by Frederick
The plug-ugly behind the desk was awake this time; he sat reading a newssheet, his feet as before plumped on the desk.
When he saw me his eyes widened incredulously and his jaw dropped. He peered silently at me, unbelievingly; then he recovered himself. “You,” he grumbled. But his expression was as strained as that of a man who has seen a ghost.
“Yes, me,” I said. “Is Mr. Faulkner in now?”
He glowered at me. His Neanderthal brain was obviously trying to reach a difficult decision. He grunted, and said: “I’ll go see.”
He lifted his gross body with astonishing vigor, rolled across the room and vanished through a door with Faulkner’s name on it. I stood waiting for long minutes; then he came back and snarled, “Go on in.”
The room I entered was a little larger than the Neanderthal’s, but dark and low-ceilinged. The walls were lined with rows of ancient books, the leather of their bindings cracking and peeling; the air was musty, dusty, redolent of dry rot.
Beneath the one dim Troyon tube, Faulkner sat staring coldly at me. He was a nondescript human—medium tall, medium thin, medium sallow and wrinkled, medium elderly. His black suit was rather worn for a successful attorney’s; it was also not very clean. His eyes were hard behind thick-lensed eyeglasses.
I said, “Mr. Faulkner?”
He sat very erect, palms pressed against his desk. “I am,” he said crisply. “And you claim to be James Eden.”
I looked at him curiously. “I am James Eden,” I corrected. “You radioed me several times about my uncle’s estate, Mr. Faulkner. I told you I was coming here to claim it. Did you get my radio?”
His stare remained cold. “Hum,” he said. And then, obliquely, “Why didn’t you keep your appointment yesterday?”
I said, with some irritation, “Because I was mugged and robbed, Mr. Faulkner. I’m sorry if it inconvenienced you.”
“Hum,” he said. His hawklike face expressed neither surprise nor sympathy. “What do you want?”
“Why—well, as I wrote you, I want to take possession of my uncle’s estate.”
He said disagreeably, “Do you indeed! And just who might your uncle be?”
I stared at him, hardly believing I was hearing right. “My uncle Stewart Eden,” I said in some confusion. “You know him, Mr. Faulkner!”
“I knew him. Stewart Eden is dead, young man.” I started to say something, but he clipped on, one hand raised to restrain me: “Furthermore, I should like to see some identification from you.”
I said hotly: “I told you, Mr. Faulkner—I was robbed! All my identification is gone.”
He looked skeptical. He said: “Hum!”
“But that’s what really happened,” I insisted. “I—”
The hand was raised again. “Enough, young man!” he said sharply. “There is no point in continuing with this. As an attorney, permit me to acquaint you with the law. Imposture for the purpose of criminal gain—posing as the heir to an estate, for instance—is a serious offense. My advice to you is to give it up.”
I was stunned. “What?” I demanded.
“You understood me, I believe. You are not James Eden. I do not know who you are, but it is certain that him you are not.”
I cried, “Listen, Mr. Faulkner, you’re making a mistake! I am James Eden.”
He shouted, “And I say you are not! I have met James Eden—right here, in this office! You look no more like him than you do like me!”
I gaped at him. “Wh-what?”
“Impostor!” he raged. “Get out of my office! Now—and get down on your knees and thank me for not turning you over to the police!”
I burst out, “See here, Mr. Faulkner, this is ridiculous. Of course I’m James Eden—I can prove it!”
He said explosively, “Do so!”
I hesitated. “Well,” I admitted, “it will take a little time. I’ll have to send back to the States for my papers.
“Liar!” he cried. “You dare say that, when I have in my desk here the identification book of the real James Eden, with his picture, fingerprints and all the rest!”
I gaped. “You—you what?” I asked feebly.
He thrust a hand into a drawer. “See for yourself,” he said harshly, tossing a familiar little red book before me. I picked it up apprehensively…
Familiar?
I had carried it for many years. It was not an imitation of my book—it was my book, to the last crease and ink spot and blurred line.
But the picture in it was not of me. The man was a total stranger; the description fit him, not me; the signature was not my own.
Faulkner snatched the book away from me. “Bishop!” he called.
The Neanderthaler rolled in from the other room, and stood regarding me eagerly. To me, Faulkner said coldly: “Get out!”
What else could I do?
Gideon explained it—perhaps. “Your friend Mr. Faulkner must have had you mugged,” he speculated. “I would imagine, Jim, that he wants you out of the way pretty badly, to go as far as murder.”
“But the identification book, Gideon!” I said.
He shook his head. “Jim,” he said patiently, “there are men in Thetis who could forge any document the world has ever seen. It isn’t hard for someone who knows how. The question isn’t ‘how’; the question is ‘why.’ I don’t like to leap at conclusions, but the one that suggests itself most quickly is: Marine Mines Limited are worth more than they seem to be.”
I shook my head bewilderedly. “But they can’t be,” I said. “It’s all below the depth limit, the whole prospect—even if Uncle Stewart had found something there, there’s no way of getting it out.”
Gideon shrugged. “Have you a better idea?”
I had to confess I didn’t. We sat wordless for a moment. Then I said: “Well, what shall I do? Go back and get thrown out of Faulkner’s office again?”
Gideon shook his head, and a gleam of anticipation came into his eye. “Not this time, Jim. First you establish your identity—go to the consul here in Thetis, get a duplicate of your papers. Then we go back to see Faulkner. You and me both. And I would like to see us get thrown out; it would be quite a spectacle, Jim.”
I did as Gideon suggested.
The office of the immigration inspector was up with the other government buildings, on Level Twenty-one.
I stated my case to an assistant at the passport window. He nodded non-committally, excused himself, then returned to take me to the office of the Inspector himself.
He was a plump, bald, brisk-mannered little man named Chapman. He shook my hand pleasantly, listened to my story and nodded understandingly.
“That sort of thing happens,” he said. “Pity, but it does. We can help you, young man.” He rang a bell; his secretary showed me the way to the laboratory.
I was stripped, measured, weighed, fingerprinted, retina-printed, photographed with natural light, fluorescence and X-rays.
I was examined, poked and probed; my teeth were counted and charted; the pores on the soles of my feet were located and graphed. The process took well over an hour.
When it was finished, a white-smocked lab attendant brought me back to the Inspector.
Inspector Chapman handed me a passport, which bore in scarlet letters the legend TEMPORARY. “Carry this for the next two weeks,” he instructed. “By then we will have word from the United States; if your statistics match the information our laboratory sends them, we’ll issue you a new permanent passport. This one, I’m sorry to say, will not do you much good except to permit you to travel about Thetis. You can’t leave without a permanent passport.”
“And you’ll have that in two weeks?” I asked. “Thank you very much, sir.”
He escorted me to the door. “Not at all,” he said. “It’s part of our job to help out when someone loses an important document.” He looked at me levelly. “Always assuming,” he added, “that the document is really theirs to begin with.”
The door closed on his last words.
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14
The Outcasts of Marinia
So we had to wait—wait until the mixup on my papers could be straightened out, wait until we could have a showdown with Faulkner, wait until I could learn the answers to many questions.
We had time to kill, Gideon and I. We spent it looking around the dome-city of Thetis. Gideon knew it well, from the high administrative levels to the sub-cellars below the very sea floor. And he showed me everything there was.
He took me to the great submarine quays, not the liner terminals where I had docked in the Isle of Spain, but the freight ports where the commerce of the sub-sea world was carried on. Through the view ports in the side of the dome we could see, floodlighted, a busy hustle of ungainly freighters and tiny, porpoiselike sea cars, nuzzling down to the discharge ports, slipping up and away to the other cities of Marinia. We watched a lumbering tanker as it made five unsuccessful passes at the port—“Tough job for them,” Gideon chuckled; “they’re lighter than the water, and it’s hard to swim them in just right.” I nodded and stared, wide-eyed. Lighter than the water! Yet it was obvious—their cargoes of petroleum and its products needed more than the mere weight of the cargo hulk to equal an identical volume of sea water. Through the view ports one was hardly aware of the water outside: it looked like some curious scene of interplanetary space, with the sub-sea ships taking the parts of rockets. The muck in suspension in the water around Thetis made it cloudy, but it was more like a land fog than an undersea view. I could even see, dimly, the face of the tanker-pilot as he raged at his engineer through the intercom as they made their fruitless passes—and then his smile of triumph as the grapples locked, and they were moored. He was not alone in die bridgehouse; beside him were men in the uniform of the Maritime Service—
And one of them was no stranger! “Bob!” I gasped. “Bob Eskow!”
Gideon looked at me curiously. “An acquaintance of yours?” he asked.
“Just the best friend I have in the world, that’s all! Gideon, this is wonderful luck! How can we get to that tanker?”
He scratched his head doubtfully. “I don’t know if it’s a good idea,” he objected mildly. “You know, Jim, we still haven’t figured out what Kelly was up to when he mugged you. And that’s Kelly’s Kingdom down there, where the freighters discharge.”
My expression must have convinced him. He grinned and surrendered. “All right. Come on,” he said.
We took a fast elevator down, but it seemed to take terribly long. At the discharge level we came out onto a badly lighted, poorly kept section of Thetis, much like the one I had come in at, but even worse in appearance if possible. There were the same long rows of warehouses, the same jostling, bustling crowds of dock workers. I stayed close by Gideon’s side as he struck out confidently.
But there was no trouble—not the sort of trouble I might have feared, at any rate. There was no sign of Kelly; no one even looked at us, much less tried to repeat Kelly’s attack. What actually happened was much, much worse.
We reached the tanker—5.5. Warren F. Howard was its name—and rode the little pneumatic lift to the entrance port. I stopped a crewman and asked directions to the bridge; with Gideon in tow, I raced along the narrow passageways and climbed through a hatchway to the bridgehouse.
Bob wasn’t there.
The pilot was talking casually to a deck officer; they turned to look at me with some irritation. I asked excitedly, “Is Bob Eskow here? I saw him from the dome—”
The pilot said something in a whisper. The deck man nodded thoughtfully. He said: “Who wants him?”
“My name,” I told him, “is—”
Gideon’s elbow caught me sharply in the ribs. He interrupted smoothly, “Just a couple of old friends of his, sir. Can you tell us where we can find him?”
The deck officer glowered. “How did you get aboard?” he demanded.
“Just walked, sir,” Gideon said with a wide-eyed look of innocence. “Was that wrong?”
The deck officer gave him a long look. Then, to me, he said:
“You’ll have to go ashore. Eskow’s in his quarters and can’t be disturbed.”
“But I just saw him!” I cried.
“You heard me.” The deck officer touched a bell, and a seaman popped through the hatch. “Show these men ashore,” the officer ordered.
Unwillingly I went. Back on the other side of the entrance port, I asked the seaman: “Can you take a message to Mr. Eskow for me?”
The seaman looked dubious, until he caught sight of my outstretched hand and the folded bill it contained. “Sure,” he said cheerfully. “What do you want me to tell him?”
I wrote a hasty note, signed it “Jim,” and handed it to the seaman, who disappeared into the entrance port with it. Gideon murmured:
“Don’t know if that was rightly smart, Jim. Know what ship this is?”
I shook my head. Gideon whispered: “Hallam Sperry’s tanker flagship. And that first officer is one of his personal pets, Jim; that’s why I didn’t want you telling him who you were.”
I said uncertainly, “But surely he wouldn’t have kept me from seeing an old friend!”
“Are you so very sure of that?” Gideon asked quietly. But I had no chance to answer, for the seaman was back. His face was extremely cold. He said:
“Mr. Eskow says he never heard of you.” And he disappeared again before I could collect my wits to answer.
Back in our hotel, I stared out the window at the bustling crowds of Marinians. Even Bob Eskow seemed to have turned against me! Except for Gideon, there seemed no one I could trust in all the world.
I never felt so lonesome in my life as at that moment.
I sat there, fruitlessly worrying, until Gideon came in. He had sent me on ahead while he ran some mysterious errand of his own, down in Kelly’s Kingdom; when he came into the room his face was grave. He said at once:
“Jim, something’s up. There’s talk down at the ’charge levels.
Sperry’s got something.”
“What has he got?”
Gideon looked worried. “That’s just it, I don’t know. Ever hear of a man named Catroni?”
“No.”
Gideon’s face was in harsh lines. “Fortunate for you,” he said. “Catroni. Kicked out of the States, kicked out of every country in Europe, on Hallam Sperry’s payroll here in Marinia. Payroll for what? Nobody knows—officially. But the man started out as a common hoodlum. Draw your own conclusions.”
“Sounds like someone you couldn’t trust very far,” I said.
Gideon nodded soberly. “That is the trouble, Jim. Somebody trusted him a little too far. He was with your uncle when the seacar was lost. And they say—” He hesitated, looking at me almost beseechingly. “They say—don’t draw too much hope from this, Jim, but they say that Catroni was seen going into Sperry’s quarters yesterday.”
I leaped up. “Gideon! That means—”
He said fretfully, “I know what it means. If it’s true that Catroni is here—and if he really was with Stewart Eden—then maybe there’s a chance. A chance of heaven knows what, Jim—for if Catroni came back secretly, there must be dirty work somewhere that he is covering up. But still—”
“Gideon,” I said tensely, “let’s go see Hallam Sperry!”
He stared. “You are out of your mind!”
“No, Gideon. I can see him. I have his invitation, after all—on the Isle of Spain he made me an offer. I can tell him I want to discuss it; and perhaps I can find something out.” Gideon was shaking his head somberly, but I rushed on. “Don’t you see, Gideon, I have to try it. Sperry won’t dare do anything openly—he has too much at stake. And besides—well, I’ll lay it on the line, Gideon: Suppose you’re wrong? Suppose Sperry isn’t quite as bad as you’ve painted him?”
He stopped me, mercifully, then. There was fierce pride and hurt in his eyes. He said carefully: “All right, Jim. I can’t blame you for wanting to see for yourself.” He slumped wearily into a chair, no
t looking at me. “I only hope,” he said, “that what you see doesn’t hurt you.”
“SIT, SIT,” Hallam Sperry rumbled impatiently.
I sat down. I started to say, “Mr. Sperry, I—”
He interrupted before I got started. “My son is here,” he said suddenly. “Brand. You remember Brand, eh? Told me a great deal about you. Maybe I should say about James Eden. Eh?”
The question seemed half-humorous, but his cold eyes were not humorous at all. “What do you mean?” I asked.
He shrugged ponderously. “What do you want?” he asked.
He had me somewhat confused. I said, “Well, back on the Isle of Spain you made a proposition, Mr. Sperry.”
I stopped. He was shaking his huge head. “Forget that,” he said.
“I’m an old man. I bear no grudge for you trying to take me in, but it didn’t work.” He stared at me out of his sea-cold eyes. “You’re no more James Eden than I am,” he said. “You know it, I know it, what’s the use of trying to pull the wool over an old man’s eyes?”
I said, trying to control my temper, “Mr. Sperry, I am James Eden! I was knocked out and robbed—my papers were stolen—but I’m getting new ones from ‘Frisco.”
He laughed shortly. “That’s it, boy,” he applauded. “Stick to it!”
“Please, Mr. Sperry! Look, you say your son is here—ask him to identify me.”
Hallam Sperry looked at me for a long, opaque moment. Then he rose ponderously and turned his back while he poured himself some sort of drink. Without turning he said: ‘Brand?”
A voice came promptly from a speaker-diaphragm over Hallam Sperry’s desk. “Yes, sir?”
Hallam Sperry said: “Brand, have you been watching us on the scanner?”
“Yes, father,” came the metallic voice strongly. “He’s an impostor, sir. I never saw him before.”
“Thank you, Brand,” the old man said mildiy. He clicked a switch on his desk and sat down, sipping his drink. He looked at me with his cold, inquiring eyes. “Eh?” He asked. “Still want to argue?”
All at once the world looked tremendously black. I could only sit there, staring at him. Had everyone gone insane? How could Brand Sperry deny that I was James Eden?
