Skylark DuQuesne

18. HUMANITY TRIUMPHANT, NOT INC

SINCE Seaton as Ky-El Mokak was not the least bit fussy, he accepted the first house that Prenk showed him. His honor offered also — with a more than somewhat suggestive expression — to send him a housekeeper, but Seaton declined the offer with thanks; explaining that that could wait until he got himself organized and could do a little looking around for himself.

Prenk gave Seaton a handful of currency and a ground car — one of Prenk’s own, this; a beautifully streamlined, beautifully kept little three-wheeled jewel of a ground-car — told him where the shopping-centers were, and went back to City Hall.

Seaton bought a haircut and a shave, a couple of outfits of clothing, and some household supplies, which he took out to his new home and stowed away.

By that time it was the local equivalent of half-past three, and the shifts changed at four o’clock; wherefore he drove his spectacular little speedster six miles up-canyon to the uraninite mine that was the sole reason for the town’s existence. Since he did not want to be shot out of hand, he did not dare to be late or to do anything unusual, either during the five-mile train-ride along the main tunnel or during the skip-ride down to the eighty-four-hundred-foot level where he was to work.

Once in the stope itself, however, he stopped — exactly thirteen feet short of the stiffly erect young overseer — and stood still while his shift mates picked up their tools and started for the banging wall — the something-more-than-vertical face of the cavernous stope — to begin their day’s work.

The overseer-was a well-fed young man, and the second native Seaton had seen who looked more than half alive. His jacket, breeches and boots were as glossily black as his crash-helmet was glossily white. He was a very proud young man, and arrogant. His side-arm hung proudly at his hip. His bull-whip coiled arrogantly ready for instant use.

This wight stared haughtily at Seaton for a moment, and began to swell up like a pouter pigeon. Then, as Seaton made an unmistakable gesture at him, he went into smoothly violent action.

“Oh, you’re the wilder!” he snarled, and swung the heavy blacksnake with practiced ease.

But Seaton had known exactly what to expect and he was ready for it. He ducked and sidestepped with the speed and control of the trained gymnast that he was; he handled the short, thick club that had been in his sleeve as though it were the wand of the highly skilled prestidigitator that he was. Thus, in the instant that the end of the lash curled savagely around the hickory he swung it like a home-run hitter swings a bat — and caught the blacksnake’s heavy, shot-loaded butt on the fly in his right hand.

The minion went for his gun, of course, but Seaton’s right arm was already swinging around and back, and as gun cleared holster the bull-whip’s vicious tip snapped around both gun and hand with a pistol-sharp report. The trooper stared, for an instant stunned, at the blood spurting from his paralyzed right hand; and that instant was enough.

Seaton stepped up to him and put his left fist deep into his midsection. Then, as the half-conscious man began to double over, he sent his right fist against its preselected target. Not the jaw, he didn’t want to break his hand or the throat. Nor did he hit him hard; he didn’t want to kill the guy, or even damage him permanently.

As the man fell to the hard-rock floor — writhing in agony, groaning, strangling and gasping horribly for breath — the men and women and teen-agers looking on burst as one into clamor. “Stomp ’im!” they shrieked and yelled. “Give ’im the boots! Stomp ’im! Kill ’im! Stomp ’is head clean off! Stomp ’im right down into the rock!”

“Hold it!” Seaton rasped, and the miners fell silent; but they did not relapse into their former apathy.

Seaton stood by, waiting coldly for his victim to be able to draw a breath. He picked the overseer’s pistol-like weapon up and looked it over. He had never seen anything like it before, and casual inspection didn’t tell him much about how it worked, but that could wait. He didn’t intend to use it. In fact, he wasn’t really interested in it at all.

When the overseer had partially recovered his senses, Seaton jammed a headset onto his head and thought viciously at him; as much to give him a taste of real punishment as to find out what he knew and to impress upon his mind exactly what he had to do if he hoped to keep on living. Then Seaton made what was for him a speech. First, to the now completely deflated officer:

“You — you slimy traitor, you quisling! Know now that a new regime has taken over. Maybe I’ll let you live and maybe I’ll turn you over to these boys and girls here — you know what they’d do to you. That depends on how exactly you stick to what I just told you.

One thought of a squeal — if you ever get one mili-meter out of line, and you’ll be under surveillance every second of every day — you’ll die a long, slow, tough death. And I mean tough!”

He turned to the miners; studied them narrowly. His “shot in the arm” had done them a lot of good. Excitement was still high; none of them had relapsed into the apathy that had affected them all such a short time before. In fact, one close-clustered group of men was eyeing Seaton and the overseer in a fashion that made it perfectly clear that, had it not been for Seaton’s mien and the gun and the whip, there would have been a lynching then and there.

“Take it easy, people,” Seaton told them. “I know you all want to tear this ape apart, but what good would it do? None. Not a bit. So I won’t let you do it, if I have to use the whip and even the gun to keep you from it. But I don’t intend to use either whip or gun and I don’t think I’ll have to, because this is the first bite of a fresh kettle of fish for every civilized human being of this world. I won’t go into much detail, but I represent a group of human beings, as human as yourselves, called HUMANITY TRIUMPHANT. I’m a fore-runner. I’m here to bring you a message; to tell you that humanity has never been conquered permanently and never will be so conquered. Humanity has triumphed and will continue to triumph over all the vermin infesting all the planets of all the solar systems of all the galaxies of all surveyed space.

“HUMANITY TRIUMPHANT’s plans have been made in full and are being put out into effect. Humanity will win here, and in not too long a time. Every Chloran in every solar system in this region of space will die. That’s a promise.

“Nor do we need your help. All we ask you is that you produce the full quota of ore every week, so that no Chloran warship will come here too soon. And that production will be no problem very shortly, since I can repair your machinery and will have it all back in working order by one week from today. So in a very few weeks you women can go back to keeping house for your families; you youngsters can go back to school; and half of you men will be able to make quota in half a shift and spend the other half of it playing penny-ante. And you, Brother Rat—” he turned back to the deposed overseer—

“you can peel that pretty uniform. You’re going to work, right now. You and I are going to be partners — and if you so much as begin to drag your feet I’ll slap your face clear around onto the back of your neck. Let’s go!”

They went. They picked up a drill — which weighed all of three hundred pounds — and lugged it across the rough rock floor to the foot of the face; which, translated from the vernacular, means the lower edge of the expanse of high-grade ore that was being worked.

It was a beautiful thing, that face; a startlingly high and wide expanse of the glossly, lustrous, submetallic pitch black of uraninite; slashed and spattered and shot through at random with the characteristic violent yellows of autunite and carnotite and the variant greens of torbernite.

But Seaton was not particularly interested in beauty at the moment. What he hoped was that he could keep from giving away the fact that this was the first time he had ever handled a mining machine of any kind or type. He thought he could, however, and he did.

For, after all, there are only so many ways in which holes can be made in solid rock.

Second, since the hardrock men who operate the machinery to make those holes are never the greatest intellects of any world, such machinery must be essentially simple.

And third, the Brain’s visualizations had been very complete and Richard Seaton was, as he had admitted to Prenk, an exceptionally smart man.

Wherefore, although Seaton unobtrusively let the ex-overseer take the lead, the two men worked very well together and the native did not once drag his feet. They set up the heavy drill and locked it in place against the face. They slipped the shortest “twelve-inch” steel into the chuck and rammed it home. They turned on the air and put their shoulders to the stabilizing pads — and that monstrous machine, bellowing and thundering under the terrific urge of two hundred pounds to the square inch of compressed air, drove that heavy bit resistlessly into the ore.

And the rest of the miners, fired by Seaton’s example as well as by his “shot in the arm,” worked as they had not worked in months; to such good purpose that when the shift ended at midnight the crew had sent out almost twice as much high-grade ore as they had delivered the night before.

It need hardly be mentioned, perhaps, that Seaton was enjoying himself very much.

Although he was not, in truth, the “big, muscle-bound ape — especially between the ears” he was wont to describe himself as, there was certainly a pleasure in being up against the sort of problem that muscle and skill could settle. For a time he was concerned about the fact that events elsewhere might be proceeding at a pace he could not control; but there was not a minute spent on the surface of this planet that was not a net gain in terms of the automatic repair of the Valeron. That great ship had been hurt.

Since there was at the moment very little that Seaton could do effectively about DuQuesne, or directly about the Chlorans, or the Fenachrone — and was a great deal he could do here on the surface of Ray-See-Nee — he put the other matters out of his mind and did what had to be done.

And enjoyed it enormously!

Seaton went “home” to the empty and solitary house that was his temporary residence and raised the oversize ring to his lips. “Dottie,” he said.

“Oh, Dick!” a tiny scream came from the ring. “I wish you wouldn’t take such horrible chances! I thought I’d die! Won’t you, tomorrow morning, just shoot the louse out of hand? Please?”

“I wasn’t taking any chances, Dot; a man with half my training could have done it. I had to do something spectacular to snap these people out of it; they’re dead from the belt-buckle up, down, and back. But I’ve done enough, I think, so I won’t have any more trouble at all. It’ll get around — and how! — and strictly on the Q and T. All those other apes will need is a mere touch of fist.”

“You hope. Me, too, for that matter. Just a sec, here’s Martin. He wants to talk to you about that machinery business,” and Crane’s voice replaced Dorothy’s.

“I certainly do, Dick. You say you want two-hundred-fifty-pound Sullivan Sluggers, complete with variable-height mounts and inch-and-a-quarter — that’s English, remember — bits. You want Ingersoll-Rand compressors and Westinghouse generators and Wilfley tables and so on, each item by name and no item resembling any of their own machinery in any particular. Since you are supposed to be repairing their own machinery, wouldn’t it be better to have the Brain do just that, while you look on, make wise motions, and learn?”

“It might be better, at that,” Seaton admitted, after a moment’s thought. “My thought was that since nobody now working in the mine knows anything much about either mining or machinery it wouldn’t make any difference, as long as the stuff was good and rusty on the outside, and I know how our stuff works. But I can learn theirs and it will save a lot of handling and we’ll have the time. They’re working only two shifts in only one stope, you know. Lack of people. But nine-tenths of their equipment is as dead as King Tut and the rest of it starts falling apart every time anybody gives any of it a stern look — I was scared spitless all shift that we’d be running out of air or power, or both, any minute. So we’ll have to do one generator and at least one compressor tonight; so you might as well start getting the stuff ready for me.”

“It’s ready. I’ll send it down as soon as it gets good and dark. In the meantime, how about Brother Rat? Have you anyone watching him?”

“No, I didn’t think it was necessary. But it might be, at that. From up there, would you say?”

“Definitely. And Shiro and Lotus haven’t much to do at the moment. I’ll make arrangements.”

“Do that, guy, and so long ’till dark.”

“Just a sec, Dick,” Dorothy said then. “I’m not done with you yet. You remembered the no-neighbors bit, I think?”

“I sure did, Honey-Chile. No neighbors within half a mile, So, any dark of the moon, slip down here in one of the fifteen-footers and all will be well.”

“You big, nice man,” Dorothy purred. “Comes dark, comes me! an’ you can lay to that.”

Countless parsecs away, DuQuesne made proper entry into the Solar System, put his Capital D into a parking orbit around Earth, and began to pick up his tremendous order of machine tools and supplies. It went well; Brookings had done his job. There was, however, one job DuQuesne had to do for himself. During the loading, accordingly, he went in person to Washington, D.C., to the Rare Metals Laboratory, and to Room 1631.

That room’s door was open. He tapped lightly on it as he entered the room. He closed the door gently behind him.

“Park it,” a well-remembered contralto voice said. “Be with you in a moment.”

“No rush.” DuQuesne sat down, crossed his legs, lighted a cigarette, and gazed at the woman seated at her electronics panel. Both her eyes were buried in the light-shield of a binocular eyepiece; both her hands were manipulating vernier knobs in tiny arcs.

“Oh! Hi, Blackie! Be with you in half a moment.”

“No sweat, Hunkie. Finish your obs.”

“Natch.” Her attention had not wavered for an instant from her instruments; it did not waver then.

In a minute or so she pressed a button, her panel went dark, and she rose to her feet.

“It’s been a long time, Blackie,” she said, stepping toward him and extending her hand.

“It has indeed.” He took her hand and began an encircling action with his left — a maneuver which she countered, neatly but still smilingly, by grasping his left hand and holding it firmly.

“Tsk, tsk,” she tsked. “The merchandise is on display, Blackie, but it is not to be handled. Remember?”

“I remember. Still untouchable,” he said.

“That’s right. You’re a hard-nosed, possessive brute, Blackie — any man to interest me very much would have to be, I suppose — but no man born is ever going to tell me what I can or can’t do. Selah. But let’s skip that.” She released his hands, waved him to a chair, sat down, crossed her legs, accepted the lighted cigarette he handed her, and went on, “Thanks. The gossip was that you were all washed up and had, as Ferdy put it, “taken it on the lam.” I didn’t believe it then and I don’t believe it now. I’ve been wanting to tell you; you’re a good enough man so that whatever you’re really after, you’ll get.”

This woman could reach DuQuesne as no other woman ever had. “Thanks, Hunkie,” he said; and, reaching out, he pressed her right hand hard then dropped it. “What I came up here for — have you a date for Thursday evening that you can’t or won’t break?”

Her smile widened; her two lovely dimples deepened. “Don’t tell me; let me guess. Louisa Vinciughi in Lucia.”

“Nothing else but. You like?”

“I love. With the usual stipulation — we ‘Dutch’ it.”

“Listen, Hunkie!” he protested. “Aren’t you ever going to get off of that ‘Dutch’ thing? Don’t you think a man can take a girl out without having monkey-business primarily in mind?”

She considered the question thoughtfully, then nodded.

“As stated, yes. Eliding the one word ‘primarily’, no. I’ve heard you called a lot of things, my friend, but ‘stupid’ was never one of them. Not even once.”

“I know.” DuQuesne smiled, a trifle wryly. “You are not going to be obligated by any jot or iota or tittle to any man living or yet to be born.”

Her head went up a little and her smile became a little less warm. “That’s precisely right, Marc. But I’ve never made any secret of the fact that I enjoy your company a lot. So, on that basis, okay and thanks.”

“On that basis, then, if that’s the way it has to be, and thanks to you, too,” DuQuesne said, and took his leave.

And Thursday evening came; and all during that long and thoroughly pleasant evening the man was, to the girl’s highly sensitive perception… well, different, although very subtly so. He was not quite, by some very small fraction, his usual completely poised and urbane self. Even Vinciughi’s wonderful soprano voice did not bring him entirely back from wherever it was he was. Wherefore, just before saying goodnight at the door of her apartment, she said:

“You have something big on your mind, Blackie. Tremendously big. Would it help to come in and talk a while?” This was the first time in all their long acquaintance that she had ever invited him into her apartment. “Or — wouldn’t it?”

He thought for a moment. “No,” he decided. “There are so many maybes and it’s and buts in the way that talking would be even more futile than thinking. But I’d like to ask you this: how much longer will you be here in Washington, do you think?”

She caught her breath. “The Observer says it’ll take me a year and a half to get what I should have.”

“That’s fine,” DuQuesne said. His thoughts were racing, but none of them showed.

What were those observers doing? And why? He knew the kind of mind Stephanie de Marigny had — they were feeding with a teaspoon a mind fully capable of gulping it down by the truckload… why? Why? So as not to play favorites, probably — that was the only reason he could think of. DuQuesne was playing for very high stakes; he could not afford to overlook any possibility, however remote. Had his interest in Hunkie de Marigny been deduced by the Norlaminians? Was it, in fact, possible — even likely — that he was under observation even now? Was their strange slowdown in her training meaningful? He could not answer; but he decided on caution. He went on with scarcely a noticeable pause, “I’ll see you well before that — if I may?”

“Why, of course you may! I’d get an acute attack of the high dudgeons if you ever came to Washington without seeing me!”

He took his leave then, and she went into her apartment and closed the door… and stood there, motionless, listening to his receding footsteps with a far-away, brooding look in her deep brown eyes.