Young Bleys - Childe Cycle 09 (45 page)

CHAPTER
38

As
he returned
to his own suite in the same hotel, the idea of the orphan boy found in the spaceship continued to nag at Bleys. The coincidences involved were almost too much to swallow.

Those with the child would have had to have deserted someone that young only very shortly before the ship was found. How could they be sure the ship would be found, if they deserted it? Secondly, in a small courier ship like that, that would not have been exactly childproofed, how could they possibly be sure that the baby boy, left alone, would not start pulling levers he shouldn't and punching buttons that he was ordinarily not allowed to touch? At almost three years of age, he was just at the point where he would rush for the chance to experiment, the minute Authority was out of the way.

Thirdly, thought Bleys, having floated down on one of the elevator disks and stepped onto his own floor, what had caused them to abandon Hal Mayne in the first place? Presumably, the adult or adults had been perfectly healthy and all right,
otherwise they could not have brought the ship into the kind of close proximity with Earth's immediate space, so that its being found was likely.

Most people did not realize the mind-baffling immensity of space. Just as, for hundreds of years, people on Old Earth had not really appreciated the enormous volume of water involved in the seas of that world. So little had they understood it, that he had read once that very often people could not believe, when someone was lost overboard from a ship at sea, why he could not be searched for and found, even if he had sunk below the surface.

Finally, he thought, unlocking the door of his suite and stepping into it and having the lights go on all around him, was the curious upbringing that those with the boy had specified for him. A Dorsai, a Friendly, and an Exotic as tutors. It was quite obviously an intention to have the child brought up exposed to all three of the major Splinter Cultures at once. Why? There must have been some reason why the boy was to grow up knowing those three, very disparate points of view.

It was as if those who had left him had had some special future in mind for the boy, once he had grown up. And if they had such a special future in mind, what could it be? To possibly preach the virtues of those three chief Splinter Cultures to the population of Earth? It was an answer, but Bleys' mind was uncomfortable with it. The arrangements were too elaborate for such a straightforward goal.

Obviously, what he needed was more data on the boy himself, and on everything connected with him.

Bleys sat down in one of the overstuffed floats with armrests, hardly noticing that, like the ones in Dahno's suite, they had been tailored to his size.

If it was information he wanted, nothing was easier. The hotel's communication system would link him with the twenty-four-hour network of libraries and reference sources all over Old Earth. The only place he would not be able to access for information would be The Final Encyclopedia, in orbit somewhere overhead right now.

An odd thought struck him and he sat up straight in his chair.

The Final Encyclopedia was supposed to be in a special fixed orbit, and kept there by its own drive engines, when gravity threatened to change its position. Just exactly where was that spot? It would be interesting to know where it hung in relation to the surface of Earth, below.

He keyed, the library service and asked the question. The answer came back immediately.

He checked the coordinates he was given with the location of the estate that Dahno had told him to take over the next day. It could not be a coincidence. The Final Encyclopedia hung directly over the estate, even though it was miles out from the surface.

This was more than merely interesting, thought Bleys, since to hold a fixed orbital position over Earth this far above the equator, the satellite—which was what The Final Encyclopedia essentially was—would have to have its drive engines working steadily to hold it there. Normal geosynchronous orbits, as such fixed positions were called, had to be over the equator. He called the library again. Yes, the Encyclopedia had been deliberately put in that position ninety-two years before. It was the only case, the voice told him, of a satellite of Earth in a state of "dynamic geosynchronicity."

So, why was that? —Unless someone in the Encyclopedia wanted to keep a viewer steadily fixed on young Hal Mayne as he went through the process of growing up?

That too, was a farfetched supposition.

By this time, Bleys' instinctive curiosity was at full heat. He dived into everything that could be found about the background of the boy's rescue, the selling of the cruiser ship in which he had been found, and his raising since.

His raising since had been curiously un
-
newsworthy. There had been no information to speak of logged on it at all. The estate sat out by itself, deep in the Rockies, in a place that was neither convenient nor attractive to anyone else, and included a fair amount of territory, ranging widely from mountain lake, through forest, to the bare rock of vertical mountain peaks.

At the end of two hours, he ended up in a state that was unusual for him—extraordinarily frustrated. There was little more information available about the boy or his tutors, who seemed to have simply appeared at the right time to be hired, than he had been given by Dahno, originally.

He was now more than ordinarily interested in the estate he would see tomorrow and the people he would meet. He deliberately forced thought of them to the back of his mind, so he could deal with the more mundane matters of getting the Hounds together, getting a craft to take them in, and getting the maps that would allow them to land a little distance away and slip up on the estate buildings. Thankfully, the one thing that these m'n/a-trained young men did possess was the ability to move quietly and without attracting attention.

He arranged for everything and turned in for the night. They left the following morning, at dawn in a craft that Bloys himself piloted. As he approached the estate—which was indeed isolated—he indulged his curiosity to the point of gaining altitude and reaching a point where he could look at it from a long angle high in the atmosphere. But his viewing screen gave him a closeup picture of the estate and its surrounding territory.

It lay in a shallow bowl-shaped valley in the mountain rock, facing south and slightly east. It was surrounded by lodgepole pines, which went off from it to reach partway up the sides of the neighboring heights and cliffs, for they were completely surrounded by peaks.

It was at least twenty miles, a little over thirty kilometers, from the nearest habitation. But the house itself was large, and looked to be luxurious. It nestled in a flat part of the bowl looking directly southeast, with a little lake before it and a walking path around the lake. Other paths led off into the pines and were lost to sight behind their branches.

Bleys could feel the impatience, almost like a sort of rising heat from the bodies of the five Hounds in the back of the aircraft, behind him. It was, as Dahno had said, an ideal place for the Others to hold the meeting of the heads of their various world organizations; and if there were really only four people there—the three old tutors and the boy—in a completely automated house, it was not likely that anyone would bother them during their meeting.

At the same time, Bleys continued to have an uneasy feeling about the whole thing. He disliked loose ends on general principle; and it was simply the fact that the boy and his tutors had not existed in his mental universe until Dahno had told him about them. There was nothing remarkable in this, since there were uncounted millions of people he did not know. But most of those uncounted millions did not have this kind of a puzzle attached to them.

How could a two-year-old remain alive in a spaceship, adrift in space and from which any adults who had been with him had disappeared? Add to that the remarkable fact that the ship was old-fashioned—although eighty years back, ships were not all that different from the way they were now. Only, when the older ships were phase-shifted, it had been a matter of temporary discomfort to the passengers, which was not true in the present-day spaceships.

And finally, what a curiously fortunate coincidence that the ship with this near-baby aboard had been found adrift almost in Earth orbit. The chances of anything being found in space, even close to Earth, were so small that the odds against finding this one while the child was still alive must have been astronomical.

The fact was—he finally admitted to himself—this boy was an exception to the whole pattern for the future with which he had been working; a potential rock down among the cogwheels and gears of his plans.

Why this should be so, he was unsure. But the very existence of Hal Mayne troubled him.

However, these questions were ones he could only pay attention to later on when he had more time. The thing now was to take over the house and its inhabitants.

He turned the ship
away until he dipped below the
horizon of the valley top, and then came back in at low altitude, stopping about two kilometers from the edge of the bowl and the house itself. Here he set the ship down quietly, and turned to the five Hounds behind him.

"All right," he said, "now we go. Stay with me. Do exactly as I say. Arid under no circumstances shoot anyone unless I tell you to."

They left the ship and headed toward the house, from a direction that would bring them up against the side that faced toward the mountains and away from the lake. From the layout of the windows in the house, it seemed that this side was the one which was least likely to have people looking out and seeing them approach. In spite of this, at Bleys' directions they all took advantage of cover and tried to approach unseen.

When the house itself at last became visible through the trees Bleys called the five Hounds to him and instructed them in a whisper.

"You two and you two," he said, pointing out a pair of them in each case, "come in from behind the bushes at the back and sides of the patio. You two from the left. You other two from the right; and remember you come in, not to the house, but to the patio behind it, overlooking the lake, which is where I could see a couple of people standing just before the trees hid the view, as we landed."

He turned to the one remaining Hound.

"You," he said, "will follow me. I'm going directly in the door on the back side of the house in front of us, here, and you're to follow me at about one room's distance behind me. Stay out of sight, but watch me to see if I'm caught, or trapped in any way. Then it'll be up to you to step out and help me. Have you got that straight?"

The fifth Hound nodded.

Bleys looked at their faces. They were all different. About the only similarity between the five of them, was that they were all brunettes. Aside from that they had no real similarities. Their faces in particular were all individually different, ranging from round to angular. Nonetheless, he could not escape the feeling that they were all identical, all as closely like each other as brothers, all cut from the same piece of cloth.

"All right," he said, "if you have any questions, ask them now."

He waited. But none of them asked him anything.

"Very well. Remember, those of you who are coming in from the ends are to stay behind the bushes and out of sight until you see me on the patio. You, the one who is going to follow me, also stay out of sight until I'm out on the patio. All right, here we go."

He turned, for all practical purposes putting the other five out of his mind. There was really only one person he could depend on here; and that was himself. This, in spite of the fact that he was not armed and they were. It had been impossible, of course, for them to bring weapons onto Earth. All the planets had very strict laws about any attempt to carry weapons onto them from another planet. Anyone found trying to do that was immediately deported back to the planet he had come from.

To make sure the deportation occurred, the planets had jointly made the spaceship companies themselves responsible. The spaceship companies, in turn and in self-protection, had required that all passengers—such as Bleys and these five had been—pay double fares when they left Association. Double fares were the rule. The one-way passenger got back the unused part of his fare from the spaceship company, in whatever currency it had originally been paid, after the passenger had passed all custom checks on the world of destination.

Dahno, however, had produced five void pistols for the Hounds in the Shadow Hotel. He had not explained, to them or to Bleys, where he got them; and Bleys had not been interested in asking. If it had been up to him, the Hounds would have carried either no weapons, or else imitation or unloaded ones. It made no difference. He wanted to handle this without anyone getting hurt.

Once the Hounds had vanished noiselessly right and left among the trees, he went forward himself to the back of the house; and, standing a little to one side, glanced in the window next to the door there. He saw that the room the door opened into was empty. Still, he was cautious as he turned the knob and opened it with as little noise as possible.

He had stepped into what was evidently a sort of mud room—a place where outdoor clothes that would track dirt into the house were taken off, hung up, put on racks, or otherwise left while the person involved changed into something that would bring less dirt further inside. There was nothing on Bleys' shoes, however, but pine needles, he noted.