No Man's World

IX

Emotionless robots handled the luggage with superhuman skill and expertise. Handbags, grips, suitcases, duffelbags, packing cases, crates, shining alloy cylinders—all were smoothly operated by the robotic team of loaders. The starship stood straddle-finned on the pad, the early sun sending a gleam to strike and bounce in reflected glory from her needle nose. The passengers rode upwards smoothly in elevators that dropped them off at the decks specified on their tickets.

Men and women from Ragnar and the good ol’ PLW were last to leave the elevator, entering the ship through the first-class airlocks immediately in rear of the command sections.

Because this was a ship belonging to Horakah, nationals of that stellar grouping also traveled first-class.

Dave Caradine entered the starship through a narrow port situated just where the fins sprang from the hull.

He went straight to his cabin, a two-berth place with cramped accommodation for the week’s run. Earth week, that was. Five days, Horakah standard. Have to remember that. Especially since that night of rain when Koanga had told hmi that he knew Shanstar was not the planet of his birth.

To hell with that now. And don’t—particularly don’t— worry about the silvery alloy crate that had made planetfall on Gamma-Horakah containing samples of Shanstar wares and was leaving that planet with a man and woman of Ahansic cocooned snugly within its innocent metal shell. He wondered how they’d stand out the journey. They were provisioned, had a good air supply, sanitary arrangements—a sort of miniature spaceship in which to ride within the larger compass of the starship.

They’d done it all in that hectic week since he had agreed and that last night when he’d spent an evening and night with Harriet Lafonde such as he had imagined denied to him forever.

She was no dignified, old and majestic lady. No, sir! Not when the Pomcrush had a sweetener added, and the lights had shone in her eyes and her gray hair had been rearranged to reveal the genuine golden strands hidden beneath. She’d said, laughing, that the gray camouflage made her feel more up to the job of travel official for an entire planet.

And, for the third particular thing in the thoughts thronging his brain, when she’d discarded that demurely severe green dress and sallied forth in a silver sheath that revealed maturity that both Sharon and Allura would not come by until they had experienced a great deal more of the galaxy.

Yes. A great girl Harriet Lafonde.

A pity that her planetary grouping and his might very soon he at war.

Of course, a girl could spray her hair any color she wished for a night’s enjoyment, and foundation garments could turn a plug-ugly marine sergeant into a TV starlet at the tightening of a magneclamp. But Harriet had used those tricks to age and mature herself instead of the other way around. The girl with whom he’d lived it up along the great white way around the entertainment belt of Gamma had been the real Harriet. That, in due time, he’d found out. It had been real nice.

Yes, quite a girl.

The warning signal sounded and the starship was cleared of visitors. Caradine stepped out of his cabin and found his way to the observation lounge where he ordered a Pomcrush. Around him his fellow passengers for the journey, drifting into this automatic central point on the time of departure, were talking and laughing, all in subdued voices, waiting for the moment when the starship would lift jets and hoist for interstellar space. The robot bartender sounded brash, dispensing drinks, smokes and sedative pills.

The faintest of thrillings through the ship’s fabric coincided with the last warning. Four minutes later the ship leaped from Camma-Horakah and was outward bound.

Well, that was it. There was no going back now.

The sight of the planet, just before they made transition and went into interstellar drive, affected Caradine oddly.

If some of the people surrounding him had their way, their machinations came to fruition, then the next time he saw that planet might be its last—when it was disintegrating in a sleeting storm of ruptured atoms. He shuddered at the thought. Planetary destruction, although nowadays merely a part of the appurtenances of war, was still a horrible concept, no matter how it was rationalized out. It existed. That alone was enough to account for deviations from the norm, like those fantastically dressed kid gangs back there.

Tommy Gorse. Well, he wasn’t sorry he’d knocked him down. But he felt pity for the stupid kid for getting mixed up in an affair that had resulted in his murder. They’d caught the murderer all right. Caradine had realized, then, the depths of ambition and deviltry in Rawson.

On the TV the murderer, walking bowed to his trial, had only once lifted his face to the maliciously watching cameras.

A whimsical face, with a dark, secretive look and a strongly cleft chin…

Rawson had used his instrument and obtained what he wanted. The instrument, once used, could be tossed aside.

Well, Caradine had had to discard unwanted tools in the past. He thanked God that he’d never stooped to letting them hang or burn or be brain-probed on a charge that really should have been laid at his door. He finished his drink and went to his cabin.

His two-berth cabin had been allotted him as a matter of routine and he had considered himself fortunate that he had no roommate. He opened the door—robots were a luxury these low-down quarters did not extend to—and a hearty voice said:

“Welcome to our litde palace, friend. Step right in.” Caradine did so.

“Who the hell are you?” he said. Then he smiled. “Sorry. Reflex action. Take no notice. They told me I was having this cabin to myself.”

“Oh really? Sorry. Ill check, see if there’s another. I only managed to get a booking at the last moment.”

Caradine looked at him. Medium height, broad, a toughly pugnacious face with two strong grooves running down from his nose to the comers of his mouth. Firm hps and uneven teeth. A quiet dark-green shirt and slacks. The suspicion of a bulge under the armpit, just by that easily unfastened mag-neclamp.

Just like his own magneclamp on his white shirt, in fact.

“I’m Carson Napier. From the Belmont group.”

Caradine extended his hand. “John Carter. Shanstar.”

Carson Napier’s hand faltered, then he recovered, and when he shook hands Caradine felt the violent tremble in the man’s hand. He had lost all the color from his face and great drops of sweat started out on his brow like rain dripping off the eaves of an old, slanted-roof house.

“John Carter? You did say John Carter?”

“Yes. Is anything the matter. Are you all right?” Caradine, still holding Napier’s hand, turned him to sit on the edge of the bunk.

“I’m all right. It was just something unexpected, that’s all.” He looked up and Caradine released the trembling hand. “I suppose the name Carson Napier means nothing to you?”

Caradine laughed. “As a matter of fact, it does. But it’s something that you can know nothing of. Just an amusing, faraway memory, shall we say.”

Napier was recovering. He still sat hunched up, looking at Caradine. And there was something in that look, some familiar image that brought Caradine up, wondering, surmising, remembering. Once men had looked at him like that, in the long ago…

“You say I can know nothing of it—” Then Napier sat up straight, forced himself to laugh, and stood up. “And you’re right, of course. I need a drink. Would you care to join me?”

“Thank you, but not right now. I’ve just come from the lounge. Before dinner?”

“Delighted. Now, if you’ll excuse me—” and Napier went out fast. The door slammed shut.

Caradine sat down and began to think hard. It wasn’t impossible; just— Then he brushed the notion away as absurd. Just because two names had come from the same stable didn’t mean a thing. Names were universal property, now that all men were equal. Only, of course, men from a larger stellar grouping were more equal than men from a smaller. Oh, well.

That was present-day life in this our galaxy.

Even so, if the fantastically impossible had become fact, then Carson Napier had acted much as Caradine might expect him to act. After all, John Carter was one of his favorite cover names. Hmm. Carson Napier would bear watching.

“The toughest job of being an interstellar businessman is finding out just what a particular stellar grouping does not have or produce. Then you shop around your own group, or an allied friendly cluster, and ship in the goods. But in almost any planetary group you can find almost any type of goods. You have to develop specialties.”

Caradine wasn’t talking. He was listening to the large, jovial, beefy-faced man with the alcohol breath and the wilting flower in his buttonhole. And he’d made a success of it. He knew what he was talking about. The others in the lounge, sitting about sipping drinks, smoking, sometimes lending half an ear to the music in the background, knew that he knew what he was talking about.

“But don’t you find it a rat race, Mr. Lobengu?” asked Carson Napier. He and Caradine were sitting at the same table. There was a curious sort of prickly truce between them.

“If you let your nerves get you down, Napier, you’re finished. You new to the fame?”

Napier laughed self-consciously. “More or less. I have a lot to learn.”

“Well, I’m your man.” Lobengu took the fat cigar from his mouth and used it to threaten Napier. “It took me just three weeks to secure a visa to Alpha. I’m told that’s a pretty good record. But I’d had it figured from the other Horakah planets just what Horakah was missing. I have samples of it safely stowed away iirthe holds.” He smiled quite charmingly. “Of course, you don’t expect me to tell you what that something is? No, of course not. But that’s the way to operate, young Napier. Find yourself a toe hold, and then go in punching.”

A woman giggled and her husband nudged her. They were clerks, going home after a holiday on Gamma, too poor to afford the first-class travel to which they were entitled. But they’d had a good holiday. Caradine liked them both.

They had their kid with them, a girl about six or seven, with a bright crop of golden curls, and wearing a simple, pretty little white dress that fell in straight, charming lines. Caradine had won a shiplong friendship with a smile and a bar of local confectionary. Just how the conversation began, Caradine couldn’t afterwards remember; he thought it must have been Jinny. But straight from the self-confident Lobengu they were talking about fairy stories and Jinny was perched on Carson Napier’s knee, and a thin woman with overbright eyes and a bead necklace was telling the child about Father Christmas.

“Mummy’s told me about him,” Jinny said firmly. “I want to hear that other story about the man with the white face.”

Jinny’s mother and father laughed self-consciously, glancing at each other. Lobengu laughed heartily. Napier said, “Which story was that, Jinny?”

“You know. About the man who blew up the Earth.”

Everyone chuckled, thinking back to the bedtime stories of their own childhood. Everyone, that is, except Caradine. Oh, sure, he chuckled. That was camouflage. But he wasn’t thinking back over the billions of miles to a never-never land as were the others. As the others—except, perhaps, Napier?

“But how do you know he blew the Earth up?” asked Napier.

“Daddy said so. Everyone was very wicked. There was a war. That’s nasty.” She made a face and everyone smiled sympathetically. “All the worlds were blown up all over the place.”

“Well,” Lobengu said heavily. “That’s true enough.”

“Have you been there, Mr. Lobengu?” asked Caradine politely.

Lobengu faced him. “As a matter of fact, Mr. Carter, I have. I did a field trip out to the edge of the Blight only last year. A planet out there with the most amazing, well, trade secrets and all, y’know. But I looked through the scopes and I saw the area—black, sunless, dead.” He wiped a hand across his forehead. “After the normal stars of home, it was upsetting. Most upsetting.”

“D’you think,” Napier said carefully, “that anyone’s ever ventured into the Blight?”

Lobengu snorted. Jinny’s father, Harold Jiloa, said, “But why would anyone want to do that? There’s nothing there, is there? It was all destroyed.”

“It must have been terrible,” said Rita Jiloa in a whisper.

Jinny pouted. “You said all the worlds were blown up. And you said you saw where they weren’t,” she looked at Lobengu. “So that part of it’s true. But why isn’t the part about Earth and the man with the white face true? Why is that a fairy story?”

Everyone looked about in surprise. “Well, Jinny,” said her father slowly. “Just because there is the Blight doesn’t mean that all the stories about it are true. There never was any planet called Earth. It’s just a, well, a fable, a legend. A fairy story to make you laugh.”

Caradine said, “How does one laugh over blowing up a million suns and their planets?”

“I think it’s time for bed, young lady,” said Rita Jiloa firmly. She stood up. Jinny put both arms around Napier’s neck.

“Don’t wanna go to bed. I want to hear about Earth.”

“Well, five minutes, then.” Her mother glanced at Harold Jiloa, sighed, and sat down. Jinny snuggled closer to Napier.

“Well, as I remember it,” Napier said, “there were a lot of bad men in those days. And they were all different colors. They had this terrible and wicked war. And they were so blind to all the things that matter that they went about blowing up each other’s worlds.” He paused. A quietness had fallen in the lounge.

“Like we’re going to do to Ahansic if they don’t behave?” chirped Jinny innocently.

“Lord, what these kids pick up off the TV,” said her father, embarrassed.

“Well, I’m from Erinmore,” said Lobengu puffily. “And we have better than seven hundred suns.”

Oddly, the most burning topic in introductions hadn’t come up before this. Napier said, “Belmont.” Caradine said, “Shanstar.” The thin woman with the eyes and beads said, “Delavue.”

Napier went on with the old story of how the war had raged throughout the explored galaxy, and then had burnt itself out and men had broken through to this section, near the center, leaving behind the legacy of hate and broken suns, and leaving behind, too, their own home world called the Earth, which was still there, spinning around its little sun. Earth’s sons and daughters had gone into fresh pastures, and the best had survived. But only the best, only those with a fresh golden tan. All the others, the wicked, depraved, the white and black and yellow and brown and red, had died out. And in the end, a man with a white face had blown up the Earth.

“Why?” asked Jinny.

“No one knows, my dear. But, as there never was an Earth, it doesn’t really matter.”

“Daddy said he did it out of a broken heart. And he had a funny name to go with his funny white face, too.” She shut her eyes, trying to remember.

Napier said quickly, “No one wanted to bother about what was behind the Blight, Jinny. All that was cleaned away, and we all started off afresh. And no one ever goes into the Blight and nothing ever comes out of it.”

Lobengu stirred. “Now there’s a funny thing. When I was on the Blight perimeter last year there was a story current that a ship had come out of the Blight.”

“No!” You’re kidding!”

“Well,” Lobengu said. “It takes some believing, I know. But the story was going the rounds. A ship had come in out of the Blight and disappeared in our portion of the galaxy.”

“Last year?” Caradine said. “Whose year, Mr. Lobengu?”

“Why, Erinmore’s of course. Let me see, about five hundred days of Horakah’s, I’d say.” Caradine did the sum.

Jinny was bouncing about, not interested in this. “That man who blew up the Earth a million years ago,” she said. “That man with the funny white face. What was his name?”

Napier held the little girl close to him, so that Caradine couldn’t see his face. But he heard what he said.

“His name, Jinny, was Caradine.”