Masters of Everon (4 page)

Armage turned and left. Tibur turned and led the rest of them up an escalator ramp to the second story and showed Martin to a three-room suite taking up one whole end of the second floor.

Martin stepped in without a word, closing the door behind him. Tibur turned and led Jef with Mikey to another bedroom, two doors down the hall from the suite.

"I'll see your luggage is sent out here from the spaceport," Tibur said, and went away.

Jef led Mikey on the leash about a tour of the bedroom, stopping to let the maolot rub against and sniff all the items of furniture. Maolots in the blind stage had unbelievable spatial memories. After one tour of the room Mikey knew its dimensions and the location of all the objects in it. Jef unsnapped the leash and Mikey walked to the center of the space of carpeting by the window and curled up on the patch of sunlight coming through the wide window in that wall of the room, as confidently as if he could see it.

"Stay there, now. Wait for me," Jef said to the maolot and went out of the bedroom, sliding the door closed behind him. He paused to listen for the
tick
of the magnetic lock that was now keyed over to his thumbprint. Then he went to the door of the suite into which Martin had vanished and touched the annunciator button above the latch button. "Jef Robini," he said.

The door slid open almost immediately, to show Martin standing at the far end of the room beyond.

"I won't say I wasn't expecting you," Martin commented. "Come in. Sit down."

Martin touched a button on a tabletop control deck that closed the door behind Jef and came to take a gaudy, red-padded, armless chair opposite the one in which Jef had already seated himself. The living room of the suite was considerably larger than Jef's full bedroom and had been furnished and decorated by someone with no eye for color or style.

"I'd guess," said Martin, looking at him with the shadow of a thin-lipped smile, "you've got something on your mind to discuss."

"You could put it that way," said Jef. He was once more bracing himself against the strange inclination to like Martin; and the struggle made his voice remote and dry. "I take it you never knew I existed until that moment in the debarkation lounge, just before the ship landed?"

"Did I not?" said Martin.

"I don't see how you could have," Jef said. "On the other hand, you clearly gave the Constable the impression we'd had a good deal to do with each other, on the trip out from Earth, at least."

"Don't be so quick to doubt me, now," said Martin. "Why, it seems to me there may even be a reference to you and your Mikey in my papers."

Jef stared hard at him.

"What are you trying to tell me?" he said at last. "My name's not in your papers."

"Isn't it, then?"

"Will you give me a straight answer?" The familiar feeling of sad bitterness was beginning to gather once more inside Jef. "Is my name there, or isn't it? And don't tell me you don't know. You'd have to know."

"Would I?" Martin's black eyebrows lifted on his forehead. "Busy as I am, paperwork isn't always something I can check on personally. And those clerks back at Corps headquarters will go making mistakes now and then."

"Then you're saying it isn't there, after all?"

"Did I say that?"

Jef gave up on that tack.

"All right," he said. "Maybe you'll tell me then why you're being so helpful to us? Whether you knew who I was or not, you've gone to some trouble for us twice. I appreciate it, but I'd like to know why you did it. We don't know each other and I've no claim on you. Or are you going to play games with me about that, too?"

"Oh, I don't think so," said Martin. He nodded at the wall that the living room of his suite shared with Jef's room. "That's a valuable maolot you've got over there. The only one ever raised away from its native world."

"Oh, you know that, do you?"

"It hardly takes knowing. Research would hardly have given you a grant to bring him here if your situation and that of your beast wasn't unique. Well, you might say I'm unique, too—here and now, on this world at least, I'm the only John Smith there is. It could be that our two uniquenesses would find a profit in working together."

He paused, looking at Jef.

"Go on," said Jef.

"Very well," said Martin. "But how could I work with your maolot unless the two of you were free and clear to be about the business you'd come to do? So naturally I stepped in when the other passengers seemed to be building a threat against him, and did so again when Mr. Armage seemed about to act in a manner somewhat drastic."

"So it's Mikey you want," Jef said. "What do you want him for? What kind of use could you have for him?"

"Why, none that specific to mention, just at the present moment," said Martin. "I'm only keeping an eye to the future, so to speak, on the basis of my past experience with work on worlds such as this. Maybe you don't know that someone like myself has the absolute obligation of checking out newly planted planets from time to time, to see that the humans on them are using the resources properly, and not wasting them. Habitable, Earth-like worlds, within a reasonable distance of old Sol, are not that easy to come by; as everyone should know these days. If I find something wrong here, I might be obliged to recommend quarantine; and then Everon'd be cut off from all interstellar travel for fifty or a hundred years."

"I know all that," Jef said. "But I don't see how Mikey can help you make your inspections, which I take it is what you'll be doing."

"Well now," said Martin, stretching his legs out and gazing thoughtfully at the white-painted ceiling above them. "Inspecting is indeed a good part of a John Smith's work, true enough. But that's only when the world in question is essentially conformable to Corps regulations and intent. When it is honestly trying to abide by the law; and all there is to be found, perhaps, are a few, unconscious violations of good ecological practice. But it's another story altogether when there are deliberate law-breakers there, when there might be a conspiracy to misuse the world for personal gain. That sort of situation in which the slash-and-burn mentality has gotten out of hand, you might say; and there are some who figure to take with a ruthless hand what they can and carry their profits from it off to some other new world."

Jef stared hard at Martin. It was impossible to be sure if the other man was being serious or not. But the long speech he just heard had been delivered without a smile. If it had not been so hard to believe in Martin as a John Smith, perhaps it would have been easier to take what he had just said at its face value.

"You think there are ecological criminals on Everon?" he said.

"Who knows?" Martin shrugged. "But can I take it for granted there are none?"

Jef felt his interior bitterness like a heavy pressure inside him.

"What kind of an answer is that?" he said. "I asked you a straight question. If you don't think there's something ecologically criminal going on here, what do you want with Mikey?"

"Surely a prudent man can be allowed to carry an umbrella on a cloudy day, without being required to predict a thunderstorm?" Martin raised his eyebrows. "It's enough for me that your Mikey might be useful to me, in case of some such eventuality. It ought to be enough for you, shouldn't it, that my speaking when I did saved him from being impounded and destroyed?"

Jef felt guilt.

"Of course," he replied, "I said I was grateful to you for that."

"Then perhaps you'll think a bit on the old adage of not looking a gift horse too closely in the mouth," said Martin. "Now that I've named you as someone in whose welfare I take an interest, the locals are sure to take note of where you go; and if I should need the use of you and your maolot, they could find you for me without delay. That's all. Indeed, perhaps you'll forgive me if I say that in spite of your mild manner, you're as prickly an individual as I've encountered in some years."

There was probably more than a little truth in that, Jef admitted to himself.

"I suppose you're right," he said.

There was a small silence.

"While I'm on the subject of speaking personally," Martin said, "it might be you'd forgive another word or two. No doubt you've your own good reasons for wanting to visit the grave of this brother of yours; but such things on a new planet sometimes give the people there the idea you're searching to stir up some trouble or other. If he was employed by the E. Corps, it might be best just to let the Corps look into the matter for you—"

"I don't think it'd do it very efficiently," said Jef.

Martin's green eyes watched him closely.

"Now what makes you say that?"

"I say that," said Jef, "because I don't think the E. Corps gives a damn about Will—or ever gave a damn about him. There were rumors floating back to us that Will's death wasn't in the line of duty at all, but happened only after he'd deserted—'gone planetary' as they call it on these new worlds. The whole business was very hard on my mother and father in the months right after we got official word of Will's death; and no one at your headquarters ever spoke up to deny the rumors, or called my parents to say they still believed in his loyalty. They did nothing."

"But," said Martin, still watching him steadily, "they did affirm that it was a death in period of duty."

"No. Not even that. All they'd say was that they'd carried him on the books as on duty up to the time of his death. All the details were held back because of that security of theirs—that same security they use to shield people like you from being identified."

"There're reasons for it," said Martin softly.

"Perhaps. But I don't see its application to the matter of my brother's death. They could at least have told us where he's buried." Jef looked back at the other man squarely. "I'm not leaving Everon until I find that out, and also enough about his last few days to answer any talk of his having gone planetary."

"Earth-born persons have been known to do it, one time and another," said Martin.

"Not Will."

The deep emotion in Jef spilled out in the last two words. He heard it in his own voice, a note that sounded savage even to him.

"I see," said Martin again in that soft voice, after a long moment of silence. "I suppose then it's no use then to warn you that that chip you've got on your shoulder against the Corps could get you into deep trouble out here on one of the new worlds, where it's a long way from Earth. —No, I see from the look on your face it wouldn't." Jef got quickly to his feet.

"Is that some kind of threat from the Corps to keep me under control?" he asked.

"Not at all," said Martin. His voice was level and calm. "It's a warning based on the facts. You've come out here with no doubt in your mind that you'll find exactly what you want to find. But worlds, and people both, don't always turn out the way they're supposed to. You're hell-bent to locate your brother's grave and turn up evidence that will find him blameless. But what if there actually is and was some sort of criminal conspiracy on Everon to plunder the planet?"

"If there was, when he was alive, he'd have found out about it and reported it."

Martin looked steadily into Jef's eyes.

"Unless he was part of it," Martin said.

Jef stared at the other man.

"He wouldn't be," Jef answered. "You didn't know him."

"Do you?" asked Martin. "Your accent is pure Earth. If you'd spent as much as six months of your life on some other world, I could catch the influence of it in your speech. But I don't. That means all your life's been spent on the home world; and almost certainly your brother was gone from Earth for more than the eight years since his death. Possibly as much as half a dozen or more years before that? Since he'd not have gotten the post here without that much seniority as an ecologist in the Corps. You'll have seen him only now and then, when he was home on leave—if he ever did come home on leave. How well did
you
know him? How do you know what wild notion might have taken him under conditions you've never known and could never guess at?"

Jef was silent. It was true. Some furious impulse could have taken Will and caused him to do something that otherwise would have been unthinkable. Unwanted from the back of his mind came a memory of the circumstances under which Will had been rejected by the Ecolog Corps for training as a John Smith. He had always refused to talk in any detail about the events leading to his rejection. But from what little he said, they had gotten the picture of a Will who had passed the preliminary courses with honors and who had been just about to graduate and ship out as a field trainee when something had happened.

All the family knew was that an incident had triggered off that temper of his. He had been discharged "...
with prejudice."
Afterwards he had returned home, but stayed around only two months before shipping out on a labor contract to one of the new worlds still in the process of being terraformed. Once there, he had worked out his contract, found local employment, and what with the shortage of trained people off-Earth, had finally managed to have the
"prejudice"
set aside so that he could gain a job with the E. Corps after all, as an ordinary ecologist. In the seven years following he had worked his way up to the position of Planetary Ecologist.

"I knew him," said Jef finally, to Martin. "He'd have been dead before he'd have been a party to the sort of thing you're suggesting."

"Perhaps," said Martin. "I know nothing of him, of course. But it's a fact that anyone can find himself doing things under strange circumstances, things that other people would never have suspected he or she might be capable of. You'd probably not do badly to keep that in mind."

Jef got to his feet and went to the door. At it, however, the strong habit of courtesy ingrained in him by his Earth training made him stop and turn.

"Thank you for your help—and your good intentions—anyway," he said, and hesitated. "No offense, but you're not what most people would expect a John Smith to be like."

Martin's face grew leaner and his smile was a little wry.