The Man Who Counts

XXII

Thursday Landing had little in the way of hospital facilities: an autodiagnostician, a few surgical and therapeutical robots, the standard drugs, and the post xenobiologist to double as medical officer. But a six weeks’ fast did not have serious consequences, if you were strong to begin with and had been waited on hand, foot, wing, and tail by two anxious nations, on a planet none of whose diseases could affect you. Treatment progressed rapidly with the help of bioaccelerine, from intravenous glucose to thick rare steaks. By the sixth Diomedean day, Wace had put on a noticeable amount of flesh and was weakly but fumingly aprowl in his room.

“Smoke, sir?” asked young Senegal. He had been out on trading circuit when the rescue party arrived; only now was he getting the full account. He offered cigarettes with a most respectful air.

Wace halted, the bathrobe swirling about his knees. He reached, hesitated, then grinned and said: “In all that time without tobacco, I seem to’ve lost the addiction. Question is, should I go to the trouble and expense of building it up again?”

“Well, no, sir—”

“Hey! Gimme that!” Wace sat down on his bed and took a cautious puff. “I certainly am going to pick up all my vices where I left off, and doubtless add some new ones.”

“You, uh, you were going to tell me, sir… how the station here was informed—”

“Oh, yes. That. It was childishly simple. I figured it out in ten minutes, once we got a breathing spell. Send a fair-size Diomedean party with a written message, plus of course one of Tolk’s professional interpreters to help them inquire their way on this side of The Ocean. Devise a big life raft, just a framework of light poles which could be dovetailed together. Each Diomedean carried a single piece; they assembled it in the air and rested on it whenever necessary. Also fished from it: a number of Fleet experts went along to take charge of that angle. There was enough rain for them to catch in small buckets to drink — I knew there would be, since the Drak’honai stay at sea for indefinite periods, and also this is such a rainy planet anyhow.

“Incidentally, for reasons which are now obvious to you, the party had to include some Lannacha females. Which means that the messengers of both nationalities have had to give up some hoary prejudices. In the long run, that’s going to change their history more than whatever impression we Terrestrials might have made, by such stunts as flying them home across The Ocean in a single day. From now on, willy-nilly, the beings who went on that trip will be a subversive element in both cultures; they’ll be the seedbed of Diomedean internationalism. But that’s for the League to gloat about, not me.”

Wace shrugged. “Having seen them off,” he finished, “we could only crawl into bed and wait. After the first few days, it wasn’t so bad. Appetite disappears.”

He stubbed out the cigarette with a grimace. It was making him dizzy.

“When do I get to see the others?” he demanded. “I’m strong enough now to feel bored. I want company, dammit.”

“As a matter of fact, sir,” said Senegal, “I believe Freeman van Rijn said something about” — a thunderous “Skulls and smallpox!” bounced in the corridor outside — “visiting you today.”

“Run along then,” said Wace sardonically. “You’re too young to hear this. We blood brothers, who have defied death together, we sworn comrades, and so on and so forth, are about to have a reunion.”

He got to his feet as the boy slipped out the back door. Van Rijn rolled in the front entrance.

His Jovian girth was shrunken flat, he had only one chin, and he leaned on a gold-headed cane. But his hair was curled into oily black ringlets, his mustaches and goatee waxed to needle points, his lace-trimmed shirt and cloth-of-gold vest were already smeared with snuff, his legs were hairy tree trunks beneath a batik sarong, he wore a diamond mine on each hand and a silver chain about his neck which could have anchored a battleship. He waved a ripe Trichinopoly cigar above a four-decker sandwich and roared:

“So you are walking again. Good fellow! The only way you get well is not sip dishwater soup and take it easily, like that upgebungled horse doctor has the nerve to tell me to do.” He purpled with indignation. “Does one thought get through that sand in his synapses, what it is costing me every hour I wait here? What a killing I can make if I get home among those underhand competition jackals before the news reaches them Nicholas van Rijn is alive after all? I have just been out beating the station engineer over his thick flat mushroom he uses for a head, telling him if my spaceship is not ready to leave tomorrow noon I will hitch him to it and say giddap. So you will come back to Earth with us your own selfs, nie?”

Wace had no immediate reply. Sandra had followed the merchant in.

She was driving a wheelchair, and looked so white and thin that his heart cracked over. Her hair was a pale frosty cloud on the pillow, it seemed as if it would be cold to touch. But her eyes lived, immense, the infinite warm green of Earth’s gentlest seas; and she smiled at him.

“My lady—” he whispered.

“Oh, she comes too,” said Van Rijn, selecting an apple from the fruit basket at Wace’s bedside. “We all continue our interrupted trip, maybe with not so much fun and games aboard—” He drooped one little sleet-gray eye at her, lasciviously. “Those we save for later on Earth when we are back to normal, ha?”

“If my lady has the strength to travel—” stumbled Wace. He sat down, his knees would bear him no longer.

“Oh, yes,” she murmured. “It is only a matter of following the diet as written for me and getting much rest.”

“Worst thing you can do, by damn,” grumbled Van Rijn, finishing the apple and picking up an orange.

“It isn’t suitable,” protested Wace. “We lost so many servants when the skycruiser ditched. She’d only have—”

“A single maid to attend me?” Sandra’s laugh was ghostly, but it held genuine amusement. “After now I am to forget what we did and endured, and be so correct and formal with you, Eric? That would be most silly, when we have climbed the ridge over Salmenbrok together, not?”

Wace’s pulse clamored. Van Rijn, strewing orange peel on the floor, said: “Out of hard lucks, the good Lord can pull much money if He chooses. I cannot know every man in the company, so promising youngsters like you do go sometimes to waste on little outposts like here. Now I will take you home to Earth and find a proper paying job for you.”

If she could remember one chilled morning beneath Mount Oborch, thought Wace, he, for the sake of his manhood, could remember less pleasant things, and name them in plain words. It was time.

He was still too weak to rise — he shook a little — but he caught Van Rijn’s gaze and said in a voice hard with anger:

“That’s the easiest way to get back your self-esteem, of course. Buy it! Bribe me with a sinecure to forget how Sandra sat with a paintbrush in a coalsack of a room, till she fainted from exhaustion, and how she gave us her last food… how I myself worked my brain and my heart out to pull us all back from that jailhouse country and win a war to boot — No, don’t interrupt. I know you had some part in it. You fought during that naval engagement: because you had no choice, no place to hide. You found a nice nasty way to dispose of an inconvenient obstacle to the peace negotiations. You have a talent for that sort of thing. And you made some suggestions.

“But what did it amount to? It amount to your saying to me: ‘Do this! Build that!’ And I had to do it, with nonhuman helpers and stoneage tools. I had to design it, even! Any fool could once have said, Take me to the Moon.’ It took brains to figure out how!

“Your role, your ‘leadership,’ amounted to strolling around, gambling and chattering, playing cheap politics, eating like a hippopotamus while Sandra lay starving on Dawrnach — and claiming all the credit! And now I’m supposed to go to Earth, sit down in a gilded pigpen of an office, spend the rest of my life thumb-twiddling… and keep quiet when you brag. Isn’t that right? You and your sinecure—”

Wace saw Sandra’s eyes on him, grave, oddly compassionate, and jerked to a halt.

“I quit,” he ended.

Van Rijn had swallowed the orange and returned to his sandwich during Wace’s speech. Now he burped, licked his fingers, took a fresh puff of his cigar, and rumbled quite mildly:

“If you think I give away sinecures, you are being too optimist. I am offering you a job with importance for no reason except I think you can do it better than some knucklebone heads on Earth. I will pay you what the job is worth. And by damn, you will work your promontory off.”

Wace gulped after air.

“Go ahead and insult me, public if you wish,” said Van Rijn. “Just not on company time. Now I go find me who it was put the bomb in that cruiser and take care of him. Also maybe the cook will fix me a little Italian hero sandwich. Death and dynamite, they want to starve me to bones here, them!”

He waved a shaggy paw and departed like an amiable earthquake.

Sandra wheeled over and laid on a hand on Wace’s. It was a cool touch, light as a leaf falling in a northern October, but it burned him. As if from far off, he heard her:

“I awaited this to come, Eric. It is best you understand now. I, who was born to govern… my whole life has been a long governing, not?… I know what I speak of. There are the fake leaders, the balloons, with talent only to get in people’s way. Yes. But he is not one of them. Without him, you and I would sleep dead beneath Achan.”

“But—”

“You complain he made you do the hard things that used your talent, not his? Of course he did. It is not the leader’s job to do everything himself. It is his job to order, persuade, wheedle, bully, bribe — just that, to make people do what must be done, whether or not they think it is possible.

“You say, he spent time loafing around talking, making jokes and a false front to impress the natives? Of course! Somebody had to. We were monsters, strangers, beggars as well. Could you or I have started as a deformed beggar and ended as all but king?

“You say he bribed — with goods from crooked dice — and blustered, lied, cheated, politicked, killed both open and sly? Yes. I do not say it was right. I do not say he did not enjoy himself, either. But can you name another way to have gotten our lives back? Or even to make peace for those poor warring devils?”

“Well… well — “The man looked away, out the window to the stark landscape. It would be good to dwell inside Earth’s narrower horizon.

“Well, maybe,” he said at last, grudging each word. “I… I suppose I was too hasty. Still — we played our parts too, you know. Without us, he—”

“I think, without us, he would have found some other way to come home,” she interrupted. “But we without him, no.”

He jerked his head back. Her face was burning a deeper red than the ember sunlight outside could tinge it.

He thought, with sudden weariness: After all, she is a woman, and women live more for the next generation than men can. Most especially she does, for the life of a planet may rest on her child, and she is an aristocrat in the old pure meaning of the word. He who fathers the next Duke of Hermes may be aging, fat, and uncouth; callous and conscienceless; unable to see her as anything but a boisterous episode. It doesn’t matter, if the woman and the aristocrat see him as a man.

Well-a-day, I have much to thank them both for.

“I—” Sandra looked confused, almost trapped. Her look held an inarticulate pleading. “I think I had best go and let you rest.” After a moment of his silence: “He is not yet so strong as he claims. I may be needed.”

“No,” said Wace with an enormous tenderness. “The need is all yours. Good-by, my lady.”