Stand on Zanzibar

context (24)

ONE OF MANY ESSENTIALLY IDENTICAL PRINTOUTS FROM SHALMANESER

PROGRAMME REJECTED

Q reason for rejection

ANOMALIES IN GROUND DATA

Q define Q specify

DATA IN FOLLOWING CATEGORIES NOT ACCEPTABLE: HISTORY COMMERCE SOCIALINTERACTION CULTURE

Q accept data as given

QUESTION MEANINGLESS AND INOPERABLE

continuity (34)

THERE LIVES MORE FAITH IN HONEST DOUBT

Norman should have been at the grand official ceremony when Ram Ibusa signed the contracts with the Beninia Consortium, at the press conference thereafter and at the formal banquet in the evening. Instead, he handed Ibusa over to the GT hospitality department and fled.

He had seen and heard and sensed too much. For all the cheering news about the market, where GT stock had already bounced back to the level it had left on the founder’s death and seemed set to go higher; for all the false gaiety and the excited PR releases and the loudspeakers relaying the specially commissioned “Beninia Theme”—he could not stand the atmosphere in the GT tower. There were so many grey faces, so many blithe masks slipped when the owners of them thought they weren’t being watched.

The feeling in the air was of the kind that might have reigned over a Hebrew encampment the day Jehovah declined, for His own inscrutable reasons, to perform a miracle and wipe out the high priest of Dagon.

And that, Norman judged, was not merely a comparison but a definition. The omniscient Shalmaneser had let his faithful disciples down, and with half their minds they were afraid it might not be his fault, but theirs.

Curse computers for a trick of Shaitan! Of all the times Shalmaneser might choose to fail us he picks now, now, when my life and hopes are committed to his judgment!

He bought a pack of Bay Golds and went home.

* * *

The Watch-&-Ward Inc. key slipped smoothly into the lock. The door moved aside and showed him the interior of the apt, untidy, some of the furniture in different places, the liquor console surrounded by dead men not carried to the disposall, but otherwise not changed.

He thought at first the place must be empty. He looked into his own bedroom and saw that the bed was rumpled but only because someone had lain on the cover, not because it had been slept in. Shrugging, he lit one of the reefers he had bought and went back into the living area.

A faint snore came to him.

He strode over to Donald’s old room and flung the door open. Chad Mulligan was asleep on the bed, not in it, his hair and beard unkempt and not a stitch on him, only shoes.

It was just after four poppa-momma. What in the world was the man doing asleep at this time of day?

“Chad?” he said. And a second time, more loudly: “Chad!”

“Wha…?” Eyes blinked open, shut, open again and this time stayed open. “Norman! Sheeting hole, I didn’t expect to see you back in New York! Uh—what time is it?”

“Gone four.”

Chad sat up and forced his legs over the side of the bed, knuckling his eyes and trying to stifle a monstrous yawn. “Ooh-ah! Sorry, Norman—wowf! Welcome home. Excuse me, I shan’t be fit company until I’ve showered.”

“Since when have you taken to sleeping in the daytime?”

Chad managed to rise to his feet, and kept rising until he was on tip-toe, thrusting out with both hands to stretch his stiff muscles. He said, “It’s not a habit. Just last night I was thinking and thinking and thinking and couldn’t sleep at all, so I got drunk at breakfast time and that was that.”

“What were you thinking about? And didn’t you know there’s an inducer in the pillow there? That would have put you to sleep.”

“Inducers make me dream,” Chad said. “Liquor doesn’t.”

Norman shrugged; neither he nor Donald had ever been affected in that way by a sleep-inducer, but he remembered that one or two of the shiggies who had stayed here had complained of the same trouble—a risk of nightmares.

“Go ahead and take your shower,” he said. “Don’t be too long. I want to talk to you.”

A sudden idea had come to him, which was probably a vain hope, but any chance no matter how slim was worth taking in the present crisis.

“Sure,” Chad muttered. “Do me a favour, though—have some coffee sent up.”

* * *

Five minutes later, dressed, hair and beard still wet but combed into orderliness, Chad collected the cup of coffee waiting for him and sat down in Donald’s chair facing Norman in his own favourite.

“I envy you that Hille chair,” Chad said absently. “About the only thing in the place I do envy you, to be candid. Comfortable. And you know it’s going to remain a chair, not suddenly turn into a cosmorama unit … Okay: talk to me!”

“Chad, you’re rated the most insightful living social analyst.”

“Whaledreck. I’m rated a drunken sot. I’ve reached the stage where I get too drunk too fast to bother going out to look for shiggies, and I like women.” He gulped down his coffee and wiped his moustache with the back of his hand.

“I want to hire you,” Norman said stonily.

“Hire me? You must be hitripping. On the one hand, I’m too rich to have to work. I figured out I can exhaust myself just about twice as soon as I can exhaust my money. I’m trying to get that down to a fifty per cent margin and going to work would screw me up. On the other hand, I can’t make anybody listen to me so what’s the good of my working? That’s settled, I hope. Have a drink—no, have a joint. Come out with me and collect some shiggies and we’ll celebrate your return. Anything!”

“I have an almost completely free hand on the Beninia project. I want you, at a salary you can name yourself.”

“Whatinole for?” Chad’s astonishment seemed genuine.

Norman hesitated. “Well—you’ve heard Elihu singing the praises of Beninia, haven’t you?”

“You were there at the time. Sounded like he had his private pipeline to Paradise.”

“Think I’m the sort of codder who’s easily persuaded?”

“You mean do I think you’re a hard case? Uh-uh. But you like to come on as one. What are you working up to—understudying Elihu’s PR job?”

“Exactly. Chad, that is a country which just seems to have been getting on quietly with its own business in the middle of all kinds of chaos. There used to be others, but they’ve all been caved in by outside interference—Nepal, Tahiti, Samoa—gradually reduced to Jettex Cursion status.”

“What else would you expect? Like I keep telling people, we’re a disgusting species with horrible manners and not fit to survive.” He added irrelevantly, “Did you get the letter I sent you?”

“Yes, of course I did. I didn’t reply because I was too sheeting busy. Now listen to me, will you? Outside interference or not, the Beninians haven’t had a murder in fifteen years. They’ve never had a mucker at all, not even one. They talk a language in which you can’t say that a man has lost his temper except by saying he’s gone temporarily out of his skull. Thousands of Inoko and Kpala poured over the border as refugees only a generation ago and there’s never been any tribal disorder between them and the people who were there already. The president runs the whole shtick—a million population, which is piddling by modern standards but a lot of people if you try and count heads—he runs it like a household, a family, not a nation. Is that clear? I don’t think I can explain what the difference is, but I’ve seen it going on.”

He was beginning to get through. What he could see of Chad’s face above the beard and moustache expressed concentration.

“One big happy family, hm? Okay, so what do you want me to do about it? Sounds as though they’re getting along all right by themselves.”

“Haven’t you caught any of the news bulletins where the need for the Beninia project was explained? I saw a replay of what Engrelay Satelserv is carrying while I was down at the GT tower just now, and all it left out was the risk that Dahomalia and RUNG may fight over Obomi’s grave.”

“Sure I’ve been catching the news. Been following the progress of your old beddy Donald.”

There was a moment of blank puzzlement. “What about Donald?” Norman demanded.

“It was in the same bulletin where I saw about the Beninia project!”

“I guess I didn’t catch the whole bulletin, only the extract they were replaying at GT … What did he do?”

“Saved Sugaiguntung from a mucker, is all. Killed the man with his bare hands.”

“Donald? Chad, are you orbiting? Donald could never in a million years—”

“All human beings are wild animals and they’re not fit to roam around loose.” Chad got to his feet and approached the liquor console. “I’d better have a hair of the dog.”

Norman shook his head, dazed. Donald? Coping with a mucker? It seemed so fantastic he dismissed it from his mind and switched back to what he had been saying before.

“Chad, I’m going to keep hammering at you until you cave in, understand?”

“About going to Beninia?” Chad measured out a generous helping of vodka and began to compose a whistler manually, as though he distrusted the programmed mixing instructions. “What for? You want a sociological advisor, you go get someone with the proper background. What do I know about West Africa? Only what I’ve read and seen on screens. Go hire some specialists.”

“I have specialists. I want you, Y-O-U.”

“To do what that you think they can’t?”

“Turn Beninia upside down and shake out its pockets.”

Chad tasted the whistler critically and added another shake of angostura. “Uh-uh, Norman. You just leave me to rot myself into my grave, there’s a sweet codder. And I promise I’ll comfort my premature old age with the idea that there really is a place somewhere on the pocky face of Mother Earth where people don’t kill each other and don’t run amok and generally behave like decent people should. I don’t want to go there because at the bottom of my mind I guess I just don’t believe in such a place.”

“Nor does Shalmaneser,” Norman said.

“What?”

“Shalmaneser has rejected every single attempt we’ve made to integrate the facts about Beninia into his real-world awareness. He says he won’t accept what we tell him about its history, its commerce, its culture, or its social interactions. He claims there are anomalies in the data and they get spewed back.”

“Can’t you order him to accept the data?”

“If he refuses, you can no more order him to compute with them than you can make him act on the assumption that objects fall upwards. We’re going out of our skulls, Chad. The whole Beninia project was predicated on our being able to process every step of it through Shalmaneser—not just the hardware of it, but the educational programmes, the probable diplomatic crises, the entire economy of the country practically down to the prodgies’ pocket-money for half a century from now. And he keeps on about these anomalies which I know from my own experience aren’t there!”

Chad stared at him. After a pause he began to chuckle. “Of course they’re there,” he said. “You’ve just been telling me all about them. Don’t catch, hm? Norman, you must be suffering from brain-rot, I guess. Okay, you win—never let it be said I refused to help a friend out of trouble. Hang on until I finish my drink and I’ll come along and pay a call on Shalmaneser with you.”

Still baffled, yet convinced from Chad’s manner that to him there was a solution of transcendental obviousness, Norman was about to reply when the phone sounded. He swivelled his chair and reached for the switch.

The screen lit to show Rex Foster-Stern’s agitated countenance. “Norman!” he burst out. “Whatinole are you doing there? Prosper is going into orbit with fright—when we couldn’t find you for the press conference he practically fainted!”

“That’s okay,” Norman said. “Tell him I’ve been arranging to hire a special advisor.” He glanced at Chad, who gave a shrug and spread the hand that wasn’t holding his drink.

“Sheeting hole, couldn’t you have picked a better time to worry about recruitment?” Rex demanded. “Who is this advisor, anyhow?”

“Chad Mulligan. I’m bringing him down to talk to Shalmaneser now. Have him cleared for vocal interrogation in half an hour, will you?”

“Half an hour? Norman, you must be—”

“Half an hour,” Norman repeated firmly, and cut the circuit.

“Y’know something?” Chad said. “It might be quite interesting, at that. I’ve often thought I ought to get acquainted with Shal.”

tracking with closeups (24)

NO REASON, PURPOSE OR JUSTIFICATION

The sergeant kept 019 262 587 355 Lindt Gerald S. Pvt. to the last and when handing over his pass accompanied it with a scowl.

“I sheeting well hope you behave yourself better outside than in, Lindt!”

“Yes, sergeant,” Gerry said, woodenly at attention in spite of having reclaimed his civilian clothes, eyes fixed on a point in space above the sergeant’s shoulder. He had lost five pounds during recruit training and had had to draw in the belt of his slax.

“Shouldn’t wonder,” the sergeant said with contempt. “You’re a softass at heart, aren’t you?”

“Yes, sergeant.”

“You’ve learned something in the army, at least, hm? Well, don’t take it for everlasting gospel. Before you’re through here we’ll have had that heart out of you and made it over in a different design. All right, shift the scene.”

“Permission to dismiss, sergeant?”

“Dis-miss!”

* * *

He was a week later going into Ellay on pass than the rest of his intake. Last time he had been on thirty-six hours’ punishment drill. He was beginning to get an insight into the technique now: any recruit who wet his boots, as the current phrase went, immediately on reporting was marked as a scapegoat. It saved the noncoms the trouble of choosing one by their own judgment. The rest of the squad saw the treatment meted out to him and were supposed to quake in their boots and behave themselves.

He had done rather better than average in every instruction session so far, being brighter than average and also in better physical condition. Most of the other men in his squad were brown-noses from states where they were still at an economic disadvantage and had neither the funds nor the imagination to dodge the draft; there was a sprinkling of whites from the same states and not a few Puerto Ricans had also been grabbed by the computers. Underlying the singling out he had experienced, he suspected, there might possibly be a lean-over-backwards official directive aimed at encouraging his companions: pick out the tall good-looking blue-eyed fair-haired one and hit him because he can’t complain it’s prejudice.

He was the only blond in the whole squad.

Being better than others hadn’t saved him from worse treatment.

Thesis, antithesis—synthesis.

Along with everyone else he climbed aboard the hoverboat running shore-pass parties from Boat Camp to the mainland. He felt no particular enthusiasm about being turned loose. He felt no particular enthusiasm about anything except keeping his nose clean. But for the risk of appearing odd, he would probably have preferred to sit in the barrack-room and write home.

* * *

At the point where the hoverboat ran up the concrete slip and on to the road, someone had managed to stretch a single strand of GT-manufactured monofilament wire between two posts. The driver was in a hurry—he had seven more runs to make this evening before he could use his own pass—and hit the wire at nearly forty miles an hour. It sliced through the cab with hardly any drag at all, breaking inter-crystalline and not the tougher molecular bonds, barely leaving a mark on metal and plastic because they re-welded themselves on the Johanssen principle before air could get at the interfaces and cancel out their natural adhesion.

A force that tended to separate the parts, however, was capable of opposing the reunion.

Gerry Lindt happened to be turning to look at someone who had put a question to him. The twisting force was adequate to prevent his neck from bonding back together when the wire sliced through. Perhaps it was as well; he could have been paralysed from the neck down by the damage it did to his spinal cord. But the last horrible sight of his own torso as his eyes rolled along with his head towards the floor of the vehicle was nearer to eternal torment than even his sergeant would have wished on him.

It was obviously partisan work, not random sabotage. There was a grand roundup of suspected partisans organised immediately, and out of the two hundred and some they arrested they actually caught no fewer than four people in direct Chinese pay.

It was no special comfort to Gerry Lindt.

continuity (35)

TO AWAIT COLLECTION

For a fearful moment after he had brought Sugaiguntung to the boat, Donald thought the scientist was going to balk. There were so many things he did not know about this man whose life he had altered like an act of God. Was he afraid of the sea, was he a claustrophobe who could not be hidden in the hold?

But the reason for Sugaiguntung’s hesitation became apparent with his next utterance.

“You did say—Jogajong?”

“Right!” Donald snapped. “Who else in this country could be trusted to keep you away from the gang in power?”

“I—I hadn’t realised.” Sugaiguntung licked his lips. “I don’t involve myself much in things like this. It’s all so strange and such a shock … Captain!”

The skipper looked attentive.

“Do you truly have faith in that man?”

Christ, we’re going to have a political debate now! Donald sharpened his ears for the drone of a police helicopter or the chug of a reaction-powered patrol-boat.

“Yes, sir,” the skipper said.

“Why?”

“Look at me, sir, and my friends here—half in rags. Look at my boat, which needs painting and a new engine. Marshal Solukarta tells us fisherfolk that we are the bedrock of our country, bringing in the precious food that keeps us healthy and improves our brains. Then he fixes the price of fish at twenty talas a basket and when we complain he tells us we are committing treason. I am not even allowed to leave my work and try and make more money on land. Saving your presence, sir—you are Dr. Sugaiguntung, aren’t you?—what this country needs is not better children but better adults, who could raise their children better anyway.”

Sugaiguntung gave a shrug and approached the side of the boat. He looked for a way to clamber over the gunwale, but there was no ladder or step. Donald, giving a final nervous glance behind him, put away his gun and helped the skipper hoist the scientist aboard.

“You will have to hide in the fish-hold,” the skipper said. “It is stinking and dark. But the patrols are certain to stop us at least once if we approach the far shore. We shall have to make the trip very slowly, and before we can risk being searched there must be plenty of fish in the hold to deceive them.”

They must have done this kind of thing before, Donald realised, as with quick efficiency the two crewmen brought old tarpaulins and wrapped him and Sugaiguntung in them to protect their clothes. They were instructed to lie at the furthest end of the hold where there was a vent bringing in fresh air. Then they were left to themselves while the boat was put out to sea. Shortly, its whole fabric was shuddering with the irregular chug of the reaction-pumps.

In darkness alleviated only by a grey patch where light from the mast-head lamp soaked through the slats over the air-vent, Sugaiguntung uttered a whimper.

“Don’t worry,” Donald said, unable to prevent it sounding like a forlorn hope.

“Mr. Hogan, I don’t know if I’ve done the right thing. I—I may have fallen into a pattern of habit instead of taking a decision.”

“I don’t understand.” The scrap of anthropological information read years ago leaked back to consciousness. “Oh—yes, I think I do. You mean there’s a custom. Someone who saves your life buys a lease on it.”

“It is what I was taught as a child, and there is a great deal of irrationality left in us moderns. I have never been near to death before except once from a virus I caught. And that was while I was still a boy. One was supposed to buy back one’s right to free will by doing something at the—oh!—the behest of the one who saved you, is that right?”

“Yes, that’s good English for it. A bit antique but good English.” Donald spoke absently; he had just caught the sound of seine-nets splashing into the water. Any minute now the filling of the hold with fish would begin, and would have to be repeated heaven knew how often before the boat could head for the far shore of the Strait.

Sugaiguntung went on, like a recording: “I know as a scientist that burning a cone of incense can do nothing to appease a volcano, yet when my wife lighted one for Grandfather Loa I smelt its smoke in the house and somehow I—I felt better for it. Do you understand that?”

Donald thought of Norman sending away to his string of Genealogical Research Bureaux and gave a sour chuckle. “I guess so,” he admitted.

“But, you see, I had been thinking: what would they remember me for if the mucker had killed me? Not for the things I am proud of, my rubber-trees and my bacteria that I tailored to suit human needs. They would have remembered me for something I myself did not promise to do, which I myself could not have done! They would have grown to think of me as an impostor, wouldn’t they?” There was a pleading tone to the words, as though Sugaiguntung was desperately seeking justification for his own decision.

“Very likely,” Donald agreed. “And it wouldn’t have been fair.”

“No, precisely, it wouldn’t have been fair.” Sugaiguntung repeated the words with a kind of relish. “Nobody has the right to steal the reputation of someone else and use it to prop up a false claim. That is definite. I shall have a chance to tell the truth now, shan’t I?”

“You’ll have every facility you could possibly want.”

Abruptly a hatch squealed open and the first of the netfuls of fish came squirming loathsomely down into the hold, to die gasping in a foreign element. More followed, and more, until they were a mass that screened the two hiding men from anyone merely peering in at the hatch.

What unexpectedly turned Donald’s stomach was that they made a noise as they died.

The world reduced slowly to a dark stinking nowhere.

* * *

He had almost drifted into sleep because that was the only available escape-route when the skipper called very softly from the hatch.

“Mr. Hogan! We have been lucky—the patrol-boat on duty here is going the other way and we can watch her lights. Be quick and we can put you ashore now!”

Stiffly Donald forced his way over the slippery mounds of fish, their scales clinging to him and giving him patches of phosphorescence like a Yatakangi ghost in a temple painting. When he had levered himself out of the hatch—by touch, because the skipper had extinguished the masthead light—he turned and helped Sugaiguntung out. Soaking from the water which had puddled on the floor of the hold as the fish drained, they stood together shivering on the flimsy deck.

“I have made a signal to the sentries who hide in the trees over there,” the skipper whispered. “They know we are friendly and will not fire on us.”

“What are your crew doing?” Donald asked, seeing that the two other men were leaning over the bow and groping into darkness.

“There is a cable on the sea-bed,” the skipper said. “We do not want to make any noise with the engine and the wind is too light to move us quickly … Ah!”

With a faint splashing the crewmen recovered the cable. To it, they attached a grapple; then, straining their muscles, they began to haul the boat inshore. The sky was heavily clouded, but even so Donald could make out the difference between black sky and black land. A few lights on the slopes of Grandfather Loa, away to their left, flickered mockingly.

The boat jolted and Sugaiguntung caught at his arm, almost knocked off balance.

“Quickly—go ashore now!” the skipper urged. “I see the patrol-boat’s light coming back this way.”

To Donald, there was no way of distinguishing between one and another of the many boat-lights dotting the Strait. He was not inclined to argue with an expert, however.

“What reason can you give for coming here if you’re challenged?” he asked.

“We shall say we wanted to get rid of a latah-fish.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s poisonous. It has spines that make a man mad if they prick him. They would not dare to walk ashore and look for it in the dark because it is dangerous after it is dead.” The skipper thrust at his shoulder, pushing him forward. “But be quick—if they are going to come and talk to us they will wonder why it took so long to throw a small fish into the bushes!”

Donald scrambled down over the side away from the patrol-boat, as the skipper advised. Up to his ankles in the soft sand, he turned to help Sugaiguntung down. He felt the scientist trembling uncontrollably as they touched.

“Straight inland!” the skipper whispered. “Someone will come to meet you. It won’t be a ghost!”

And with that bitter Yatakangi joke he at once had the boat freed from the sand and turned about.

Trying not to make too much noise, Donald guided Sugaiguntung on to dry land. There was only a fringe of sand before their legs were clutched at by stringy grasses and then by shrubs. Casting about, Donald found what might be a path and headed along it, Sugaiguntung two paces behind.

“Stop!” someone said very quietly in Yatakangi.

Donald obeyed, so quickly that Sugaiguntung bumped into him and clutched at him. Now Donald distinctly heard the scientist’s teeth chattering.

Christ, can’t he take it a little smoother? At least this is his own country—he hasn’t been picked up and dumped half a world away from home.

But home had proved as hostile as any jungle, of course.

One—two—three sentries emerged from concealment. It was just possible to see that their heads were misshapen; they all wore black-light glasses. Two of them carried guns and stood back warily while the third, holding only a black-light projector, studied Donald and his companion. Satisfied about their identity, he said, “Follow us! Make as little noise as possible!”

Then there was a time of blind walking down a tunnel that twisted and turned like the intestines of a snake. It must have been cleared out, shaped and reinforced from the actual greenery hiding it, and very efficiently—Donald never caught a glimpse of the sky beyond. Eventually it began to rise.

Sugaiguntung sobbed with exhaustion and the man leading the way slackened his pace a trifle, for which Donald was glad. His sense of direction had lasted almost this far, but was beginning to let him down for lack of external data to supplement his judgment. As far as he could tell, they had headed towards Grandfather Loa—was it his slopes they were now breasting? He towered to nine thousand feet and it would be ridiculous to try and make Sugaiguntung go very far up such a mountain.

Abruptly the man ahead gestured for them to halt. Panting, they did so. There was a half-heard exchange with another hidden sentry. Given the chance to think about something other than walking too fast uphill, Donald realised that the temperature had dropped sharply from its daytime peak, yet ahead there was warm air—he could feel it on his face.

“Go past me,” said the man who had answered the sentry’s challenge. Donald and Sugaiguntung complied.

Within another ten yards they found themselves in a small roofed-over clearing, half-walled by two outcrops of sloping ground. At the far side of it was a dark patch which appeared to be a cave, no more than four feet high. Sitting on the stumps of the trees which had been cut down to make the clearing, then—Donald’s darting eyes spotted clues that could never have been seen from overhead—grafted to standing trees and bent together to provide a camouflage screen, were about eight or nine men and women wearing drab clothes and slung about with weapons. The warm air which he had noticed blowing against his face emanated from a heater in the centre of the group.

One of them rose.

“Mr. Hogan?” he said in a good English accent. “My name is Jogajong. Welcome to my headquarters. You have struck a great blow for freedom in Yatakang tonight. Dr. Sugaiguntung, we are honoured by your presence.”

The scientist mumbled something Donald did not catch.

“While this is not a luxury hotel,” Jogajong said, “I believe we can offer adequate hospitality while you are waiting for the submarine to come and collect you. You need not be afraid that the heater will attract infra-red detectors—in that cave there a hot spring sometimes bubbles up and gives off warm gas. The nearest peasant habitation is nearly a kilometre away. I have more than a hundred loyal guards on the approach paths. And, as I imagine you know in view of the way you were brought here, I have many good friends among the common people. Sit down, please. Are you hungry, thirsty, wishing for a cigarette?”

Donald sniffed the air. As though reminded of its duty by Jogajong’s words, a puff of brimstone-scented gas wafted from the cave-mouth and made him think of hell.

But there was something reassuringly confident about the rebel leader’s greeting. It gave him time to review what he had just lived through, and at once the moment of greatest terror—greater even than when Sugaiguntung put on the light inside his house and revealed him at the glass door—claimed his attention.

He said, “What happened to Zulfikar Halal?”

There was a pause. Jogajong only shrugged.

“He told me it would be expensive to buy transport across the Strait!” Donald insisted in a voice tinged with shrillness. “I gave him a thousand talas, and the bleeder didn’t show up!”

“He lied anyway,” Jogajong said without emotion. “We have good communications with your countrymen here, and as soon as we heard what you hoped to do we made arrangements of our own. There were six boats waiting beyond their usual time of sailing tonight, and any of them would have brought you to me—not because they were bribed, but because I asked it of them.”

“You mean I never need have gone to him at all?”

“That’s correct.”

Donald clenched his fists. “Why, that dirty—!”

“Yes, he is a weak link in my chain,” Jogajong nodded. “I prefer always to rely on my own countrymen. But of course your people feel that espionage is a filthy business and it is better to put the dirt on someone else’s hands. I shall make a report; he will not have the chance to deceive anyone else.”

“What will you do?” Fury made Donald eager to hear of torture: slow fires, nails pulled out by the roots.

“A word in the right place will ensure his arrest,” Jogajong murmured. “And the jails of Gongilung are not the next thing to Paradise … Don’t concern yourself. You have done more than enough, and his treachery did not in the upshot mean that your bravery was wasted.”

Donald sighed and relaxed. What the rebel leader said was obviously true. He glanced around the clearing again.

“How long do we have to wait—have they told you?”

“Until the level of activity among the aquabandits has dropped enough to give the submarine a chance of coming through unmolested.”

“Major Delahanty said something about that. How long?”

“I would estimate three to five days,” Jogajong said equably. “If necessary we can mount a certain—ah—distracting event to lure their forces away, but it would be better not to. The disappearance of someone so eminent as Dr. Sugaiguntung is going to give a great deal of trouble to the Solukarta régime anyhow. I hope they are prevented from concealing the truth; the suspicion that he may have left of his own free will could do incalculable good for my cause.”

Donald rubbed his chin. “Hmmm! Are you sure it would be better if the news leaked out?”

“Definitely, sir.”

“Could you get an anonymous message to someone at the Gongilung press club?”

“Easily. I had in fact thought of doing that, but I would need the names of people who would take such information seriously, not write it off as mere rumour.”

“I can give you a name,” Donald said.

“Excellent!” Jogajong hesitated and glanced at the other people in the clearing, silent on their tree-stump stools. “But for this moment you will excuse me—I must complete the staff conference I’m holding. Later we can talk more fully, yes?”

Donald gave a dull nod.

Staff conference? Why not? Things must have been like this in more countries than I could count—Russia, China, Cuba, South Africa … A handful of men and women meeting in a secret lair, and then suddenly coming out and turning as though by magic from fugitives to cabinet ministers! Who should know better than I do how quick and easy such a transformation is?

And to plot Yatakang’s next revolution on the threshold of a volcano seemed perfectly, inexpressibly apposite.

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THE MAN WITHOUT CONVICTIONS

When Jeff Young read about the trap set for the party of soldiers coming ashore from Boat Camp he put two and two together. The same partisan who had bought the aluminophage from him had asked for monofilament wire of a type which happened to be in store at the metalworking shop. One of the gossip sheets had circulated his way recently, apparently, and drawn his attention to some uses for the stuff based on traps which Maquis used to set in World War II for dispatch-riders on motorcycles, except that in those days they had to use piano-wire and because it was thicker and easier to see its employment was generally confined to twilight.

He was a little sorry about the eleven dead and thirty-one seriously injured soldiers. His preference was for sabotage that did no more than stir people up, like ants whose nest has been kicked—in essence, a sort of joke.

Granted, there had been nothing funny about the episode that left him with one short leg …

The beauty of this wire stranded together out of single, immensely long molecules was, of course, that it cut almost anything as readily as a cheese being sectioned, and its breaking-strain was closer than any other sort of wire to the theoretical maximum. Handling it, naturally, was a problem—one had to wear gloves of monofilament mesh, or tugging on it would slice flesh cleaner than a razor.

Thinking about it, he came up with an entirely new way of putting a rapitrans train out of operation, a means of exploding a town-gas pipe at a distance not exceeding two miles, and the device which later caved in the North Rockies Acceleratube.