Shadow on the Sand

Chapter IV Truce

Throughout the planets there was restlessness among the Stradai. Yet never before had society achieved such perfect balance. With a two trillion population base the increment for each year was sixteen point six billion or, based on average planet figures, a five-planet increment.

Basic decontamination squads maintained a five-year jump on the colonization, a fifteen-planet lead, with the agricultural groups and housing groups moving in a year behind them. Industrial resources were at constant full utilization to provide not only the necessary maintenance of the old but the complete supply of the new.

As the wave of population increase hit each prepared planet that planet became responsible for a fixed percentage of universal need, based on what it could best produce. To achieve this orderly result the above-ground organizations of both the Center and the League were forced to work with careful coordination, depending on the orders emanating from the home planet of Strada which over the long years had long ceased to maintain any form of heavy industry.

The entire planet was the bureaucratic nerve center of the continual expansion, a vast paperwork capital where even the smallest bureaus integrated their data on calculators half as large as the entire space occupied by bureau personnel.

A slight error on the part of Food Resources would result in deficiencies to be made up through the shift of manufacturing resources from other items. A faulty tabulation on the part of Center Research Facilities and a planet being currently occupied would lack the familiar huge white standard building common to all planets.

One area of careful cooperation was the ship facilities for the actual migrations. All planets at full population had to be constantly bled for the new ones being set up. Any delay in picking up the overage meant a strain on the facilities of the overburdened planet and a necessary diversion of cargo space to the planet to bring in the needed items from a planet with an overage.

With the Center responsible for the construction and maintenance of all space carriers of the commercial type and with the League responsible for routing, it was the most closely meshed area of cooperation. The League, however, had slowly taken over the construction, operation and maintenance of the vast patrol fleet.

To counteract this potential weapon the Center had liberally interpreted its maintenance of commercial carriers responsibility and had slowly acquired a “maintenance fleet” which, though ostensibly unwarlike, matched the force of the patrol fleet.

The Stradai were born, trained to maximum efficiency in the occupation which most needed them at the time of training, were permitted to set up a family unit — monogamous or polygamous, depending on the population balance of their home planet — were given physical and mental care on the basis of periodic examinations — were provided with dwelling space and food stations — were given credits for luxury items in ratio to the performance against the predetermined efficiency index in their occupations.

The working day was five hours long as a rule, varied to fit, when necessary, a longer or shorter rotational period of the planet. Creative art in all fields was encouraged but the majority of the Stradai preferred during their leisure hours to frequent the well-equipped recreation halls for the group games and entertainments devised by the Center, put into operation by the League.

The new planets as they were populated became known to their inhabitants by name — Homeplace, Blue, Pleasant Home. But to the central population records they were known by a number, the prefix being the year of preparation and the suffix being the year either in the past or future when full population would be reached.

At the time of the opening of the door to the twin worlds there were 562 planets, of which 486 had reached full population, 63 were in the process of being populated and equipped and 15 were in various stages of preparation.

No man had visited them all or even half of them. Both the Center and the League were aware that the entire 562, due to patrol fleet and maintenance fleet disposition, could be completely depopulated and/or fragmented in an estimated ten-day period.

Thus the smiling adjusted hard-working Stradai of the unpolitical classes walked about with that small ice-tight kernel of fear deep in their hearts. The very ground under them was potentially unstable and the heavens could gout a white fire that would consume them within the space of a catching of the breath, an upward glance of the eyes.

On 5980-91, one of the older planets, an elderly worker with production awards imprinted on the shoulders of his work clothes stood by the factory food station. He addressed ten other workers, the entire factory staff.

“Why aren’t we told more? Where did my son go? He’s been gone four years. I’ll never see him again. The Center took him and he wanted excitement and he was glad to go. Have they turned him into an assassin? Why? Where do the loveliest young women of this planet go? Where are they taken? Are they taken to secret places, to be the pleasure of the big men in the League and the Center?

“What is this thing we make here? Some think it is a weapon. I think it is a weapon. Who is going to use it? And on whom? Why are we so carefully forced, so early in the game, to swear secret loyalty to either the Center or the League? I no longer have any loyalty to either.”

The other men, white-lipped, turned uneasily away. The elderly man stood, waiting. At last, high in the wall, the brass voice of the speaker said, “Marana Seventy-nine C point One, report at once to BuPers. Report at once.”

He turned and walked out. The gong sounded the end of the short rest period. The others went back to work without looking directly at each other. In the late afternoon a young worker reported and took the place of the old man.

When they reported the next morning the few personal items that the old man had kept in the work bench drawer under the bank of lights that he had watched for thirty years were gone. No one asked who had taken them. There was no need for that.

The workers in the factory felt a certain pride in being allied with the Center. After discreet and subtle questioning they found that the young worker was also one of them. Tension relaxed and within a few weeks the old man was forgotten.

The small unimportant-looking Chief of the Center maneuvered his tiny ship toward the asteroid with the ease of long practise. The asteroid was a minute million-ton chunk of black rock, selected originally because it was firm in its orbit, readily predictable, yet without motion on its own axis.

He brought his speed in relation to the asteroid to nearly zero, guided the ship slowly into the circular mouth of the tunnel, keeping it a foot from the vitrified floor. As it reached the gravitized area the prow nosed down, scraped and the small ship settled, rocking slightly before coming to rest. After he activated the port behind the ship he waited and watched the dial indicating outside air pressure creep up to normal.

Wearily he climbed out of the ship, opened the smaller port at the deep end of the tunnel, pulled it shut behind him. Drugged with exhaustion he made his way to his bedroom, pulled off his clothes, stepped into the bath.

Here in the hollow interior of the asteroid were ail of the fruits and awards his position merited, the best the culture could provide. Tart wines from the rocky hills of distant planets. Quiet, peace, luxury, service so perfect as to be barely noticeable. A million hours of music no farther away than the nearest wall selector. The golden girls of Garva or the cat-fragile women of Tsain.

He lay in the deep hot bath and the water swirled around him, washing away some of the ache, the tension.

The League knew of this place and undoubtedly knew of his arrival to the exact moment. And, knowing of it, somewhere a trained hand would rest close to a button or switch. The asteroid would make a very small puff of blue-white flame. But if that were done within one second a few dozen sybaritic retreats of League leaders would disappear in like fashion. It was a form of truce and he had come to accept it almost as a form of security.

The rush of warm air absorbed the moisture from his body. He went back into the bedroom and found that the soiled clothes had disappeared. Fresh ones were laid out for him. He knew that the servitors were awaiting his orders, that there had been a great alertness among them since the moment of his arrival.

Yet there was restlessness mingled with the weariness and he decided that for a time they should wait.

He pushed a button recessed into the top of a small table and stood back, naked, his arms crossed, watching the wide wall of the bedroom. It took on a misty look, shimmered, and was gone. As always the utter blackness was breathtaking, the stars burning with that fierce brilliance so impossible to describe to one who never left the atmospheric envelope of his home planet.

It took him but a moment to orient himself to this familiar sight. And he found Strada, not harsh like the stars but misted like the other planets, so small that even were the atmosphere gone he would have been unable to pick out the outlines of the continents.

The self-doubt which he had felt of late was new to him. Never before had he doubted his own decisions. Always he had done his work, hoping and planning and dreaming that one day there would appear a chance to break the stalemate, to win the first and last victory over the League. And now the chance had come with this doorway into another world.

Why not use it at once? Devise a clever plan of transporting vast numbers of key Center personnel into the new world. Enlarge the doorway and set up others. Turn the other world into an arsenal. Flood their heavens with ships of the Center. Then, with the first genuinely impregnable fortress that had existed for a dozen generations, issue forth to smash the League. Why not?

He knew he had lied to Lofta. There was no real reason for great slowness. There was every reason to make haste. Who could know what the League planned?

And yet — he smiled. The three agents, Amro, Massio and Faven, had reported to him in person. Amro had been their spokesman. It was the first time in his career that he had permitted direct contact with the agents. The honor had awed them. And yet through their awe he had sensed their pleasure in this new world, this quiet, primitive world.

The woman agent, Faven, had very cleverly insinuated the idea that Amro had formed a very unnecessary emotional attachment for the Earthwoman who lived among them, not suspecting their origin. And he had seen Amro’s anger, in itself a guarantee of the truth.

He looked off through space at Strada and whispered aloud, “There is the nerve center. There is the real battleground. There is the head of the beast. Neither side will quite dare to destroy it for it is the guarantee of power for both the League and the Center.

“If it were gone the chaos of mismanagement would divide the planets into the island empires — warring empires. If either the Center or the League should attempt to move away from Strada, to move the top leaders of either faction, Strada would cease to exist. Our only security is in each other’s arms. Hardly an embrace of love.”

The decision would have to be made and soon. There were restless lieutenants who would not hesitate at an assassination of their own Chief if they became convinced that he was becoming a burden to the Center. And indecision would start them thinking along that line.

He pushed the button again and the wall slowly took on the look of solidity. He faced the room and said softly, “Awaken me in five hours.”

The substance of the bed folded up around him and the temperature of the room quickly sank to the exact degree which he preferred.

Though Kama of the League had no thought for women, he had slowly and pleasantly grown quite aware of one of the four female guards who gave him the substitution check whenever he left his working area, one of the most carefully guarded of all the League installations on Strada.

For a time he was merely subconsciously aware that one of the guards smiled at him. And later he singled her out. She was not tall, quite rounded, not really pretty in any way. But Kama had a deep mistrust of beauty in any form. This one had a way of looking at him that disturbed him and set his mind working in half-forgotten patterns.

Much to his disgust he found himself thinking of her during the hours when he should have been giving all of his attention to the problem of deduction which the change in Center methods had brought up.

Kama was oddly shy for all of his power as one of the most influential, though anonymous, members of The Three. And so it was another week before he brought himself to request her plate, giving then the somewhat awkward excuse that he was spot-checking defensive operations. He fitted the plate into the desk translator and the tiny magnetized areas were transformed into written information.

Her name was Maen, followed by the usual index number giving the code for the planet of birth, year of induction into the sub-rosa service of the League, intelligence rating. He found to his secret pleasure that she was assigned a small room of her own in the second sublevel under the guard station to which she was attached.

On the next day he called her by name and she flushed with pleasure. And that evening she found a chance to whisper to him her room number and a time.

Two minutes after the time she had mentioned, as Kama entered her room, she held the muzzle of the issue farris over his heart and pulled the trigger. Kama found time, even as his life exploded into nothingness, to wonder professionally how on Strada she had managed to be substituted for the genuine Maen, whose loyalties naturally were beyond question.

She made the routine hopeless attempt to escape and the alerted guard trapped her as was the custom by a judicious use of the wall projectors which froze the main motor nerves. The surgeon on duty studied the exact position of the deadly pellet imbedded deep beside the spinal cord.

She was wheeled behind the shields and the surgeon made the usual hopeless attempt to guide the mechanical hands which performed the operation. The pellet was laid bare but as the attempt was made to deactivate it exploded with a violence that bulged the heavy plates and stunned the surgeon.

Had he permitted her to regain the power to speak she would have exploded the pellet by saying the key word. Had he attempted a mechanical means of tapping memory the pellet would have been activated.

As was expected, no trace was discovered as to the method by which the substitution had been arranged. Her cover had been protected by a false master plate which covered the minute physiological differences that could not be duplicated. All guards, following the incident, were cross-checked so mercilessly that two of them, driven into complete mindlessness, had to be destroyed.

Martha Kaynan looked out of the window at the grey overcast day and wondered what had happened to her. This short vacation had been intended as a gap in her New York activities which of late had become quite flavorless. She had not anticipated much in the way of interest or pleasure. But there was a strange spell on this coast. The known realities had faded and there was an extreme clarity here.

Some of her self-confidence was gone. Yesterday was the day she had planned to leave. And she had sought them out, particularly Quinn, and had planned to be very firm. But she had found herself saying dubiously, “I had — planned to leave today.”

And Quinn had merely said, “I think you will stay.”

She had known of course that she would. And she had not questioned him. She had not even wondered how long she would stay.

They were odd, the three of them, and being near them had in some unaccountable way increased her perceptivity. Almost as though a deep racial knowledge, buried for ten thousand years, was being brought up into the light again. Sometimes she could taste their thoughts on the fringe of her mind. Not the real meaning, of course, but the emotions behind the thoughts.

Jerry Raymond seemed impatient, as though he waited for some great happening, mistrusting delay. Fran Raymond hated her. She could feel that. And Quinn seemed to be lost in some personal problem of his own, a weighing of factors. For the three of them it seemed to Martha to be a time of suspension.

And she knew that on two nights she had been drugged. She wondered why they had found it necessary to do that and she had a desperate curiosity as to what they had done while she was in drugged sleep. But oddly she could feel no resentment. It was as though the rules which pertained to these three were not the common day-by-day rules of social behavior governing the rest of mankind.

She turned quickly as Quinn came into the room. She smiled. “A day like this makes me feel like something out of Jane Eyre.”

“Yes,” he said but not before she had gained the clear and unmistakable impression that the name meant nothing to him. There were odd gaps in Quinn’s memory. Sometimes, though his speech was colloquial, without shade of accent, she had the curious feeling that English was a language he had learned to speak. And that was silly because she knew that Quinn had been born in Philadelphia.

Something tremendous had happened to Quinn during the year they had been apart. And Martha knew that she had to find out what it was or spend the rest of her life wondering. Whatever had happened it had made a deep and basic-change in him. The Quinn she remembered, though selfish and sensuous and egocentric, had a certain amount of sympathetic imagination, and a touch of warmth.

The new Quinn French had a deep ice-cold ruthlessness about him as though he had been refashioned for use as a weapon.

He stood beside her. “What are the three of you waiting for?” she asked.

He started in surprise. “Waiting?”

“Of course you are. Don’t try to lie to me, Quinn.”

“It’s the weather that makes you think crazy things.”

“I thought this yesterday. And the sun shone all day.”

He smiled at her but his eyes were aloof. “Why, we’re waiting for the end of the world. Hadn’t you heard?”

She said soberly, “Maybe you are. Maybe you are.”

“A walk will do you good, Martha.”

“Where are Fran and Jerry?”

“They’ve gone into Harlingen.”

They walked down the beach. The waves were higher, thudding monotonously against the packed sand. She walked with her head bent, her hands thrust into the pockets of her tan slacks.

“What do you believe in, Quinn?” she asked. “I mean about people. I’m not asking it right. About the rights of people, of the individual?”

“The individual? What sort of an individual? An important one?”

“Why ask that?”

“An important individual is perfectly safe to exercise power in any way he wishes as long as he is able to protect himself.”

“And the unimportant individual?”

Quinn shrugged. “The unimportant individual is unimportant and so is any discussion of his rights. He exists as a tool to be used by the important ones. If he has ability the point is to grab him early enough to give him the right mental adjustment to your own ends and then he works for you and against the others.”

“And if he gets in your way?” she asked.

He looked surprised. “What can you do except kill him?”

She stopped so suddenly that he went on alone for a few paces, turned and stared back at her. “Do you believe that, Quinn?”

He frowned. “What else is there to believe?”

She stamped her foot on the sand. “I’ve heard that sort of talk before from some of the adolescent Fascisti but they say it to make an effect. And I’ve heard it from sarcastic undergraduates. But not from an adult. Look at me, Quinn.”

“I’m looking.”

“All right. I am unimportant. I am in your way. I’m in a position to block whatever it is that you and Fran and Jerry are planning. Do you kill me?”

“I don’t understand.”

“Look at me. I have the only life that I’m given to live. I have dreams and hopes — damn it, Quinn, I’m a person. Dead, I’m so many chemicals. Do you have the right to put an end to me? Just like that? Just because I’m unimportant?”

His smile was weak. “This is a pretty alien sort of philosophy to me, Martha.”

“Alien! Good heavens, it’s what you’ve been taught all your life! What’s alien about it?”

He made a long mark in the wet sand with his bare foot. “Okay, Martha. Suppose you have a society based on your ideas. The individual is important. How can that society progress? No conflicts are ever absolved. Warring groups have to fight with words.”

“And in your brave society they fight with murder? Oh, brother! You’ve got a hole in that argument I could steer the Queen Mary through. In your society you might be okay for progress until you get a perfect balance of power between two opposed groups. Violence is your watchword. What happens? The two groups will neatly and carefully wipe each other out and your whole society in the bargain. Is that good?”

He didn’t answer.

She said, “You didn’t answer my question? If I should get in your way would you kill me?”

“I’d have to, wouldn’t I?” he said, apparently amazed at the question.

“I think I’ll take this walk alone if you don’t mind,” she said.

Amro stood and watched her go slowly up the beach. For years the conflict in his mind had been one of ways and means, of increasing his effectiveness with the basic concept of his position in the Center a thing beyond argument or conjecture.

Her words had the effect of attacking the foundation stones of his beliefs and it gave him a disquieting feeling of confusion. He tried to tell himself that this primitive society could not presume to teach an agent of the Center anything. The Center would win. It had to win.

But could she be right? When the conflict broke would it end everything? If it would, the very struggle itself became a struggle to see whether the Center or the League would feel strong enough to take the first step toward oblivion. And for one horrid moment he was shaken by the idea that maybe the entire conflict was pointless.

He ran after her. She stopped and regarded him coldly. “Well?”

“Martha, maybe the answer wasn’t complete. I said that I would have to. But that is just a rule. Maybe, when the moment came, I’d be unable to do it.”

“This,” she said, “is a new high in boy meets girl. Boy declares affection by telling girl that maybe he couldn’t kill her if he was supposed to. I’m touched by the depths of your affection, darling. I might test you.”

“How?”

“Never mind.”

He thrust toward her mind, groping for the test she had in mind, but he met the firm resistance he had not expected.

She smiled. “Maybe you shouldn’t have taught me, Quinn. I’m getting better at it. Truce?” Once again there was the startling thought in her mind that the word was foreign to him.

“Yes,” he said uneasily. “Truce.”

“We won’t fight for a time.”

“Oh. Of course not.”