Visions of Liberty (3 page)

"That seems like a rather mild punishment for a murderer," Dantler observed dryly. "What happened to him after that?"

"He got a job at the Laughingstock. Llayless's mines are always short of labor. But we let the Laughingstock workers know about him, and he didn't stay there long. Probably they shouldered him, too."

"But you don't know that for certain."

"No, I don't know it for certain. But I know he didn't stay there long."

"Do you know where he went from there?"

"I never heard him mentioned again after he left the Laughingstock, but you can bet that the workers there passed the information about him along to workers at the next place he caught on."

Dantler stayed overnight. The men gave him what was, for the Last Hope, a fabulous luxury—a tent all to himself. The food was rough but filling. The other amenities were just a shade above zero. There was barely enough hot water—heated over a campfire—to go around. There was plenty of ore soup, though—a hot, stimulating drink made with local herbs—and it was obvious that no one at the camp went hungry. Early the next morning he walked back over the mountain to the Laughingstock. All of the camp's men came along to make certain he didn't get lost. The loaded mules came, too, and the men took turns pushing cartloads of ore.

"Paths look different going the other way," Kit Grumery explained.

At the Laughingstock settlement, he took his leave of his Last Hope companions and went directly to the office and asked to see the manager. A different clerk was on duty, and for a second time Dantler presented his credentials. He was admitted to the manager's office at once and greeted by Ed Mullard, a grizzled oldster who had spent his life scratching for pay dirt and finally rode to riches on the coattails of someone luckier than he who found the Laughingstock claim.

He scowled at Dantler's credentials, then scowled more fiercely at Dantler. "I hope you're not about to interfere with our operations. There's nothing for the GBI to investigate here."

"My information is that you harbored a murderer. That's what I want to know about."

Mullard leaned back and stared at Dantler. "If there's ever been a murderer on this claim, it's news to me."

"A man named Roger Lefory came to work for you immediately after murdering a fellow worker at Last Hope."

"Lefory," Mullard mused. "Yes, I do remember him because he was always complaining about something. But I had no idea he was a murderer."

"Tell me about him," Dantler said.

Mullard leaned back and meditated. "For one thing, he was the most accident-prone man I've ever met. Mining is a dangerous business, and things do happen, but with Lefory it got to be ridiculous. Tunnels only seemed to collapse while he was in them. Scaffolding gave way only when he was passing it. Machinery failed dangerously only when he was tending it. Hot water spilled only when he was there to get burned. He kept complaining that his fellow workers arranged these accidents, which of course was nonsense. No one could have arranged all that. They were the sort of things that are bound to occur from time to time, and he happened to be unlucky. Finally a gear broke on a tipcart loaded with ore, and he was buried up to his neck and had to be dug out. He just missed being buried alive. The next day he turned up missing. There's a passenger car on every ore train, so it's easy for men to desert if for any reason they don't like their work here."

"Do you know where he went?"

"To Pummery. That's where all the ore trains go. He found a job at one of the smelters. I received a notice with the usual request for his work history."

"Did you send down his personal effects and any wages he had due him?"

"By quitting without notice, he forfeited any wages owed to him. I know nothing about his personal effects. Probably he took with him anything he wanted to keep. He hadn't been here long enough to have accumulated much."

Obviously Mullard had nothing more to tell him, so Dantler boarded the passenger car on the next departing ore train and rode down to Pummery in a totally frustrated mood.

The world of Llayless had been named after an early explorer, but through eight sectors of space it was known as "Lawless." Among worlds, it was a genuine oddity—a single-owner world. Old Albert Nicols, the original owner, who had managed, by dint of rigged poker games, loans foreclosed with indecent haste, and questionable wills to consolidate several hundred claims into one title deed, had taken a young wife just before he died. By that time Llayless was an extremely wealthy mining world with only a tiny fraction of its potential being exploited, and the widow inherited everything. She immediately established her residence several sectors away on a world that offered far more comfort than the world of Llayless could have provided for her, and from that vantage point she kept close tabs on her accumulating mining royalties and gave generously to charities.

Single ownership was not the world's only peculiarity. It had no government. Those who leased land and mineral rights were responsible, by contract, for their holdings and everyone they permitted on them. Some administered them in a stern, paternal fashion; some were tyrannical dictators; a few ran their holdings congenially as partnerships. Occasionally one let things degenerate into rowdyism but only until the world's factor heard about it.

Finally, the world of Llayless was "Unnullified." This was a form of probation inflicted on all recently discovered and newly settled worlds. The sacred constitution of the Inter-World Federation guaranteed certain human rights and considerations throughout its territory, and a world that failed in this respect was nullified, which meant that it was totally embargoed. A world without government was placed in limbo with the label "Unnullified" until it got its act together. After a reasonable time the world would either be normalized or changed to Nullified status.

Birk Dantler had looked into the Llayless's history before he left on his assignment. He was startled to find that there had been no updating of its status since it was, as a newly settled world, marked "Unnullified." He took the matter to his superiors, who took it to their superiors. Someone had goofed. As a result, Dantler was given an important subsidiary mission. In addition to tracking down a murderer, he was to give the world a long-overdue evaluation of its status. If the unusual nature of the world posed any complications for him, he had the authority to recommend immediate reclassification to "Nullified."

Arriving on Llayless, Dantler discovered that custom and immigration procedures were both informal and simple. There almost weren't any. Each new arrival had to place on file a fully paid return ticket to the world he came from. His fingerprints and the name of his next-of-kin were recorded, but that was only so the Llayless Mining Corporation would know who was on the world just in case some other world's investigative branch should come looking, and so there would be someone to notify and send his property to in case he died. These formalities taken care of, a wave of the hand conferred the freedom of the planet.

One thing about this process puzzled Dantler. As the new arrival passed through the gate that opened on the world of Llayless, he was immediately swarmed upon by a dozen or so lean and voracious-looking men who reminded Dantler of a flock of vultures. He asked the man ahead of him in line who the vultures were.

"Labor brokers," the other replied. "Didn't anyone warn you? You have to watch yourself, or you may suddenly find you've signed away your life for the next seven years. If you catch so much as a glimpse of a piece of paper coming your way, put your hands in your pockets. If you find a stylus in your fingers that you don't remember picking up, throw it as far as you can. Be careful who you drink with. They have to get your signature and also your fingerprints on the contract, but no contract has ever been voided because the man who signed it claimed he was drunk."

When Dantler's turn came, he brushed the fingerprinting pad aside along with the rest of the formalities and passed his credentials across the counter: passport with several pages bearing arrival and departure stamps from various worlds, an embossed identification card, and a letter. The clerk scrutinized them in turn and, after giving Dantler a startled glance, turned to a computer, typed briefly, and accepted the result from a printer. He added one more stamp to Dantler's passport. Then, as an afterthought, he carefully printed a number beside it.

He handed Dantler the form the computer had produced. "You should keep this with your passport," he said. "You'll be asked for it when you leave Llayless. Just in case you lose it, which has happened, I've recorded your arrival number in your passport. If you lose that, there'll have to be a tedious investigation, so don't lose it. The town is only half a kilometer from the port, but don't try to walk there unless you're equipped with sand shoes. There's a conveyor you can ride, or there's a 'bus that's a little faster and a lot less comfortable."

He added, "Welcome to Llayless. I hope you enjoy your stay," and turned to the next new arrival. Towing his space trunk, Dantler passed through the gate and was surprised to be totally ignored by the labor brokers. The clerk must have given them some sort of signal.

Dantler headed directly for the exit and opted for the 'bus. When he arrived on a new world, he wanted to see as much as possible as quickly as possible, and he knew he wouldn't be seeing anything at all while riding in a conveyor tube. The 'bus was a sturdy, tracked conveyance, and a glance at it told a traveler all he needed to know about travel in the deserts of Llayless. Mountains loomed on all sides, providing a distant haze of superb beauty. The desert was a disaster of sand dunes and slag heaps. Crossing the former, the 'bus left a cloud of sand behind. With slag heaps, it was a cloud of dust.

Pummery, the principal commercial city of the world of Llayless, had been almost invisible when the spaceship was settling in for a landing. It was a complex of massive domes enclosing business buildings, residences, smelters, and the immense nuclear power plant, with tubes for the network of railway lines that extended in all directions like spreading tentacles. Domes and tubes were more than half buried in the shifting sands of a narrow, elongated desert. The spaceport, unfortunately, had to be kept cleared of sand, and a platoon of dozers worked full time at the task.

The domes and tubes were an afterthought engendered by necessity. In its remote past, which could have been as long ago as three or four decades, the municipality of Pummery had been a struggling desert mining town calling itself Struth. Then someone struck it rich, and the manipulators took over. After the usual period of underhanded contrivance and downright chicanery, Old Albert emerged triumphant.

When he died, his widow hired a factor, one Jeffrey Wallingford Pummery, to manage the world for her, after which she shook the sands of Llayless from her heels forever. One of the factor's first acts was to manipulate a name change. Llayless's principal commercial center, Struth, became Pummery, thus splashing the factor's own name prominently on the world's map. No one objected. As long as Pummery operated efficiently and honestly and kept her royalties coming, the widow didn't bother herself with minor things like name changes. The factor was, for all that Dantler had heard, a shrewd and honest operator who built for the future.

The Llayless desert was a terrible place for a world's commercial center, but Pummery was perfectly situated to serve mining operations in the mountains on all sides. The narrow-gauge electric railway lines bringing ore to the smelters from the mines were able to coast down the mountain slopes, thus hauling their loads at a profit because they generated electricity in the process. The only cost was for replacing their frequently worn-out brakes.

Those mines were rich enough to occupy the Llayless Mining Corporation for years to come. Until they played out, the remainder of the world would remain untouched.

The 'bus stopped in front of the Llayless Mining Corporation's world headquarters. Dantler climbed out along with several others who had come to Llayless on business, left his space trunk to be delivered to a sprawling, dilapidated, one-story building farther along the town's central street—its faded sign bore the message " . . . OTEL" —and stood regarding the headquarters building with puzzled scrutiny. Apparently Jeffrey Wallingford Pummery did not go in for luxury, as he was using the same ramshackle three-story building that had been Old Albert's headquarters. It hadn't even been treated to a new coat of paint for years.

Dantler's fellow passengers entered the building ahead of him. Either they were directed at once to the departments that concerned them or they already knew the way because they had vanished by the time Dantler entered. He approached the receptionist, a pert, overalled young lady with bluish blond hair. She eyed him disdainfully. The lobby proctor took in Dantler's appearance with a snort and decided not to like his looks. He took a step forward.

Dantler proffered a letter to the young lady—the same he had shown the clerk at the port. She glanced at it, glanced at Dantler again, and suddenly decided to read it slowly and with care. The proctor came forward and read over her shoulder. When the young lady had finished her reading and made a copy of the letter, the proctor took it and read it a second time.

His attitude had flip-flopped. "Mr. Pummery's personal offices occupy the third floor," he said politely. "If you will follow me, please, I'll show you to the tubes." The levitation tubes were J. Wallingford Pummery's one concession to modern comfort. Probably he became tired of negotiating three flights of stairs to and from his office several times a day.

The receptionist must have warned everyone that Dantler was coming. He moved as if by magic through the various barricades that Pummery had erected to protect himself from unwanted intruders. Five minutes later, having been shown into a cramped office that was as spartan as Dantler expected, Dantler was settled comfortably in a guest chair and scrutinizing the great man himself while a scowling Pummery scrutinized him. He might have been a retired university professor—tall, slender, neatly bearded, scholarly. The beard was gray, but Pummery looked young and energetic.