by Chad Oliver
“Hungry! Hah! I’m hungry too!”
“Well, why don’t we eat then? Where’s that fancy supper?”
“Supper! That’s what I’m talking about—supper!”
“You mean you want me for supper?” Rita Reynolds asked incredulously. “Very flattering, I’m sure, but—”
“It won’t hurt you, my dear. Not at all. It’s like a transfusion, perfectly painless. You’ll be as good as new in the morning. I don’t want it all.”
“Just a wee nip, so to speak.”
“Yes, yes. Oh, I’ve waited for this moment!”
“Well, you can keep right on waiting. I’m not having any.”
“No,” he gloated, “you’re not. But I am!”
“Oh stop it, Jonathan. I’m hungry.”
“Enough!” Jonathan Newcastle thundered. “I thirst!”
Jonathan Newcastle laughed horribly and advanced on his victim. His terrible red eyes burned with savage, age-old fury. He was through fooling around now. This wasn’t one of their sugar-coated movies. This was the real thing. The blood pounded through his veins.
“Thirsty,” Rita Reynolds said warily. “Yes, I’m thirsty too. Why don’t you fix me a drink—”
“Fool, fool,” whispered Jonathan Newcastle, stalking forward. “I’m going to fix me a drink.”
“For God’s sake, stop this silly acting. I don’t like it and it isn’t necessary—”
“Invoking the Deity again! No use, no use. You don’t know the proper methods, not at all. Hah—acting! We’ll soon see who’s acting. Oh, I’ve waited so long—so long.”
Rita Reynolds backed hesitantly into a corner. She looked lovely there, a little confused, her red lips parted. Red! And her throat, her white, pulsing, wonderful throat—
“Now,” hissed Jonathan Newcastle.
He reached out, clutching her to him.
“Look, Jonathan!” Rita squirmed, then pushed strongly at his chest. “Not now, damn it! No! You crazy—”
He forced her head back and his white teeth found her throat. Ecstasy …
“You clumsy idiot!” the girl panted, twisting out of his grasp. “That hurts!”
“Rita—no! Don’t—”
Her indignant hand came around in a perfect arc and connected with a hard, stinging slap. Jonathan Newcastle staggered backward, more astonished than hurt. Slapped! Him, Jonathan Newcastle! It was unbelievable.
“Your technique may be new, Casanova,” Rita sneered, “but it’s lousy just the same!”
She gathered up her purse and wrap and bounced toward the door, contempt in every line of her lush body.
“Rita!” Jonathan Newcastle moaned hopelessly, hungrily.
“Now,” Rita Reynolds informed him. “I’ve seen everything. But everything!” The door slammed behind her.
Jonathan Newcastle sank wearily into an armchair, his head in his hands.
“Foiled,” he sighed in utter despair. “Foiled again!”
NORTH WIND
The heavy glass doors whispered apart before him and Norman Mavor walked out of the hearing room. His formal blue suit was still crisply pressed, his straight gray hair neatly combed. He moved down the spotless corridor with a firm step.
Except for his eyes, he might have passed himself off as a man without a care in the world.
His eyes were green—not the shallow green of grass or leaves, but the deep, translucent green of the sea. The eyes were embedded in a lined, craggy face that had seen better days, and at the moment they were more than a little bloodshot.
He looked neither to right nor left, and people kept out of his way. If he heard the barbed comments that followed him down the corridor he gave no outward sign.
He took the private elevator to the roof and climbed into a copter with NORMAN MAVOR discreetly lettered on the sides of the cabin.
Then he waited.
He didn’t smoke. He didn’t fidget. His eyes were open, looking straight ahead, but it was impossible to tell what they were seeing, if anything.
He just waited.
Ten minutes later, a balding, red-faced dynamo of a man came panting up the little-used stairway, waved excitedly, and piled his somewhat globular form into the copter next to Mavor.
“We tied ’em in circles, Norm,” Karl Hauser chuckled, his multiple chins dancing. “Old Fishface and the Development boys never knew what hit ’em!”
“You bet,” Norman Mavor said icily. “We won those guys a quarter of their own planet without firing a shot. Ain’t we grand?”
Karl Hauser beamed, undaunted. “Save it for the Old Ladies League,” he advised. “You need a drink.”
“With that I am in complete agreement. Sky Grotto suit you?”
“They sell alcohol, don’t they?”
Mavor essayed a smile, not too successfully, and lifted the copter up into the sunlight that washed New York in yellow gold.
Two hours afterward, fortified by a predominantly liquid lunch topped by a drowning hamburger, Norman Mavor checked in at his private office near Lake Success. His grooming was still faultless; only the fact that the lines in his face were less strikingly obvious than before betrayed the lessening of the tension within him.
His office was chiefly notable for its utter lack of curios, gewgaws, knick-knacks, and assorted junk-gadgets. It was clean in its simplicity, and if its stained pine walls and hardwood floors lacked something in warmth, they could at least not be accused of pretense in any form.
There was one photograph on Mavor’s desk. It was set in a neat silver frame, and it was a picture of a smug chimpanzee sitting cross-legged on a box.
The chimp’s name was Basil, and there was a nameplate on the frame to that effect. Basil was one of the few remaining anthropoid apes; the orang and the gorilla were long extinct, and only a scattering of chimps and gibbons were left to hold the fort.
There was nothing special about Basil, save that Mavor liked the expression on his face. It was hard to take yourself too seriously with a chimpanzee on your desk.
Mavor sat down, and waited.
In precisely four minutes there was a knock on his door, which meant that someone had succeeded in getting past the small army of his assistants to talk to him personally. Mavor loathed the tri-di phone, and seldom answered it.
“Come in,” he said.
The door opened and a young, very earnest man hurried in with a folder under his arm.
Enter Prometheus, bearing fire, Mavor thought. He recognized the man: Bill Shackelford, one of the field data analysts. Aloud, Mavor said, “Hello, Bill. How long before the end of the world?”
Shackelford blinked, but made a fast recovery. “I figure a billion years, give or take a few hundred million. Why?”
Mavor shrugged. “When people barge in here,” he said, “it’s generally a matter of life or death. The lot of the Integrator of Interstellar Affairs is not a happy one, as you may discover if you ever get kicked upstairs into my job.”
“I do have something I think you ought to see, Mr. Mavor, or I wouldn’t have bothered you.”
Mavor nodded sagely. “Let me guess. You have been checking a field report from one of our rover boys, right?”
“Well, yes. That’s my job.”
“And you have discovered something extraordinary, right?”
Shackelford sat down, as though he had lost some of the wind from his sails. “I didn’t exactly discover it, Mr. Mavor—it’s in the field report.”
“Ah. Let’s see now.” Mavor tilted his old-fashioned swivel chair back and gazed at the ceiling. “One of the field men has stumbled across a rare item on—ummmm—Capella IV should be about due, yes?”
“No,” Shackelford said with some relish. “It’s from Arcturus III.”
“Arcturus, then. It couldn’t have been a plain old primitive culture, because that’s too common to bring to my attention. It couldn’t be an advanced civilization, in the usual sense, or I’d have heard of it long ago. So what does that leave us, Bill?
Either a culture past the Neolithic and into an early urban situation, which might cover the planet without attracting our attention with radio waves or spaceships, or else—what?”
“You tell me, Mr. Mavor.”
“Okay.” Mavor tilted his chair forward again and put his elbows on the desk. “I’ll tell you. The anthropologist on Arcturus has stumbled across something that looks primitive, but isn’t. How’s that?”
“How did you know?” Shackelford asked, visibly disappointed.
“Basil told me,” Mavor said, nodding toward the photograph. “He’s a very widely read ape.”
Shackelford sat quite still, caught in that maddening impasse of the recently adult male: too old to walk out in a huff, too young to turn the tables with any master-stroke of daily diplomacy. “Well,” he said finally, “I’m sorry I bothered you, since you have such a remarkable source of information already at hand.”
Mavor squinted his green eyes, damning himself inwardly for his absolute inability to play the buddy-buddy to everyone. He rather liked Shackelford, he knew that the younger man would now go home and tell his wife about what a monster the boss was, and he knew that he had made an enemy. He already had an ample supply of the latter, but he couldn’t function any other way.
The silence got tighter.
“I kind of thought you might be interested,” Shackelford said finally, fidgeting on his chair.
“Go ahead and smoke, Bill,” Mavor said, recognizing the symptoms. “I won’t throw a tantrum.”
Shackelford produced a cigar, ignited it with a puff, and carefully blew a cloud of smoke into a neutral corner. Mavor, who had been expecting the inevitable pipe, was pleasantly surprised—mentally, if not in an olfactory sense.
“Spill it,” Mavor said. “What hath the Noble Savage come up with this time around?”
Shackelford flushed and started pawing through his official folder.
“Skip the technical jargon. Whatever you’ve got on Arcturus III, plain English will bore through to my addled wits.”
The younger man chewed on his cigar instead of counting to ten. “According to Simpson—he’s the anthropologist out there—they’ve got a culture that’s still in a hunting and gathering situation as far as technology goes—no cultivated crops or anything—but at the same time they’ve got a terrifically complex political set-up.”
“How complex is ‘terrifically’ complex?”
“They’ve got big ceremonial centers with resident political and religious officials; they run the show, according to Simpson.”
“I take it that most of the people don’t live in these centers?”
“No, most of them are scattered along the rivers. They just get together on sacred days and whatnot.”
“Sort of like the old Maya?”
“The Maya were agricultural.”
“Thank you.” Mavor smiled faintly. “How many people are involved in this deal? One tribe?”
Shackelford frowned. “It’s hard to tell. I get an impression that it’s a bigger affair than just one tribe.”
“You get an impression, hey? If you don’t know, say so.”
“Okay. I don’t know.”
“What else?”
“Simpson says he’s on the track of something big, really big.”
“Elephant? Hippo? Dinosaur?”
Shackelford retreated behind a cloud of cigar smoke. “He says they’ve got a lot of dope they shouldn’t have.”
“Ah, the Wisdom of the Ancients rears its ugly head. Are they splitting atoms with their stone axes?”
“Simpson isn’t sure; he’s just beginning his research.”
“Ummmm. And what does he suggest we do about it?”
“More or less the Standard Procedure for cases like this. He wants us to declare Arcturus III off-limits for a one-hundred-year waiting period, until we’re certain what it is we’re butting into. The law says—”
“Basil keeps me posted on the law. What do you think of all this?”
“May I speak frankly, Mr. Mavor?”
“I would recommend it highly.”
“Okay, then. I think this thing on Arcturus III is one of the most remarkable things I’ve ever heard of. These people aren’t just a bunch of savages, Mr. Mavor—they’re unique, they’ve done something nobody ever managed before.” Shackelford leaned forward, his eyes bright. “They’ve earned their chance. Legally, you’re their protector on Earth. It’s your duty to keep our people off of Arcturus III. That’s what I think.”
Mavor didn’t change expression. “At least you’re not ambiguous,” he said. “You can go now.”
Shackelford hesitated, then got up. His face was very white. He put the folder under his arm and started out.
“Leave the folder here if you will, please.”
He tossed it on the desk and left, clearly flirting with an attack of high blood pressure and budding ulcers.
Norman Mavor punched the NO VISITORS button and opened the folder on his desk. He sat straight-backed in his chair, the crease in his trousers still razor-sharp.
His deep green eyes went to work—patiently, and yet not without a kind of steady ruthlessness.
He made occasional neat notes on white cards ready for indexing.
The hours passed, and Mavor hardly moved. He felt a cold knot tying itself in icy loops in the pit of his stomach.
Night came to the city.
On the other side of his office wall, a dark autumn wind whispered down from out of the north.
Mavor had strongly suspected that he was in trouble within minutes after Bill Shackelford had walked into his office. It hadn’t been any sixth sense that had warned him, unless its name was Experience.
A preliminary reading of Simpson’s report hadn’t made him feel any better.
After three days of study, he was certain.
It wasn’t the easiest trick in creation for any United Nations brass to disappear for a week in the country. It was still less simple for one of the bigwigs to walk out for a month, for business was always pressing, and generally critical.
No one set off on a junket of 33 light-years unless it was pretty damned important.
Mavor thought Arcturus III was that important.
Since he was his own boss, with a twenty-year tenure that nothing less than outright impeachment could shake, he got away with it by keeping his mouth shut until the last minute, and then leaving red-faced Karl Hauser, his chief legal expert, to do his explaining for him.
He lined up a UN space liner over which he had jurisdiction, and did some backstage red-tape cutting to clear it for use. While the ship’s navigation officers were computing a faster-than-light course to Arcturus III, he found out what he could about Edward Simpson, the anthropologist already in the field.
Simpson’s official photograph showed a lean, strong face, somewhat lantern-jawed, with dark hair and eyes. It was a rather ordinary face in the sense that it approached the cultural ideal of what a face should be; it would have suited any one of a host of moderately well-known tri-di actors, but it was not striking enough to stick in your mind.
How can you sum up a face in words?
Mavor tagged it as determined and a trifle cynical, and turned to more revealing sources of information.
Simpson had majored in paleontology as an undergraduate at Harvard, and then switched to anthropology for his Ph.D. at the University of Michigan. His academic record tended to be spotty—he had done extremely well in courses that interested him, and just enough to pass in required work that hadn’t caught his fancy. He’d done a fairly interesting dissertation on the prehistoric relationships between the southeastern United States and the Valley of Mexico, and published a solid ethnographic account of an agricultural group on Capella II.
Capable, then, if no ball of fire.
He’d grown up in Maine, where his father was a guide in the game preserves along the Canadian border. He’d married a local girl in Patten, and they had one son.
He was thirty-two years old.
Anything odd?
Anything revealing?
Well, he’d once gotten into warmish water by stating publicly that the UN was run by a collection of windbags, but that was the extent of his subversion, if such it could be termed.
Edward Simpson was either an extremely ordinary young man, or he had a talent for keeping his eccentricities to himself. In any event, he was not likely to have gone off half-cocked.
He knew what he was doing.
Mavor spent a day at home saying goodbye to his wife, Sue, who by this time was resigned to the periodic vanishings of her husband. Sue was even-tempered and not overly imaginative; Mavor had often doubted whether any other woman would have put up with him.
The space liner lifted on schedule.
Mavor looked into the viewscreen, and out across the star-blazed midnight that was the sea between the worlds. He saw splendor and loneliness, and the challenge of a universe in which man was but one tiny mystery in a darkness that had no ending.
The ship faded into the gray of hyperspace.
It was September 1, 2044.
The third planet of Arcturus was a green world, warmed by a reddish sun.
After contacting Simpson by radio from the liner, Mavor boarded a landing launch. The gray sphere drifted down out of the great night into a blue sky dotted with white clouds. It came to rest as lightly as a soap bubble on the target area. Mavor got out and the sphere floated up toward the sun, and was gone.
He was alone.
He stood by a small crystal-clear spring that chuckled out from under clean brown rocks. Around him a field of nodding grasses murmured in a fresh, cool breeze. To the east he could see blue mountains wrapped in shadows, and from the south he caught the hint of salt from the sea.
The air was a trifle richer in oxygen than that of Earth, but otherwise identical except for a few trace elements. It had a tang and a sparkle to it. You never really knew fresh air, Mavor thought, until you breathed on a planet that had never known heavy industries, where the internal combustion engine was fifty thousand years away, and smoke only a sweet tendril over a campfire….
