The Mammoth Book of Golden Age SF (59 page)

The Commdor rubbed his hands with satisfaction and said, “You may wear it tonight – and I’ll get you more.
Now
keep still.”

The Commdora kept still.

Jaim Twer fidgeted and shuffled his feet. He said, “What’s twisting
your
face?”

Hober Mallow lifted out of his brooding. “Is my face twisted? It’s not meant so.”

“Something must have happened yesterday – I mean, besides that feast.” With sudden conviction, “Mallow, there’s trouble, isn’t there?”

“Trouble? No. Quite opposite. In fact, I’m in the position of throwing my full weight against a door and finding it ajar at the time. We’re getting into this steel foundry too easily.”

“You suspect a trap?”

“Oh, for Seldon’s sake, don’t be melodramatic.” Mallow swallowed his impatience and added conversationally, “It’s just that the easy entrance means there will be nothing to see.”

“Atomic power, huh?” Twer ruminated. “I’ll tell you. There’s just about no evidence of any atomic power economy here in Korell. And it would be pretty hard to mask all signs of the widespread effects a fundamental technology such as atomics would have on everything.”

“Not if it was just starting up, Twer, and being applied to a war economy. You’d find it in the shipyards and the steel foundries only.”

“So if we don’t find it, then—”

“Then they haven’t got it – or they’re not showing it. Toss a coin or take a guess.”

Twer shook his head. “I wish I’d been with you yesterday.”

“I wish you had, too,” said Mallow stonily. “I have no objection to moral support. Unfortunately, it was the Commdor who set the terms of the meeting, and not myself. And
that
outside there would seem to be the royal ground-car to escort us to the foundry. Have you got the gadgets?”

“All of them.”

The foundary was large, and bore the odor of decay which no amount of superficial repairs could quite erase. It was empty now and in quite an unnatural state of quiet, as it played unaccustomed host to the Commdor and his court.

Mallow had swung the steel sheet onto the two supports with a careless heave. He had taken the instrument held out to him by Twer and was gripping the leather handle inside its leaden sheath.

“The instrument,” he said, “is dangerous, but so is a buzz saw. You must have to keep your fingers away.”

And as he spoke, he drew the muzzle-slit swiftly down the length of the steel sheet, which quietly and instantly fell in two.

There was a unanimous jump, and Mallow laughed. He picked up one of the halves and propped it against his knee. “You can adjust the cutting-length accurately to a hundredth of an inch, and a two-inch sheet will slit down the middle as easily as this thing did. If you’ve got the thickness exactly judged, you can place steel on a wooden table, and split the metal without scratching the wood.”

And at each phrase, the atomic shear moved and a gouged chunk of steel flew across the room.

“That,” he said, “is whittling – with steel.”

He passed back the shear. “Or else you have the plane. Do you want to decrease the thickness of a sheet, smooth out an irregularity, remove corrosion? Watch!”

Thin, transparent foil flew off the other half of the original sheet in six-inch swaths, then eight-inch, then twelve.

“Or drills? It’s all the same principle.”

They were crowded around now. It might have been a sleight-of-hand show, a corner magician, a vaudeville act made in high-pressure salesmanship. Commdor Asper fingered scraps of steel. High officials of the government tiptoed over each other’s shoulders, and whispered, while Mallow punched clean, beautiful round holes through an inch of hard steel at every touch of his atomic drill.

“Just one more demonstration. Bring two short lengths of pipe, somebody.”

An Honorable Chamberlain of something-or-other sprang to obedience in the general excitement and thought-absorption, and stained his hands like any laborer.

Mallow stood them upright and shaved the ends off with a single stroke of the shear, and then joined the pipes, fresh cut to fresh cut.

And there was a single pipe! The new ends, with even atomic irregularities missing, formed one piece upon joining. Johannison blocks, at a stroke.

Then Mallow looked up at his audience, stumbled at his first word and stopped. There was the keen stirring of excitement in his chest, and the base of his stomach went tingly and cold.

The Commdor’s own bodyguard, in the confusion, had struggled to the front line, and Mallow, for the first time, was near enough to see their unfamiliar hand-weapons in detail.

They were atomic! There was no mistaking it; an explosive projectile weapon with a barrel like that was impossible. But that wasn’t the big point. That wasn’t the point at all.

The butts of those weapons had, deeply etched upon them, in worn gold plating, the Spaceship-and-Sun!

The same Spaceship-and-Sun that was stamped on every one of the great volumes of the original Encyclopedia that the Foundation had begun and not yet finished.
The same Spaceship-and-Sun that had blazoned the banner of the Galactic Empire through millennia
.

Mallow talked through and around his thoughts, “Test that pipe! It’s one piece. Not perfect; naturally, the joining shouldn’t be done by hand.”

There was no need of further legerdemain. It had gone over. Mallow was through. He had what he wanted. There was only one thing in his mind. The golden globe with its conventionalized rays, and the oblique cigar shape that was a space vessel.

The Spaceship-and-Sun of the Empire!

The Empire! The words drilled! A century and a half had passed but there was still the Empire, somewhere deeper in the Galaxy. And it was emerging again, out into the Periphery.

Mallow smiled!

The
Far Star
was two days out in space, when Hober Mallow, in his private quarters with Senior Lieutenant Drawt, handed him an envelope, a roll of microfilm, and a silver spheroid.

“As of an hour from now, Lieutenant, you’re Acting Captain of the
Far Star
, until I return – or forever.”

Drawt made a motion of standing but Mallow waved him down imperiously.

“Quiet, and listen. The envelope contains the exact location of the planet to which you’re to proceed. There you will wait for me for two months. If, before the two months are up, the Foundation locates you, the microfilm is my report of the trip.

“If, however,” and his voice was somber, “I do
not
return at the end of two months, and Foundation vessels do not locate you, proceed to the planet, Terminus, and hand in the Time Capsule as the report. Do you understand that?”

“Yes, sir.”

“At no time are you, or any of the men, to amplify in any single instance, my official report.”

“If we are questioned, sir?”

“Then you know nothing.”

“Yes, sir.”

The interview ended, and fifty minutes later, a lifeboat kicked lightly off the side of the
Far Star
.

Onum Barr was an old man, too old to be afraid. Since the last disturbances, he had lived alone on the fringes of the land with what books he had saved from the ruins. He had nothing he feared losing, least of all the worn remnant of his life, and so he faced the intruder without cringing.

“Your door was open,” the stranger explained.

His accent was clipped and harsh, and Barr did not fail to notice the strange blue-steel hand-weapon at his hip. In the half-gloom of the small room, Barr saw the glow of a force-shield surrounding the man.

He said, wearily, “There is no reason to keep it closed. Do you wish anything of me?”

“Yes.” The stranger remained standing in the center of the room. He was large, both in height and bulk. “Yours is the only house about here.”

“It is a desolate place,” agreed Barr, “but there is a town to the east. I can show you the way.”

“In a while. May I sit?”

“If the chairs will hold you,” said the old man, gravely. They were old, too. Relics of a better youth.

The stranger said, “My name is Hobber Mallow. I come from a far province.”

Barr nodded and smiled. “Your tongue convicted you of that long ago. I am Onum Barr of Siwenna – and once Patrician of the Empire.”

“Then this
is
Siwenna. I had only old maps to guide me.”

“They would have to be old, indeed, for star-positions to be misplaced.”

Barr sat quite still, while the other’s eyes drifted away into a reverie. He noticed that the atomic force-shield had vanished from about the man and admitted dryly to himself that his person no longer seemed formidable to strangers – or even, for good or for evil, to his enemies.

He said, “My house is poor and my resources few. You may share what I have if your stomach can endure black bread and dried corn.”

Mallow shook his head. “No, I have eaten, and I can’t stay. All I need are the directions to the center of government.”

“That is easily enough done, and poor though I am, deprives me of nothing. Do you mean the capital of the planet, or of the Imperial Sector?”

The younger man’s eyes narrowed. “Aren’t the two identical? Isn’t this Siwenna?”

The old patrician nodded slowly, “Siwenna, yes. But Siwenna is no longer capital of the Normannic Sector. Your old map has misled you after all. The stars may not change even in centuries, but political boundaries are all too fluid.”

“That’s too bad. In fact, that’s very bad. Is the new capital far off?”

“It’s on Orsha II. Twenty parsecs off. Your map will direct you. How old is it?”

“A hundred and fifty years.”

“That old?” The old man sighed. “History has been crowded since. Do you know any of it?”

Mallow shook his head slowly.

Barr said, “You’re fortunate. It has been an evil time for the provinces, but for the reign of Stannell VI, and he died fifty years ago. Since that time, rebellion and ruin, ruin and rebellion.” Barr wondered if he were growing garrulous. It was a lonely life out here, and he had so little chance to talk to men.

Mallow said with sudden sharpness, “Ruin, eh? You sound as if the province were impoverished.”

“Perhaps not on an absolute scale. The physical resources of twenty-five first-rank planets take a long time to use up. Compared to the wealth of the last century, though, we have gone a long way downhill – and there is no sign of turning, not yet. Why are you so interested in all this, young man? You are all alive and your eyes shine!”

The trader came near enough to blushing, as the faded eyes seemed to look too deep into his and smile at what they saw.

He said, “Now look here. I’m a trader out there – out toward the rim of the Galaxy. I’ve located some old maps, and I’m out to open new markets. Naturally, talk of impoverished provinces disturbs me. You can’t get money out of a world unless money’s there to be got. Now how’s Siwenna, for instance?”

The old man leaned forward, “I cannot say. It will do even yet, perhaps. But
you
a trader? You look more like a fighting man. You hold your hand near your gun and there is a scar on your jawbone.”

Mallow jerked his head. “There isn’t much law out there where I come from. Fighting and scars are part of a trader’s overhead. But fighting is only useful when there’s money at the end, and if I can get it without, so much the sweeter. Now will I find enough money here to make it worth the fighting? I take it I can find the fighting easily enough.”

“Easily enough,” agreed Barr. “You could join Wiscard’s remnants in the Red Stars. I don’t know, enough, if you’d call that fighting or piracy. Or you could join our present gracious viceroy – gracious by right of murder, pillage, rapine, and the word of a boy Emperor, since rightfully assassinated.” The patrician’s thin cheeks reddened. His eyes closed and then opened, bird-bright.

“You don’t sound very friendly to the viceroy, Patrician Barr,” said Mallow. “What if I’m one of his spies?”

“What if you are?” said Barr, bitterly. “What can you take?” He gestured a withered arm at the bare interior of the decaying mansion.

“Your life.”

“It would leave me easily enough. It has been with me five years too long. But you are
not
one of the viceroy’s men. If you were, perhaps even now instinctive self-preservation would keep my mouth closed.”

“How do you know?”

The old man laughed. “You seem suspicious. Come, I’ll wager you think I’m trying to trap you into denouncing the government. No, no. I am past politics.”

“Past politics? Is a man ever past that? The words you used to describe the viceroy – what were they? Murder, pillage, all that. You didn’t sound objective. Not exactly. Not as if you were past politics.”

The old man shrugged. “Memories sting when they come suddenly. Listen! Judge for yourself! When Siwenna was the provincial capital, I was a patrician and a member of the provincial senate. My family was an old and honored one. One of my great-grandfathers had been— No, never mind that. Past glories are poor feeding.”