Watchers of the Dark (19 page)

“How can we trade with them when they have nothing to trade?” Tizefa demanded.

“How can you think about trade when they’re, starving? Give them the food!”

“One shipload of nuts won’t feed a planet. It won’t even feed a city.”

“It’ll keep some people alive until we can get back here with more food.”

“We?”
The
efa
gazed at him dumbfounded.

“Look,” Darzek said. “I’ll buy your ship. I’ll buy your load of nuts.”

“What do you offer?” Linhefa asked politely.

“For your ship, what you paid for it plus the cost of this voyage. For the nuts, whatever the price used to be on Yorlq.”

The
efa
exchanged glances. “Agreed,” Linhefa said.

Darzek turned to the captain. “You’re working for me now. Start breaking out the cargo. We’ll return this Quarmer to his village with a ration of nuts, and then we’ll put nuts down at every populated place as long as the supply lasts.”

“You mean as long as the transmitters last,” the captain said. “We have only four left, including the one that is down now.”

“Then put them down carefully. A lot of lives depend on it.”

The
efa,
though they made no effort to conceal their puzzlement, obediently opened shipping compartments and began counting bags of nuts. Brokefa rationed them out, drawing upon his amazingly detailed recollections of towns and cities and their pre-Dark populations. Darzek didn’t want the nuts dumped into the overgrown ovals where they might not be found, so the captain meticulously placed the transmitter in the street near the center of each town.

It required only seconds to unload a ration of nuts, but putting down the transmitter and retrieving it took tedious calculations and tense, nerve-wracking minutes. They followed the line of day around the planet, and when finally they finished, tossing out all of the ship’s emergency rations at the last stop, the captain had made several hundred of the difficult point transmissions and lost only one more transmitter. He gleefully called himself the galaxy’s foremost expert.

“I’ll pay you a bonus,” Darzek promised him. “Now take us home.”

But captain and crew were too exhausted even to perform the routine functions of the return to Yorlq. All of them sprawled about the small lounge and went to sleep. Darzek dozed off thinking wryly that few men had ever begun a journey as a stowaway and ended it owning the ship. Equally amazing was the fact that none of the
efa
had asked him what he was doing there. Perhaps each of them assumed that one of the others had invited him.

When he awoke the ship was safely under way, so he went back to sleep. He awoke a second time to find the lounge deserted.
Efa,
captain, and crew were all crowded into the small control room.

“What’s the matter?” Darzek called.

“We can’t catch a beam from the Yorlq transfer station,” the captain said.

Darzek blinked sleepily and covered a yawn. “Something wrong with our equipment?”

“No,” the captain said emphatically.

“Something’s wrong with their equipment, then. What about the other stations?”

“There aren’t any beams, and none of them answer our signal.”

“There’s nothing to do but keep trying,” Darzek said cheerfully.

“And you had to give away all of our rations,” Brokefa complained.

“I’ll buy you any food you want at the transfer station,” Darzek promised. He said quietly to the captain, “Can you go in without a beam?”

“No. It would be too risky, both for the ship and the station. Difficult, too. Anyway, it’s forbidden, and—just a moment.”

“Got something?”

“Yes.”

The captain jerked out the message strip and glanced at it wonderingly. “It says—‘Go away, Grilf!’”

Grilf.
They stared at each other.

During their brief absence the Dark had taken Yorlq.

“I haven’t seen him since he brought your message.”

“Message? Didn’t he bring two?”

She shook her head.

“That’s odd. He was to hand you a note if I wasn’t back in three days. Are the regular transmitters still working?”

“They were a moment ago. I just came back from Rhinzl’s.”

The
efa
were stirring impatiently. “You want to know how things are at home,” Darzek told them. “Go ahead. But I want you back here at once with the rest of the traders. All of them. Tell them their presence is urgently required at a meeting, and if they won’t come bring them anyway.”

“Meeting?” Brokefa exclaimed. “What is there to meet about? We need only to obtain the necessary supplies, and leave.”

“Suit yourself. But this particular ship belongs to me, and it isn’t going anywhere until I’m ready/ And,” he added darkly, “it isn’t accepting any passengers who refuse to come to my meetings.” He waved them away and turned to greet Gud Baxak, who hurried in slobbering joyfully.

“This transmitter connects with a spaceship,” Darzek told him, patting the portable frame. “Put some of the undertraders here, and tell them to guard it with their lives. The ship is short of supplies. It has no food at all, and not enough water and air for the number of passengers it may have to carry. We’ll make better arrangements later, but for the present everything will have to be brought here and passed through this transmitter. Do you know what to do?”

“Yes, Sire,” Gud Baxak said, beaming.

“Then do it” He said to Miss Schlupe, “Tell me what’s been happening.”

“I really don’t know. The natives whoop it up all day, but so far they’ve just wandered about in mobs and made a lot of noise. Except for cutting off the service transmitters, they’ve left us alone. Do you need me at your meeting?”

“No. Go to bed. You look worn out, and this is only the beginning. Get some sleep while you can.”

“Where are you going?”

“To find Kxon. I can’t make any plans until I’ve talked with him.”

He stepped through to Kxon’s headquarters. The place was a shambles. The carefully compiled files were strewn from room to room; furnishings had been tossed about and smashed. Stunned, Darzek righted a chair and seated himself wearily.

He’d lost the battle for Yorlq before it began. At the moment he most urgently needed his investigators—the moment he’d trained them for—they’d gone mad along with the other natives.

“That’s why the traders hired only foreigners,” he thought. “Their experience with the Dark taught them not to trust natives.” He told himself defensively that he’d had to trust natives, that no foreigner could have moved about Yorlq unnoticed the way Kxon did. But he should have been prepared for this.

Minutes slipped by, and still he sat huddled in bleak despondency, unwilling to move, reluctant even to think or plan. He had called the traders together, intending to rally them to a battle that was already lost. Now he could only ask their help in collecting supplies and organizing an evacuation. They’d help eagerly, of course. The same mental weapon with which the Dark maddened the natives probably paralyzed the traders’ will to resist.

He started. Was it possible that the Dark’s mental weapon was working on
him?
Angrily he got to his feet and strode to the transmitter.

At dawn Miss Schlupe found him sitting meditatively in the garden. She handed him a dish of her synthetic rhubarb beer, and he sipped it appreciatively, saying, “This is the right time for it.”

“Did you get any sleep at all?”

He shook his head.

“Are the traders going to cooperate?”

“They have no choice if they want to leave here on my ship. It took me hours to get that point across, but it finally registered.”

“I wondered if you’d found an obstructionist among them.”

Darzek smiled. “Which is a polite way of saying, ‘Agent of the Dark.’ No, but I’m watching all of them very carefully—watching them and having them watched. Each of them now has one of my undertraders as an assistant, supposedly for liaison duties. It’d be difficult to say which were deliberately obstructive and which were merely scared stiff, but all of them are cooperating, albeit reluctantly.

“Gul Meszk owns an interest in a factory that produces compartments for spaceships, or did before the Dark put a damper on the spaceship business in this sector. He thinks there are enough finished passenger units on hand to fill my ship. Gul Kaln is what would be called an electronics nut back on Earth, and he has enough equipment available to put together any number of outsized transmitters. The two of them are working at getting the passenger compartments up to the ship. As for the others, Rhinzl is willing to do whatever I want, but only at night when he knows there’ll be very little that I want done. He’s going to muster the few available nocturnals and organize a night watch. I have the rest out collecting supplies, but I’m afraid I’ll have to prod them constantly.”

“I hope you have something for me to do. I’ve never felt so useless in my life.”

“You can take charge of the evacuation. The natives may turn off the broadcast power at any moment, so I’m having outside doors cut in all of the dwellings. As the compartments are made ready you can bring the women and children over here, one household at a time, and pass them through to the ship.”

“Are you really going to fight the natives?”

“The hill is a perfect defensive position. Any native who climbs it won’t feel much like fighting when he reaches the top.”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“I’m going to make a show of fighting,” Darzek said. “There’s something I want to find out—something I
must
find out—and this is the only way it can be done.”

“Can it be done before we starve?”

“We’re culling all of the warehouses for anything that might be of use to us. Gul Kaln has some self-powered transmitters ready so we can keep moving supplies after the power is cut off. As fast as the noncombatants move out we’ll convert the dwellings into supply depots.”

“Water?”

Darzek laughed. “We’ll stock that, too. And if we need more, every dwelling has a lovely aquaroom with a reserve of I don’t know how many thousands of gallons.”

“All right. We’ll be prepared for a siege. Will it take that long to find out what you want to know?”

“I don’t know,” Darzek said soberly. “No one has ever resisted the Dark before, so I have no idea what will happen. The more I learn about the Dark, the more confused I get. Why would any rational entity go tearing through the galaxy on an orgy of conquest, and then leave the conquered worlds to starve? The Dark doesn’t merely induce insanity—it
is
insanity. I can’t make any sense out of it.”

“Those howling natives certainly didn’t make sense to me.”

“If we could hold on here until they regain a measure of sanity, it would be a tremendous morale booster to the whole galaxy. A victory here could be the turning point. On the other hand, there aren’t enough of us to defend this place if the natives attack in force, even if their only weapons are their bare hands, and I hate to think what will happen if there are a few Eyes of Death among them. So I’m going to make a show of fighting. Perhaps I’ll learn . . . something . . .”

“Have you learned a substitute for breakfast? No one on the
Hesr
has eaten since the day before yesterday. Your army will fight better on a full stomach.”

“I’ll take it up with Gul Ceyh,” Darzek promised. “He’s appointed himself quartermaster general.”

A few minutes later he sought out Miss Schlupe again and said remorsefully, “Schluppy, you just changed jobs. Behold the harvest of total automation. There isn’t a person in the entire trading community who knows how to cook!”

Already exhausted, Darzek spent a frustrating, exhausting day dashing frantically from place to place, never quite finishing one task before he was urgently needed elsewhere. He inspected warehouses, browbeat balky traders into making plans and doing something about carrying them out, saw that the hilltop’s thick vegetation was cut and stacked in barricades, and organized the undertraders and youths into squads and platoons. Along the way he dealt with an unending succession of messengers who dashed up breathlessly for decisions on problems of truly Gordian perplexity.

In one of the warehouses he found a stack of stout poles of unidentifiable wood, intended for an indiscernible purpose, and he armed a company of shock troops with them. No officer had ever commanded a more motley group, but they responded eagerly and learned quickly. Their attitude pleased Darzek, even though he could not watch their slithering, ambting, gamboling, shuffling, gliding, and skating charge without laughing.

Gul Kaln’s unlimited resourcefulness provided Miss Schlupe with a makeshift kitchen, and she supervised an endless preparation of food with helpers drawn from every type of animate on the
Hesr,
who also served as tasters for their own kinds. Darzek inspected the place—once—and found its variegated outpourings astonishing and largely nauseous.