Watchers of the Dark (12 page)

“Last evening I overheard Gul Meszk remarking that he had three full shiploads of
skruka-gum
on the way from Sesnav. His unit price, delivered here on Yorlq, will be a full fifteen per centum under what you paid. His ships will be unloading in four days.”

Gud Baxak cringed with humiliation.

“I further find,” Darzek went on, “that these two shipments, Gul Meszk’s and ours, are the only supplies of
skruka-gum
likely to reach Yorlq in the next five terms. Does all of this suggest anything to you?”

“Yes, Sire. I shall divert my two shiploads to another world and salvage what I can from my stupidity.”

“You will not,” Darzek told him. “You will immediately post an anticipation of unlimited quantities of
skruka-gum,
availability within the half-term. You will invite bids, minimum price fourteen lurn-weights per solvency, which is at least ten per centum under what Gul Meszk could sell his for.”

“But that would be twenty-five per centum under what I could sell mine for!” Gud Baxak protested.

“Gul Meszk will of course divert his three ships and attempt to dispose of the cargos before knowledge of an unlimited supply of low-priced
skruka-gum
on Yorlq becomes general. As soon as you learn that he has done so, you will cancel your anticipation and announce that you could obtain only the two shiploads at a higher price. You should be able to dispose of the lot at current rates, which will give you a tidy profit of twenty per centum.”

Gud Baxak’s bone-ringed face underwent contortions of incredulity. “But I can’t post an anticipation unless we have an anticipation! And if we have one, there would be no need to cancel it!”

Darzek sighed and weighed the value of a small business coup against the possible suspicion that such sharp dealings might arouse. He doubted that it would be worth the risk. Gud Baxak was hard-working and no dunce, and would doubtless salvage a small profit. “No,” he said regretfully. “You are quite right. Divert your two shiploads, and get the best price you can. And Gud Baxak—”

“Yes, Sire?”

“I want as few people as possible to find out about this little blunder of yours. Try to dispose of the two shiploads without posting availability or asking for bids.”

“Yes, Sire.”

Obviously relieved, Gud Baxak genuflected and hurried away.

Darzek sighed again, pondering the mysteries of interstellar business; more particularly, the mysteries of interstellar businessmen.

They were incredibly, unnecessarily, even disgustingly honest. They worked hard, of course—fanatically hard. Their knowledge was encyclopedic, and they strove incessantly to keep it that way. And they were utterly devoid of shrewdness and imagination, and seemed incapable of the slightest machination.

“There isn’t a one of them,” Darzek mused, “who would make a tenth-rate poker player. God knows they all have the faces for it, but they’re constitutionally incapable of the smallest bluff.”

When he searched for the cleverness behind a brilliant business coup, it invariably turned out that the trader had scored his success merely because he knew more, and worked harder, than his competitors. The traders not only told the truth, but they believed everything they heard. Implicitly. On Earth, the wealthiest of them would have gone broke in a matter of months.

Darzek could have become a multibillionaire in record time, but money was the least of his needs. His only concern now was for his reputation, and it wouldn’t do to have word get around that Gul Meszk had made an ass out of Trans-Star Trading Company’s first undertrader.

Irritably he got to his feet and paced back and forth. “If they’re so dratted honest,” he growled, “why did they lie to me about the oil?”

Mentally he ticked off the names of the traders who interested him: E-Wusk, Azfel, Meszk, Kaln, Rhinzl, Isc, Ceyh, Halvr, Brokefa. All of them had been routed out of peaceful prosperity by the Dark—E-Wusk four times, the others at least once. Their property had been confiscated, their businesses ruined.

A trader thus burned should have feared the fire—should have taken himself with alacrity to a remote part of the galaxy, putting as many light years between himself and the Dark as the more than ample dimensions of space permitted.

Yet all had gathered here on Yorlq, on the very threshold of the Dark, and carried on as if nothing had happened. Brokefa had joined a group of maf-cousins already established here, but there was no explanation at all for the presence of the others. They were flourishing, but they could have flourished as easily on the other side of the galaxy.

“Except for E-Wusk, they’re afraid of the Dark,” Darzek mused. “They won’t talk about it. If they’re cornered, they’ll lie to avoid even an indirect reference to it, and yet they remain directly under its shadow. When you consider that they won’t lie about anything else, not even to make money—when their lives are dedicated to making money—it becomes highly significant, or at least meaningful. I wish I knew what it meant.”

Miss Schlupe stepped out of the transmitter. She always did so with a look of surprise on her face, as though she never quite expected the blamed thing to work. “What did you do to poor Gud Baxak?” she asked.

“Shocked his moral fiber, I suppose.”

“You shouldn’t do that. The poor boy is half frantic.”

“Really? What’s he doing?”

“Working furiously. Checking references, getting messages off three a minute—”

“It’ll do him good. What’s that you have?”

She held out a long, narrow leaf. “What does it look like?”

“I haven’t the vaguest idea.”

“It’s tobacco.”

“No!” He stared. “It couldn’t be!”

“I’ve been visiting Rhinzl,” she said. “He’s quite a horticulturist. He has lovely flowers, and all kinds of strange plants. And I found this.”

“It couldn’t be anything like tobacco.”

“I’ll dry some, and see.”

“Fine. And then you can teach one of Gul Azfel’s pwisqs to smoke, to see if the stuff is poison.”

“Only yesterday you were threatening to buy a spaceship and send it to Earth for a load of tobacco. There’s nothing to lose by trying, is there?”

“I suppose not,” Darzek said absently. “Miss Schlupe, what would you do if you wanted a trading empire with a truly impregnable monopoly?”

“I couldn’t imagine wanting such a thing.”

“That’s because you’re pure in heart. I’ve been thinking about these worlds that the Dark has taken. One moment they were receiving food, raw materials, and processed and fabricated items from all over the galaxy. The next moment they were receiving nothing. What did they do?”

“They did without.”

“No, Miss Schlupe. They may have gone on trading with each other, but that’s by no means certain, and even then I doubt that they could make themselves self-sufficient. The Dark has created a considerable void in interstellar trade. I find that idea fascinating. I’m wondering if I could fill it myself.”

“You?”

“I’ll put it another way. I’m wondering if, by making motions at filling that void, I may find that someone has already thought of it. Someone whose name is E-Wusk, Azfel, Meszk, Kaln, Rhinzl, Isc, Ceyh, Halvr, or Brokefa. One, or several, or all nine. It would account for their unnatural silence on the subject of the Dark. In short—”

“I like the way you talk for an hour, and then say, ‘In short—’ Why don’t you start out with the short of it, so I can understand you.”

“Item,” Darzek said. “A revolution, a severance of relations, an eviction of foreigners, is unbelievable, staggering, incredible, inconceivable, and a number of other adjectives I can’t think of at the moment. It can’t happen. Since the worlds have complete autonomy, there’s no need for it to happen. Suddenly it does, on a massive scale. It’s so unimaginable that the only explanation anyone can think of postulates extra-galactic invaders armed with mind rays. It matters not that no one has ever seen one of these invaders, not even on the worlds that were revolting. When one rejects the possibility of their being invisible, which I do—”

“All right. Scratch the invaders. Where does that leave you?”

“With a question I should have asked myself months— excuse me, terms—ago. Who benefits? Certainly not the revolting populations. If they merely wanted to rid themselves of foreigners, they could have done so legally and at negligible expense, and monopolized their own trade. They gained nothing by severing relations, and they ruined their economies. So who
does
benefit?”

“I give up,” Miss Schlupe said patiently. “Who?”

“Consider this: the one goal in life for a trader is trade. Business. Accumulating solvency. Supposing it occurred to a trader that he could have much more of all of these, with considerably less work and risk, if he devised a way to eliminate his grubbing competitors. A trader or group of traders who could invent a little device called the Dark, and use it to establish a trading monopoly over a large number of worlds, would have achieved a trader’s idea of paradise. It wouldn’t satisfy them, of course. Being traders, they’d want more and more worlds. The Dark would keep moving.”

Miss Schlupe beamed at him. “That’s it! You’ve wrapped it up beautifully. It explains everything, even why they won’t talk about the Dark. Now all you have to do is figure out how they do it.”

“It doesn’t explain quite everything,” Darzek said. “There’s one small matter that it doesn’t explain at all. What are they afraid of?”

Studying the hideous thing that this city had become, Darzek felt a pang of apprehension for Earth. Yorlez had parks, circular oases of tamed greenery, but the few citizens who strolled there seemed not to notice the ugly, impinging jungle. The transmitter had turned their artistic vision inward. The external appearance of a building no longer mattered if no one saw it. No one could be concerned about the view from a nonexistent window. Would Earth, too, become a place where people lived out their lives in incubated comfort, surrounded by an unseen wasteland?

He whirled in alarm as the weeds behind him heaved ominously; but the ear-shrouded head that appeared belonged to Kxon, his chief investigator. Sheeplishly Darzek holstered his automatic. He had faced the menace of the Dark coolly when he’d thought it was everywhere, but a menace that was nowhere was gradually unnerving him.

“I do not think it possible to locate any of the others,” Kxon said.

Darzek turned to look at the nondescript exterior of the nearest dwelling. With no windows or exterior doors there seemed small chance of putting the information to use, but he’d thought it worth the effort to try to identify the dwellings of his nine traders.

They had found Rhinzl’s, but only because of an addition Rhinzl had built to house his plant collection. It was not a greenhouse—the nocturnal preferred to grow his specimens in artificial light that could be turned off when he wanted to putter with them—but an extension to the original building, and the shimmering new walls stood out starkly. They had no luck at all with the other traders.

“They probably don’t even know where they live themselves,” Darzek said. “Ask them where their dwellings are located, and they’d show you a code on a transmitter’s destination board. Strange. I don’t suppose you’ve found any paths here.”

“No, Sire.”

“Or any paths leading up from the city? No? I don’t know why there would be, but at least it would give us something to think about. We might as well go back, then, and think about something else.”

Vegetation grew sparsely on the hill’s steep slope, but as they approached the bottom it rose to meet them in a vicious tangle. The path they had broken on their way to the hill had disappeared without a trace. Blindly they hacked through the weeds, missed the park they were aiming for, and finally, perspiring, sticky with sap from dripping leaves, they stumbled upon another, slipped into it unobserved, and transmitted to Kxon’s headquarters.

Darzek cleaned himself up and relaxed on a hassock to wait for Kxon. “How would you like to become a trader?” he asked him.

Kxon twitched his ears bewilderedly, which sent ripples of movement around his head. Nature had been unnecessarily lavish in its distribution of the tissue intended to reinforce a Yorlqer’s aural sense. Kxon’s ears encircled his head in a continuous band of taut flesh, forming a basket-like structure that added two feet to his height and inspired Miss Schlupe to label him a private eye with public ears. So accustomed had Darzek become to misshapen organs that he would not have thought twice about these had it not been for the paradoxical fact that Yorlqers were, all of them, extremely hard of hearing. The spectacle of an errant nature compensating for its goof in devising an inefficient hearing apparatus by enlarging upon its defects struck him as ludicrous.