The Long Way Home

14

Another blowup shivered through walls and into Langley’s bones. Somebody screamed, somebody else cursed, and there were running feet in the corridors. As he tumbled into his clothes and snatched his energy gun out, he wanted to vomit. Somehow they had failed, somehow the rebellion of pawns was broken and the game went on.

He flattened himself against the archaic manual door of the room given him and opened it a crack. There was a stink of burned flesh outside. Two gray-clad corpses sprawled in the passage, but the fight had swept past. Langley stepped out.

There was noise up ahead of him, toward the assembly chamber. He ran in that direction with some blind idea of opening up on the attackers from behind. A bitter wind was clearing smoke away and he gasped for breath. A remote part of him realized that the entry port had been blown open and the thin mountain air was rushing in.

Now—the doorway! He burst through, squeezing the trigger of his blaster. There was no recoil, but the beam hissed wide of the back he wanted. He didn’t know how to aim a modern gun, how to outwit a modern mind, how to do anything. Understanding of the technique came just as someone spun around on a heel and kicked expertly with the other foot. Langley’s blaster was torn loose, clattered to the floor, and he stared into a dozen waiting muzzles.

Valti’s crew was gathered around Saris Hronna. Their hands were lifted sullenly, they had been overpowered in the assault and were giving up. The Holatan crouched on all fours, his eyes a yellow blaze.

Brannoch dhu Crombar let out a shout of Homeric laughter. “So there you are!” he cried. “Greetings, Captain Langley!” He towered over the tight-packed fifty of his men. The scarred face was alight with boisterous good humor. “Come join the fun.”

“Saris—” groaned the American.

“Please.” Brannoch elbowed a way over to him. “Credit me with some brains. I had purely mechanical weapons made for half my party, several days ago—percussion caps of mercury fulminate setting off a chemical explosion—thunderish hard to shoot straight with ’em, but at close quarters we can fill you with lead and he’s powerless to stop it.”

“I see.” Langley felt surrender in himself, the buckling of all hope. “But how did you find us?”

Marin entered. She stood in the doorway looking at them with her face congealed to a mask, the face of a slave.

Brannoch jerked a thumb at her. “The girl, of course,” he said. “She told us.”

Her inhuman composure ripped. “No!” she stammered. “I never—”

“Not consciously, my dear,” said Brannoch. “But while you were under your final surgery, a posthypnotic command was planted by a conditioning machine. Very powerful, such an order -. impossible to break it. If Saris was found, you were to notify me of the circumstances at the first opportunity. Which, I see, you did.”

She watched him with a mute horror. Langley heard a thundering in his head.

Very distantly, he made out the Centaurian’s rumble: “You might as well know, captain. It was I who took your friends. They couldn’t tell me anything, and against my wishes they... died. I’m sorry.”

Langley turned away from him. Marin began to weep.

Valti cleared his throat. “A nice maneuver, my lord. Very well executed. But there is the matter of several casualties among my own people. I’m afraid the Society can’t permit that sort of thing. There will have to be restitution.”

“Including Saris Hronna, no doubt?” Brannoch grinned without humor.

“Of course. And reparations according to the weregild schedule set by treaty. Otherwise the Society will have to apply sanctions to your system.”

“Withdrawal of trade?” snorted Brannoch. “We can do without your cargoes. And just try to use military force!”

“Oh, no, my lord,” said Valti mildly. “We are a humane people. But we do have a large share in the economic life of every planet where we have offices. Investments, local companies owned by us—if necessary, we could do deplorable things to your economy. It isn’t as rigid as Sol’s, you know. I doubt if your people would take kindly to...say... catastrophic inflation when we released several tons of the praseodymium which is your standard, followed by depression and unemployment when a number of key corporations retired from business.”

“I see,” said Brannoch, unmoved. “I didn’t intend to use more force on you than necessary, but you drive me to it. If your entire personnel here disappeared without trace—I’ll have to think about it. I’d miss our gambling games.”

“I’ve already filed a report to my chiefs, my lord; I was only waiting for their final orders. They know where I am.”

“But do they know who raided you? It could be fixed to throw the blame on Chanthavar. Yes. An excellent idea.”

Brannoch turned back to Langley. He had to grip the spaceman’s shoulder hard to attract his attention. “Look here,” he asked, “does this beast of yours speak any modern language?”

“No,” said Langley, “and if you think I’m going to be your interpreter, you’ve got another think coming.”

The heavy face looked pained. “I wish you’d stop considering me a fiend, captain. I have my duty. I don’t hold any grudge against you for trying to get away from me; if you cooperate, my offer still stands. If not, I’ll have to execute you, and nothing will be gained. We’ll teach Saris the language and make him work anyhow. All you could do is slow us up a little.” He paused. “I’d better warn you, though. If you try to sabotage the project once it’s under way, the punishment will be stiff.”

“Go ahead, then,” said Langley. He didn’t care, not any more. “What do you want to say to him?”

“We want to take him to Thor, where he’ll aid us in building a nullifier. If anything goes wrong through his doing, he’ll die, and robot ships will be sent to bombard his planet. They’ll take a thousand years to get there, but they’ll be sent. If, on the other hand he helps us, he’ll be returned home.” Brannoch shrugged. “Why should he care which party wins out? It’s not his species.”

Langley translated into English, almost word for word. Saris stood quiet for a minute, then:

“Iss grief in you, my friend.”

“Yeah,” said Langley. “Reckon so. What do you want to do?”

The Holatan looked thoughtful. “Iss hard to say. I hawe little choice at pressent. Yet from what I know of today’ss uniwerse, iss not best to aid Sol or Centauri.”

“Brannoch has a point,” said Langley. “We’re just another race. Except for the Society offering you a little better deal, it doesn’t affect your people.”

“But it doess. Wrongness in life, anywhere in all space, iss wrongness. Iss, for instance, chance that some day someone findss out a for traweling faster than light met’od. Then one race on the wrong pat” iss a general menace. Also to itself, since other outraged planetss might unite to exterminate it.”

“Well... is there anything we can do, now, except get ourselves killed in a fit of messy heroism?”

“No. I see no out-way. That doess not mean none exists. Best to follow the scent ass laid, while snuffing after a new track.”

Langley nodded indifferently. He was too sick of the whole slimy business to care much as yet. Let the Centaurians win. They were no worse than anybody else. “O. K., Brannoch,” he said. “We’ll string along.”

“Excellent!” The giant shivered, as if with a nearly uncontrollable exuberance.

“You realize, of course,” said Valti, “that this means war.”

“What else?” asked Brannoch, honestly surprised.

“A war which, with or without nullifiers, could wreck civilization in both systems. How would you like, say, the Procyonites to come take over the radioactive ruins of Thor?”

“All life is a gamble,” said Brannoch. “If you didn’t load your dice and mark your cards —I know blazing well you do, too!—you’d see that. So far the balance of power has been pretty even. Now we will have the nullifier; it may tip the scales very far indeed, if we use it right. It’s not a final weapon, but it’s potent.” He threw back his head and shook with silent laughter.

Recovering himself: “All right. I’ve got a little den of my own, in Africa. We’ll go there first to make preliminary arrangements—among other things, a nice convincing synthetic dummy, Saris” corpse, for Chanthavar to find. I can’t leave Earth right away, or he’d suspect too much. The thing to do is tip my hand just enough to get declared persona non grata, leave in disgrace—and come back with a fleet behind me!”

Langley found himself hustled outside, onto a slope where snow crackled underfoot and the sky was a dark vault of stars. His breath smoked white from his mouth, breathing was keen and cold, his body shuddered. Marin crept near him, as if for warmth, and he stepped aside from her. Tool!

No... no, he Wasn’t being fair to her, was he? She had been under a gas when she betrayed him, with less will of her own than if someone had held a gun at her back. But he couldn’t look at her now without feeling unclean.

A spaceship hovered just off the ground. Langley walked up the ladder, found himself a chair in the saloon, and tried not to think. Marin gave him a glance full of pain and then took a seat away from the others. A couple of armed guards, arrogant blond men who must be Thorians themselves, lounged at the doors. Saris had been taken elsewhere. He was not yet helpless, but his only possible action would be the suicidal one of crashing the ship, and Brannoch seemed willing to chance that.

The mountains fell away under their keel. There was a brief booming of sundered air, and then they were over the atmosphere, curving around the planet toward central Africa.

Langley wondered what he was going to do with himself, all the remaining days of his life. Quite possibly Brannoch would establish him on some Earth-type world as promised—but it would be inside the range of his own and Solar culture, marked for eventual conquest, it would not be what he had imagined. Well—

He wouldn’t see the war, but all his life there would be nightmares in which the sky tore open and a billion human creatures were burned, flayed, gutted, and baked into the ground. And yet what else could he have done? He had tried, and failed... wasn’t it enough?

No, said the New England ancestor.

But I didn’t ask for the burden.

No man asks to be born, and nevertheless he must bear his own life.

I tried, I tell you!

Did you try hard enough? You will always wonder.

What can I do?

You can refuse to surrender.

Time slipped by; so many minutes closer to his death, he thought wearily. Africa was on the dayside now, but Brannoch’s ship went down regardless: Langley supposed that something had been flanged up, fake recognition signals maybe, to get it by the sky patrols. There was a viewscreen, and he watched a broad river which must be the Congo. Neat plantations stretched in orderly squares as far as he could see, and scattered over the continent were medium-sized cities. The ship ignored them, flying low until it reached a small cluster of dome-shaped buildings.

“Ah,” said Valti. “A plantation administrative center -perfectly genuine too, I have no doubt. But down underground, hm-m-m.”

A section of dusty earth opened metal lips and the ship descended into a hangar. Langley followed the rest out and into the austere rooms beyond. At the end of the walk there was a very large chamber; it held some office equipment and a tank.

Langley studied the tank with a glimmer of interest. It was a big thing, a steel box twenty feet square by fifty long, mounted on its own antigravity sled. There were auxiliary bottles for gas, pumps, engines, meters, a dial reading an internal pressure which he translated as over a thousand atmospheres. Nice trick, that... was it done by force-fields, or simply today’s metallurgy? The whole device was a great, self-moving machine, crouched there as if it were a living thing.

Brannoch stepped ahead of the party and waved gaily at it. His triumph had given him an almost boyish swagger. “Here they are, you Thrymkas,” he said. “We bagged every one of them!”