Anarchaos

XXXVII

Everything went smoothly. Bundled up in heavy furs, I could have been Colonel Whistler or anyone. Jenna and I took a corporation auto out to the airfield, where at her orders the plane was already warming up. It was a small plane, with only ourselves and the pilot aboard. I dispatched the pilot after we took off, but kept Jenna for her usefulness. She knew how to fly the plane, and she could clear the way if any questions arose at any of our stops.

The entire circuit took three standard days, and questions did arise. After the first day there was an increasing urgency in the requests for information about Colonel Whistler, who seemed to have disappeared. (I had buried him in the snow not far from the Ice building at Cannemuss.) Jenna had the authority of the Colonel in her own person when he was unavailable, and she did excellent work keeping the corporation employees from growing too suspicious too soon.

We did the circuit almost entirely without rest, going first to Chax and then to Ulik, on to Prudence, to Moro-Geth, and at last to Ni. I told Jenna, when we arrived at Ni, to wait at the company airfield till I returned, as she had done at each of our other stops, and this time she said, “Shouldn’t I go on to the spaceport and start arranging for our tickets?”

“You can call them from here, can’t you?”

“Yes, there’s a ground line, but why not go straight there?”

“Because it would be better to fly in. Phone and order two round-trip passages, for Colonel Whistler and his secretary of Ice, to be billed to the Wolmak Corporation.”

She smiled. “That’s lovely, Rolf. We’ll let them pay our fare.”

“We’ve got to, I don’t have any money. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

We kissed, and I picked up the last of the five suitcases, and carried it into the city.

When I arrived at Ni spaceport they told me there wouldn’t be another ship leaving for two standard days, but there were dormitory facilities if I cared to wait on UC territory. I said I did, and got out the rest of my luggage and money, which had been checked here ever since I’d first arrived. I then went to the UC commander and said to him, “I’m afraid I have a rather — delicate problem. While I was here, there was a woman…”

He smiled, showing that he was a man of sophistication, and said, “It does happen.”

“The only problem is, she might come out here looking for me, and to tell you the truth she frightens me.”

“You want us to keep her out, is that it? Well, unauthorized local citizens are kept out anyway, so there’s really no problem.”

“Well, but she isn’t exactly a local citizen. She’s an off-worlder, works for one of the syndicates.”

“Ahh,” he said, nodding his head. “I see. So she could come in.”

“If she could be told there was no one here by my name, no one” — I held up my left wrist — “suiting my description, I would be very grateful.”

“I’m sure it can be arranged,” he said, and was very hearty and jolly and man to man with me.

So I had no trouble from Jenna. I waited the two days, a ship arrived, and I boarded it, the only passenger leaving the planet. I’d been somewhat afraid Jenna would decide to book passage by herself after all, but she had chosen not to. What she was doing instead I couldn’t guess, except that she had surely given up waiting for me by now. If she hadn’t been found out by Wolmak employees already, she was more than likely busy trying to rearrange the facts of the last few days so as not to get in trouble with the corporation. I thought it likely she would succeed, she having the kind of drive necessary for success. As to the suitcases, I hardly thought it likely she would be mentioning them to anyone, since their effects might ultimately reflect back upon her. Besides, she didn’t know — and I doubted she could guess — what I had done with them.

The suitcases were my answer to the problem of Gar’s death, my final answer. I had tried avoiding the problem, with death or antizone. I had tried giving it a limited response, avenging Gar upon the persons of Phail and the other involved parties from Sledge. But I now saw that it would end only when I had accepted my responsibility to the fullest and completed the vengeance I’d come out here to start.

It was the colony that had killed my brother. That was true, finally. After the specifics of inter-corporation intrigue and lost strikes, there was still the fact that Anarchaos had produced the climate in which Gar’s life could end as it had done. Phail and Gar, working for the same corporations on other planets, would never have met one another across a loaded gun.

If the colony was responsible for Gar’s death, it followed that I must somehow kill the colony. I had tried to believe for a while that it was best to leave the place to its own slow self-destruction, as in the empty shacks around the perimeters of the major cities, but the rough health of Cannemuss had proved it would be a long while before that slow suicide completed itself. I had tried to believe with Rohstock, who wrote in Voyages To Seven Planets that “All are guilty on Anarchaos, and the guilty are invariably punished — by life on Anarchaos,” but it is true that man is infinitely adaptable, and if a man knows no life other than the Life of Hell, eventually Hell becomes normality and ceases to be Hell. I had tried to evade the issue by telling myself the task was too big for one man, but even as I’d thought it I’d known that the magnitude of a duty is never an excuse for shirking the attempt to perform it.

When I had seen in Colonel Whistler’s eyes the look I remembered from Phail, I had known at last there was no choice. Anarchaos was a cancer, and to merely snip off a few of the sick cells was to do nothing. The entire cancer had to be rooted out and destroyed.

Thus the suitcases.

It was my job to kill the colony, and what was it now that kept the colony alive? The Union Commission, bound this way and that by rules and regulations so that it could supply Anarchaos the necessities of its life without supplying the discipline and order it so urgently needed. Some underling members of the UC might be disgusted by the arrangement, might want to do something more forceful, but those at the top were too ensnarled in red tape and the balance of power, aided and abetted by those off-world corporations who were fattening themselves on this rich carrion world.

Well, I had just seen to it that the red tape would disappear. Tourists might be slaughtered, missionaries and merchants might be obliterated, engineers and prospectors and all honest workmen might be slashed and hacked, and the UC, wrapped in its own regulations, would stand to one side and do nothing. But now something was going to happen, and the UC would have to move.

According to the timers and my watch, it would happen in two standard days, eighteen hours and twenty-one minutes after my spacecraft lifted off Anarchaos. At that moment in time, the five suitcases would explode, each with enough force to demolish a city block, enough to topple one of those towers.

Four of the suitcases were hidden in the four UC Embassies in Chax, Ulik, Prudence and Moro-Geth. The fifth was hidden in the spaceport at Ni.

In less than three days, the entire personnel of the UC mission to Anarchaos would be wiped out. Records gone as well, and the heart of the monetary system. And all the equipment in the spaceport.

I wasn’t sure in which direction the UC would cut the red tape, whether they would merely pull out entirely and leave Anarchaos to rot in its own juices, or rather move in emphatically, take over full-time governing of the planet, and replace its absurd anarchy with some protectorate government of its own. In either case, this colony at Anarchaos was dead. We were even.

Alone in the blank passenger compartment of the spaceship, I sat a while in thought, and slowly boredom crept over me, the boredom of travel by shuttle, until at last I took Gar’s notebook from my pocket. Neither then nor later did I look at any of the sections in code. Instead, I opened it to the remembered spot and began to read: