[Jan Darzek 05] - The Whirligig of Time

by Lloyd Biggle, Jr.

  Then he went off to tell Miss Schlupe that if her students weren't trained yet, she had the rest of the day to finish up. His next stop was to see UrsNollf at the office assigned to the committee of scientists. UrsNollf was still studying the eleventh planet, and he gloomily reported no progress. At Zarst, Raf Lolln and the priests were trying to dissect an error from the plans for the experiment that failed. Raf Lolln was of the opinion that the entire project had been an error. Darzek resignedly returned to Vezpro and called on the masfiln. He told him the ship would have to be released to Kernopplix and sent as instructed, and their only recourse now was the hope that the plans for tracing it succeeded. Min Kallof agreed reluctantly and thanked Darzek for his efforts.

  Early the next morning, Darzek visited the transfer station. Kernopplix had appropriated a suite of rooms, and Miss Schlupe's students filled all but one, where a Vezpronian doctor Kernopplix had engaged was examining them. Kernopplix greeted Darzek effusively. "My friend, all difficulties vanish at your touch. How I could have managed without you, I do not know. I am forever indebted to you!"

  "Why?" Darzek asked innocently. "We've both profited. I'm at least as much indebted to you."

  "I have been a party to many joint enterprises," Kernopplix said soberly. "Your generosity is as rare as your competence, and I'll remember both with pleasure - and repay you in kind if the occasion presents itself."

  Darzek looked about him. "How are you proceeding?"

  Kernopplix gestured at the waiting females. "The selection seems to be quite good. In fact, excellent. I've rejected only two thus far. I send them one at a time to the doctor, who certifies their health. Then I take them aboard."

  "Immediately?" Darzek asked.

  "But of course. I see that they are settled comfortably in their private compartments and want nothing. Then I leave them, disengaging the transmitter. I have been provided with special instructions for that. No one will be able to enter their compartments until the ship reaches its destination. The service transmitters of course remain connected. "

  "A wise arrangement," Darzek observed. "One never knows about these space crews."

  "This crew will not be Vezpronian."

  "That, too, is wise," Darzek agreed. Kernopplix's screening of the young females was considerably less strict than he had expected, which pleased him; but on the world of Bbran, perhaps all of Miss Schlupe's candidates would have been considered rare beauties. Kernopplix obviously was too busy to squander time in idle talk, and Darzek said as much and took his leave.

  At the other side of the space station, he entered the small room where Miss Schlupe had established her headquarters. She was seated before a block of paired lights. The moment Kernopplix disengaged a compartment's transmitter, one of a pair of lights went out, and Miss Schlupe stepped through to the same compartment for the electronics engineer had ingeniously devised a transmitter within a transmitter, and these supposedly isolated females would have the run of the ship any time they wanted it. Miss Schlupe delivered a kit that consisted of a knife, a blackjack of her own design, a chemical spray guaranteed to render any life form unconscious for several minutes to an hour, and a roll of cord for tying up victims. This equipment, added to Miss Schlupe's arduous training in unarmed combat, made each of the ship's passengers positively lethal.

  There was nothing for Darzek to do, so he sat down and watched.

  When the 195th passenger had been taken aboard by Kernopplix, Darzek went back to the other side of the station. He watched while Kernopplix accepted his 200th passenger and escorted her aboard. When he returned, a special messenger was waiting for him. The messenger carried a thick package - the solvency certificates - and pushed a cart on which was a cube slightly larger than a meter square on each side.

  Kernopplix took the package and checked the contents carefully.

  Then, his manner obviously jubilant, he signed a receipt and dropped the package into a slot in the cube. The slot sealed automatically. The messenger then handed over an envelope that contained the key words for opening the safe. Kernopplix signed another receipt and added his own seal to the envelope. With the messenger's help he pushed the cart through a transmitter to one of the cargo compartments. He left the cube there and disengaged that compartment's transmitter.

  The ship's crew was ready; so was that of the chartered ship that was to accompany it. Kernopplix escorted both crews aboard their ships to give them their verbal and sealed instructions. Then he returned for one more spidery embrace and a sputtering gush of thanks before he took his final leave of Darzek and stepped through a transmitter to his compartment on the chartered ship.

  Darzek went to the transfer station's restaurant, from which he could watch the two ships departing. They drifted away slowly, using their maneuver rockets. Finally they reached clearance distance. Moments later they made their first jump and vanished.

  Darzek returned to the Trans-Star office. He found a message from Miss Schlupe waiting for him: "Come immediately." Darzek stepped through to her training center, and there, in the large building, seated disconsolately in circles, were three hundred young Vezpronian females, two hundred of whom Darzek had recently seen put aboard a spaceship now departed.

  He said, in a voice that cracked with disbelief, "Are these -" "They are," Miss Schlupe said bitterly. "Your pal Forlan and his assistants got the bright idea of putting an army aboard and protecting the purity of Vezpronian womanhood. So they had a special transmitter built into a closet in each compartment. After I got my bunch safely installed, they invaded all the compartments and told the females they were ordered back to Vezpro. So they went. There are now three males in each compartment - including the hundred compartments that weren't used. Nine hundred males in all. Of course they don't know about our special transmitters, they wouldn't know how to use the weapons we smuggled aboard even if they knew where they're hidden, and they haven't got any plan."

  "Where'd they get the males?" Darzek asked.

  "From - wouldn't you guess - the planet's staff of proctors. Not only has Vezpro failed to follow the blackmailer's instructions on every point, but this shenanigan isn't going to accomplish a thing."

  15

  Darzek headed for the government complex, intending either to remove the roof or place the entire government under some kind of interdiction that he would invent when he got there, but before he arrived he thought better of it. The damage was done. Miss Schlupe's female commandos might be needed for some other purpose, so there was no point in publicizing their training.

  He quietly asked Forlan and Min Kallof why the substitution had been made, and they explained that they wanted the captives aboard the ship to be individuals capable of capturing the blackmailer and his cohorts.

  "Besides," Min Kallof said emotionally, "we could not simply give away Vezpro's innocent females like so many animals. The honor of the world was at stake. Believe me, the proctors will cope with this schemer."

  "Supposing he doesn't appear?" Darzek asked. "He may have the ship picked up by an agent, such as Kernopplix, who won't know his identity or anything else about him. It'll immediately be obvious that Vezpro did not meet his demands."

  They had no answer, so Darzek left them. He could count on Vezpro's inept proctors to blunder their assignment no matter what happened. Now everything depended on E-Wusk.

  The old trader was at work in the communications center he had set up next to the Trans-Star office. Darzek looked in on him and saw him huddled in the corner, his telescoping limbs twitching with concentration, while assistants hovered nearby, delivering messages and waiting for instructions. Darzek decided not to bother him.

  He returned to his living quarters, where a still - furious Miss Schlupe was rocking at a pace that would have got her ticketed in any residential area on Earth.

  But she spoke calmly. "I've been thinking. The whole proposition was a fraud. Why would this blackguard want two hundred females and all that solvency? He was ju
st asking for something he knew Vezpro couldn't or wouldn't deliver."

  "You may be right." "I know I'm right."

  "But he won't know Vezpro couldn't or wouldn't deliver until he inspects the ship, or sends someone to do it, and if things work out for E-Wusk, no one will approach the ship without being identified."

  "It's still a long time until the new cycle," Miss Schlupe said. "True. One might almost suspect that our villain expected shenanigans, and he'll be back shortly with more demands."

  Miss Schlupe snorted. "That's his' worry. What I meant was there still plenty of time to figure this thing out and nail the person responsible. You can keep that committee of scientists at work and maybe add a member or two. You might accidentally get one with an iota of imagination. I've been reading the reports, and I don't understand any of it except the word 'impossible,' which gets tiresome after the first hundred times."

  "Good point."

  "And I'm still working on the missing scientists. Every new name we turn up is checked with the Zarstans, and I have lists of those that disappeared again after joining the Order and those that disappeared without joining it. There's got to be some kind of connection."

  "There's no argument that our mad scientist couldn't have done it all himself, even if he supplied the know-how," Darzek agreed. "He had to have expert help."

  "And then there's Qwasrolk."

  "There's always Qwasrolk," Darzek said wearily. "Nothing to do there but keep looking for him and wave good-bye when we find him."

  "We've found him," she said.

  "Dead?"

  "No. Very much alive."

  "Strange. According to the Skarnaf doctors, he should have died long ago. How much of a glimpse of him did you get?"

  "We didn't see him, but we found someone who did. And we found out where he's been hanging out occasionally."

  "Show me," Darzek said.

  They were Naz Forlan's people - the aliens, the refugees from an exploding sun, who had received grudging charity on this world of Vezpro - and, according to Forlan's assistants, had been discriminated against and despised ever since they arrived.

  Darzek had never seen a more relaxed, happier people.

  Each farm was a model of order and meticulous upkeep. Farm buildings and dwellings were circular, their sides curving outward like doughnuts, with small, circular windows. The agricultural operations were automated to a point almost beyond Darzek's comprehension. One elderly farmer and his wife ran a farm that seemed to be the size of a U.S. county. The widely separated towns were supply centers and storage depots for agricultural products. Forlan had said a million refugees arrived here; Darzek wondered what had happened to them. .

  The old farmer was simply a more venerable edition of Forlan dressed in less stylish, coarser clothing, skin darkening with age, bushy hair thinner, but as quietly polite and with the same air of culture about him. "Ah - the crazy one," he said, when Miss Schlupe had introduced Gul Darr and asked about Qwasrolk. "Farmer himself, I'd guess. I've seen him four, five times. Usually he stands on the hill yonder, watching the autocultivators. Probably never saw anything like that where he farmed."

  "I've never seen anything like it either," Darzek confessed. "And Qwasrolk comes from a world where the holdings are small and animals pull the machines."

  "Ah, that'd account for it. Loves the land, though. Maybe it reminds him of home."

  "It might," Darzek agreed. "The place where he grew up was rolling land very much like yours."

  "Thought so," the old farmer said with a shy smile. "A farmer knows. Some people love machines. Some love solvency. Some love land. Me, I love my land, and I recognize others who do, no matter how alien they are."

  "What was he wearing?" Darzek asked.

  The farmer fingered his own clothing. "Old stuff. Something thrown out. Not his. He's only two-armed, and I could see where he'd torn the other two arms from the clothing. Got in his way, I suppose." He paused. "Had a bad accident, hadn't he? Even at a distance I could see how disfigured he was. First couple times I tried to walk up to him, but he disappeared. Funny business, that. Know how he does it?"

  "No. We'd certainly like to know."

  "So would I. Good trick, but a funny business all around. Suppose he's shy about meeting people, being disfigured that way. Loves the land, though. Stands there and looks at it as though he'd like to get down and dig in it with his hands. Easy to see he was a farmer."

  "He grew up to it," Darzek said. "Then he went to school - to the university - and became a scientist."

  "Ah. Should have stayed a farmer. One that loves the land should farm it."

  He invited them in, and his elderly wife served a cool drink made from the leaves of a native plant, and small, crunchy cakes. Darzek already had lost interest in this reappearance of the unfortunate Qwasrolk. That tortured soul might or might not be able to reveal something concerning his accident, but he certainly wouldn't as long as he permitted no one to approach him.

  But this farmer, this cheerful, obviously prosperous and contented member of an allegedly oppressed minority, interested Darzek immensely. Darzek bluntly asked a question: Did the refugees from Hlaswann have any difficulties with the natives of Vezpro?

  The old farmer chuckled, flexing his four arms. "Refugees? Been a long time since any of us was a refugee. When we first arrived, some resented us. Natural that way, you know. But the government made us welcome, and there were plenty of Vezpronians who gave us the hand of cousinhood, and sympathy, and even financial help. And no one resents us now. They're begging us to stay. We made Vezpro agriculturally independent, you see. We brought intensive farming to Vezpro. They knew nothing about it, but we were experts. Once they saw what we were about, they helped us in every way they could. We showed them what machinery we needed, and they designed it. No one in the galaxy is better with machines than the Vezpronians. Of course once it was perfected they made a very good thing of it, building it for export. It increased the productivity of our farms, and now we sit and watch the machines work until the land is needed for something else, and then we leave."

  "Leave?" Darzek echoed.

  The old farmer gestured an affirmative. "Got our own world again. Way over on the other side of the galaxy. Uninhabited. Synthesis government found it for us, and our young people've been going there for years. We old ones wait and watch the machines. It's hard to leave even an adopted world when we've been here so long. The Vezpronian government would like to nave us stay, because we supply the world's food. Machines are great for doing work, but they don't know the land. They're worthless without a farmer to tell them what to do and when. We said, 'Give us your young people, and we'll make farmers of them,' but the young Vezpronians want to be scientists and engineers. So we watch our machines, and the cities and factories grow and come ever closer to us, and eventually they take our land."

  "Take it?" Darzek echoed. "Surely they make some compensation."

  The old farmer laughed. "Surely. Ten times what it's worth. The Vezpronians have been good to us. They gave us refuge, they let us buy farms on credit, they built us machines, and now they buy the land back at far more than it's worth. And they'd like to have us stay and open up marginal land for farming, with government assistance. Some think we should. A lot of us will die here, still watching our machines, still growing food for Vezpro, still waiting for the cities and factories to grow and take our land, because Vezpro has done so much for us. But most of us want our own world - a farming world. A world without stinking factories and growing cities. So we sell our land and go there. If it wasn't so far, we'd continue to sell food to Vezpro and buy its machines. No, we have no difficulty with the natives. We love them like cousins. We always have, and we always will. The debt we owe them is beyond payment."

  "One of your number has done well in another way," Darzek said.

  "The Mas of Science and Technology. Naz Forlan. I know him well."

  "Do you? Yes, he's done wel
l. There are others like him who have gone into science and industry and done well. We're proud of them. But they would have been happier if they'd stayed farmers. That's our people's destiny - with the land."

  They left the old farmer leaning on a stone fence watching his machines. Behind him, on a low hill, was the grove where Qwasrolk had paused several times in his tortured wanderings, his pilgrimage from nowhere to nowhere, to gaze at a land that looked hauntingly like that remote plot where he was born.

  Why had Qwasrolk come here, when obviously he was homesick for another world? "He surely knows he hasn't long to live," Darzek said. "If he's that homesick for Skarnaf, why didn't he stay there to die? We not only don't know why he came here, but we still haven't a clue as to how he got here, have we? Has Gud Baxak found out anything?"

  "No. There may he a simple explanation, if only we knew what it was. If there isn't, then he must have teleported. And if he can teleport from Skarnaf to Vezpro, then he could - maybe - teleport from Nifron D to Skarnaf."

  "Improbable," Darzek said. "But suggestive."

  "It might be perfectly clear if we had all the facts. To Qwasrolk, whatever he's doing must seem perfectly logical."

  "He has to be living somewhere and eating something when he isn't admiring the landscape. If he could be cornered and questioned, could he tell us anything?"

  "Of course. He could tell us where he was when the accident happened, and what he was doing there, and for whom."

  "If he remembers."

  "There is that," Miss Schlupe agreed. "An atomic explosion at close range might be memory-shattering. Perhaps hypnosis -"