Monument (novel)

16

He was clad only in a loincloth, and he entered the Hiln’s control room with the superb confidence of one about to take possession of it. He said, “Commander Vorish? I am Fornri.”

Vorish did not offer to touch hands. He would give this native a fair hearing, but he wasn’t pleased about the commotion that had made the interview possible. He especially wasn’t pleased because, if his men had been as alert as he expected them to be, this youngster should have been a corpse right now instead of an emissary, and Vorish could think of nothing that Fornri or any other native might have to say to him that couldn’t wait until the morrow or even the next week. He indicated a stool, and as Fornri accepted it he moved up one for himself.

Fornri spoke firmly. “My understanding is that you are members of the Space Navy of the Galactic Federation of Independent Worlds. Is that correct?”

Caught in the act of seating himself, Vorish straightened up and stared. He said blankly, “Yes—”

“On behalf of my government, I ask your assistance in repelling invaders of our world.”

The communications duty officer so far forgot himself as to exclaim, “The devil!” Vorish managed to sit down on his second try, and he said calmly, “By ‘invaders’ I suppose you refer to the construction project.”

“I do.”

“Your planet has been classified Three-C by the Federation, which places it under the jurisdiction of the Colonial Bureau. Wembling and Company have a charter from the Bureau. They are hardly to be considered invaders.”

Fornri spoke with exaggerated deliberation. “My government has a treaty with the Galactic Federation of Independent Worlds. The treaty guarantees the independence of Langri and also guarantees the assistance of the Federation in the event that Langri is invaded. I am calling upon the Federation to fulfill its treaty obligations.”

Vorish turned to the duty officer. “Let’s have the index.”

“Shall I put it on that screen, sir?”

“Yes. Dial Langri for me, please.”

The screen at Vorish’s side flickered to life, and he spoke aloud as he read. “Initial contact in ’44. Classified Three-C in ’46. There’s no mention of any treaty.”

Fornri took a tube of polished wood from his belt and slipped out a rolled parchment. He passed it to Vorish, who unrolled it and smoothed it flat. He stared at it so long, and so incredulously, that the duty officer came to look over his shoulder.

“That’s the seal of the battle cruiser Rirga!” the duty officer exclaimed. “It’s a certified copy of the original.”

Vorish tapped the parchment with one finger. “Where is the original?”

“It is preserved in a safe place,” Fornri said. “We requested copies at the time the treaty was signed, and the naval officers supplied them.”

Vorish looked again at the screen. “There’s something exceedingly peculiar about this. The treaty is dated two months after the initial contact, and it classifies the world Five-X. That would mean that the ’46 action was a reclassification. The index should say so, but it doesn’t.”

“There’d be no possible explanation for almost a two-year delay in classifying a world,” the duty officer said. “But is the treaty genuine?”

“Where would these natives get the knowledge and equipment to produce a forgery on this order?” Vorish turned to Fornri. “If this is genuine, and I see no reason to doubt it, there’s skulduggery here on an order I wouldn’t have thought possible. Tell me what happened.”

The next morning Aric Hort called to keep an appointment made by way of Smith’s com equipment the night before. He took Vorish for a walk along the beach, and at a point beyond the construction site perimeter, where the coast curved northward for a short distance, they found eight native boys waiting for them with a boat. They had a swift ride along the coast, past several native villages, and eventually the shore curved west again and Vorish saw the spectacular silhouette of a modern building perched on a bluff by the sea.

“So that’s the medical center,” he said. “Would you mind explaining—”

“Not until you’ve seen it. I promised Talitha she could have first crack at you before I stuff you with misleading information.”

“Talitha?”

“Miss Warr. Wembling’s niece. The medical center is her pet project.”

“I gather that you don’t think much of it.”

“I think it’s tremendous,” Hort said. “I just wish the natives hadn’t had to pay such a stiff price for it. When a man has an infected toenail, we ought to be able to heal him without cutting off his head.”

They turned shoreward and beached their boat beside two other native boats that were drawn up on the beach. Someone had gone to considerable trouble to construct a paved walk that curved to the top of the bluff on a gentle slope, but another path, crude but well worn, went directly and steeply to the top, and Hort led him that way without apology.

Talitha Warr received him graciously and introduced him to Dr. Fenell, the Wembling and Company staff doctor who spent two half days a week at the medical center and also was on call for emergencies. Miss Warr was capable of ornamenting any surroundings and also seemed dazzlingly efficient. Dr. Fenell was a gawky young man, obviously inexperienced, and certainly not the sort Vorish would have expected to find in such an adventurous project. He wondered if the man was a failure attempting to rehabilitate himself.

The doctor followed Miss Warr about as though she were the doctor and he the nursing assistant, and he fawned over her at every opportunity. Vorish observed Aric Hort glaring at the two of them. Obviously there was a rivalry here that perhaps accounted for Hort’s attitude toward the medical center and made his judgments suspect, but that was no concern to Vorish. He would form his own judgments.

So he politely observed the various tiny clinics, most of them without signs of recent use, from magno and hydrotherapy to nutrionics. He professed to admire the pediatrics ward, with its adjoining children’s playground, though he wondered how the native children managed to cope with such radically civilized toys.

What impressed him most was not the clinic but the fact that it seemed to have so little use. The only patients he saw were a few adults seated in the magnificent park that overlooked the sea, and every one of them was a bone-fracture case. Watching them as they came and went in self-powered invalid chairs from the native-type buildings at the rear, he decided to ask his own medical staff to examine this puzzle. Either the Langrian natives were an unusually healthy people, or they were using the medical center only for a few medical problems they couldn’t handle themselves.

Otherwise, if Miss Warr expected to overwhelm him with her uncle’s generosity to the natives, it was just as well that she would not be seeing the report he intended to file. Vorish had seen medical centers on many worlds. Any time a man in his command became seriously ill far from regular navy facilities, Vorish had to obtain for him the best medical care conveniently available, and he always made it a point to inspect the facilities himself. He would not willingly place one of his men in the care of Langri’s medical center. The building and its setting were attractive, but its medical facilities were at best mediocre, and there was no trained staff at all. Miss Warr, for all of her enthusiasm, was a novice, and the doctor could not possibly have the broad spectrum of experience so essential to a medical director. Wembling and Company had in fact made no more than a gesture at providing medical care for the natives.

But Vorish did not denigrate the gesture. He well understood that even a badly run center could produce spectacular results on a primitive world that had been completely without medical care.

“That’s the story,” Miss Warr said finally. “I insisted that the center be built first, and here it is. We’ve already inoculated the entire population against the worst diseases, and there’s a regular inoculation program for children. Diseases that formerly caused certain death now no longer require hospitalization, and we haven’t had a death from sickness since the center opened. We’re making spectacular improvements in infant mortality, and broken bones, which in the past frequently caused death or life-time disability, now are routinely handled. I still have nightmares about that child I saw die, and it’s the greatest satisfaction I’ve ever experienced to know that it won’t happen again.”

“To be sure,” Vorish murmured. “I see that you’re training native nurses.”

“We call them medical assistants. We have youngsters of both sexes studying here, and we let them perform all kinds of routine chores under supervision. As much as possible we convert our cases into medical lessons for them. Of course the natives won’t be able to achieve the competence to run the center themselves until they’re able to send their bright young people to medical schools on other worlds and make fully qualified doctors of them. That’s many years away, but the problem isn’t urgent. The resort will have its own medical center, so there’ll be doctors available until the natives can provide their own.”

“Thank you very much, Miss Warr,” Vorish said. “I’ll send my own medical officer to visit you. I’m sure he’ll be interested.”

Vorish and Hort emerged at the rear of the center, near the native buildings, and they took the paved walk back to the beach. As soon as it had curved out of sight of the center, Vorish said to Hort, “Now will you answer my questions?”

“You saw it yourself,” Hort said. “She thinks the medical center justifies everything.”

“I want to know what you think. I’ve heard Fornri’s story, and I believe him. He couldn’t possibly have forged that treaty, and anyway my records officer has come up with an old index tape that he fortunately neglected to discard, and on it Langri is classified Five-X. How did Wembling get the classification switched to Three-C?”

“How does a big-time operator manage anything?” Hort asked bitterly. “Political pressure, bribery, trading favors—if there’s a way, he knows how to find it. Probably we’ll never know how he did it. The question should be—what can be done about it while there’s still time to save the natives?”

“Save the natives? Surely Wembling isn’t plotting anything more sinister than stopping their harassment. He started his project with the idea of helping them.”

“He did not,” Hort said hotly. “Wembling never has any idea except to help himself. He was trying to make a record so he’d get a diplomatic appointment to a world with more potential loot. The moment he got the notion he could make more money from Langri resorts than he could from mining concessions somewhere else, he sent Ayns off to Colomus to get Langri reclassified.”

“I see. Even so, if the resort is as successful as Wembling predicts, ten per cent of the profits will produce a whopping income for the natives. Why are they fighting him?”

“Haven’t they the right to reject the ten per cent and the resort if they don’t want either?”

“Of course. That is, they should have had that right under the violated treaty. But it does seem to me that they could have compromised—received the benefits from the resort and at the same time controlled it. Wembling did try to get their permission first, Fornri said. And when he couldn’t, then he worked the reclassification.”

They had reached the beach. The natives pushed the boat into the water and stood waiting for them, but Hort and Vorish turned aside and sought the forest’s edge and a fallen tree to sit on. The boys grinned and pulled the boat back onto the beach.

“It’s a matter of life and death,” Hort said.

Vorish regarded him skeptically. “You’ll have to explain that.”

“These natives have a precarious existence. Perhaps a small resort, properly controlled, wouldn’t affect the world’s ecology, but Wembling doesn’t do anything in a small way. He’s building a huge resort, and he’s planning others, and already his construction and the water recreation of his workers is seriously affecting the natives’ food supply. If Wembling isn’t stopped, there won’t be any native population left to enjoy that ten per cent when and if Wembling and Company gets around to paying it.”

“Are you serious?”

“Deadly serious. It’s a scientific fact that a people can become accustomed to certain kinds of foods and unable to eat others. There are dozens of worlds where local populations are fond of native herbs that make visitors ill.”

“The Space Navy can tell you a few things about that,” Vorish said. “Our men come from all the member worlds of the Federation. Space Navy ships have to have dietary classifications, so that men accustomed to the same kinds of food can serve together.”

“Langri’s problem is much more serious than that. For an unknown number of generations, these natives have been existing on a diet composed almost entirely of koluf, a Langrian sea creature. It’s an extremely rich and nutritious food, but its components of vitamins and minerals and the rest are peculiar to the world of Langri and unlike any food ever eaten by humans anywhere else. By evolution or adaptation the natives’ bodies are accustomed to this, and I’m afraid they won’t be able to assimilate normal human foods. And the construction activity is ruining their hunting grounds.”

“In other words,” Vorish mused, “the natives can’t eat anything but this koluf, and Wembling and Company are destroying it.”

“Not ‘destroying.’ Driving it away. As far back as the natives can remember, koluf always have followed regular feeding routes along the coast. Now they’re changing them.”

“I see.”

“Would it be possible to have your medical staff investigate this for me?” Hort asked.

“The ability of the natives to eat normal food? Certainly. Now what’s this about a Plan? And what are ‘conjunctions’?”

Hort chuckled. “Fornri means ‘injunctions,’ and there’ve been a lot of them. The court held up Wembling’s work for months.”

“I heard about that. It cost the natives a fortune and they lost every case.”

“It bought them some time, though, and that’s what they say they need. Time for the Plan.”

“And what’s the Plan?”

“I don’t know. Whatever it is, they believe in it absolutely. The Plan said Fornri should see you the moment you landed, so he insisted on seeing you last night. I tried to convince him he’d get himself killed, and he said he’d follow the Plan and be perfectly safe and every hour was important. Now you know as much about it as I do.”

“He easily could have got himself killed,” Vorish said. “On the other hand, he didn’t, so maybe he was perfectly safe. All things considered, this seems like an extremely complicated problem.” He got to his feet. “I have an appointment with Wembling, and it wouldn’t do to keep a busy and important man waiting.”

They walked toward the boat, and the grinning boys launched it again and stood waiting for them.

“I don’t think the natives can beat Wembling in court,” Vorish said. “He’ll have too much money, and too much influence, and the trickiest lawyers money can buy.”

“Where do you stand in this?”

“Squarely in the middle,” Vorish said. “I’m absolutely impartial, and Wembling isn’t going to like that. I’ll protect him from the natives, but I’m also going to protect the natives from Wembling, in every way I can. And while I’m doing that, I’m going to report this situation at once, in more detail than Fleet Headquarters will like, and request action to get the treaty restored. The problem on this world isn’t what the natives can or can’t eat. The problem is a treaty that was negotiated in good faith on both sides and now has been brazenly violated. The honor of the Space Navy is involved.”

“You don’t realize how potent Wembling’s influence is. Your headquarters will file that report and forget it.”

“Then I’ll take action to get it unfiled,” Vorish said with a grin.

The natives weren’t talking about their Plan, but Wembling talked rather too much about his. He took Vorish and Smith to his planning office, where an impressive scale model of the resort was on display. There he bit a capsule, breathed pungent colored smoke into their faces, and orated statistics.

“A thousand accommodations,” he said proudly, “and most of them suites.”

Smith stooped for a closer look. “Are those things on the beach terrace swimming pools?”

“Right. There’ll also be an indoor pool. Some people can’t stand even mildly salty water, you know, and some will be afraid of the ocean creatures, even though there’s no danger. Well—what d’ya think of it?”

“It’s very—impressive,” Vorish murmured.

“There’ll be two main dining rooms and half a dozen small ones that’ll specialize in food from famous places. I’ll have a whole fleet of over- and underwater boats for recreation and sight-seeing. You may not believe it, but there are millions of people in the galaxy who’ve never seen an ocean. Why, there are worlds where people don’t even have enough water to bathe in. Some worlds even have to import their air. If their populations can come to Langri now and then and live a little, they’ll need a lot fewer doctors and psychiatrists. This project of mine is nothing less than a service to humanity.”

Vorish and Smith exchanged glances. “From the looks of this, the only humanity you’ll benefit will be the poor, broken-down millionaires,” Vorish observed.

Wembling waved a hand disarmingly. “This is only the beginning. Have to put the thing on a sound financial basis right from the start, you know. Later there’ll be plenty of room for the little fellows—not in water-front hotels, of course, but there’ll be community beaches and hotels with rights of access and that sort of thing. My staff has it worked out. Once this resort opens for business—”

The construction sounds outside the window had halted. Wembling dashed for the door, with Vorish and Smith close on his heels. Once outside, they stopped and watched him sprint to the nearest work point, where three of his hammerheads were struggling with a native.

The young man had attached himself to a girder that was about to be swung aloft. The workers were trying to remove him, but he clung stubbornly. Wembling dashed up waving his arms angrily and shouting orders. None seemed to be needed. The workers had to remove the native without harming him, and they were doing their best. Eventually they managed to pry him loose and carry him away.

“What can they possibly gain from that?” Smith asked.

“Time,” Vorish said. “Time for their Plan.”

“Has it occurred to you that this Plan might consist of a genuine uprising with real explosives?”

“No, and from what I’ve seen of the natives, that’s the last thing I’d expect. What do you think of Wembling?”

“He’s a self-activated power unit.”

“Much as I loathe the man, I have to admire the way he gets things done,” Vorish said. “I’d hate to be a native and have to fight for my life against him. They’re intelligent enough to know they can’t evict him with force. I’m afraid, though, that they’re trying to match wits with him. They don’t stand a chance that way, either.”

Wembling got the work started again, and then he trotted back to join them. “If you’d put in the kind of defensive line I want, I wouldn’t have that trouble,” he complained.

“We both know I’m not going to do it,” Vorish told him. “An electronic barrier would cost a fortune, and the dead natives it produced would be my responsibility. I wouldn’t even suggest it, At the very worst, the natives are only a minor nuisance to you.”

“They make the men nervous. Everyone has to keep alert every minute so he won’t accidentally kill one of the puggards.”

“That should make them highly efficient workers,” Vorish observed dryly.

“Maybe, but the natives mucking about the project slow me down. I want ’em kept out.”

“Frankly, I think you’re exaggerating the problem. One or two interruptions a day doesn’t slow you down much—certainly not enough to justify keeping a naval battle cruiser here. However, I have my orders. I’ll use everything I have short of violence to keep them out.”

Wembling grinned good-naturedly. “I guess I can’t ask more than that.”

He looped his arm through Vorish’s and led him back to the planning office.