The Rithian Terror

IV

Cassina's eyes were closed. His face was a dead olive-gray except for a slight flush on either cheekbone. He had the stupid, defenseless look of all sleeping invalids.

His head was supported by a hollow in the bolster; a rigid harness covered his neck. His mouth was slightly open under the coarse black mustachios, and a curved suction tube was hooked over his lower teeth.

The tube emitted a low, monotonous, gurgling, which changed abruptly to a dry sucking noise. An attendant stepped forward and joggled the tube with one finger; the gurgling resumed.

As Spangler glanced away from the unconscious man, a medic came forward. He was tall and loose-limbed; his brown eyes gleamed with the brilliance that meant contact lenses. "Commissioner Spangler?"

Spangler nodded.

"I'm Dr. Householder, in charge of this section. You can question this man now, but I want you to avoid exciting him if you can, and don't stay longer than fifteen minutes after the injection. He's got sixteen drugs in him already."

Spangler stepped forward and sat down by the bedside. At Householder's nod, an attendant set the muzzle of a pressure hypodermic against Cassina's bare forearm. She pressed the trigger, then unscrewed the magazine, dropped it into a tray and replaced it with another. In a moment Cassina sighed and opened his eyes.

Another attendant set a metal plate on the bed under Cassina's hand and gently forced a stylus between his fingers. Cables from plate and stylus led back around the foot of the bed to a squat, wheeled machine with a hooded screen.

The attendant went to the machine, snapped a switch and then sat down beside it.

Cassina's eyes turned slowly until he discovered Spangler. He frowned, and seemed to be trying to speak. His lips moved minutely, but his jaw still hung open, with the suction tube hooked inside it. The monotonous gurgling of withdrawn sputum continued.

"Don't try to talk," Spangler said. ”Your throat and jaws are immobilized. Use the stylus."

Cassina glanced downward, and his hand clenched around the slender metal cylinder. After a moment he wrote, "What have you done to Wei?"

The words crawled like black snakes across the white screen. Spangler nodded, and the attendant turned a knob; the writing vanished.

Spangler looked thoughtfully at Cassina. The question he had been expecting was, "What happened?"—meaning "What happened to me?" In the circumstances, the question was almost a certainty—probability point nine nine nine.

But Cassina had asked about Wei instead.

Grudgingly, Spangler said, "Nothing, Colonel. We weren't after Captain Wei, you know. The Rithian spy had concealed itself in his room. We couldn't warn Wei without alerting the Rithian."

Cassina stared gravely at Spangler, as if trying to decide whether he were lying. Spangler abruptly found himself gripping his knees painfully hard.

"He's all right?" Cassina scrawled.

"Perfectly," said Spangler. "Everything's all right. We've got the Rithian, and the alert is over."

Cassina drew a deep breath and let it out again. His mouth still hung idiotically slack, but his eyes smiled. He wrote, "What have you got me in this straitjacket for?"

"You were injured in the struggle. You'll be fit again in a few days. We're going to put you back to sleep now." Spangler motioned; the horse-faced girl pressed the hypo against Cassina's arm and pressed the trigger.

After a moment she said, "Colonel Cassina, we want you to write the numbers from one to fifty. Begin, please."

At "15" the scrawled numerals began to grow larger, less controlled; "23" was repeated twice, followed by a wild "17".

It was long after office hours, but Spangler still sat behind his desk. He had switched off the overhead illumination, the only light came from the reading screen in front of him. The screen showed a portion of the transcript of his interview with Cassina.

Spangler flipped over a switch and ran the film back to the beginning. He read the opening lines again.

Q. : Can you hear me, Colonel?

A. : Yes.

Q. : I want you to answer these questions clearly, truthfully and fully to the best of your ability. When and where did you first meet Captain Wei?

A. : In Daressalam, in October, 2501.

Q. : Are you certain of that? Are you telling the truth?

A. : Yes.

Cassina's conscious mind was convinced that he had first met "Wei" twenty years ago in the Africa District. Several repetitions of the question failed to produce any other answer. Spangler had tried to get around the obstacle by asking for the first meeting after December 18, 2521—the date of the Rithian agents' discovery by the city patrol.

He skipped a score of lines and read:

Q. : What happened after that dinner?

A. : I invited him up to my quarters. We sat and talked.

Q. : What was said?

A. : (2 sec. pause) I don't remember exactly.

Q. : You are ordered to remember. What did Wei tell you?

A. : (3 sec. pause) He told me—said he was Capt. Wei, served under me in the Africa Department from 2501 to 2507. He—

Q. : But you knew that already, didn't you?

A. : Yes. No. (2 sec. pause) I don't remember.

Q. : I will rephrase the question. Did you or did you not know prior to that evening that Wei had served under you in the Africa Department?

A. : (3 sec. pause) No.

Q. : What else did he tell you that night?

A. : Said he had done Naval Security work. Said he had applied for transfer, to be attached to me as my aide.

Q. : Did he tell you anything ehe, either instructions or information, other than details of your former acquaintance or details about his transfer, that evening?

A. : No.

Q. : Skip to your next meeting. What did he tell you on that occasion?

Gradually the whole story had come out, except one point. Spangler had struck a snag when he came to the evening of the 26th, two days ago.

Q. : What did Wei tell you that evening?

A. : (4 sec. pause) I don't remember. Nothing.

Q. : You are ordered to remember. What did he tell you?

A. : (6 sec. pause: subject shows great agitation) Nothing, I tell you.

Q. : You are ordered to answer, Colonel Cassina.

A. : (subject does not reply; at the end of five seconds begins to weep)

Dr. Householder: The fifteen minutes are up, Commissioner. ..

End tran scrpt 15. 52 hrs 12/28/2521.

Later in the afternoon, after his first report to Keith-Ingram, Spangler had had another session with Cassina under the interrogation machine. He had drawn another blank, and had had to give up after five minutes because of Cassina's increasing distress. On being released from the machine, Cassina had gone into a coma and Householder declared that it would be dangerous to question him again until further notice.

Half an hour later, while he was talking to Pembun, Spangler had had a report that Cassina, still apparently unconscious, had made a strenuous effort to tear himself free of the protective collar and had gone into massive hemorrhage. He was now totally restrained, drugged, receiving continuous transfusion, and on the critical list.

Pembun. Pembun, Pembun. There was no escaping him: no matter where your thoughts led you, Pembun popped up at the end of the trail, as if you were Roger trying to get out of the Space Thing's dreadful garden.

Pembun had been right again; Pembun was always right. They had triggered some post-hypnotic command in Cassina's mind, and Cassina, twitching to the tug of that string, had done his best to kill himself.

"It seems to me," Pembun had said that afternoon, "that the main question is—w'y did Colonel Cassina try so 'ard to get to the Rithch w'en 'e found out you were after 'im? 'E 'ad a command to do it, of course, but w'y? Not jus' to warn the Rithch, becawse 'e didn' get enough warning that way to do 'im any good, an' besides, if it was only that, w'y did the Rithch try to kill Cassina?"

"All right," Spangler had said, keeping his voice level with difficulty. "What's your explanation, Mr. Pembun?"

"Well, the Rithch mus' 'ave left some information buried in Cassina's subconscious that 'e didn' want us to find. I 'ad an idea that was it, and that's w'y I asked you not to tell Cassina the Rithch was dead—I thought 'e might 'ave been given another command, to commit suicide if the Rithch was discovered. I think we're lucky to 'ave Colonel Cassina alive today, Commissioner; I b'lieve 'e's the most important man in the Empire right now."

"That's a trifle strong," Spangler had said. "I won't deny that this buried information, whatever it is, must be valuable. But what makes you assume that it's crucial? Presumably, it's a record of the Rithian's espionage or sabotage activities…"

"Sabotage," Pembun had said quickly. "It couldn' be the other, Commissioner, becawse the Rithch wouldn' care that much if you found out something you already know. I b'lieve Cassina knows this: 'e knows w'ere the bombs are buried."

"Bombs!" Spangler had said after a moment. The idea was absurd. "They wouldn't be so stupid, Mr. Pembun. We have military installations on two hundred sixty planets, not to mention the fleet in space. We'd retaliate, man. It would be suicide for them to bomb us."

"You don' understand, Commissioner. They don' want to bomb Earth—if they did, there wouldn' 'ave been any need for the Rithch to leave a record of w'ere the bombs were. 'E'd simply set them with a time mechanism, and that would be that. We couldn' do a thing till after they went off. But 'e was the last one alive, an' 'e couldn' be sure 'e'd get back with 'is information, so 'e 'ad to leave a record. That only means one thing. The Rithi just want to be able to warn us: 'Leave us alone—or else.' "

Spangler's mind had worked furiously. It was terrifyingly possible; he could find no flaw in it. Suitably placed, a few score medium-sized disruption bombs would break a planet apart like a rotten apple. "Medium-sized" meant approximately six cubic centimeters; they would be easy to smuggle, easy to conceal, almost impossible to find. The only defense would be a radio-frequency screen over the whole planet; and if the enemy knew the precise locations of the bombs, even that defense would not work; a tight directional beam, accurately aimed, would get through and trigger the bombs. All it required was a race stubborn enough to say, "Leave us alone—or else"—and mean it. from what Pembun had said about the Rithians, they might well be such a race.

But Earth played the percentages. Earth took only calculated risks. Earth would have to succumb.

That chain of reasoning had taken only a fraction of a second. Spangler examined it, compared it with the known facts, and discarded it. He smiled.

"But, Mr. Pembun—we've got Cassina. It doesn't matter whether we get the information out of him or not; all we care about is that the Rithians aren't going to get it."

Pembun had looked absurdly mournful. "No, you're assuming that Cassina is the only one 'oo's got the information. I wish that was so, but I don' see 'ow it can be. Don' you see, giving it to Colonel Cassina was a mistake, becawse 'is mind is the obvious place for us to look. Now, I can see the Rithch making that mistake, deliberately, becawse it struck 'im so funny 'e couldn' resist it—but I can't see 'im making that mistake becawse 'e was stupid. I think Colonel Cassina was jus' an afterthought: 'e was feeling cocky, and 'e decided to plant the message one more time, right under your noses. I think 'e and 'is friends 'ad already planted it a 'undred or two 'undred times, 'owever many they 'ad time for. An' if it was me, I would 'ave picked interstellar travelers —agents for trading companies, executives who travel by spaceship a lot, visitors to Earth from other systems. I think that's w'at they did. If they did, it's practicly a mathematical certainty that their agents will eventually reach one of those people. You could keep up the embargo, not let anybody leave, but 'ow long would it take to process everybody 'oo might carry the message?"

"Years," Spangler had said curtly, staring at his desk-top.

"That's right. It could be done, and if you were lucky it might work. But it would kill Earth just as sure as blowing it up… We've got to find out what Colonel Cassina knows, Commissioner. There isn' any other way."

After that, the news about Cassina had come, almost as if it had been timed to underscore Pembun's words. Then the second and more painful interview with Keith-Ingram. Then Spangler had turned to some of the routine matters that had been filling his in-box all day, and quite suddenly it had been quitting time.

Spangler had started to leave, but had stopped at the door, turned to look at the silent, comforting walls, turned around and sat down at his desk again. Acting on an impulse he could hardly explain, he had called Joanna and begged off taking her to dinner. He had been sitting there, hardly moving, ever since.

He pressed the stud of his thumb-watch. Twenty-one-eighteen and one quarter."

Three hours; and he had had no dinner. There was a sickish taste in his mouth, and he felt a little light-headed, but not at all hungry.

He thumbed open the revolving front of the desk, took out a dispenser vial of pick-me-ups, and swallowed one moodily.

It came down to this, Spangler thought slowly. They had been very nearly beaten; except for one man—Pembun—they would have been beaten. And that was all wrong.

Pembun was uncouth, ill-educated, unmannered. His methods were the merest improvisation. He had intelligence, one was forced to admit, but it was crude, untutored and undirected. Yet he got results.

Why?

It was possible to explain all the events of the past two days simply by saying that Pembun had happened to possess special knowledge, not available to Security, which had happened to be just the knowledge needed. But that was an evasion. The knowledge was not "special"; it was knowledge Earth should have had, and had tried to get, and had failed to get.

Again, why?

It seemed to Spangler that since Pembun's arrival the universe had slowly, almost imperceptibly turned over until it was upside down. And yet nothing had changed. Pembun was the same; so were Spangler and the rest of the world he knew. It was a little like one of those optical illusions that you got in Primary Camouflage—a series of cubes that formed a flight of stairs going upward; and then you blinked, and the cubes were hollow, or the stairs were hanging upside down. Or like the other kind, the silhouettes of two men, with converging perspective lines at the top and bottom: you thought one man was much taller, but when you measured them you found that both were the same—or even that the one that had seemed smaller was larger than the other…

Spangler swore. He had been on the point, he realized, of getting up, taking a scooter to G-level, Suite 111, and humbly asking Pembun to explain to him why the sun now revolved around the Earth, black was white, and great acorns from little oak trees grew.

He picked up a memocube and flung it violently onto the desk again.

The gesture gave him no relief; the feeling of rebellion passed; depression and bewilderment remained.

Like a moth to the flame—like Mohammed to the mountain —Spangler went to Pembun.

This time the door was closed.

After the space of three heartbeats, the scooter moved off silently down the way he had come, lights winking on ahead of it in the deserted corridor and fading when it passed. It turned the corner at Upsilon and disappeared, heading for the invisible lategoer who had signaled it.

Silence.

Down the corridor for five meters in either direction, glareless overhead lights showed Spangler every detail of the satin-finished walls, the mathematical lines of doors and maintenance entrances, the almost invisible foot-traces that, sometime during the night, would be vibrated into molecular dust and then gulped by suction tubes. Beyond was nothing but darkness. Far away, a tiny dot of light flared for an instant, like a shooting star, as someone crossed the corridor.

Spangler had an instant's vision of what it would be like if the whole thing were to stop: the miles of empty corridors, the darkness, the drifting dust, the slow invasion of insects. The dead weight of the Hill, bearing invisibly down upon you, the terrible, unsentient weight of a corpse.

Swallowing bile, he put his hand over the doorplate.

There was a long pause before the door slid open. Pembun, in underblouse and pantaloons, blinked at him as if he had been asleep. "Oh—Commissioner Spangler. Come awn in."

Spangler said hesitantly, "I'm disturbing you, I'm afraid. It isn't anything urgent; I'll talk with you tomorrow."

"No, please do come in, Commissioner. I'm glad you came. I was getting a little morbid, sitting 'ere by myself."

He closed the door behind Spangler. "Drink? I've still got 'alf the w'iskey left, and all the soda."

The thought of a drink made Spangler's stomach crawl. He refused it and sat down.

On the table beside the recliner were several sheets of paper and an ornate old-fashioned electro-pen.

"I was jus' writing a letter to my wife," Pembun said, following his glance. "Or trying to." He smiled. "I can't tell 'er anything important without violating security, and I know I'll prob'ly get back to Ganymede before a letter would, after the embargo is lifted, any'ow, so there rilly wasn' much sense to it. It was jus' something to do."

Spangler nodded. "It's a pity we can't let you leave the Hill just now. But there's an amusement section right here, you know—cinemas, autochess, dream rooms, baths—"

Pembun shook his head, still smiling. "I wouldn' take any pleasure in those things, Commissioner."

His tone, it seemed to Spangler, was half regretful, half indulgent. No doubt they had other, more vigorous pleasures on Manhaven. Narcotics and mixed bathing would seem to them effete or incomprehensible.

Without knowing what he was about to say, he blurted, "Tell me truthfully, Pembun—do you despise us?"

Pembun's eyes widened slightly, then narrowed, and his whole face subtly congealed. "I try not to," he said quietly. "It's too easy. Did you come 'ere to ask me that, Commissioner?"

Spangler leaned forward, elbows on knees, clasping his hands together, "I think I did," he said. "Forgive my rudeness, Pembun, but I really want to know. What's wrong with us, in your view? What would you change, if you could?"

Pembun said carefully, "W'at would you say was your motive for asking that, Commissioner?"

Spangler glanced up. From this angle, Pembun looked somehow larger, more impressive. Spangler stared at him in a kind of rapture of discovery: the man's face was neither ugly nor ludicrous. The eyes were steady and alive with intelligence; the wide mouth was firm. Even the outsize ears, the heavy cheeks, only gave the face added strength and a curious dignity.

He said, "I want information. I've misjudged you grossly— and I apologize, but that's not enough. I feel that there must be something wrong, with my basic assumptions, with the Empire. I want to know why we failed in the Rithian affair, and you succeeded. I think you can help me, if you will."

He waited.

Pembun said slowly, "Commissioner, I think you 'ave another motive, w'ether you realize it consciously or not. Let me tell it to you, and see if you agree. Did you ever 'ear of pecking precedence in 'ens?"

"No," said Spangler. "By the way call me Spangler, or Thorne, won't you?"

"All right—Thorne. You can cawl me Jawj, if you like. Now, about the 'ens. Say there are twelve in a yard. If you watch them, you'll find out that they 'ave a rigid social 'ierarchy. 'En A gets to peck all the others, 'en B pecks all the others but A, C pecks all but A and B, and so on down to 'en L, 'oo gets pecked by everybody and can't peck anybody back."

"Yes," said Spangler, "I see."

Pembun went on woodenly, "You're 'en B or C in the same kind of a system. There are one or two superiors that lord it over you and you do the same to the rest. Now, usually w'en anybody new comes into the yard, you know right away w'ether it's someone 'oo pecks you or gets pecked. But I'm a different case. I'm a different breed of 'en, and I don't rilly belong in your yard at all, so you try not to peck me excep' w'en I provoke you; it would lower your dignity. That's until you suddenly find that I'm pecking you. Now you've got to fit me into the system above yourself, becawse all this pecking wouldn' be endurable if you got it from both directions. So you came 'ere to say, 'I know you're 'igher in the scale than me, so it's all right. Go a'ead—peck me.' " Spangler stared at him in silence. He was interested to observe that although he felt humiliated, the emotion was not actually unpleasant. It's a species of purge, he thought. It's good for us all to be taken down a peg now and then. "What's more," Pembun said, watching him, "you enjoy it. It's a pleasure to you to kowtow to somebody you think is stronger, especially w'en your status and seniority aren't in any danger. Isn' that true?"

"I won't say you're wrong," Spangler answered, trying to be honest. "I've never heard it expressed just that way before, but it's certainly true that I'm conditioned to accept and exert authority—and you're quite right, I enjoy both acts. It's a necessary state of mind in my profession, or so I've always believed. I suppose it isn't very pretty, looked at objectively."

Pembun started to reach for the whiskey decanter, then drew his hand back. He looked at Spangler with a wry smile. "Wat you don' realize," he said, "is that I get no pleasure out of it. This may be 'ard for you to understand, but it's no fun for me to beat a man 'oo's not trying to 'it me back. This 'ole conversation 'as been unpleasant to me, but I couldn' avoid it. You put me in a position w'ere no matter w'at I said, even if I rifused to talk to you at all, I'd be doing w'at you wanted. And this is the funny part, Commissioner— in making me 'urt your self-esteem, you've 'urt mine twice as bad. I expec' I'll 'ave a bad taste in my mouth for days."

Spangler stood up slowly. He took two deep breaths, but his sudden anger did not subside; it grew. He said carefully, "I don't need to have a mountain fall on me. That's a quaint expression we have, Mr. Pembun—it means that one clear and studied insult is enough."

Suddenly Pembun was just what he had seemed in the beginning: an irritating, dirty-faced, ugly little beast of a colonial. Pembun said, "You see, now you're angry. That's becawse I wouldn' play the pecking game with you."

Spangler said furiously, "Mr. Pembun, I didn't come here for insults, or for barnyard psychology either. I came to ask you for information. If you are so far lost to common civility—" The sentence slipped out of his grasp; he started again: "Perhaps I had better remind you that I'm empowered to demand your help as an official of the Empire."

Pembun said, unruffled, "I'm 'ere to 'elp if I can, Commissioner. W'at was it you wanted, exactly?"

"I asked you," said Spangler, "to tell me what, in your opinion, were the causes of Security and War Department failure in the Rithian case." As Pembun started to speak, he cut in: "Put your remarks on a spool, and have it on my desk in the morning." His voice sounded unnaturally loud in his own ears; it occurred to him with a shock that he had been shouting.

Pembun shook his head sadly, reprovingly. "I'll be glad to— if you put your request in writing, Commissioner."

Spangler clenched his jaw. "You'll get it tomorrow," he said. He turned, opened the door and strode away down the empty corridor. He did not stop to signal for a scooter until he had turned the corner, and Pembun's doorway was out of sight.

He found Joanna in the tower room, lying against a section of the couch that was elevated to form a backrest. The room was filled, choked to bursting by a male voice shouting incomprehensible syllables against a strident orchestral background. Spangler's brain struggled futilely with the words for an instant, then rejected them in disgust. The recording was one of Joanna's period collection, sung in one of the dead languages. German; full of long vowels and fruity sibilants.

She waved her hand over the control box, and the volume diminished to a bearable level. She stood up and came to meet him.

"I thought you sounded upset when you called," she said, kissing him. "Sit here. Put your feet up. Have you had anything to eat?"

"No," said Spangler. "I couldn't; I'm too tired for food."

"I'll have something up. You needn't eat it if you don't want to."

"Fine," he said with an effort.

She dialed the antique food-selector at the side of the couch, then came to sit beside him.

The voice was still shouting, but as if it were a long distance off. It rose to a crescendo, there was a dying gasp from the orchestra, a moment's pause, and then another song began.

"Why don't you have that translated?" he asked irritably.

"I don't know; I rather like it as it is. Shall I turn it off?"

"That's not the point," said Spangler with controlled impatience. "You like it as it is—why? Because it's incomprehensible? Is that a sane reason?"

The food-selector's light glowed. Joanna opened the hopper, took out a tube of broth and a sandwich loaf, and put them on the table at Spangler's elbow.

"What are you really angry about, Thorne?" she asked quietly.

"I'll tell you," said Spangler, sitting erect. The words spilled out of him, beyond his control. "Do you think it isn't obvious to me, and to everyone else who knows you, what you're doing to yourself with this morbid obsession? Do you think it's pleasant for me to sit here and watch you wallowing in the past, like a dog in carrion, because you're afraid of anything that hasn't been safely buried for five hundred years?"

Her eyes widened with shock, and Spangler felt an answering wave of pure joy. This was what he had come here to do, he realized, though he hadn't known it before. It was what he should have done long ago. She blushed furiously from forehead to breast, then turned ivory-pale.

"Stop it," she said in a tight voice.

"I won't stop," Spangler said, biting the words. "Look at yourself. You're half-alive, half a woman. You let just enough of yourself live to do your work, and answer when you're spoken to, and respond to your lover. The rest is dead and covered with dust. I can taste it when I kiss you. How do you think I feel, wanting you, knowing that you're out of my reach—not because…"

She got up and started toward the door. Spangler reached her in one stride, pushed her backward onto the couch and held her there with his whole weight.

"… not because you belong to anyone else, or ever will, but because you're too timid, too selfish, too wrapped up in yourself ever to belong to anybody?"

She struggled ineffectively. Her eyes were unfocused and glazed with tears; her whole body was trembling.

Spangler tore open her gown, pulled it away from her body. "Go ahead, look at yourself! You're a woman, a living human being, not a mummy. Why is that so hateful? Do you get any pleasure from killing yourself and everything you touch?" He shook her. "Answer me!"

She gasped, "I can't…"

"What can't you? You can feel, you can speak, you can do anything a normal human being can do, but you won't. You wouldn't leave that smug little shell of yours to save a life. You wouldn't leave it to save the Empire—not even to save yourself."

"Let me go."

"You're not sick, you're not afraid, you're just selfish. Cold and selfish. Everything for Joanna, and let the rest of the universe go hang!"

"Let me go."

Her trembling had stopped; she was still breathing hard, but her pale lips were firm. She raised her lids and looked at him squarely, without blinking.

Spangler raised his open right hand and struck her in the face. Her head bobbed. She looked at him incredulously, and her mouth opened.

Spangler hit her again. At the third blow, the tears started again. Her face crumpled suddenly and a series of short, animal sounds came out of her. At the fourth, she stopped trying to turn her head aside. Her body was limp, her eyes closed and without expression. Her sobs were as mechanical and meaningless as a fit of the hiccoughs.

Spangler rolled away from her, stood up and went to the chair. He felt purged and empty. There was a heavy tiredness in his limbs; he could feel his heart beating slowly and strongly. He said tonelessly, "You can get up now. I won't hit you again."

After a moment she sat up, spine curved, head hanging. When she got to her feet and turned toward the bathroom door, Spangler followed and stepped in front of her, grasping her arms.

"Listen to me," he said. "You're going to marry me, and we're going to be happy. Do you understand that?"

She looked up at him without interest.

"You fool," she said.

She stood motionless until he let her go, and then moved without haste through the doorway. The door closed behind her, and Spangler heard the lock click.