The Long Way Home

18

Langley made no reply. There didn’t seem to be anything to say.

“I don’t know why,” Valti told him. “I often think that we, the Society, must have a Technon of our own. The decisions are sometimes incomprehensible to me, though they have always worked out for the best. It means war if either side gets the nullifier... and why should the Centaurian barbarians get the advantage?”

“Why indeed?” whispered Langley. The night was utterly still around him.

“I can only think that... that Sol represents a long-range menace to us. It is, after all, a rigid culture; if it became dominant, it might act against us, who cannot be fitted into its own static pattern. It’s probably best in the light of history that the Centaurians take over for a while.”

“Yeah,” said Langley.

This tore it. This knocked everything he had thought into a ten-gallon hat. Apparently the Technon was not the real boss of the nomads. And yet—

“I tell you this in all honesty,” said Valti. “It might have been easier to keep you in ignorance, but that was a risk. When you found out what we were up to, you and Saris could make trouble between you. Best to get your free consent at the start.

“For your own help, captain, you are offered a manned spaceship in which you can find your own planet, if you don’t like any known to us. Nor need you worry about betraying Saris; he’ll be no worse off on Thor than on Earth, indeed you will be in a position to bargain and assure good treatment for him. But I must have your decision now.”

Langley shook his head. This was too much, too suddenly. “Let me think a bit. How about Brannoch’s gang? Have they been in touch with you?”

“No. I know only that we are supposed to get them out of the embassy tower, where they are being kept under house arrest, and provide transportation to Thor for them. I have papers from the Technon which will get us in there too, if we use them right.”

“Haven’t they contacted anybody?”

It couldn’t be seen through the rigid spacesuit, but Valti must have shrugged. “Officially, no. Certainly not us. But in practice, of course, the Thrymans must have variable-frequency communicators secreted in their tank, where human police could hardly go to search. They must have been talking to their agents on Earth by that means, though what was said I don’t know. Chanthavar realizes as much, but there’s little he can do about it except to have the Thrymans destroyed, and that goes against the gentlemanly code. These high-ranking lords of different states respect each other’s rights... they never know when they might find themselves in the same fix.”

“So.” Langley stood immobile, but the knowledge was rising in him and he wanted to shout it.

He hadn’t been wrong. The Technon did rule the Society. But there was, there must be, an additional complication, and he thought he had grasped its nature.

“I ask you again, captain,” said Valti. “Will you help?”

“If not,” said the spaceman dryly, “I suppose your disappointment would be quite violent.”

“I would infinitely regret it,” murmured Valti, touching the blaster at his side. “But some secrets are rather important.” His small pale eyes studied the other. “I will, however, accept your word if you do agree to help. You’re that kind of man. Also, you could gain little or nothing by betraying us.”

Langley made his decision. It was a leap into darkness, but suddenly he felt calm rising within himself, an assurance which was like a steadying hand. He was going somewhere again—it might only be over a precipice, but he was out of the maze and walking like a man.

“Yes,” he said. “I’ll come along. If.”

Valti waited.

“Same terms as before. The girl Marin is to accompany us. Only first I’ve got to find her. She’s been manumitted -down on low-level somewhere. When she’s back here, I’ll be ready to leave.”

“Captain, it may take days to—”

“That’s too bad. Give me a fistful of money and I’ll make a stab at locating her myself.”

“The operation is set for tomorrow night. Can you do it by then?”

“I think so—given enough money.”

Valti emitted a piteous groan, but dug deep. It was a very fat purse which Langley clipped to his belt. He also held out for a small blaster, which he holstered beneath his cloak.

“Very well, captain,” said the trader. “Good luck. I’ll expect you to be in the Twin Moons at 2100 hours tomorrow night. If not—”

“I know.” Langley drew a finger across his throat. “I’ll be there.”

Valti bowed, lowered his helmet, and left the same way he had come.

Langley could have wept and howled for sheer excitement, but there wasn’t time. He went out of the apartment and down the halls. They were deserted at this hour. The bridgeway beyond was still jammed, but when he took a grav-shaft going down he was alone.

It brawled and shouted in the Commons, crowds milled about him, in his drab university gown he met little respect and had to push his way. Down to Etie Town.

It lay on the border of the slum section, but was itself orderly and well policed. There were some humans living in or near it, he knew, hired help. A nonhuman had no interest in a woman, except as a servant. It would be the safest place for a girl thrown out of high-level to go. At least, it was the logical place to begin his search.

He had been a clumsy amateur, grown mentally paralyzed by his own repeated failures in a world of professionals. That feeling was gone now. The magnitude of his determination lent an assurance which was almost frightening. This time nothing was going to get in his way without being trampled down!

He entered a tavern. Its customers were mostly of a scaly, bi-pedal race with snouted heads, who didn’t need special conditions of atmosphere or temperature. They ignored him as he walked through the weird maze of wet sponge couches they favored. The light was dull red, hard to see by.

Langley went over to a corner where a few men in the livery of paid servants were drinking. They stared at him, it must be the first time a professor had come in here. “May I sit down?” he asked.

“Kind of crowded,” snapped a sulky-looking man.

“Sorry. I was going to buy a round, but—”

“Oh, well, then, sit.”

Langley didn’t mind the somewhat constrained silence that fell. It suited him perfectly. “I’m looking for a woman,” he said.

“Four doors down.”

“No... a particular woman. Tall, dark red hair, upper-level accent. I think she must have come here about two weeks ago. Has anyone seen her?”

“No.”

“I’m offering a reward for the information. A hundred solars.”

Their eyes widened. Langley saw avarice on some of the faces, and flipped his cloak back in a casual way to reveal his gun. Its possession was a serious offense, but nobody seemed inclined to cry out for the police. “Well, if you can’t help me I’ll just have to try somewhere else.”

“No... wait a minute, sir. Take it easy. Maybe we can.” The sulky man looked around the table. “Anybody know her? No? It could be inquired about, though.”

“Sure.” Langley peeled off ten ten-solar notes. “That’s to hire inquirers. The reward is extra. But it’s no good if she isn’t found inside... Hm-m-m... three hours.”

His company evaporated. He sat down, ordered another drink, and tried to control his impatience.

Time dragged. How much of life went in simply waiting!

A girl came up with a suggestion. Langley sent her off to look too. He nursed his beers: now, as never before, he had to have a clear head.

In two hours and eighteen minutes, a breathless little man panted back to the table. “I’ve found her!”

Langley’s heart jumped. He stood up, taking it slow. “Seen her?”

“Well, no. But a new maid answering her description did hire out to a Slimer—a merchant from Srinis, I mean—just eleven days ago. The cook told me that, after somebody else had tracked down the cook for me.”

The spaceman nodded. His guess had been right: the servant class would still know more gossip than a regiment of police could track down. People hadn’t changed so much. “Let’s go,” he said, and went out the door.

“How about my reward?”

“You’ll get it when I see her. Control your emotions.”

Five thousand years ago, a bibliophile acquaintance had made him read a tattered book some hundred years old—the Private Eye school—claiming it was something unique in the annals of pornography. Langley had been rather bored by it. Now, recognizing the prototype of his action-pattern, he grinned. But any pattern would do, in this amorphous world of low-level.

They went down a broad street full of strangeness. The little man stopped outside a door. “This is the place. I don’t know how we get in, though.”

Langley punched the scanner button. Presently the door opened, to reveal a human butler of formidable proportions. The American was quite prepared to slug a way past him if necessary. But he wasn’t a slave—aliens weren’t permitted to own humans. He had been hired once, and could probably be hired again.

“Excuse me,” said Langley. “Do you have a new maid, a tall red-head?”

“Sir, my employer values his privacy.”

Langley ruffled a sheaf of large bills. “Too bad. It’s worth a good deal to me. I only want to talk with her.”

He got in, leaving his informant to jitter outside. The air was thick and damp, the light a flooding greenish yellow which hurt his eyes. The outworlders would employ live servants for prestige, but must have to pay rather well. The thought that he had driven Marin to this artificial swamp was like teeth in his soul.

She stood in a chamber full of mist. Droplets of fog had condensed to glitter in her hair. Unsurprised eyes watched him gravely.

“I’ve come,” he whispered.

“I knew you would.”

“I’m... can I say how sorry I am?”

“You needn’t, Edwy. Forget it.”

They returned to the street. Langley paid off his informant and got the address of a hotel. He walked there, holding her hand, but said nothing till they were safely alone.

Then he kissed her, half afraid that she would recoil from him. But she responded with a sudden hunger. “I love you,” he said; it was a new and surprising knowledge.

She smiled. “That makes it mutual, I think.”

Later, he told her what had happened. It was like turning on a light behind her eyes. “And we can get away?” she asked softly. “We can really start over? If you knew how I’ve dreamed of that, ever since—”

“Not so fast.” The grimness was returning, it put an edge in his voice and he twisted his fingers nervously. “This is a pretty complicated situation. I think I know what’s behind it—maybe you can help fill in the gaps.

“I’ve proven to myself that the Technon founded the Society and uses it as a spy and an agent of economic infiltration. However—the Technon is stuck away in a cave somewhere. It can’t go out and supervise affairs; it has to rely on information supplied by its agents. Some of these agents are official, part of the Solar government; some of them are semiofficial, members of the Society; some are highly unofficial, spies on other planets.

“But two can play at the same game, you know. There’s another race around which has a mentality much like the Technon’s—a cold, impersonal mass-mind, planning centuries ahead, able to wait indefinitely long for some little seed to sprout. And that’s the race on Thrym. Their mental hookup practice makes them that kind: an individual doesn’t matter, because in a very real sense each individual is only a cell in one huge unit. You can see it operating in a case like the League, where they’ve quietly taken over the key position, made themselves boss so gradually that the Thorians hardly realize it even today.”

“And you think they have infiltrated the Society?” she asked.

“I know they have. There’s no other answer. The Society wouldn’t be turning Saris over to Brannoch if it were truly independent. Valti tried hard to rationalize it, but I know more than he does. I know the Technon thinks it still owns the Society, and that it’d never give Centauri an advantage.”

“But it has, you say,” she protested.

“Uh-huh. Here’s the explanation as I see it. The Society includes a lot of races. One of those races is Thryman. Probably they’re not officially from Thrym. They could have been planted on a similar world, maybe with some slight surgical changes in their appearance, and passed themselves off as natives. They got members into the nomad bureaucracy by the normal process of promotion and, being very able, eventually these members got high enough to learn the truth—that the Technon was behind the whole show.

“What a windfall for them! They must have infiltrated the Society on general principles, to get control of still another human group, but found they’d also gotten a line into the Technon itself. They can doctor the reports it gets from the Society—not every report, but enough. That power has to be saved for special occasions, because the machine must have data-comparison units, it must be capable of ‘suspicion’, to do its job. This is a special occasion.

“Chanthavar, Brannoch, and Valti were all acting at cross purposes because there hadn’t been time to consult the Technon; otherwise it would normally have told Valti to keep hands off the affair, or at least to cooperate with Chanthavar. When it was informed, you know, it ordered Valti’s release.

“But then the Thrymans got busy. Even imprisoned, they must have been in touch with their agents outside, including high-ranking Thrymans in the Society.

“I don’t know exactly what story has been fed the Technon. At a guess. I’d suggest something like this: A trading ship has just come back with news of a new planet inhabited by a race having Saris” abilities. They were studied, and it turned out that there is no way to duplicate that nullifying effect artificially. The Thrymans are perfectly capable of cooking up such a report complete with quantitative data and mathematical theory, I’ll bet.

“All right. This report, supposedly from its own good, reliable Society, reaches the Technon. It makes a very natural decision: let the Centaurians have Saris, let them waste their time investigating a blind alley. It has to look real, so that Brannoch won’t suspect; therefore, work through Valti without informing Chanthavar.

“So... the end result is that Centauri does get the nullifier! And the first news the Technon has of this is when the invading fleet arrives able to put every ship in the Solar System out of action!”

Marin made no reply for a while. Then she nodded. “That sounds logical,” she said. “I remember now... when I was at Brannoch’s, just before coming to you, he spoke with that tank, mentioned something about Valti being troublesome and ripe for assassination, and the tank forbade him to do it. Shall we tell Chanthavar?”

“No,” said Langley.

“But do you want the Centaurians to win?”

“Emphatically not. I don’t want a war at all, and letting this information out prematurely would be a sure way to start one. Can’t you see the wild scramble to cover up, purge, strike at once lest you be further subverted?

“The fact that Brannoch himself is in the dark, that he knows nothing about this supremely important Society business, indicates to me that Thrym doesn’t exactly have the interests of the League at heart either. The League is only a means to a much bigger and deadlier end.”

He lifted his head. “So far, darling, my attempts to sit in on this game have been pretty miserable flops. I’m risking both our lives against what I think is the future of the human race. It sounds rather silly, doesn’t it? One little man thinking he can change history all by his lonesome. A lot of trouble has been caused by that delusion.

“I’m gambling that this time, for once, it’s not a mistake -that I really can carry off something worth while. Do you think I’m right? Do you think I even have a right to try?”

She came to him and laid her cheek against his. “Yes,” she whispered. “Yes, my dearest.”