The Continent Makers and Other Tales of the Viagens (20 page)

And then the twenty-kilo weight of the gold snatched the whole bag from his grasp. Clank! Gold pieces spilled out of the open mouth of the sack and rolled in little circles on the causeway. The tailed men whooped and pounced on them, abandoning their chase. While Borel was glad not to have to dodge any more spears, he did think the price a little steep. However, to go back to dispute possession of the money now would be merely a messy form of suicide, so he rode wearily on.

He reeled into Novorecife about noon, and was no sooner inside the wall than a man in the uniform of Abreu’s security force said: “Is the senhor Felix Borel?”

“Huh?” He had been thinking in Gozashtandou so long that in his exhausted state the Brazilo-Portuguese of the spaceways at first was entirely meaningless to him.

“I said, is the senhor Felix Borel?”

“Yes. Sir Felix Borel to be exact. What—”

“I don’t care what the senhor calls himself; he’s under arrest.”

“What for?”

“Violation of Regulation 368.
Vamos, por favor!”

Borel demanded a lawyer at the preliminary hearing, and since he could not pay for one, Judge Keshavachandra appointed Manuel Sandak. Abreu presented his case.

Borel asked: “Senhor Abreu, how the devil did you find out about this little project of mine so quickly?”

The judge said: “Address your remarks to the court, please. The Security Office has its methods, naturally. Have you anything pertinent to say?”

Borel whispered to Sandak, who rose and said: “It is the contention of the defense that the case presented by the Security Office is
prima facie
invalid because the device in question, to wit: a wheel allegedly embodying the principle of perpetual motion, is inherently inoperative, being in violation of the well-known law of conservation of energy. Regulation 368 specifically states that it’s forbidden to communicate a device ‘representing an improvement upon the science and technics already existing upon this planet.’ But since this gadget wouldn’t work by any stretch of the imagination, it’s no improvement on anything.”

“You mean,” sputtered Abreu, “that it was all a fake? A swindle?”

“Sure,” said Borel, laughing heartily at the security officer’s expression.

Abreu said: “My latest information says that you actually demonstrated the device the day before yesterday in the auditorium of the Order of Qarar at Mishé. What have you to say to that?”

“That was a fake too,” said Borel, and told of the thread pulled by Zerdai in the wings.

“Just how is this gadget supposed to work?” asked the judge. Borel explained. Keshavachandra exclaimed: “Good Lord, that form of perpetual motion device goes back to the European Middle Ages! I remember a case involving it when I was a patent lawyer in India.” He turned to Abreu, saying: “Does that description check with your information?”

“Yes, your Excellency.” He turned on Borel. “I knew you were a crook, but I never expected you to brag of the fact as part of your defense against a legal charge!”

“Bureaucrat!” sneered Borel.

“No personalities,” snapped Judge Keshavachandra. “I’m afraid I can’t bind him over, Senhor Cristôvão.”

“How about a charge of swindling?” said Abreu hopefully.

Sandak jumped up. “You can’t, your honor. The act was committed in Mikardand, so this court has no jurisdiction.”

“How about holding him until we see if the Republic wants him back?” said Abreu.

Sandak said: “That won’t work either. We have no extradition treaty with Mikardand because their legal code doesn’t meet the minimum requirements of the Interplanetary Juridical Commission. Moreover the courts hold that a suspect may not be forcibly returned to a jurisdiction where he’d be liable to be killed on sight.”

The judge said: “I’m afraid he’s right again, senhor. However we still have some power over undesirables. Draw me a request for an expulsion order and I’ll sign it quicker than you can say
‘non vult.’
There are ships leaving in a few days, and we can give him his choice of them. I dislike inflicting him on other jurisdictions, but I don’t know what else we can do.” He added with a smile: “He’ll probably turn up here again like a bad anna, with a cop three jumps behind him. Talk of perpetual motion, he’s it!”

###

Borel slouched into the Nova Iorque Bar and ordered a double comet. He fished his remaining money out of his pants pocket: about four and a half karda. This might feed him until he took off. Or it might provide him with a first-class binge. He decided on the binge; if he got drunk enough he wouldn’t care about food in the interim.

He caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror back of the bar, unshaven, with eyes as red as his hair and his gorgeous private uniform unpressed and weather-beaten. Most of the bravado had leaked out of him. If he’d avoided the Novorecife jail, he was still about to be shipped to God knew where, without even a stake to get started again. The fact that he was getting his transportation free gave him no pleasure, for he knew space travel for the ineffable bore it was.

Now that Zerdai was irrevocably lost to him, he kidded himself into thinking that he’d really intended to take her with him as he’d promised. He wallowed in self-pity. Maybe he should even go to work, repugnant though the idea appeared. (He always thought of reforming when he got into a jam like this.) But who’d employ him around Novorecife when he was in Abreu’s black books? To go back to Mikardand would be silly. Why hadn’t he done this, or that . . .

Borel became aware of a man drinking down the bar; a stout middle-aged person with a look of sleepy good nature.

Borel said: “New here, senhor?”

“Yes,” said the man. “I just came in two days ago from Earth.”

“Good old Earth,” said Borel.

“Good old Earth is right.”

“Let me buy you a drink,” said Borel.

“I will if you’ll let me buy you one.”

“Maybe that can be arranged. How long are you here for?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“What do you mean, you don’t know yet?”

“I’ll tell you. When I arrived, I wanted a good look at the planet. But now I’ve finished my official business and seen everything in Novorecife, and I can’t go wandering around the native states because I don’t speak the languages. I hoped to pick up a guide, but everybody seems too busy at some job of his own.”

Borel, instantly alert, asked: “What sort of tour did you have in mind?”

“Oh, through the Gozashtando Empire, perhaps touching the Free City of Majbur, and maybe swinging around to Balhib on my way back.”

“That would be a swell tour,” said Borel. “Of course it would take you through some pretty wild country, and you’d have to ride an aya. No carriages. Also there’d be some risk.”

“That’s all right, I’ve ridden a horse ever since I was a boy. As for the risk, I’ve had a couple of centuries already, and I might as well have some fun before I get really old.”

“Have another,” said Borel. “You know, we might be able to make a deal on that. I just finished a job. My name’s Felix Borel, by the way.”

“I’m Semion Trofimov,” said the man. “Would you be seriously interested in acting as a guide? I thought from your rig that you were some official . . .”

Borel barely heard the rest. Semion Trofimov! A bigshot if ever there was one; a director of Viagens Interplanetarias, member of various public boards and commissions, officer of capitalistic and cooperative enterprises back on Earth . . . At least there’d be no question of the man’s ability to pay well, and to override these local bureaucrats who wanted to ship Borel anywhere so long as it was a few light-years away.

“Sure, Senhor Semion,” he said. “I’ll give you a tour such as no Earthman ever had. There’s a famous waterfall in northern Ruz, for instance, that few Earthmen have seen. And then do you know how the Kingdom of Balhib is organized? A very interesting set-up. In fact, I’ve often thought a couple of smart Earthmen with a little capital could start an enterprise there, all perfectly legal, and clean up. I’ll explain it later. Meanwhile we’d better get our gear together. Got a sword? And a riding outfit? I know an honest Koloftu we can get for a servant, if I can find him, and I’ve got one aya already. As for that Balhib scheme, an absolutely sure thing . . .”

A.D. 2153

The Continent Makers

I.

Gordon Graham looked up from his calculations as the telephone on his wrist tinkled. When he activated the receiver, the voice of his brother Ivor spoke from the little instrument: “Gordon?”

“Yeah, what is it?” drawled Gordon Graham.

“Busy tonight?”

“We-ell, I’m doing some figuring on the Project . . .”

“Look, will you come down out of your scientific cloud long enough to take over one of my tourists this evening?”

“Huh? What sort of tourist?” said Gordon Graham in tones of alarm.

He had been through this before. Once he’d promised to show New York nightlife to a member of Ivor’s guided tour when Ivor was otherwise occupied. The tourist had turned out to be an ostrichman from Thor with a voice like a foghorn in disrepair. All evening, far from enjoying the sight of the noted strippeuse, Ayesha van Leer, doing her famous fig leaf song, the Thorian had honked into Gordon’s ear his bitter complaints about the “partition” of his planet.

It seemed that nearly a hundred years previously, in the early days of interstellar exploration, a party of Earthmen had bought a thinly inhabited Thorian continent from the chiefs of its primitive natives for some ridiculous price: a record player with a stack of symphonic records and a case of Irish whiskey, or something like that. When the Irish was gone and the player broken, the Thorians had demanded their continent back. Wherefore there had been a little war in which the Thorians with their spears and boomerangs had come off second best.

By the time the civilized Thorians of the other continents had roused themselves to take a serious view of the matter, a Terrestrial colony was flourishing and a whole new Earthly generation had grown up on the disputed continent. These circumstances led the Interplanetary Supreme Court to decide that the Thorians might not expel the Earthmen, who had come legally and had been allowed to live there undisturbed for many decades. On the other hand the Interplanetary Council had adopted rules to prevent advanced peoples from taking advantage of backward ones again . . .

All of which Gordon’s Thorian had recounted in molecular detail in his honking accent until Gordon had nearly gone mad from boredom.

And then there had been the time he let Ivor talk him into taking one of the latter’s tourists to the zoo. The tourist had proved to be an Osirian, a scaly creature like a small bipedal dinosaur a head taller than a man, with a complicated design painted on its bare hide. The animals had thrown such fits that the keepers ordered Gordon and his companion out, much to Gordon’s embarrassment.

“It’s a Krishnan this time,” said Ivor. “A girl. Practically human, too; you’ll like her.”

“Yeah?” said Gordon Graham. “You said I’d like that ostrichman from Thor . . .”

“No, no, this isn’t like that at all. She’s a member of the tour from the republic of Katai-Jhogorai, which is the most cultured state on the planet; all carefully selected people too. This being Sunday, the other gawkers are resting at the Cosmo, but I promised to take Jeru-Bhetiru—that’s her name—out to Boonton to visit relatives in the extra-terrestrial colony. That was okay, but she met some Osirian out there who told her about some society that meets in the Bronx tonight and sold her the idea of going. Since her boyfriend who’s studying Earthly law at N.Y.U.—since he was busy, I said I’d take her, forgetting I already had a date of my own. So—uh—I thought—especially since she’s a beauty and an interesting personality—”

“Okay, I’ll t-take her,” said Gordon Graham. “Where do I meet you?”

“Just a minute while I look at the time-table . . . We’ll be on the Boonton Branch train, Lackawanna Division, that gets into the K.S.T. at seventeen fifty-two.”

“All right. See you.”

Gordon Graham broke the connection, got up, and looked around vaguely for some clean clothes. Such was the warmth of the late June air that he wouldn’t bother with a blouse; he cared nothing for other people’s ideas of formality. He looked at his long-nosed face in the mirror to see if he needed a second shave and decided against it. Then his mind wandered off among the differential equations describing magmatic vortices, on which he’d been working, and he stood lost in thought for ten minutes without moving a muscle.

Finally he pulled himself out of his trance, sat down, and wrote a few equations lest he forget them. Then he resumed his preparations. It was later than he had thought, so he hurried a bit, as much as he ever hurried. Not that it would do Ivor and his extra-terrestrial girlfriend any great harm to wait a few minutes for him . . .

At last he left the small four-apartment house in Englewood, New Jersey, where he and Ivor shared one of the apartments, to walk to the tube station. On the way to the station he passed the helicab lot and toyed for a moment with the idea of taking one of the cabs. It would set him down on the roof of the Columbus Circle Terminal (initials K.S.T. in the new spelling) in ten minutes. On the other hand the time he’d save would not be worth the extra cost.

On the tube train his mind wandered hazily between his beloved equations and the blind date he’d committed himself to. A Krishnan girl
might
be beautiful even from the Earthly standard, despite blue-green hair, pointed ears, and feathery smelling-antennae sprouting from between her eyebrows. And she could presumably talk instead of having to communicate by sign language with writhing tentacles like an Ishtarian. Still she would not be a human being; her internal organs . . .

Well, maybe that was just as well. For Gordon Graham had sworn a great oath, by the founders of the science of geophysics, not—repeat not—to fall in love on first sight again, after all the misery it had caused him the last three or four times. It was all very well for the extraverted Ivor to tell him that what he needed was to get married; how could you when all the squids you asked laughed at you?

He got off the train at the K.S.T. In walking through the maze of passages in the terminal he let his mind wander off into some of the more abstruse problems of geophysics. When he came to he was on the escalator going down to the High Speed Line platforms at the lowest level of the station . . .

As the escalator was slowly crawling down two deep decks, Graham saved time by reaching up, seizing a crossbar with a directional sign on it, and swinging his long legs easily from the down escalator to the up one next to it. The feat brought startled stares from the other escalator passengers, especially as the sober-looking Graham did not seem like a young man to put on an impromptu public trapeze act.

He finally found the gate through which passengers issued from trains of the Lackawanna Division of the North American Railroads. His watch showed him that he was just in time to meet the 1752 train of the Boonton division—or “Buunton” as the announcement board said it in reformed spelling. (Graham was always forgetting to sign his checks “Goordon Greiam” and getting in trouble with his bank in consequence.)

The passengers presently streamed out, Ivor among them, almost as tall as Gordon but looking much shorter because he was broader. Ivor Graham, ex-football hero and now local New York guide for the Tilghman Travel Agency (GUIDED TOURS TO ALL PLANETS) introduced his brother to the Krishnan girl.

Jeru-Bhetiru was almost as tall as Gordon Graham—not unnatural, as Krishnans averaged about the stature of the tallest human races. Something to do with lesser surface gravity of that planet. She possessed external organs of smell, that looked something like a pair of blue-green feathers or perhaps like elongated supernumerary eyebrows, rising from above the bridge of her nose. Her hair was a glossy bluish-green and grew in a not-quite-human pattern on her head. Her features bore a slightly flattish Mongoloid look, so that while she would, with other coloration, have made a passably pretty American Caucasoid girl, she would have been simply ravishing as a Chinese or Indonesian. Her skin bore a faintly greenish tinge too, and her large pointed ears stuck up like those of the Little People in children’s picture books. She wore the frontless Minoan-style dress of her native planet: an outfit to arrest attention even in that sophisticated city and age, rising primly to a high collar in back but in front bare to the midriff, so that it was patent that the wearer, though oviparous, was still definitely a mammal.

Gordon Graham gulped, reflecting that convergent evolution had certainly outdone itself in producing the Krishnans, so human-looking that it was possible for the two species to enjoy the pleasures of carnal love with each other. (Though of course without issue; the chromosome mechanism of the Krishnans was entirely different from that of Terrans.) The mere thought made Gordon Graham tingle, blush, and clear his throat.

“G-g-glad to know you, Miss Bhetiru,” he said at last.

Ivor corrected him: “If you must say ‘Miss,’ say ‘Miss Jeru.’ They put surnames first like the Chinese. I call her ‘Betty.’ ”

“Glad to know you—uh—Betty,” said Gordon solemnly.

She smiled warmly. “I am glad to know you too. Of course in my language if you wanted to use the familiar form, you would call me Jeru-Bhetiru, but I shall be happy with ‘Betty.’ ”

Ivor explained: “Her old man is Jeré-Lagilé. You know, the Earthly representative of Katai-Jhogorai for all those years. After her tour finishes its New York stay, she’s going to leave it and stay on for a few months to study our Earthly child psychology. Doesn’t look like a snake-pitter, does she?”

Gordon had to admit she didn’t. Despite the oriental look of her Krishnan features, she was all that Ivor had promised and then some.

Ivor continued: “Gordon’s a big-shot scientist on the Gamanovia Project, Betty, as well as an instructor of geophysics at Columbia. He’s really a brilliant guy in spite of that sappy look.”

“What is the Gamanovia Project?” asked Jeru-Bhetiru.

“Oh, don’t you know? It’s that scheme for increasing the land area of the Earth by making some new continents.”

“My ancestors! How do they do that?”

“You tell her, Gordon,” said Ivor.

Gordon Graham cleared his throat. “The fact is, Miss—uh—Betty, that we’ve found how to control currents in the amorphous magmatic substratum—”

“Please!” she said. “I do not know all those big words! Can you not make it more simple?”

Gordon collected himself. “Well, you know that if you go down below the surface on a planet like this for fifty or sixty miles, you’d find yourself in a mass of white-hot lava, which however can’t flow freely like a true liquid because it’s under such terrific pressure. But it will flow slowly, under long-continued stresses, like cold pitch, and these currents cause movements in the crystalline crust that lies on top of this substratum. That’s how we get mountain ranges and oceanic deeps and things. Now, we find that by setting off atomic charges in the substratum at a controlled rate of disintegration, we can control these magmatic currents, as they’re called, so as to cause parts of the ocean bed to rise to the surface, and other parts to sink deeper so as not to flood the existing land surfaces.”

“How do you get the charges down there?”

“By a ‘maggot,’ a kind of mechanical mole, remote-controlled from the surface . . . Say, what’s next on the program, Ivor? Have you folks eaten yet?”

Ivor Graham directed them to the K.S.T. restaurant, while Gordon, now warmed up to fine professorial fettle, went on with his explanation.

Jeru-Bhetiru asked: “Why do they call it ‘Gamanovia’?”

“Because that will be the name of the first new experimental continent. It’s to be raised in the South Atlantic around Ascension Island, and every nation in the World Federation had its own idea of what it should be named. Most of ’em had their pet national heroes in mind; the Indians wanted ‘Nehruvia,’ for instance. Somebody suggested ‘Atlantis,’ but it was objected that in the first place Plato’s imaginary Atlantis was in the North Atlantic, and in the second, if this experiment worked, we’d probably want to raise another continent in the North Atlantic and we’d better save that name for it.

“Brazil wanted to name the new continent either after Vasco da Gama, the first European to navigate those waters, or João da Nova, who discovered Ascension Island a few years later. When the others said ‘Gamia’ and ‘Novia’ would be lousy names for continents, the Brazzies just grinned and said: ‘All right, senhores, we’ll run them both together and call it ‘Gamanovia.’ And being the world’s leading power . . .”

“Here we are,” said Ivor. “Hey, Gordon, don’t you want to wash your hands?”

Gordon Graham looked and saw that he did indeed want to wash his hands—and literally, not as a euphemism. For the steel bar by which he had swung from one escalator to the other had borne a thick coating of dust on its upper surface. He got lost a couple of times before he found a men’s washroom on the next lower story.

As this was Sunday, the room happened to be entirely empty. As Graham was soaping his hands, a smallish dark man came in nervously puffing a cigarette, apparently on a similar errand. But then the man suddenly spoke: “Ain’t you Dr. Gordon Graham?”

“Uh?” said Graham vaguely, startled out of his daydream of the beautiful Bhetiru. “Y-yes—that is, I haven’t got my Ph.D. yet, but I am Gordon Graham.”

“Good. I must spick to you soon. Are you goink places tonight?” The man seemed to have a slight Slavic accent.

“Yes, b-but who are you?”

“My name is Sklar. I will tell you more about myself later.”

“And—uh—what do you want to see me about?”

“About your Gamanovia Project. You’ll have to teck my word that it is important; I can’t go into details now. What time do you get home from work tomorrow?”

“Let’s see, that’s Monday—oh, about fifteen hundred.”

“Good, I will see you there—”

The man broke off and whirled as two other men, much larger than he, came in through the door and stalked swiftly towards the two who already occupied the washroom. One of them had his right hand in his blouse pocket, which bulged as if the man were pointing a gun, inside the pocket, towards the self-styled Sklar. The other faced Graham, placed a large hand on his chest, and gave a sharp push.