Sanctuary in The Sky (7 page)

XII

“No, I’m afraid not,” said Raige, and gave an apologetic half
smile.

“But why not?” said Ligmer insistently, leaning forward so that he could put his right hand on the desk at which Raige sat in the official administration block of her station. This was the public section of Glaithe territory; so far as outsiders knew, it corresponded to Cathrodyne or Pag territory.

Or rather: so far as most outsiders knew. Whether it was due to loss of secrecy, or merely to ingenious deduction, it seemed that these two outsiders—Ligmer and his Pag opposite number, Usri—had penetrated the disguise protecting the Glaithes’ private section of Waystation.

Raige set her face in a severe expression. “You have to admit, Ligmer,” she said primly, “that neither you Cathrodynes nor the Pags have a very good record with regard to Waystation. You have both in the past attempted to gain control of the station for yourselves. Agreed, it is good to see that you are capable of working in co-operation as well as against one another; but I have small doubt that if you were permitted access to the information you want you would each
immediately start thinking of ways in which it could be turned to the advantage of your own people and the disadvantage of others.”

She uttered the speech in a lecturing tone, and was taken aback by the expression of satisfaction which crossed Usri’s face when she had finished.

“Well, that tells us one thing,” the Pag said. “We’re correct in our guesswork. If we were wrong, you’d cheerfully let us go ahead and look for knowledge you were certain we’d never find—because it wouldn’t be there. Your record isn’t entirely clean either, Captain Raige; and you cannot deny that."

“We do what is necessary to preserve the neutrality of Waystation,” said Raige stiffly.

“Including giving shelter to renegades,” said Ligmer sourly. “How neutral is that?”

Raige looked ostentatiously puzzled.

“Oh, you know what I mean!” snapped Ligmer. “There was a Majko yesterday—a steward off one of our liners. You’re too well informed not to know about him. Publicly insulted Cathrodyne by claiming that we rule Majkosi unjustly—”

“In that case,” interrupted Raige, “we are happy to welcome him and give him asylum here. As you well know, Ligmer, our administration of Waystation is the only thing that prevents one or the other of your two empires from annexing us also. We can hardly deny to members of your so-called ‘subject’ races a freedom we enjoy ourselves.” '

Ligmer made an indignant rejoinder; Raige ignored him and looked down at the written application form on the desk. It had reached her a few hours ago, closely followed by the two archeologists in person to demand action on it.

They requested access to the pictorial records section of the memory banks—those giant electronic recorders hidden in the very heart of Waystation, shielded by all its bulk from the interstellar noise which could confuse or distort their delicate patterns. Some of them, nonetheless, had become unusable over the millennia, and the rest the Glaithes had deciphered only with extreme difficulty and sometimes suspected inaccuracy. A single ultra-high energy cosmic ray particle could upset the balance in a thousand important circuits,
garbling the information therein or even changing its sense completely.

And they had a very specific object in mind.

“Mark you,” said Usri, “it’s pretty obvious why they’re scared to release such information. If the Bringer theory is confirmed, this will imply that all the races of the Arm are in fact descended from the builders of Waystation, and should be permitted to share in it equally. This is a long way from the monopoly Glai enjoys at present.”

She spoke directly to Ligmer, giving Raige a sidelong look to make sure the words went -home.

“Scholar Usri is wrong, of course,” said Raige without raising her head. “On that count and on the previous one. I honestly do not know whether this information does exist. If it does, and if it confirms the Bringer theory, it would not change the situation at all. I repeat: Pagr and Cathrodyne have both attempted to seize monopoly control of Waystation. We at least permit people of all races to come and go freely and to live here in undisputed peace; we cannot enforce this equitable treatment outside the limits of the station, but we would if we could.”

Ligmer gave vent to a disgusted snort. “All right then!” he said sharply. “Tell us why you deny us access to the master memory banks, when we are engaged in our professional pursuit of knowledge—and yet you give permission to someone who is not even a citizen of one of the systems of the Arm at all!”

There was a long silence. At length Raige said in genuine mystification, "Who do you mean? I’ve not heard of. such a case.”

“No?” said Usri, heavy with sarcasm. “Then how was it that we saw this man Lang coming out of the memory bank halls yesterday?”

Raige shook her head. “I didn’t know about this. I will investigate if you like. It is possible that someone on our staff agreed to show him over the memory bank halls because he is a distinguished visitor, but it is perfec
tl
y certain that he would not have been allowed access to any information that has not been generally released.”

Ligmer got to his feet. “There is something rather unpleasant about you Glaithes,” he said. “Behind your facade of righteousness and impartiality you descend to some very nasty tricks.”

Usri copied him, and towered over the doll-like figure of Raige as she remained seated. “Agreed!” said the Pag, curling back her upper lip to show her one filed tooth. “Can you expect my people to abandon their belief in the Pag origin of Waystation, for instance, if you will not permit scientific assessment of the facts?”

Impassively, Raige pressed the door-catch release on the desk. “You may leave,” she said. And scowling, they did so.

When they left the office, Raige sat for a short while staring into space. Of course, it was entirely possible that Lang had been given a guided tour of the memory bank halls; it was also possible—but unlikely—that Ligmer and Usri had invented the story.

Somehow, though, she felt sure they hadn’t—she remembered that Vykor had claimed to see Lang somewhere else where he shouldn’t have been. Sighing, she contacted Indie on the internal communicator system.

“Indie, do you remember that young Majko, Vykor, who said he’d seen the man from out of eye-range in our quarters?”

“I do,” Indie answered.

“I just had a report that Lang has also been seen emerging from the memory bank halls. Did anyone give him authority to visit them?”

“No!” said Indie positively. “No one could have granted such permission without my knowing about it; I’m responsible for all visitors to that section. Do you think the report is genuine?”

“Ninety-nine per pent sure.” Raige hesitated. “Would you try and confirm it, though? Perhaps one of our staff on duty at the time saw him as well.”

“Most unlikely—they’d have reported it. And this is the first I’ve heard. However, I’ll let you know if I discover anything.”

He broke the connection, sounding worried, and Raige gave a wry smile. That would hardly be surprising under the circumstances.

For a casual visitor, Lang was causing entirely too much
trouble. There was the fact that Vykor believed him to be responsible for the fit of anger which was costing him his chance of going home. There was the episode in their private quarters. There was this conversation Vykor had also reported—about the various theories of Waystation’s origin. There was ...

She checked herself. Apart from the unexplained intrusion in the Glaithe quarters, which only Vykor vouched for, there was nothing certain in any of this. Perhaps she was yielding to the intuition she had felt when Vykor’s ship came in, and imagination was strengthening her suspicions.

This joint visit from a Pag and a Cathrodyne together was a far more substantial matter to work on. It had been known for a long time that the mutual distrust of the two races was giving place bit by bit to a grudging respect, not to say admiration. The trend was assisted by the fact that both of them disliked the Glaithes as much as they detested one another.

And it had likewise been known that there were Pags like Usri who wished to see the' nonsensical propaganda which was Pagr’s official line replaced by something with a scientific foundation. So much was accountable.

What was not accountable was the story she had had from Vykor about the Cathrodyne officer called Ferenc. As Vykor had seen him on the trip out, he had appeared to be a typical intransigent diehard, so intolerant of Pags that he had nearly come to blows with the Pag officer who traveled with him.

Yet he had struck up an acquaintance with Usri in the City, apparently forgetting his previous animosity and talking in a friendly way.

This suggested two explanations. The first: Ferenc had put up a front during the trip out from Cathrodyne; it was just conceivable that he had undergone a change of heart since he had been a member of the Cathrodyne staff at Waystation some time before. Raige had never met him during his previous stay—he had been a comparatively junior officer, engaged in routine administration work. But the Glaithes painstakingly recorded every scrap of information they could glean about the foreign staffs on the station, and she had
found from Ferenc’s old dossier that a change of heart was improbable if not out of the question.

That left: a definite change of Cathrodyne policy. A new soft line of approach might be planned. Genuine? Or a cover for something else? Past analogy favored the latter—Pag and Cathrodyne had for long been worse bedfellows than lamb and lion.

Besides, if Ferenc had been sent out to Waystation (she did not believe for a moment that he was really on furlough) as a result of a change of policy at home, he would also have been a man who had had a change of heart, the relaxation at the top would have produced a corresponding personality at the bottom. But Ferenc wouldn’t have felt it necessary to disguise such a change of heart by affecting intolerance during the trip out.

Raige sighed. The double-dealing complexity of work at Waystation was sometimes almost too much for her, and she found herself aching for the day when she would go back to Glai and bear those children that waited in the ovum bank for her arrival.

So the Cathrodynes must be on to something important enough for them to swallow their national pride and be polite to the Pags while they followed their discovery up. They must also be sure enough of themselves to allow Pags—in the person of Usri and others—to get a partial view of it. She lifted up Ligmer’s application to get data from the memory banks. It asked for a comparative evaluation of design principles here in the structure of Waystation and in the ships that had been found fossilized in lava flows on Pagr.

Innocent enough, at first glance. But it might be deadly.

Evaluation of design principles, properly carried out, would reveal one thing right away: The maps published by the Olaithes and supposed to show Waystation accurately did in fact contain deliberately misleading information. This would indicate the existence of the heretofore concealed Glaithe private quarters—which formed a vast network all through the station, under, around and between the sections allotted to other races, so that the Glaithes could watch and be alert at all times.

Of course, that need not prove fatal; knowledge that this
web of concealed cabins and corridors existed did not give a clue to the special elevator codes needed to enter it. But it might lead to the knowledge beyond, the knowledge which the Glaithes hoped desperately might remain their secret for ever, or until Pag and Cathrodyne no longer squabbled among the stars of the Arm.

The knowledge that in the heart of Waystation, yet further toward the center than the memory banks, still waited the incredible, unbelievable engines whose slumbering power had once hurled Waystation from star to star across the galaxy.

XIII

“Ligmer!
I
want to have a word with you!”

At the crackle of Ferenc’s voice, the archeologist halted in his tracks and swung round. He was returning to the cabin which had been allotted him in the Cathrodyne section of Waystation for the duration of his stay. His head had been full of anger at what he regarded as the arbitrary refusal by Raige of his request; he had been sure that to put it jointly in the name of himself and Usri would ensure acceptance.

Still in the casual civilian clothes which suited his upright frame so poorly, Ferenc came down the corridor with a set expression. He nodded at the door of the cabin outside which Ligmer had halted.

“This one yours?”

“Uh—no. The next one along.”

“All right.” Ferenc went past him swiftly and shoved open the door, standing slighdy aside and gesturing to Ligmer to enter. As soon as he had done so, Ferenc followed and shut the door again.

He sat down in the nearest chair, leaving Ligmer to make do with the couch, and gave him a scowl. “I suppose you’ve

been thinking some pretty disgraceful things about me,” he said after a pause. He uttered the words as though they cost him a great effort.

“Why?” parried Ligmer.

“Don’t give me that! Because after all that I said—and meant—during the trip here, you found me fraternizing with a Pag. Right?”

“It did seem strange,” Ligmer agreed cautiously. “But now I think you had a reason for it.”

“Damned right I did. And so that you can watch yourself when this Usri woman is around you—which looks like being most of the time, though
I
can’t stand Pag company for more than a few minutes together no matter how much I drive myself—I got General-Marshal Temmis’ permission to enlighten you about the reason.”

“Oh,” said Ligmer in a flat voice. It was clear from his face that he thought he had probably already committed some embarrassing blunder.

“I told Temmis when I got here-that I didn’t think it was wise for you to be allowed to muck around on your own in Pag company. Still, he said the High Council agreed to your assignment here, so I can’t press the matter. After what happened, though, I suggested I ought to warn you to keep your nose clean.

“You know what gets done to people who don’t keep their secrets properly?”

Ligmer swallowed and nodded.

“But I don’t have much in the way of secrets,” he ventured.

“You’re just about to acquire one,” said Ferenc grimly, and ran over the orders which Temmis had given him on his arrival, with the facts behind them as an explanation for his own unprecedented and out-of-character behavior.

As he progressed
,a light seemed to dawn on Ligmer, and at the end he was nodding slowly, back and forth, back and forth.
“That’s why,”
he said in a satisfied tone as Ferenc’s last words died into silence.

“Why what?” Ferenc’s first reaction after his long speech had been relief at getting it over with; now he pounced alertly on Ligmer’s words.