Collected short fiction, p.600
Collected Short Fiction, page 600
“I see.” Scarlet turned cheerfully to a new survey of that wealthy room. “I suppose that any long delay would be expensive to you.”
“It would kill me!” His harsh and sudden violence was startling, but then he grinned bleakly at the way Scarlet cringed. “I was talking to Coral,” he added. “She tells me that you spoke of leaving the service.”
“A foolish dream of my youth.” Wistfully grave, Scarlet shook his head. “An old dream of a new life, out among the new stars of the galactic frontier. If I had the means for a new start there, I’d quit the service today.”
“Good.” The trader’s flinty grin began to soften. “I see that we can do business. With your service background, you’re just the man I need to handle my affairs with these anthropoids. If you’ll sign a contract with me for just a hundred years—”
“I won’t,” Scarlet said. “I’ve already thrown too many centuries away, pampering savages.”
“What else do you want?”
“I—uh—” Scarlet checked himself, to peer uneasily at the strange luxury around him. His throat felt dry. His temples throbbed. For a moment he wished that he had been more securely integrated—but then, of course, his psionic maladjustment was his secret strength.
“We have privacy.” Flintledge winked appallingly. “Neither of us is likely to violate it.” He gestured for the robot. “Have another drink, and tell me what you want.”
Weakly, Scarlet waved the robot away.
“I want the flyer.” He gasped for his breath, blinking at his own audacity. “The flyer and half your cargo.”
“If that is meant to be a joke—”
“That’s my price.”
The trader’s dark face turned yellow. Wheezing alarmingly, he gulped another whiskey. His great, dark hands spread into grasping talons, reached out savagely, and slowly sank.
“You’re an unconditioned fool!” he breathed at last. “Why should I pay you such a price?”
“If I had been better conditioned, I’d have nothing for sale,” Scarlet reminded him. “As things stand, I have nine planets on the block, one of them half-terra-formed and inhabited. I am offering you a bargain.”
“If I refuse—”
“I’ll approve the blinker project.” Scarlet laughed as unpleasantly as possible. “You can look for another world to loot—if your Vegan bankers care to give you time.”
“YOUR Equity is a hard trader!” Flintledge grinned, briefly revealing a pained admiration. “As two misfits, striving to heal our psionic scars with money, we ought to strike a reasonable bargain. But you know I can’t give up this flyer.”
“With planets to sell, you can buy a better one.”
“You’re unintegrated!” The trader’s voice lifted vehemently. “You don’t realize all the scheming, the waiting, the daring, the borrowing, the begging pretty men—”
“But I do realize.” Scarlet rose. “That’s how I know that you can’t afford to let me approve the blinker.”
“Sit down!” Flintledge yelped. “Let’s have another drink, over a reasonable arrangement!”
“We have just concluded a reasonable arrangement,” Scarlet said. “I am going back to reconvene the inquiry now. For the sake of appearances, I shall have to skim through the evidence, but I shall be forced to rule on the crisis before that savage ship arrives.”
“Listen, Your Equity!” Flintledge was weeping. “Listen to reason!”
“If you want a favorable ruling,” Scarlet interrupted him, “send your banker to the hearing. Let him bring formal legal conveyances to the ship, half the trade goods and half the terra-forming gear. He can pass the documents up to me as a final packet of evidence.”
“You have thought of everything!”
“I hope!” A pale smile showed Scarlet’s rodent teeth. “I believe we understand each other. My ruling in your favor will not become final until I have actual possession of the flyer and my share of the cargo, with time for a start toward the stars.”
“If Your Equity is absolutely unconditioned—”
“That’s our bargain.” Scarlet let his voice grate painfully. “Send me your banker.” He nodded curtly at the dancing figurine. “By the way, I’m keeping her.”
“I’ll leave the others, too.” Flintledge glanced sardonically at the two crystal plaques where Scarlet had seen his public and his private selves. “You will be needing them!”
Silently, avoiding those disturbing mirrors, Scarlet turned to go.
“I’ll prepare the documents.” Flintledge followed him anxiously toward the air lock. “I trust Your Equity to anticipate whatever difficulties may be created for us by Newbolt and old Whitherly and the signal crew—”
Clothed in the cold blue purity of his judicial light, Scarlet spun a sound barrier to shut out the trader’s whining voice. He was drunk with elation, too drunk to fret with petty detail.
The frontier stars were in his grasp.
VII
THE hearing dome was crowded again, the contending groups as breathlessly tense as if they had never been conditioned. Even the signal officer wore a restless look. Coral flashed Scarlet a green, uneasy smile. Newbolt rose ominously to report that his monitors were still tracking the savage attacker, which was no more than halfway to the moon.
Concealing his elation, Scarlet resumed the inquiry with a request for additional relevant evidence.
Newbolt quickly offered a psionic tape recording the consequences of a casual illicit contact between a disguised quarantine officer and an unsuspecting native named Lenin. Scanning the tape in his most severe judicial manner, Scarlet found his wandering thoughts drawn unexpectedly back from the freedom of the frontier stars. In the unconditioned native, he somehow saw himself.
“Your Equity,” Newbolt urged him, “this record shows the unreadiness of these savages for any kind of contact with civilization. A native boy talks briefly with a civilized outsider. Neither intends any harm. But the native picks up ideas more dangerous than atomic theory to his fellow savages!”
“I’ll weigh the evidence.” Scarlet paused to scowl. “Are there other exhibits?”
“Your Equity, please!” Coral fluttered brightly to the bench, bringing a tape from the frail ivory hands of old Mark Whitherly. “There have been other contacts, with less harmful results. Here is the record of a case which proves that the natives are as highly civilized as you are.”
Scarlet scanned the report of another accidental contact. A royal yacht from Altair II had been wrecked in space. One passenger had found his way to Earth. Alone among the savages, he had learned to like them. When a rescue expedition reached him, he refused to leave his native friends.
“A touching display of sentimental primitivism!” Penwright scoffed. “But the outcome is not surprising when you consider the dubiously human status of Altair II—which itself very narrowly escaped our signal project.”
Lazily insolent, he brought another exhibit to the bench.
“Here, Your Equity, is evidence that contact with these verminous animals is full of unpredictable dangers—not only to them, but also to us!”
The tape recorded the fate of a big-nosed peddler from the frontier worlds, who came to Earth to satisfy an unconditioned thirst for whiskey, and died there of something called a cold.
“These sub-human worlds here at the Center face us with mysteries greater than the flying lights, and enemies deadlier than we have met on the frontier planets.” The signalman radiated his cool, complacent beauty. “Your Equity must consider that the first flash of our beacon will sterilize all the malignant mutant micro-organisms that have been breeding here for thirty thousand years.”
“I’ll consider everything.”
SCARLET turned his carefully impatient frown upon old Mark Whitherly, who was wildly waving another psionic tape. Hiding his own growing concern about Flintledge, he watched Coral gliding to help the old man toward the bench.
A sudden stir among the worried quarantine people huddled at the door gave him a moment of hope that the trader or his banker had arrived at last, but the man who entered was only Newbolt, bringing a curt report that the savage rocket was drawing near the moon.
“We have your decision now.” The commander’s muscular shoulders lifted majestically, as if tossing off his tattered respect for Scarlet. “For our own safety, Your Equity, we must either recognize this contact and welcome our visitors into universal civilization—or else deny their human status and allow the blinker protest to proceed.”
“I’ll decide,” Scarlet rasped. “When I have weighed all the evidence.”
He looked again for Flintledge, and decided that the trader was waiting to drive a harder bargain in another private meeting.
“The inquiry is recessed,” he rapped abruptly. “Clear the chamber.”
“Wait, Wain!” Coral snatched Whitherly’s tape and rippled toward the bench. “Scan this before you decide.” Bright excitement cascaded from the psionic moons in her hair. “It’s more than proof that these people are human. It is proof that they are our own ancestral race. It’s the clue that led Mark to the side of that prehistoric space port on Mars. Please take time to scan it!”
Ignoring the signals of contempt and alarm that were flickering between the cool signal officer and the boiling commander, Scarlet took the tape from Coral. It told of an old explorer who had gone down among the unsuspecting natives to search their history for the first decisive spark of human civilization. Fighting a skeptical quarantine inspector no better conditioned than Scarlet himself, the explorer had pierced the lost past far enough to glimpse the birth of the human mind, the invention of the scientific method, and the launching of the first neutrionic flyer.
“That was—us!” Coral whispered, when he looked up from the tape. “This is our home planet; the people on that flyer were our forefathers. You can’t let anybody murder our mother race!”
“Please, Miss Fell!” Penwright reproved her with a hard bronze grin, and turned smoothly to the bench. “If Your Equity feel that we still have time for such entertainments, I have another exhibit to submit.”
Scarlet glanced again at the empty doorway.
“Very well,” he muttered.
THE tape reported the case of a native who had been illegally removed from Earth for exhibition in a galactic zoo. Inadequately adjusted, even by savage standards, he had violently destroyed the expensive reconstruction of his primitive habitat in which he had been displayed. Scarlet followed him to his fate with a reluctant and uncomfortable “fascination, as if the unconditioned anthropoid had also been himself.
“Well?” Penwright leered at Coral. “Are you sure you can make civilized men out of such untamable animals?”
“That one was sick,” she protested. “He was not typical.”
“But what about this one?” Newbolt looked suddenly up from his wrist transceiver, glowering at the bench. “Your Equity, my monitors have just intercepted an electromagnetic signal from the savage rocket, beamed directly at this station. The sender appears as violent as that captive animal.”
“Please translate the message.”
“I shall, Your Equity.”
Sound boomed into the dome, amplified through Newbolt’s wrist instrument. For a moment it was utterly strange; then Scarlet distinguished a savage voice beneath the metallic distortion of the crude transmission system. In another moment, the psionic translator had given meaning to the roaring syllables.
“United States Aerospace Force Rocket Ship Four One, Major Tom Scoggins in command, calling unidentified base on lunar equator.”
Scarlet heard a tremor in the voice and a breath quickly drawn; he caught a vivid sensation of the frightened but determined savage in the rocket, flying his crude craft toward a world unknown to him, crouching desperately over his battery of weapons, preparing to face hostility as violent as his own. Even though the savage was completely unconditioned, Scarlet felt a thrill of unexpected admiration.
“Identify yourselves!” The strained voice rang again through the crackle of static. “Establish your friendly intentions at once. Otherwise we shall be forced to take action to insure the safety of the United States!”
“WAIN, that’s our contact!” Coral’s voice lilted joyously. “You can tell that Major Tom Scoggins is desperately afraid, but this message proves that he is human. How can we wait?”
“We—uh—we can’t.” Disturbed by a wave of unexpected emotion in himself, Scarlet turned uncertainly to Newbolt. “I—uh—I’m forced to instruct you to reply—”
“Your Equity!”
The shout drew his eyes to the doorway. The dapper young Vegan banker came bursting into the dome, waving a sheaf of psionic documents. Sight of them turned Scarlet giddy. Here was his long dream realized. Here was his escape forever from all the wounds and sneers that he had suffered from the beautiful people, escape from their false sympathy and their shallow pretense that he could ever be one of them. Here was glorious revenge for his unconditioned ugliness. He shut his eyes for an instant, trying to recover his mask of judicial severity.
“Your Equity!” The banker’s urgent voice seemed far away. “Captain Flintledge wishes me to present these new exhibits in evidence. We are confident that they will persuade you to recognize the contact, disapprove the blinker project and open Earth to galactic commerce.”
Hands trembling, Scarlet accepted the documents. Though his eyes were blurring, he quickly satisfied himself that they were what he had demanded—the neutrionic flyer and a fair half of its load of trade goods and terraforming machinery, legally conveyed to him.
“What kind of unconditioned aberration can delay your decision now?” Newbolt’s contemptuous indignation reached him faintly. “May I remind Your Equity that our anthropoid attacker is already arming his fusion missiles?”
“I—I’m aware of the facts.”
Scarlet rose unsteadily, gasping for his breath. The important facts were those in his hands. Even though his decision sacrificed one worn-out world, it would enable him to claim and colonize a hundred new ones when he reached the galactic frontier. For his own profit, perhaps; but also for the expanding community of human civilization.
Such facts were all that mattered. But others kept buzzing insanely in his mind. Louder than Newbolt’s angry shout the earnest voice of the young savage Lenin echoed from the tape. The decision of the shipwrecked prince flamed brighter than the moons in Coral’s hair. The breathless desperation of Major Tom Scoggins was somehow suddenly his own.
Stiffly, he gestured for silence in the chambers.
“I—uh—I have weighed the evidence.”
Grinning at the splendid people waiting, he let his rodent teeth jut. He widened his yellow eyes. He was glad of his bent little body and the bulge of his low forehead and the red freckles splotched along his receeding jaw. Proud of all his unconditioned ugliness, he let them wait.
“I have—uh—given due consideration to all the claims which have been presented here.” He let his slow voice rasp and whine offensively. “I have reviewed the Covenants of Non-Contact, and all the body of galactic law and custom relating to contact crises. I am ready—uh—to rule.”
Snarling hideously, he let them wait again.
“I rule that no contact exists!”
CORAL gasped indignantly. Old Whitherly swayed and fell. The banker bellowed. Newbolt and the signal officer shouted their startled approval. The uproar drowned his voice.
In the breathless hush that followed that surprised outburst, he let them wait again. He picked his pointed noise, deliberately savoring their pain.
“The evidence convinces me that this native culture could not survive an uncontrolled contact.” Ignoring the baleful rage of the banker, he studied the smug elation of Newbolt and Penwright, and paused again to relish what he meant to do to them. “However, I am equally convinced that they are human beings.”
He let his voice drag and grate.
“Aware of my sworn duty under the Covenants, I therefore disapprove the signal project. I order Commander Newbolt and his successors to continue the quarantine of Earth until its native culture is declared ready for contact.”
He stopped again to enjoy the sputtering deflation of the signal officer.
“Pursuant to that directive, I order Newbolt to intercept the savage Tom Scoggins without needless injury to him or his crew. I suggest that they be enlisted in the quarantine service, as undercover agents acting to prevent any future expeditions from Earth into space.”
“Why, Wain? Why?” Coral stared up at him, the blue flame pale and cold and flickering furiously around her. “Why have you done this?”
He merely smiled at her with his offensive teeth, until she hissed and ran from the dome. Newbolt and the banker stalked after her. The signal officer turned to follow, but swung abruptly back.
“Your Equity?” His cold voice was ominous and slow. “May I ask why?”
“You have no right to ask.” Scarlet paused to survey the signs of strain that marred his bronze mask of calm perfection. “I don’t mind telling you, however, that I came here prepared to make a different decision. You yourself helped to change my first intention, with the evidence you offered about the people of Earth. Even the stories of their imperfections helped to persuade me that they are as human as I am. You seem surprised by my ruling. Perhaps I am, too. Surprised—and pleased!”
Penwright was no longer listening. His wrist screen had flashed. He scanned it, whispering. When at last he looked up again at Scarlet, his bronze mask was beautiful again.
“Your Equity,” he murmured gently, “I have another surprise for you. I believe it means that your astonishing verdict will soon be reversed by a higher authority, in favor of our signal project.”
“Careful!” Scarlet rapped. “You’ll find yourself in contempt.”
“I am in contempt.” Penwright nodded serenely. “I can be candid about that, because we have just received a message from a passenger on another incoming service flyer. He’s an old associate of yours, from the quarantine office on Denebola IV. Remember Warden Thornwall?”
