Short stories complete, p.48
Short Stories Complete, page 48
The spokesman mentioned a sum of money.
Lukens gagged. He rocked his head in disbelief, then put back the dregs in his glass with a swift motion. “You’ll think me foolish to brush off such a handsome offer without a hearing, but . . . no. No way, my gentle Kree friends. I really must decline.”
The Kree mentioned a sum half again as large as the first.
Perspiring now, the man said, “You’re joking!”
“Our kind possess six perceptive senses, Man. But not what is known as the ‘sense of humor.’ ”
“Y-you spoke . . . of an extenuating circumstance?”
Unself-consciously, the spokesman dropped a name.
He will be aboard?”
“Most assuredly. As well as his family, his whole entourage. In light of contemporary Imperial politics, he is the most important figure in the visited galaxy—and therefore a firm guarantee that in this singular instance LEX GALACTICUM will fail to be invoked.”
Lukens continued to sweat. “Now I’m, uh, on your wavelength,” he said hollowly. “Tell me, what’ll the Kree expect from this?”
“Our demands will be purely political. You and your confederates are welcome to retain any additional monies you may extort.”
“I . . . see. And, after the caper? What’re my lads and I to do afterward, get up and walk away?”
“A means of flight, and suitable haven, will be provided. The fee will be deposited to your account before the . . . adventure begins, payable in tungsten, thorium, stellars—any civilized currency or precious metal you care to specify.”
Lukens blinked bloodshot eyes. He licked his lips. “Still sounds pretty flaky,” he said. “I’ll have to sleep on it.”
“Your decision must be immediate, Man. You have learned far too much about our affairs to lightly decline.”
Major Lukens stiffened. “An ‘offer I can’t refuse,’ is it?”
“Analyze your position logically,” urged the spokesman. “You go armed, but could you draw out your laser weapon and bum both of us before . . . the end?”
“ ’Tis a fine, high-velocity argument,” conceded Major Lukens.
“Excellent! You shall accompany us to our vessel on-orbit. You may return, later, and recruit selected assistants. Come!”
Stone-faced, the mercenary pushed back his chair. He shuffled hesitantly between the blocklike Kree, shooting quick glances of appeal toward the crowded bar. Not one of his carousing troopers paid the slightest heed to the exit.
Lukens stifled the curse rising in this throat. God’s Armpit, he reflected bitterly, had been aptly named!
The longer Sather waited, the more anxious he became. After months of anticipation, innumerable briefing sessions and high-level counselings, he was actually aboard ship, preparing for his pristine mission “Out There.” He was very apprehensive about it—scared, to be truthful. Never in his wildest imaginings had he envisioned a first assignment of such magnitude.
For the twentieth time in an hour he fingered the microelectronic switches surgically implanted in the soft tissue under either jawbone—flat lumps, bulging not at all—designed so that boorish armorer had told him to be capable of activation in an emergency by simply rolling his head from side to side. In fact the armorer had forced him to practice it. Even bound and gagged, hanging upside down, Sather would be able to trigger the lethal switches. A sequence of coded pressures on the leftmost would trigger the one on the right; a shorter sequence applied to the right switch would trigger. . . .
Triggerman! That’s what the blasted armorer had called him. Pleading with Secretary Drake, Sather had used every iota of persuasive guile he possessed in arguing the futility of turning him, a fledgling career diplomat, into some outré form of human bomb. The Secretary for Alien Affairs had remained unmoved, smiling paternally. It seemed that LEX GALACTICUM demanded autodestruct capabilities for every Imperial starship destined to range beyond the periphery of human civilization—an inheritance from the Lianasan War, Sather presumed. There were no exceptions. The ship’s master was usually entrusted with the honor, for the awesome responsibility was indeed an honor. One couldn’t argue with Secretary Drake, and certainly not with LEX GALACTICUM.
But for a civilian starship bound on a voyage so crucial to Mankind’s immediate destiny, the notion of a “suicide switch” struck Sather as absurd. No, as obscene!
Immured deep within the vessel’s welded alloy bulkheads lurked a ridicuously small thermonuclear device. Were Sather to find it necessary—try as he would, he couldn’t conceive such an eventuality—to depress the switches in sequences known only to himself, and to that arrogant armorer now peacefully asleep somewhere down in rural Pennsylvania, the weapon would instantly transform Astraeus into a fleeting cloud of radioactive gases.
The diplomat jerked nervous fingers away from his throat. He waited, glancing now and again at the ship’s subjective timing system readout winking on the bulkhead of the astrogator’s lounge.
The anticipated call came at 04:36, Terran Zone 9 Time, when a communications officer swam topsy-turvy into the lounge and beckoned. “Signal for you, sir. You can take it in the security booth.”
Sather nodded his thanks, pulling himself hand-over-hand along the freefall safety lines into the conning deck. From their respective stations, the master and bridge officers watched his entrance with curious eyes. The soundproofed cubicle abaft the comm console was tiny. He had difficulty gaining leverage to shut the door, self-conscious because of his ineptness under zero gee.
“There you are,” announced the vidicom. “I’m scrambling, Sather. We can speak freely.” Regarding him stoically was Terran Secretary for Alien Affairs, the Honorable Alan R. Drake, with the sunburst medallion of Pax Terrestriana gleaming on the breast of his tunic.
“Everything’s prepared, Mr. Secretary. His Radiance and the members of his delegation should have a pleasant transit.”
“But not you, I daresay.” The elder statesman’s unsmiling visage stared back at Sather. Drake looked weary, especially around the eyes, as if he hadn’t slept well for weeks. Which was probably the case. “I realize you’ve already been briefed to distraction. I know you’ll make every effort to rein your . . . that is, to conduct yourself with decorum. Be again forewarned, however: insult and innuendo are His Radiance’s stock in trade.”
“If I’d had less confidence in myself, sir, I wouldn’t have volunteered. May I ask how the final conference went?”
“Oh, these preliminary fencings and skirmishings mean little.” The other’s voice was ridged with frustration. “Mutual resentments and bitternesses over the Lianasan War—they’re now beginning to call it the War of Misunderstanding, by the way—will linger for decades. Next year, when we’re escorted to Llanasa for the Phase II talks, I anticipate a much more fruitful. . . . God, Sather! Better we’d stayed home and never met any exoskeletal demons!”
“Yes, sir.”
Drake smacked his lips tiredly. “Well, best I sign off and let you get cracking. You’ve wangled a damned thankless assignment for your first duty Out There. You’ll be away from the Fond and Familiar, among belligerent aliens, for a long time. I realize how foolish the, er, destruct rigamarole seems. Think of it as a formality, a necessary evil. In fact, I order you to forget about it.”
“Of course, sir. Will you drop in on Marilyn now and then?”
“Delighted to, Sather. After all, Jane and I promised to look after her, didn’t we? Oh, one thing more. I’ll expect an interim report via ultraband once you reach Way Station.”
“Right, sir. We’re scheduled for a refueling layover.”
“Good, good. All of us have absolute faith in you, you know.”
“Thank you, Mr. Secretary. I won’t let you down.”
“The least of my worries. The very least, my boy. Bon voyage!”
Sather slumped in the booth after switching off. Closing his eyes, he sought to compose himself, not wanting his agitation to infect other members of the ship’s company. From master to lowliest scullery cook, Astraeus was crewed by hand-picked volunteers, all of whom had heard tales—some exaggerated, some not—concerning the bellicose aliens they would be escorting to their distant homeworld. The primary requisite for candidates had been that no selectee had lost a near relative during the internecine, hotly contested interstellar war just concluded. The War of Misunderstanding was, Sather reflected, an apt cognomen.
Spoiled by a lack of challenge during its centuries of unthwarted expansion, the Terrestrial Imperium had unwittingly encroached upon a volume of space governed by the Lianasan Hegemony. Confronting each other in the dark alley of interstellar vacuum, the respective cultures had growled once, then scrabbled for one another’s throats like predatory jungle creatures.
Anticipating quick victories, Imperial Space Forces had instead met with stunning reversals. The enigmatic Lianasans evidenced high technological sophistication, their electromagnetic shielding techniques subtly countering the superior firepower of the Imperium’s Sunday punch, rendering impotent the ferrite-seeker warheads of missiles, denigrating the effectiveness of dekajoule laser batteries.
Terran casualties had mounted alarmingly, though absolutely no differences were resolved since all encounters had been military. Captured Lianasan warriors—tens of thousands were taken as the dreary years wore on—had the disconcerting habit of exhibiting a berserk form of madness before dying in agony several hundred hours later. Nor had the finest available medical talents been able to discover chemical, biological, bacteriological or any other reasons for the wholesale alien deaths. The effect on Imperial morale had been devastating; Lianasan captives who became separated from their commands during viciously contested ground battles—planets like Concrellin changed ownership time and again—had been transformed by some unknown catalyst into mindless berserkers who were unbeatable. Killable, yes. But not conquerable.
The bloodshed reached insane proportions and would have continued but for the self-sacrifice of a captured intelligence agent who, prior to execution for espionage, had persuaded his interrogators to pause and negotiate.
This tentative foot-in-the-door precipitated a wary ceasefire, culminating in full-scale diplomatic conferences held in neutral space. But diplomacy had broken down repeatedly as His Radiance, the Lianasan Plenipotentiary, changed from cultured diplomat into scowling, tongue-lashing demon. To Terra’s diplomatic corps, these Jekyll and Hyde transformations had been a first magnitude enigma. The envoy seemed intelligent and understanding one instant, the next utterly refractory and uncompromising. Lianasan’s were so . . . different, although a suitably dressed alien adult might pass for a gangling human being in poor light.
At last, with negotiations teetering on the brink of permanent rupture, a scholarly xenologist dispatched to the conference site in a last-ditch attempt to save whatever proved salvageable, had earned universal respect for deducing the root of the Lianasan puzzle. It seemed Lianasan sexuality did not culminate in the familiar human ecstatic paroxysm, orgasm. Lianasans were saddled with a truly devastating biological drive—pain.
Deprived of congress with one another for protracted periods, alien males and females alike soon developed a restlessness which grew into acute distress. Unless quenched by coupling—self-imposed cultural taboos prohibited masturbation or homosexuality in any form—waxing agony in the sensitive genitalia terminated in berserk madness and eventual death. Akin to a racial self-destruct mechanism, this unenviable sex drive had been cause for much recent speculation on Sather’s part. He saw in it an eerie analog to his secondary role as Triggerman, picturing Lianasans coupling in blind sexual frenzy, desperate to blot the overwhelming pain in the only manner possible within their Spartan constraints. To them, fulfillment was relief, not release; anodyne instead of pleasure.
Sighing, the diplomat opened his eyes, having imagined no such exotic assignment when applying for xeno-diplomatic work. He recalled Secretary Drake’s parting words at the final briefing session:
“Sather, we must learn to appreciate something emotionally as well as intellectually. Our standards and lifestyles, our code of laws and ethics may seem perfectly viable to us. But perhaps only to us. The Lianasans, not to mention other ET’s we’ve stumbled across, are not as we are, do not think and react as we do. Humanity’d best learn to live with non-anthropocentric ideals damned fast, else pull in its horns and be content to remain a provincial, backwater species.”
Reflecting wryly on the wisdom of this, Sather touched the lethal implants in his neck one last time. He pulled himself toward the main airlock with less than total enthusiasm.
Although wearing civvies—uniforms and other military accouterments being passe in the wake of recent carnage—the young lieutenant of Imperial Marines evidenced his spit-and-polish training by managing a brace despite the uncertainties of zero gee. He “stood” on the velcro deck matting, eying his small squad in an endless search for unshined boots or other vestiges of careless grooming. Lining the portside, airlock’s vestibule, out-of-uniform marines comprised the starship’s security force, though what was to be feared baffled Sather every bit as much as his Triggerman role. Thanks to LEX GALACTICUM, security was a habit the Imperial authorities had not outgrown.
Faint, conducted scraping sounds caused by unshipping the umbilical tube reached Sather. The starship’s intercom system crackled into life. “Rendezvous and docking concluded. Demate accomplished. All hands stand by for pseudo-gee.”
Gradually, accompanied by a passing twinge of dizziness, Sather felt himself grow heavier. In a moment his feet were pressing into the velcro deck matting with comforting assurance he’d known all his earthbound life. With a nervous cough, he willed himself to relax.
“Mr., uh, Sather . . . ” The young marine lieutenant made a project of clearing his throat. “What if they try’n talk to us?”
“You’ve been briefed.” Realizing how snappish that had sounded, Sather tempered his response. “Answer all direct questions, Lieutenant, but make no overtures. Wasn’t that made clear?”
“Oh, yes, sir. Sure was.”
“Then, presumably, you’ve passed along the instruction.”
“Yes, sir. Sorry, I didn’t mean to seem—”
“Shush-h-h! The Lianasan party’s coming inboard.”
Servomotors whined. The inner lock cycled open ponderously. Framed in the ellipsoid opening was a regal, dominating presence.
Fashioned of some stiff material resembling burnished metal, His Radiance’s pleated jacket accentuated the sweep of armored shoulders. A silver loinstrap covered the soft flesh of his unarmored abdomen, with a frilly, curtainlike arrangement extending downward to mid thigh. Long, tapering arms were folded as if in challenge, the smooth external armor sheathed in a faintly blue-tinged epidermis. A dark cape, flowing behind the alien to the “floor” of the lock chamber, helped create an impression of Satanic majesty.
But stereographs had not prepared Sather for the intensity of those baleful amber eyes—enormous cat’s eyes, with vertical, dark-slitted pupils staring fixedly from beneath preposterously flaring brow ridges.
The diplomat remembered himself at last. “A felicitous welcome, O Radiant One.” He bowed low. “May thy homecoming be an occasion for great rejoicing.”
The towering alien plenipotentiary returned the bow with a slight tilt of his spine, a barely perceptible tip of his gleaming skull. “Art thou,” he said, straightening, “he known as Sather?”
“I hight Sather, most Radiant One.”
“Quite so. He known as Drake informed us of thy . . . zeal.”
His Radiance stepped lithely from the airlock. The members of his retinue flowed silently around him, standing like so many statues cast in blued-steel, among them a number of Lianasan females as well as several children.
“Sather, thy striving toward command of the Lianasan tongue doth fall but flatly on the ear. Wilt thou be offended if one requests thee to dispense with it forthwith?”
“I had hoped. . . .” Stung, Sather smarted at the other’s ungraciousness. “Since I’m to live among your people,” he said in Lingua Stella, “it seemed only proper to—”
“Practice on another occasion,” directed the envoy brusquely. “If we are not mistaken, you represent one of the brown-skinned human subspecies called—for some obscure reason—‘black.’ We’ve been given to understand that more lightly pigmented humans tend to look down upon your kind and hold them apart. Is this so?”
Feeling that things were moving a bit too fast for him, Sather said, “In parts of our world it was once true, sir. Generations ago my ancestors were victims of such prejudice. I am not. Present day society is much more enlightened.”
“Now that you have had contact—and conflict—with species other than your own?”
“Going out into the galaxy undoubtedly contributed to our . . . maturity, sir. But the particular problem you refer to was solved quite some time in the past.”
“Interesting. We Lianasans are fortunate in being a homogenous species.” Although the inflection in his timbrous voice was nil, the alien’s sarcasm was apparent. “On the other hand, mightn’t Drake have decided to send someone of relatively low caste on this . . . errand? An expendable ‘alien’ amongst aliens, as it were?”
“I . . . hardly think that could be the case, sir.”
“So!” Seconds wore by. His Radiance continued to appraise the diplomat as if trying to decide whether he was being argumentative. Then nictitating membranes closed and opened as the Lianasan blinked. “Sather, was ‘prejudice’ legislated out of existence by your renowned code of laws? We have studied LEX GALACTICUM at length. Truthfully, it seems a hodgepodge of contradictory, loosely worded statutes. We fail to see how the Terrestrial Imperium, or any more or less sane society, could be governed thusly.”
The diplomat squelched an impulse to wipe the film of perspiration from his forehead. “Many provisions of our legal code are traditional rather than institutional—carryovers from the multinational governments of our world’s adolescence. As for legislating away ethnic or religious preju—
