"By double-damn, you out-from-under-wet-logs-crawling poppycock!" Van Rijn flushed turkey red. "Not bad enough you pirate my men and ships, with all their good expensive cargoes, but you have the copperbound nerve to call it legal!"
Rentharik fingered the ceremonial dagger hung about his neck. "Old man, the writ of the Kossalu runs through this entire volume of space. You can save yourself punishment—nerve-pulsing, to be exact—by surrendering peacefully and submitting to judgment."
"By treaty, open space is free to all ships of all planets," said van Rijn. "And it is understood by all civilized races that treaties override any local law."
Rentharik smiled bleakly. "Force is the basis of law, captain."
"Ja, it is, and now you make the mistake of using force on van Rijn. I shall have a surprise for your strutting little slime mold of a king."
Rentharik turned to a recorder tube and spoke into it. "I have just made a note to have you assigned to the Ilyan run after conditioning. We have never found any way to prevent seepage of the Ilyan air into the crewman's helmets; and it holds chlorine."
Van Rijn's face lit up. "That is a horrible waste of trained personnel, captain. Now it so happens that on Earth we can make absolutely impervious air systems, and I would gladly act as middleman if you wish to purchase them—at a small fee, of course."
"There has been enough discussion," said Rentharik. "You will now be grappled and boarded. There is a fixed scale of punishments for captured men, depending on the extent of their resistance."
The screen blanked.
Torres licked sandy lips. Tuning the nearest viewscreen, he got the phase of the Borthudian frigate. She was a black shark-from, longer and slimmer than the dumpy merchantman, of only half the tonnage but with armor and gun turrets etched against remote star clouds. She came riding in along a curve that would have been impossible without gravitic acceleration compensators, matching velocities in practiced grace, until she loomed huge a bare kilometer away.
The intercom broke into a scream. Van Rijn swore as he saw Dorothea having hysterics in the cabin. He cut her out of the circuit and thought with anguish that she would probably smash all the bottles—and Antares still eleven days off!
There was a small pulsing jar. The Gantok was in phase and the gravity fingers of a tractor beam had reached across to lay hold of the Mercury.
"Torres," said van Rijn. "You stand by, boy, and take over if anything happens to me. I may want your help anyway, if it gets too rough. Petrovich, Seichi, you got to maintain our beams and hold 'em tight, no matter what the enemy does. O.K.? We go!"
The Gantok was pulling herself in, hulls almost touching now. Petrovich kicked in the full power of his converter. Arcs blazed blue with million-volt discharges, the engine bawled, and ozone was spat forth sharp and smelling of thunder.
"A pressor beam lashed out, an invisible hammerblow of repulsion, five times the strength of the enemy tractor. Van Rijn heard the Mercury's ribs groan with the stress. The Gantok shot away, turning end over end. Ten kilometers removed, she was lost to vision among the stars.
"Ha, ha!" bellowed van Rijn. "We spill all their apples, eh? By damn! Now we show them some fun!"
The Borthudian hove back into sight. She clamped on again, full strength attraction. Despite the pressor, the Mercury was yanked toward her with a brutal surge of acceleration. Seichi cursed and threw in all the pressor power he had.
For a moment van Rijn thought his ship would burst open. He saw the deckplates buckle under his feet and heard steel shear. Fifty million tons of force were not to be handled lightly. The Gantok was batted away as if by a troll's fist.
"Not so far! Not so far, you dumbhead! Let me control the beams." Van Rijn's hands danced over the pilot board. "We want to keep him for a souvenir!"
He used a spurt of drive to overhaul the Gantok. His right hand steered the Mercury while his left wielded the tractor and the pressor, seeking a balance. The engine thunder rolled and boomed in his skull. The acceleration compensator could not handle all the fury now loosed, and straps creaked as his weight was hurled against them. Torres, Petrovich, and Seichi were forgotten, part of the machinery, implementing the commands his fingers gave.
Now thoroughly scared, the Borthudian opened her drive to get away. Van Rijn equalized positive and negative forces, in effect welding himself to her hull by a three-kilometer bar. Grinning, he threw his superpowered engine into reverse. The Gantok strained to a halt and went backwards with him.
Lightning cracked and crashed over his engineers' heads. The hull shuddered as the enemy fought to break free. Her own drive was added to the frantic repulsion of her pressors, and the gap widened. Van Rijn stepped down his own pressors. When she was slammed to a dead stop, the blow echoed back at him.
"Ha, like a fish we play him! Good St. Peter, the Fisherman, help us not let him get away!"
It was a bleak and savage battle, nine and a half trillion empty kilometers from anyone's home, with no one to watch but the stars. Rentharik was a good pilot, and a desperate one. He had less power and less mass than the Mercury, but he knew how to use them, lunging, bucking, wheeling about in an attempt to ram. Live flesh could only take so much, thought van Rijn while the thunders clattered around him. The question was, who would have to give up first?
Something snapped, loud and tortured, and he felt a rush of stinging electrified air. Petrovich cried it for him: "Burst plate—Section Four. I'll throw a patch on, but someone's got to weld it back or we'll break in two."
Van Rijn signaled curtly to Torres. "Can you play our fish? I think he is getting tired. Where are the bedamned spacesuits?"
He reeled from his chair and across the pitching deck. The Gantok was making full-powered leaps, trying to stress the Mercury into ruin. By varying their own velocity and beam-force, the humans could nullify most of the effect, but it took skill and nerve. God, but it took nerve! Van Rijn felt his clothes drenched on his body.
He found the lockers and climbed awkwardly into his specially built suit. Hadn't worn armor in a long time—forgotten how it stank. Where was that beblistered torch, anyhow? When he got out on the hull, surrounded by the blaze of all the universe, fear was cold within him.
One of those shocks that rolled and yawed the ship underfoot could break the gravitic hold of his boots. Pitched out beyond the hyperdrive field and reverting to normal state, he would be forever lost in a microsecond as the craft flashed by at translight speeds. It would be a long fall through eternity.
Electric fire crawled over the hull. He saw the flash of the Gantok's guns—she was firing wildly, on the one-in-a-billion chance that some shell would happen to be in phase with the Mercury. Good—let her use up her ammunition. Even so, it was a heart-bumping eerie thing when a nuclear missile passed through Van Rijn's own body. No, by damn, through the space where they coexisted with different frequencies—must be precise—now here is that fit-for-damnation hull plate. Clamp on the jack, bend it back toward shape. Ah, heave ho, even with hydraulics it takes a strong man to do this, maybe some muscle remains under all that goose grease. Slap down your glare filter, weld the plate, handle a flame and remember the brave old days when you went hell-roaring halfway across this arm of the galaxy. Whoops, that lunge nearly tossed him off into God's great icebox!
He finished his job, reflected that there would have to be still heavier bracing on the next ship of this model, and crept back to the air lock, trying to ignore the ache which was his body. As he entered, the rolling and plunging and racketing stopped. For a moment he thought he had been stricken deaf.
Then Torres' face swam into the intercom, wet and haggard, and said hoarsely: "They've quit. I don't think they expect their own boat can take any more of this—"
Van Rijn straightened up his bruised back and whooped. "Excellent! Wonderful! But pull us up alongside quick, you lardhead, before—"
There was the twisting sensation of reversion to normal state, and the hyperdrive noise spun into silence. Van
Rijn lost his footing as the Mercury sprang forward and banged against the enemy.
It has been an obvious tactic for Rentharik to use: Switching off his interstellar drive in the hope that the Terran ship would remain hyper and flash so far away he could never be found again. The answer was equally simple—a detector coupled to an automatic cutoff, so that the Mercury would instantly do likewise. And now the League ship was immediately alongside the Gantok, snuggled beneath the very guns the frigate could no longer bring to bear and held by a tractor force she could not break.
Van Rijn struggled back to this feet and removed his helmet. The intercom blushed at his language.
"Captain!" Petrovich yelped the realization. "They're going to board us!"
"name of Judas!" van Rijn's breastplate clashed on the deck. "Must I do all your thinking for you? What use is our pressor if not to swat off unwelcome guests?" He threw back his head and bellowed with laughter. "Let them try, let them try! Our drive field envelops theirs, so it does not matter whether they use their engines or not—and we are stronger, nie? We can drag them with us ever if they fight it. All my life I have been a deep-sea fisherman. And now, full speed ahead to Antares with this little minnow that thought it was a shark!"
A hypervid call to Antares as soon as they were in range brought a League carrier out to meet them. Van Rijn turned the Gantok over to her and let Torres pilot the battered Mercury in. Himself, he wanted only to sleep.
Not that the Borthudians had tried any further stunts, after their boarding party was so cold-bloodedly shoved into deep space. Rentharik was sensible enough to know when he was beaten, and had passively let his ship be hauled away. But the strain of waiting for any possible resistance had been considerable.
Torres had wanted to communicate with the prisoned crew, but van Rijn would not allow it. "No, no, my boy, we demoralize them more by refusing the light of our eyes. I want the good Captain Rentharik's fingernails chewed down to the elbow when I see him.
That was in the governor's mansion, in Redsun City. Van Rijn had appropriated it for his own use, complete with wine cellar and concubines. Between banquets he had found time to check on local prices and raise the tag on pepper a milli-credit per gram. The colonists would grumble, but they could afford it; if it weren't for him, their meals would be drab affairs, so didn't he deserve an honest profit?
After three days of this, he decided it was time to see Rentharik. He lounged on the governor's throne, pipe in one hand.
Rentharik advanced across the parquet floor, gaunt and bitter under the guns of two League gentlemen. He halted before the throne.
"Ah, so there you are!" Van Rijn beamed and waved the bottle. "I trust you have had the pleasant stay? Redsun City jails are much recommended, I am told."
"My government will take measures," spat the Borthudian. "You will not escape the consequences of this piracy."
"You maggoty little kinglet will do nothing of the sort," declared van Rijn. "If the civilized planets did not dare fight when he was playing buccaneer, he will not when it is the other way around. He will accept the facts and learn to love them."
"What do you plan to do with us?"
"Well, now, it may be we can collect a little ransom for you, perhaps, eh? If not, the local iron mines are always short of labor. But out of the great goodness of my heart, I let you choose one man who may go home freely and report what has happened. After that we negotiate."
Rentharik narrowed his lids. "See here, I know how your filthy trading system works. You won't do anything that doesn't pay you. And to equip a vessel like yours—one able to capture a warship—costs more than the vessel could ever hope to earn."
"Quite so. It costs just about three times as much."
"So . . . we'll ruin the Antares route for you! Don't think we'll give up our patrols in our own sovereign territory. We can outlast you, if you want a struggle of attrition."
"Ah!" Van Rijn waggled his pipestem. "That is what you cannot do, my friend. You can reduce our profit considerably, but you cannot eliminate it; therefore, we can continue the route indefinitely under present conditions. You see, each voyage nets a thirty per cent profit."
"And it costs three hundred per cent of your profit to outfit a ship—"
"Indeed. But we are only so equipping every fourth ship. That means we operate on a smaller margin, yes, but a little arithmetic should show you we can still scrape by in the black ink."
"Every fourth—!" Rentharik shook his head, frankly puzzled. "But what will you gain? Out of every four encounters, we will win three."
"Just so. And by those three victories, you will capture twelve slaves. The fourth time, we rope in twenty Borthudian spacemen. Naturally, you will never know beforehand which ship is going to be the one that can fight back. You will either have to give up your press gangs or see them whittled away." Van Rijn rubbed his horny palms together. "So you see, by damn, always I operate on the statistics, and always I load the statistics. My friend, you have had it edgewise."
Rentharik crouched where he stood and blazed at his captor: "I learned, here, that your union will not travel through the Kossaluth. Do you think reducing the number of impressed men by one fourth will change their minds?"
Van Rijn grinned. "If I know my spacemen—why, of course. Because if you do continue to raid us, you will soon reduce yourselves to so few crews as to be helpless. Then you will have to deal with us, and our terms will include freeing of all the slaves, deconditioning, and good fat indemnities. Any man worth his salt can stand a couple years' service, even on your moldy rustbuckets, if he knows he will then be freed and paid enough to retire on."
He cleared his throat, buttered his tone, and went on: "So is it not wise that you make terms at once? We will be very lenient if you do. You will have to release and indemnify all your present captives, and stop raiding, but you can send students to our academies at not much more than the usual fees. We will want a few minor trade concessions as well, of course—"
"And in a hundred years you'll own us!" It was a snarl.
"If you do not agree, by damn, in three years we will own you. The choice is yours. You must have a continuously expanding supply of spacemen or your economy collapses. You can either let us train them in civilized fashion, and give us a wedge by which we ruin you in three generations, or you can impress them and be ruined inside this decade. Pick your man; we will let him report to your king-pig. And never forget that I, Nicholas van Rijn of the Polesotechnic League, do nothing without very good reason. Even the name of my ship could have warned you."
"The name—?" whispered Rentharik.
"Mercury," explained van Rijn, "was the god of commerce, gambling—and thieves."
APPENDIX II:
The Man Who Counts
and the Technic Civilization Series
by Sandra Miesel
The Man Who Counts and the Technic Civilization Series
The Man Who Counts answers the question implicit in its title: who is the man who counts? What personal qualities must such a man have? Poul Anderson explores the issue by cleverly inverting hallowed pulp fiction clichés. The result is an adventure story far more intelligent than any conventional tale of sober and muscular virtue triumphant.
Anderson accomplishes his purpose by successive doses of misdirection and correction. He quickly engages our sympathy for the principal viewpoint character, Eric Wace. This stalwart young engineer, blue of eye and strong of jaw, is the presumptive hero. Wace seems all the nobler in contrast to his "aging, fat, and uncouth, callous and conscienceless" employer, Nicholas van Rijn. This merchant prince is lecherous, while Wace is prudish, devious while Wace is blunt; and flamboyant while Wace is restrained. He tweaks Wace's idealism with remarks like "cowards make the best strategists." His malaprops and fractured syntax assault Wace's ears. His noisy self-pity and superstitious piety jar Wace's sensibilities. In short, everything about van Rijn, even his waxed mustaches and greasy black ringlets, encourages us to see him playing
Comic Antagonist to Wace's Heroic Protagonist. But after establishing these biases in the opening chapters, the author spends the rest of the novel demolishing them with delicious irony. True heroes need not seem the least bit Heroic—or even nice.
Anderson measures our initial responses to the characters against their performance under the stress of shipwreck on an alien planet. The marooned humans must get help before they starve or perish in a war between two native peoples.
The crisis demonstrates Wace's strength and skill but at the same time exposes the shortcomings of his cautious, unimaginative nature. Van Rijn, however, is not limited to the capabilities of his own hands and mind, forceful as these actually are. He knows how to multiply his power: "My job is not to do what is impossible, it is to make others do it for me." He is a charismatic manager, but Wace is too obtuse to appreciate this talent: "You bloated leech, do you expect to be carried home by my labor and my brains and fob me off with another factor's job on another hell-planet?" He short-sightedly rates his efforts building ice ships above van Rijn's imagining them. (The flagship of this bizarre fleet, the Rijsttafel, takes its name from a lavish spread of Dutch-Indonesian style curry, as a nod to van Rijn's ancestry.)
The Van Rijn Method Page 58
