Other

by Gordon R. Dickson

  The major nodded toward the slopes.

  “In the trees, encircling the Command and moving in on them. We’ll try to herd the Command’s members into the open before we really close in on them. In fact, you should hear some needle guns soon, if not some power weapons as well, as the Command discovers they’re being encircled.”

  They waited. Sure enough, after about another ten minutes or so, from the woods of the slope came the buzzing, whizzing sound of needles from needle guns, igniting their tiny rocket ends after being fired and picking up speed in midair. Then silence. Then, after a little while again, a fair amount of needle-gun noise all at once and the explosive bark of a power pistol—not a rifle, Bleys noted. A power rifle would have made a more prolonged sound.

  As for the needle guns, there was no way of telling how many of them belonged to the outlaws and how many to the Militia. Needle guns… every farmer on Association kept them for the common plague of variform rabbits and the rare chance at other small variform game that had been imported to the planet. No doubt it was the same here on Harmony. But the guns could be used as serious weapons, as well as game-gatherers.

  A moment later, the black uniforms of enlisted Militia appeared at the edge of the trees on the slope, moving into the plowed ground. But several dozen of them surrounded only three male figures, not exactly ragged as far as clothes went, but wearing garments that had obviously been mended and washed innumerable times. They herded these captives forward as if they had weapons—although they were clearly disarmed now—across the cropland and up to the major, with his officers, on the road.

  At close range they began to look like a father and two sons. All were about the same height, all had the same dark brown hair, lean bodies and narrow suntanned faces, all had the same over-large seeming hands, spread by hard work.

  As they came close to the road itself, the relationship showed more plainly. The oldest was a man at least in his forties; gray was visible among the brown hairs of his head, and grayish-white stubble shrouded his lower face. Of the younger two, one might have been in his twenties with a comparable but dark stubble—and the third looked about sixteen, with a beardless face.

  They had the look of Old Earth northern European ancestry. The faces of all three were expressionless.

  “Sorry, sir,” said the lieutenant apparently in charge of the group of militia men herding the three forward. He spoke to the major, ignoring Bleys and Toni, who stood with the Commanding Officer, “but most of them have moved out during the night. We found sign in the woods of a good-sized group having been camped there.”

  “What sign?” exploded the oldest of the three prisoners. “That’s our woods. My boys and I know every meter of it. If there was sign there, we would have seen it. There isn’t any. He’s making it up!”

  “Shut up, you!” said the sergeant closest to him, elbowing the man in the stomach. It was not a hard-driven elbow, but it was enough to bend him over and interrupt his breathing so that he could not go on speaking.

  “If you don’t mind, sergeant,” said the major, “we’ll have none of that.”

  There was, Bleys thought, an almost unctuous righteousness to his voice, as if he was overly conscious of Bleys and Toni watching.

  “Doesn’t do any good to lie to us,” the major went on, still in the same tone of voice to the oldest prisoner, who had now recovered his breath. “The lieutenant has better things to do that go around making up evidence.”

  “Hah!” said the man. “As if any Militiaman would hesitate about that—”

  The same sergeant who had used his elbow before moved close again, and the man turned away from him. But the sergeant only began the gesture, he did not carry through.

  “Tell me, Lieutenant,” said the major thoughtfully, “you took a measurement cast of the footprints of these three? Did you find them mixed in with the footprints of the others who had already left?”

  “All over the place with them, sir,” answered the lieutenant.

  The major sighed.

  “Then I guess there’s no doubt about it,” he said, looking at the sky regretfully for a second, as if seeking some sort of guidance from on high. “They’re obviously part of the group. A rear guard left to see if we showed up to follow their friends.”

  He turned back to the older man.

  “Was that why you three stayed?” he asked. “Be truthful now, and it’ll go easier on you.”

  “We didn’t stay behind anybody!” snapped the older man. “We’ve always lived here!”

  “Well then,” the major said, patiently, “it had to be one of you who fired on my men.” He looked at the lieutenant. “Is that right, Lieutenant?”

  “Absolutely right, sir. In fact, Odderly has a few stray needles in him. Nothing important. The company aide man can get them out when he comes back. Their weapons weren’t very accurate.”

  “Show me the weapons,” he said.

  Two needle guns and four knives, ranging from a small folding knife to some short straight knives, were brought forward, passed from militia hand to militia hand until they reached the lieutenant, who held them out to the major for his inspection.

  “None of them’s ours!” said the older of the two youngest prisoners, “except the folding knives—Jed’s and mine!”

  “You didn’t find a power pistol, among their shooting weapons?” the major asked the lieutenant.

  “No, sir,” said the lieutenant. “They must have hid it. Should I send some men back up for a closer search?”

  “No,” said the major. “Of course they’d have some well-screened hidey-hole somewhere. Waste of time”—he looked up at the sun—“and the afternoon’s getting on—and we don’t need any additional evidence, anyway.”

  He stepped clear of the group in front of him so that he could look down the road to an elm growing by the side of it, less than a half-dozen meters from him.

  “That tree’s got a handy limb,” he said. “You can get on with it.”

  Rope was evidently already in the possession of the escorting soldiers, as needle guns prodded the three over into position under the branch the major had mentioned. As the nooses were placed around their necks, the oldest looked at the two beside him. The expressions of none of them had changed, but the face of the youngest, next to the older man, had paled.

  “We are in God’s hands, my son,” said the older man.

  Bleys heard a soft, sudden, sharp exhalation of breath from Toni.

  “They’re not going to hang them!” she said, in a low voice.

  “No,” said Bleys. He raised his voice.

  “Major!” he said.

  The major turned and looked at him.

  Bleys beckoned to him, stepping back and aside several steps, so that the major, in coming to him, stepped out of easy earshot of the other militiamen and officers. Like the prisoners, the major’s face was unchanged as he stopped before Bleys.

  “You will not hang those three,” Bleys said in a low, private voice. He looked down into the other’s face, so close to his own now, and felt an ugly griping sensation in the pit of his stomach. The feeling of wildness was alive in him.

  The major’s face had not altered, but his brown eyes, shaded by the visor of his uniform cap, suddenly seemed to have a yellowish cast.

  “If you do,” Bleys went on—hearing his voice as calm as usual and feeling his own features unmoved, in spite of the powerful emotion within him—“I’ll see you court-martialed within months, or even weeks, broken, and dismissed from the Militia—perhaps hanged, yourself.”

  There was a moment of silence in which their eyes stayed locked. Then the major turned sharply away from Bleys to face the elm and the prisoners. All three had the far ends of their ropes over the thigh-thick branch, and militiamen ready at each to haul on them.

  “Lieutenant!” shouted the major.

  The lieutenant held up a hand to interrupt any further movement of the militiamen ready to pull on the rope.

  “Sir
!” he called back.

  “Turn them loose,” snapped the major. “Let them go!”

  “Sir?” the lieutenant called back, his voice cracking.

  “What’s the matter?” the major cried furiously. “Can’t you understand an order when it’s given?”

  “Yes, sir. Right away, sir,” said the lieutenant.

  He turned to the waiting militiamen and began speaking urgently. The rope ends came back over the branch and the nooses were taken from around the necks of the three.

  These stood where they were for a moment, staring at Bleys and the major. Then, at a word from the oldest, they began to walk off together across the field of emerging crops, toward the trees on the slope.

  “Wait here,” Bleys said to Toni and strode after them. When they saw him following, they broke into a run and were lost in moments among the shadows that began at the edge of the wood.

  Bleys followed, not hurrying. Behind him he could hear orders being given to the militiamen. He reached the edge of the trees and stepped upward into the shadow among them, the sudden coolness of the shade falling upon him like a second cloak.

  “That’s far enough,” said a woman’s voice; and he stopped.

  He had gone no more than half a dozen of his long paces in among the trees, which by their very height and interlocking leaves had killed off the ground cover, so that the slope had a park-like aspect. But after the bright sunlight of the open land, the relative gloom among the trees made it hard to see until his eyes could adjust. It was a second or two before he made out the person speaking to him.

  Slowly she came into focus, seeming to fade into visibility like some ghost appearing out of nothingness. She was a slim young woman, not as tall as Toni, but taller than average. She looked bulkier than she probably was in the rough woods-clothes she wore, the thick jacket, the work trousers and boots—all of a dark color—so that even as he began to see her better, she seemed to blend into the dimness of the woods.

  A heavy holster, with its flap buttoned down on her left hip, showed the butt of a power pistol projecting forward, so that if the flap were up it would be available to either hand. But her right hand held a needle gun, its light weight making its rifle shape balance easily in her grasp, with its muzzle toward him. It could easily be fired one-handed from her hip, as she held it now, with only a touch of her finger on the trigger button. At this short range, the expanding pattern of the needles in her first burst would not miss him.

  The two weapons sat severally on her hip and hand as if long custom had made them familiar with being there. There could be no doubt she was no local farmer, like the three whose lives Bleys had just saved. But it was not that obvious difference that caught his attention, so much as the sight of her face and hands.

  She was black-skinned and beautiful, actually the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. Her face was sculptured beneath its smooth skin by narrow bones; and her fingers, curled around the balance point of the dull-black needle gun, were long, slim and utterly professional in their grip. The steadiness of her gaze upon him was like the steadiness of Henry’s when he looked at anyone. Authority and intelligence sat strongly on her; but it was not even this, so much, as something further beyond the physical in her, an impression of dedication, of certainty—and a uniqueness that might well be the uniqueness of courage, or even of some towering inspiration like Bleys’s own dream of the future.

  “What did you say to the major to make him let them go?” she asked. Her voice was clear and pleasant, but un-colored by emotion; and she spoke as someone who had the right to be answered.

  “I told him their deaths would cost him more than it was worth to him,” said Bleys. “In brief.”

  “Why?”

  “There was no need for them to hang,” said Bleys.

  “No. There wasn’t,” she said. “Who are you?”

  “I’m Bleys Ahrens,” he said—and when she did not at once seem to recognize or respond to this, he added, “Some people call me. ‘Great Teacher,’ although I didn’t invent the name, and I’d just as soon they didn’t use it. But my rule is to let people call me what they want, good or bad.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Now I remember hearing about you. Well, I’ll thank you for what you did for the Heisler family—James and the two boys, Daniel and Jedediah. None of them had anything to do with our being here for a few days.”

  She paused. “It’s best you turn around and go back now.”

  “Wait!” said Bleys. “You’re the leader of the Command the Militia was hunting here, aren’t you? Rukh Tamani?”

  His eyes were accustomed enough to the forest dimness now to see a faint smile on her face.

  “I won’t deny it,” she said. “Go now.”

  “Wait.” Bleys lifted a hand to stop her own going for a few more seconds. “Have you got anyone in your Command named Hal Mayne—or Howard Immanuelson?”

  “Go!” said Rukh Tamani.

  She stepped back and sideways, so that she was immediately lost to sight behind the thickness of the tree next to which she had stood. The smooth suddenness of the move made her seem to vanish before his eyes.

  Bleys turned about and walked away.

  Once more in the sunlight, he saw that the troops were already formed in a double line and starting the march back along the road that would return them to their trucks and, eventually, their base, while their officers flew. The major and Toni stood by the open door of Barbage’s waiting atmosphere ship, and Toni’s eyes watched him closely as he approached them. The major also looked, but said nothing. Only his eyes, once Bleys was close enough to

  see, still held the impression of a faint yellowishness that Bleys had noticed when he had given the man the ultimatum, earlier.

  “Very well, then,” said the major, expressionlessly, as Bleys reached them. He turned away from the entrance and toward his own ship, across the field. “I’ll bid you farewell—Great Teacher!”

  Chapter 19

  “You are connected to Bishop McKae,” said the cheerful female voice. “May we see you, Bleys Ahrens?”

  “That’s not necessary,” said Bleys. “You’ve undoubtedly got a print of my voice there that you’ve already checked with what you’re hearing right now. My vision tank is going to stay off as well to avoid your doing any pictorial recording, and I imagine the one at your end will, too.”

  Bleys was sitting alone in an anonymous public communications room in the spaceport at Citadel on Harmony. The room was no larger than a closet, with barely room enough inside it for the single chair, jacked as high as he could get it. The green-paneled wall before him held the vision tank, at the moment anonymous gray; and a slot below the tank for the insertion of identification, or credits sufficient to pay for the call.

  Bleys had ignored this slot. His voice had been registered automatically with Communications General on Harmony from the first time he had visited this world.

  Consequently, he could have charged this call—but there would have been a record of his payment. Cash calls paid from the caller’s end were anonymous, but he had gone even one step further toward anonymity in the public records by making the call collect, since by law, the location and identity of callers on collect calls, were not recorded at all.

  As Bleys had expected, there had been a minimum of hesitation in accepting the charges at McKae’s end. Also, as he had expected after what he had just said, the tank stayed as gray and uninformative as if it had been filled with a heavy mist. McKae would not be in the habit of exposing his face on such a call, either.

  There was a pause at the far end, following his last words; then McKae’s voice came on, warmly noncommittal but enthusiastic.

  “Well, now! This is a coincidence—I was going to call you sometime today, probably later in the afternoon.”

  “Later this afternoon, I’ll be off-planet,” said Bleys.

  “Leaving so soon?”

  “I’ve been here ten days and given eight talks,” said Bleys. “Time
’s getting short, I’m afraid. So I’m going now. Besides, I think I’ve done as much as I can for you.”

  “Yes,” said McKae, after a small pause. “I heard your talks. It would have been even better, of course, if I could have told them specifically about New Earth’s possibly hiring troops from us.”

  “Whether or not they do, still depends,” said Bleys. “That’s one reason I’m in a hurry now.”

  There was another momentary pause at the far end.

  “Of course,” said McKae. “Yes. Well, I’d been holding off my announcement of you as my choice for First Elder so as not to sound too confident too early in the campaign. Since you’re leaving now, though, I’d better do it in tonight’s speech.”

  “I would,” said Bleys. “I won’t be around to hear you, of course, but I’ll be reading about it in a transcript of your speech sometime after I’ve been on Cassida more than a few days. I’ll be waiting for it, in fact.”

  He waited for McKae to answer.

  “Well, good luck, then,” said McKae, coming back on the line almost abruptly. “Congratulations, First Elder.”

  “Congratulations, Eldest,” Bleys replied. “I’ll say goodbye now.”

  “Remember, I’ll need you back in time to be with me here or on Association when I’m installed—” McKae said rapidly. “The Installation can’t be held off too long, once I’m elected.’”

  “You’ll have to hold it off as long as necessary,” said Bleys. “If you look at our history, there was at least one I Eldest that didn’t have his ceremony of office until nearly a year after his election. So there’s precedent, if you need it. Just stay in touch with me, and I’ll let you know when the time’s right.”

  “I will,” said McKae. “Have a good trip.”

  “Enjoy your election,” Bleys said and broke the connection.

  Later, aboard the spaceship to Cassida, once they were a good two shifts out and beyond any light-speed communications, Bleys wrote up the conversation for his memory file.

  Examining the written version, he thought over the tones in McKae’s voice as he had spoken. They had not given away much—but very definitely there was something more at work in the man than the normal anxiety over the immediate future. Naturally, his election was the first concern, even though it was all but assured to him. But present, also, was at least the beginning of an uneasiness about his dependence on Bleys.