Empire of Two Worlds

Fourteen

There were no aircraft at the base camp, and no pilots who knew the course. They were all outside Klittmann. The engineers had been putting down a landline so there would very shortly be television communication between Rheatt and Bec’s army, but I didn’t want to announce I was coming in case Bec got any more ideas about delaying me. So I hitched a ride on one of the supply wagons.

We took about eight days getting there. Already I was too late for the big fight.

The plain outside Klittmann was strewn with our wagons and a few parked aircraft, but evidently the sloops and the fighting men were already inside the city. The great grey pile of Klittmann was quite a sight: they’d bombed it heavily and one whole side of it was blasted open, masses of concrete having tumbled to the ground and the inside of the city being revealed in all its layer-upon-layer complexity.

I found my way inside the city, grabbed a Rheattite officer and went looking for Bec. The destruction inside Klittmann was unbelievable. Heavy explosives had been let off with criminal disregard for the buttresses that kept the whole place standing up. Prowling black sloops patrolled the dusty streets. The usual background noise of activity was absent, and in the silence I heard firing going on elsewhere in the city. It seemed that for the most part Klittmann was already in our hands. Many of the elevators had ceased working and we rumbled tortuously up ramps in one of the sloops, making for the upper levels where Bec had his headquarters.

Compared with the Basement where I had lived for so long before leaving Klittmann, the upper reaches we were now moving in were classy; but nearly ten years on Earth had dulled my appreciation of fine differences. Now it all looked sordid, monotonous and claustrophobic. Nothing but metal and concrete and stale, cold-smelling air.

There had been an awful lot of killing. At first I thought the Rotrox were the cause of that; but shortly before we reached Bec’s hang-out we crossed a big plaza where I saw that Bec’s revenge had been complete and vicious.

I made the driver stop the sloop and I got out to have a closer look. Piled in the plaza were bodies, their hands tied, riddled with bullet holes. Their fine dress told me they were high class: probably government members and tank owners.

More bodies hung by the neck from the overhead longerons. Dimly I realised that everybody whom Bec had looked on as an enemy in the past was here. I caught sight of Blind Bissey, the owner whose tank we had appropriated, swinging listlessly with eyes bulging, blind in death as they had been in life.

Bec had even killed Bissey’s dog.

Wearily I climbed back in the sloop and signalled the driver to carry on.

When I walked in on Bec he was sitting in a fairly small, untidy office, a nearby table piled with papers. He was smoking a tube of weed meditatively. It was like old times.

If he was surprised to see me, he hid it. He scarcely moved.

“Hello, Klein. Didn’t expect you so soon.”

“So I believe,” I said stonily.

I took a good look at him; as if seeing him for the first time: much smaller than me, a stocky, dapper body, the squared-off shoulders and dark, conservative Klittmann-style clothes; the square face and plastered-down black hair. The only big difference from ten years ago was that there was more jowl beneath the jaw.

He glanced up at me. “What happened to Grale?”

“He’s dead. He tried to kill me, Bec. You should have sent another man to do the job. Or is that the way you wanted it?”

His gaze became speculative and distantly angry. “Whaddya mean he’s dead? Who gives you the O.K. to go and wipe out Grale?”

“I’ve told you,” I said evenly, “his idea was to wipe me out and tell you he was defending himself.”

Bec listened while I told him the story of how I had tricked Grale with the blind. Finally he chuckled.

“Well, it looks like I had to lose one of you. Frankly, I’m glad it wasn’t you. Care for a smoke?”

I took the tube he offered. It was the first in a long time.

“It looks like you have it all sewn up,” I said, drawing the smoke into my lungs.

“That’s right. It sure felt good to get even with some of the klugs running this place.”

I wondered what had happened to all the philosophy Bec used to talk. Right now he seemed to be motivated by nothing but revenge. It gave me a bad feeling to see him gloat.

“Yes,” I said, “I saw them on my way in. What happens next, Bec?”

“Things are going to move fast from now on. Very fast. I’ll be needing your help, Klein. Right now we have Klittmann. We have very little time to knock it into shape. Because by the time a year is out we’ll have damn near the whole of Killibol.”

I held the smoke in my lungs for an astonished few seconds.

“But how?” It wasn’t possible to conquer all the planet’s cities, besieging them one by one, in anything like so short a time.

Bec’s face became sardonic. “Technique, Klein, technique. It beats brute force every time.”

“I don’t see how any kind of technique is going to do what you’re saying.”

“Tank plague.”

I couldn’t have heard him right. I stared at him, puzzled and frightened. Ice began to congeal in my insides.

Tank and plague, when said together, are the two most terrible words on Killibol. More than one city had wasted away and died, destroyed by a famine nothing can relieve. Nobody ever visits the empty shell of such a city, not even centuries after.

But Bec was sitting here talking about it without batting an eyelid. “In Rheatt I had one or two projects going that I didn’t tell you about,” he said. “Maybe you heard about them indirectly. Anyway, while you were building up the League I got a few Rheattite scientists to work for me.” He paused, lighting up another tube. “It’s a funny thing. They’re clever that way. But they never used any weapons like this against the Rotrox. I guess they were scared it might get back to them. Anyway, they bred a special strain of tank plague, a disease that attacks the nutrient in the tanks but leaves protein and all animal life unharmed. I’m pretty sure there’s no defence against it.”

“So within a year there won’t be a productive tank anywhere.”

Bec nodded, giving me another glance with his glittering eyes. “It’s beautiful. A virus. I’ve got agents flying out now to a dozen cities. They’re wearing skin dyes so they won’t look too strange. They’ve got orders to penetrate the cities — that’s not too difficult for a man on his own — and release the virus. Once it gets into the air it has to get through to the tanks before long: there’s no known filter that can keep it out. You realise what that means, Klein?”

“Sure.” My throat was dry. “It means you’re the master.”

He was watching me carefully. “That’s right. For some years I’ve been building up enormous stockpiles of food in Rheatt. The only food available on Killibol will have to come from Earth, through the gateway, which we control. Anybody who wants to eat will have to come to us. Things are going to have to be run as we say, and no other way.”

But did Bec have enough food to feed everybody? I doubted it. Even granted that he couldn’t get round to infecting every city in Killibol straight away, the population would still run into tens of millions, perhaps hundreds of millions. Perhaps he would set up tanks on Earth to produce protein faster than soil-grown food; but taking care of everybody he robbed of sustenance didn’t seem to be uppermost in his mind right now.

“No,” I said softly.

Something indefinable happened in his hard black eyes.

“What do you mean, Klein, no?”

I threw down the tube I was smoking. There was a feeling in my chest that seemed to be bursting. “That isn’t the new state we talked of creating, Bec. You talked about freeing people from the slavery of the tanks. About breaking the stasis. Now you’re putting a stranglehold on the cities that the tank owners could never even have dreamed of. How do you square that with everything you said, Bec?”

His right hand, resting on the table, shifted uneasily. “Don’t be a klug. You have to be an iron man, a king, to achieve anything.”

Bec was always a faster thinker than me. I could see I would have to get this over with quick. “I can’t let you do it, Bec.” I said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t come so far with you for this.”

He glared at me, his face raging.

“You punk! You trying to tell me how to run my own outfit?”

Keeping his glittering eyes on me, he got to his feet. Suddenly he lunged for his holster which was hanging on a hook on the wall. My gun was already in my hand. I fired once. The heavy slug caught him in the chest and knocked him sideways. He fell sprawling, face down, and didn’t move.

I stood there, the gun still held stupidly in my hand, the blast still sounding in my ears. I felt lost, overpowered, like a son who has killed his father, or a dog that has killed its master. It was the first time I could remember that I had wanted to cry.

I believe I would never have seen it if it hadn’t been for that mind-blowing experience in Harmen’s laboratory. The visions I had seen there had expanded my mind and made me see things from a different angle. I saw clearly now that it wasn’t any altruistic idea that had motivated Bec, but deeply selfish ambition. Valid though they were in themselves, the ideas he had taught me had been only means to establishing his own glory.

Perhaps he really had believed in them at one time; perhaps he had never ceased to imagine he still did believe in them. But towards the end he was too far gone for such claims to be credible. Had he lived, I could see nothing ahead for Killibol but an iron-jacketed tyranny.

“Hello, Klein.”

The familiar flat baritone made my blood freeze. The side door was opening. Becmath stood there — the same Becmath I had just shot and who was lying on the floor!

Harmen’s warning flashed into my mind.

Doppelganger!

Becmath moved into the room and turned over his own body with his foot, bringing the face into view. Then he looked up at me, wearing his usual sardonic smile.

“Looks like I underestimated you this once, Klein. Or maybe it was one of those subconscious mistakes Harmen talks about.”

“Bec,” I tried to speak, but could only croak.

“Don’t worry about it. I guess I did go slightly off the rails, didn’t I? You can do it your way, now. Keep the boys in line, Klein. Don’t let things get out of hand.”

Suddenly he seemed to be advancing towards me, expanding to fill my vision, his smile growing more and more weird.

Then he was gone.

For what seemed like an age I did nothing but stand trembling. I became aware of the sound of running feet outside. Reeth burst into the room holding a repeater. He looked at me, then at Bec’s corpse.

I stood him off with my handgun, trying to control myself. “I had to do it, Reeth. He was going too far.”

“You mean the plague?”

I nodded. He stared in awe at the body, then slowly put up his gun.

“Yeah, it was pretty bad,” he said with a sigh. “But the agents are already out. What are we going to do now?”

I let my own gun hand drop, the weapon hanging loosely in my fingers. Somehow I couldn’t even find the strength to return it to my holster.

“We’ll make out,” I said. “We’ll go along with Bec’s original plan, the one he drew up years ago, and modify it according to circumstances….”

Now that there was communication with Earth we could break the tyranny of the tanks once and for all, I thought. We could bring in any amount of fresh nutrient. We could import millions of tons of topsoil to grow natural food. At first some people might die due to Bec’s meddling, but the situation would stabilise in time. There would be rapid air transit, between all cities. There would be commerce with Rheatt and the rest of Earth. It would be a two-planet empire where a man could act freely without fear of starving. As for the Rotrox, they would be dealt with.

Reeth shook his head regretfully. “And Bec promised me a dozen cities all of my own.”

“You can have them,” I told him. “There’s going to be a lot of organising to be done. But they won’t be cities peopled by slaves.”

More footsteps sounded. Heerlaw came into the office, backed by one of his countrymen. His eyes fell on Bec and the thin ribbon of blood that was creeping across the floor; then at the handgun that still hung limply in my fingers.

He stood stock-still before he spoke.

“You were right to kill him,” he said at last. “For all his genius, he was a man of blood and violence. But will you be any better?”

“I hope so,” I answered tiredly. “You’d better hope so, too, because you can’t do without me now.”

That was true: Rheatt, the Rotrox, and now Klittmann, were all joined in a contradictory web of hostility and mutual support which would collapse into a gruesome bloodbath without someone to co-ordinate it. Bec had been that man, and I was the only one who could step into his shoes. It was going to take all my energy and skill to sort this mess out.

But then, I’d had the best of training.

There was one more thing.

The Klittmann tanks, naturally, had been the first to get hit by the plague. As soon as the television landline was complete I put through calls to Rheatt to locate the food stocks Bec had mentioned. And after I had found them, I gave myself the time to put through a call to Palramara.

Her face came up on the screen. The colours never seem to come true on Earth television and her face had a pinkish, rather than a green tinge. Briefly, if it’s possible to put such things briefly, I told her what had happened and that Becmath was dead.

She received the news without any visible sign of emotion. “And what now?” she asked.

Did she mean politics — or us?

Us. That was the problem I had been wrestling with since I had killed Bec, when I hadn’t been too occupied with more important matters.

I knew I could have Palramara again if I wanted her. And I did want her. With Bec out of the way we could come together again. The attraction was still there and it would still work for us. But I also knew that I could get Dalgo off Merame if I tried hard enough. The choice was mine.

Her enlarged pupils stared at me distantly out of the screen. I swallowed.

“I’ll do what I can to get your husband released,” I said quickly. Her expression didn’t change. I looked away.

“Goodbye, Palramara.”

Abruptly I cut the connection.

I’d always been fairly lonely. I could be lonely again; it was no sweat.

For the thousandth time I wondered if Becmath’s doppelganger had ceased to exist when it vanished, or if it had been drawn off into some other part of the universe. I hoped it had been annihilated, because I didn’t like to think of him wandering around somewhere, lost and also alone.