ventilators could not quite dismiss a tobacco haze. The most noticeable object on the desk was a small image of St. Dismas, carved from sandroot in the

  Martian style. The precise and perfect patron for Nicholas van Rijn, thought Torres.

  He clicked his heels and bowed till the helmet plume swept his nose. “Lodgemaster-Captain Torres speaking for the Brotherhood, sir.”

  Van Rijn grunted. He was a huge man, two meters high, and
the triple chin and swag belly did not make him appear soft. Rings glittered on the hairy hands and bracelets on the thick wrists, under snuff-soiled lace. Small gray eyes, set close to the great hook nose under a sloping forehead, blinked at the spaceman. He went back to filling his churchwarden, and said nothing until he had a good head of steam up.

  “So, by damn,” he muttered then. “You speak for the whole louse-bound union, I hope.” The long handlebar mustaches and goatee waggled over a gorgeously embroidered waistcoat. Beneath it was only a sarong, columnar legs and bare splay feet.

  Torres checked his temper. “Yes, sir. For all the locals in the Solar Federation, and every other lodge within ten light-years. We understood that you would represent the League.” “Only tentatively. I will convey your demands to my colleagues, such of them as I can drag out of their offices and harems. Sit.”

  Torres did not give the chair an opportunity to mold itself to him; he sat on the edge and said harshly: “It’s simple enough, sir. You already know our decision. We aren’t calling a real strike . . . yet. We just refuse to take any more ships through the Kossaluth of Borthu till the menace there has been stopped. If you insist that we do so, we will strike.”

  “By damn, you cut your own throats,” replied Van Rijn with surprising mildness. “Not alone the loss of pay and commissions. No, but if Antares is not kept steady supplied, she loses taste maybe for cinnamon and London dry gin. Not to speak of products offered by other companies. Like if Jo-Boy Technical Services bring in no more indentured scientists, Antares builds her own academies. Hell and lawyersl In a few years, no more market at Antares and all fifteen planets. You lose, I lose, we all lose.”

  “The answer is simple enough, sir. We just detour around the Kossaluth. I 'know that’ll take us through more hazardous regions, we’ll have more wrecks, but the brothers don’t mind that risk.”

  “What?” Somehow, Van Rijn managed a basso scream. “Pest and camion balls! Double the length of the voyagel Double the fuel bills, salaries, ship and cargo losses . . . halve the deliveries per year! We are ruined! Better we give up Antares at once!”