Masters of Everon (2 page)

"As a matter of fact, yes—" Uncharacteristically, Jef found himself with a sudden strong urge to explain himself to this first friendly fellow traveler he had encountered. Words had been locked up inside him for so long now, with no one to listen. "You see, he's been on Earth for experimental observation since just after his birth. Now he's eight years old. His eyes ought to be open and he ought to be three times as big as he is—"

"Three times? Come now, Mr. Robini!"

"Yes, sir. Three times this size. But for some reason he hasn't matured. The assumption—my assumption—is that there was something lacking to him on Earth; so I've managed to bring him back here to see if, on his home world, he'll mature after all."

"Your assumption, you say?" The question was almost sharp.

Jef was suddenly wary, conscious of perhaps having flooded this stranger too suddenly with more information than it was prudent to give. But there was no easy way to stop talking now.

"Mikey grew up with me," he said. "My family were docents with the Xenological Research station in Philadelphia. When I went after a doctorate in alien intelligences, I took him for the subject of my thesis; and the thesis helped get me the grant to bring him back here for further observation."

"So," said Martin Curragh, "you're an off-Earth zoologist, are you?"

The touch of wariness redoubled.

"Not exactly," he said. "Not yet. The only reason I got the grant was that no one could try this work with Mikey except me. There's no lack of people with qualifications to push me aside, if it hadn't been for the fact that I was the only human he'd respond to—after my father and mother died."

Martin looked at him during a small moment of silence.

"They're dead, then, are they?" he asked.

"Two years ago. An undersea traffic tunnel collapsed." Even after this length of time Jef did not like to talk about it. "At any rate, that's why I'm here."

"All because you were lucky enough to be named a docent to this interesting beast eight years ago."

"It wasn't exactly luck," said Jef.

"Oh?" Martin's eyebrows raised. "What do you call it then?"

"String-pulling, I suppose," said Jef. "My older brother was a Colony Representative for the Ecological Corps here on Everon. I suppose you know what such people do?"

"What do they do?"

"They operate something like glorified agricultural advisers to new colonies in their First Mortgage most of the time," said Jef a little bitterly. "In this case Will was up in the mountains here on Everon and he found a new-born maolot cub, not far from where his mother had been killed in a rockslide. He managed to keep the cub alive and ended up sending him back to Earth for observation as he grew up. So it was probably his recommendation that turned the trick in getting us named as docents—though my father was a fully qualified and thoroughly experienced zoologist and he was working for the Xenological Research Service. Only—well, you know how much influence a North American would have in the intercultural services."

"Not the greatest, certainly," said Martin.

For a second the impulse passed through Jef to ask Martin if he was himself a North American. But his accent made it unlikely and the question teetered on the edge of invading the other's privacy.

"So," said Jef, "as I say, Mikey and I grew up together. Apparently—I say
apparently
because no one had ever succeeded in keeping one alive in captivity before—they attach to a single person only. He'd do anything my father or mother asked him, but the only one he really responded to was me. That's why there was no point in sending him back here with anyone else, and why I got the research grant."

"And this brother of yours—the one who found him—" said Martin, "the beast wouldn't respond to him, either? Not a matter of imprinting, then."

"No. Baby ducks, and some Earth creatures like them, may imprint and follow around the first moving object they encounter, but Mikey belongs to Everon. Not to speak of the fact that he's a lot more intelligent than any duck; or for that matter, in my opinion, more than anything else Earth-born except a human. But, in any case, William never saw him after those first few days."

"He never came visiting home to Earth?"

"He died somewhere in the upcountry here on Everon," said Jef a little shortly. He was now having strong second thoughts about spreading all this intimate history out before a complete stranger. "That was a few weeks after he sent Mikey to us."

"Did he, now?" There was no noticeable note of sympathy in Martin's voice. "I suppose you'll be trying to find his grave, and all that."

In fact that was one of the things that Jef had planned to do, if it was still possible to locate that grave after nearly eight years. A recently colonized world was not the easiest place to track down matters that had probably only been casually recorded to begin with.

"Perhaps." Jef had not meant the conversation to get into these personal areas. At all costs he must put a period to it. "In any case that's a private matter."

"Oh, indeed?"

It seemed to Jef that what he now heard was an open sneer in Martin's voice.

"That's right, Mr. Curragh," he said. "I've a right to privacy, I think?"

"Oh, you have that." Martin rose to his feet in one smooth movement. "You needn't fear I'll pry into your secret business. You may be a very John Smith now, and no one suspecting it. Good day, Mr. Robini."

He turned and walked off.

Jef sat where he was, torn between resentment at Martin's attitude and a feeling that he had perhaps rebuffed the man too strongly. But though Martin would have no way of knowing it, he had struck a painful nerve with his gibe about Jef being a "John Smith," that name which was the cover identity for those top-ranking members of the interworld Ecological Corps, the Planetary Inspectors. The Inspectors held awesome powers to recommend economic sanctions by the family of inhabited planets against any world not managing its ecology properly; and the "John Smith" cover name was designed to protect these men and women in their personal lives, from political and other pressures. No one but the Corps knew the real identity of any John Smith.

Jef had dreamed once of being an E. Corps Inspector, himself. That had been before Will, the older brother he could barely remember had applied for the position and been rejected by the Corps. That had been sixteen years ago; but Jef could remember the heavy blow of disappointment on the family household when word of Will's rejection arrived. Jef's father had endured that defeat, too, without a word. But, young as he had been then, Jef had felt the pain lying deeply within the elder Robini, silent but inextinguishable.

In spite of the rejection, Will had made his own way to the new worlds and finally caught on with the E. Corps in a subordinate position. He had gone on to give more than half a decade in faithful duty, ending here on Everon, his last post. And how had the Corps rewarded that service...?

Jef wrenched his mind from the memory. He thought again of Martin with a harsh contempt. What could someone like him know of what went into the making of a John Smith—

"Landing in one minute!" The voice of a ship's officer from a ceiling speaker sounded over Jef's head and he came back to himself with a start. All this time the spaceship had been dropping steadily down toward the surface of Everon and the space there without his realizing it. "Landing in one minute. Exit by the debarkation lounge airlock only, please. A local official will be at the foot of the landing stair to direct you through entrance procedures."

A few seconds later there was the slightest of jars as the ship touched down. Suddenly, beyond the partitions around Jef and Mikey, people were standing up, collecting their portable belongings and beginning to move toward the still-closed airlock of the debarkation lounge. As the first of the passengers from behind the rear partition enclosing Jef and Mikey began to pass, Mikey lifted his head sharply.

"Easy..." said Jef, putting his arm around the heavy shoulders of the maolot. "We'll just wait. Wait, Mikey. Let the rest of them off first."

The lounge emptied. Jef snapped a leash to a collar around Mikey's neck and led the maolot out. They went down a short corridor to their left and out through the opened airlock at its end, to step down on to the landing stairs leading toward the cement pad below.

The brilliance of Everon's large sun, Comofors, dazzled Jef's eyes as he stepped out of the relative shadow of the ship's lighting. The light did not glare, but it was so strong Jef could not focus. Everything seemed touched with glints of gold. The air itself appeared alive with shimmers of it. Jef was aware of Mikey beside him, lifting his head sharply, sniffing deeply at the native atmosphere he had not breathed since William had carried him, then no larger than a month-old St. Bernard pup, aboard just such a spaceship as this, on his voyage to Earth eight years ago. A violent current of excitement seemed to wash out from the maolot and stain Jef himself.

He found himself, also, spreading his nostrils to the Everon air, inhaling deeply; for it was strange, with soft odors resembling those of cinnamon and crushed clover—unlike anything he had ever smelled on Earth. Automatically he began to descend the narrow landing stair, with Mikey's head bumping into him from behind at every step.

All at once he was caught up in an awareness he could only remember feeling a few times before in his life. Without warning, what was Everon—and what Everon was to him—had sprung upon him like a tiger from cover. His vision was dazzled, but at the same time he saw everything with sharp-edged clarity. He was intensely conscious of the three-dimensional reality into which he now descended. He could feel, so sensitively that the touch of it was almost painful, the hard roundness of the metal handrail against his palm and fingers. He saw as if in a carving the faces of the people on the field below, the woman in a dark blue Customs uniform standing at the foot of the ladder, the landing attendants in their white coveralls, the silver-gleaming metal posts of a fenced enclosure holding a handful of the passengers, and the large mass of other passengers, boarding a grey and green airbus a little farther off. Beyond the fenced enclosure, some two hundred meters distant, was the yellow-brown building that was the spaceport terminal—lounges and foreign officers' headquarters under one roof. It, and the silver metal of the fence enclosure, were the only two touches of color in the landscape that did not seem gilded and transmuted by the golden light from Comofors, standing now at a little past midday in the sky.

It was one of those rare and aching moments in life. Sensations poured in on Jef, overloading him as he went blindly down the landing stair. There was too much to absorb all at once, and he was absorbing it all involuntarily. This was part of what he had come here to find. It was differentness; it was freedom after the boredom and the crushing restrictions, the drabness, overcrowding and loneliness of Earth. Here, without conscious effort, he had become suddenly a part of everything around him. He breathed with the grass beyond the white concrete landing pad, he warmed with the soil of the low, forested hills on the horizon. The breeze brought him a thousand separate messages at once, and the whole world of Everon, this world he had never in his life seen before, called to him with a voice stronger than the voice of his own familiar world of home.

"Passport?" said the Customs official at the bottom of the landing stair. He had reached ground. Looking at her from centimeters of distance, now he saw a tall, middle-aged woman with faded auburn hair and tired brown eyes.

"Here," said Jef, dazedly, handing his papers over, along with the special Ecological Service permit for the cabin transportation of Mikey. "We're red-flagged."

"I see," she said, glancing at the red-tape sticker at the top of the passport. "Research. All right. Left, there. Move along, please..."

Jef turned left, entering the small cluster of people standing waiting inside one steel-fenced area. Through the golden sunlight he stared at the wide windows on the upper level of the terminal, where the foreign officers' headquarters would be. It would have been up there that William would have had his office for most of the year before his death that he had been stationed here.

Mikey rubbed his head against Jef's hip. Remembering the official's directions, Jef moved off toward the enclosure where the six other people—undoubtedly, like himself, red-flagged for special handling by the Everon Customs authorities—were waiting.

As he brought Mikey up to them, Jef recognized only one of the six. Martin Curragh was deep in conversation with a small, heavy-set, grey-haired man. The others, Jef guessed, had all been from the individual cabins up front in the first-class passenger section. Unexpectedly, Martin interrupted his conversation to give Jef an odd, penetrating look, a look almost of warning. Jef blinked, but the black-haired man turned immediately back to his conversation without further gesture.

To their left the airbus was filling up with the mass of general passengers, but the red-flagged six in the enclosure as yet had no transportation visible. However, several of them were keeping a watch toward the south, over the tops of the variformed oaks that enclosed the spaceport, in the direction of Spaceport City as Jef remembered it from his brother's maps. A minute or so later a small, ducted-fan aircraft emerged above the oaks in that direction and came swiftly to hover a dozen feet above their enclosure before settling straight down to a landing. From the aircraft—some sort of police courier ship, to judge from the markings on it—stepped a very big man, tall as well as heavy, in a khaki-and-blue uniform with gold stars on the shirt pocket and carrying a clipboard in one hand.

He did not come to the waiting people, but took two steps only out from under the shadow of the ducted fans in the wings of his aircraft and halted. He looked at his clipboard.

"Robini, Jef Aram," he called, without looking up. "Also a maolot."

The rest of the red-flagged passengers turned to stare at Jef and Mikey. Jef led Mikey forward until they stopped in front of the man. As they did so, Jef realized that unconsciously he had been stretching himself up as tall as he could, and this effort was making him as tense and stiff as a guy wire under load. In spite of Jef's own height, this individual had six centimeters of height on him, and outweighed him by at least forty kilos.