The Godmakers

Chapter Three

Lewis Orne clasped his hands behind his back until the knuckles showed white. He stared darkly out of his second-story window at a Hamal morning. The big yellow sun dominated a cloudless sky above distant mountains. It promised to be a scorcher of a day.

Behind him there was the sound of a scratchy stylus rasping across transmitpaper as the Investigation-Adjustment operative made notes on the interview they had just completed. The paper was transmitting a record of the words to the operative’s waiting ship.

So maybe I was wrong to push the panic button, Orne thought. That doesn’t give this wise guy the right to ride me! After all, this is my first job. They can’t expect perfection the first time out.

The scratching stylus began to wear on Orne’s nerves. Creases furrowed Orne’s square forehead. He put his left hand up to the rough wooden window frame, ran his right hand through the stiff bristles of his close-cropped red hair. The loose cut of his white coverall uniform—standard for R&R agents—accentuated his blocky appearance. Blood suffused his full-jowled face. He felt himself vacillating between anger and the urge to give full vent to a pixie nature, which he usually kept under control.

He thought:If I’m wrong about this place, they’ll boot me out of the service. There’s too much bad blood between R&R and Investigation-Adjustment. This I-A joker would just love to make us look stupid. But by god! There’ll be some jumping if I’m right about Hamal!

Orne shook his head. But I’m probably wrong.

The more he thought about it, the more he felt it had been stupid to call in the I-A. Hamal probably was not aggressive by nature. Very likely there was no danger that R&R would provide the technological basis for arming a potential war maker.

Still…

Orne sighed. He felt a vague, dreamlike uneasiness. The sensation reminded him of the drifting awareness before awakening, the moments of clarity when action, thought and emotion combined.

Someone clumped down the stairs at the other end of the building. The floor shook beneath Orne’s feet. This was an old building, the government guesthouse, built of rough lumber. The room carried the sour smell of many former occupants and haphazard cleaning.

From his second-floor window Orne could see part of the cobblestone market square of this village of Pitsiben. Beyond the square he could make out the wide track of the ridge road that came up from the Plains of Rogga. Along the road stretched a double line of moving figures: farmers and hunters coming for market day in Pitsiben. Amber dust hung over the road. It softened the scene, imparted a romantic out-of-focus look.

Farmers leaned into the pushing harnesses of their low two-wheeled carts, plodding along with a heavy-footed swaying motion. They wore long green coats, yellow berets tipped uniformly over the left ear, yellow trousers, with cuffs darkened by the road dust, open sandals that revealed horny feet splayed out like the feet of draft animals. Their carts were piled high with green and yellow vegetables seemingly arranged to carry out the general pastel color scheme.

Brown-clothed hunters moved with the line, but at one side like flank guards. They strode along, heads high, cap feathers bobbing. Each carried a bell-muzzled fowling piece at a jaunty angle over one arm, a spyglass in a leather case over the left shoulder. Behind the hunters trotted their apprentices pulling three-wheeled game carts overflowing with tiny swamp deer, dappleducks and porjos, the snaketailed rodents which Hamalites considered such a delicacy.

On the distant valley floor Orne could see the dark-red spire of the I-A ship that had come flaming down just after dawn on this day, homing on his transmitter. The ship, too, seemed set in a dream haze, its shape clouded by blue smoke from kitchen fires in the farm homes that dotted the valley. The ship’s red shape towered above the homes, looking out of place, an ornament left over from holiday decorations for giants.

As Orne watched, a hunter paused on the ridge road, unlimbered his spyglass, studied the I-A ship. The hunter appeared only vaguely curious. His action didn’t fit expectations; it just didn’t fit.

The smoke and hot yellow sun conspired to produce a summery appearance to the countryside—a look of lush growing behind pastel heat. It was essentially a peaceful scene, arousing in Orne a deep feeling of bitterness.

Damn! I don’t care what the I-A says. I was right to call them. These Hamalites are hiding something. They’re not peaceful. The real mistake here was made by that dumbo on First-Contact when he gabbled about the importance we place on a peaceful history!

Orne grew aware that the scratching of the stylus had stopped. The I-A man cleared his throat.

Orne turned, looked across the low room at the operative. The I-A agent sat at a rough table beside Orne’s unmade bed. Papers and folders were scattered all around him on the table. A small recorder weighted one stack. The I-A man slouched in a bulky wooden chair. He was big-headed, gangling and with overlarge features, a leathery skin. His hair was dark and straggling. The eyelids drooped. They gave to his face that look of haughty superciliousness that was like a brand mark of the I-A. The man wore patched blue fatigues without insignia. He had introduced himself as Umbo Stetson, chief I-A operative for this sector.

The chief operative, Orne thought. Why’d they send the chief operative?

Stetson noted Orne’s attention, said: “I believe we have most of it now. Let’s just check it over once more for luck. You landed here ten weeks ago, right?”

“Yes. I was set down by a landing boat from the R&R transport, Arneb Rediscovery.”

“This was your first mission?”

“I told you that. I graduated from Uni-Galacta with the class of ’07, and did my apprentice work on Timurlain.”

Stetson frowned. “Then they sent you right out here to this newly rediscovered backwater planet?”

“That’s right.”

“I see. And you were full of the old rah-rah, the old missionary spirit to uplift mankind, all that sort of thing.”

Orne blushed, scowled.

Stetson nodded. “I see they’re still teaching that ‘cultural renaissance’ bushwa at dear old Uni-Galacta.” He put a hand to his breast, raised his voice in an elaborate caricature: “We must reunite the lost planets with the centers of culture and industry, and take up the glo-rious onward march of mankind that was cut off so brutally by the Rim Wars!”

He spat on the floor.

“I think we can skip all that,” Orne muttered.

“You’re sooooo right,” Stetson said. “Now, what’d you bring with you to this lovely vacation spot?”

“I had a dictionary compiled by First-Contact, but it was pretty sketchy in…”

“Who was that First-Contact?”

“Name on the dictionary says André Bullone.”

“Oh—Any relation to High Commissioner Bullone?”

“I don’t know.”

Stetson scribbled something on his papers. “And that First-Contact report says this is a special place, a peaceful planet with a primitive farming-hunting economy, eh?”

“That’s right.”

“Uh-huh. What else’d you bring into this garden spot?”

“The usual stuff for my job and reports… and a transmitter, of course.”

“And you pushed the panic button on that transmitter two days ago, eh? Did we get here fast enough for you?”

Orne glared at the floor.

Stetson said: “I suppose you’ve the usual eidetic memory crammed with cultural-medical-industrial-technological information.”

“I’m a fully qualified R&R agent!”

“We will observe a minute of reverent silence,” Stetson said. Abruptly, he slammed a hand onto the table. “It’s a plain damn stupidity! Nothing but a political come-on!”

Orne snapped to angry attention. “What?”

“This R&R dodge, sonny. It’s demagoguery; it’s perpetuating a few political lives by endangering all of us. You mark my words: We’re going to rediscover one planet too many; we’re going to give its people the industrial foundation they don’t deserve; and we’re going to see another Rim War to end all Rim Wars!”

Orne took a step forward, glaring. “Why’n hell do you think I pushed the panic button?”

Stetson sat back, his calm restored by the outburst. “My dear fellow, that’s what we’re now trying to determine.” He tapped his front teeth with the stylus. “Now, just why did you call us?”

“I told you! It’s…” He waved a hand at the window.

“You felt lonely and wanted the I-A to come hold your hand, that it?”

“Oh, go to hell!” Orne barked. “In due time, son. In due time.” Stetson’s drooping eyelids drooped even farther.

“Now… just what’re they teaching you R&R dummies to look for these days?”

Orne swallowed another angry reply. “War signs.”

“What else? But let’s be specific.”

“We look for fortifications, for war games among the children, for people drilling or other signs of armylike group activities…”

“Such as uniforms?”

“Certainly! And for war scars, wounds on people and buildings, the level of wound treatment knowledge in the medical profession, indications of wholesale destruction—you know, things like that.”

“The gross evidence.” Stetson shook his head from side to side. “Do you consider this adequate?”

“No, damn it, I don’t!”

“You’re sooooo right,” Stetson said. “Hmmmmmm. Let’s us dig a little deeper. I don’t quite understand what bothers you about the honest citizenry here.”

Orne sighed, shrugged. “They have no spirit, no bounce. No humor. They live in perpetual seriousness bordering on gloom.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah. I… I… uh…” Orne wet his lips with his tongue.

“I… uh… told the Leaders’ Council our people are very interested in a steady source of froolap bones for making left-handed bone china saucers.”

Stetson jerked forward. “You what?”

“Well, they were so damn serious all the time. I just had as much of it as I could take and, well, I… uh…”

“What happened?”

“They asked for a detailed description of the froolap and the accepted method of preparing the bones for shipment.”

“What’d you tell them?”

“Well, I… Well, according to my description they decided Hamal doesn’t have any froolaps.”

“I see,” Stetson said. “That’s what’s wrong with this place, no froolaps.”

Now I’ve done it, Orne thought. Why can’t I keep my big mouth shut? I’ve just convinced him I’m nuts!

“Any big cemeteries, national monuments, that sort of thing?” Stetson asked.

“Not a one. But they have this custom where they plant their dead vertically and put an orchard tree over them. There are some mighty big orchards.”

“You think that’s significant?”

“It bothers me.”

Stetson took a deep breath, leaned back. He tapped his stylus on the table, stared into the distance. Presently, he asked: “How’re they taking to reeducation?”

“They’re very interested in the industrial end. That’s why I’m here in Pitsiben village. We’ve located a tungsten source nearby and—”

“What about their medical people?” Stetson interrupted. “Wound knowledge, that sort of thing?”

“It’s difficult to say.” Orne said. “You know how it is with medics. They have this idea they already know everything and it’s difficult to find out just what they do know. I’m making progress, though.”

“What’s their general medical level?”

“They’ve a good basic knowledge of anatomy, surgery and bone setting. I get no pattern, though, in their knowledge of wounds.”

“Do you have any ideas why this planet is so backward?” Stetson asked.

“Their history says Hamal was accidentally seeded by sixteen survivors—eleven women and five men—from a Tritsahin cruiser disabled in an engagement during the early part of the Rim Wars. They landed with a lifeboat without much equipment and damn little know-how. I take it they were mostly black gang who got away.”

“And here they sat until R&R came along,” Stetson said. “Lovely. Just lovely.”

“That was five hundred Standard Years ago,” Orne said.

“And these gentle people are still farming and hunting,” Stetson murmured. “Oh, lovely.” He glared up at Orne. “How long would it take this planet, granting they have the aggressive drive, to become a definite war menace?”

Orne said: “Well—there are two uninhabited planets in the system they could build up for raw materials. Oh, I’d say twenty to twenty-five S-years after they got the industrial foundation on their home planet.”

“And how long before the aggressive core would have the know-how to go underground so we’d have to blast the planet apart to get at them?”

“Give ’em a year the way they’re going now.”

“You are beginning to see the sweet little problem you R&R dummies create for us!” Stetson pointed an accusing finger at Orne. “And let us make one little slip! Let us declare a planet aggressive and bring in an occupation force and let your damn spies find out we made a mistake!” He doubled his hand into a fist. “A-ha!”

“They’ve already started building factories to produce machine tools,” Orne said.

“They’re quick enough.” He shrugged. “They soak everything up like some dark gloomy sponge.”

“Very poetic,” Stetson growled. He lifted his long frame from the chair, strode to the middle of the room. “Let’s go take a closer look. And I’m warning you, Orne, the I-A has more important things to do than go around wet-nursing R&R.”

“And you’d just love to make us look like a pack of fumbleheads,” Orne said.

“You’re sooooo right, son. That would not make me lose any sleep at all.”

“So what if I made a mistake! A first… ”

“We’ll see, we’ll see. Come along. We’ll use my go-buggy. ”

Here goes nothing, Orne thought. This schlammler isn’t going to look very hard when it’s easier to sit back and laugh at R&R. I’m finished before we start.