No Man's World

XII

There had probably been a better way of dealing with them. But all that was now in the past. Ahead lay dangers that were all the more ominous because they were unknown. If all this planet, as rumored, was workshop and factory and spacefield, then how come this road, winding through the country darkness?

Dawn was not far off. A lot of miles and a lot of country separated Caradine from the point where he had turned Baksi and Hoe off, and he needed to find a hole for the car and himself to hide out during the day. Days here were about thirty Earth hours and, the spring solstice being at hand, were divided up pretty evenly between day and night.

Baksi had pretty clearly been taken by the authorities, forced to work with them, and had no doubt been testing and turning over all the agents Koanga had managed to smuggle into Alpha. Normally, there would have been no reason to suspect hini; a fresh man, coming to this planet would welcome a friend and an outstretched hand. But those passes had been the tip-off. Baksi had overreached himself with those.

Caradine snapped to alertness. A car passed overhead in the darkness with a low grumble of power. It turned, angled down. A black shape momentarily flitted before the stars.

The reputed crack efficiency of Alpha-Horakah had broken down in the matter of the fire brigade; Caradine had fully expected to have been challenged before this. He wondered if they’d sent a boy to do a man’s job.

The car landed, badike, on the road ahead. Caradine kept his headlights on with the dome light off, pushed himself away from the wheel across the seat, and then since the car ahead lay fairly across the road, cut the engine and let the car roll. His nose bumped the fascia and his eyes just peered over it, through the dusty windscreen. The rain had died hours back, and the road had been lousy.

A hint of colossal buildings lay ahead. Perhaps they hadn’t picked him up at all as a wanted man but were merely the final checkpoint to the last entry onto the true Alpha-Horakah. The countryside he had been traversing could well be a wide and camouflaging belt around the tourist center and spaceport.

The windscreen above his head shattered, melted, flowed down in molten puddles of white-hot glassite. The back of the car disappeared. Scorching heat battered at his head. His fumbling hand managed to reach the door. The next shot might rake down, onto the front seats, crisp him as he sprawled.

They’d said nothing. They hadn’t challenged. They’d just stopped in front of him and burned right through where a driver would be sitting.

Caradine felt the anger burn in sympathy along his veins.

There was no second shot.

The door was jammed, the intense heat must have convected along the frame and warped it. He was trapped inside. Heat was dying around him, now, and his eyes were readjusting after the intolerable brilliance of the flash.

Inexplicably, in the way of cars, his headlights were still burning. He cocked a cautious eye over the fascia and peered along the path of illumination. Pinned in that light the side of the air car glowed. The faces of two men looked out, one slightly echeloned behind the other as he lifted and turned to look over his comrade’s shoulder.

The Beatty took them, one after the other, neatly, delicately, completely lacking the monstrous wash of fire that had destroyed his car.

Without emotion, Caradine put his foot against the door, bashed it open, jumped out and walked across to the air car.

Their identifications told him that they were special field operatives, counter-espionage. There was no secrecy; counterespionage, that’s what their smart black-covered ident wallets proclaimed. Well, then. Caradine went about the business methodically and quickly, conscious of the probable alarm the fire had caused and aware of the pressing shadows of those monstrous buildings.

By the time he had finished, the buildings had resolved in dawn light into tall towers, multi-windowed, patch-painted in miserly maintenance so that they looked scabrous. He was feeling very tired, with a soreness about his eyes.

The larger of the two dead men’s clothing fitted well. The one millimeter aperture of the Beatty and its ravening, destructive cauterizing power made no mess. The two bodies, together with one uniform, were placed in Baksi’s ground car. Caradine sprayed the counter-espionage man’s handgun over the car and the splurge of fire sloughed everything into an orange holocaust and final, collapsing gray embers.

Then he sent the air car up and away in a long slant, not caring what blip he was sending across watching radar screens.

The drunk was not a providential stroke of good fortune.

What was fortunate and beyond Caradine’s calculations was the drunk’s insistence on committing suicide. It was an odd combination and by the time Caradine reached the body the man was not only dead, he was past recognition.

Philosophically, Caradine removed all the items he required and pushed the twisted dead body further into the antigrav stilt. The awful power of a planetary mass crushed down on the body and removed it forever from the ken of humanity. Caradine headed for the first cheap lodging house patronized by the workers along the badly lit alleyway.

He’d dumped the official air car long since. With controls set on auto and engine let out at full speed, it rose into the sky heading out and up. It was a powerful model. It would brush the fringes of space before it failed and plunged back. Somewhere serious scientific men might record a new meteor.

Then he’d known well enough what sort of locality to head for. In the tangle of streets huddled outside the gates of the factory site—a hiving twenty-square-mile complex of machine shops, gantries, testing rigs and admin blocks—he’d found the local equivalents of the beer hall, the night club, the pub, the doss house. Horakah demanded work and more work from its all but slave work people; it could not, through sheer matter-of-fact psychological considerations, refuse to provide amusement. That amusement was of the lowest and rawest kind. Caradine didn’t care. He’d waited for the drunk he knew to be inevitable, dodging with deceptive casualness the uniformed police who stalked always in pairs, and had followed him. He had intended only to steal the man’s papers.

But the man had stubbornly in his drunken state wanted to argue with an antigrav stilt supporting a fifty-story air platform. The platform floated half a mile high and no doubt acted as a focal point for freights. The drunk had ignored the warning barriers, had clambered over and had of course had his head crushed by the antigrav stilt. The stilt supported the platform and pressed against the ground—in a very real sense it contained the weight of the planet balanced on its foot.

And now, armed with the name of Constantin Chad, freighter licensed to operate between factories, Caradine was heading dog-tired for the nearest flophouse.

His tired mind found an explicable tie-up between the occupation of the drunk on this machine world and his death. A man who pushed freight trains through the sky at better than Mach Three might very well wish to argue with an antigrav stilt supporting a freight platform. The deeper complexities of the human mind were just as contrary here on this planet, in a section of the galaxy teeming with suns and planets, as they were back beyond the Blight, where Earth itself was the focal point of a million solar systems.

The two secret service men he had shot had had plenty of Horakah money on them. The surly human attendant— the flophouse facilities did not extend to robots—took the money and showed him into a single. The room was clean and bare, but it had that indefinable sleazy air that made Caradine’s skin crawl. He was too tired to worry over trifles. He checked the spy eye and bug detector, found it clear, and lay on the bed.

He trusted his own reflexes to wake him up swiftly and in deadly silence if anyone attempted to rob him. He went to sleep.

He did not sleep the clock around, but lay in bed, meditating, until the long Horakah night waned and he could decently go out to find breakfast. Caradine was a man who was used to dealing with the heart of a problem. Koanga had sent him here to spy, to find out the organization of the Horakah space fleets. The task might seem insuperable to a man without interstellar administration experience and in all truth it posed a nice problem to Caradine, who probably better than anyone else in this end of the galaxy, knew about interstellar admin and organization. After all, he’d handled or cajoled one million independently-minded solar systems; Horakah queened it over a bare thousand.

He washed up and made himself presentable and made for the door. The attendant stopped him.

“Papers?” Caradine said. He decided to probe a little. “Shouldn’t you have asked for those last night?”

“Yeah. But I don’t bother bums like you normally. The police have been sending out alerts, though.” He picked at a hollow tooth. “Some excitement’s stirred up those official layabouts.”

Which was a lead, and an expected one. The ident papers of the two agents Caradine kept stowed in his wallet. He showed the Chad license. As he took it back after the bored scrutiny, he saw again the offiicial’s indecipherable signature and the robotically stamped name: “Horak.”

“I suppose they do things differendy over in Horak?” he said, studying the attendant.

The man creased his whiskery face into a smile. “Huh! Fine chance you or I’d have in Horak. Capital cities don’t welcome bums like us.”

“They sure don’t,” Caradine said in mutual self-pity.

“You’ve never pushed a freight there?”

“Nope. Hoping to, one day. Any tips?”

“Only one.” The hollow tooth sucked ponderously. “Stay clear of anyone in uniform. But—” the guffaw exhaled bad breath—“they’re all in uniform in Horak. Haw, haw.”

Caradine laughed and went out. Horak it was, then. The scarcity of maps hadn’t bothered him when he had a perfectly good one among the agents’ papers. Transport might be a problem, but that would be solved by guile, bravado— or the gun.

He bought an inconspicuous suit of dark-gray synthetic twill and took a leisurely swing on public transport—huge, lumbering four-decked air omnibuses that ploughed ahead in the air lanes scattering lesser cars like fish before sharks-making a zig-zag journey into the jumping-off point for Horak. Everywhere he went the sprawling complexes of vast manufacturing plants covered the land and he saw the far-off glint of starship noses pointing to the sky.

Nearly every block had a scanning TV eye and a loudspeaker clump. Authority here kept a firm and square thumb harshly planted on private life. That, too, merely followed the pattern. Totalitarian worlds had been known to Caradine and before he’d cleaned them up he’d done an amount of field research. At the jumping-off point he felt confident of going right into the capital, a distant cluster of shining towers.

None of that confidence was shaken as two brown-uniformed policemen stopped him leaving the bus terminal and asked for his papers. Without hesitation he handed across the Chad license. Waiting for the ponderous official scrutiny, he looked about casually, without a care in the world—or the galaxy.

“Okay, Chad. Where’re you goin’?”

“Oh, I expect to pick up some freight here. Dunno the details yet. You know how it is.”

“No, fellow, we don’t. We’re policemen. Not freight bums. See?”

“Oh. Oh, sure. Sorry.”

The licence was returned. The policemen stalked on, began to stop others and ask for papers.

The unfortunate early demise of Constantin Chad had been very, very fortunate.

Entering a restaurant of the class suitable to his present station, he had a satisfactory meal. About him people were moving chairs and craning heads to see the wall-size TV screen across the end of the room. This, too, fitted. On a world like this, dominated by moguls demanding the last effort from their workers, regular and fully attended news bulletins formed an essential part of the structure of control. Conforming, Caradine moved his chair and watched.

It was like Gamma, only worse. Sheer, blatant, raw and frenziedly sickening war propaganda. No wonder little Jinny Jiloa had talked about blowing Ahansic up; judged on the content of this TV news coverage, if Horakah did not quickly attack and subjugate most of her interstellar neighbors, she would be invaded, raped, decimated, enslaved and forced under the yoke. He kept a face that was as wooden as those about him. Propaganda as unprocessed as this must have been going out for a long, long time to be accepted without a murmur or a laugh.

Outside news followed. A gigantic swarm of alien spaceships had been spotted approaching from a direction in which, as far as astronomers knew, lay only thinly scattered suns. Therefore this enormous fleet was either a war maneuver of Rag-nar or was a true alien force. No one seemed bothered. Cara-dine guessed they considered this just one more subterfuge in the game of nerves being played out there among the stars. Once propaganda goes beyond a certain limiting line of credibility, only the end of the galaxy has impact.

Figures quoted mentioned a hundred thousand starships. The moral was drawn. Horakah must speed up production! Even more battleships must be launched! Everyone must work twice as hard!

It was a relief to turn to the next item.

A shot came up on the screen of a starship and alighting passengers. The news reader said: “Direct from Gamma, this starship brings the latest in the long line of despicable spies to be caught by our brilliant security services. These underhanded and filthy vermin try to steal our secrets and to blow up the work of many patient hands. But never fear! They are all caught in the end.”

The screen showed Hsien Koanga and Allura, pale-faced under their golden tan, handcuffed, stumbling down the ramp and pushed into a waiting black air car. Allura paused for a moment and brushed back her heavy auburn hair. She was viciously prodded on. Caradine sat very still.

The news reader said: “Also on the starship coming here to answer unnamed charges was the travel official for Gamma, Harriet Lafonde.”

Harriet walked down the ramp, smiling. But Caradine did not miss the men with her, hard-faced men with their hands in their pockets.

So Harriet too, was here on Alpha-Horakah, under arrest.