JACK HOLLOWAY FOUND himself squinting, the orange sun full in
his eyes. He raised a hand to push his hat forward, then lowered it
to the controls to alter the pulse rate of the contragravity field
generators and lift the manipulator another hundred feet. For a
moment he sat, puffing on the short pipe that had yellowed the
corners of his white mustache, and looked down at the red rag tied
to a bush against the rock face of the gorge five hundred yards
away. He was smiling in anticipation.
“This’ll be a good one,” he told himself
aloud, in the manner of men who have long been their own and only
company. “I want to see this one go up.”
He always did. He could remember at least a thousand blast-shots
he had fired back along the years and on more planets than he could
name at the moment, including a few thermonuclears, but they were
all different and they were always something to watch, even a
little one like this. Flipping the switch, his thumb found the
discharger button and sent out a radio impulse; the red rag
vanished in an upsurge of smoke and dust that mounted out of the
gorge and turned to copper when the sunlight touched it. The big
manipulator, weightless on contragravity, rocked gently; falling
debris pelted the trees and splashed in the little stream.
He waited till the machine stabilized, then glided it down to
where he had ripped a gash in the cliff with the charge of
cataclysmite. Good shot: brought down a lot of sandstone, cracked
the vein of flint and hadn’t thrown it around too much. A lot
of big slabs were loose. Extending the forward claw-arms, he pulled
and tugged, and then used the underside grapples to pick up a chunk
and drop it on the flat ground between the cliff and the stream. He
dropped another chunk on it, breaking both of them, and then
another and another, until he had all he could work over for the
rest of the day. Then he set down, got the toolbox and the
long-handled contragravity lifter, and climbed to the ground where
he opened the box, put on gloves and an eyescreen and got out a
microray scanner and a vibrohammer.
The first chunk he cracked off had nothing in it; the scanner
gave the uninterrupted pattern of homogenous structure. Picking it
up with the lifter, he swung it and threw it into the stream. On
the fifteenth chunk, he got an interruption pattern that told him
that a sunstone—or something, probably something—was inside.
Some fifty million years ago, when the planet that had been
called Zarathustra (for the last twenty-five million) was young,
there had existed a marine life form, something like a jellyfish.
As these died, they had sunk into the sea-bottom ooze; sand had
covered the ooze and pressed it tighter and tighter, until it had
become glassy flint, and the entombed jellyfish little beans of
dense stone. Some of them, by some ancient biochemical quirk, were
intensely thermofluorescent; worn as gems, they glowed from the
wearer’s body heat.
On Terra or Baldur or Freya or Ishtar, a single cut of polished
sunstone was worth a small fortune. Even here, they brought
respectable prices from the Zarathustra Company’s gem buyers.
Keeping his point of expectation safely low, he got a smaller
vibrohammer from the toolbox and began chipping cautiously around
the foreign object, until the flint split open and revealed a
smooth yellow ellipsoid, half an inch long.
“Worth a thousand sols—if it’s worth
anything,” he commented. A deft tap here, another there, and
the yellow bean became loose from the flint. Picking it up, he
rubbed it between gloved palms. “I don’t think it
is.” He rubbed harder, then held it against the hot bowl of
his pipe. It still didn’t respond. He dropped it.
“Another jellyfish that didn’t live right.”
Behind him, something moved in the brush with a dry rustling. He
dropped the loose glove from his right hand and turned, reaching
toward his hip. Then he saw what had made the noise, a hard-shelled
thing a foot in length, with twelve legs, long antennae and two
pairs of clawed mandibles. He stooped and picked up a shard of
flint, throwing it with an oath. Another damned infernal
land-prawn.
He detested land-prawns. They were horrible things, which, of
course, wasn’t their fault. More to the point, they were
destructive. They got into things at camp; they would try to eat
anything. They crawled into machinery, possibly finding the
lubrication tasty, and caused jams. They cut into electric
insulation. And they got into his bedding, and bit, or rather
pinched, painfully. Nobody loved a land-prawn, not even another
land-prawn.
This one dodged the thrown flint, scuttled off a few feet and
turned, waving its antennae in what looked like derision. Jack
reached for his hip again, then checked the motion. Pistol
cartridges cost like crazy; they weren’t to be wasted in fits
of childish pique. Then he reflected that no cartridge fired at a
target is really wasted, and that he hadn’t done any shooting
recently. Stooping again, he picked up another stone and tossed it
a foot short and to the left of the prawn. As soon as it was out of
his fingers, his hand went for the butt of the long automatic. It
was out and the safety off before the flint landed; as the prawn
fled, he fired from the hip. The quasi-crustacean disintegrated. He
nodded pleasantly.
“Ol’ man Holloway’s still hitting things he
shoots at.”
Was a time, not so long ago, when he took his abilities for
granted. Now he was getting old enough to have to verify them. He
thumbed on the safety and holstered the pistol, then picked up the
glove and put it on again.
Never saw so blasted many land-prawns as this summer.
They’d been bad last year, but nothing like this. Even the
old-timers who’d been on Zarathustra since the first
colonization said so. There’d be some simple explanation, of
course; something that would amaze him at his own obtuseness for
not having seen it at once. Maybe the abnormally dry weather had
something to do with it. Or increase of something they ate, or
decrease of natural enemies.
He’d heard that land-prawns had no natural enemies; he
questioned that. Something killed them. He’d seen crushed
prawn shells, some of them close to his camp. Maybe stamped on by
something with hoofs, and then picked clean by insects. He’d
ask Ben Rainsford; Ben ought to know.
Half an hour later, the scanner gave him another interruption
pattern. He laid it aside and took up the small vibrohammer. This
time it was a large bean, light pink in color. He separated it from
its matrix of flint and rubbed it, and instantly it began
glowing.
“Ahhh! This is something like it, now!”
He rubbed harder; warmed further on his pipe bowl, it fairly
blazed. Better than a thousand sols, he told himself. Good color,
too. Getting his gloves off, he drew out the little leather bag
from under his shirt, loosening the drawstrings by which it hung
around his neck. There were a dozen and a half stones inside, all
bright as live coals. He looked at them for moment, and dropped the
new sunstone in among them, chuckling happily.
VICTOR GREGO, LISTENING to his own recorded voice, rubbed the
sunstone on his left finger with the heel of his right palm and
watched it brighten. There was, he noticed, a boastful ring to his
voice—not the suave, unemphatic tone considered proper on a
message-tape. Well, if anybody wondered why, when they played that
tape off six months from now in Johannesburg on Terra, they could
look in the cargo holds of the ship that had brought it across five
hundred light-years of space. Ingots of gold and platinum and
gadolinium. Furs and biochemicals and brandy. Perfumes that defied
synthetic imitation; hardwoods no plastic could copy. Spices. And
the steel coffer full of sunstones. Almost all luxury goods, the
only really dependable commodities in interstellar trade.
And he had spoken of other things. Veldbeest meat, up seven
percent from last month, twenty percent from the last year, still
in demand on a dozen planets unable to produce Terran-type
foodstuffs. Grain, leather, lumber. And he had added a dozen more
items to the lengthening list of what Zarathustra could now produce
in adequate quantities and no longer needed to import. Not
fishhooks and boot buckles, either—blasting explosives and
propellants, contragravity-field generator parts, power tools,
pharmaceuticals, synthetic textiles. The Company didn’t need
to carry Zarathustra any more; Zarathustra could carry the Company,
and itself.
Fifteen years ago, when the Zarathustra Company had sent him
here, there had been a cluster of log and prefab huts beside an
improvised landing field, almost exactly where this skyscraper now
stood. Today, Mallorysport was a city of seventy thousand; in all,
the planet had a population of nearly a million, and it was still
growing. There were steel mills and chemical plants and reaction
plants and machine works. They produced all their fissionables, and had
recently begun to export a little refined plutonium; they had even
started producing collapsium shielding.
The recorded voice stopped. He ran back the spool, set for
sixty-speed, and transmitted it to the radio office. In twenty
minutes, a copy would be aboard the ship that would hyper out for
Terra that night. While he was finishing, his communication screen
buzzed.
“Dr. Kellogg’s screening you, Mr. Grego,” the
girl in the outside office told him.
He nodded. Her hands moved, and she vanished in a polychromatic
explosion; when it cleared, the chief of the Division of Scientific
Study and Research was looking out of the screen instead. Looking
slightly upward at the show, back over his own screen, Victor was
getting his warm, sympathetic, sincere and slightly too toothy
smile on straight.
“Hello, Leonard. Everything going all right?”
It either was and Leonard Kellogg wanted more credit than he
deserved or it wasn’t and he was trying to get somebody else
blamed for it before anybody could blame him.
“Good afternoon, Victor.” Just the right shade of
deference about using the first name—big wheel to bigger wheel.
“Has Nick Emmert been talking to you about the Big Blackwater
project today?”
Nick was the Federation’s resident-general; on Zarathustra
he was, to all intents and purposes, the Terran Federation
Government. He was also a large stockholder in the Chartered
Zarathustra Company.
“No. Is he likely to?”
“Well, I wondered, Victor. He was on my screen just now.
He says there’s some adverse talk about the effect on the
rainfall in the Piedmont area of Beta Continent. He was worried
about it.”
“Well, it would affect the rainfall. After all, we drained
half a million square miles of swamp, and the prevailing winds are
from the west. There’d be less atmospheric moisture to the
east of it. Who’s talking adversely about it, and what
worries Nick?”
“Well, Nick’s afraid of the effect on public opinion
on Terra. You know how strong conservation sentiment is;
everybody’s very much opposed to any sort of destructive
exploitation.”
“Good Lord! The man doesn’t call the creation of
five hundred thousand square miles of new farmland destructive
exploitation, does he?”
“Well, no, Nick doesn’t call it that; of course not.
But he’s concerned about some garbled story getting to Terra
about our upsetting the ecological balance and causing droughts.
Fact is, I’m rather concerned myself.”
He knew what was worrying both of them. Emmert was afraid the
Federation Colonial Office would blame him for drawing fire on them
from the conservationists. Kellogg was afraid he’d be blamed
for not predicting the effects before his division endorsed the
project. As a division chief, he had advanced as far as he would in
the Company hierarchy; now he was on a Red Queen’s racetrack,
running like hell to stay in the same place.
“The rainfall’s dropped ten percent from last year,
and fifteen percent from the year before that,” Kellogg was
saying. “And some non-Company people have gotten hold of it,
and so have Interworld News. Why, even some of my people are talking
about ecological side-effects. You know what will happen when a
story like that gets back to Terra. The conservation fanatics will
get hold of it, and the Company’ll be criticized.”
That would hurt Leonard. He identified himself with the Company.
It was something bigger and more powerful than he was, like
God.
Victor Grego identified the Company with himself. It was
something big and powerful, like a vehicle, and he was at the
controls.
“Leonard, a little criticism won’t hurt the
Company,” he said. “Not where it matters, on the
dividends. I’m afraid you’re too sensitive to
criticism. Where did Emmert get this story anyhow? From your
people?”
“No, absolutely not, Victor. That’s what worries
him. It was this man Rainsford who started it.”
“Rainsford?”
“Dr. Bennett Rainsford, the naturalist. Institute of
Xeno-Sciences. I never trusted any of those people; they always
poke their noses into things, and the Institute always reports
their findings to the Colonial Office.”
“I know who you mean now; little fellow with red whiskers,
always looks as though he’d been sleeping in his clothes.
Why, of course the Xeno-Sciences people poke their noses into
things, and of course they report their findings to the
government.” He was beginning to lose patience. “I
don’t see what all this is about, Leonard. This man Rainsford
just made a routine observation of meteorological effects. I
suggest you have your meteorologists check it, and if it’s
correct pass it on to the news services along with your other
scientific findings.”
“Nick Emmert thinks Rainsford is a Federation undercover
agent.”
That made him laugh. Of course there were undercover agents on
Zarathustra, hundreds of them. The Company had people here checking
on him; he knew and accepted that. So did the big stockholders,
like Interstellar Explorations and the Banking Cartel and
Terra-Baldur-Marduk Spacelines. Nick Emmert had his corps of spies
and stool pigeons, and the Terran Federation had people here
watching both him and Emmert. Rainsford could be a Federation
agent—a roving naturalist would have a wonderful cover occupation.
But this Big Blackwater business was so utterly silly. Nick Emmert
had too much graft on his conscience; it was too bad that
overloaded consciences couldn’t blow fuses.
“Suppose he is, Leonard. What could he report on us? We
are a chartered company, and we have an excellent legal department,
which keeps us safely inside our charter. It is a very liberal
charter, too. This is a Class-III uninhabited planet; the Company
owns the whole thing outright. We can do anything we want as long
as we don’t violate colonial law or the Federation
Constitution. As long as we don’t do that, Nick Emmert
hasn’t anything to worry about. Now forget this whole damned
business, Leonard!” He was beginning to speak sharply, and
Kellogg was looking hurt. “I know you were concerned about
injurious reports getting back to Terra, and that was quite
commendable, but . . . ”
By the time he got through, Kellogg was happy again. Victor
blanked the screen, leaned back in his chair and began laughing. In
a moment, the screen buzzed again. When he snapped it on, his
screen-girl said:
“Mr. Henry Stenson’s on, Mr. Grego.”
“Well, put him on.” He caught himself just before
adding that it would be a welcome change to talk to somebody with
sense.
The face that appeared was elderly and thin; the mouth was
tight, and there were squint wrinkles at the corners of the
eyes.
“Well, Mr. Stenson. Good of you to call. How are
you?”
“Very well, thank you. And you?” When he also
admitted to good health, the caller continued: “How is the
globe running? Still in synchronization?”
Victor looked across the office at his most prized possession,
the big globe of Zarathustra that Henry Stenson had built for him,
supported six feet from the floor on its own contragravity unit,
spotlighted in orange to represent the KO sun, its two satellites
circling about it as it revolved slowly.
“The globe itself is keeping perfect time, and Darius is
all right. Xerxes is a few seconds of longitude ahead of true
position.”
“That’s dreadful, Mr. Grego!” Stenson was
deeply shocked. “I must adjust that the first thing tomorrow.
I should have called to check on it long ago, but you know how it
is. So many things to do, and so little time.”
“I find the same trouble myself, Mr. Stenson.”
They chatted for a while, and then Stenson apologized for taking
up so much of Mr. Grego’s valuable time. What he meant was
that his own time, just as valuable to him, was wasting. After the
screen blanked, Grego sat looking at it for a moment, wishing he
had a hundred men like Henry Stenson in his own organization. Just
men with Stenson’s brains and character; wishing for a
hundred instrument makers with Stenson’s skills would have
been unreasonable, even for wishing. There was only one Henry
Stenson, just as there had been only one Antonio Stradivari. Why a
man like that worked in a little shop on a frontier planet like
Zarathustra . . .
Then he looked, pridefully, at the globe. Alpha Continent had
moved slowly to the right, with the little speck that represented
Mallorysport twinkling in the orange light. Darius, the inner moon,
where the Terra-Baldur-Marduk Spacelines had their leased terminal,
was almost directly over it, and the outer moon, Xerxes, was edging
into sight. Xerxes was the one thing about Zarathustra that the
Company didn’t own; the Terran Federation had retained that
as a naval base. It was the one reminder that there was something
bigger and more powerful than the Company.
GERD VAN RIEBEEK saw Ruth Ortheris leave the escalator, step
aside and stand looking around the cocktail lounge. He set his
glass, with its inch of tepid highball, on the bar; when her eyes
shifted in his direction, he waved to her, saw her brighten and
wave back and then went to meet her. She gave him a quick kiss on
the cheek, dodged when he reached for her and took his arm.
“Drink before we eat?” he asked.
“Oh, Lord, yes! I’ve just about had it for
today.”
He guided her toward one of the bartending machines, inserted
his credit key, and put a four-portion jug under the spout, dialing
the cocktail they always had when they drank together. As he did,
he noticed what she was wearing: short black jacket, lavender
neckerchief, light gray skirt. Not her usual vacation get-up.
“School department drag you back?” he asked as the
jug filled.
“Juvenile court.” She got a couple of glasses from
the shelf under the machine as he picked up the jug. “A
fifteen-year-old burglar.”
They found a table at the rear of the room, out of the worst of
the cocktail-hour uproar. As soon as he filled her glass, she drank
half of it, then lit a cigarette.
“Junktown?” he asked.
She nodded. “Only twenty-five years since this planet was
discovered, and we have slums already. I was over there most of the
afternoon, with a pair of city police.” She didn’t seem
to want to talk about it. “What were you doing
today?”
“Ruth, you ought to ask Doc Mallin to drop in on Leonard
Kellogg sometime, and give him an unobstrusive going
over.”
“You haven’t been having trouble with him
again?” she asked anxiously.
He made a face, and then tasted his drink. “It’s
trouble just being around that character. Ruth, to use one of those
expressions your profession deplores, Len Kellogg is just plain
nuts!” He drank some more of his cocktail and helped himself
to one of her cigarettes. “Here,” he continued, after
lighting it. “A couple of days ago, he told me he’d
been getting inquiries about this plague of land-prawns
they’re having over on Beta. He wanted me to set up a
research project to find out why and what to do about
it.”
“Well?”
“I did. I made two screens calls, and then I wrote a
report and sent it up to him. That was where I jerked my trigger; I
ought to have taken a couple of weeks and made a real production
out of it.”
“What did you tell him?”
“The facts. The limiting factor on land-prawn increase is
the weather. The eggs hatch underground and the immature prawns dig
their way out in the spring. If there’s been a lot of rain,
most of them drown in their holes or as soon as they emerge.
According to growth rings on trees, last spring was the driest in
the Beta Piedmont in centuries, so most of them survived, and as
they’re parthenogenetic females, they all laid eggs. This
spring, it was even drier, so now they have land-prawns all over
central Beta. And I don’t know that anything can be done
about them.”
“Well, did he think you were just guessing?”
He shook his head in exasperation. “I don’t know
what he thinks. You’re the psychologist, you try to figure
it. I sent him that report yesterday morning. He seemed quite
satisfied with it at the time. Today, just after noon, he sent for
me and told me it wouldn’t do at all. Tried to insist that
the rainfall on Beta had been normal. That was silly; I referred
him to his meteorologists and climatologists, where I’d
gotten my information. He complained that the news services were
after him for an explanation. I told him I’d given him the
only explanation there was. He said he simply couldn’t use
it. There had to be some other explanation.”
“If you don’t like the facts, you ignore them, and
if you need facts, dream up some you do like,” she said.
“That’s typical rejection of reality. Not psychotic,
not even psychoneurotic. But certainly not sane.” She had
finished her first drink and was sipping slowly at her second.
“You know, this is interesting. Does he have some theory that
would disqualify yours?”
“Not that I know of. I got the impression that he just
didn’t want the subject of rainfall on Beta discussed at
all.”
“That is odd. Has anything else peculiar been happening
over on Beta lately?”
“No. Not that I know of,” he repeated. “Of
course, that swamp-drainage project over there was what caused the
dry weather, last year and this year, but I don’t see
. . . ” His own glass was empty, and when he tilted the jug over
it, a few drops trickled out. He looked at his watch. “Think
we could have another cocktail before dinner?” he asked.
JACK HOLLOWAY FOUND himself squinting, the orange sun full in
his eyes. He raised a hand to push his hat forward, then lowered it
to the controls to alter the pulse rate of the contragravity field
generators and lift the manipulator another hundred feet. For a
moment he sat, puffing on the short pipe that had yellowed the
corners of his white mustache, and looked down at the red rag tied
to a bush against the rock face of the gorge five hundred yards
away. He was smiling in anticipation.
“This’ll be a good one,” he told himself
aloud, in the manner of men who have long been their own and only
company. “I want to see this one go up.”
He always did. He could remember at least a thousand blast-shots
he had fired back along the years and on more planets than he could
name at the moment, including a few thermonuclears, but they were
all different and they were always something to watch, even a
little one like this. Flipping the switch, his thumb found the
discharger button and sent out a radio impulse; the red rag
vanished in an upsurge of smoke and dust that mounted out of the
gorge and turned to copper when the sunlight touched it. The big
manipulator, weightless on contragravity, rocked gently; falling
debris pelted the trees and splashed in the little stream.
He waited till the machine stabilized, then glided it down to
where he had ripped a gash in the cliff with the charge of
cataclysmite. Good shot: brought down a lot of sandstone, cracked
the vein of flint and hadn’t thrown it around too much. A lot
of big slabs were loose. Extending the forward claw-arms, he pulled
and tugged, and then used the underside grapples to pick up a chunk
and drop it on the flat ground between the cliff and the stream. He
dropped another chunk on it, breaking both of them, and then
another and another, until he had all he could work over for the
rest of the day. Then he set down, got the toolbox and the
long-handled contragravity lifter, and climbed to the ground where
he opened the box, put on gloves and an eyescreen and got out a
microray scanner and a vibrohammer.
The first chunk he cracked off had nothing in it; the scanner
gave the uninterrupted pattern of homogenous structure. Picking it
up with the lifter, he swung it and threw it into the stream. On
the fifteenth chunk, he got an interruption pattern that told him
that a sunstone—or something, probably something—was inside.
Some fifty million years ago, when the planet that had been
called Zarathustra (for the last twenty-five million) was young,
there had existed a marine life form, something like a jellyfish.
As these died, they had sunk into the sea-bottom ooze; sand had
covered the ooze and pressed it tighter and tighter, until it had
become glassy flint, and the entombed jellyfish little beans of
dense stone. Some of them, by some ancient biochemical quirk, were
intensely thermofluorescent; worn as gems, they glowed from the
wearer’s body heat.
On Terra or Baldur or Freya or Ishtar, a single cut of polished
sunstone was worth a small fortune. Even here, they brought
respectable prices from the Zarathustra Company’s gem buyers.
Keeping his point of expectation safely low, he got a smaller
vibrohammer from the toolbox and began chipping cautiously around
the foreign object, until the flint split open and revealed a
smooth yellow ellipsoid, half an inch long.
“Worth a thousand sols—if it’s worth
anything,” he commented. A deft tap here, another there, and
the yellow bean became loose from the flint. Picking it up, he
rubbed it between gloved palms. “I don’t think it
is.” He rubbed harder, then held it against the hot bowl of
his pipe. It still didn’t respond. He dropped it.
“Another jellyfish that didn’t live right.”
Behind him, something moved in the brush with a dry rustling. He
dropped the loose glove from his right hand and turned, reaching
toward his hip. Then he saw what had made the noise, a hard-shelled
thing a foot in length, with twelve legs, long antennae and two
pairs of clawed mandibles. He stooped and picked up a shard of
flint, throwing it with an oath. Another damned infernal
land-prawn.
He detested land-prawns. They were horrible things, which, of
course, wasn’t their fault. More to the point, they were
destructive. They got into things at camp; they would try to eat
anything. They crawled into machinery, possibly finding the
lubrication tasty, and caused jams. They cut into electric
insulation. And they got into his bedding, and bit, or rather
pinched, painfully. Nobody loved a land-prawn, not even another
land-prawn.
This one dodged the thrown flint, scuttled off a few feet and
turned, waving its antennae in what looked like derision. Jack
reached for his hip again, then checked the motion. Pistol
cartridges cost like crazy; they weren’t to be wasted in fits
of childish pique. Then he reflected that no cartridge fired at a
target is really wasted, and that he hadn’t done any shooting
recently. Stooping again, he picked up another stone and tossed it
a foot short and to the left of the prawn. As soon as it was out of
his fingers, his hand went for the butt of the long automatic. It
was out and the safety off before the flint landed; as the prawn
fled, he fired from the hip. The quasi-crustacean disintegrated. He
nodded pleasantly.
“Ol’ man Holloway’s still hitting things he
shoots at.”
Was a time, not so long ago, when he took his abilities for
granted. Now he was getting old enough to have to verify them. He
thumbed on the safety and holstered the pistol, then picked up the
glove and put it on again.
Never saw so blasted many land-prawns as this summer.
They’d been bad last year, but nothing like this. Even the
old-timers who’d been on Zarathustra since the first
colonization said so. There’d be some simple explanation, of
course; something that would amaze him at his own obtuseness for
not having seen it at once. Maybe the abnormally dry weather had
something to do with it. Or increase of something they ate, or
decrease of natural enemies.
He’d heard that land-prawns had no natural enemies; he
questioned that. Something killed them. He’d seen crushed
prawn shells, some of them close to his camp. Maybe stamped on by
something with hoofs, and then picked clean by insects. He’d
ask Ben Rainsford; Ben ought to know.
Half an hour later, the scanner gave him another interruption
pattern. He laid it aside and took up the small vibrohammer. This
time it was a large bean, light pink in color. He separated it from
its matrix of flint and rubbed it, and instantly it began
glowing.
“Ahhh! This is something like it, now!”
He rubbed harder; warmed further on his pipe bowl, it fairly
blazed. Better than a thousand sols, he told himself. Good color,
too. Getting his gloves off, he drew out the little leather bag
from under his shirt, loosening the drawstrings by which it hung
around his neck. There were a dozen and a half stones inside, all
bright as live coals. He looked at them for moment, and dropped the
new sunstone in among them, chuckling happily.
VICTOR GREGO, LISTENING to his own recorded voice, rubbed the
sunstone on his left finger with the heel of his right palm and
watched it brighten. There was, he noticed, a boastful ring to his
voice—not the suave, unemphatic tone considered proper on a
message-tape. Well, if anybody wondered why, when they played that
tape off six months from now in Johannesburg on Terra, they could
look in the cargo holds of the ship that had brought it across five
hundred light-years of space. Ingots of gold and platinum and
gadolinium. Furs and biochemicals and brandy. Perfumes that defied
synthetic imitation; hardwoods no plastic could copy. Spices. And
the steel coffer full of sunstones. Almost all luxury goods, the
only really dependable commodities in interstellar trade.
And he had spoken of other things. Veldbeest meat, up seven
percent from last month, twenty percent from the last year, still
in demand on a dozen planets unable to produce Terran-type
foodstuffs. Grain, leather, lumber. And he had added a dozen more
items to the lengthening list of what Zarathustra could now produce
in adequate quantities and no longer needed to import. Not
fishhooks and boot buckles, either—blasting explosives and
propellants, contragravity-field generator parts, power tools,
pharmaceuticals, synthetic textiles. The Company didn’t need
to carry Zarathustra any more; Zarathustra could carry the Company,
and itself.
Fifteen years ago, when the Zarathustra Company had sent him
here, there had been a cluster of log and prefab huts beside an
improvised landing field, almost exactly where this skyscraper now
stood. Today, Mallorysport was a city of seventy thousand; in all,
the planet had a population of nearly a million, and it was still
growing. There were steel mills and chemical plants and reaction
plants and machine works. They produced all their fissionables, and had
recently begun to export a little refined plutonium; they had even
started producing collapsium shielding.
The recorded voice stopped. He ran back the spool, set for
sixty-speed, and transmitted it to the radio office. In twenty
minutes, a copy would be aboard the ship that would hyper out for
Terra that night. While he was finishing, his communication screen
buzzed.
“Dr. Kellogg’s screening you, Mr. Grego,” the
girl in the outside office told him.
He nodded. Her hands moved, and she vanished in a polychromatic
explosion; when it cleared, the chief of the Division of Scientific
Study and Research was looking out of the screen instead. Looking
slightly upward at the show, back over his own screen, Victor was
getting his warm, sympathetic, sincere and slightly too toothy
smile on straight.
“Hello, Leonard. Everything going all right?”
It either was and Leonard Kellogg wanted more credit than he
deserved or it wasn’t and he was trying to get somebody else
blamed for it before anybody could blame him.
“Good afternoon, Victor.” Just the right shade of
deference about using the first name—big wheel to bigger wheel.
“Has Nick Emmert been talking to you about the Big Blackwater
project today?”
Nick was the Federation’s resident-general; on Zarathustra
he was, to all intents and purposes, the Terran Federation
Government. He was also a large stockholder in the Chartered
Zarathustra Company.
“No. Is he likely to?”
“Well, I wondered, Victor. He was on my screen just now.
He says there’s some adverse talk about the effect on the
rainfall in the Piedmont area of Beta Continent. He was worried
about it.”
“Well, it would affect the rainfall. After all, we drained
half a million square miles of swamp, and the prevailing winds are
from the west. There’d be less atmospheric moisture to the
east of it. Who’s talking adversely about it, and what
worries Nick?”
“Well, Nick’s afraid of the effect on public opinion
on Terra. You know how strong conservation sentiment is;
everybody’s very much opposed to any sort of destructive
exploitation.”
“Good Lord! The man doesn’t call the creation of
five hundred thousand square miles of new farmland destructive
exploitation, does he?”
“Well, no, Nick doesn’t call it that; of course not.
But he’s concerned about some garbled story getting to Terra
about our upsetting the ecological balance and causing droughts.
Fact is, I’m rather concerned myself.”
He knew what was worrying both of them. Emmert was afraid the
Federation Colonial Office would blame him for drawing fire on them
from the conservationists. Kellogg was afraid he’d be blamed
for not predicting the effects before his division endorsed the
project. As a division chief, he had advanced as far as he would in
the Company hierarchy; now he was on a Red Queen’s racetrack,
running like hell to stay in the same place.
“The rainfall’s dropped ten percent from last year,
and fifteen percent from the year before that,” Kellogg was
saying. “And some non-Company people have gotten hold of it,
and so have Interworld News. Why, even some of my people are talking
about ecological side-effects. You know what will happen when a
story like that gets back to Terra. The conservation fanatics will
get hold of it, and the Company’ll be criticized.”
That would hurt Leonard. He identified himself with the Company.
It was something bigger and more powerful than he was, like
God.
Victor Grego identified the Company with himself. It was
something big and powerful, like a vehicle, and he was at the
controls.
“Leonard, a little criticism won’t hurt the
Company,” he said. “Not where it matters, on the
dividends. I’m afraid you’re too sensitive to
criticism. Where did Emmert get this story anyhow? From your
people?”
“No, absolutely not, Victor. That’s what worries
him. It was this man Rainsford who started it.”
“Rainsford?”
“Dr. Bennett Rainsford, the naturalist. Institute of
Xeno-Sciences. I never trusted any of those people; they always
poke their noses into things, and the Institute always reports
their findings to the Colonial Office.”
“I know who you mean now; little fellow with red whiskers,
always looks as though he’d been sleeping in his clothes.
Why, of course the Xeno-Sciences people poke their noses into
things, and of course they report their findings to the
government.” He was beginning to lose patience. “I
don’t see what all this is about, Leonard. This man Rainsford
just made a routine observation of meteorological effects. I
suggest you have your meteorologists check it, and if it’s
correct pass it on to the news services along with your other
scientific findings.”
“Nick Emmert thinks Rainsford is a Federation undercover
agent.”
That made him laugh. Of course there were undercover agents on
Zarathustra, hundreds of them. The Company had people here checking
on him; he knew and accepted that. So did the big stockholders,
like Interstellar Explorations and the Banking Cartel and
Terra-Baldur-Marduk Spacelines. Nick Emmert had his corps of spies
and stool pigeons, and the Terran Federation had people here
watching both him and Emmert. Rainsford could be a Federation
agent—a roving naturalist would have a wonderful cover occupation.
But this Big Blackwater business was so utterly silly. Nick Emmert
had too much graft on his conscience; it was too bad that
overloaded consciences couldn’t blow fuses.
“Suppose he is, Leonard. What could he report on us? We
are a chartered company, and we have an excellent legal department,
which keeps us safely inside our charter. It is a very liberal
charter, too. This is a Class-III uninhabited planet; the Company
owns the whole thing outright. We can do anything we want as long
as we don’t violate colonial law or the Federation
Constitution. As long as we don’t do that, Nick Emmert
hasn’t anything to worry about. Now forget this whole damned
business, Leonard!” He was beginning to speak sharply, and
Kellogg was looking hurt. “I know you were concerned about
injurious reports getting back to Terra, and that was quite
commendable, but . . . ”
By the time he got through, Kellogg was happy again. Victor
blanked the screen, leaned back in his chair and began laughing. In
a moment, the screen buzzed again. When he snapped it on, his
screen-girl said:
“Mr. Henry Stenson’s on, Mr. Grego.”
“Well, put him on.” He caught himself just before
adding that it would be a welcome change to talk to somebody with
sense.
The face that appeared was elderly and thin; the mouth was
tight, and there were squint wrinkles at the corners of the
eyes.
“Well, Mr. Stenson. Good of you to call. How are
you?”
“Very well, thank you. And you?” When he also
admitted to good health, the caller continued: “How is the
globe running? Still in synchronization?”
Victor looked across the office at his most prized possession,
the big globe of Zarathustra that Henry Stenson had built for him,
supported six feet from the floor on its own contragravity unit,
spotlighted in orange to represent the KO sun, its two satellites
circling about it as it revolved slowly.
“The globe itself is keeping perfect time, and Darius is
all right. Xerxes is a few seconds of longitude ahead of true
position.”
“That’s dreadful, Mr. Grego!” Stenson was
deeply shocked. “I must adjust that the first thing tomorrow.
I should have called to check on it long ago, but you know how it
is. So many things to do, and so little time.”
“I find the same trouble myself, Mr. Stenson.”
They chatted for a while, and then Stenson apologized for taking
up so much of Mr. Grego’s valuable time. What he meant was
that his own time, just as valuable to him, was wasting. After the
screen blanked, Grego sat looking at it for a moment, wishing he
had a hundred men like Henry Stenson in his own organization. Just
men with Stenson’s brains and character; wishing for a
hundred instrument makers with Stenson’s skills would have
been unreasonable, even for wishing. There was only one Henry
Stenson, just as there had been only one Antonio Stradivari. Why a
man like that worked in a little shop on a frontier planet like
Zarathustra . . .
Then he looked, pridefully, at the globe. Alpha Continent had
moved slowly to the right, with the little speck that represented
Mallorysport twinkling in the orange light. Darius, the inner moon,
where the Terra-Baldur-Marduk Spacelines had their leased terminal,
was almost directly over it, and the outer moon, Xerxes, was edging
into sight. Xerxes was the one thing about Zarathustra that the
Company didn’t own; the Terran Federation had retained that
as a naval base. It was the one reminder that there was something
bigger and more powerful than the Company.
GERD VAN RIEBEEK saw Ruth Ortheris leave the escalator, step
aside and stand looking around the cocktail lounge. He set his
glass, with its inch of tepid highball, on the bar; when her eyes
shifted in his direction, he waved to her, saw her brighten and
wave back and then went to meet her. She gave him a quick kiss on
the cheek, dodged when he reached for her and took his arm.
“Drink before we eat?” he asked.
“Oh, Lord, yes! I’ve just about had it for
today.”
He guided her toward one of the bartending machines, inserted
his credit key, and put a four-portion jug under the spout, dialing
the cocktail they always had when they drank together. As he did,
he noticed what she was wearing: short black jacket, lavender
neckerchief, light gray skirt. Not her usual vacation get-up.
“School department drag you back?” he asked as the
jug filled.
“Juvenile court.” She got a couple of glasses from
the shelf under the machine as he picked up the jug. “A
fifteen-year-old burglar.”
They found a table at the rear of the room, out of the worst of
the cocktail-hour uproar. As soon as he filled her glass, she drank
half of it, then lit a cigarette.
“Junktown?” he asked.
She nodded. “Only twenty-five years since this planet was
discovered, and we have slums already. I was over there most of the
afternoon, with a pair of city police.” She didn’t seem
to want to talk about it. “What were you doing
today?”
“Ruth, you ought to ask Doc Mallin to drop in on Leonard
Kellogg sometime, and give him an unobstrusive going
over.”
“You haven’t been having trouble with him
again?” she asked anxiously.
He made a face, and then tasted his drink. “It’s
trouble just being around that character. Ruth, to use one of those
expressions your profession deplores, Len Kellogg is just plain
nuts!” He drank some more of his cocktail and helped himself
to one of her cigarettes. “Here,” he continued, after
lighting it. “A couple of days ago, he told me he’d
been getting inquiries about this plague of land-prawns
they’re having over on Beta. He wanted me to set up a
research project to find out why and what to do about
it.”
“Well?”
“I did. I made two screens calls, and then I wrote a
report and sent it up to him. That was where I jerked my trigger; I
ought to have taken a couple of weeks and made a real production
out of it.”
“What did you tell him?”
“The facts. The limiting factor on land-prawn increase is
the weather. The eggs hatch underground and the immature prawns dig
their way out in the spring. If there’s been a lot of rain,
most of them drown in their holes or as soon as they emerge.
According to growth rings on trees, last spring was the driest in
the Beta Piedmont in centuries, so most of them survived, and as
they’re parthenogenetic females, they all laid eggs. This
spring, it was even drier, so now they have land-prawns all over
central Beta. And I don’t know that anything can be done
about them.”
“Well, did he think you were just guessing?”
He shook his head in exasperation. “I don’t know
what he thinks. You’re the psychologist, you try to figure
it. I sent him that report yesterday morning. He seemed quite
satisfied with it at the time. Today, just after noon, he sent for
me and told me it wouldn’t do at all. Tried to insist that
the rainfall on Beta had been normal. That was silly; I referred
him to his meteorologists and climatologists, where I’d
gotten my information. He complained that the news services were
after him for an explanation. I told him I’d given him the
only explanation there was. He said he simply couldn’t use
it. There had to be some other explanation.”
“If you don’t like the facts, you ignore them, and
if you need facts, dream up some you do like,” she said.
“That’s typical rejection of reality. Not psychotic,
not even psychoneurotic. But certainly not sane.” She had
finished her first drink and was sipping slowly at her second.
“You know, this is interesting. Does he have some theory that
would disqualify yours?”
“Not that I know of. I got the impression that he just
didn’t want the subject of rainfall on Beta discussed at
all.”
“That is odd. Has anything else peculiar been happening
over on Beta lately?”
“No. Not that I know of,” he repeated. “Of
course, that swamp-drainage project over there was what caused the
dry weather, last year and this year, but I don’t see
. . . ” His own glass was empty, and when he tilted the jug over
it, a few drops trickled out. He looked at his watch. “Think
we could have another cocktail before dinner?” he asked.