The Last Hurrah of the Golden Horde Page 6

  “A madman?” said ben Ezra, his eyes narrowing to slits.

  “What a madman!” exclaimed the captain. “To top it all off… why do you know what, Jacob? He thought he had the secret of Overdrive as well!”

  “Really,” said ben Ezra, perhaps a shade too dryly.

  “I swear, I expected him to pull the Philosopher’s Stone itself out of his pocket!” laughed Peter Reed.

  “Indeed.”

  “Where is this Dr. Ching?” said David Steen.

  Ben Ezra flashed him a dirty look.

  “Ah, you know as well as I do, Jacob, don’t you? A one in a million accident, but it did happen. The automatics in his Deep Sleep cubicle malfunctioned. He died of old age on the last hop.”

  “Died?” said ben Ezra slowly.

  “I assure you Jacob, there was no lapse in safety procedures, and we are fully covered.”

  “To be sure,” said ben Ezra. “To be sure.” His eyes were even more unreadable than usual.

  “Do you by any chance have the body?” he said.

  “Yes,” replied Reed. “It’s still in the cubicle.”

  “Good. Mr. Ching had relations on Galdwin, which… er… is our next stop. We will take the body to them. David, get a detail.”

  “But, sir—”

  “David!”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “A most unfortunate accident, Peter,” said ben Ezra.

  “Yes.”

  “But you say the man was mad anyway,” said ben Ezra, bringing his face close to Reed’s.

  Reed stared back. “Very mad,” he said evenly.

  “You are quite sure?” said ben Ezra.

  Reed drummed his fingers nervously on the desk. Ben Ezra’s glance fell to Reed’s hand, for a short moment. Reed’s gaze followed. Then they were staring in each other’s eyes again.

  “Quite sure,” said Peter Reed.

  “I see,” said Jacob ben Ezra. The corners of his mouth curled upward in the slightest suggestion of a grin.

  Reed’s mouth went dry.

  “Well, Peter,” said ben Ezra, suddenly and unexpectedly convivial, “it’s been nice meeting you again. Very nice. But I really must be going.”

  “Sorry to see you leave so soon,” said Reed.

  “I’ll bet you are!” said ben Ezra with a little laugh.

  He walked to the door and opened it.

  “Good-by, Peter,” he said.

  “Good-by, Jacob.”

  As he stepped through the doorway, the admiral swiveled his neck to face Reed.

  “Perhaps,” he said dryly, “I’ll be seeing you a lot sooner than you think I think.” Then he was gone.

  “What in space did he mean by that, Dad… sir?” asked Roger Reed.

  The captain stared at the empty doorway.

  “I think I know,” he said, “but I’m not sure I want to know.”

  Peter Reed floated by the viewport, watching ben Ezra’s ship break orbit.

  He’s really going, Reed thought. But he did not feel like congratulating himself.

  He knew. He had to know. Jacob would never have swallowed a cock-and-bull story like that unless he wanted to. Well, he’s got Ching’s body, and he’ll take it back to Earth, and that’ll be the end of it. The Overdrive is mine.

  But what, he thought, am I going to do with it? The safe thing would be to destroy the plans… or—

  It’d take time and money to build it. The Outward Bound could never do it alone, but there are planets out here on the outer ring who’d do the work, and not ask too many questions.

  Or there’s Maxwell. Horvath is dead, but there’s never a dearth of his kind. The Overdrive would bring a fantastic price from someone like that. But what would he do with it? Rule the Galaxy?

  The Galaxy… who can say anything about the Galaxy? Man has seen such a small piece of it. Naturally, the chance of running into another intelligent race has been nil, as long as we were confined to such a small volume of space. But now—What exists in the center?

  Without realizing it, Peter Reed had made his decision.

  Ching had died for the Overdrive, thought Reed. Manny’s given seven years of his life for it, seven lonely years.

  And Jacob—Jacob took the biggest chance of his career to give Man the Galaxy.

  Captain Reed sighed resignedly. One doesn’t go in for this kind of life unless one is something of a romantic, he thought, no matter what I may say about profits.

  What have all the profits been for? Just to keep the Outward Bound in space. Why stay in space? What logical answer is there?

  Reed remembered a quotation from a man thousands of years dead, so long his name had been forgotten.

  “Why climb mountains?” they had asked the mountaineer.

  “Because they are there,” he had said.

  Why go to the stars? Because they are there. It was enough.

  Manny understood that. In a way, perhaps Ching understood it, too.

  And Jacob had risked a thousand-year career so that Man could have the Galaxy. Because it was there.

  And can I do less, thought Peter Reed. A few hundred light-years of space is no substitute for the Universe.

  Roger may never be captain of the Outward Bound. The twilight of the tradeships has already begun—

  Reed looked sadly out the ’port at ben Ezra’s receding ship. Good-by, Jacob, he thought, good-by to a way of life a thousand years old.

  But Man must have the Overdrive.

  Jacob ben Ezra watched the green disk of Toehold slowly recede. Hidden on the other side of the planet now, was the Outward Bound.

  By now, he thought, Peter will have decided to build an Overdrive.

  He laughed softly to himself. We old foxes understand each other. We both have our excuses—Peter his profits, me my duty.

  But when it comes down to it, we’re both in space for the same reason, and neither of us can put it into words.

  So Earth will be satisfied. They’ll have the body of poor Ching. Little will they know, little will they know, until it’s too late.

  There are planets out here that will ask few questions. Peter has the force field to sell, and for that, he can get his Overdrive built. And after that—

  After that, in the short run, who knows? Ben Ezra shifted his gaze to the vast, multi-colored cloud of stars that is the center of the Galaxy.

  In the short run, who knows, he thought. Who cares? But in the long run—in the long run, Man will have the Galaxy, perhaps not to himself, certainly not to himself, but have it he will.

  The admiral put out his half-finished cigarette. I’ve been in this business so long, that I’m a legend, he thought. How ironic that the thing I can be most proud of is something that, once the Overdrive is a reality, will be called a failure.

  He looked at the cloud of stars. They seemed to be looking right back. Come on, they seemed to say, we’ve been waiting.

  A failure—Maybe you could call it that—

  He grinned at the far glow of the Center.

  “Coming!” he said.

  A Child of Mind

  Doug Kelton awoke in the middle of the night with the leaf-branches creaking in the forest like the rigging of a great sailing ship; with the sweet modulated whistles of the piperlizards saluting the twin moons; with a landcroc cooing somewhere deeper within the forest.

  He stretched the muscles of his naked body minutely, one by one, careful not to awaken the sleeping woman whose limbs were intertwined with his in the hammock. It was a time for aloneness.

  He felt perfect breasts press and relax, press and relax against his chest with the slow rhythm of her untroubled breathing. He brushed long silky strands of her hair from his face and inhaled the fragrance of her.

  It was a light and perfumy smell, too perfect, too clean, too… antiseptic. A woman should not smell like that, a woman did not really smell like that, not after a night of lovemaking, not under less alien skies…

  He wondered how Blair’s woman smelled, and D
exter’s. He smirked wryly to himself. If he was any judge of men, Blair’s woman would reek of fear and sweat mixed with crude perfume.

  Dexter’s woman would not smell at all.

  Kelton found those dark, confused thoughts creeping up on him again, as he had every night for the past week or so. But there was something different about this night—he felt a decision forcing its way to the surface of his troubled mind. It was a decision he had tried so hard to avoid…

  Don’t be a fool! he told himself. You’ve got everything here a man could ever want. A garden of a planet, warm, lush, full of food, without any really dangerous lifeforms…

  Nevertheless, he found his mind forming the cold steel image of the ship.

  Idiot! The woman of your dreams, the perfect mate, the ideal lover…

  Dexter and Blair are happy! They don’t have any trouble sleeping, they’ve got exactly what they want. They…

  He imagined them with their women in the nearby huts, and his face soured. What had happened to Blair and Dexter was part of why he couldn’t sleep.

  Blair beat his woman at night. She, of course, loved it. She could not help loving it, just as she could not help enjoying being his slave during the day; serving him breakfast in his hammock in the morning; washing him; dressing him, shaving him and combing his hair; washing his feet at night and drying them using her own blond hair as a towel. Then the daily beating, and to bed. Kelton did not want to think of what Blair did to his woman then.

  But he knew that she loved it, as she loved Blair. She loved every minute of it, every blow, every stupid petty indignity. She could not help loving it.

  Blair, he could at least dimly understand. To him a woman was merely an animal, something to inflict his will upon to the greatest extent possible—not an uncommon attitude. The lower he made his woman, the higher he made himself. Blair was no monster. On Earth, under normal conditions, with a real woman, he would be held in reasonable check by the force of her personality. But here…

  Dexter was something else again.

  Dexter was regressing, and it was horrible to watch. Dexter’s woman woke him in the morning, gently but firmly, pushed him lovingly out of bed, made sure he washed, shaved and brushed his teeth, fed him a nutritious, well-balanced breakfast, a sensible light lunch and an over-indulgent supper. She made sure he got to bed at a reasonable hour and kept him from using the ship’s alcohol and tobacco supply.

  The thought of the two of them in bed made Kelton bilious. In a very real sense, Dexter was sleeping with the image of his mother. Kelton found it nauseating. He continually had the urge to kick Dexter’s woman’s teeth down her mealy-mouthed throat.

  But, of course, Dexter loved every minute of it.

  Kelton felt the woman stir sinuously in her sleep against him. It sent a tremor of pleasure shivering down his spine. Even in her sleep, she knew and played upon every nerve in his body. Making love with her was like playing two-part harmony with a virtuoso; like eating a custom-ordered meal from the finest robot-chef in the Galaxy. She really did know him better than he knew himself. And she loved him quite literally with every fibre of her being.

  It would be madness to leave her.

  He stroked the small of her back moodily, and she quivered delightfully in her sleep.

  It was greater madness to stay.

  Even though the planet appeared to be a garden of a world, a real jackpot planet, they had played it by the book. Kelton landed the ship in a large clearing in a forest well south of the equator on the largest continent. Before leaving the ship, they enclosed it in a force-fence, and Blair did a complete atmospheric analysis, while Kelton checked the air for micro-organisms. The ship’s robot was sent to scout the area for possible dangerous animals.

  There was a saying among Survey men: “Planets are like women. It’s not the ugly ones that are dangerous.” Lathrop III had been a beautiful planet, and what had eventually happened there was one of the reasons that all Survey ships were now equipped with twenty “Planet Killers”—missiles with hundred-megaton cobalt and sodium jacketed warheads, the “dirtiest” bombs that man made.

  But the air checked out perfect, the all-purpose antibiotics and viricides were more than a match for the local micro-organisms, the robot ran into no trouble, and so, on the second day, they went outside.

  There were several good reasons why a preliminary Survey team was always made up of three men. First of all, there were three basic specialties needed to make a preliminary evaluation of a planet: geology, ecology and xenology.

  But more important, three was a stable number. There would always be a clear majority on any decision. No cliques could form, since the largest possible clique was two, and two was already a majority.

  This planet showed no signs of intelligent life, so Blair, the team xenologist, could take it easy. Kelton, the ecologist, and Dexter, the geologist, would make the reports that would determine whether this planet was worth a full-scale evaluation for colonization.

  Kelton’s first reaction to the planet was a happy sigh. The atmosphere had a slightly higher oxygen content than Earth’s—just enough to make you feel great, without really making you giddy. It smelled clean and fragrant, the smell of growing things uncontaminated by smog, stale hydrocarbons, or any of the other inevitable atmospheric by-products of an industrial civilization.

  Kelton felt like a kid in the country.

  “Jackpot planet,” said Larry Blair. “Ten thousand credit bonus.”

  “Don’t you ever think of anything but money?” snapped Curt Dexter.

  Blair leered at him. “There’s only one other thing that’s worth thinking about,” he said, “and when you’re cooped up in a Survey ship for six months, it isn’t very healthy to dwell on that”

  Dexter’s answer was a scowl. Under ordinary circumstances, Blair and Dexter would probably get along pretty well. But when three men are isolated together for months on end, little things become big things, and friction is inevitable.

  But all things considered, Kelton thought, it was a well-balanced team, and a planet like this was just the thing to loosen things up.

  Kelton laughed. “Don’t count your credits before they’re catched, Larry. Just because there are no natives to throw the bull at doesn’t mean that this planet’s already been evaluated. Some of us have to work for a living.”

  That seemed to break the tension. Even Dexter was smiling.

  “Okay, peasants,” Blair said. “Curt, you dig for gold, and Doug can dig the animals. I’ll supervise.”

  The preliminary work went quite smoothly. Dexter took sample borings of the soil and substrata. Kelton collected specimens and took pictures. Blair helped out some.

  The geological report was favorable. The planet’s crust contained all the necessary metals for a potential colony’s industrial base. Since the planet was rather young, there would be a shortage of fossil fuels, but radioactives were plentiful and coal and oil were far from necessities.

  An ecological report, though, must be more detailed. It had been easy enough to determine that the biochemistry of the planet was close enough to Earth’s so that the colonists would not have to import a Terran ecology. The local forms of life were quite edible.

  But an ecologist must look for more subtle things. Survey records were full of reports on planets with Terrestrial biochemistry that were nevertheless marked off limits. Predators might be too efficient and too big, the local ecologies might be in such delicate balance that a colony would trigger planetwide catastrophe. On some planets, there were key organisms that, while deadly to humans, were also absolutely essential to the planet’s food chains and could not be eliminated without destroying the planet’s bioforms.

  There didn’t seem to be anything like that here, but…

  Kelton checked the slides in the two microscopes again. It could not be. Yet there it was.

  Two identical cell sections from two seemingly identical female piperlizards, the little insect-eaters which whistl
ed so sweetly at night.

  The two lizards were identical, organ for organ.

  Yet the cells were different.

  The differences were subtle, but under a good microscope, they were obvious. Two females of the same species, outwardly identical. But made up of two different kinds of protoplasm.

  Just like the insects.

  Just like the landcrocs.

  Just like every other organism on the planet that he had studied which was sexually differentiated.

  Kelton scratched his head. Functionally speaking, the higher forms had the usual two sexes. But on a cellular level, there was… a third sex?

  That wasn’t the answer either. The males and… call it “female A”, had identical cellular structure. But “female B” was different. The same species, but different protoplasm.

  He grunted unhappily. He knew that it would be impossible to make a positive report until he figured it out. It was far too large an unknown factor. More work was needed. Much more work. He’d have to do a statistical study. What percentage of the females were “type A” and what percentage “type B”?

  More important, what did it mean?

  There did seem to be a pattern… The cells of the males and “female As” differed among the various species; that was to be expected.

  But the “female Bs” of all species had the same cell structure and the same protoplasm.

  It was as if they were different phases in the life cycle of the same organism…

  An organism that passed through reptile, insect and mammal stages? An organism that at various stages mimicked every other organism on the planet?

  It was beginning to rain. The fat drops of water pinged flatly on the great leafbranches that formed the roof and walls of the hut. It was a soft, gentle rain, peaceful, like most everything else on this planet.

  Kelton sighed. It would be so easy to spend the rest of my life here, he thought. He felt the reassuring warmth of the woman in his arms. When you come right down to it, what chance would I ever have of finding another woman like her?