Asgard's Conquerors (9 page)

There was a telephone strung up beside the keyboard, and Finn snatched
it from its perch. He punched out what was obviously an emergency code.

"This is Jack Martin," he snapped. "If anyone comes
through that hatchway, you'll have a real emergency on your hands. You could be
trying to breathe vacuum. We've got suits, and we're not bluffing."

I had an awful suspicion that things were getting out of hand. I wasn't
sure that it was a good idea to threaten to sabotage the microworld. I had no
idea what the penalty for that kind of sabotage might be, but it couldn't be a
minor matter, even by comparison with desertion from the Star Force.

The hatchway didn't open. There was a very long pause. The silence was
suddenly rather oppressive.

"Get the bloody suits!" said Finn, impatiently.

"Hell, John," I said, "that's not something they're
going to forgive. Maybe we'd better just give up, hey? Cut our losses."

"You bastard, Rousseau," he said, as it sunk in just how far
over the top he'd gone. "This is all your fault."

I felt that this was more than a little unjust. I'd only had the
problem, when all said and done. He'd supplied his own greed and his own
recklessness. I realised that there must be more to this than met the eye, and
that it wasn't just a sudden desire to get rich that had motivated his attempt
to spring me. I guessed that he had needed a trip out of the system anyhow. I
wondered again what it was that John Finn had done which required him to adopt
a phony identity. Nothing trivial, apparently.

He went to the locker, and opened it to expose the neat row of
spacesuits inside. There was also a set of lighter suits—sterile suits, I
assumed, for working in biologically- contaminated environments. At least one
of the spacesuits would be tailored specifically for Finn. He looked at them
for a whole minute, then seemed to change his mind, and began fiddling with the
sterile suits. He took one out and passed it to me. He took a second one for
himself, and began to pull it on.

"It's no good," he complained, in a tone as tortured as if he
was chewing on powdered glass. "There's only one thing we can do. We have
to get your ship back."

"How do you propose we do that?" I asked.

"Blackmail," he replied, succinctly. "We have to make
the threat stick. Trouble is, I can't evacuate anything but the docking-bay.
Too many safety-devices. Leaves only one alternative."

He got his suit on, and sealed it. He picked up the mud gun from where
he'd laid it down. I could see his eyes staring at me from behind the
faceplate. I could tell that he was thinking hard.

The phone beside the hatchway began to trill. Finn ignored it, so I
picked it up.

"Martin?" asked the voice at the other end.

"This is Rousseau," I replied.

"Ayub Khan here. What exactly do you plan to do, Mr. Rousseau? I'm
sure you know as well as we do that any damage you cause will endanger you at
least as gravely as it endangers anyone else. There's nowhere to go, I assure
you."

"Mr. Martin thinks we have nothing to lose," I told him.
"He thinks that now he's thrown in with me, the Star Force are going to
shoot him too. He's not in a very positive frame of mind."

"Martin has a lurid imagination," said Ayub Khan. "This
is a civilized world—a scientific research station. The Star Force are not
bandits."

"But they won't be pleased with him, will they?"

Finn had undone his helmet again, and he took the phone away from me.
"Listen to me, Khan," he said, roughly. "You know as well as I
do that I don't have much to lose. I think you already know who I really am,
and what I'm wanted for. I'm not going to start blasting holes in your precious
microworld but what I will do is take the plugs out of every one of your bloody
incubators. I'll fill the whole bay with your precious bugs—which not only
blows half your experiments, but leaves you facing one hell of a decontamination
problem. Rousseau and I are already suited up. Now, how would you feel about
ordering the cargo ship to turn around and bring the
Mistral
back, so that we can get aboard it? That way, we can all
be happy—except the Star Force. Rousseau and I leave the system, your people
carry on with their happy little lives and their precious research. Okay?"

I couldn't tell whether there was any reply. After half a minute or so,
Finn hung up.

I looked at Finn, and he looked back.

"You'd better suit up," he told me.

"What for?" I asked. "What's in those tanks,
anyhow?"

"Ring dust . . . gunk from the outer atmosphere of the

planet . . .
sludge from Ariel and Umbriel."

"What the hell was that about bugs?"

He shrugged. "Stuffs lousy with bugs. Viruses, bacteria . . . God
knows what."

I suppose I must have looked at him as if he was mad. "The rings
of Uranus are full of bacteria? That's impossible!"

He gave me a filthy look. "Well, I sure wouldn't know about
that," he said, contemptuously. "But I'll bet you your half of our
ship that Dr. Ayub Khan feels a lot more strongly about what's in those tanks
than he does about keeping Kramin and his bully boys sweet."

The phone trilled again, and I picked it up.

"Yes?" I said.

"Very well, Mr. Martin," said Ayub Khan, who was obviously
no good at recognising voices. "The cargo-vessel transporting
Mistral
has been directed to turn back. It will dock in
approximately four hours. You may board it and depart."

I blinked. I looked at Finn, and said: "You were right. They're
bringing her back."

"We win!" His exultation failed to cover up his surprise. He
hadn't been at all certain that it would work. But even as I watched him, I saw
the mood of self-congratulation build inside him. He was beginning to think
that he was a very clever fellow indeed—if he had ever really doubted it.

"Thank you, Dr. Khan," I said, rather leadenly. "That's
most kind of you. We'll be happy to wait."

It was a lie, of course—I was anything but happy.

But I couldn't for the life of me see what else we could

do.

5

The best-laid
plans of mice and men, so the poet assures us, gang aft agley. The worst-laid
plans can hardly be expected to fare much better. You will understand,
therefore, that the four hours which stretched ahead of Finn and myself while
we waited for our getaway ship to be brought back to dock was not a comfortable
prospect.

"You don't suppose they're going to let us get away with this, do
you?" I asked of Finn.

"Got a better idea?" he spat back at me. He still had his
sterile suit on, but he'd unfastened the helmet so he could talk. I hadn't
bothered to put mine on.

I didn't have a better idea. In fact, I didn't have any ideas at all.
But I had completely lost confidence in Finn's ideas. He seemed to me to have
an over-ripe imagination, which obviously had a tendency to run away with him.
Not for the first time I cursed my luck in running into him. Of all the people
I had known in my life who might conceivably be found on a microworld orbiting
Uranus, he was probably the only one who could have compounded my problems to
this degree. Everybody else would have had sufficient sanity and kindness to
leave me alone.

"Why exactly are you calling yourself Jack Martin these
days?" I asked him.

He favoured me with a sour expression. "Because I'm a Star Force
deserter," he told me. "Among other things."

It didn't come as a tremendous surprise.

"What other things?"

"Nothing serious. Theft." He paused, then went on: "Was
drafted when I got back after my stay on Asgard. If I'd stayed out there, I'd
have been okay, but I couldn't stick the place. Creepy humanoids, cold, dark
caves—like hell frozen over. Came back, pulled a couple of software frauds, set
up the fake identity. Wasn't too difficult. But you can't move about on Earth
or Mars these days without leaving a trail like an electronic skunk. Australia
got too hot. Had to go back to the belt; had to get out of there, too. Been
here for a year. Ayub Khan's on to me, but hasn't turned me in. Not because of
his innate generosity, you understand. I'm not even particularly useful to him,
in spite of my special skills—but it would be inconvenient to get a
replacement. Isn't just the law, either. Got other people looking for me. When
you're being hunted from both sides . . . I'd give a lot to get back to Asgard,
even if it is hell frozen over. Or a colony world, maybe. Never been to a
colony. You?"

"You're quite the little Napoleon of crime, aren't you?" I
said. "I always knew you'd go to the bad, even in the old days. Mickey
must be turning in his grave."

"I'm not the only one here who's wanted for desertion, am I?"

"You're the only one who's guilty."

"Sure. You're a real war hero, Rousseau. You really did your bit
for dear old Mother Earth, piddling around in absolute zero out on the galactic
rim. Is it true that your bosses there were peddling android super-soldiers to
the Salamandrans?"

These were low blows, but I could see his point of view. The Tetrax had
sold war-materials to the Salamandrans, including technics they'd developed as
a result of our researches on Asgard. Maybe somewhere along the line, one of
my discoveries had contributed a little. I wondered, though, whether the Tetrax
had been selling stuff to our side too. It would be logical. The fact that
humans aren't supposed to be biotech-minded probably made Tetrax systems all
the more attractive as items of purchase.

"Okay," I said to Finn, "I guess neither of us is Robin
Hood. But it looks like we're outlaws from here on in— unless we change our
minds and surrender."

"Ho ho," he said, humourlessly.

"I'm serious," I told him. "You could zap me with the
mud gun and claim to be a hero. Tell them I blackmailed you into it because I
knew your real name. Or I could zap you with the mud gun and tell them I only
just found out what a ruthless desperado you are."

He wasn't amused. "What did you find on Asgard?" he asked,
changing the subject back to something less worrying.

I decided that talking was preferable to silence, given the mood we
were in. "I found out that the levels go a long way down," I said,
without much enthusiasm. "There are thousands of them. There could be
more surface area down there than on the homeworlds and colonies of all the
galactic humanoids put together. If they were all populated there'd be an awful
lot of people inside that world."

"Know what I think it is?" he asked.

"Probably," I told him. "I've heard just about every
theory there is. Hot favourite, by a wide margin, is that it's an interstellar
Noah's Ark fleeing from some cosmic disaster which took place unimaginable
aeons ago in the black galaxy."

I could tell by his face that I'd guessed it in one. Desperately, he
cast around for some other notion, so that he could pretend I was wrong.

"It could be a zoo," he said. "Or it could be that
they're refugees from our own galaxy, from the time before any of the
present-day humanoids went into space. They say it couldn't possibly be
coincidence that all the civilizations in the galactic arm should be
approximately the same age, and all the humanoid races look so very similar.
The guys on Goodfellow think we all have common ancestors—that all our worlds
may have been terraformed in the distant past by some kind of parent
species."