Into the Slave Nebula (11 page)

Afterwards he thought he must have gone insane for a while, because his next clear perceptions were of a spaceport. Open sky above, shedding a little chilly rain; awnings flapping as they were erected; everyone shivering and huddling together. How like it was to the time he had first seen a cargo of androids at the port on Newholme—

Newholme?

Bewildered, he stared about him as though scales had fallen from his eyes. Hope bloomed in his dark mind like the outburst of a nova. This was the same port on Newholme he had seen before, and human beings were approaching the android compound talking loudly about the selection of a supercargo for the voyage to Earth, and among them was …

Horn struggled to his feet, thrusting aside those of his fellows who clung to him for warmth.

“Dize!” he shouted.
“Dize!”

A
S
H
ORN
struggled desperately through the press of androids to reach the side of the pen, he saw Dize check in puzzlement, heard him say to one of his two companions, “Kyer, did I hear somebody calling me?”

Kyer!
The name that had been signed to the letter he’d found among Cavelgrune’s belongings! He’d never expected to encounter him, or any other of Talibrand’s confederates, on this voyage—he’d assumed that when the letter, along with everything else he owned, fell into Talibrand’s hands emergency warnings would have been sent out. Could it be that the traders had too efficiently accomplished their assigned task of “losing” him among anonymous androids, so that not even someone in Kyer’s position knew which consignment he was traveling with?

The dealer was a little man with sharp eyes. His face revealed anxiety as he glanced into the android compound and rapidly away again.

“I didn’t hear anything, Mr. Dize,” he said. “Except the regular chatter. Well, shall we move on to the next batch?”

Frantically Horn clawed his way the last few paces to the fence, seized it in both hands and rattled it until the supports rang. “Dize!
Dize!
Come over here and take a look at me!”

Kyer spotted him now, and his expression changed to one of pure horror. The third man in the group, a uniformed member of the port authority staff, seemed bewildered and was glancing blankly from one to another of his companions.

Dawning comprehension showed on Dize’s face. He strode over to the wire and stared at Horn, frowning as though trying to imagine his features unstained by android blue. All of a sudden his jaw dropped.

“By all the galaxies, it’s Deny Horn! I’d know you anywhere! What in space is this bastard Kyer up to, trying to sell you off as an android?”

“Stop him!” Horn shouted, and lunged forward against the wire as though he could tear an opening with his bare hands. Kyer had spun on his heel and fled, terror lending wings to his feet.

“After him!” Dize screamed at the port official. ‘Don’t let him get away! That’s a friend of mine in there—been kidnapped and painted blue!”

But the other man’s reactions were too slow; the whole outburst had left him dazed. He set off in Dize’s wake at a lumbering run, but long before they managed to catch him Kyer had made good his escape among a crowd of passengers assembling for a departing flight.

Dize returned, panting and cursing, and snapped at the official to open the cage quickly and let Horn out.

“Bastard!” he said thickly. “Won’t get away with this, I promise you—if I have to stand guard at the port myself, I’ll make sure he doesn’t get off Newholme! Here, come and tell me what’s happened, Horn … Horn, are you ill?”

His voice changed and he took a step forward in alarm as Horn stumbled through the compound gate.

I’m—I’m all right,” he whispered. “It’s just that I never expected to …”

He felt his eyes stinging and a lump rose in his throat. There was no way of making it clear to anyone who hadn’t suffered his recent terrible experiences how glad he was to be free.

The official broke in. “Mr. Dize, you can’t just help
yourself to one of these androids! They’re bonded cargo in transit, and I have to answer for—”

“Android be damned, blasted and perditioned!” Dize bellowed, putting his arm around Horn’s shoulder as he closed his eyes and swayed. “This is Derry Horn of Horn & Horn Robots, and I shipped out from Earth with him only a month ago!”

The official’s eyes bulged. His mouth worked but no sound emerged.

“Let ’em all out!” Horn whispered. “They’re all human, same as I am. I’ve been all the way to the planet where they start their trip. There isn’t a factory there, only a place where they bring human children to be sterilized and dyed blue and conditioned into believing they’re a manufactured product. That’s what Lars Talibrand found out—that’s why the traders had him killed!”

“What?”

“What he’s been through must have turned his mind,” said the port official solicitously. “I guess you’d better call a doctor and—”

Horn fixed him with burning eyes. “Crazy, am I? You’ll see! How big a cut do you take on these
people
Kyer’s been buying and selling?”

He rounded on Dize. “Look, I’ve got to get to someone in authority, fast! I must get back to Creew ’n Dith and fix the bastard who did this to me. I’m going to take him apart with my own two hands.”

There was no anger in the words—only a cold fury which made Dize shiver visibly.

“Captain Larrow’s waiting for me to load the cargo for the next trip,” he said finally. “Hang on while I get a message through and tell him he’s going to be one man short, and I’ll do exactly what you want!”

“Well, I don’t really see that there’s much we can do,
Mr. Horn,” said the portly lawforce commissioner. “I do naturally sympathize, don’t misunderstand me. It must be dreadful to be kidnapped and disguised as one of the artificial—”

“Stop saying that!” Horn blazed. “I tell you there aretft any ‘artificial’ androids going through your port! They’re human!’

“Ah—yes,” the commissioner said soothingly, in a tone which implied that the sooner Horn was taken to a psychiatrist the sooner he’d give up that nonsensical delusion. “But you see you can’t file suit from here against the person you allege to be responsible, and no crime has been committed in Newholmer law. Even this person Kyer … well, to be frank, Mr. Horn!” He stumbled over the formal mode of address, as though calling anyone with a blue skin “mister” grossly offended him. “You have no evidence that he was aware of your identity, have you?”

“So why did he take to his heels when Horn exposed him?” Dize barked.

“Really, Mr. Dize, if
I
were to see an apparently deranged android being let out of the compound and hear him promise to go for me, I think I’d quite likely make myself scarce just as he did.” The commissioner settled comfortably in his chair. “Well carry out the necessary inquiries, I can assure you of that. But I can’t commit myself any further.”

“Let’s get out of here,” Horn said morosely, and rose.

Dize caught up with him on the way to the street, scowling. “Why, that fathead!” he muttered. “Wish I could have him aboard ship with me for a week or two!”

“I should have expected this,” Horn sighed. “People have been used all their lives to accepting a blue skin as proof in itself of android origin. What’s more, the commissioner probably knows perfectly well that if something did happen to upset the android trade, Newholme
and Creew ’n Dith and all the rest of the worlds through which the cargoes are staged would be cutting their chief economic lifeline to Earth. Earth’s so stinking rich there’s just about nothing else except androids they care to import in quantity!”

‘Yes, but …” Dize swallowed hard. “I mean, if I hadn’t met you in this condition, I guess I’d have found it hard to believe, too, but now you tell me I’ve been shipping real humans all these years, and—and I feel I want to throw up!”

“You can comfort yourself with the notion that most people on Earth are in a state by now where they’d cheerfully sell their own children for androids if it meant saving themselves a bit of trouble.” They had reached the street now and were walking along together, attracting many curious glances from passers-by.

“All right, but—but so far I can’t make it clear to myself how the sheer volume of the supply is kept up!” Dize grunted. “I mean, we carry nearly ten thousand a year ourselves, aboard Larrow’s ship!”

“Now, it’s all working pretty easily,” Horn said. He’d had plenty of time, during the long lonely days shut up among the androids, to work out the way it had to be.

“Part of the supply, but only part, comes from worlds close to here, like Creew ’n Dith, where there are still enough wild animals to make it convincing that the kids might have been killed and eaten by them. I’ve no way of being sure, but I suspect that until Lars Talibrand came along the proportion was much higher—after all, the shorter the distances you have to transport them, the more profitable your victims must be.

“The main source, though, is way, way out. Think for a moment. Think of that chart of the inhabited galaxy you showed me, with the names marked by guesswork out beyond Arthworld. How long has it been since anyone on Newholme was sufficiently interested to send out
a ship and check on the accuracy of those maps? A century?”

“Well—ah …” Dize looked embarrassed. “Yes, I reckon you’d have some difficulty getting the funds appropriated for an exploring ship these days, just to go check on the accuracy of a map.”

“Same on Earth, only worse. We fixed the troubles which made people want to emigrate, like overcrowding and poverty. The pressure came off Newholme and you settled down to enjoy life, as was only natural. Here, and on Creew ’n Dith and probably on Lygos and Vernier and all the rest of them, people with a whole new planet to develop stopped being interested in what was going on out there at the frontier.

“But the sort of restless types who are dissatisfied enough to pioneer a new planet are much more prepared to accept the nuisance and inconvenience and even danger of moving on to still another strange world. So long as they manage to keep their ships intact, of course—it takes a colossal technical foundation to manufacture new ones. In the past century or so a dozen or more new worlds may have been opened up, by people who apart from their ships are living in a kind of Stone Age! Nobody knew where they would end up, even on the planets they set out from, and if they wore their ships out and couldn’t send news back, who’d realize the frontier had engulfed yet another star?”

“I get you,” Dize nodded. “Yes, it hangs together okay.”

“And that, of course, is where the traders collect their supply of so-called androids, by raiding isolated settlements which can’t report what’s going on because they’re completely cut off from the old-established worlds.”

“Do you mean there never
were
such things as real androids?”

Horn shook his head. “Of course not. I know for a certainty that androids really are made, back on Earth.
But the skill and training involved must be fantastic, and the cost when they were first introduced must have been astronomical. But because Earth is so rich, and because human beings always like to outshine their neighbors by having something that’ll make them jealous, I guess the demand must have been tremendous. So someone—maybe one day we’ll find out who—presumably said to himself, ‘I know the answer to this!’ And he organized a supply of ‘imported’ androids.”

“But if the skills required are so advanced, how could he have made people believe—?”

Horn cut Dize’s interruption short. “Once a thing’s been done, it’s far easier to repeat it than it was to do it the first time. I was fooled for ages, because intrinsically there’s nothing absurd about the idea that someone might have packed the equipment for an android factory aboard a starship and gone off to some world where he could train his own operators and just help himsef to the necessary raw materials by going out and digging them up. The guy who started this android trade probably used exactly that argument as a cover.

“At first, I imagine, it would just have been a kidnapping racket. The price was high enough so that the profit on a few victims would have more than paid for the cost of going out and getting them. Then as androids started to be mass-produced it would have become necessary to draw on a source where a whole shipload could be had at one blow—these isolated frontier worlds I just menioned.”

“But someone must have asked awkward questions!” Dize insisted.

“Why? All of a sudden, look! Here’s a profitable commercial item in great demand on Earth. Overnight, worlds which formerly were too poor to buy anything from Earth except the most basic essentials become able to
purchase luxuries as well. So the kidnapping racket turns into a full-scale slave trade, and but for the fact that someone was foolish enough to revert to the old-fashioned notion of stealing away kids from a relatively advanced planet, right under Lars Talibrand’s nose on Creew ’n Dith, it might have gone on indefinitely.

“You see, the masterminds of the trade are far from stupid. You know Shembo personally, don’t you? Have you talked with him since I last saw you?”

Dize shook his head. “Our schedules haven’t crossed on Newholme lately.”

“Well, two of Kyer’s associates were sent to try and kidnap me from his ship, and when Shembo prevented them they killed themselves.”

“I heard about that!” Dize said, startled. “Two dead bodies found lying on the port, right? They’d taken poison and their ID had been stolen. You say they were connected with Kyer? Why didn’t you tell the commissioner, then?”

“Since my meeting with Coolin, I’m not inclined to trust lawforce officers,” Horn grunted. “That’s not the point. What I’m driving at is that it takes fierce conditioning to insure that your subordinates kill themselves rather than be unmasked. I’ve no doubt that anyone who agrees to take part in the android trade is threatened with that, and also with the possibility that if he betrays the organization he’ll be thrown in with a batch of androids, as I was, but with his brain pithed so he can’t give away any secrets.

“Besides that precaution, the masterminds compartmentalize the trade so efficiently that I’m willing to bet you’ve never known for sure where any of the androids you shipped had originated. Right?”

“Well, on the manifests …” Dize checked himself. “No, you’re quite right. Never thought of that before.
I’ve never dealt with anyone who’d actually been on the world which the androids were attributed to, only with middlemen like myself and Shembo.”

“Right. The end of the trade closest to the point of origin is carefully confined to people conditioned against talking. The androids themselves are not only kidnapped when they’re too young to talk, if possible, but also have their brains thoroughly washed. Then they’re separated in transit—not one of the group I started off with from wherever I was blued up is there on the port at the moment. The rest have been scattered to different ships approaching Earth via different outworlds.”