The Long Way Home

8

The strangers did not speak, but hurried him along. They seemed to know all the empty byways, their progress upwards was roundabout but fast and hardly another face was seen en route. Langley tried to relax, feeling himself swept along a dark and resistless tide.

Upper town again, shining pinnacles and loops of diamond light against the stars. The air was warm and sweet in his lungs, he wondered how much longer he would breathe it. Not far from the shaft exit, a massive octagonal tower reared out of the general complex, its architecture foreign to the slim soaring exuberance which was Technate work. A nimbus of radiance hung over its peak, with letters of flame running through it to spell out COMMERCIAL SOCIETY. Stepping onto a bridgeway, the four were borne up toward a flange near its middle.

As they got off onto the ledge, a small black aircraft landed noiselessly beside them. A voice came from it, amplified till it boomed through the humming quiet: “Do not move farther. This is the police.”

Police! Langley’s knees felt suddenly watery. He might have known—Chanthavar would not leave this place unwatched, he had sent an alarm when the spaceman was found missing, the organization was efficient, and now he was saved!

The three traders stood immobile, their faces like wood.—A door dilated, and another man stepped from the building as five black-clad slaves and one Ministerial officer got out of the boat. It was Goltan Valti. He waited with the others, rubbing his hands together in a nervous washing motion.

The officer bowed slightly. “Good evening, sir. I am pleased to see you have found the captain. You are to be commended.”

“Thank you, my lord,” bowed Valti. His voice was shrill, almost piping, and he blew out his fat cheeks and bobbed his shaggy head obsequiously. “It is kind of you to come, but your assistance is not required.”

“We will take him home for you,” said the officer.

“Oh, sir, surely you will permit me to offer my poor hospitality to this unfortunate stranger. It is a firm rule of the Society, a guest may never leave without being treated.”

“I am sorry, sir, but he must.” In the vague, flickering light, the officer scowled, and there was a sharp ring in his tones. “Later, perhaps. Now he must come with us. I have my orders.

Valti bowed and scraped. “I sympathize, sir, these dim eyes weep at the thought of conflict with your eminence, but poor and old and helpless worm though I be”—the whine faded into a buttery purr—“nevertheless, I am forced to remind you, my lord, much against my will, which is only for pleasant relationships, that you are outside your jurisdiction. By the Treaty of Lunar, the Society has extraterritorial rights. Honored sir, I pray you not to force me into requesting your passport.”

The officer grew rigid. “I told you I had my orders,” he said thinly.

The trader’s bulky shape looked suddenly enormous against the sky. His beard bristled. But the voice remained light: “Sir, my heart bleeds for you. But be so kind as to remember that this building is armed and armored. A dozen heavy guns are trained on you, and I must regretfully enforce the law. The captain will take refreshment with me. Afterward he shall be sent to his home, but at present it is most inhospitable to keep him standing in this damp air. Good evening, sir.” He took Langley’s arm and walked him to the door. The other three followed, and the door closed behind them.

“I suppose,” said the spaceman slowly, “that what I want isn’t of much account.”

“I had not hoped to have the honor of talking with you privately so soon, captain,” answered Valti. “Nor do I think you will regret a chat over a cup of good Ammonite wine. It gets a little bruised in transit, so delicate a palate as yours will detect that, but I humbly assert that it retains points of superiority.”

They had gone down a hall, and now a door opened for them. “My study, captain,” bowed Valti. “Please enter,”

It was a big, low-ceilinged, dim-lit room, lined with shelves which held not only microspools but some authentic folio volumes. The chairs were old and shabby and comfortable, the desk was big and littered with papers, there was a haze of strong tobacco in the rather stuffy air. Langley’s attention was drawn to a screen in which a stereoscopic figure was moving. Briefly, he failed to understand the words—

Then he realized. The actor had a queue; he wore a fur cap, a lacquered breastplate, and flowing black robes; he was reaching for a scimitar; the background was a kind of Grecian temple—but by all the gods, it was still Hamlet!

“An old folk play, I believe, captain,” said Valti, shuffling up behind him. “They’ve been putting on some revivals lately—interesting material. I believe this is Martian of the Interregnum period.”

“No,” said Langley. “A bit older than that.”

“Oh? From your own time, even? Very interesting!” Valti switched it off. “Well, pray sit down and be comfortable. Here comes refreshment.”

A creature the size of a monkey, with a beaked face and strangely luminous eyes beneath small antennae, entered bearing a tray in skinny arms. Langley found a chair and accepted a cup of hot spiced wine and a plate of cakes. Valti wheezed and drank deep. “Ah! That does these rheumatic old bones good. I fear medicine will never catch up with the human body, which finds the most ingenious new ways of getting deranged. But good wine, sir, good wine and a pretty girl and the dear bright hills of home, there is the best medicine that will ever be devised. Cigars, Thakt, if you please.”

The monkey-thing leaped grotesquely to the desk and extended a box. Both men took one, and Langley found his good. The alien sat on Valti’s shoulder, scratching its own green fur and giggling. Its eyes never left the spaceman.

“Well—” After the last couple of hours, Langley felt exhausted. There was no more fight in him, he relaxed and let the weariness run through nerve and muscle. But his head seemed abnormally clear. “Well, Mr. Valti, what was all this foofaraw about?”

The trader blew smoke and sat back, crossing his stumpy legs. “Events are beginning to move with uncomfortable rapidity,” he said in a quiet tone. “I’m glad this chance came to see you.”

“Those cops seemed anxious that I shouldn’t.”

“Of course.” The deep-sunken little eyes twinkled. “But it will take them some time to line up those collections of reflexes they call brains and decide to attack me; by then, you will be home, for I shall not detain you long. The good Chanthavar, now, would not stall, but he is fortunately-engaged elsewhere.”

“Yes... trying to find my friends.” Langley felt a dull grief in him. “Do you know they were taken?”

“I do.” There was sympathy in the tone. “I have my own agents in the Solar forces, and know more or less all which happened tonight.”

“Then—where are they? How are they?”

Bleakness twisted the half-hidden mouth. “I am very much afraid for them. They are probably in the power of Lord Brannoch. They may be released, I don’t know, but—” Valti sighed. “I’ve no spies in his organization, nor he in mine... I hope; both of them are too small, too uncorrupted, too well set up—unlike Sol’s. We must be very much in the dark with regard to each other.”

“Are you sure, then, that it was he who—”

“Who else? Chanthavar had no need that I can see to stage such an affair, he could order all of you arrested any time he chose. None of the other foreign states are in this at all, they are too weak. Brannoch is known to head Centaurian military intelligence at Sol, though so far he has been clever enough to leave no evidence which would be grounds for his expulsion. No, the only powers which count in this part of the galaxy are Sol, Centauri, and the Society.”

“And why,” asked Langley slowly, “would Brannoch take them?”

“Isn’t it obvious? The alien, Saris Hronna I think he’s called. They may know where to find him.

“You don’t realize what a fever he has thrown all of us into. You have been watched every minute by agents of all three powers. I toyed with the idea of having you snatched myself, but the Society is too peaceful to be very good at that sort of thing, and Brannoch beat us to it. The moment I learned what had happened, I sent a hundred men out to try to locate you. Fortunately, one group succeeded.”

“They almost didn’t,” said Langley. “They had to take me away from two others—Centaurians, I suppose.”

“Of course. Well... I don’t think Brannoch will try to assault this stronghold, especially since he will have hopes of getting the information from your friends. Do you think he will?”

“Depends.” Langley narrowed his eyes and took a long drag of smoke. “I doubt it, though. They never got very intimate with Saris. I did—we used to talk for hours -though I still can’t claim to know just what makes him tick.”

“Ah, so.” Valti took a noisy sip of wine. There was no expression in the heavy face. “Do you know why he is so important?”

“I think so. Military value of his ability to damp out or control electronic currents and so forth. But I’m surprised you haven’t got a machine to do the same thing.”

“Science died long ago,” said Valti. “I, who have seen worlds where they are still progressing, though behind us as yet, know the difference between a living science and a dead one. The spirit of open-minded inquiry became extinct in known human civilizations quite a while back: the rigidity of social forms, together with the fact that research no longer discovered anything not predicted by theory, caused that. It was, after all, reasonable to assume that the variety of natural laws was finite, that a limit had been reached. Nowadays, the very desire to inquire further is lacking. Sol is stagnant, the other systems barbaric under their façade of machine technology, the Society too loosely organized to support a scientific community. A dead end, yes, yes, so it goes.”

Langley tried to concentrate on abstractions, to escape the new fear which gnawed in his breast. “And so now something turns up which is not accounted for by standard theory. And everybody wants to study it and learn about it and duplicate it on a grand scale for military purposes. Yeah. I get the idea.”

Valti looked at him under drooping lids. “There are, of course, ways to make a man talk,” he said. “Not torture -nothing so crude—but drugs which unlock the tongue. Chanthavar has hesitated to use them on you, because if you do not, after all, have an idea where Saris is, the rather unpleasant process could easily set up a subconscious bloc which would forbid you to think further about the problem. However, he may now be desperate enough to do so. He will surely do it the moment he suspects you have deduced something. Have you?”

“Why should I tell you?”

Valti looked patient. “Because only the Society can be trusted with a decisive weapon.”

“Only one party can,” said Langley dryly, “but which party depends on who you’re talking to. I’ve heard that song before.”

“Consider,” said Valti. His voice remained dispassionate. “Sol is a petrified civilization, interested only in maintaining the status quo. The Centaurians brag a great deal about frontier vigor, but they are every bit as dead between the ears; if they won, there would be an orgy of destruction followed by a pattern much the same, nothing new except a change of masters. If either system suspects that the other has gotten Saris, it will attack at once, setting off the most destructive war in a history which has already seen destruction on a scale you cannot imagine. The other, smaller, states are no better, even if they were in a position to use the weapon effectively.”

“I don’t know,” said Langley. “What people seem to need today is a good swift kick in the pants. Maybe Centauri can give it to them.”

“Not with any beneficial effect. What is Centauri? A triple-star system. Alpha A has two habitable planets, Thor and Freyja. Alpha B has two semi-poisonous ones slowly being made habitable. Proxima is a dim red dwarf with one inhabited planet, the frigid giant Thrym. Otherwise there are only mining colonies maintained with great difficulty. The Thorians conquered and assimilated the men of the other worlds long ago. They established contact with the Thrymans, showed them modern technology; soon the natives—already highly civilized—were equal to their teachers. Then Thrym denied them right to settle the Proximan System. A war was fought over it, which ended officially in compromise and unification; actually, Thrym had the upper hand, and its representatives occupy key positions in the League. Brannoch has Thryman advisors here on Earth, and I wonder who is really the chief.

“I’ve no prejudice against nonhumans, but Thrym makes me feel cold. They’re too remote from man, I think they have little use for him except as a tool toward some purpose of their own. Study the situation, study history, and I think you’ll agree. A Centaurian conquest, quite apart from the killing of some billions of innocent people, would not be an infusion of invigorating barbarian blood. It would be a move in a very old and very large chess game.”

“All right.” Langley gave up. “Maybe you’re right. But what claim has your precious Society got? Who says you’re a race of—” He paused, realized that there was no word for saint or angel, and finished weakly: “Why do you deserve anything?”

“We are not interested in imperialism,” said Valti. “We carry on trade between the stars—”

“Probably cleaning the pants off both ends.”

“Well, an honest businessman has to live. But we have no planet, we are not interested in having one, our home is space itself. We do not kill except in self-defense; normally we avoid a fight by simply retreating, there is always plenty of room in the universe and a long jump makes it easy to overcome your enemies by merely outliving them. We are a people to ourselves, with our own history, traditions, laws—the only humane and neutral power in the known galaxy.”

“Tell me more,” said Langley. “So far I’ve only got your word. You must have some central government, someone to make decisions and coordinate you. Who are they? Where are they?”

“I will be perfectly honest, captain,” said Valti in a soft tone. “I do not know.”

“Eh?”

“No one knows. Each ship is competent to handle ordinary affairs for itself. We file reports at the planetary offices, pay our tax—where the reports and the money go, I don’t know, nor do the groundlings in the offices. There is a chain of communications, a cell-type secret bureaucracy which would be impossible to trace through tens of light-years. I rank high, running the Solar offices at present, and can make many decisions for myself, but I get special orders now and then through a sealed circuit. There must be at least one of the chiefs here on Earth, but where and who—or what—I couldn’t say.”

“How does this... government... keep you in line?”

“We obey,” said Valti. “Ship discipline is potent, even on those who like myself are recruited from planets rather than born in space. The rituals, the oaths—conditioning, if you will—I know of no case where an order has been deliberately violated. But we are a free people, there is no slavery and no aristocracy among us.”

“Except for your bosses,” murmured Langley. “How do you know they’re working for your own good?”

“You needn’t read any sinister or melodramatic implications into a security policy, captain. If the headquarters and identity of our chiefs were known, they would be all too liable to attack and annihilation. As it is, promotion to the bureaucracy involves complete disappearance, probably surgical disguise; I will gladly accept the offer if it is ever made to me.

“Under its bosses, as you call them, the Society has prospered in the thousand years since its founding. We are a force to be reckoned with. You saw how I was able to make that police officer knuckle under.”

Valti took a deep breath and plunged into business. “I have not, as yet, received any command about Saris. If I had been told to keep you prisoner, be sure you would not leave here. But as things are, I still have considerable latitude.

“Here is my offer. There are small interplanetary flitters hidden here and there on Earth. You can leave anytime. Away from Earth, safely concealed by sheer volume of space unless you know her orbit, is an armed light-speed cruiser. If you will help me find Saris, I will take you two away, and do what I can to rescue your companions. Saris will be studied, but he will not be harmed in any manner, and if he wishes can later be returned to his home world. You can join the Society, or you can be set up on some human-colonized planet beyond the region known to Sol and Centauri. There are many lovely worlds out there, a wide cultural variety, places where you can feel at home again. Your monetary reward will give you a good start.

“I do not think you will like Earth any more, captain. Nor do I think you will like the responsibility of unleashing a war which will devastate planets. I believe your best course is with us.”

Langley stared at the floor. Weariness was close to overwhelming him. To go home, to creep down light-years and centuries until he found Peggy again, it was a scream within him.

But—

“I don’t know,” he mumbled. “How can I tell if you’re not lying?” With an instinct of self-preservation: “I don’t know where Saris is either, you realize. Doubt if I can find him myself.”

Valti lifted a skeptical brow, but said nothing.

“I need time to think,” pleaded Langley. “Let me sleep on it.”

“If you wish.” Valti got up and rummaged in a drawer. “But remember, Chanthavar or Brannoch may soon remove all choice from you. Your decision, if it is to be your own, must be made soon.”

He took out a small, flat plastic box and handed it over. “This is a communicator, keyed to a frequency which varies continuously according to a random-chosen series. It can only be detected by a similarly tuned instrument which I possess. If you want me, press this button and call; it need not be held to your mouth. I may even be able to rescue you from armed force, though it’s best to be quiet about this affair. Here... keep it next to your skin, under your clothes, it will hang on of itself and is transparent to ordinary spy-beams.”

Langley rose. “Thanks,” he muttered. “Decent of you to let me go.” Or is it only a trick to disarm me?

“It’s nothing, captain.” Valti waddled ahead of him to the outside flange. An armored police craft hovered just beyond its edge. “I believe transportation home is waiting for you. Good night, sir.”

“Good night,” said Langley.