The World Swappers (3 page)

CHAPTER V

Temperamentally, reflected Bassett, Lecoq and himself were ill-suited. If only he could find another man with such a gift for improvisation, but without Lecoq’s irascibility and tendency to work himself up into a frenzy … He dismissed the thought. He had looked hard and long for a substitute for Lecoq, but, though Bassett was always careful not to let him know it, Lecoq had made himself indispensable.

Now he raised a hand to cut short the subordinate’s flow of words. “Lecoq!” he said sharply. “Sit down, have a cigar, and shut up for a moment. Suppose we look at this matter with a bit more detachment–”

“Detachment!” snarled Lecoq. “With a situation like this facing us, how can we even pretend to be detached?”

“I said shut up and sit down,” Bassett repeated levelly, and Lecoq, grumbling, subsided.

For a moment Bassett did not go on. He turned his head to the picture window at the right of his desk; made of one-way glass for privacy, it gave him a view from the vantage point of the eleventh floor clear across Rio to the edge of the sea. Afternoon sun was glimmering on a seeming infinity of windows in the lower buildings within his view.

Matter transmitter
… The concept ticked through Bassett’s mind. With instantaneous transport of goods, how enormously complex a trading empire might be built up; how much more of the visible universe might be delivered into the hands of man!

He grew aware that he was stretching Lecoq’s limited ability to remain silent beyond its capacity. He turned back to face his assistant across the vast bare top of his enormous desk.

“You panic, Lecoq,” he said bluntly. “As you say, it is disturbing to discover that there exists a group of persons with such resources that they can not only employ devices we believed to be purely hypothetical, but can also forecast the failure of a plan we believed to be reliable.”

“Disturbing!” Lecoq snapped. “It means that we’ve been made monkeys of!”

“Nonsense. If this group, whoever they are and wherever they may operate from, were powerful enough for us to need to fear them, actively fear them, then they would not feel a need to remain hidden from us. Obviously, they do wish to stay concealed. This argues that they have considerable resources of knowledge, but not of effective forces. Yet it is reassuring that they have not succeeded in remaining in hiding. Up till the other day, we had heard the vaguest rumours of such a group. Now we know a good deal about them. Logically, I deduce that we have worried them out of their preferred pattern of behavior. Good. Let’s do it again. Soon.”

Lecoq scowled gloomily. “How? We still don’t know where they operate, who their members are. I’ve consulted a dozen of our staff physicists, and none of them can define a method of detecting the operation of a matter transmitter, so we can’t locate them that way.”

“How?” said Bassett, ignoring the last part of Lecoq’s remark. “Why, by taking them at their word and capitalizing on their suggestion about Ymir.”

“You’re not seriously proposing to follow that up, are you?” Lecoq demanded. “Ymir! It’s the least likely of the outworlds to afford a solution to our problems.”

“They were right about our failure on Boreas, weren’t they?” Bassett countered. “You’re not going to tell me they rigged our own company computers to give us a false answer. No, we got adequate confirmation on that score as soon as we processed our data. Boreas is out. It looked obvious. This suggests to me that we probably weren’t even asking the right questions. But that’s beside the point. If this mysterious group has such exact knowledge of my personal movements, for example, that they can have a man waiting for me in mid-Pacific within half a mile of the place where my ship comes down–”

“They probably extrapolated from its entry into the atmosphere and transmitted the man there a moment before we arrived.” Lecoq plainly did not think highly of the achievement.

“I don’t care how he got there.” Bassett hunched himself forward in his chair and rested his elbows on the desk. “The important fact is that they did have someone waiting to meet me on my arrival on Earth, which argues a close study and pretty full knowledge of my recent activities. No one except ourselves knew just when we were returning to Earth, nor that I was proposing to put down in mid-Pacific instead of coming direct to the South Atlantic off Rio, as might have been expected. That’s point one.

“Point two: They knew in advance, and our computers have agreed with them, that Boreas was a stupid place to look for an answer to our problems.

“Point three: Despite their vaunted pretensions to be able to solve the Ymiran problem, they took the trouble of arranging an elaborate and impressive means of telling me about it. This could well imply that they are in fact looking to me for the solution which they can’t find, even though they know where it lies. Consequently–”

Bassett threw himself back in his chair again and gave Lecoq a belligerent and authoritative stare. “Consequently, we will investigate, with all the resources at our disposal. And this time we’ll frame our questions differently. What do you know about Ymir, Lecoq?”

The suddenness with which he threw out the question took Lecoq by surprise. Now he hunted for his voice as if, in the unaccustomedly long period of listening, he had momentarily mislaid it.

“Why, I know quite a lot about all the colonies. Ymir is by far the coldest, most miserable and generally unlikely world which men have ever attempted to make their home. The equatorial regions are habitable; the population is around eight or ten million, and everyone is half-frozen and half-starved. But they claim to like it.”

“No!” exploded Bassett. “That’s a dangerous way of putting it. They don’t
like
it; they endure it more or less gladly, and there’s a whole universe of difference. I’ve been reading up on Ymir’s history–just before I called you up, as a matter of fact. I still have the spool in, in fact.”

He glanced down at the controls on the side of his desk, moved one of the switches, and shaded the windows so that the office was in half-darkness. Lecoq swung his chair around to face the same wall as Bassett, and on which, as the projector warmed up to speed, a flickering series of words and pictures appeared. Bassett was running the spool back to its beginning.

“This is an official account from the Ymiran Embassy,” he said. “I had someone call on them and pick it up this morning. Apparently they supply these to anyone who asks for one, by way of publicity.”

“I shouldn’t have thought they had much to boast about on their icebox of a planet,” Lecoq said sarcastically.

“Oh, it isn’t boasting. It’s probably a sort of inverted pride; they’re displaying their toughness, self-righteousness and endurance. Look at that, now.” He stopped the projector on a wide-angle shot of Ymir’s capital city, Festerburg; its square, ugly buildings poked up between walls of ice, and coarse black smoke swirled about each rooftop, as if trying to blend it back into the bleak landscape. They burned coal and oil, laid down in an earlier interglacial period, obtained by arduous hand mining and drilling.

“Know where that is?” Bassett demanded.

“That’s the capital,” Lecoq snapped. “Festerburg.”

“Right. Know why they call it Festerburg? It’s from the first line of one of their religious songs,
Ein’ feste Burg ist unser Gott.
I could think of better reasons for choosing the name, but that’s the official reason as given here.”

He snapped rapidly through a series of shots of the founding fathers of Ymir, all without exception angry-faced, intolerant-looking men and women. He stopped at a faded view of the original landing.

Among the glaciers and the snowdrifts, the peaked-faced children stood shivering while their parents held a ceremony around the ruins of the ships which had brought them. They were determined to cut every link that bound them to sinful, worldly, unspiritual Earth.

“Only they couldn’t, of course,” said Bassett. “They now refer to the fact under the excuse of wishing to go back and persuade us lush-living Earthers that we should deny the flesh as the Ymirans do. In fact, of course, they bit off more than they could chew. They intended to be self-sufficient and go ahead and mortify themselves in isolation; they managed to starve a few thousand children to death, and then they reopened limited contact with Earth, for seeds, ultrahardy meat animals, and so on. Well, that’s been the way things have remained. The Ymirans maintain that it is hateful to them to spend a tour here at their embassy around the corner; they say they are nauseated by the luxury and fleshpots of Rio. In actual fact, I gather they line up for the jobs that fall vacant, and a few years ago one of their staff, a man called Jaroslav Dubin, actually fell, and started to mix with Earthmen as if we were perfectly acceptable. They had to ship him home quickly before he infected any of his colleagues. You won’t find that mentioned in the official brochures, by the way.

“Their pose of denying themselves even the comfort of a tolerable climate because comfort of any kind is sinful is, as you may expect, beginning to slip. The elders, who are too set in their ways ever to change, would dearly like to cut all ties with Earth again and return to the original aims of the colonizers. Only they can’t–not that we’d worry much if they did, mark you.

“However, as long as there is contact between the two planets, the younger generation on Ymir wonders, in spite of all, whether their revered ancestors
were
such righteous vessels of divine inspiration, or whether they were just a bunch of masochistic old fanatics bent on wrecking their descendants’ future. Consequently, they detest us–for our sinfulness, they say, but more likely because they are profoundly, horribly, unsupportably jealous.

“To suggest to them that they should receive new immigrants from Earth is just as ridiculous as to think we’d ever find an Earthborn wanting to go there. This brings me back to my earlier point: we aren’t asking the right questions.”

“If this character with the matter transmitter isn’t just feeding you a line because you were too close to a real solution on Boreas and he wanted to draw you off,” said Lecoq brilliantly.

Bassett nodded. “I thought of that. That’s why we’re going to take Ymir and turn it upside down and shake it until the key factor falls out. If it’s there. Right, Lecoq–you know what I want done. Get out and start doing it.”

CHAPTER VI

Enni Zatok lived in a city. Everyone on Ymir lived in a city, of which there were five on the entire planet. The reason was simple: communal heating made the most of their exiguous resources of coal and oil, and in any case the mere presence of a concentrated mass of human bodies raised the temperature another valuable degree.

There were about ten million people on Ymir. The total had taken three centuries to reach that figure, for many children died young, and many adults, owing to poor nutrition and the adverse effects of the climate, were able to father only small families.

But Enni Zatok had seen pictures of people who went about in the open air with nothing on at all, under a sky as blue as her own eyes and a sun much more golden than her hair. She had compared their freedom of movement with her own, which was encumbered by layer on layer of protective clothing. She had drawn a conclusion. These people in the pictures bathed in a sea which glittered and glistened, and was so unlike the livid yellow-gray equatorial ocean hammering at the rocks of Ymir that Enni could not really convince herself that both were liquid water. She had drawn a conclusion from that too.

She had seen the pictures in a magazine from Earth, which belonged to Jaroslav Dubin. In fact, she had seen many books and magazines from Earth, and they all belonged to Jaroslav. But it was the pictures in the very first one which lived most vividly in her memory.

Jaroslav Dubin was not exactly famous on Ymir–rather, he was notorious, in a way that no one else had ever been. Because adults and prissy children always changed the subject when his name came up, his notoriety had grown and increased. Sometimes parents unwisely told their children of his awful fate as a cautionary tale–the story of the man who had sold his chance of salvation for the fleshpots of Earth–and consequently there were always boys and girls to snigger over what they knew about him.

One day a boy in her class at school confided that he had actually met the outcast Jaroslav, and that this miserable sinner was really the happiest, friendliest, most likable person on the planet. When Enni timidly referred to the wiles of the devil, the boy went further in his admissions and furtively revealed that Jaroslov had given him a magazine which had actually been printed on Earth. The magazine revealed people living in the sinful luxury they had all heard described but had never seen.

Jaroslav, declared the boy who had met him, actually looked as happy as the people in the pictures–and to children accustomed to their sour-faced parents and teachers, that in itself was a minor miracle.

Enni looked longingly at the pictures. How could such people be the vessels of evil? Evil, she felt instinctively, must be dark and cruel and filthy, whereas these people were bright and gay and clean, and spoke kindly to one another.

She asked the boy who had the magazine to lend it to her, and because not even the iron discipline of Ymiran society had been able to destroy certain fundamental reactions, and because Enni had an appealing smile and blue eyes and fair hair and was nearly seventeen years old, the boy had given her the magazine.

But she had made the mistake of hurrying to her room when she went home, to pore over the pages in private, and her father had come to see what she was up to. First he had tongue-lashed her; then he had torn precious pages to shreds and stamped on them; lastly he had made her take off her clothes and had left her for a night and a day and a night, naked, blue with cold, and without food or water, to impress the wickedness of her action on her.

Many things had been frozen into Enni’s mind by those cold and lonely hours. Not least, her expression froze–into quiet obedience. Several times she heard her mothers footsteps approach, and hesitate outside the door as though she were going to ask how her daughter was. But every time she went away again without speaking. That too reinforced Enni’s decision.

After it was all over, her father never mentioned what had happened. Certainly he would not have spoken about it to anyone outside the family; that would have been an admission of failure in his duty as a parent. A properly brought-up child should not even have felt the urge to commit such a sinful deed. Enni was glad of this, for she had to maintain an outward respect for her parents or be further punished. But behind her pale face her mind was very active.

For some time afterwards she was a model of good behavior. When a year had gone by without another breach of propriety, her parents again began to take her word for what she did, and that was the chance Enni had been waiting for–the chance to lie, to deceive, to cheat her parents on the grandest possible scale. How could she offer lip service to people she no longer regarded as fit to live?

In the meantime, in school and among her friends, there had been talk of Earth and the people of Earth, and also of Jaroslav Dubin, whose name was spoken in the hushed tones children of other worlds reserved for obscenities. Some of the children dared to voice the opinion that Jaroslav was right about the people of Earth and their parents were wrong; after all, they argued, Jaroslav had been to Earth and most people hadn’t.

On the other hand, said the opposition, Jaroslav was the only one of many Ymirans who had been to Earth or to local planets who asserted an opinion contrary to the accepted one. Enni listened silently to this discussion; she already knew what she thought. She felt her skin itch, pent as it was inside two vests, two pairs of bloomers, sweater, heavy socks, clumsy, enormous shoes, parka, scarf, headwear, till she could barely walk for the weight of the load. And she bided her time.

One night, when she had begged a friend to give her an alibi, she went to see Jaroslav Dubin. It was hardly a surprise to her to find four of her classmates already in Jaroslav’s home.

Dearly as the elders of Ymir would have liked to see him ostracized, or better still dead and buried, they could not rid themselves of Jaroslav Dubin. Unrepentant, impervious to the coals of fire they figuratively heaped on his head, Jaroslav had taken advantage of the voyage home from Earth to get acquainted with the commander of the vessel on which he was shipped out. Afterwards, the elders wished they had not been so concerned to get Jaroslav off Earth before it was noised around that an Ymiran had actually deserted his fellows and gone off to live among the sinners of Earth. If they had not been in such a panic, they might have averted the consequences. On arriving on Ymir, the skipper of the spaceship informed the elders that Jaroslav Dubin was the only halfway human person he had met from what he called–as did most outsiders–this icebox of a planet. In the future he wanted Jaroslav to be his agent on Ymir; he was getting sick of having to face the frozen-gutted elders, and he wanted someone passably pleasant to deal with.

The elders refused; they could not conceive of doing otherwise. But the next ship that called refused to discharge cargo unless Jaroslav acted as agent.

The elders turned down the request, and set their jaws grimly. But the captain of the ship kept his word and took his cargo back into space as he had threatened. They missed three cargoes in identical circumstances. Plainly, there was a conspiracy; equally plainly, the Ymirans would have to give in.

So now, hated but tolerated, Jaroslav Dubin was plump and well-fed with supplies his friends of the space trade brought specially for him. It was these same spacemen, doubtless, who kept him provided with the ceaseless flow of additions to his library that he was so generous in lending out. Aching, cursing, the elders realized that in their midst they had a one-man subversive organization, about which they could do nothing.

They had even debated killing Jaroslav for the good of the community at large as they saw it. But the hard facts remained: the spacemen could get by without Ymiran trade, while Ymir could not survive without the spacemen’s services. And if they could not satisfy the sharp minds of spacemen about the reason for Jaroslav’s disappearance, they had no doubt the spacemen would withdraw their trade.

This, then, was the man Enni stole away to visit–not the sniveling outcast aware of his impending damnation that the elders would have liked to believe him, but the happiest, most comfortable individual on Ymir.

Enni had been working herself up to the visit for a year; her excited anticipation diluted her terror as she stole through the bare, icy streets, between the black, blank-faced houses, fearing at any moment to hear the tread of a custodian who would demand what she was doing out of her parents’ home, and to whom lying would be of no use. It was worst of all when she came to the spaceport, for the elders had decreed that Jaroslav’s house must be isolated from the city proper by a half mile of bare ground. But it was winter-dark, and no one saw her as she fled across the open space and cowered into the shelter of Jaroslav’s porch.

It was warm, for Jaroslav had heating units that his friends in the space trade had given him; there was luscious off-world food and brilliant light. And there was talk–terrifying, wonderful talk, of Ymir and Earth, of Astraea and Boreas and K’ung-fu-tse and all the other worlds where men lived in greater comfort and happier surroundings than here.

Plump, smiling, as friendly as the descriptions Enni had been given, Jaroslav leaned back in a soft armchair, presiding over the discussions without saying much himself; his function was rather to generate ideas and leave them to be turned over in the minds of his companions. On that first evening Enni said nothing; she was self-conscious and embarrassed, because it was far too hot in Jaroslav’s room to keep on her usual indoor clothes and no one but her parents had ever before seen her in her vest and bloomers. Later, she went again and talked a little, and then again, and then at every opportunity. Sometimes she was the only person there aside from Jaroslav; sometimes there was a spaceship officer calling on his only friend on Ymir. Most often, though, the group consisted of three or four other young people who had managed to elude parental supervision for a precious hour or two.

On her third visit, Jaroslav, beaming delightedly, gave her a dress from Earth to put on while she was in the house, and thereafter he kept it waiting for her to change into on her arrival. She would never have dared to try and hide it in her own home.

After a while she found herself hoping that Jaroslav would be alone when she called. Occasionally he was. But he invariably treated her with courtesy and never presumed on the situation. She could not quite decide whether he wanted to or not at first. Later she learned to notice the slight disappointment in his manner as the evening progressed, if no one else turned up, and she reahzed that to Jaroslav an evening when he had only one visitor was a failure. Like leaven working in rising dough, Jaroslav’s nature was to be yeast in the ferment of ideas now bubbling through the minds of the young men and women of Ymir.

And what did he get out of it? What was his purpose in this genuinely dangerous activity? Those were questions Enni found herself unable to answer. The danger lay in the possibility of the elders, or someone else in authority, discovering what was happening; then, whether or not Jaroslav himself suffered, his “pupils” would certainly be severely punished, and Enni had come wonderingly to understand that such an event would cause Jaroslav deep and sincere sorrow.

That, perhaps more than anything else about Jaroslav, reinforced the conclusions Enni had come to earlier. In her opinion, the fact that Jaroslav had learned (presumably among the people of Earth, for he had had no other chance) to care as deeply for the fate of others as for himself was the most astonishing thing about his altogether surprising nature. She told him so, one evening when no one else was with them, and for a long time the speculative look that came and went in his eyes as he listened haunted her memory and filled her mind with puzzlement.

Much later, she came to understand.