Anarchaos

XXXI

It was difficult to get the story from him. Each time he recovered from my attentions he tried to scream for help, so that I finally had to adjust him and make it impossible for him to speak above a whisper. Then his recital was marred by general inconsistency and interrupted from time to time by faintings and bubblings up of blood. But I eventually did get the story and rearranged it into sensible and chronological order:

Behind the name Sledge was an inter-star corporation named Kemistek, an operation quite similar to the Wolmak Corporation and in fact in direct competition with Wolmak. Both Kemistek and Wolmak maintained spies in the other’s employ, and two such Kemistek spies working for Wolmak were Lingo, the entrance guard at Ice Tower in Ulik and Piekow Lastus, the man who had accompanied Gar on his last trip.

Lastus had no technical education whatever. Although he’d been with Gar when Gar made his last important strike. Lastus could nor subsequently have described what the strike was nor how to get back to it. All Lastus could do was secretly radio to Sledge, which he did.

Phail and Triss and Elman were sent to intercept Gar at Yoroch Pass. Triss insisted they were not sent to kill Gar but merely to bribe him if possible, or if bribery failed to attempt intimidation. I believed him, since those three were not by nature or occupation killers. If Gar’s death had been requested or anticipated, Malik and Rose would have been the ones sent.

But death should always be anticipated on Anarchaos, where all legal and social restraints on individual behavior have been stripped away. Gar refused to be bribed, nor could this trio of puppies successfully intimidate him. Phail waved a gun around. Phail grew increasingly angry. It was surely significant that Phail had recently suffered personal problems, involving a woman on his home world whom he had not seen since coming to Anarchaos fifteen months before. All at once, Phail was shooting. Before anyone realized what was happening. Gar had been shot dead and Piekow Lastus himself was wounded and down on the ground.

At that point, Triss and Elman managed to disarm Phail and keep him from finishing the job on Lastus. Phail wanted Lastus dead because, in the shocked reaction to his deed, he wanted no witnesses. Triss and Elman, frightened of their companion by now, definitely wanted Lastus alive; so long as Lastus lived, surely Phail would not be thinking of killing Triss and Elman.

As to Lastus, he swore never to tell. And why should he tell? To do so, he would have had to admit his status as seem agent for Kemistek. Besides, Kemistek would not pay him a pension, in addition to the disability pension he would be eligible for from Wolmak.

Phail and Elman and Triss all helped bury Gar, and then took the notebook and left. General Ingor, the top Kemistek executive on Anarchaos, was furious when told what had happened, but chose to do nothing. A Kemistek executive, while acting for Kemistek, represented the company in anything he chose to do, so that the General was forced to support Phail’s action at least to the extent of maintaining silence about it. This silence was made easier by the fact that Phail had apparently gotten away with it.

The only thing that did not appear to resolve itself satisfactorily was Gar’s notebook. The code he’d used in it proved to be unbreakable. It was perhaps this as much as anything else that influenced the General to punish his three young executives by extending their stay on Anarchaos indefinitely. (In the normal course of events, all three of them would have been assigned to other and surely more pleasant worlds by now.)

In any event, the whole affair seemed safely and permanently closed, and then I turned up. When I asked Lingo for Lastus’ address, Lingo immediately reported to Sledge. Phail was the executive who received the information, and he promptly panicked, afraid I would get the truth from Lastus. It was Phail who sent Malik and Rose to kill me, and incidentally to shut Lastus’ mouth for good and all.

This time, when the others learned what Phail had done, there was increased displeasure, beginning when General Ingor pointed out that I might have been able to shed light on my brother’s personal code. But it seemed too late to do anything about it, and except for the fact that Phail seemed to have assured himself a dim future with Kemistek everything remained unchanged.

It was three years later when they were on the tour of the mine and first ran into me. (Three years! I reach back for the time, and my memory seems to fall into a hole. Three years, gone forever.) None of them thought of the implications until much later, when it struck Elman that possibly Gar Malone’s brother hadn’t been killed, that possibly the man who had looked like Gar Malone had been Gar’s brother after all. Phail refused to consider the idea when it was presented to him, and Triss was doubtful, but General Ingor thought it best to follow it up. By then, of course, I had already made my escape. Still, they had seen me once, and they had a description of me — including the missing hand — and when the story went around Sledge Tower at Prudence about the crazy bearded horseman who had waved a handless arm in fury and chased a helicopter while riding a hairhorse, Phail quickly guessed who the horseman might have been.

Once again, Phail was first. It was he who put feelers out for me everywhere it seemed to him that I might go, including the UC Embassy, and he who sent Malik and Rose to get me and bring me to him.

His initial idea was merely to turn me over to the General, but then he saw a way of regaining lost favor by spiriting me away, putting me to work on the notebook, and eventually going to the General with the code completely broken, the message read, the site of the great lost strike pinpointed precisely. In having me taken away from Prudence to the Sledge research ship in the Sea of Morning, he was hiding me primarily from his own people.

But not exclusively his own people. Just as Kemistek had spies at Wolmak, so Wolmak had spies at Kemistek, and these spies at last became aware of some corners and edges of what had been going on. Additionally, the UC request for information on a man named Rolf Malone had piqued Wolmak’s interest. Colonel Whistler and his people did not yet fully understand what was going on, but they knew that something was afoot and that Phail was involved in it. Wolmak was currently trying everything in its power to learn Phail’s whereabouts.

So. The simple facts that I had been seeking were now mine. Gar had been betrayed by Lastus into the hands of Phail, who killed him out of irritation. This murder was aided and condoned by Triss and Elman and General Ingor. The trails back from Gar’s murder led one way to the woman on another world who had been abrasive with Phail’s emotions, and led another way to the rivalry of two mining and chemical corporations for new caches of raw materials.

No one had gone out to murder Gar Malone for being Gar Malone.

It was with the same impersonality that I snuffed the life from Triss.