The Ethical Engineer (17 page)

"Proof is easy, Hertug of all the Perssonoj, because I know everything
about everything. I can build machines that walk, that talk, that run,
fly, swim, bark like a dog and roll on their backs."

"You will build a
caroj
for me?"

"It could be arranged, if you have the right kind of tools I could
use. But I must first know what is the specialty of your clan, if you
know what I mean. Like the Trozelligoj make
caroj
and the D'zertanoj
pump oil. What do your people do?"

"You cannot know as much as you say if you do not know of the glories
of the Perssonoj!"

"I come from a distant land and as you know news travels slowly around
these parts."

"Not around the Perssonoj," the Hertug said scornfully and thumped his
chest. "We can talk across the width of the country and always know
where our enemies are. We can send magic on wires to kill, or magic to
make light in a glass ball or magic that will pluck the sword from an
enemy's hand and drive terror into his heart."

"It sounds like your gang has the monopoly on electricity, which is
good to hear. If you have some heavy forging equipment...."

"Stop!" the Hertug ordered. "Leave! Out—everyone except the
sciuloj
. Not the new slave, he stays here," he shouted when the
soldiers grabbed Jason.

The room emptied and the handful of men who remained were all a little
long in the tooth and each wore a brazen, sun-burst type decoration on
his chest. They were undoubtedly adept in the secret electrical arts
and they fingered their weapons and grumbled with unconcealed anger at
Jason's forbidden knowledge. The Hertug signaled him to continue.

"You used a sacred word. Who told it to you? Speak quickly or you will
be killed."

"Didn't I tell you I knew everything? I can build a
caroj
and given
a little time I can improve on your electrical works, if your
technology is on the same level as the rest of this planet."

"Do you know what lies behind the forbidden portal?" the Hertug asked,
pointing to a barred, locked and guarded door at the other end of the
room. "There is no way you can have seen what is there, but if you can
tell me what lies beyond it I will know you are the wizard that you
claim you are."

"I have a very strange feeling that I have been over this ground once
before," Jason sighed. "All right, here goes. You people here make
electricity, maybe chemically, though I doubt if you would get enough
power that way, so you must have a generator of some sort. That will
be a big magnet, a piece of special iron that can pick up other iron,
and you spin it around fast next to some coils of wire and out comes
electricity. You pipe this through copper wire to whatever devices you
have, and they can't be very many. You say you talk across the
country. I'll bet you don't talk at all but send little clicks, dots
and dashes.... I'm right aren't I?" The foot shuffling and rising buzz
from the adepts was a sure sign that he was hitting close. "I have an
idea for you, I think I'll invent the telephone. Instead of the old
clikkety-clack how would you like to
really
talk across the country?
Speak into a gadget here and have your voice come out at the far end
of the wire?"

The Hertug's piggy little eyes blinked greedily. "It is said that in
the old days this could be done, but we have tried and have failed.
Can you do this thing?"

"I can—if we can come to an agreement first. But before I make any
promises I have to see your equipment."

This brought the usual groans of complaint about secrecy, but in the
end avarice won over taboo and the door to the holy of holies was
opened for Jason while two of the
sciuloj
, with bared and ready
daggers, stood at his sides. At almost the same instant Jason looked
in through the door he heard the sound.

Now the reaction of the human body, while remarkably fast, need
certain finite measures of time and have been measured over and over
again with a great deal of accuracy. The commands of the brain, speedy
as they may be, must be carried by sluggish nerves and put into
operation by inert lumps of muscle. Therefore to say that Jason's
reactions were instantaneous is to tell a lie, or at least exaggerate.
Only to his watchers did his actions appear to take place that fast;
they were older, and less alert, and had not had the advantage of
Pyrran survival training. So to their point of view the sacred portal
was opened and Jason vanished in a flurry of activity. Two lightning
blows sent his guardians spinning, and before they had fallen to the
floor their supposed captive was through the door and it was slammed
in their faces. Before the first dumfounded Persson could jump forward
the bolt grated home inside and the door was sealed.

Things were a little more complex than that to Jason. When the door
opened he had had a good view of the inside of the room, of a slave
cranking the handle on a crude collection of junk that could only have
been a generator. Thick wires looped across the room from the thing to
a man who stood before some blades of copper pushing at them with a
wooden stick, while above his head fat sparks leaped the gap between
two brassy spheres. As if to complete this illustration for a
bronze-age edition of "First Steps in Electricity" another cable
twisted up from the spark gap and vanished out a small window. The
entire thing might have been labeled "How to Generate A Radio Signal
in the Crudest Manner." As Jason reached this conclusion in the
smallest fraction of a second, and at almost the very same instant, he
heard the sound.

What he heard could have been distant thunder, an earthquake, a
volcano or some giant explosion. It rumbled and rolled, muffled by
distance, yet still clear. It resembled none of these things to Jason,
but made him think only of a high altitude rocket or jet, cleaving
through the atmosphere.

It must have been the juxtaposition of these two things, occurring as
they did at the same time, the view of a radio transmitter, no matter
how crude, and the thought that there might be a civilized craft or
some kind up there containing men who would come to his aid if he
could only contact them. The idea was an insane one, but even as he
realized that fact he was through the door and bolting it behind him.
Perhaps he did it because he had been pushed around entirely too much
and felt like pushing someone else for a change. In any case it was
done, insane or not, and he might as well carry through.

The generator slave looked up, startled, but when Jason glanced at him
he lowered his eyes and kept cranking. The man who had been working
the transmitter spun about, startled by the slam of the door and the
muffled pounding and shouts that followed instantly from the other
side. He groped for his dagger when he saw the stranger, but before it
was clear of the scabbard Jason was on him and after a few quick
Pyrran infighting blows the man lost all interest in what was
happening and slid to the floor. Jason straddled his body, picked the
stick up, nodded to the slave who began cranking faster, and began to
tap out a message.

S-O-S ... S-O-S ... he sent first, then as fragments of code came back
to him he spelled out J-A-S-O-N D-A-L-T H-R-E.... N-E-E-D A-I-D....
R-I-C-H.... R-E-W-A-R-D ... F-O-R ... H-E-L-P....

He varied this a bit, repeated his name often, and tried other themes
appealing for off-world aid. It was a slim chance that he had heard a
rocket, and even slimmer chance that they would pick his message out
of the static if they happened to be listening. He had no evidence
that any off-worlders were in contact with this planet, merely hope.
He tapped on and the slave ground away industriously. His arm was
growing tired by the time the old guard in the other room found
something heavy enough to swing and broke the door down. Jason stopped
tapping and turned to face the apoplectic Hertug, rubbing his tired
wrist.

"Your equipment works fine, though it could use a lot of
improvements."

"Kill him.... Kill!" the Hertug sputtered.

"Kill me and there goes your
caroj
, as well as your telephone system
and your only chance to wrap up all the industrial secrets in one big
bundle," Jason said, looking around for something heavy to swing.

A gigantic explosion slammed into the room; a crack appeared in one
wall and dust floated down from the ceiling. There was a sound of
snapping small arms fire in the distance.

"It worked!" Jason shouted with unrestrained glee and hurled a heavy
roll of wire at the startled men in the doorway and followed instantly
after it in a headlong dive. There was a flurry of action, most of the
damage being done by his boots, then he was through and running out of
the throne room with the men bellowing in pursuit.

A small war seemed to be raging ahead, the sharp explosions of gunfire
being mixed with the heavier thud of bombs and grenades. Walls were
down, doors blasted open while confused soldiers rushed in panic
through the clouds of dust. One of them tried to stop Jason who kept
on going, carrying the man's club with him. Sunlight shone ahead and
he dived through a riven wall and landed, rolling in the open ground
next to the dock. A spaceship's lifeboat stood there, still glowing
hot from the speed of descent, and next to it stood Meta keeping up a
continuous fire with her gun, happily juggling micro-grenades with her
free hand.

"What were you waiting for," she snapped. "I have been in orbit over
this planet for a month now, waiting for some word from you. There are
dozens of radio transmitters on this continent and I have been
monitoring them all." She fired a long burst at an upper story where
some bowmen had been foolish enough to appear, then ran to Jason, eyes
wet with tears. "Oh, darling, I was so worried."

She held him—with her grenade-throwing arm—and kissed him fiercely.
She kept her eyes open while she was doing this but only had to fire
once.

"Jason!" a voice called and Ijale appeared, half-supporting the still
dazed Mikah.

"Who is this?" Meta snapped, the chill back in her voice.

"Why—just someone I know," Jason answered, smiling insincerely. "You
should recognize the man, he's the one who arrested me."

"Here is a gun, you will want to kill him yourself."

Jason took the gun, but used it to clear a nearby roof-top, the
powerful kick of the Pyrran automatic was like a caress on the heel of
his hand.

"I don't think I want to kill him. He saved my life once, though he
has tried to lose it for me a dozen times since. Let's get upstairs to
the ship and I'll tell you about it. There are more healthy spots than
this to have a conversation."

Washed, shaved, scrubbed, cleaned, filled with good food and slightly
awash with alcoholic drink, Jason collapsed into the acceleration
couch and firmly swore that life was worth living after all.

"You can't appreciate the simple things of life until you have gone
without them for a while. Or the better things either." He reached out
and took Meta's hand. She pulled it away and fed more digits into the
computer.

"How did you find me?" he asked, trying to discover a subject that she
might warm to.

"That should be obvious. We saw the markings on the ship that took you
away and charted a directional trace before it went into jump-space.
We identified the markings and I went to Cassylia, but the ship had
never arrived there. I back-tracked the straight-line course and found
three possible planets near enough to have registered in the ship
during jump-space flight. Two are highly organized with modern
spaceports and would have known if the ship had landed. It hadn't.
Therefore you must have forced the ship down on the planet we just
left. And once you were there you would find one of the radios to send
a message. Which is what you did. It is obvious. Who is she?" The
final words were in a distinctly chillier tone of voice, and there
could be only one she, Ijale, who crouched across the room, obviously
unhappy and wide-eyed with fear at this voyage in a spaceship, not
understanding the language the others spoke.

"I've told you before—just a friend. She was with us, and helped us,
too. I couldn't let her go back to the life in the desert, it's more
brutal than you can possibly imagine. There is an entire planetful of
slaves back there, and of course I can't save them all. But I can do
this much, take out the one person there who would rather see me live
than die."

"What do you intend to do with her?" The sub-zero temperature of
Meta's voice left no doubt as to what she wanted to do with her. Jason
had already given this a good deal of thought, and if Ijale was going
to live much longer she had to be separated as soon as possible from
the deadly threat of female Pyrran jealousy.

"We stop at the next civilized planet and let her off. I have enough
money to leave a deposit in a bank that will last her for years. Make
arrangements for it to be paid out only a bit at a time, so no matter
how she is cheated she will still have enough. I'm not going to worry
about her, if she was able to survive in the
krenoj
legion she can
get along well anywhere on a settled world."

He could hear the complaints on when he broke the news to Ijale, but
it was for her own survival.

"I shall care for and lead her in the paths of righteousness," a
remembered voice spoke from the doorway. Mikah stood there, clutching
to the jamb, a turban of bandages on his head.

"That's a wonderful idea," Jason agreed enthusiastically. He turned to
Ijale and spoke in her own language. "Did you hear that? Mikah is
going to take you home with him and look after you. I'll arrange for
some money to be paid to you for all your needs, he'll explain to you
what money is. I want you to listen to him carefully, note exactly
what he says, then do the exact opposite. You must promise me you will
do that and never break your word. In that way you may make some
mistakes and will be wrong sometimes, but all the rest of the time
things will go very smoothly."