The Potter of Firsk and Other Stories

by Jack Vance

  The intermediums took their numbered seats, these ranged around a dais and a great screen. Here would form a schematized picture of the battle, with different colors indicating the advances, retreats, with lights emphasizing emergency points. The whole play of this chart would be synthesized from the steady reports of the two hundred flight captains, relayed through the intermediums, and watching the chart, the staff, including General Vec and Marshal Koltig, would direct the strategy of the battle.

  Marshal Koltig sat drinking coffee in a study nearby, brooding over intelligence reports—a large, brown, mustached man, full of bluff energy. “They know we’ve mobilized,” he told General Vec. “We’ve kept it secret longer than I dared hope…They’re calling up reserves.”

  Vec poured himself coffee. “I’ll be interested to see the performance of the Mark IV Blatchats against their new Gladius Rams. I believe we’ve the better fire-power.”

  Koltig looked up. “That’s right, the Blatchats are your special pets.

  “…Better emphasize once again to the intermediums that there must be no individual actions, no dog-fighting. We are a vast overwhelming mass of precise machinery; that’s important. No heroics. Drive home the fact that we will win through our unprecedented firmness and coordination. We cannot allow this advantage to be nullified by individual grandstanding.”

  Vec stood up. “I’ll make it clear.” He paused. “Let me see—Abel Ruan was to have special helmets for us. Has he arrived?”

  “I believe he’s in Suite C. You’d better send an orderly to check. Time’s getting short. Twenty-two minutes now.”

  Zoltan Vec delivered his warning speech to the sighing body of intermediums, returned to the study. The orderly he had sent to Abel Ruan saluted.

  “Abel Ruan requests that you come to Suite C for your helmet, sir.”

  “Very well,” said Vec. “Tell the technicians to give the screen a final check.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Vec found Marshal Koltig in Suite C, adjusting a domed helmet to his head, while Abel Ruan connected a clip to the nerve-graft on his neck.

  “It would be better not to use the helmet until the battle is under way,” said Ruan, in the tone of a doctor advising about the use of a salve. “The brain is particularly energetic, but it also must work harder than any of the others, so it is as well not to use it until there is a need.”

  “I see,” said Marshal Koltig. “I just throw the switch, correct?”

  “Right—the switch stimulates the brain, awakens it from what amounts to sleep. To select one whom you wish to communicate with, merely think of the color corresponding to the name.” He produced a printed sheet. “Here is the list. General Vec, as you see, is light blue. You, Marshal, are maroon. So to make contact with General Vec, merely picture the color. The brain will do the rest.”

  “Marvellous, marvellous,” exclaimed Marshal Koltig. “In the name of our leader, the great Butin, you shall be richly rewarded!”

  Abel Ruan shook his long narrow head, and the glasses on his nose glinted. “No, I want no reward—merely the satisfaction of contributing to a great historical event.”

  “Oh, you scientists!” the Marshal chaffed. “Impractical visionaries!”

  Abel Ruan smiled his wide long-toothed grin, turned to General Vec. “Here, General, is your helmet. You heard my instructions to the Marshal? Not to use the helmet until necessary?”

  General Vec nodded, donned the helmet gingerly. Never had he quite accustomed himself to the use of this subsidiary brain. Grimly he clipped the lead to the nerve-graft on his neck.

  “Now,” said Abel Ruan, “you’re all in order.”

  Marshal Koltig glanced at his wrist-watch. “We must hurry. The bombers took off nine minutes ago; in half an hour we will be over Federate territory.”

  An orderly entered. “Contact has been made, sir. Over Blorland, by Fighter Squadron 819.”

  “Results?” snapped Marshal Koltig.

  “Unreported, sir.”

  “819,” muttered Koltig. “That will be Flight 14.” He dialed ‘14’ on a communicator, was put through to the intermedium serving the squadron in question.

  “14.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “F-S 819 encountered 12 Gladius Rams at 90,000 feet, sir. They are trying to break our formation, but have not succeeded and we have downed three—now four—without loss.”

  “Good,” said Koltig. “Carry on.”

  A number of other contacts were made and reported, skirmishes, scout brushes.

  “Looks like they’re waiting for us somewhere over Ladomir,” said Koltig, arising. “Well, Vec, perhaps we’d better take our places.”

  They passed through the door into the murmurous room, took their places on the dais. The screen above them now glowed, showing the Blorland–Ladomir boundaries, with a rim of the North Ocean in one corner. A flat black triangle slowly crossing the chart was the body of the Moltroy bombers, the great ships of strategic position. Once any number of these thunderous vessels had penetrated the enemy’s defenses, he must surrender, or see his nation vanish in molten clods and hot gas. A fainter gray shadow indicated the supporting fighters, and already along the periphery spots of color indicated contact with the defending planes of the World Federation.

  Far down, sweeping along the Glimmet coast came a blue shadow—vague because its composition was yet unknown—the World Federation offensive force. And at the bottom of the screen a chart noted the current casualties, so far nine Moltroy Blatchats, opposed to fifteen Federate Gladius Rams.

  Koltig glanced out at the two hundred intermediums; each sat pale, intent in his seat, eyes half-closed, the thoughts from the flight captains far out over Ladomir winging home to the brains in the helmets and so to the human brain.

  Vec said, “Here it comes—here comes their median sweep.” A red line glared across the screen—the battle-front.

  Koltig jumped to his desk, gestured to the screen operator. The map suddenly expanded, until the area of battle filled the whole screen, and the black triangle of bombers dissolved into its separate elements.

  Vec said, “They’re breaking through at 98, sir.”

  Koltig shouted, “Rocket-squadrons 12, 13, 14 to 98!” His voice boomed across the hall, the intermedium working with the flight moved, sent the order, the flight captain swerved his squadron, and a minute later the breach was healed. The casualty chart at the bottom clicked over furiously, but faster, much faster on the Federate side.

  “The Blatchats are out-maneuvering them,” cried Vec, as the triangle of bombers, momentarily slowed, forged ahead. But as they watched, the apex of the triangle glowed red, vanished.

  “By our great Butin!” cried Koltig, astounded. “What’s happened?”

  Vec called sharply to the integrators. “2—repeat.”

  “A new type of rocket, sir, evidently dive-bomb type. Estimated speed five thousand MPH.”

  “Get those heavy trackers above the fleet! Spot them as they come in!”

  The order flashed across the windy distance, a segment in the rear rose, cast a panoply of accurate anti-fire above the bombers.

  “Second rocket-attack repulsed, sir.”

  “Good, good!” Koltig clapped his hands. “Vec, so far, so good! We’re gaining!” He suddenly became aware of the weight on his head, his helmet—forgotten in the tension of the battle. “Eh, Vec—we have our helmets. We can see this all ourselves.”

  “Of course,” said Vec…

  The room went mad with fear. The intermediums sprang from their seats, ran shrieking in circles, dove into corners, plunged from the room.

  Koltig and Vec watched, rapt in the utmost dream-like wonder, unable even to feel dismay.

  And on the battle-front, the flight captains screamed and flailed their arms, and likewise fled anywhere legs could take them.

  And in a twinkling the armada from Moltroy became a mindless anarchy of expensive machinery.

  Edvard Schmidt stoppe
d the car, stared unbelievingly at the man in the vineyard—a thin wispy man wearing faded blue dungarees, a man with a narrow bald head, a thin toothy mouth.

  Schmidt jumped from the car. “Abel! Of all things, to find you here!”

  Ruan looked up with no surprise, indeed little reaction other than a slight narrowing of the eyes. “How are you, Edvard?”

  “Well, of course! But you—” Schmidt indicated the vineyard.

  “I own this land,” said Abel shortly. “Now I live here—just over the hill.”

  “But your retirement—a young man yet!”

  Ruan sighed, put his pruning shears in his pocket. “Evidently, my dear Edvard, you do not read the papers.”

  “What’s all this?” demanded Schmidt. “What’s in the papers concerning you?”

  Ruan pinched his lips, snorted sardonically. “Today, my friend, the great leader Butin, as well as Marshal Koltig and your old acquaintance General Vec, is to be hanged…And but for my—let us say, anonymity—beside them would hang Abel Ruan. The mad scientist! The arch-fiend of the electrons! String him up!”

  Schmidt sobered. In his surprise he had overlooked Ruan’s record of cooperation with the Moltroy despots.

  “Well—possibly. Of course, Butin and those others—after all they planned the whole thing…”

  Ruan stared bitterly sidelong at old Schmidt. “Hang them then? When simple therapy would make them into different men entirely? No—human blood-thirst demands revenge. Revenge on poor Abel Ruan as well as Butin the leader…Revenge is pride. It’s like saying no one’s going to do that to me and get away with it!”

  “Well—what about you?” inquired Schmidt cautiously. “Do you consider therapy a sufficient expiation for your part in the Moltroy crimes?”

  Abel Ruan laughed a harsh loud laugh, with a genuine note of amusement.

  “Edvard, it becomes necessary to mar your illusions. You are not aware but that for my work, my scheming, my risks—that Butin would not be hanging today, but rather the members of the World Federation Council!”

  “It seems to me,” said Schmidt coldly, “that you bent your best efforts to aid the Moltroy cause.”

  “How do you account for the remarkable Federate victory, when Moltroy was advancing at all levels?”

  “Why—the breakdown of your telepathic system, of course.”

  “Bah!” Ruan suddenly bared his teeth, and the glasses perched on his long nose flashed in the sunlight. “The telepathic system functioned perfectly—from first to last, exactly as I had planned.”

  “Perhaps you had better explain.”

  Ruan smiled. “Why not?…From the time that the Moltroy general entered the Institute, it was obvious that telepathy would be used in war communications. All that was needed was the idea—the funds to develop it. Any one of a thousand Moltroy scientists could have done as well as I. But, as I told you one time, it was necessary for me to stay with the project, stay on top of it, control it…I went to work for the Moltroy army, even as you did.”

  Schmidt blinked. “I—I contributed nothing to their war effort.”

  “You detracted very little. Well, to get on; from the first, as you are aware, we used the brains of blackbirds, as being peculiarly susceptible to telepathic rapport. Even when the brains had been bred and refined to nearly the complexity of a human brain, with a blackbird’s instincts…I built several special helmets secretly; I arranged for their use at exactly the critical instant. These helmets on the heads of Marshal Koltig and General Vec won the war for the World Federation.”

  “And these helmets—what was so remarkable about them?”

  Abel Ruan smiled, showing long teeth. “They were built around the brains of sparrow-hawks.”

  Schmidt stared.

  “The instant the blackbird-brains felt the hawk-brain, they reacted the same way four hundred blackbirds in the field react to a hawk in the sky. Panic.”

  Schmidt said after a moment, “Abel, this is hard to believe.”

  Ruan shrugged.

  “However, I believe! I apologize to you. And I insist that you accompany me to Varly, and receive the recognition you deserve.”

  Ruan shook his head. “The Sunday-supplements would call me ‘the Blackbird Hero’. And I have my vineyard to tend.”

  Schmidt said, “Once, Abel, you told Zoltan Vec that you were a man of many curiosities. Are you still curious?”

  “Indeed I am. I am curious as to the nature of an animal that produces great works of music, atomic power, a united world, but nonetheless hangs its old enemies.”

  “That curiosity may be relieved in the new Suarede National Institute. A chair; a salary; and time for your vineyard, too.”

  Abel Ruan flung out his long thin arms. “You are right. I’m with you.”

  Together they climbed into Schmidt’s car and drove off toward Varly.

  Sjambak

  Howard Frayberg, Production Director of Know Your Universe!, was a man of sudden unpredictable moods; and Sam Catlin, the show’s Continuity Editor, had learned to expect the worst.

  “Sam,” said Frayberg, “regarding the show last night…” He paused to seek the proper words, and Catlin relaxed. Frayberg’s frame of mind was merely critical. “Sam, we’re in a rut. What’s worse, the show’s dull!”

  Sam Catlin shrugged, not committing himself.

  “Seaweed Processors of Alphard IX—who cares about seaweed?”

  “It’s factual stuff,” said Sam, defensive but not wanting to go too far out on a limb. “We bring ’em everything—color, fact, romance, sight, sound, smell…Next week, it’s the Ball Expedition to the Mixtup Mountains on Gropus.”

  Frayberg leaned forward. “Sam, we’re working the wrong slant on this stuff…We’ve got to loosen up, sock ’em! Shift our ground! Give ’em the old human angle—glamor, mystery, thrills!”

  Sam Catlin curled his lips. “I got just what you want.”

  “Yeah? Show me.”

  Catlin reached into his waste basket. “I filed this just ten minutes ago…” He smoothed out the pages. “‘Sequence idea, by Wilbur Murphy. Investigate “Horseman of Space”, the man who rides up to meet incoming spaceships’.”

  Frayberg tilted his head to the side. “Rides up on a horse?”

  “That’s what Wilbur Murphy says.”

  “How far up?”

  “Does it make any difference?”

  “No—I guess not.”

  “Well, for your information, it’s up ten thousand, twenty thousand miles. He waves to the pilot, takes off his hat to the passengers, then rides back down.”

  “And where does all this take place?”

  “On—on—” Catlin frowned. “I can write it, but I can’t pronounce it.” He printed on his scratch-screen: CIRGAMESÇ.

  “Sirgamesk,” read Frayberg.

  Catlin shook his head. “That’s what it looks like—but those consonants are all aspirated gutturals. It’s more like ‘Hrrghameshgrrh’.”

  “Where did Murphy get this tip?”

  “I didn’t bother to ask.”

  “Well,” mused Frayberg, “we could always do a show on strange superstitions. Is Murphy around?”

  “He’s explaining his expense account to Shifkin.”

  “Get him in here; let’s talk to him.”

  Wilbur Murphy had a blond crew-cut, a broad freckled nose, and a serious sidelong squint. He looked from his crumpled sequence idea to Catlin and Frayberg. “Didn’t like it, eh?”

  “We thought the emphasis should be a little different,” explained Catlin. “Instead of ‘The Space Horseman’, we’d give it the working title, ‘Odd Superstitions of Hrrghameshgrrh’.”

  “Oh, hell!” said Frayberg. “Call it Sirgamesk.”

  “Anyway,” said Catlin, “that’s the angle.”

  “But it’s not superstition,” said Murphy.

  “Oh, come, Wilbur…”

  “I got this for sheer sober-sided fact. A man rides a horse up to meet the incoming s
hips!”

  “Where did you get this wild fable?”

  “My brother-in-law is purser on the Celestial Traveller. At Riker’s Planet they make connection with the feeder line out of Cirgamesç.”

  “Wait a minute,” said Catlin. “How did you pronounce that?”

  “Cirgamesç. The steward on the shuttle-ship gave out this story, and my brother-in-law passed it along to me.”

  “Somebody’s pulling somebody’s leg.”

  “My brother-in-law wasn’t, and the steward was cold sober.”

  “They’ve been eating bhang. Sirgamesk is a Javanese planet, isn’t it?”

  “Javanese, Arab, Malay.”

  “Then they took a bhang supply with them, and hashish, chat, and a few other sociable herbs.”

  “Well, this horseman isn’t any drug-dream.”

  “No? What is it?”

  “So far as I know it’s a man on a horse.”

  “Ten thousand miles up? In a vacuum?”

  “Exactly.”

  “No space-suit?”

  “That’s the story.”

  Catlin and Frayberg looked at each other.

  “Well, Wilbur,” Catlin began.

  Frayberg interrupted. “What we can use, Wilbur, is a sequence on Sirgamesk superstition. Emphasis on voodoo or witchcraft—naked girls dancing—stuff with roots in Earth, but now typically Sirgamesk. Lots of color. Secret rite stuff…”

  “Not much room on Cirgamesç for secret rites.”

  “It’s a big planet, isn’t it?”

  “Not quite as big as Mars. There’s no atmosphere. The settlers live in mountain valleys, with airtight lids over ’em.”

  Catlin flipped the pages of Thumbnail Sketches of the Inhabited Worlds. “Says here there’s ancient ruins millions of years old. When the atmosphere went, the population went with it.”

  Frayberg became animated. “There’s lots of material out there! Go get it, Wilbur! Life! Sex! Excitement! Mystery!”

  “Okay,” said Wilbur Murphy.

  “But lay off this horseman-in-space. There is a limit to public credulity, and don’t you let anyone tell you different.”

  Cirgamesç hung outside the port, twenty thousand miles ahead. The steward leaned over Wilbur Murphy’s shoulder and pointed a long brown finger. “It was right out there, sir. He came riding up—”