The Search for Zei

CHAPTER I

Dirk Barnevelt hunched his mooselike form over his typewriter and wrote:

Twenty-five degrees north of the equator on the planet Krishna lies the Banjao Sea, the largest body of water on this planet. And in this Sea is found the Sunqar, home of legend and mystery.

Here under the scorching rays of the hot high sun, the beaked galleys of Dur and the tubby roundships of Jaz-murian slowly rot in the unbreakable grip of a vast floating continent of the terpahla sea vine. Even the violent storms of the Krishnan sub-tropics no more than ruffle the surface of this immense floating swamp— which, however, sometimes heaves and bubbles with the terrible sea life of the planet, such as the gvam or harpooner.

Barnevelt sat back to wonder: For a couple of years he'd been writing about the places that Igor Shtain explored; would he ever see any of them? If his mother died… But that was unlikely. With modern geriatrics she'd be good for another century. He still had a great-great-grandfather alive in the Netherlands. Besides, he thought guiltily, that was no way to think about one's mother. He resumed:

Nothing, once caught in this web of weed, can escape unless it can fly like the aqebats that wing over from the mainland to prey on the smaller sea life of the Sunqar. Here time means nothing; nothing exists save silence and heat and the stench of the strangling vine.

At least, thought Barnevelt, this hack writing was better than trying—as he had once tried—to ram the glories of English literature down the unwilling throats of rural adolescents with only two interests: sex, and escape from the toils of the public school system.

To the heart of this forbidding place Igor Shtain, most celebrated of living explorers, plans to penetrate on his forthcoming Krishnan expedition, to clear up once and for all the sinister rumors that for years have issued from this undiscovered country.

Barnevelt gazed into space, like a moose that has heard the mating cry of its kind, while waiting for the next sentence to form. A hell of a thing if Shtain never showed up to carry out his expedition! He, Dirk Barnevelt, couldn't release this publicity puff until the missing explorer was found.

Well, you may say, why cannot Shtain simply ask the skipper of a spaceship to set him down near the Sea, and fly over it in his helicopter, cameras whirring and guns ready? Because Krishna is a Class H planet, and the Interplanetary Council regulations forbid visitors from other planets to reveal mechanical devices and inventions to its egg-laying but human-looking natives, who are deemed on one hand too backward and warlike to be trusted with such things, and on the other intelligent enough to take advantage of them.

So there will be no helicopter, no guns. Dr. Shtain will have to do it the hard way. But how? For the Sunqar can neither be walked over nor sailed through…

Barnevelt jumped like a tripped mousetrap as Mrs. Fisch-man said over his shoulder: "Time for the meeting, Dirk."

"What meeting?"

Mrs. Fischman, the secretary of Igor Shtain, Ltd., rolled her eyes up as she always did when Barnevelt showed his balmier side. "The directors. They want you."

He followed her into the board room, bracing himself for unpleasant surprises like a man summoned to hear the verdict of a court-martial. The three directors of Igor Shtain, Ltd. were present: Stewart Laing, who was also vice-president and business manager; the banker Olaf Thorpe; and Panagopoulos, also treasurer. Mrs. Fischman, the secretary, completed the list of executives since Shtain had disappeared.

Even though the firm's president was missing, his likeness looked out at them from the colored bathygraph on the wall: a square-jawed brick-red face seamed with many small wrinkles; coldly glittering china-blue eyes; a close-cut brush of coppery hair speckled with gray.

On the unofficial side there were, besides Barnevelt, the little Dionysio Perez the photographer, the large brown George Tangaloa the xenologist, and Grant Marlowe the actor, looking much like the picture on the wall even without the makeup he wore when impersonating Shtain on the lecture platform.

"What ho, ghost!" said Tangaloa, grinning.

Barnevelt smiled feebly and slouched into the remaining chair. Though he, like the others, was a stockholder in the company, his holdings were so small that he, a minnow among muskellunges, did not speak with any authority. However, this was not a formal directors' or stockholders' meeting, but an informal assembly of worried specialists who cooperated to put before the public that synthetic entity known as "Igor Shtain," of which the real Shtain was only a part—albeit the most important part.

"Well, Stu?" said Marlowe, lighting his pipe.

Laing said: "No news of the Old Man."

Mrs. Fischman rasped: "Those damn detectives! Hundreds of bucks a day for weeks, and not one lousy thing do they find. I bet they never did anything but trail wayward husbands before we hired them."

"Oh, no," said Laing. "Ugolini has fine references."

"Anyway," she continued, "if we don't get going, that contract with Cosmic Features won't be worth a last year's snowball."

Laing said: "Ugolini does have a theory that the Old Man has been taken to Krishna."

"How does he figure?" said Marlowe, puffing.

"Igor was hoping to clear up those rumors about a connection between the Sunqar and the janru racket. The Division of Investigation hasn't been able to get a man in there— or rather those they sent never came out. So the W.D.I, hoped that the Old Man, as a private citizen, could learn something. Well, thanks to Dirk, Igor gets plenty of publicity about his safari. Now, let's suppose the main connection of the janru ring are on Earth because of the effect of the stuff on human beings."

(Perez looked as if he were going to cry.)

Laing continued: "Then why shouldn't the ring, hearing of this expedition, decide to put the Old Man on ice?"

Barnevelt cleared his throat, his long equine face taking on the embarrassed look it always assumed before his superiors. "How d'you know they haven't murdered him? I've often wanted to myself."

"We don't, but it's not easy to dispose of a body completely, and there's no trace of his body on Earth."

Tangaloa's organ-bass voice broke in: "Blokes have been smuggled past the Viagens Interplanetarias security measures before."

"I know," said Laing. "However, we've got private, city, state, national, and international police looking for Igor, and that's all we can do in that direction. Our immediate concern is that contract. All I can see is for some of us to go to Krishna and carry out Igor's plans. Get the 50,000 meters of film—a quarter of it in the Sunqar—turn it over to Cosmic, and by then we shall know if the firm's going to continue. If Shtain's on Krishna, rescue him if possible."

Laing's sharp eyes swept the room. All nodded.

"So," he continued, "the next question is: Who?"

Most of those present looked away, assuming the detached air of people who didn't work there at all, but had just dropped in for a visit.

George Tangaloa patted his paunch. "Dio and I can do it."

Perez jumped up. "I no go! I no go until thees trouble with my wife is feexed. That damn drug, thees damn woman use on me, not my fault…"

"Yes, yes," interrupted Laing. "We know about your trouble, Dio, but we can't send one man alone."

Tangaloa yawned. "I presume I could manage by myself. Dio has checked me out on the Hayashi camera."

Mrs. Fischman said: "If we send George alone we won't get enough film to wrap around your finger. He'll settle down the first place they got good steaks and beer and…"

"Why Ruth!" said Tangaloa with ostentatious innocence. "Are you insinuating I'm indolent?"

"Damn right you're indolent," said Marlowe the actor. "Probably the laziest hunk of meat that ever came out of Samoa. You need somebody like Dirk to keep an eye on you…"

"Hey!" cried Barnevelt, shyness dropping from him like a discarded cloak. "Why me? Why not you? Matter of fact you not only look like Igor, you can even imitate that foul Russian accent of his. It is you who should gaw, my frand…"

Marlowe waved a hand. "I'm too old for roughing it, just a mass of flab, and I never had any training at that sort…"

"Neither have I! And you said yourself the other day I was an impractical intellectual, so who am I to clear the dark places and let in the law?"

"You can work the Hayashi, and you yacht, don't you?"

"Oh, fool! Only on a friend's boat. You don't think I own a yacht on my pay, do you? Of course if you wanted to raise it…"

Marlowe shrugged. "It's the experience that counts, not how you got it. And being brought up on a farm you know about the simple life."

"But we had electricity and running…"

"Furthermore, all of us have dependents except George and you."

"I've got my mother," said Barnevelt, his naturally ruddy face turning a lobsterish red. References to his rural background always embarrassed him; for, while he preferred city life, he had never gotten over the feeling that to these born city slickers he was a figure of fun.

"Bunk!" said the acid voice of Mrs. Fischman. "We know all about your old lady, Dirk. Best thing for you would be to get away from her apron-strings."

"Look here, I don't see what business…"

"We'll pay her your salary while you're gone, if you like, so she won't starve. And if you put it over there'll be enough dividend to get you out of those debts she got you into."

"Enough," added Marlowe, "so you'll be able to afford a fancy duplex apartment with an Oriental manservant."

Tangaloa put in: "Don't you think he'd get more fun out of a French maid?"

Barnevelt, now scarlet, shut up. It was always a mistake to bring up his mother. On one hand he felt he ought to defend her, while on the other he feared they were right. If only his father, the Dutchman, hadn't died while he was still a boy…

"Besides," Marlowe went on, "I know my limitations, and I shouldn't be any better at Igor's job than he was at mine in New Haven."

"What's this?" said Thorpe. "Don't think I know that story."

Laing explained: "You know Igor's the world's worst public speaker, so Grant takes his place on the platform, using his films, just as Dirk ghost-writes his books and articles. For emergencies we procured a little mechanical speaker that looks like a flower on the lapel and made recordings of some lectures, written by Dirk and spoken by Grant. Then we trained Igor to stand there moving his mouth in synchronism with the speech coming out of the speaker."

"And then?"

"Then two years ago Grant got sick, and Igor undertook the job with this gadget. But when he stood up and started the speaker, the thing had gotten out of adjustment and played the same line over and over: '… happy to be here… happy to be here… happy to be here…', Like that. It ended with Igor dancing on the gadget and howling Russian curses."

While Thorpe laughed, Laing turned to Barnevelt. "It's a lot to ask, Dirk, but there's no way out. Besides, if you're Igor's ghost, don't you want your body back?"

Tangaloa, grinning like a large Polynesian Billiken, sang: "Bring back, bring back, oh bring back my body to me, to me!"

All laughed save Barnevelt.

"No," he said with the exaggerated firmness of a man who feels his inner defenses beginning to crumble, "I can make a perfectly good living on Earth without Igor Shtain Limited-better than I'm making now…"

"Wait," said Laing. "There's more to it. I had a talk with Tsukung of the Division of Investigation, and they're really worried about the janru racket. You know what it did to Dio, and you read about the Polhemus murder. The extract is so powerful you can hide a hundred doses in a tooth-cavity. It's diluted thousands of times over, and finally appears in perfumes with names like nuit d'amour and moment d'extase. But with the janru added they really do what the names imply. A woman can squirt herself with the stuff, and as soon as a man gets a whiff he goes clean daft and she can make him jump through hoops as if he were under Osirian pseudohypnosis.

"But that's not all. It only works when a female uses it on a male, and the way the stuff's getting spread around, Tsukung's afraid the women will completely dominate the men of the world in a couple of decades."

"That wouldn't be so bad," said Mrs. Fischman. "I could use some on that nogoodnik husband of mine."

"So," continued Laing, "you can save the male half of the human race from a fate worse than death—or at least a fate like the one your mother's been inflicting on you. Isn't that worth while?"

"Come to think of it," said Marlowe, "are we sure Dirk's mother hasn't been using it on him?"

Barnevelt shook his head vigorously. "It's just that she got the psychological jump on me long ago. But what do I get out of this? I'm a peasant slave already."

"You'd get away from her," said Laing.

Tangaloa said: "You don't want to see the women enslave the men, the way you Westerners used to do to your women, do you?"

"It'll make a man of you," said Marlowe. "Anybody your age who's never been married needs something drastic."

"It'll give you real experience to write about," said Mrs. Fischman.

"Better get in your adventures now, while you're young and unattached," said Thorpe. "If I had your chance…"

"We'll raise your salary," said Panagopolos. "And with your expense-account on Krishna, you can…"

"Think of all the screwy animals you'll see," said Tangaloa. "You're crazy about queer beasts."

"And," said Laing, "it's not as though we were asking you to go to Mars and live among those oversized insects with an oxygen-mask on your face. The natives look almost human."

"In fact, the females…" said Tangaloa, making curving motions in the air with his hands.

"Oh, hell, I'll go," said Barnevelt at last, knowing that they'd talk him around in the end. Anyway, hadn't he promised himself an adventure like this years ago when he was a boy on the farm in Chautauqua County? Served him right.