Worlds Apart

by J. T. McIntosh

  "Don't tell me anything. What I don't know they can't get from me. I don't see what you can hope to do, and I'm not going to ask."

  "Bentley!" Rog shouted.

  Bentley looked up, said something to Dick, and came across to them. "Well?" he said.

  "Pertwee's waiting to let the Clades recapture him," said Rog. "What should he tell them?"

  "I thought perhaps you might, John," said Bentley quietly. "It's what I'd do if it were Mary. In fact, I've even thought out what seems to be the best answer to that question. Remember when we were approaching this system, decelerating, twenty-odd years ago. Remember the dead world?"

  Pertwee nodded.

  "Tell them we've gone there. Explain it how you like. But convince them somehow there's no urgency -- you said they thought that anyway. Get them to go to -- what did we call it?"

  "Outpost."

  "That's it. Take them out there, delay them as long as you can -- then, when you can't delay them any more, let them come looking for us."

  "How long do you want?"

  "As long as we can get."

  "But what, as a minimum, do you absolutely have to have?"

  Bentley considered.

  "We might do something in two months."

  "Two months! Then there's a chance!"

  "Oh, yes. If you can get them to go to Outpost."

  "I'll try." Pertwee put out his hand.

  He didn't protract his farewells. Mary, Brad, Jessie, Kate, Frank, Ruby -- these were all who mattered. Ruby mattered most, and he had least qualms about leaving her. She didn't say anything -- she was never very communicative -- but he felt that at the parting they had reckoned up and settled everything between them. Ruby was young to be responsible, but she had taken responsibility under Rog Foley. She was going to take her part in building the new Lemon.

  He went east; not far, for he was only leaving Lemon so that he wouldn't see what happened there. He waited a day, two days.

  When he returned there wasn't a living soul in the valley, and most of the houses had been destroyed.

  IX

  1

  Every morning, now, Phyllis took Toni out in the open, well clear of the ship, and talked with her in complete freedom. Always, to increase the illusion, Phyllis wore Mundan clothes. It worked as it was probably meant to work -- Toni had so thoroughly identified the grim, cold Lieutenant Barton with the uniform she wore that Phyllis in a ket or cuffed shorts was accepted easily as another person.

  Every day Toni's eyes smarted more and she was stiffer. Fatigue got into her bones and into her very blood. Time moved jerkily; it would glide along rapidly, imperceptibly, and then draw up with a crash and a jar. Thinking of the last time she was in bed was like looking through the wrong end of a telescope. Behind her stretched the morning and the long, silent night with three guards sitting up with her, making certain she didn't doze even for a moment. Behind that the day, always a slightly less tired day than this one, and before that the morning and another long, silent night. And so back to the time when she was being tortured, but could have spent fifteen hours a day sleeping if she wished.

  Sometimes it was hard to talk, but for the most part she made the effort. It was more pleasant, if possible, to keep herself interested and awake than to succumb and be jarred into wakefulness.

  And she had learned a lot of interesting things about the Clades. There were a lot of things she knew now and wished she could tell the Mundans.

  The Mundis had been supposed to he the last interstellar ship that could leave Earth, and it very nearly was. It was made while Earth's dvilization was still functioning, while communications were good, while one only had to order a piece of equipment and get it. As Phyllis spoke about this she echoed a certain bitter jealousy which must have animated all Clades when they thought of the Mundis.

  The Class was built in a collapsing culture -- or rather, after all culture had collapsed. It was built amid violence and ruin and murder and famine. When anyone engaged on its construction refused to obey an order, it was routine to shoot him. Life was dirt cheap on a world that had billions, of whom only a paltry three hundred could be taken on the Cladss. Disappointment was routine too. The flat statement that there wouldn't be any curium had to be overturned somehow, or meant wholesale conversion to the use ef americium or plutonium. Heavy hydrogen was a problem at another time; there just was not, and never would be, any more heavy water. The technicians went back to graphite, which had been used at any earlier stage for the same purpose.

  And while atomic power made low-voltage electric power look pretty silly, it could be more than merely infuriating when the electric power cut out altogether and the Clades technicians had to waste a valuable six months making the construction base entirely self-contained.

  Yes, the men who built the Clades had a right to sneer at the men who built the Mundis. They did, too, and perhaps that was the real start of what was now to be a war between the two ships and their people.

  Phyllis reported all this secondhand, more or less indifferently, merely because Toni expressed interest. She hadn't been concerned in it herself. She had been born in space.

  Those who had remained behind on Earth had been in no doubt of what the purpose of this last mighty ship would be. Men knew again that survival mattered before all else. Survival of self, group, nation, race, humanity, animal life. The Clades was sent after the Mundis to make sure. Two chances were better than one.

  And two chances woald continue to be better than one.

  "This isn't what's taught among us now," observed Phyllis. "It's what" I heard when I was a child. We were supposed to contact the Mundane, that was all. We were to see if you'd succeeded -- if you had settled down, if you were safe. The contact was to be very slight, and only to see if you needed help. Then we were to go on colonizing other worlds, making sure that never again would the destruction of one tiny world threaten the whole race of man."

  "But you didn't," said Toni. "Why?"

  The Clades didn't because that was only the view of those who stayed behind. For those who went, things had a different aspect. There was no doubt of survival any more. If there were, why, certainly they'd rather the Mundane survived than no one at all. But as it was, the Mundans were only the obvious first item in the Clade list of conquests . . .

  "Do you agree with this?" Toni demanded.

  Phyllis shook her head impatiently. "You don't understand. If someone says a uniform is magenta, and you know you'll be shot if you say it's anything else -- it's magenta. You don't tell yourself you'll call it magenta, but it's really green. If you do that, some time you'll make a mistake and say it's green."

  "Yes, but that doesn't /make/ it magenta."

  "It does to a Clade. If he wants to live, that is."

  "You mean you /must/ agree to conquer Mundis?"

  "Not quite. My agreement isn't called for. Asking for agreement is giving a person a chance to disagree."

  Toni thought of saying, but didn't, that from the very way she talked it was clear that Phyllis had never done what she said every Clade must do. She didn't believe the uniform was magenta. She might build up an unshakable response, but her calculations on the subject were based on the fact that it was green. . . .

  "Go on," said Toni. "If we were your first conquest, why did you wait all these years?"

  The President of the United Nations, when the Clades took off, had been a dictator. He had to be, in the world he lived in. There was no authority but supreme authority.

  If a totalitarian system is to work properly, and keep on working, there must be no time when there isn't a leader. It is: "The king is dead: long live the king" There must be no instant when there is no supreme leader.

  The Clades left Earth, however, with Commodore Corey in command, but answerable to the President. And Corey didn't become supreme commander until twenty-eight years later, when they /knew/ the President no longer existed.

  Meantime the Clades had landed on Secundis and found it ha
bitable. They had built a colony, overhauled the ship, spent twelve years growing stronger and training and preparing. They never went to Mundis, for if they did they would lose a possible future advantage of surprise. As it was, the Mundans couldn't know there had been a second ship, and when the Clades were ready --

  "I can take it from there," said Toni. "You do what you're told instead of what seems to be the right thing, and your supreme leader had told you not to interfere with us. Not until you had /another/ leader, who wasn't answerable to anyone, could you change that and act in another way."

  "That's it," said'Phyllis.

  That was the last day when Toni could really think clearly. After that she was fuzzy all the time. She didn't know how many days it had been. It seemed like months.

  The curious thing was that it wasn't really unpleasant. The aches and pains and stiffness had stopped. Apparently her body had learned now to use ordinary rest for recuperation, since it couldn't have sleep. Besides, Toni knew she was soon going to tell them where Lemon was. Soon she would mumble it without knowing what she was doing -- she knew, unfortunately, that it was somewhere to the southwest of where the Clades was grounded, and calculated from what Pertwee had told her about distance that it was about a thousand miles away.

  After all, she knew she had done more than anyone would have expected. The Clades were surprised that she still held out -- Phyllis admitted that she had given them all a grudging respect for Mundans. And whatever was happening at Lemon, surely they had had time now to get something worthwhile done. If Pertwee hadn't got through, her efforts had been wasted. If he had, the Mundans had had plenty of time to get out of Lemon, wherever good that would do.

  There was a day of which she could remember nothing. They wouldn't have let her sleep, of course, but she must have gone around in a coma. Then a day when she found herself about to tell them where Lemon was, and came more awake than she had been for days with a mighty effort.

  When at last it happened, she felt cheated. She was suddenly aware of Phyllis's voice through a mist asking her to repeat something. She hadn't the faintest idea what she had said. She was staring at Phyllis, who was exultant and yet faintly, inexplicably regretful as well.

  "Oh, well," said Phyllis, "I think I got it. If you tell how far, I can let you sleep now. Otherwise you'll have to come to the control room."

  "What did I say?" Toni demanded dazedly.

  "Southwest, a little west."

  "All right. A thousand miles," said Toni weakly. The resistance was over. It seemed childish to pretend it wasn't. She collapsed completely and never knew that Phyllis, at the risk of being thought soft, carried her to her bunk and covered her up.

  But then Phyllis made all the capitol there was to be made out of reporting the location of Lemon, after all this time. She had done all she could to build up the legend of Toni's courage and devotion to duty (that, of course, was how it was phrased among the Clades), so that when she finally succeeded she would have done what was obviously a very difficult job.

  The Clades was in the air at once.

  2

  Pertwee surveyed the valley of Lemon and felt a certain wry satisfaction about the destruction he had wrought.

  When he came back to the village after giving the Mundans time to get clear there had still been a broad, plain track stretching away southwards -- the track of animals, many feet and every wheeled vehicle that could be pressed into service or thrown tugether. But Pertwee, having noted the track, was careful not to follow it. And two days later it would have been difficult to see. Two more days, and it was impossible.

  Even the direction, however, had been a lie. Pertwee knew that Rog would not have left with him the responsibility of knowing in which direction they had gone. They hadn't gone due south.

  Waiting, Pertwee had burned the fields. The last Mundan-Terran crop had been garnered from them; there was no point in letting the Clades see how easily and successfully wheat and corn and barley could be grown in Mundan soil. They might yet be deceived about Mundis. It didn't look an unduly friendly or desirable planet for Earthmen, and if they could be persuaded to keep that idea, so much the better.

  Anxiety grew less, tension relaxed, as the days passed. Pertwee didn't think about what Rog would do. But a little time was clearly necessary even before the Clades came to Lemon and Pertwee tried to win more time, If the Clades had come while the track was still visible, of course, the whole effort would have been wasted.

  There was quite a lot to do, at first. He burned the houses too, those that would burn. Not many of them would, for fire was such a constant hazard that the basic purpose of a house was rather as a protection against fire than anything else. Pertwee wasn't trying to obliterate Lemon. He merely wanted what remained to give away as little information as possible to the Clades.

  As the days went by and there was less to do, the time passed more and more slowly. Pertwee began to fear that the Clades had found the Mundans without coming near Lemon. Perhaps, by supreme had luck, Rog had led his people right into the Clades' hands.

  But one day he heard the sound of atomic engines and looked up. The Clades was coming over the hill. It came straight to Lemon, confidently.

  Pertwee wore nothing but his shorts and sandals. He was living on a small store of food and water cached in one of the ruined houses. He stood out in the open and waited.

  He had thought as little as he could about Toni since he saw her last, but he allowed himself to think about her now. Though he had known it was inevitable that she would break down in the end, he still felt unreasonably disappointed that she had. Just a short while ago, hours or minutes, she had told the Clades where Lemon was, knowing what the Clades were, knowing what they would do to the Mundans . . .

  And with this, but quite separate, were fear and anxiety on Toni's account. Perhaps, having got all they wanted of her, the Clades had killed her. Perhaps she had not spoken until she was near to death. Perhaps she was alive but maimed, disfigured, minus an eye or a leg or an arm.

  He didn't like it either way. He didn't want Toni to have surrendered easily; he didn't want her to be crazed or mutilated or dead.

  The ship landed neatly and quickly. As before, a squad of men jumped to the ground; as before, Pertwee waited. Within ten minutes he was before Commodore Corey. Sloan was there, Mathers and Phyllis, As far as the Clades were concerned the situation hadn't changed, to go by their attitude.

  "Your people have gone again, I see," said Corey. He tried to keep his voice cold and emotionless, but Pertwee sensed something in it -- the natural anger and frustration, and something else. "It's stupid. We must find them."

  "Certainly," Pertwee admitted. "What have you done with Toni?"

  "That can wait."

  "No, it can't. I have something to say to you, obviously, or I wouldn't have been waiting for you. But I'm not going to say it until I see Toni."

  He didn't feel nearly as confident as he sounded. He could feel the sweat forming on his back, and there was something crawling in his guts. He was afraid of torture and he was afraid of death, but showing his fear would weaken his position.

  "You are not dictating to me," rapped Corey, Pertwee became interested. Corey was angry and afraid of something, at a guess. If so, the fear was new; there hadn't been the slightest sign of it before.

  Pertwee was silent. Sloan coughed. "Sir -- "he began.

  "Did I ask for your opinion, captain?" demanded Corey. And as Sloan shrugged, Pertwee guessed a little more. The commodores position was much more precarious than it had been. One could see that, by the way he dared his officers to speak, and yet had to pretend not to see their significant glances among themselves.

  "I'm still waiting," said the commodore, turning back to Pertwee.

  "So," Pertwee observed, "am I."

  Sloan grinned openly. But suddenly Corey realized it wasn't too late to retreat yet, though it would be soon. "You can't see your wife just at the moment," he said in a milder tone. "She's sleep
ing."

  "Forever?" demanded Pertwee bluntly.

  "No, she will be perfectly all right after a few hours' sleep. She has merely been kept awake until she told us where Lemon was. Now, your message?"

  Pertwee glanced at Phyllis, assuming that Toni had remained principally her charge. To his amazement she smiled faintly,fleetingy, at him.

  "I'd like to see her first," he said.

  Corey bit back a sharp refusal. He gestured to Phyllis. "Take him to see her," he said impatiently, "and bring him back here at once."

  Pertwee hoped Phyllis would say something on the way, something to explain that fleeting, conspiratorial smile. But he didn't expect it, and it didn't happen. She acted like a robot. He wished he had the quick mind of Rog Foley. Rog, he was certain, would have guessed more than he had and would already be making use of what he had deduced.

  Phyllis opened a door and for the first time for weeks Pertwee saw Toni. She was sleeping easily, quite unharmed, as far as he could see; again he was glad and sorry, glad she was safe, sorry she had given in so comparatively easily.

  The robot unexpectedly came to life again. Phyllis must have seen his frown. "She took about ten times as much as we expected," she said. "When she spoke, she was asleep on her feet."

  Pertwee turned to her quickly, but her expression warned him. They went back to the commodore's cabin without another word.

  "Now, say what you have to say," said Corey.

  Pertwee had been wondering whether to modify his plans in the light of what was going on, but he could see no advantage in doing so. Dissension among the Clades was all to the Mundans' advantage, of course; it was a pity there was no way in which he could aggravate it at the moment.

  "You won't find my people," he said definitely. "You can search if you like -- so much the better. When you're satisfied they're no longer on Mundis, I'll tell you where they've gone, if you like."

  The commodore frowned. "What nonsense is this?"

  "By the time you reach them," Pertwee said calmly, "they'll be ready for you. So it doesn't matter whether you know where they are or not. It would really be better, though, if there /must/ be a demonstration of power, to have it soon."