John Brunner (11 page)

"Proper food?
Medical attention?
A hot
shower?
Even"—
Kynance
curled her lip
into a shadow of a smile, glancing at his bare body with engaging
frankness—"clothes?"

"But
you're not employed by the company any longer!"
Coberley
exclaimed. "The automatics won't obey you now!"

"It
just so happens,"
Kynance
said in a judicious
tone, "that I'm rather particular about automatics which are supposed to
look after me. I've been doing a check of several of the important systems, and
at the moment when I—ah— infringed my contract, quite a few of them were
disconnected so that I could check their condition. I don't suppose it will be
difficult to convert them to manual operation; all of them except the
circuit-restorer are still receiving power."

"But
you were forbidden to touch the automatics at
alll
"
That was
Dickery
Evan, raising his broken arm as mute
witness to the truth of his statement.

"Not
exactly,"
Kynance
murmured. "Not even the
Zygra
Company can rewrite galactic legal precedents to suit
its own convenience. I assure you that the only thing I've done which did entitle
them to fire me was to wave to you, and
that
might
not stand up too long in
court
....
However, before we get it to a court we have to
attend to you. Come along—this
wayl
"

XII

W
ithin an hour
, Horst's bewilderment had given way to awe.
Nothing much had visibly altered here in the familiar environment of the main
station, but in the dragging years since he had been dismissed from his post
for trying to rewire a faulty book-projector classed as "crucial
equipment" by virtue of its theoretical use for supplementary briefing,
his memory of it had been distorted by nightmares into a kind of hell.

And indeed it had been a gigantic trap for
him, ready to spring at the most trivial excuse.

Not
for
Kynance
, though. This astonishing young woman had
opened the back of the
medicare
unit and manually revised
the settings first for Evan's arm—now comfortable in a proper plastic
healing-sheath instead of his own rough splints —and then for Victor's
deficiency disease. Vitamins, proteins, and God-knew-what had gone streaming
into his
knobbled
veins, and now he lay snoozing on
the supervisor's bunk for the first time in—how many years had he been a
starving wanderer across the face of
Zygra
?

Not
starving any longer. While Horst and
Coberley
took
their turns in the shower-cabinet and borrowed her comb to impose order on
their shaggy hair and beards,
Kynance
had re-routed
the organic synthesizer flow supplying the
autochef
so
that it would cope with demands for five portions instead of one, and when they
were clean and dressed they found platters of unbelievable food waiting; it had
all started its existence as forms of what they had been eating for years, but
the transformation was like a miracle. She had even refrained from setting the
autochef
to
salad,
rightly
judging that their diet of uncooked
Zygran
plants had
soured them forever on anything remotely similar.

Coberley
merely tucked in, grunting, as though the
source of his energy—
hate
against the universe in
general and the
Zygra
Company in particular—had dried
up and left him without initiative. Horst, though, found
himself
staring at
Kynance
and eating by touch alone.

"You
must be an extraordinary person!" he burst out at last.

"What have I done?"
Kynance
parried. "You're the ones who are astonishing.
How long have you been out there without help, resources, or"—gesturing
at the loaded table—"terrestrial food?"

"That's not so
...
Horst passed his hand over his face; the fingers were
trembling
. "
Not so important," he finished
emptily. "What I mean is—well, if
I'd
done
some of the things you seem to have done here, like trying to bring the automatics
under control without the computer, I'd have expected to be treated like
Dickery
here and tossed aside on a clump of floating weed
as though I were garbage!"

He
repressed a shiver. He still had the sense that he was in a maze full of
dangerous traps, and had to keep reminding himself that this mere girl, so
much younger than he was, had drawn at least half the teeth of the machinery.

"You
must have done something much worse than just interfering with one of the
automatics, then,"
Kynance
said, glancing at
Evan.

"I guess I did,"
came
the sullen answer. "When this happened to me and the automatics wouldn't
listen, I got so mad I wanted to ruin the pelt-crop."

"I
thought so."
Kynance
leaned forward earnestly.
"If you hadn't done that, you could have stayed here indefinitely— it's a
matter of galactic law that a person in distress and especially in danger of
his life, which you could have argued
you
were,
being injured and unable to fend for yourself, commits no crime if he helps
himself to someone's property in order to sustain himself."

"Fat lot of good telling me now,"
Evan answered sharply.

"Shut
up,"
Coberley
said, raising his eyes and
checking an enormous gobbet of food on the way to his greasy mouth.

He
turned his gaze to
Kynance
. "You mean I could
have stuck around and just taken whatever I wanted, and they couldn't have
stopped me?"

"Goodness,
yes. Food and drink and medical supplies, anyway."

"The
hell you say,"
Coberley
muttered. "Well, it
wouldn't have done me much good, anyhow. I
reacted
the
same as
Dickery
—
got
crazy-mad
at the company."

"If
you'll forgive my saying so . . ."
Kynance
began, and hesitated.

"Say
whatever you like," Horst told her. "You've earned the right."
He gestured to indicate the station around them.

"Well,
it sounds pretty unfair after what you've all been through . . . ." She
bit her lip. "Frankly, though, I think you walked into this with your eyes
shut, and it was damned silly of you."

"Think
we don't realize that?" Horst exclaimed. "I've kicked myself twice
around the planet! I got into this because it looked like a shortcut to
getting a girl I wanted. I was no prize and I thought I could make myself into
one. I'd been a damned fool all my life, skipping from one course of study to
another until I'd wound up without a decent degree in anything, and that meant
I couldn't hold a job drawing the kind of salary this girl had in mind, so I
volunteered for
Zygra
against the advice of what few
friends I had . . ."

He
broke off.
Kynance
was looking at4iim oddly. "A
bit of a romantic,
hm
?" she said. "The
outworlds
aren't kind to romantics, as I've recently
learned."

"Call trying to buy a girl with a year
of your life romantic'?"
Coberley
jeered. Some
of his spirit seemed to have returned with the food he'd engulfed.

"I
didn't quite mean that,"
Kynance
said.
"What I had in mind was this bit about skipping from subject to subject instead
of buckling down and fitting himself into the right sort of mold for Nefertiti.
You
are
Nefertitian
?" she added. Horst gave a nod.
"There can't be many people like that on the
outworlds
,
and it's one of the things I've missed most:
people
who like to associate with people, spend times chatting idly, instead of
driving themselves around the clock. I'd figured out that at least some of the
volunteers for
Zygra
must have been like you, because
there's
sc
little room for them anywhere off Earth.
The
outworlds
don't offer them the chance for a
decent living."

"I
often thought I'd like to go to Earth," Horst admitted. "But there
was nothing I could have done—except come here —where I'd have a chance of
making the cost of the fare." He paused briefly. "And you know
something else? I guess that's why I never made any real friends at home.
Everybody else on the whole damned planet seemed to be so involved in making a
career, earning a fortune—while to me it simply didn't seem like enough to give
purpose to a man's life."

"Listen
to him!" scoffed
Coberley
. "He's been going
on like this ever since I first knew him, playing the same tape over and
over."

"What induced
you
to come to
Zygra
?"
Kynance
inquired.

"Me?
I was stupid, same as Horst and
Dickery
and Victor.
Wouldn't think it to look at me now, but when I was Horst's age I had muscles
and there was a big demand for men who were built, back on Loki—which is my
home world. I didn't have too many brains to go with the muscles, though, and I
got kind of left behind by events. So I jumped at what I thought was a
snap."

"
Dickery
?"

He
told her, with many sighs, about what he had planned to do with the salary he
would have collected on leaving here. It made him seem like what she had at
first guessed: a rather nice, but lazy, man not bright enough to invest twenty
years' hard work in some other job against the promise of later enjoyment.
Easy meat for the
Zygra
Company. All of them were,
including Victor, about whom the others reported that in a fit of deep
depression he'd decided he wanted to get the hell away from the entire human
race, and had grabbed this job as a hermitage. Of course, when his condition
had cycled back to the upward phase, he'd regretted it.

"Do
any of you know why the
Zygra
Company adopted this
policy of changing its supervisors annually, recruiting them on this absurd
basis and deliberately trapping them into infringing their contracts?" she
asked next.

"I
think so," Horst answered. "Victor knew the man before him, who knew
the first of these nine
Shuster
told you about. It
seems that there was a man called
Zbygniewski
who was
planted by another company to find out what he could about this place and the
life-cycle of the pelts. He must have been armored up to the roof of his skull
with post-hypnotics and drugs, because he got through the company's routine
interrogation, joined the staff, was assigned to his tour of duty here—it was
farmed out among permanent employees then, you see—and after his year's stay
he got away with information that enabled his bosses to launch the most nearly
successful of all the raids on
Zygra
. He'd also
planted a
boobytrap
for his successor, the idea being
that this would make the planet legally unoccupied so that someone else could
land and claim possession before the harvesting ship came to pick up the next
crop."

He
broke off. Something in
Kynance's
expression had
given him a clue to what she was thinking. He said, listening to his own words
in near-bewilderment, "Legally—unoccupied . . .?"

"Not
so fast,"
Kynance
objected, raising a hand. But
she also gave him a wink. "I assume that this
boobytrap
he left was what started the company on its present course?"

"I
gather from hints I've picked up that it was Shuster's idea, the thing that
advanced him in the company," Hoist said.

"That
fits,"
Kynance
nodded. "A swine like him
wouldn't be much liked even by the fellow swine
who
must run the
Zygra
Company, so you'd expect him to
have done something exceptionally nasty to get ahead to where he is now. And
the dirty underhandedness of the traps people
run
into-matches his personality."

"You can say that
again," agreed
Dickery
Evan fervently.

"Just how underhanded?"
Kynance
went on,
disregarding the interruption. "Would you please tell me how each of you
was inveigled into breaking his contract?"

So they did. Horst wondered optimistically if
some of the means employed would turn out to be illegal—
Kynance
seemed to know a great deal about the law. But that hope was quenched as time
after time she cited reasons to justify the company's position.

To
Evan she said, "I'm afraid tampering with an officially-required record of
your work does count as sabotage and voids the contract without chance of
appeal: Levi Rico versus Free Space Haulage Company, 2153."

And
to Horst she said rather sadly, "I know they might never have used that
book-projector to give you supplementary instructions, but legally you were
not entitled to do anything that risked garbling vital information from your
employers. Computers are legally non-conscious machines, hence devoid of
intelligence, so you should have told the record that you suspected a
malfunction needing manual repairs-then you'd have been within your
rights."

And
to
Coberley
, who had been snared through trying to
reset the
autochef
when it had burned his breakfast:
"The computer was bound to consider the chance that you might alter
another of its settings and perhaps poison yourself— Fernando Duquesne versus
the Osceola Food Company, 2099, is quite clear on that."

"All right, since you're so smart,"
Coberley
spat, "now tell us what we can do to
get off this stinking
mudballl
"

"I'm not sure I can do that,"
Kynance
admitted.

"Then
what in the name of—?"

"
Coberley
, pipe down!" Horst rapped. "This girl
has done things you and I wouldn't have had the guts to try even if we'd
thought of them."

"That's nothing very special,"
Kynance
said. "You see-well, it strikes me that you
outworlders
are too used to relying absolutely on
machines. It's only natural; you've done miracles with integrated automatic
systems which were never needed on Earth, like this one which looks after
Zygra
so efficiently. When your life depends on them, you
don't interfere with their operations. The moment I caught sight of you
paddling your boat along, I realized I'd fallen into the same trap—swallowed
whole what the
Zygra
Company told me about the planet
being impossible to colonize and even the single supervisor needing
life-support equipment costing millions of credits."

"I
thought you wouldn't have sacrificed your contract without some plan in
mind," Horst said softly.

"If
it's not a plan to get us out of here I'm not interested,"
Coberley
snapped.

"It
may well lead to that,"
Kynance
told him.
"Though at best it's going to involve a delay of a year—a
Zygran
year, I mean. There
are
one
hell of a lot of compensations, nonetheless. You might say there's a fat prize
attached which will more than make up for the salaries we've lost."

Dickery
sat up and began to take notice, and she
unfolded to them the fantastic scheme which had come to her in a flash of
inspiration.