J f bone, p.1
J. F. Bone, page 1
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The Meddlers by J. F. Bone
CHAPTER 1
I walked slowly down the dimly lit Avenue of the Merchants, eyed the goods on display, absorbed the sights, sounds and smells of Cit Eldora and displayed the characteristic curiosity of an Earthling tourist. Not the slightest trace of anxiety or nervousness marred the smooth contours of my face; my eyes mirrored no hint of the demands that my brain and adrenals were sending to my muscles.
I walked through the crowd of Parthians and tourists toward the vehicular part of the avenue. In an avenue of this size, I figured there should be some readily available form of transport; a gharry, a cycle cab, or even a taxi. The austerity measures initiated by Eldor XIV hadn’t reached the tourist trade yet, so my chances were good, but I had to depend on luck, and I didn’t like that.
Get out of here! my brain screamed. Hurry! You know what they’ll do if they catch you! I swore silently at the adrenalin that had pushed the panic button. I didn’t dare betray excitement. I was a blasé and superior Earthling and I’d better stay that way if I loved my skin and wanted to keep it intact.
Parth, with its low population, its open spaces, its trackless forests, primitive economy, and humanoid species was an irresistible attraction to Earthlings, surfeited with an overcrowded, overorganized world. The gravity, two-thirds that of Earth, was an added attraction. Parth was everything Earth was not, and Eldor XIV made it all available for a price.
Earthmen came in droves and went home to tell their friends. Tourism poured wealth into Eldor’s treasury, raised living standards in the cities, and brought the blush of prosperity to the countryside, a new situation for the feud-ravaged world, and most Parthians were in no mood to risk their easy living for the doubtful honor of having another Family in charge. The old society had drowned in the flood of tourist wealth that gave Eldor the monetary muscle and helped his efforts to turn the government of Parth from an oligarchy into a dictatorship.
If Eldor had his way, all Parth would be subject to his whims. If he weren’t supported and bankrolled by George Gordon Bennett, he still might be marginally acceptable, but with Bennett in the picture, Eldor was intolerable. I had known Bennett for nearly ten years and in that time I’d found little that was lovable and much that was suspicious. It was because of Bennett that I was here and it was because of Bennett that I was running. I had underestimated that blonde pirate. My bug had been discovered and my only hope of survival lay in flight. I could blow the lid off Parth if I got back to Earth. My tapes could trigger a popular revolt that might sweep Eldor from power and return the Families to their old place. I could maybe send Bennett to rehabilitation. At the very least I’d bring him out into the open.
The police didn’t know my identity, but unravelling that puzzle was just a matter of time. They didn’t know what I had looked like, and my appearance had changed since I had landed and passed through Customs and I.D. check.
But problems existed, too. Bennett, at least, would know my true identity, my purpose, and my ultimate destination. That would narrow the chase. There were only a few hundred thousand Earthlings on Parth and at least half of them were female, which would narrow the search even more. Most male Earthlings on Parth could be eliminated categorically, and the rest could be psych-checked in a matter of hours. I had to get away quickly; cleanly if possible; messily if necessary. All I must do was evade capture by a highly organized, superbly equipped police state on a world where I was an alien and had no organization or sympathizers to shield me. I grinned wryly. There was nothing to it!
I was conscious of the package under my left arm. I’d have to use those tapes. They were in triplicate—ordinary voice-letter microtapes in cassettes ten centimeters square and about the thickness of a piece of cardboard. They had self-destruct devices incorporated into them, but I had little faith in that ruse, for whatever one mind can conceive, another can subvert. One I’d mail to Earth. It wouldn’t get there, of course, but it might misdirect the pursuit. I had no doubt that every piece of mail leaving Parth would be examined, and the ham-handed postal authorities would turn the tape into a blank. I’d send another to the Autarch of the Borkarq Family, hereditary enemies of the Eldora. Arrangements had already been made with the Autarch about how to avoid the destruct mechanism. The third tape I would keep. If I were caught and the tape decoded it would be my death warrant, but I had no intention of being caught.
I reached the curb, found a post box and deposited the tape to Earth. With a whine of turbines, a ground car swept past, the gold circlet and dagger of the police emblazoned on its side. I flicked my handlight at a taxi with a red vacancy sign in its window, bulled past two big Parthians who also had signalled the car at the same time, and was inside before they realized how easily they had been manhandled. The driver lowered the flag, fed gas to the turbine and sped off before the natives could contest my occupancy.
“Where to, Earthling?” the driver said in bastard Lingua Franca.
“Warehouse district,” I said. “I’ll tell you where to go when we get there.”
CHAPTER 2
The car took me to the warehouses that lay along the banks of the Sanes River. It was a gloomy district with the squat black buildings sitting side by side on pilings along the riverbank. Beyond them the long wharves were lined with ships, idle now—with their deck lights gleaming through the foggy darkness.
“Turn left,” I directed as the cab began to move past the faces of the dark buildings. “Stop here.”
“That’ll be four sentars, sir,” the cabbie said.
“A fair and reasonable price,” I said, as I took a vibrator from my pocket and stunned him with a medium intensity discharge. I pushed the fellow away from the tiller bar and maneuvered the cab into a dark place between two buildings. Then I arranged him comfortably on the front seat, stuffed a hundred-sentar note in his tunic, locked the vehicle against thieves, and left.
These warehouses were peculiar to Parth, I thought as I moved soundlessly through the darkness. Material stored in them was virtually immune from seizure, a fact I had learned years ago. At that time I had paid twenty years’ rent on a cubicle and packed it with any material I might need at some future date. Since Transworld paid the bill, it was no skin off my pocketbook. I found my shed, unlocked it, checked with area security to keep a guard from visiting, and laid out the things I wanted. I struggled into a spacesuit, a heavy-duty job of the clumsy design common ten years ago. I found a kelly and a set of weights, then restored the other gear and locked the cubicle again. I might need the contents again some years hence. Three minutes later I slipped into the Sanes River and vanished under the surface.
The gentle sweep of the current carried me downstream and finally into the more rapid flow of the main current away from the stone jetties. In midstream the gentle trip became nightmare. The Sanes might once have been a beautiful river, but the dredges, tugs, barges, industrial wastes, and ocean-going vessels had turned the water into a sludgy soup festooned with waste and debris. I took the darkness as long as I could before anxiety drove me to the surface.
I was a quarter of a mile from shore—and directly in the path of a freighter coming upriver from the ocean. I took one horrified look, valved air and dove for the bottom. I didn’t dare move as the ship passed over me, its weed-covered keel scarcely a meter above. Finally the noise and motion had passed, and the river began to flow smoothly again.
I slowly rose to the surface. By adjustments of air supply, I was forced to float, and delicately suspended myself, barely awash on the surface. But despite the problems of maintaining flotation I moved steadily downstream on the schedule I had planned, until I came to the first of the dams that held back water for the navigation locks. Here the current died and I was forced to swim. I reached the dam, moved underwater across its upstream face until I reached a sharply shelving bank and crawled up until my helmeted head broke the surface. Crouched behind a screen of brush overhanging the bank of the river, I looked upward at the stonework of the dam looming above me. Voices sounded from above, their soft Parthian accents oddly menacing. “You say it was an Earthman who tried to kill Eldor?” one voice said curiously.
“Aye, that is what I was told. But he will not get away. Guards are everywhere. He cannot leave the city. By morning he will be caught.”
“Then why are we ordered to be alert?”
“Just in case, Karther, just in case. The police might let him slip. So we and other lockmen will watch, in case he comes this way.”
I grinned. With any luck at all, those two would be watching a long time.
All I had to do was wait for a ship to come downstream and, when the locktenders were busy, slip ashore and disappear into the woods bordering the river. My traffic check through this lock had indicated i would never have to wait over two hours. So I allowed that much time.
But I didn’t allow for the flap my successful penetration of Eldor’s security had thrown the police into. It was nearly two-and-a-half hours before the first boat came down the channel, and this craft was a police launch, its blue lights gleaming, its antennae circling purposefully, and its crew alert.
As the lockmen went to handle the patrol boat, I twisted the radar opacity knob on my suit belt, left the water and swarmed up the bank toward the welcoming green arms of the forest. I was in sight less than fifteen seconds and the darkness covered me. But I had scarcely reached the shelter of the woods
“Search says it’s still here,” one of them said. “Wonder why it didn’t spot him before.”
I held my breath as they went past.
“Boat says about ten meters left. Those detectors are real gadgets. Ah—here he—oh Kirt!”
“What’s the matter, Drumo?”
“You know what we got?” Drumo’s voice was heavy with disgust. “You know what the ferdeelan schluck we got? Headquarters ain’t gonna be happy about us wastin’ time on a ferdeelan Vardel!”
“A Vardel!” Someone laughed.
I grinned into the darkness. The big, stupid beasts roamed the outskirts of Parthian cities looking for things to scavenge. They were essentially harmless, but they looked enough like a man to fool a relatively non-sophisticated search scanner.
I listened to the Parthians go with mingled relief and exasperation. This was cutting it too fine. Dawn would probably find me still trying to reach the ship, and with dawn would come trouble. The Parthian’s electronic and nucleonic gadgetry might not be as good as Earth’s, but the optical systems in their orbital stations couid track a fly through a forest. During darkness one could move reasonably freely on Parth, but daylight was another story. Presently the boat’s engines started and it swung upriver and disappeared. I broke cover as soon as it was out of sight, ran across to the water below the dam, entered the river and continued downstream.
The cave was where I remembered it, and the cycle was still there in back, covered with dirt and plastic wrap. I dug it out and checked it. The engine whined to life as I turned the steering rod, climbed into the bucket seat, and sped off down the narrow forest trail below the cave.
Fifty kilometers down the highway I turned onto a side road and into the abandoned stronghold of one of the Families. It sat upon a wooded hill, a large sprawling structure slowly crumbling into ruin. The walls, revetments and windows were cracked and chipped by time, but were still remarkably well-preserved.
Below the building were the squad rooms, the quarters and the missile sites that once made this stronghold a rallying place. Farther below ground were the factories and armories. Except for the material the Family had moved after the first landing of the Earthlings, the works and tools were still there. It was an eerie feeling to walk through the place. I had done it once before and had no desire to repeat the experience.
I had rented a piece of this property and stored an Altair-class spacecraft in one of the empty missile silos in the area. I had closed the lid on the ship, knowing with relative certainty that neither it nor its contents would be touched as long as the rent was paid. Five years ago, when I started chasing Bennett, I knew that it wasn’t going to be a quick affair and had made some plans for the future. I wasn’t going to get killed by lack of foresight or lack of materials if I could help it. I had traps laid for him on both Halsey and Earth, waiting until I could trigger them. And it was just the luck of the game that the break occurred on Parth. Halsey would have been a harder job than this.
CHAPTER 3
False dawn cast its gray light across the horizon as I drove the cycle into the shelter of a revetment near the silo where it would be shielded from the blast at takeoff. Beyond was a manway into the silo and I worked on the doorway for nearly two minutes, burning away rocks and tendrils with a hand laser before I could open it. The ancient metal, still bright and uncorroded, swung back, tearing loose the vegetation I had missed. I turned on my handlight and descended a metal ladder to the primary corridor forty meters below.
I went down the corridor, through another door and into a dusty room crowded with seats, scanner cells and instruments. I pushed a large yellow-handled switch on the master control console and was rewarded with a glow as the bank of lights came on. That was the nice thing about a Parthian nuclear power plant; its useful life was virtually forever. I closed the silo lid switch and slowly, with remarkably little noise, the lid of the silo moved against the pressure of the vegetation that covered it. I didn’t wait for it to open; there was too much yet to do. I ran to the lock that opened into the interior of the silo, cracked it open and squeezed myself between the wall and the drive tubes of the spacer before circling the spacer to look for the boarding ladder. The noise was louder here, a grinding metallic protest mixed with ripping and popping sounds as the rising lid parted the growth above it. Pieces of wood and leaves rained down and I winced as a larger piece struck me on the shoulder.
I found the ladder about half way around the ship and began to climb the rungs that extruded from the hull plates.
Since the hull was slightly larger at the stern than at the bow, it was no great effort to make the climb; although once, some twenty meters above the base, I looked down and had an acute attack of vertigo, for to my eyes there was nothing below me except empty air and the sheer smooth wall of the launch tube. I clung, shivering, to my perch, while the dizzy spell passed, and then resumed the climb.
And then it was over. The air lock was in front of me, the outer door was open and I crawled in with a sigh of relief. A minute later I was in the pilot’s chair. I closed the air lock doors, retracted the boarding ladder and energized the primaries that would bring life to the ship. The control panel gleamed. The vision tank, set on forward viewing, showed a circle of daylight above the shaft. I was barely in time. Dawn was breaking. Reaction washed through me in icy waves as I watched the exciter dial climb toward firing range. The optical scanners in Parth’s orbital stations would soon be searching the visible terrain. Their computers would instantly note the new hole in Parth’s surface where the silo had been opened. Within seconds position data would be flashed to Cit Eldora and in other seconds the deviation would be checked and a missile would home on the unauthorized hole in Parth’s surface. I sweated as I watched the exciter dial, my fingers poised over the firing keys. Slowly the indicator approached the green area. Seconds clicked inexorably past on the chronometer. I set a timer, coupled it into the drive controls and converter and waited. I’d have to take off at max, which was disturbing. I fastened the safety web around me and watched the drive exciter until it hit the green line, then retracted the stabilizing rods, fired the jets and advanced the throttle to its farthest notch. I was slammed into the web by an instant two-Gee acceleration that quickly built to five. When the yacht leaped skyward I went smoothly into blackout as the acceleration drove the blood from my brain into my rump. I was conscious just long enough to note that the rear view screen showed a picture of incredible violence, far more than could have been caused by the jets.
The ground heaved and boiled as an enormous explosion ripped the silo apart. My last thought before acceleration blackout was how much power there was in a full-driven ion jet. It didn’t occur to me until much later that no jet could have done that much damage. That explosion had been a missile. I had left in the proverbial nick of time.
In hyperspace there is virtually no inertia and hence virtually no acceleration pressure; and so in due time the robomedic healed my injuries and I regained consciousness. I screamed once or twice before I realized where I was, then grinned weakly and exerted the necessary will power to overcome the distortions of Cth. The trip timer read ten hours and twelve minutes. I’d made it! I’d won the bundle, the brass ring, the ball of wax. The worst was over.
Bennett was beaten. Even if the yellow-bearded giant knew I’d trapped him and started after me instantly, he would be too late. I had the faster ship and would arrive on Earth days ahead of him. My ship, gleaming plasticly in the monochrome light, was able to hold the yellow band with ease and could touch green if driven at maximum.
Well—that was it. I’d have a few days en route to write my story, and once I turned the yarn over to Jim Flynn my troubles would be over.
