The Man Who Counts

II

Desolation walled him in.

Even from this low, on the rolling, pitching hull of the murdered skycruiser, Eric Wace could see an immensity of horizon. He thought that the sheer size of that ring, where frost-pale heaven met the gray which was cloud and storm-scud and great marching waves, was enough to terrify a man. The likelihood of death had been faced before, on Earth, by many of his forebears; but Earth’s horizon was not so remote.

Never mind that he was a hundred-odd light-years from his own sun. Such distances were too big to be understood: they became mere numbers, and did not frighten one who reckoned the pseudo-speed of a secondary-drive spaceship in parsecs per week.

Even the ten thousand kilometers of open ocean to this world’s lone human settlement, the trading post, was only another number. Later, if he lived, Wace would spend an agonized time wondering how to get a message across that emptiness, but at present he was too occupied with keeping alive.

But the breadth of the planet was something he could see. It had not struck him before, in his eighteen-month stay; but then he had been insulated, psychologically as well as physically, by an unconquerable machine technology. Now he stood alone on a sinking vessel, and it was twice as far to look across chill waves to the world’s rim as it had been on Earth.

The skycruiser rolled under a savage impact. Wace lost his footing and slipped across curved metal plates. Frantic, he clawed for the light cable which lashed cases of food to the navigation turret. If he went over the side, his boots and clothes would pull him under like a stone. He caught it in time and strained to a halt… The disappointed wave slapped his face, a wet salt hand.

Shaking with cold, Wace finished tucking the last box into place and crawled back toward the entry hatch. It was a miserable little emergency door, but the glazed promenade deck, on which his passengers had strolled while the cruiser’s gravbeams bore her through the sky, was awash, its ornate bronze portal submerged.

Water had filled the smashed engine compartment when they ditched. Since then it had been seeping around twisted bulkheads and strained hull plates, until the whole thing was about ready for a last long dive to the sea bottom.

Wind passed icy fingers through his drenched hair and tried to hold open the hatch when he wanted to close it after him. He had a struggle against the gale… Gale? Hell, no! It had only the velocity of a stiffish breeze — but with six times the atmospheric pressure of Earth behind it, that breeze struck like a Terrestrial storm. Damn PLC 2987165II! Damn the PL itself, and damn Nicholas van Rijn, and most particularly damn Eric Wace for being fool enough to work for the Company!

Briefly, while he fought the hatch, Wace looked out over the coaming as if to find rescue. He glimpsed only a reddish sun, and great cloud-banks dirty with storm in the north, and a few specks which were probably natives.

Satan fry those natives on a slow griddle, that they did not come to help! Or at least go decently away while the humans drowned, instead of hanging up there in the sky to gloat!

“Is all in order?”

Wace closed the hatch, dogged it fast, and came down the ladder. At its foot, he had to brace himself against the heavy rolling. He could still hear waves beat on the hull, and the wind-yowl.

“Yes, my lady,” he said. “As much as it’ll ever be.”

“Which isn’t much, not?” Lady Sandra Tamarin played her flashlight over him. Behind it, she was only another shadow in the darkness of the dead vessel. “But you look a saturated rat, my friend. Come, we have at least fresh clothes for you.”

Wace nodded and shrugged out of his wet jacket and kicked off the squelching boots. He would have frozen up there without them — it couldn’t be over five degrees C — but they seemed to have blotted up half the ocean. His teeth clapped in his head as he followed her down the corridor.

He was a tall young man of North American stock, ruddy-haired, blue-eyed, with bluntly squared-off features above a well-muscled body. He had begun as a warehouse apprentice at the age of twelve, back on Earth, and now he was the Solar Spice Liquors Company’s factor for the entire planet known as Diomedes. It wasn’t exactly a meteoric rise — Van Rijn’s policy was to promote according to results, which meant that a quick mind, a quick gun, and an eye firmly held to the main chance were favored. But it had been a good solid career, with a future of posts on less isolated and unpleasant worlds, ultimately an executive position back Home and — and what was the use, if alien waters were to eat him in a few hours more?

At the end of the hall, where the navigation turret poked up, there was again the angry copper sunlight, low in the wan smoky-clouded sky, south of west as day declined. Lady Sandra snapped off her torch and pointed to a coverall laid out on the desk. Beside it were the outer garments, quilted, hooded, and gloved, he would need before venturing out again into the pre-equinoctial springtime. “Put on everything,” she said. “Once the boat starts going down, we will have to leave in a most horrible hurry.”

“Where’s Freeman van Rijn?” asked Wace.

“Making some last-minute work on the raft. That one is a handy man with the tools, not? But then, he was once a common spacehand.”

Wace shrugged and waited for her to leave.

“Change, I told you,” she said.

“But—”

“Oh.” A thin smile crossed her face. “I thought not there was a nudity taboo on Earth.”

“Well… not exactly, I guess, my lady… but after all, you’re a noble born, and I’m only a trader—”

“From republican planets like Earth come the worst snobs of all,” she said. “Here we are all human beings. Quickly, now, change. I shall turn my back if you desire.”

Wace scrambled into the outfit as fast as possible. Her mirth was an unexpected comfort to him. He considered what luck always appeared to befall that potbellied old goat Van Rijn.

It wasn’t right!

The colonists of Hermes had been, mostly, a big fair stock, and their descendants had bred true: especially the aristocrats, after Hermes set up as an autonomous grand duchy during the Breakup. Lady Sandra Tamarin was nearly as tall as he, and shapeless winter clothing did not entirely hide the lithe full femaleness of her. She had a face too strong to be pretty — wide forehead, wide mouth, snub nose, high cheekbones — but the large smoky-lashed green eyes, under heavy dark brows, were the most beautiful Wace had ever seen. Her hair was long, straight, ash-blond, pulled into a knot at the moment but he had seen it floating free under a coronet by candlelight -

“Are you quite through, Freeman Wace?”

“Oh… I’m sorry, my lady. I got to thinking. Just a moment!” He pulled on the padded tunic, but left it unzipped. There was still some human warmth lingering in the hull. “Yes. I beg your pardon.”

“It is nothing.” She turned about. In the little space available, their forms brushed together. Her gaze went out to the sky. “Those natives, are they up there yet?”

“I imagine so, my lady. Too high for me to be sure, but they can go up several kilometers with no trouble at all.”

“I have wondered, Trader, but got no chance to ask. I thought not there could be a flying animal the size of a man, and yet these Diomedeans have a six-meter span of bat wings. How?”

“At a time like this you ask?”

She smiled. “We only wait now for Freeman van Rijn. What else shall we do but talk of curious things?”

“We… help him… finish that raft soon or we’ll all go under!”

“He told me he has just batteries enough for one cutting torch, so anyone else is only in the way. Please continue talking. The high-born of Hermes have their customs and taboos, also for the correct way to die. What else is man, if not a set of customs and taboos?” Her husky voice was light, she smiled a little, but he wondered how much of it was an act.

He wanted to say: We’re down in the ocean of a planet whose life is poison to us. There is an island a few score kilometers hence, but we only know its direction vaguely. We may or may not complete a raft in time, patched together out of old fuel drums, and we may or may not get our human-type rations loaded on it in time, and it may or may not weather the storm brewing there in the north. Those were natives who swooped low above us a few hours ago, but since then they have ignored us… or watched us… anything except offer help.

Someone hates you or old Van Rijn, he wanted to say. Not me, I’m not important enough to hate. But Van Rijn is the Solar Spice Liquors Company, which is a great power in the Polesotechnic League, which is the great power in the known galaxy. And you are the Lady Sandra Tamarin, heiress to the throne of an entire planet, if you live; and you have turned down many offers of marriage from its decaying, inbred aristocracy, publicly preferring to look elsewhere for a father for your children, that the next Grand Duke of Hermes may be a man and not a giggling clothes horse; so no few courtiers must dread your accession.

Oh, yes, he wanted to say, there are plenty of people who would gain if either Nicholas van Rijn or Sandra Tamarin failed to come back. It was a calculated gallantry for him to offer you a lift in his private ship, from Antares where you met, back to Earth, with stopovers at interesting points along the way. At the very least, he can look for trade concessions in the Duchy. At best… no, hardly a formal alliance; there’s too much hell in him; even you — most strong and fair and innocent — would never let him plant himself on the High Seat of your fathers.

But I wander from the subject, my dear, he wanted to say; and the subject is, that someone in the spaceship’s crew was bribed. The scheme was well-hatched; the someone watched his chance. It came when you landed on Diomedes, to see what a really new raw planet is like, a planet where even the main continental outlines have scarcely been mapped, in the mere five years that a spoonful of men have been here. The chance came when I was told to ferry you and my evil old boss to those sheer mountains, halfway around this world, which have been noted as spectacular scenery. A bomb in the main generator… a slain crew, engineers and stewards gone in the blast, my co-pilot’s skull broken when we ditched in the sea, the radio shattered… and the last wreckage is going to sink long before they begin to worry at Thursday Landing and come in search of us and assuming we survive, is there the slightest noticeable chance that a few skyboats, cruising a nearly unmapped world twice the size of Earth, will happen to see three human flyspecks on it?

Therefore, he wanted to say, since all our schemings and posturings have brought us merely to this, it would be well to forget them in what small time remains, and kiss me instead.

But his throat clogged up on him, and he said none of it.

“So?” A note of impatience entered her voice. “You are very silent, Freeman Wace.”

“I’m sorry, my lady,” he mumbled. “I’m afraid I’m no good at making conversation under… uh, these circumstances.”

“I regret I have not qualifications to offer to you the consolations of religion,” she said with a hurtful scorn.

A long gray-bearded comber went over the deck outside and climbed the turret. They felt steel and plastic tremble under the blow. For a moment, as water sheeted, they stood in a blind roaring dark.

Then, as it cleared, and Wace saw how much farther down the wreck had burrowed, and wondered if they would even be able to get Van Rijn’s raft out through the submerged cargo hatch, there was a whiteness that snatched at his eye.

First he didn’t believe it, and then he wouldn’t believe because he dared not, and then he could no longer deny it.

“Lady Sandra.” He spoke with immense care; he must not scream his news at her like any low-born Terrestrial.

“Yes?” She did not look away from her smoldering contemplation of the northern horizon, empty of all but clouds and lightning.

“There, my lady. Roughly south-east, I’d guess sails, beating up-wind.”

“What?” It was a shriek from her. Somehow, that made Wace laugh aloud.

“A boat of some kind,” he pointed. “Coming this way.”

“I didn’t know the natives were sailors,” she said, very softly.

“They aren’t, my lady — around Thursday Landing,” he replied. “But this is a big planet. Roughly four times the surface area of Earth, and we only know a small part of one continent.”

“Then you know not what they are like, these sailors?”

“My lady, I have no idea.”