by Ipomoea
"Like this. Be my guest, Miss Martinez. Our guest. Be in on everything that happens, provided you do not release anything until I give you leave. With my guarantee that when you get it, you'll get it all."
She was torn, that much was obvious from her face. Venner studied her and added a further condition: "You'd have to inform your head office that you're after a story of some kind, naturally, but I put it to you not to drop any real clues, else there'll be somebody else horning in to take it away from you. Can you do that?"
"You leave that to me." She rose urgently then hesitated. "You're not trying to put something over on me, are you?"
"In the presence of Dr. Hutten?"
"Yes. Well, all right. How much time have I got?"
Venner glanced up at his man. Joe said, carefully, "The flight lifts off in forty-five minutes. You should have your gear aboard Venner Three by that time, miss."
As soon as she was out of hearing range Sam demanded, "What was that for? Do we want a news worn an hanging around our necks?"
"You'll be my guest also, Hutten." the old man leaned back and took up his drink, scowling horribly. "You're in this, like it or not, and we don't want any more publicity than we can handle. She will be where we can keep an eye on her. Better the devil we know, eh? Meantime, there are a few things you need to know. . . ."
"Just a minute. If I'm to be your guest—and thank you for that—what about my things? Hadn't I better transfer them?"
"That will not be necessary." Joe came in again quietly. 'Tour baggage will have been transferred automatically to the Ceti Queen. I can collect it later, when we are in flight"
"We were talking about Happy Sugar." Venner brushed aside the interruption impatiently. "For your information, listen. We think we can identify the mischief molecule. We do that by checking blood samples from known addicts. Consider that they have never been seen to commit any crime, nor is there any civilized way of getting them to talk, nor do they sell the stuff, so far as we can find—they give it away— and you get hooked permanently on just one dosage—think of that and realize what we are up against, but we- think we can identify the molecule. From ultra-delicate analyses of blood serum of known addicts. And the only other place we have ever been able to find the thing is in those seeds I showed you. And that was by accident."
"Can't you get at it a bit faster?" Sam complained and the old man scowled again, maltreating his cigar.
"I just want you to know how hard the job is and on what slim clues we are operating. It took system-analysis to unearth a pattern in the distribution of the stuff. As I've just said, it is not sold; it is given away. None of the people we have been able to catch, or interrogate, will talk, nor is there anything we can do to them that will make them talk. They just don't care. So, the only common factor we have been able to find among all of them, and there are several thousands, by this time, is sugar. Just ordinary common white granulated sugar, done up in individual plastic packs, such as you'd get in any café or eating house. No label on the packs, that's the only difference. And that's how the name got around. Some nosy newsman found out. But we have analyzed every sugar-packet found. We've done everything to that stuff except split its atoms. And—nothing!"
"Then it's not the sugar after all?"
"Who knows? What we do know is this: the distribution spread shows that the stuff is coming from three centers, and each center is a spaceport. So the logical conclusion is that it is coming in from outside the solar system. That opens the field pretty wide, but this is where the lucky chance came in. Field naturalists are thorough people. They observe everything, test everything, especially exotic plants. Those seeds were found on Verdan. They yield the only other source of that damned chemical."
"So?" Sam tightened up inside.
"So we have checked this even further. That plant grows only in the wheat fields of Verdan. Nowhere else on the planet. And your fathe:* is the wheat king of the planet—as well as being the uncrowned overlord of the whole three-planet financial empire!"
"Now wait!" Sam set his jaw angrily. "There is a great big hole in your theory so far. My father is a businessman, not a farmer. He is in—whatever he is in—because it pays. And you say that the people who are pushing this filthy drug are giving it away? Quite apart from any moral judgments about my father, that does not add up, sir!"
"It's a pleasure to talk to a man who can cut through to the heart of a^matter." Venner grinned ferociously. "But how many ordinary people can? We have a link between this stuff and Rex Hutten. Once let that get into the headlines and what good will intelligent appraisal do anybody? Now do you see why I wanted Miss Martinez under my wing? And you too? This is a thing we have to handle with gloves, until we can get some more hard facts."
"But it doesn't make sense. This is my field, Dr. Venner, and I assure you that people or organizations do not push drugs unless there is some financial reward involved. Even when there are religious or mystical implications, you'll always find some commercial interest involved somewhere. One does not give this kind of thing away."
"So there are reasons we do not yet know about. But the facts are there, and hard. And there are more, somewhat dubious but worth considering. The addict, for instance, is the one who carries the stuff and spreads it—and that is all wrong on normal patterns. You agree?"
"Yes." Sam nodded at that. "The usual thing is that the pusher has the sense to keep himself free of the drug. He merely sells it."
"Right. But these people get hooked, end then hook others. And it takes just one dose. Further doses don't do a thing, make no difference. So the addict, if he has a stock of the stuff, can infect several others. So it could spread like a chain reaction. And, as far as we can tell, the only reason it doesn't is that there is a limit on the amount of the stuff that can be brought in. So far. How long that will last is anybody's guess. Now, there are a few other points. The addict is an instant and total loss to the community. He becomes a bum. And, even if we had everything going for us, I doubt if we could find a cure, because this stuff apparently acts on brain chemistry to change it permanently. So even if the addict came to the authorities for help, there wouldn't be any. And thev don't come. They are quite happv with their state."
"I can appreciate," Sam murmured, "that this must be a source of concern to the authorities, of which you are presumably one, but you have already heard me on drugs. Who am I to point the finger at someone who chooses to opt out, either by chemistry or any other way? As for trying to implicate my father in the racket, that's a different matter, and should be left until we can talk with him face to face. I have no brief on either side."
"I heard you," Venner growled. "Now you hear me a bit more. On what Ipomoea does to people. One dose is enough. The addict loses all sense of responsibility. He also becomes sterile. He, or she. I know, you're going to ask if that's such a disaster. And I will agree it isn't. Better they didn't reproduce that kind. All right. But this is the deadly bit, and it is known only to a handful of chosen people. You'll see why when I tell you. After about a year, and we can't pin it down any closer than that, the addict lapses into a totally new condition. He switches off altogether. No reaction. No intellect. He becomes a vegetable. What the doctors call a decerebrate preparation. At a guess, there's come peculiar kind of brain damage that is cumulative up to a point, and then the brain just drops out."
"At a guess? You mean you don't know?"
"We don't know. Even in this permissive day and age we can't do exploratory brain surgery on living people. If you can call them living."
"But what about postmortem surgery?"
"Logical to the last, eh?" Venner grinned, and there was something chilly about his grin now. "Postmortem, as you say. Only we are still waiting for one of them to die. They don't. Strictly between us, Hutten, we have reason to believe that these vegetables are totally immune to any illness, sickness, disease, germs, bacteria, virus—anything. They do not even show signs of getting older. We are stuck with them. We
look like being stuck with them forever. And their numbers increase at about a hundred or so a week. That's the latest figure I have."
Hutten shoved back in his chair. All at once the subdued hum and chatter of people, the distant drone of impersonal music, seemed loud and impertinent in his ears. He fought to contain nausea while his mind yielded him a pattern, a terrifying picture of Earth slowly being swamped in a great mass of immortal vegetables, brainless bodies. Fantasy spoke to him.
"It sounds as if somebodv is trying to wipe out Earth," he said, and Venner jerked forward, his little eyes hard-keen.
"You get the picture fast, Hutten. It took me a while to see it."
"Five billion people?"
"Increase the supplv, add in the chain-reaction effect and the sterility—and the appeal of the drug—and it doesn't seem all that big or impossible. But imagine what this would do, in headlines."
Sam shivered. "All richt, Venner, you've made your point. All I can say is that I'm sure tny father isn't involved in any such crazy scheme. But you'd expect me to say that in any case." He tried a formal smile, and then it came back to him with shocking impact. Somebody had tried to kill him. In the light of this queer meeting he had forgotten it altogether! Venner's sharp eyes saw something.
"What's on your mind now?"
Sam told him, in brief but inclusive detail. The old man listened intently, masticating his cigar with restless jaws.
"No accident, that's for sure. And you had all the luck. Now, who was in a position to know, first, that you were traveling?"
"I imagine the ethergram, and my flight reservations, went through all sorts of hands, maybe hundreds."
"You're right, there. Joe!" the old man glanced up at his impassive servant. "How long would it take you to gimmick a suit and an M-X door like that? Roughly?"
"Twenty minutes at the outside, probably less."
"So it could have been somebody on the ship itself, not necessarily on the ground. You didn't see any familiar faces, Hutten?"
"No. Didn't expect to. This is my first time off Earth."
"So. Well, you can rest assured on one thing—nobody will do any tricky gimmicking on my ship. And"—he glanced at his wrist—"we had better be moving out there soon. Time for just one more, Hutten?"
"No thank you. Look here, Venner, just who the devil are you, anyway? I mean, I had an ethergram, and you've established yourself as being in some way connected with Interplanetary Security, but from what little I do know of the ISB, they are more or less a police force. If you'll excuse me, you do not look at all like a policeman!"
"I'm not. You are quite right in describing ISB as a kind of police body. They operate out in the open, with uniforms and authority and all the rest of it. They do a fine job. But there are some situations where a policeman can't operate efficiently. Here, for instance, where there is no law. Authority has to abide by authority, you know what."
"So what are you? Cloak and dagger? Secret service?"
"Don't knock it, Hutten. I am a member of a small group, strictly non-official and anonymous, who get called in when there's something going on that shouldn't, when certain people are playing tricky games and have to be discouraged, or when there's something making a smell but where the law has no teeth. For want of a name, we call it the Philosophy Corps."
"Outside the law?"
"That's right. No official backing, no status—and no rewards, apart from satisfaction at doing something worthwhile. To operate like that, a man has to be independently rich, sufficiently well-informed to be able to see the big picture, and smart enough to use brains rather than muscle. And the one thing he does not want is publicity."
"But you already have a public image!"
"As myself, sure. And you are on the way to becoming famous as the son of Rex Hutten. That's fine. Anything else is strictly between us, not for the pretty ears of our traveling companion, all right? Right. I think we had better move now. Joe, get us a runner!"
VI
Venner Three was small, with berth room for only six, but luxurious in her appointments. Sam, who only knew a little about spaceships, knew enough to appreciate the luxury, and the gracious ease with which they lifted off and away from Mars under Joe's efficient supervision. The robot-like manservant sat well forward in the control cabin, engrossed with the instruments and controls that he seemed barely to touch. Sam lolled alongside Venner, with Louise on the old man's other side, and watched screens avidly.
"Your first time in space; this is all new to you," Venner said. "But what about you, my dear?"
"Mars is my limit," she told him. "I've never had the chance, nor the spare credits, to get any further than that. I know we go in caravan, but I don't know why. Can't this dinky little ship of yours jump to Ceti on its own?"
"Size has nothing to do with it." Venner rolled his everlasting cigar to one corner of his mouth and snorted. "Don't you ever call this a dinky little ship again, miss. You'll see the swarm come up to join us—there's one now—and just remember, this ship has the legs of anvthing you're likely to see. As for the caravan system, it's this way." Canalopolis was far away and a tiny thing down there, a tiny white diamond alongside the rainbow-bulk of the domes. Sam saw ships coming up, flame-tailed, to join them.
"The Yashi-Matsu generator, see, is a massive affair. And it creates a globular stress-field that is pretty massive too. That is an inherent effect of the system. Gravity-waves are huge things, big and slow, so the field has to be a certain minimum size, in the same sense that it is impossible to get high-fidelity reproduction of bass notes from a midget speaker. It just can't be done. You can't make a little field, nor a midget generator. So one ship could mount a generator, but it would be economic disaster. So we use one generator to englobe a number of ships. Remember railways?"
She made a fluttering sign of indecision. "Only just. Didn't they have steam, and coal, or something?"
"Hah! Anyway, they had one engine at the front, and passenger carriers trailing after. Just one engine—lots of passenger cars. Same as this. The globular field encloses a stress-space where Einsteinian absolutes are modified somewhat. Within that field all these ships will form a loose kind of cluster, and then they will be idle. The warp-master will do all the rest. Far as I know, our schedule calls for a stop at Alpha Centauri, another at Epsilon Indi, and then we're home, Tau-Ceti. Travel time about two weeks."
"Why," she wanted to know, "did it have to be Mars? I mean, why not use Luna as a base to jump from? It's right on our doorstep!"
"Also right in old Sol's plasma field. Too many energetic particles. Matter of fact, we had to get as far as Mars before we could try out the Yashi-Matsu field theory anyway. And it worked precisely as calculated. You have to hand it to the Japanese for that."
"A point." Sam inserted himself into the discussion. "As a sociologist I am of course aware of the Japanese talent for making things work, and I fully expected to see them greatly in evidence, in space. Yet I've not seen one—correction, only one, a doctor—since leaving Earth. Why is that?"
"Looked in the wrong places," Venner explained promptly. "You should have looked in the repair and maintenance sheds, or anywhere that calls for specialized skills. We'll have one along as warp-master, you can bet, and a few as emergency repair-staff. But you wouldn't expect to see any on a milk run like Earth-Mars, where it's just a matter of pushing the right button."
Miss Martinez was itching to get back into the talk, but before she could speak Joe suddenly flipped a switch or two and Sam stared at the new view on the screen before him. Venner grunted, stabbed with his finger.
"There's somebody in trouble, looks like."
Among the vapor trails arching up from the dark half-disk of the planet, one was ragged. Even as Venner sat back, the trail grew another dogleg, and sunlight gleamed momentarily from the hull of that struggling ship. Joe made fresh movements and the picture shivered and grew huge, picking out the ship in question. At the same moment the radio crackled into life
.
"Ceti Queen to warp-master. This is Horst Danziger, master of Ceti Queen, to warp-master. We seem to have a massive defect in the drive unit and firing control. It's impossible to be certain of the extent of defect without full overhaul, but we must assume it's dangerously unreliable. We'll therefore be unable to join cluster. Returning surface immediately. Over."
"Understand perfectly, Captain Danziger." The reply came promptly, in a gentle murmur of condolence. "Sorry you will not be with us. Earnestly hope you can land safely, that defect is not hazardous."
There was a moment's buzzing silence, then a crackle as Danziger came on again to say, "Thank you. We seem to have the defective drive under reasonable—" The voice cut off abruptly, and in the black of the shadow of Mars there grew a monstrous fireball, billowing out and searing the eyes. The screen darkened as automatic volume controls dimmed the glare. Sam was frozen into horror, hardly able to grasp the fact that a ship and all its crew and passengers had just disintegrated. It seemed a lifetime later that the gentle murmur, now full of command, came back.
"Remaining ships will cluster as scheduled. Cluster as scheduled, please, and then we will await decision from the ground. Proceed as scheduled!"
-Venner twisted his head around, his cigar canted at a ferocious tilt. "You have your through-flieht card, Hutten?"
"Eh?" Sam shook himself, groped for meaning, then fumbled in his poncho-pocket to get out the card, and stared at it. Ceti Queen! Venner took it for just one glance and passed it back.
"Adds up, doesn't it? Somebody definitely does not want yon to get as far as Verdan."
"But you can't possibly believe . . . ?"
"I refuse to buy three coincidences in a row, Hutten. What's more, I am now inclined to believe that this is being masterminded from the far end, from our destination, not from Earth."
"I don't see how you can deduce that." Sam argued more for something to say than from any spirit of disagreement. He did not want to think about himself aboard that ship, himself a cloud of radioactive dust. "We are several light-years awav from Ceti!"
