Masters of Everon (3 page)

The other said nothing, but held out his hand. A stubborn coal of anger began to kindle inside Jef; and instead of responding he merely looked at the hand.

"Passport," said the big man sharply.

"Sir," said Jef, slowly taking the passport and Mikey's permit from the inside pocket of his jacket, "may I ask who I'm speaking to?"

"Avery Armage. Everon Planetary Constable." Armage pulled the papers from Jef's grip. "I'll take those."

"Constable?" Jef stared. The title meant that this man was the top police official of Everon. "Can I ask why we're being met by the Planetary Constable?"

Armage chuckled. For a second he looked cheerful and friendly, his face squeezed into small bunches like knots of muscle. But the sound of his humor was throaty and lacked warmth.

"You can ask..." he said. He was busily scanning Jef's papers. "What's this about bringing in your maolot permanently? We've got enough trouble with the ones we've already got killing off our wisent herds, now. All right—the animal's impounded, by my order."

"Hold it a minute!" said Jef, as the other started to turn away. "I've got a Research Service permit. It says—"

"I know what it says." Armage turned back to him, smiling; and Jef abruptly understood that what the Constable might find amusing was not necessarily what most people would consider so. "But the situation's changed since you applied for your grant over two years ago. Everon paid off its First Mortgage to Earth early last year. The Corps hasn't owned us for a year and a half. All they have is supervisory rights. The minute you and your maolot touched ground here, both of you became subject to local law, Everon law; which law reads that any maolot caught within settled or ranching areas is to be impounded or destroyed."

"Destroyed!" Jef stared at Armage for a moment that was too stark for speech. "You can't destroy him! Look at the
reason for travel
on my passport. This is an experimental animal concerned in a grant from the Xenological Research Service. I've been sent out with him from Earth specifically to study his reactions to being reintroduced to his native habitat after being laboratory-raised on Earth. The results of this study can affect the way native life forms are handled on a dozen different worlds, worlds already colonized as well as worlds that haven't been settled yet. You can't just destroy an animal like that—"

"Well, now, that's too bad—what you tell me," said Armage softly. His dark eyes caught points of light, as a cat's eyes might, from the yellow sun overhead. "But the law's the law. I'm sorry about it, of course, but—"

"Come now, don't be sorry, Constable," broke in the voice of Martin Curragh; and the black-haired man was suddenly there, standing together with Jef and Armage, his thin-lipped mouth quirking in a friendly curve at the huge police official. "Instead, why don't you just wait for a moment to hear the whole of the matter, before you do something you might later regret. Surely Everon's not so rich and powerful yet that it can ignore the wishes of the Xenological Research Service, which has as its concern the good of all humanity—as we all know, don't we?"

Armage's face drew into hard lumps again, but this time not humorously.

"And who are you?" he said to Martin.

"Who am I? I've a dozen or two different names, if it comes to that," said Martin cheerfully. "But I won't trouble you with them."

He handed Armage a thick sheaf of papers topped by a red-flagged passport.

"You can call me John Smith," he said, "seeing that's the name folks like myself are best known by. The fact is, I'm a Planetary Inspector, sent out to pay you a small visit. It seems Ecolog Corps headquarters were thinking it was time one of us Smiths had a look here to see all was in order. I heard you saying how you'd paid off your Mortgage, but there's supraplanetary law yet to be thought of. I'm sure there're no violations here, and all that; but you understand I'll have to look about a bit, anyway, just to satisfy the order that sent me out."

Armage stood holding the papers Martin had handed him. The Constable had not moved or changed expression. He looked to Jef like a three-dimensional image in a cube of transparency.

"And as far as Mr. Robini's concerned," Martin said, "of course his work is no concern of mine. My only concern is how Everon fits in with the family of worlds in which we all are children, as the saying goes. But for your private advice, I might mention that I had quite a talk with Mr. Robini aboard the ship, and found myself impressed indeed with this research of his. It may well be that not only Everon, but worlds yet unsettled may have cause to bless the name of Mr. Robini and his beast for the work they'll be doing here to benefit all humanity. But of course, my dear Constable, as you point out, it's up to you entirely and your local laws how you deal with him, the maolot, and the whole matter."

Armage had been staring unmovingly into the smiling countenance of Martin all the time Martin was talking. The face of the big man still had not moved a muscle. Now, however, he smiled as if he was seeing not only Martin, but Jef, for the first time.

"It's a great pleasure to have you both visiting us, gentlemen," he said. Almost absently, without looking at Jef, he handed Jef's papers back. "Everon can use as much good attention as she can get. You'll be guests of mine, of course, while you're here in Everon City. I insist."

"And of course I accept," said Martin, "and without being able to speak for Mr. Robini, I would venture the thought that he would find being your guest pleasant as well. Now, I do hate to be rushing you, Constable, but Mr. Robini and I both have schedules that leave little spare time. Perhaps we could take off for Everon City with no further delay? You could possibly have us flown in by your craft, here; and it could come back for these five other good, red-flagged folks right after dropping us off at your place?"

As if in a dream, Jef found himself leading Mikey and following Martin on board the aircraft. He remarked, without having the freedom of mind to dwell on it at the moment, that Armage seemed to have taken his acceptance of the Constable's hospitality for granted, following Martin's smooth rush of words. He coaxed Mikey into a seat beside him. Up front in the craft Armage was giving orders to the pilot.

There was no more talk of impounding and destroying Mikey. In fact, as far as any casual observer might have been able to deduce, the Constable seemed entirely to have forgotten the existence of the young maolot.

Seen from the air as the aircraft approached it, half an hour later, Armage's home—by the standards of housing on a world occupied by humans for less than twenty standard years—could safely be called a mansion. Several acres of ground-hugging native vine made a green lawn that surrounded it completely, sweeping past a large, hourglass-shaped swimming pool and scattered, thick-trunked variform oaks, to a windbreak of smaller variform spruce and fir, planted to the side of the building facing the misty ridges that were mountains, far to the north.

The house itself was a white, two-story building, apparently constructed of color-impregnated metal panels obtained from some dismantled space cargo vessel, rather than of the cheaper native stone, wood, or local concrete. The architecture of it was vaguely colonial. It even had a semblance of a porch across its front and four tall, entirely unnecessary pillars.

During the flight out, Jef had occupied the rear row of seats alone with Mikey, who was continuing to show a good deal of interest in his surroundings, clambering excitedly back and forth across Jef to push the heavy muzzle of his blind head against the cabin windows of the aircraft, first on this side, then on the other. After their near-miraculous deliverance from the law of Everon, Jef had thought it wisest not to let the maolot intrude on the Constable. Consequently, he had kept to the back of the craft with Mikey and left the Constable to sit up front with Martin behind the pilot.

As a decision, it had no doubt been a good one. But it had the drawback of putting Jef in no position to ask Martin why he had, a second time, come to their rescue. It was not unreasonable that a John Smith should be concerned with justice and fairness to that extent—it was just unusual, and perhaps a little too good to believe.

Moreover, if there was a question naturally to be raised about that, there was as much of a question to be made about the behavior of Armage in meeting the red-flagged passengers personally, the moment they had stepped off the spaceship. Again, there was nothing obviously unreasonable about such behavior; it was just not what might normally be expected.

A Planetary Constable was a highly-placed elected official in the government of a world like Everon. He was much more than a local chief of police, even a chief of police of the largest city on a world—which Everon City was. The natural expectation would be to find one of his staff meeting red-flagged passengers off an incoming spaceliner and then, if necessary, conducting them to meet the Constable at his office.

If Armage had been expecting a John Smith to show up, that might have been a good reason for his appearance at the landing pad in person. But it was difficult to believe that he had—otherwise he would hardly have been so openly indifferent to Jef's papers and a grant backed by the Xenological Research Service. Like all the international Services of powerful Earth, Research was not something to be taken lightly by a newly-settled planet that was still very much dependent for its existence on help from the mother world.

No, Jef was willing to swear that Armage had been as surprised when Martin turned out to be a planetary inspector as Jef himself had been.

Why, then, had Armage met the ship? What had drawn him to greet the passengers personally? And what, if anything, had his being there to do with his arbitrary and devastating decision about Mikey, before Martin had stepped in to object?

This warm, golden-lit planet had turned out to be darkly shadowed by more uncertainties than Jef had imagined. His plan had been to stop overnight in an Everon City hotel, just long enough to arrange for his heavy gear to be shipped to meet him upcountry; and then tomorrow morning he would take off on foot with Mikey for the mountains, to accustom the maolot to being back in his native environment as gradually as possible. Instead, here he and Mikey had been shoved into the spotlight of a VIP situation, a situation he would have been uncomfortable in back on Earth.

At the same time he had to admit to a small pleasure in being where he was. After being treated like a pariah and worse by the Everon people aboard the spaceship, to be invited to stay at the home of their Planetary Constable gave him a certain amount of satisfaction. More than that, he could hope it signaled the beginning of a more friendly relationship between him and the colonists. There had been a definite uneasiness nagging at him that he might find himself in the position of being refused help generally by his fellow humans here on this alien world.

But still, the whole sequence of events was strange. Martin had been the cause of all that had happened out of the ordinary, first with his speaking up in Jef and Mikey's defense on the ship in the debarkation lounge, and then with his words to the Constable. Why? Why should he have put himself out like that for a complete stranger and a native beast, considered vermin by the humans who lived here? True enough, he was obviously a highly unorthodox type of character; but that raised other questions. How had he managed to become a John Smith in the first place? He did have that strange likeability that had so struck Jef. But beyond that, he was at best a raffish, unlikely individual. True—Jef struggled with what he thought might be his own prejudices-Martin had so far done nothing that a John Smith might not be envisioned as doing. But it was undeniable that he did not fit the popular image of an E. Corps Planetary Inspector.

Jef soothed a still-excited Mikey and came slowly but definitely to the decision to corner Martin as soon as possible and pin him down to some answers. It made Jef uneasy not to understand why things were happening. He was a little ashamed of that uneasiness —but it remained. Whenever Jef thought of Will, his mind rebelled at the fact that his brother should have been found unacceptable for a position for which a Martin Curragh had been accepted. There had been only one flaw in Will's apparent fitness to qualify for the popular image of a John Smith—his Robini temper. One small difference only—and Jef had never seen that temper evoked in his older brother by selfish or petty reasons. While Martin was at variance with the John Smith image in half a dozen ways...

But the aircraft had now landed. Armage led them across the tight, intertwined green of the lawn, and a tall, bald-headed man in his fifties opened the front door for them before they reached it.

"Tibur," said Armage to the man. "I've brought some guests. This is John Smith, sent to us from the Ecolog Corps. And this is a Researcher from Earth, a Mr. Jef Robini. Gentlemen, my housekeeper, Aldo Tibur."

"How do you, sirs," said Tibur. His voice was ragged, as if the vocal cords had been torn or abraded. From the neck up every inch of his head looked shaven. Even his eyebrows consisted of a few pale-blond hairs that were almost invisible. There was a network of hair-fine wrinkles around the corners of his eyes and his mouth that showed sharply in the bright yellow sunlight.

"John Smith will have the guest suite. Find a room for Mr. Robini close by. Don't worry, Tibur," said Armage, bunching his face in a small smile, for Tibur was staring at Mikey. "Mr. Robini has the maolot completely under control. Haven't you, Mr. Robini?"

"That's right," said Jef.

"I'll see you both later. John Smith," Armage turned to Martin, "will you excuse me? There're those other red-flagged passengers for me to check out. I'll join you for dinner this evening. You will be my guests for a dinner tonight, here at my house?"

"Why not, indeed?" said Martin.

"It'll be a great pleasure—I'll phone you, Tibur, about the guest list and the details. You two and Tibur will have the place to yourselves here until then, gentlemen. I live by myself. I'll meet you later."