Lavender laughed. “I’ve heard that, too.”
“Take it,” said Bozart.
The adventurer took the laminated card. His eyes widened. “It’s real,” he breathed. “It is real.” He looked up, incalculably more friendly. “I never even saw one of these before. What are your terms?”
Meanwhile the bright, vivid Olympians walked back and forth past them, their clothing all white and black in dramatic contrast. Unbelievable geometric designs shone on their cloaks and their hats. The two bargainers ignored the natives. They concentrated on their own negotiations.
Benjacomin felt fairly safe. He placed a pledge of one year’s service of the entire planet of Viola Siderea in exchange for the full and unqualified services of Captain Lavender, once of the Imperial Marines Internal Space Patrol. He handed over the mortgage. The year’s guarantee was written in. Even on Olympia there were accounting machines which relayed the bargain back to Earth itself, making the mortgage a valid and binding commitment against the whole planet of thieves.
This, thought Lavender, was the first step of revenge. After the killer had disappeared, his people would have to pay with sheer honesty. Lavender looked at Benjacomin with a clinical sort of concern.
Benjacomin mistook his look for friendliness and Benjacomin smiled his slow, charming, easy smile. Momentarily happy, he reached out his right hand to give Lavender a brotherly solemnification of the bargain. The men shook hands, and Bozart never knew with what he shook hands.
5
“Gray lay the land oh. Gray grass from sky to sky. Not near the weir, dear. Not a mountain, low or high – only hills and gray gray. Watch the dappled, dimpled twinkles blooming on the star bar.
“That is Norstrilia.
“All the muddy gubbery is gone – all the work and the waiting and the pain.
“Beige-brown sheep lie on blue-gray grass while the clouds rush past, low overhead, like iron pipes ceilinging the world.
“Take your pick of sick sheep, man, it’s the sick that pays. Sneeze me a planet, man, or cough me up a spot of immortality. If it’s barmy there, where the noddies and the trolls like you live, it’s too right here.
“That’s the book, boy.
“If you haven’t seen Norstrilia, you haven’t seen it. If you did see it, you wouldn’t believe it.
“Charts call it Old North Australia.”
Here in the heart of the world was the farm which guarded the world. This was the Hitton place.
Towers surrounded it and wires hung between the towers, some of them drooping crazily and some gleaming with the sheen not shown by any other metal made by men from Earth. Within the towers there was open land. And within the open land there were twelve thousand hectares of concrete. Radar reached down to within millimeter smoothness of the surface of the concrete and the other radar threw patterns back and forth, down through molecular thinness. The farm went on. In its center there was a group of buildings. That was where Katherine Hitton worked on the task which her family had accepted for the defense of her world.
No germ came in, no germ went out. All the food came in by space transmitter. Within this, there lived animals. The animals depended on her alone. Were she to die suddenly, by mischance or as a result of an attack by one of the animals, the authorities of her world had complete facsimiles of herself with which to train new animal tenders under hypnosis.
This was a place where the gray wind leapt forward released from the hills, where it raced across the gray concrete, where it blew past the radar towers. The polished, faceted, captive moon always hung due overhead. The wind hit the buildings, themselves gray, with the impact of a blow, before it raced over the open concrete beyond and whistled away into the hills.
Outside the buildings, the valley had not needed much camouflage. It looked like the rest of Norstrilia. The concrete itself was tinted very slightly to give the impression of poor, starved, natural soil. This was the farm, and this the woman. Together they were the outer defense of the richest world mankind had ever built.
Katherine Hitton looked out the window and thought to herself, “Forty-two days before I go to market and it’s a welcome day that I get there and hear the jig of a music.”
Oh, to walk on market day
And see my people proud and gay!
She breathed deeply of the air. She loved the gray hills – though in her youth she had seen many other worlds. And then she turned back into the building to the animals and the duties which awaited her. She was the only Mother Hitton and these were her littul kittons.
She moved among them. She and her father had bred them from Earth mink, from the fiercest, smallest, craziest little minks that had ever been shipped out from Manhome. Out of these minks they had made their lives to keep away other predators who might bother the sheep, on whom the stroon grew. But these minks were born mad.
Generations of them had been bred psychotic to the bone. They lived only to die and they died so that they could stay alive. These were the kittons of Norstrilia. Animals in whom fear, rage, hunger and sex were utterly intermixed; who could eat themselves or each other; who could eat their young, or people, or anything organic; animals who screamed with murder-lust when they felt love; animals born to loathe themselves with a fierce and livid hate and who survived only because their waking moments were spent on couches, strapped tight, claw by claw, so that they could not hurt each other or themselves. Mother Hitton let them waken only a few moments in each lifetime. They bred and killed. She wakened them only two at a time.
All that afternoon she moved from cage to cage. The sleeping animals slept well. The nourishment ran into their blood streams; they lived sometimes for years without awaking. She bred them when the males were only partly awakened and the females aroused only enough to accept her veterinary treatments. She herself had to pluck the young away from their mothers as the sleeping mothers begot them. Then she nourished the young through a few happy weeks of kittonhood, until their adult natures began to take, their eyes ran red with madness and heat and their emotions sounded in the sharp, hideous, little cries they uttered through the building; and the twisting of their neat, furry faces, the rolling of their crazy, bright eyes and the tightening of their sharp, sharp claws.
She woke none of them this time. Instead, she tightened them in their straps. She removed the nutrients. She gave them delayed stimulus medicine which would, when they were awakened, bring them suddenly full waking with no lulled stupor first.
Finally, she gave herself a heavy sedative, leaned back in a chair and waited for the call which would come.
When the shock came and the call came through, she would have to do what she had done thousands of times before.
She would ring an intolerable noise through the whole laboratory.
Hundreds of the mutated minks would awaken. In awakening, they would plunge into life with hunger, with hate, with rage and with sex; plunge against their straps; strive to kill each other, their young, themselves, her. They would fight everything and everywhere, and do everything they could to keep going.
She knew this.
In the middle of the room there was a tuner. The tuner was a direct, empathic relay, capable of picking up the simpler range of telepathic communications. Into this tuner went the concentrated emotions of Mother Hitton’s littul kittons.
The rage, the hate, the hunger, the sex were all carried far beyond the limits of the tolerable, and then all were thereupon amplified. And then the waveband on which this telepathic control went out was amplified, right there beyond the studio, on the high towers that swept the mountain ridge, up and beyond the valley in which the laboratory lay. And Mother Hitton’s moon, spinning geometrically, bounced the relay into a hollow englobement.
From the faceted moon, it went to the satellites – sixteen of them, apparently part of the weather control system. These blanketed not only space, but nearby subspace. The Norstrilians had thought of everything.
The short shocks of an alert came from Mo
ther Hitton’s transmitter bank.
A call came. Her thumb went numb.
The noise shrieked.
The mink wakened.
Immediately, the room was full of chattering, scraping, hissing, growling and howling.
Under the sound of animal voices, there was the other sound: a scratchy, snapping sound like hail falling on a frozen lake. It was the individual claws of hundreds of mink trying to tear their way through metal panels.
Mother Hitton heard a gurgle. One of the minks had succeeded in tearing its paw loose and had obviously started to work on its own throat. She recognized the tearing of fur, the ripping of veins.
She listened for the cessation of that individual voice, but she couldn’t be sure. The others were making too much noise. One mink less.
Where she sat, she was partly shielded from the telepathic relay, but not altogether. She herself, old as she was, felt queer wild dreams go through her. She thrilled with hate as she thought of beings suffering out beyond her – suffering terribly, since they were not masked by the built-in defenses of the Norstrilian communications system.
She felt the wild throb of long-forgotten lust.
She hungered for things she had not known she remembered. She went through the spasms of fear that the hundreds of animals expressed.
Underneath this, her sane mind kept asking, “How much longer can I take it? How much longer must I take it? Lord God, be good to your people here on this world! Be good to poor old me.”
The green light went on.
She pressed a button on the other side of her chair. The gas hissed in. As she passed into unconsciousness, she knew that her kittons passed into instant unconsciousness too.
She would waken before they did and then her duties would begin: checking the living ones, taking out the one that had clawed out its own throat, taking out those who had died of heart attacks, rearranging them, dressing their wounds, treating them alive and asleep – asleep and happy – breeding, living in their sleep – until the next call should come to waken them for the defense of the treasures which blessed and cursed her native world.
6
Everything had gone exactly right. Lavender had found an illegal planoform ship. This was no inconsequential accomplishment, since planoform ships were very strictly licensed and obtaining an illegal one was a chore on which a planet full of crooks could easily have worked a lifetime.
Lavender had been lavished with money – Benjacomin’s money.
The honest wealth of the thieves’ planet had gone in and had paid the falsifications and great debts, imaginary transactions that were fed to the computers for ships and cargoes and passengers that would be almost untraceably commingled in the commerce of ten thousand worlds.
“Let him pay for it,” said Lavender, to one of his confederates, an apparent criminal who was also a Norstilian agent. “This is paying good money for bad. You better spend a lot of it.”
Just before Benjacomin took off Lavender sent on an additional message.
He sent it directly through the Go-Captain, who usually did not carry messages. The Go-Captain was a relay commander of the Norstrilian fleet, but he had been carefully ordered not to look like it.
The message concerned the planoform license – another twenty-odd tablets of stroon which could mortgage Viola Siderea for hundreds upon hundreds of years. The Captain said: “I don’t have to send that through. The answer is yes.”
Benjacomin came into the control room. This was contrary to regulations, but he had hired the ship to violate regulations.
The Captain looked at him sharply. “You’re a passenger, get out.”
Benjacomin said: “You have my little yacht on board. I am the only man here outside of your people.”
“Get out. There’s a fine if you’re caught here.”
“It does not matter,” Benjacomin said. “I’ll pay it.”
“You will, will you?” said the Captain. “You would not be paying twenty tablets of stroon. That’s ridiculous. Nobody could get that much stroon.”
Benjacomin laughed, thinking of the thousands of tablets he would soon have. All he had to do was to leave the planoform ship behind, strike once, go past the kittons and come back.
His power and his wealth came from the fact that he knew he could now reach it. The mortgage of twenty tablets of stroon against this planet was a low price to pay if it would pay off at thousands to one. The Captain replied: “It’s not worth it, it just is not worth risking twenty tablets for your being here. But I can tell you how to get inside the Norstrilian communications net if that is worth twenty-seven tablets.”
Benjacomin went tense.
For a moment he thought he might die. All this work, all this training – the dead boy on the beach, the gamble with the credit, and now this unsuspected antagonist!
He decided to face it out. “What do you know?” said Benjacomin.
“Nothing,” said the Captain.
“You said ‘Norstrilia.’”
“That I did,” said the Captain.
“If you said Norstrilia, you must have guessed it. Who told you?”
“Where else would a man go if you look for infinite riches? If you get away with it. Twenty tablets is nothing to a man like you.”
“It’s two hundred years’ worth of work from three hundred thousand people,” said Benjacomin grimly.
“When you get away with it, you will have more than twenty tablets, and so will your people.”
And Benjacomin thought of the thousands and thousands of tablets. “Yes, that I know.”
“If you don’t get away with it, you’ve got the card.”
“That’s right. All right. Get me inside the net. I’ll pay the twenty-seven tablets.”
“Give me the card.”
Benjacomin refused. He was a trained thief, and he was alert to thievery. Then he thought again. This was the crisis of his life. He had to gamble a little on somebody.
He had to wager the card. “I’ll mark it and then I’ll give it back to you.” Such was his excitement that Benjacomin did not notice that the card went into a duplicator, that the transaction was recorded, that the message went back to Olympic Center, that the loss and the mortgage against the planet of Viola Siderea should be credited to certain commercial agencies in Earth for three hundred years to come.
Benjacomin got the card back. He felt like an honest thief.
If he did die, the card would be lost and his people would not have to pay. If he won, he could pay that little bit out of his own pocket.
Benjacomin sat down. The Go-Captain signalled to his pinlighters. The ship lurched.
For half a subjective hour they moved, the Captain wearing a helmet of space upon his head, sensing and grasping and guessing his way, stepping to stepping stone, right back to his home. He had to fumble the passage, or else Benjacomin might guess that he was in the hands of double agents.
But the Captain was well trained. Just as well trained as Benjacomin.
Agents and thieves, they rode together.
They planoformed inside the communications net. Benjacomin shook hands with them. “You are allowed to materialize as soon as I call.”
“Good luck, sir,” said the Captain.
“Good luck to me,” said Benjacomin.
He climbed into his space yacht. For less than a second in real space, the gray expanse of Norstrilia loomed up. The ship which looked like a simple warehouse disappeared into planoform, and the yacht was on its own.
The yacht dropped.
As it dropped, Benjacomin had a hideous moment of confusion and terror.
He never knew the woman down below but she sensed him plainly as he received the wrath of the much-amplified kittons. His conscious mind quivered under the blow. With a prolongation of subjective experience which made one or two seconds seem like months of hurt drunken bewilderment, Benjacomin Bozart swept beneath the tide of his own personality. The moon relay threw minkish minds against him. The synapses
of his brain re-formed to conjure up might-have-beens, terrible things that never happened to any man. Then his knowing mind whited out in an overload of stress.
His subcortical personality lived on a little longer.
His body fought for several minutes. Mad with lust and hunger, the body arched in the pilot’s seat, the mouth bit deep into his own arm. Driven by lust, the left hand tore at his face, ripping out his left eyeball. He screeched with animal lust as he tried to devour himself … not entirely without success.
The overwhelming telepathic message of Mother Hitton’s Littul Kittons ground into his brain.
The mutated minks were fully awake.
The relay satellites had poisoned all the space around him with the craziness to which the minks were bred.
Bozart’s body did not live long. After a few minutes, the arteries were open, the head slumped forward and the yacht was dropping helplessly toward the warehouses which it had meant to raid. Norstrilian police picked it up.
The police themselves were ill. All of them were ill. All of them were white-faced. Some of them had vomited. They had gone through the edge of the mink defense. They had passed through the telepathic band at its thinnest and weakest point. This was enough to hurt them badly.
They did not want to know.
They wanted to forget.
One of the younger policemen looked at the body and said, “What on earth could do that to a man?”
“He picked the wrong job,” said the police captain.
The young policeman said: “What’s the wrong job?”
“The wrong job is trying to rob us, boy. We are defended, and we don’t want to know how.”
The young policeman, humiliated and on the verge of anger, looked almost as if he would defy his superior, while keeping his eyes away from the body of Benjacomin Bozart.
The older man said: “It’s all right. He did not take long to die and this is the man who killed the boy Johnny, not very long ago.”
“Oh, him? So soon?”
“We brought him.” The old police officer nodded. “We let him find his death. That’s how we live. Tough, isn’t it?”
* * *
The ventilators whispered softly, gently. The animals slept again. A jet of air poured down on Mother Hitton. The telepathic relay was still on. She could feel herself, the sheds, the faceted moon, the little satellites. Of the robber there was no sign.
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