Voyage Across the Stars (20 page)

Crewmen scurried to their duty stations or out into the corridor again. That left Slade on the bridge with Levine, Snipes, and one of the Meeting members—Rooks. Slade wondered if Rooks’ partner, Bourgiby, had been an overdose fatality on Erlette. The tanker seated himself on the analog tub which had become his usual spot. He looked at the commo unit which he still held. Sighing, he replaced it in its belt sheath.

“You should’ve taken your finger off just before we lifted,” Levine said savagely.

“Wouldn’t have changed a thing,” said Slade. He rubbed his eyes. He had gotten no sleep for over thirty hours. “I’d cut the power lead to this thing,” he said, tapping the unit without looking down, “so they wouldn’t get a blip if my thumb slipped. Thattell them it was a fake.”

“A fake?” Rooks repeated. “You didn’t really have a bomb like you said?”

Slade stood up angrily. “Look,” he said, “I’m a tank officer, not a technician. Sure, I suppose you could rig a bomb and a command detonator out of even the gear available on this tub. But
I
couldn’t, not in a couple of hours. Via! I put something together that looked real to me. And I prayed to the Lord that our friends down there—” he gestured toward a bulkhead. Only context could indicate that he meant the Erlette authorities—“couldn’t prove it wasn’t real except by daring me to fire it.” Slade smiled past his restless irritation. “Things could’ve gotten interesting if they’d pushed.”

“I was just about to stick it in,” said Rooks. His voice built by stages from reflection to anger. “She patted me on the back of the neck and I thought ‘The bitch ought to trim her nails.’ And then I couldn’t feel anything where she nicked me. Then my whole body. Couple hours ago I come around, my neck hurts and my butt hurts where they’d jabbed me again. And they load forty of us in a truck like cordwood, still half zonked and bare-ass naked. I wish you’d blown up every bloody one of the bitches!”

Levine and Snipes were nodding, perhaps for different reasons. Slade said, “It’s not the people, it’s their culture. And that’s something their grandmothers locked them into. Ever been on Eutyche?”

Blank looks greeted the question. The tanker shrugged and continued. “They lock women up there. From birth. When she’s sold into marriage, the father and brothers carry the girl to the husband under guard. Let your daughter run on the street and she’ll be stoned to death by your neighbors before they burn your house down over you. It’s not people there, and it’s not people here on Erlette. It’s just the way people live.”

“Well, that may be, Captain Slade,” said Levine. He was showing a little more backbone than his previous norm. “But it’s a problem that has to be solved, this culture. And the only way I see to solve it was as Mister Rooks says. Blow them all up.”

“There’s some might say the same about other things; like this ship, hey?” Slade gibed. He rang his knuckles off a console for emphasis. “Isn’t true, though. Not about Erlette, anyhow.”

Slade struck a stance in the middle of the deck with his left fist raised. He extended the index finger. “They don’t need men, because they’ve got the Sperm Bank.” He extended the middle finger with the fist. “There’s enough traffic here to keep the gene pool fluid and it seems to scratch any itches for something beyond lips and prosthetics that may arise among the citizens.”

Slade’s ring finger flipped up also. “So male infants go for the chop. Nobody could hide their baby boy through puberty . . . and even then, it’d just be something to hunt for officials who get into that sort of thing. You’ve got a society maintained by people like Deputy Brandt.”

“So blow it bloody up!” snapped Rooks.

Slade smiled. “No,” he said, “blow up the bloody Sperm Bank.” He folded his fingers back into a fist. “Then they’ve got to coddle every male they’ve got, infants or immigrants. Or else their whole world goes down the tubes when the population drops below a viable level. Like a lot of places did where there was too small a settlement to begin with. Like Stagira, I suspect. That’s all it would take.”

“Then it
is
too bad your bomb wasn’t real,” Snipes said. It was hard to tell if his sourness resulted from the fact that a gynocratic society had not been smashed, or if the tone belonged to his interaction with Slade earlier.

The tanker laughed as he seated himself again on the analog device. “Via,” he said, “the bomb was real enough. It was the controls I had to fake.”

The other three men stiffened. “The Cylobar was just as real as what we blew clear of Stagira with,” Slade explained. “So were the blasting caps. Just how real, I guess they learned on Erlette when we jumped and the Transit fields generated a current in the leads.”

Slade’s lips smiled like a dog worrying flesh. “And I only hope Deputy Brandt and her crew had gotten into the building by that time.”

“He smashed the culture for spite,” thought Elysium. “Not because he believed the replacement would be better.”

“It will be better,” the other current noted. Extrapolations flickering through the group consciousness supported that view.

“But all that mattered to him was bringing down the structure around the ears of those who had threatened him,” pressed the flow that was too rigorous to be hostile, too chilling not to be negative.

“What he did,” closed the other current, “benefitted individuals and Mankind. If he acted from instinct rather than belief, so much the better for him . . . and for his universe, which is our universe as well. . . .”

“When it’s somebody else’s specialty,” Don Slade was saying, “and they’ve pulled it out every time despite the disaster they’re predicting, then it’s easy to discount what they say the next time. It happens—I’m told it happens—in military settings, too.”

Those who knew as well as heard Slade were flashed a glass-edged vision: the doorway of a command post, three men in gray uniforms pistol-shot on the ground and the neck of the fourth being broken by Slade’s bloody hands.

“They always think you can hold it if you’ve held before,” Slade muttered. “They tell me.”

The big man cleared his throat. “So it shouldn’t have been a shock when we popped out of Transit only a kay above the ground the next time . . .”

The buzzer went off. All the instrument consoles were bathed in red lights. Such warnings were unnecessary, because only the dead could doubt there was an emergency when the starship flipped on its back in a gravity well.

Slade was on the bridge as usual during maneuvering. He was not strapped in. GAC 59 had no facilities to immobilize as many men as the ship now carried. Besides, the hot LZs on which the tanker was trained had no time for such frills.

Slade’s legs shot up because his arms hugged the curve of the analog tub instinctively. Then Levine righted the ship in a corkscrew motion through a massive forward thrust. As a result, GAC 59 was moving at over a hundred kph when it plowed through the trees and into a field. Things began happening in a hurry. Slade probably lost his grip before the display unit shredded its clamps and flew into a console. By then the question was academic, even to Slade himself.

The sirens of the emergency vehicles merged in Slade’s mind with the screams. Some of the screams were his own. . . .

“Because,” Slade said, and the speakers amplified his voice so that it could be heard by all the hundred and three other survivors, “the authorities here think they’re being exceptionally nice in not standing us against a wall and shooting us every one.”

The tanker nodded toward the double doors of the hall. Many of the mercenaries turned to look also, though they all knew what they would see there. The detachment of Rusatan police wore neat, white uniforms. Some of them seemed unfamiliar with the submachine guns they had been issued for this detail. Those were the only guns in the room, however, and they were gripped the tighter when the local men felt the mercenaries looking at them.

“So,” Slade continued from the dais, “staying here on Rusata isn’t an option. Unless you figure to stay the way the folks will who were too late for the medics.”

Men looked at one another, at themselves. The Rusatans had given the crash victims excellent medical treatment, but reconstruction had stopped with grafts of synthetic skin. Prosthetics, the locals had noted bluntly, were the business of the mercenaries themselves. The salvage value of GAC 59 would not cover the cost of necessary treatment—and the necessary shipment of the survivors off a world their presence would disrupt.

“It’s not
fair!”
muttered Captain Levine. He sat beside Slade on the dais. “She was
my
ship. I ought at least to have had all she brought for scrap.”

“That wasn’t an option either, my friend,” said the tanker in a low, dangerous voice. Slade cut on the amplifier again and continued, “So we have the choice of leaving on either of the ships in port right now. That’s a human tramp out of Barmaki; and an Alayan ship.”

“Those’re the ones that look like bloody lightwands?” somebody demanded from the audience.

“The Alayans have exoskeletons, yes,” Slade replied. He raised his voice so that it would ride over the disgust. “They have eight limbs, and they speak to humans through vocalizers. They also—” his voice went up a further notch; he rose to focus attention—“have extremely well-found ships, although they don’t operate on the same principles that ours do. Captain Levine is going to talk to you now about the other choice.”

Slade sat down. Levine glanced at the gathered men, then looked at his boots again. “It won’t—” he began. Slade reached across the spacer and flicked the mike on his epaulette to ‘ON.’ “I’ve been over the ship,” Levine resumed. “They want us bad, so they’re making a price to Rusata. Doesn’t do cop for us . . .”

He looked up. In a stronger voice, Levine continued. “It won’t get us there. Not one more landing, not two or I’m the Messiah. They want us because they’re worse-crewed than we were, and their captain thinks he can make Barmaki with me and what’s left of my people.” Levine nodded. Three or four of the audience nodded back, the remnant of GAC 59’s crew.

“But they can’t,” Levine said. He stood up as Slade had done, but without the tanker’s deliberation. Levine’s hands washed each other unnoticed. “I don’t know how they got here. One of their generators has kicked out three times, and it’s heaven’s own providence they weren’t actually
in
Transit when it happened. Their captain hoped I could help fix it. You
can’t
fix a generator except to pull out the boards and replace them. They’re trying to use jumpers to the other generators, heaven blast me if I lie!”

Captain Levine paused, then sat down abruptly. In a lowered voice he closed, “I—I don’t want the bugs either. But we’ll all die if we ship with the Barmacids. I’m sure of it.”

“The Alayans offer passage for as far along their route as the individual wants,” Slade said over the worried murmur. “They won’t alter their course, but they’ll disembark passengers at any point. So long as the ground authorities are willing. They say that eighty to ninety percent of the worlds they touch are human, and—”

“And that’s cop!” roared someone from the audience.

“All right, maybe it is!” Slade shouted back with the support of the amplifier. “But we know they
do
land on human worlds or they wouldn’t be here, would they?”

Breathing hard, but in a more reasonable voice, the tanker went on. “People, this is no time to wedge our heads. We can take passage to someplace livable with the Alayans—or we can jump straight to Hell with the Barmacids. If anybody’s that determined to die, there’s people right here can probably oblige him.” Slade waved again at the police.

The tanker had risen to a half crouch during his burst of anger. Now he settled himself again in his chair as the audience buzzed. “Oh,” Slade added, “there’s one other thing. Some of you may have the notion that going off in a human ship might leave the way open to—opportunities. Other than settling someplace.” He nodded toward the police detachment, this time to explain why he had chosen a euphemism instead of saying piracy. “No guns leave here with us. Everything aboard GAC 59 except your asses and mine became government property when we crashed. If you don’t like the word salvaged, you can say confiscated. It won’t bother the locals a scrap, and it’s how things are.”

The buzzing lowered despondently.

“Now,” Slade concluded, “you were each issued a ballot and a stylus when they marched you in. There’s a box for your votes right here.” He pointed to the foot of the dais. “We all go the way the majority decides. You mark A for Alayans, B for Barmacids. You drop it in the box. And if you want to live, you mark an A”

Levine shut off his microphone. As the hall rustled with men marking ballots, the spacer whispered, “I wonder what they’d vote if they knew the Alayan ship drives people crazy?”

Slade shut off his mike as well. “A chance of going crazy’s better than near certainty of being lost in Transit,” he whispered back. “So they’d for sure vote the same way they’re going to now.”

The first of the castaways were shuffling toward the box, clutching their ballots.

“Just as sure as I’m doing the counting,” Don Slade concluded in a voice that did not move his lips.

The screams were attenuated by the hundred meters of corridor between Slade and their source. They were still easily loud enough to identify. The tanker was off his mattress and running for the sound even before his conscious mind was aware of the occurrence it had dreaded.

The Alayan starship was an assemblage of globes joined by tubes. The ship appeared to have as much and as little geometric certainty as a spider’s web. That is, the basic form was certain, but the location of any single element within the whole might well have been random.

There was no way the ship itself could land or take off in a gravity well. Two of the globes carried lighters for ferrying cargo and passengers to the vessel in orbit. It had concerned Slade to realize that the lighters were of human manufacture though none of the vessel’s other apparatus was. The situation suggested absurdly that the Alayans had not touched down on planets before their scattered vessels encountered humans some centuries before.