Other

by Gordon R. Dickson

  “I’ll talk to everybody,” said Bleys.

  Chapter 10

  The following day at Blue Harbor—a large city on a great inland lake—was as the weather people had arranged and Toni had repeated to Bleys. Sirius shone hotly down through occasional, small rain-filled clouds. Generally, he shone on the wide expanse of open field, rising gently on all sides around a circular, depressed area, bright green with fresh variform spring grass, that Bleys had chosen for his outdoor speech. There was room on those gentle slopes for up to one hundred thousand people, although less than half that number was expected.

  In the center of this area stood a temporary dark brown building of pre-formed materials that Dahno had arranged to have set up. It would be large enough to hold Bleys, his broadcast equipment and his immediate party; and it had a flat roof above which his image could be projected during his speech. The situation could hardly have been better chosen.

  “I’m worried,” said Toni, looking out through the oneway window of the limousine in which she, with Bleys and Henry, were riding out to the broadcast point, with Henry’s security people in other vehicles before and behind them. Bleys looked at her.

  “What do you suppose the CEOs or the Guilds are likely to try here?” she said.

  “Nothing,” said Bleys. “We might run into the occasional stray crazy, but the Soldiers should handle anything like that; and Dahno’s waiting for us in the broadcast building. I don’t think we’ll hear anything from the two organizations for a bit. They’ll want some time to negotiate with each other.”

  Toni turned her head sharply to look at him.

  “Negotiate?” she echoed. “The CEO’s and the Guilds? What will they be negotiating?”

  “How to join forces and get rid of me.”

  “Those two join forces?” said Toni. “Do you think they’d do that?”

  "They don’t have much choice. I said I wouldn’t work with either of them, but of course they’ll both go on trying to twist my arm to get me on their own side. However, if that won’t work, they’ll both want to have a plan for working together to get rid of me—off New Earth altogether.”

  “But could they work together?” Toni said. “I’d have thought they’d never trust each other that much.”

  ‘They don’t and never will,” said Bleys, “but a common foe makes unlikely friends. It wouldn’t be the first time in history that two deadly enemies worked together to destroy someone they both wanted out of the way—”

  “You don’t think either one of them might try to use you to break the power of the other, then use your doing that as an excuse to get you killed or run off their planet?” Toni broke in.

  “Either outfit would have to be controlled by fools to try it. That would really bring interstellar repercussions down on their heads; and there’s no way they could keep their responsibility for it hidden—” Bleys broke off suddenly, gazing at her.

  Toni looked back calmly. For several seconds, their eyes held, and then Bleys breathed out softly.

  “Toni,” he said, “thank you. I’m a fool myself for not thinking of it.”

  He remembered suddenly how when he was still very young he had gone through a period—thankfully brief—in which he had first realized that the people around him, though they might all be adults, had never been as perceptive and intelligent as he was. He had assumed that all grown-ups were just like him—only wiser and more experienced—and he had been shocked when he began to find this was not true. Here and now, he had been overlooking one of the most obvious of dangers, simply because it was so obvious. Toni had thought of it at once.

  “You’re absolutely right,” he said to her. “Of course, the fact they might be doing something stupid has never stopped some people; particularly, if they’re not used to looking closely at consequences. I should have realized that.”

  He looked gratefully at her and fingered his wrist control pad to talk to the building just ahead of them.

  “There’s another example of how valuable you are to me,” he said to her. “—Dahno? Are you in the broadcast building there? If you are, what’s the count of the spectators?”

  “Better than we expected,” Dahno’s voice came back. “The rooftop scan gives an approximate figure in the seventy thousands.”

  “Good,” said Bleys, “we’ll be there in five minutes or less. I’m going to start my walk in shortly.”

  He shut off the phone connection and turned to Henry.

  “I’ll want to walk only the last twenty meters or so,” he said. “Everyone here is going to claim that they saw me in person, anyway, so there’s no point in my making more than a brief appearance. We’ll drive into the fringes of the crowd and stop when the crowd gets thick.”

  It was barely a minute before they were among a loose scatter of people standing on the grass; a moment later, the crowd had thickened to the point where the limos were almost crawling. Bleys spoke again.

  “I think here,” he said.

  Henry picked up the car phone and began giving orders to his Soldiers in the other limousines. A moment more, and they were all out of the vehicles, pushing through an ever-tighter press of people, with the Soldiers in a close group encasing Toni, Henry and Bleys. Bleys smiled over the heads of their protectors and waved to the people on both sides as they went, but without answering the voices that called to him.

  Though Bleys found it easy enough to keep a smile on his face for those they passed, he was aware of a tension in him, an armed feeling, as if an attack might come without warning from the crowd.

  I work better behind the scenes, he thought. The tension stayed with him until at last—and it seemed a much longer time than twenty meters should take to cover—they reached the building on foot, went through the door and shut it, leaving the Soldiers outside to guard against those still thickly following.

  Within, the sound of the crowd was muted. There was little space, however, and much to fill it. Chairfloats, and the equipment for broadcasting, recording and projecting his image above the roof of the building as he talked, took up nearly all the space.

  Only, in a small area left clear, was a chair set up for him, on whom the equipment was focused.

  “Take it away,” Bleys said. “I want to talk standing.” He discussed a few points with the equipment technicians—all members of the New Earth Others’ organization—then took his position, cape over his shoulders, head erect, feet spread apart slightly.

  “Now,” he told the equipment-people.

  There was a moment’s cessation of sound from outside the building, followed abruptly by a rising sound of voices from the crowd. The projected image of Bleys, twenty meters tall, appeared in three dimensions in the monitors, showing it as if standing on the roof of the building. By a function of the projection, Bleys knew, he would seem to face in all directions about him at once. So that to each of those watching, his eyes would appear to look directly at him or her, alone.

  He waited for a moment until almost total silence came back. Then spoke.

  “You are all Pioneers and the children of Pioneers!”

  At that first phrase, flung at them like the challenge of a trumpet, the last murmurs died away, slowly but completely; so that his words that followed seemed suddenly to echo into the complete and listening silence.

  “While there were those on Old Earth who preferred not to leave their safe and comfortable quarters on the home world to adventure among the stars, you or your ancestors went forth and populated these New Worlds. As always, it was the best who went out. The bravest. The most hopeful. The strongest.

  “For nearly three hundred years, your Younger World forebears wrestled with insufficiently terraformed earth, to build it into livable territory. They transformed wild planets into tame ones. They created a new society, with a common language—Basic—of their own. A language to which Old Earth still pays only lip service; so that while most back there understand it, few can speak it with comfort, even now. But for you, it has become you
r native tongue.

  “You are the inheritors of what your ancestors did. And, like them, you still struggle with an alien environment; to dominate it, to make it useful, to make it profitable, to make it a place you can call home. Recognize this, all of you!”

  For the first time since the silence began, i* was broken. Penetrating the walls of the brown building came a murmur from the listeners outside. It rose to a low roar and then died away again. Bleys waited until they had quieted once more.

  “Now you stand on the earth you inherited and had a share in making,” his voice went on.

  “Tell me, are you satisfied with what the effort of three hundred years has gained you? Are you satisfied with what you have?”

  Once again the murmur rose to a roar, this time a little louder than before, and once more it died away while Bleys waited.

  “If you are not satisfied, let us ask ourselves who is to blame …”

  He had them with him now, and he spoke on.

  Old Earth it was, Bleys told them, that had deliberately been guilty of keeping them from full development. That guilt had been shown clearly by the Mother World’s attempts, first to dominate the Younger Worlds directly, then—when it failed in this—to direct and control them by indirect means.

  It had been abetted in this, both consciously and unconsciously; by the Dorsai, the Exotics and even by certain elements in the societies of all the Younger Worlds. Now, for the last hundred years, Old Earth’s effort had been directed and focused by the Final Encyclopedia. In stunting their growth as worlds, it had stunted them as individuals. If-they would grow as individuals, they would see clearly the shackles with which Old Earth had bound them and the means to throw them off for good. They must strive as individuals to learn and think clearly about the interstellar situation. And the way to do that was to think clearly about themselves.

  There were ways to do this, and he would be talking about them in his later speeches here on New Earth.

  As he walked through them afterward, they cheered and struggled to get close enough to touch him.

  “Hytry,” said Toni, when they were at last being driven back to their hotel. She was crammed this time between the large bodies of Bleys and Dahno. Henry sat beside the driver, in the front two seats. Bleys and Dahno looked sideways and down at her.

  “What about Hytry?” asked Bleys.

  “He did all the talking for the Guildmasters we had lunch with,” said Toni. “He acted as if he was their leader. But did he seem like a leader of leaders to you? I can believe Harley Nickolaus as the dominant one among the top CEOs in New Earth City. He’s not someone I’d like to know better; but he gives the feeling of being strong enough. Hytry, though—nothing about him seems to show the strength you’d expect in the top Guildmaster.”

  Bleys and Dahno exchanged glances over her head.

  “What do you think, Dahno?” Bleys asked.

  Dahno shrugged, almost lifting Toni off the limousine’s backseat, so pressed together they were.

  “I didn’t see him,” Dahno said.

  “Yes,” said Bleys thoughtfully. “You weren’t back from your dinner with the Governor-Mayor.”

  “I know something about Hytry through our Other contacts,” Dahno said. “But it’s not enough for me to give you any kind of sure opinion, one way or another. He’s called First Guildmaster of New Earth City. But what that means in terms of his leading the other Guildmasters of that Steering Committee of theirs, I’m not sure. If this was Association, or even Harmony, I could tell you.”

  “Hytry did seem weak,” Bleys said thoughtfully, “but there could be other reasons for his doing all the talking. He could be a puppet for the real leader. Or it could be that they decide everything by committee vote or agreement and he just announces that decision. Finally, he could be a lot brighter or a lot stronger than he pretends.”

  “I thought you said anyone could tell how intelligent other people are by measuring them against herself—or himself.” Toni said to Bleys.

  He looked down at her. “Did I tell you that? I haven’t had enough to do with Hytry to be sure what he’s actually like. Within limits, what I said is true enough. But I must have told you, too, there’s an exception—for me, for everybody. At best, none of us can see any higher than the level of own eyes. We can be sure of an equal, but we’ve no way to measure a superior.”

  “But have you ever met anyone you thought was even an equal?” she asked. “You’ve never mentioned it to me if you have.”

  He thought a little ruefully of his error (Henry would have called it a sin) of arrogance. Apparently he had fallen into it in spite of his long-standing determination not to let it trap him.

  “Isn’t that right?” she said.

  “That’s right, but”—he hesitated—“there’s you and Dahno here.”

  “Thanks,” she said. “But I’ll steer clear of being compared.”

  “Second the motion,” Dahno said.

  “All right, then,” Bleys said, “there’s Hal Mayne. I don’t know his limits, so that means they could be anything. My guess is—just at a wild guess—there’s a chance he could be my equal or better. Or I could be jumping at shadows; it’s just that there’s so much mystery about his beginnings.”

  “Hm,” said Dahno, whom Bleys knew did not believe in the possible importance—not to say dangerousness—of the boy they had chased off Earth.

  They were pulling up now, in front of the door to the lobby of their hotel. They left the limousine. Walking into the lobby, they found themselves confronted by their baggage in a pile on an open spot of the lobby floor.

  It appeared to be the baggage of all of them, including that of the Soldiers, which should still be up in their rooms. Henry, and those Soldiers who had entered the hotel just before them, were standing around it as if on guard. Henry glanced at Bleys, now, without a word.

  “Dahno,” Bleys said. “I think this is something you should be the first to look into.”

  “You’re right,” Dahno said harshly, the normal good humor of his expression completely gone. He stalked off toward the registration desk and began speaking to one of the clerks behind it.

  He was not raising his voice, and he was at a distance where they could not hear either him or the man he spoke to. Bleys settled himself in a chairfloat and beckoned Toni and Henry to join him. They took seats and waited.

  Normal expectations would have been for Dahno to return almost immediately. But his talk with the clerk continued for several minutes and ended with his following the clerk around the counter and through a door in the wall behind it, into the regions behind the registration area.

  He was gone a good half hour, during which time Bleys chatted cheerfully with Toni and Henry, about further plans for his tour, as if their baggage had never been brought down to the lobby at all. The other two were caught up in what he was saying, despite the situation. Bleys had worked at developing the skill of making even small talk interesting. He was successful with it now. Toni and Henry relaxed visibly. At the same time, however, Bleys himself was controlling and hiding a strong feeling of excitement within him. It was too soon to be sure, but he felt that things were beginning to happen.

  At the end of the half hour, Dahno emerged, accompanied by a small, tubby man, wearing a dark business suit and an unhappy, determined look on his face. They came across the floor silently and Dahno was the first to speak when they reached the chair in which Bleys lounged.

  “This is the general manager,” Dahno said abruptly, as he reached them, with nothing pleasant at all in his voice. “He insists we were due to check out today; and that he had another reservation for the rooms, which have since been taken over by the people who had the reservation.”

  “I’m very sorry, Bleys Ahrens,” said the tubby man, perspiring, “but our records are definite on the subject. Your reservation called for you to check out today; and the people who had an ironclad reservation for your suites and rooms have already moved in. Since they’
re actually in their rooms, I couldn’t evict them, even if they were there by our error. As you know that’s the law—in fact, a universal law on all the Younger Worlds, and, I believe, even on Old Earth itself.”

  “I believe it is,” Bleys murmured.

  “So now, I’m afraid, Bleys Ahrens”—faced with the mildness of Bleys’s answer, the general manager drew himself up and his voice became more authoritative—“I’m going to have to ask you to vacate the lobby. You and your people are in the way of our guests. You’ve no more reason to be here now.”

  He turned toward the concierge’s desk and snapped his fingers. There were three men in their green uniforms standing there, and they all came over. The leading one was a small man in his thirties with a deeply tanned face. His eyes met Bleys’s.

  “Two of you start to carry this luggage out to Bleys Ahrens’ vehicles,” commanded the general manager. “You, there—I don’t know your name—go get a few more bellpeople. At least three more.”

  “Yes, general manager,” said the tanned man. He turned about and went off.

  “And hurry!” the general manager called after him. His round face was sweating.

  “Well,” said Bleys, standing up, “Toni, Henry, Dahno, I guess no one’s going to turn up to help us. We might as well get going. We ought to be able to find some quarters—temporarily, at least—until we can find another hotel with rooms to hold us all under one roof. The doorman outside should know the city and the hotels.”

  He led the way toward the lobby by which they had come in, while Henry gave orders that sent the Soldiers ahead in a kind of skirmish formation.

  The other three followed him. They stepped outside and into the golden glow of another sunset, and the air filled their lungs with a freshness that the conditioned atmosphere within doors had not seemed to have. The passageway in front of the hotel was damp from what must have been a brief shower while they were inside. Some of their luggage had already been carried out by the bellpeople, but it was not waiting for them on the sidewalk before the passageway. It was simply nowhere in sight.