Masters of Everon (20 page)

Jef followed Mikey among the buildings to the one closest to the clip. At its door, the maolot once more lifted a forepaw to the latch. This time, however, the latch did not lift and the door did not open. Putting his paw down again, Mikey half turned, put one broad shoulder against the door and pushed. There was a subdued snap, and the door yawned silently inward. Mikey pushed his way through; and, after a second's hesitation, Jef followed.

Inside, this building was as black as the inside of a cave. Mikey and everything else were invisible. Jef unclipped the camping light from his belt and risked turning it on. He found himself standing in what seemed to be some sort of warehouse, piled high with sacks made out of loose-woven, reddish cloth, about one meter by a quarter of a meter in size, and stuffed, apparently, with lumpy objects.

The ends of the bags were sewn shut. Jef felt the contents of one through the cloth and discovered the objects to be about the size and shape of mature carrots, except that each one curved in a semi-circle. Struck by a sudden suspicion, Jef leaned over the bag to sniff at it. A faint, musty, lilac-like odor came into his nostrils; and the suspicion became a certainty. This building was plainly full of the roots of the question plant, a native species growing in the upland areas of Everon. The roots contained aconitine, like the monkshood plant of Earth. The question plant was one of the few forms of vegetation native to Everon that were poisonous to Earth creatures. The plant had rated a picture, as well as a warning paragraph, in one of the books Jef had read about Everon before he had made the trip here. There must be enough of the roots in the sacks surrounding him, Jef thought, to poison a city full of people.

—Or to poison all the dead eland the woods ranchers were complaining about?

But why would Beau leCourboisier and his group want to poison the eland of their fellow woods ranchers? If it was the wisent they were planning to poison—of course, thought Jef. Beau and the others would be planning to kill off wisent in retaliation for the dead eland. With this much question plant, they could do it—but that was a suicidal tactic. If the two ranching groups started killing off each others' herds, what would the planet survive on after a winter or two of depleted current food stocks?

He was still turning this over in his mind when he noticed Mikey pawing at the base of a pile of sacks against a farther wall.

"Look out, Mikey," he whispered. "They'll all come down."

Mikey paid no attention to the words. He hooked a thick, curved claw of his right forepaw into the lowest sack and pulled. Jef sprang forward to try and stop the stack of filled sacks on top from tumbling—but they did not. Instead, they swung out in one solid unit, revealing themselves as camouflage for a wide door. Jef found himself staring down a short, dark corridor from the very end of which a door that was slightly open sent a slice of white light into the corridor.

Jef stared; and for the first time his ears picked up what Mikey must have already heard with his much more sensitive ears. Something could be heard, coming from beyond the lighted doorway at the corridor's end. It was the soft, steady murmuring of a man's voice, too low-pitched to be understandable at this distance.

"Shh..." Jef breathed at Mikey. "Shh... not a sound..."

He stepped past Mikey and began to tiptoe down the dark corridor. As he came closer to the doorway, the sound of the murmuring grew louder; until, as Jef eased up to the very corner of the doorway to where he would be able to gaze around the door-jamb at whatever was inside, the words he was hearing at last came clear.

"...to set up and energize incubating units," a voice was saying, "will require at a minimum thirty hours of work by a ten-man working crew, particularly if these men are untrained. The five-hour set-up time for the incubating units you were given by manual implied that the set-up crew would be trained and experienced bio-technicians. To thaw the frozen embryos and begin to process them through the birth stage—you don't want them coming out of their capsules all at once and needing to be taken care of—will take a minimum of another sixty hours. Then, when they start to be born out of capsule, you'd better have at least one person for every twenty eland foals, if these people are untrained at that, too."

The voice broke off, interrupting itself with a comment.

"I can't understand your needing this information all over again," it said. "A full rundown was given your people when our ship went into darkside orbit here three days ago."

"Beau himself took the information with him," answered a voice that jarred Jef—the voice of Martin. "When he left here yesterday, he left without anyone knowing what needs to be done. Now he may not be able to get back tomorrow the way he'd planned."

"He'd better," said the voice. "I'm not going to hang here in orbit around a Second Mortgage planet with sixty thousand variform eland embryos..."

Jef eased forward further until he could see around the corner of the door. He looked into a room at which Martin sat in a metal chair before a full wall of equipment of the sort that Jef himself had seen many times as a boy, when he had gone to meet his father as his father was coming off duty, back at some spaceport on Earth.

It was nothing less than the full control-tower equipment necessary to communicate with and guide a full-sized interstellar spaceship out of its parking orbit around a world like this, down to a safe landing on the surface; and what held Jef motionless for a long moment, then, was not just the amazing nature of what he had discovered, but something entirely personal. Seated with his back to Jef in a chair that slid automatically up and down the six-meter length of controls and telltales of the instrument board before him, Martin continued to work and talk with the spaceship, thousands or even hundreds of thousands of kilometers away in space. As he spoke his chair slid right and left; his hands danced skillfully and economically over dials and controls.

"...Yes, I have you," Martin was saying, his chair pausing before the row of circular screens each with its little pinpoint, or line, of dancing light. "Orbital inclination to planetary plane is point sixty-five hundredths. Fair enough. Better plan on holding until present time minus eighty-three hours approximately—"

"I just told you," the voice from the instrument bank interrupted him, "we're not going to sit up here in parking orbit any longer than another sixty hours, maximum. I'll jettison cargo and write the deal off before I hold any longer. Every hour gives that spaceport control down there that much more chance to notice us, out here. Sixty hours, max. Then I dump the cargo."

"Well, now, and that would be a sweet loss to you, wouldn't it?" The mocking note, with which Jef had become familiar earlier, was in Martin's voice. "I've not been briefed on how this was all set up, being someone Beau brought in as an emergency replacement, as I said. But it doesn't take much of a brain to figure who'll be the big loser if those eland embryos get thrown away in space. Where would a bunch of backwoods game ranchers on a new colonial world like this one get the money for landing control equipment like this, plus the funds to import variform animal embryos on that scale? You'll have put a fair share of your own funds into this deal, Captain—ship and all; in hopes of special landing and other concessions from Everon once these game ranchers get political control, no doubt. Now give me no more arguments, there's a fine man; and I'll talk you down here, as I say, approximately four days from now."

Martin stopped speaking, and sat waiting. But there was no further argument from the voice that had been speaking to him.

"Well, let's break communications for now, then," Martin said finally. "Talk to you again in ten hours or thereabouts. Out."

He reached up and touched a control on the panel. The moving dots and lines of light vanished from the circular screens. Audibly yawning, Martin leaned back in his chair and swung it lazily about so that he faced the doorway. So easily and naturally did he turn, that it was a full second before Jef realized Martin had a laser handweapon in one fist and it was pointing directly at Jef. Jef felt a touch of bitterness. Everyone, it seemed, had a weapon but himself.

"All right, Mr. Robini," Martin said. "I'll bother you to come on in; slowly if you don't mind, and without getting excited. Also bring in your maolot, as calmly as may be."

Jef's face and part of his body was plainly visible beyond the edge of the open doorway. But he knew that Mikey was still out of sight behind him; and he was tempted to gamble.

"Mikey's not here," he said.

"Come now," said Martin, and a sharp note had come into his voice, "are you expecting me to take your word for that? Stand aside."

He motioned with the barrel of the laser. Grimly, Jef stepped all the way through the doorway and to one side within it. Martin's gaze went past him, and he reached out with one hand to a switch on the board behind him.

"Well, now," said Martin. "It seems you were telling me the truth, after all."

Startled, Jef glanced over his shoulder. The interior of the outer room was now illuminated—a large power crystal in the ceiling was making the place as noon-bright as the grasslands. There was no Mikey there. He had vanished. Jef was too relieved to wonder how and when. The power crystal and the outer room went suddenly dark.

"I told you so," Jef said, turning back to Martin. "How'd you get here? And what're you doing here?"

"Questions," said Martin softly. "You should really learn not to ask so many questions, Mr. Robini."

Turning slightly away from Jef, he triggered the laser on narrow aperture, sweeping its incredibly hot beam back and forth over the control bank before him.

Metal and plastic smoked and melted in narrow cuts, looking as if a giant had scrawled with a thick black pencil across the twelve-foot face of the control back. In seconds the heat of the laser beam reduced to junk what must have been several million credits worth of equipment available only from Earth.

Jef stared at the ruined instruments, too stunned by the enormity of the destruction to react. He had not felt anything for the upland game ranchers until this minute; but seeing something like this destroyed in an instant hit him unexpectedly, almost as hard as if he had been one of Beau's group himself. He opened his mouth to say what he felt—but no words seemed to fit.

Then another thought came to him.

"So," he said, "it's the city people and the wisent owners you're working for, after all, not these game ranchers."

"Well now, Mr. Robini," said Martin calmly, "what makes you so sure that this world of Everon divides itself so neatly into two camps? And, indeed, what makes you so sure that I must be working for either of them, instead of simply following my duties as a John Smith to do what's best for all those who've come to live here, and for the world itself, as well?"

"You aren't still trying to pretend to me you're a John Smith?" Jef said. "The Constable's seen your real papers. So've I."

Martin nodded.

"That night when I was downstairs at dinner, of course." He looked at Jef; and Jef, suddenly remembering how he had with Mikey's help forced the door of Martin's room, felt uncomfortable.

"All right," he said. "I'm not proud of digging through your luggage; but I felt I needed to know more about you, in self-defense. At any rate, I saw your regular papers."

"My
regular
papers? Come now," said Martin. "You're certainly aware—and if you aren't, I've mentioned it, I think—of the fact that a John Smith such as I has many names, many identities as his work requires it. You should remember that—and so should Constable Avery Armage."

"I think Armage's already made up his mind about you," Jef said. "He certainly sounded as if he had when he talked to me at Post Fifty."

"Ah, he got there before you escaped, then?"

"Yes—how'd you know I escaped?" Jef stared hard at him. "How did you know they were holding me there?"

"It's my job to know," Martin answered. "In fact, I was on my way to release you myself, but I gather others helped you to freedom before I got there. What was it the good Constable said to you?"

"He wanted to know about you. He seemed to think I was some kind of partner of yours," said Jef. "But I think he knew better. He just thought I was so fresh off the ship he could bluff me into telling him anything I knew."

"And his bluff didn't work?"

"I suggested he'd find himself facing legal action if I wasn't turned loose."

"But instead of waiting to be turned loose—" Martin was watching him keenly, "you chose to escape—from a Planetary Constable."

"I think he's up to his ears in something illegal himself," said Jef bluntly. "Anyway the chance came to get out and I took it."

"You amaze me, Mr. Robini." Martin's voice was light. "You've a practical streak in you I hadn't suspected. I'd advise you to use it now, and shake the dust of this encampment from your heels."

"I'm here to see Beau; and I haven't seen him yet."

"You'd be well advised not to see him at all. I'm on my way out myself—"

"I'm not surprised," said Jef, looking at the ruined equipment.

"I'd have a low opinion of you if you were, Mr. Robini. Now, I suggest you give me sixty seconds to get clear and then head into the woods in the first direction that attracts you. Your maolot and other true friends will find you before dawn and by that time you should have put a safe distance between yourself and this camp."

With these last words he stepped into the darkness of the outer room and effectively vanished. Jef strained his eyes to see any sign of the outside door opening to let him out, but against the brightness of the communications room it was not possible. Jef glanced at his watch, in the new silence feeling the rapid pounding of his own heart. He could not leave here. He would not leave here, and give up his only chance of finding out what had actually happened to Will.

He glanced at his watch again. Something over a minute had gone by. He took a step toward the corridor room—and Bill Eschak materialized at the entrance of the corridor. Jef stopped.