No Man's World

VIII

Standing there with the rain falling in pencil-thin streaks of color against the lights, Caradine took his chance.

“So I’m not one of you. So I wasn’t born on Shanstar. But I come from Shanstar. I am a member of your planetary group. I am one of you!”

Slowly, Hsien Koanga shook his head. He stood back and stared up at Caradine and all the perkiness had gone from him.

“We asked you to do a job for Shanstar. Had you been one of us you would have complied. I should have wondered, then.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“Do?” Allura swung a slender hand pettishly in the lamplight. “What is there to do? I’ll say my piece, I won’t be believed, and if you are condemned then I’ll suffer for perjury. A nice position you’ve worked me into, Mr. What’s-your-name!”

“I’m sorry, Allura. But I didn’t work you into it. I was rigged into this mess, too, remember. I was framed like this because I’m from Shanstar.”

“No.” Koanga spoke sharply. “That won’t wash. Because you have a visa to visit Alpha. That’s why.”

Caradine couldn’t argue. “Rawson framed me. He’s putting pressure on me to get him and the girl onto Alpha on the strength of my visa. Just how he expects me to do that, I don’t know. But if he can get me off the hook of this false charge, then I figure I’ll go along with him. I value my skin.”

“He could be taken care of.”

“That would be rather stupid. He and Sharon are the only two people who can help. I’d appreciate it if you left them alone.” Caradine mustered a smile. “Anyway, Allura, if I agree to their proposal and they say they were out in the car today, that let’s you out. They can’t charge you with perjury.”

“That’s true,” said Allura. She didn’t sound hopeful.

Koanga rocked back on his heels and cocked his head up, as though summing up Caradine for the first time. He moistened his lips. Then he said distinctly, “Tell me. Where are you from?”

Caradine had already made up his mind that when this inevitable question came he would tell the truth. But now it was here, he couldn’t face the problem; it took more courage than he had at his disposal at that disillusioned moment. “What is truth?” he said. “I don’t know. Truth is, I suppose, what a man wants to hear. I am from Shanstar. That is my home. What I was before, where I was born, they don’t matter any more.”

“You are wrong. They do matter.”

“But only to intolerant people. Men and women who cannot accept the new, who shut their minds to anything outside their normal comfortable horizons. Your ancestry, Hsien Koanga, is told to me in your name. But you don’t know that. You don’t understand race relations at all. You only know a man is a man. You cannot conceive of there being men of different color, can you?”

He hadn’t meant to say that. It had leaped out in the angry bitterness seething in him.

“Different-colored men?” Koanga stepped back. “Are you crazy, Carter?”

“No. Only that I have had access to older records than any of you know of. All men are the same beautiful golden tan now. All over the human sections of the galaxy men are all alike. Rapid transport has seen to that, despite the artificial barriers we erect. It was not always so.”

Allura said softly, “You remember, Uncle, the stories you used to tell me when I was a baby? About lost and forgotten civilizations? About the strange discoveries of new planets where men had once tried to make a civilization and failed. And of how some had succeeded and when they were found again, living on worlds they thought of center of the universe, some peoples were…” she hesitated.

Koanga finished for her. “I remember the fairy stories. Some of the people were white and some yellow and some brown. The pigments in their skins had gone wrong. Something had happened to them. Something strange and eerie under alien suns.”

Caradine shook his head. “No, Koanga. Nothing had happened to them. That was their tragedy. Nothing had happened to them. It is we who changed. This wonderful golden tan we all take for granted is an amalgam of all those old colored men and women.”

“Impossible!” Koanga sat down abruptly.

Allura was staring at Caradine now with burning intensity.

^aMy uncle also told me stories of old worlds and forgotten planets. Fairy-stories of make-believe. One planet was mentioned many times. One world where the legends say we all came from. A single tiny planet orbiting an insignificant sun, somewhere behind the Blight”

“Earth,” said Caradine.

The way he said it made it a benediction.

Koanga looked up from where he was sitting. “AD this talk—it is nonsense. What do old fairy stories matter now? We have to face the realities of the present, tempting though it is to slip away into the fantasies of childhood.” He scowled at Caradine. “Well, Carter, since you won’t tell us where you are from—and I must admit I expected nothing else—we must part company. Shanstar is in too great peril from Horakah to waste time on a shyster like you.”

“Part company? How do you mean?”

“You’re in serious trouble, with Rawson’s help or without it. We are suspected here, already. Further contact with you would be inadvisable. To keep our records clean I shall inform the Horakah police that you are not from Shanstar. That way—”

“But you wouldn’t do that!” Caradine was horrified. “Why, I’d be—I wouldn’t stand a dog’s chance.”

“You mean the real world of your birth is some ramshackle little hole, broken-down and decadent, and you go out into the galaxy and try to gain prestige by claiming you are from Shanstar. Rather despicable, don’t you think?”

“It isn’t like that at all. A man is proud of his home—”

“Not if it is a stinkhole and he has seen what better worlds are like.”

“Mine isn’t a stinkhole!” Caradine shouted, exasperated. If this little wizened Koanga denied him, he’d really be in trouble. When it had happened before he’d skipped planet with no reputation but with skin and wallet intact. This time he was under close surveillance from the local planetary police and just wouldn’t get away. He began to feel closed-in, suffocated, imprisoned.

For the first time the hideous reality of his predicament sank in. Hell! Whichever way he turned he was sunk.

“Well,” he said boldly, “what do you intend to do about it?”

“Allura and I want no part of it. You’re too dangerous, Carter. You’re carrying death about with you.”

“Look, you don’t have to inform on me. Just let it lie. If Rawson gets me off the hook, I’ll simply go off and you can forget all about me.”

“That won’t be easy,” Allura said, not looking at him.

Koanga said slowly, “As a citizen of the galaxy it is my duty to reveal deceptions of this kind. If any man is allowed to he about his home planet and claim just where he wishes, the organization we have would break down. It is my duty to turn you in; Carter.”

Caradine mentally sat back and let out a sigh of relief.

Koanga was offering a bargain. And that bargain seemed pretty obvious.

He said heavily, “I’ve given my word that I will not spy on Alpha. If I fall in with Rawson’s wishes, and smuggle him and Sharon to Alpha, I shall not have broken my word. I also told Harriet Lafonde that I would consider my word invalidated if I found that my home world was being threatened by Horakah—”

“Your home world!” The sneer was quite cutting.

“By that I meant Shanstar,” Caradine said evenly. “If you can show me that Horakah is planning aggression against Shanstar, then I can operate for you as you wish, you need not reveal my secret, and we’re all straight.”

Koanga was not in the least perturbed that his offer had been presented before he himself had made it. It had been so obviously in his mind that his thoughts merely ran on in that groove.

“Shanstar needs a man on Alpha-Horakah,” he said. The rain was ceasing now, the ten-minute period closing out. The world smelled fresh and wonderful, full of growing things. “Horakah means to take over this entire area of the galaxy. Ragnar and the good ol’ PLW will not move yet. They are so big, so powerful, that until a grouping reaches ten thousand planets they just don’t notice it. Horakah can swallow up Shanstar, Ahansic, Belmont, Delavue, a hundred smaller groups.

“On Alpha is their Central Agency. They have an entire planet working on one project and one alone: the manufacture of space fleets to smash with ease any opposition they may encounter. This is so. We have to know the composition of those fleets; the way in which they have organized scout ships, spotters, screens, heavies and battlewagons. If we knew that, we could so position our own smaller fleets that we might be able to—we would just have to—slip in and do enough damage to deter them.”

“How do you deter a thousand starships with weapons enough to annihilate a planet, when you don’t have a tenth of that strength, Koanga?”

“By knowing how the enemy is organized. Everything depends on that. You will not be the first to land on Alpha for us. The others may still be there. They may be finished. But we must have that information before Horakah moves.”

Fighting, war and sudden death amongst the sprawling stars of the galaxy. The old familiar pattern being repeated. Caradine had seen enough—too much—of interstellar politics to relish reentering the arena, especially at this- low level. But he was held, caught, transfixed. He was strung up, raw and ready for the knife, on the carefully contrived hooks of Rawson and Sharon Ogilvie.

“Rawson arranged for that stupid kid Gorse to be killed. He and his girlfriend planned to have me out of the way, with only themselves as witnesses. They could then deny I was with them. No wonder Sharon was livid when you rescued us, Allura. But—” he gestured wearily “—it made no difference in the end to their plans. It could be even that the fight in the restaurant was a put-up-job. What would a girl be doing eating a big meal like that at midmoming break? Maybe they had this thing figured the moment I landed.”

“They have some in with the local officials.” Koanga nodded slowly. “They must have known about this famous weapon of yours, Carter. And they must be able to swing some weight in having their word taken against their Ahansic outworld origin.”

Allura said, “But they have no power with Harriet Lafonde. Horakah is subdivided into so many self-important departments that a big fish in one is kicked around in another.”

“I am familiar with that organizational setup, if organization it can be called,” said Caradine. “Carry on calling me John Carter. It will serve. And I rather like the name. Now, what do we do?”

Both Allura and her uncle spoke at once. They stopped. Caradine said, “And, of course, don’t forget that I’ll be taking along Greg Rawson and Sharon Ogilvie.”

Hsien Koanga said, “That must be your affair and theirs. What happens to them once they land on Alpha is no concern of ours. You, Carter, are working for the official but never-recognized espionage agency of Shanstar now. I will brief you at a more suitable time—after you know for certain that you are going to Alpha-Horakah. But don’t let those two from Ahansic trip you up again.” He paused and his wrinkles creased around his eyes. “It might be politic to allow them to be caught early on. That I leave with you and your honor.”

“Fat lot of honor I’ve left now,” Caradine said sourly.

“Oh, I don’t know.” Allura smiled at him. “I’d say you’d done a good job of retaining your manly virtue intact.”

“If only—” Caradine burst out. “If only Shanstar and Ahansic and all the others could get together! Then, we’d be able to talk sense to Horakah.”

“That’ll be the day,” grunted Koanga, rising from his chair. “Now find Rawson and his woman before the police do.”

Rawson and Sharon found Caradine walking about in front of the garages. He had an idea they’d come that way. He kept it brief. Yes, he’d go along with their plans. They parted and the smile of triumph on the pair from Ahansic was so alike as to make Caradine begin to wonder.

Harriet Lafonde smiled too, as she looked up with the greeting lighting her face. She rose gracefully from the chair under the wide-spreading trees with the curiously flat pale-green leaves. The chair moved back silendy on the stone patio flags.

“Well, Mr. Carter. So you have come to collect your visa.”

He smiled unaffectedly at her. No doubt about it; she was charming. Her perfectly styled gray hair caught a vagrant beam of green-tinted sunshine and for a moment gleamed with a pure golden light. A trick, an optical illusion, but it transformed her into an exciting woman ten years younger.

“If it is still available. You know that I was for a time suspected of murder?”

“Yes, I know. So tiresome. But mistakes made by other departments do not affect me yet, I trust. As far as my travel department is involved, Mr. Carter, your visa is here, ready for you.” She held out her hand.

The plastic-covered case was warm from her grasp, warm from the warmth of the blood running in her veins. Caradine took it, feeling that warmth. He smiled.

“Thank you… Harriet.” He swallowed. “I’ll probably be leaving tomorrow. May I… that is, would you care to do me the honor of dining with me tonight?”

She tilted back her head and looked at him through long eyelashes. Then she laughed, a mellow golden gong-note amid the tinkling sounds of falling water and bird song and insect hum. Her eyes were a soul-drowning gray.

“I would be delighted, John.”