Читать книгу Watchers of the Dark - Lloyd Biggle jr. - Страница 6

Chapter 3

There were seventeen new passengers in the ship’s day lounge and three in the night lounge, and none of them possessed a time segment’s worth of solvency. The captain alternately cursed the world of Quarm and all of its workings for inflicting these unwanted passengers on him and pleaded with those who occupied compartments to make room for them.

“They can’t live in the lounges,” the captain said.

“Why not?” asked Gul Brokefa, a wealthy trader whose family was occupying two compartments.

“Because,” the captain said gloomily, “the Quarmers say I have to take at least a hundred more passengers before they’ll release the ship. And if these stay in the lounges, where will I put a hundred more?”

Gul Brokefa rudely suggested a place, and the captain snarled back. There was a spirited exchange before Gul Brokefa flounced away disdainfully.

Biag-n, settled unobtrusively in a remote corner, enjoyed the altercation tremendously. So did the other passengers. They had little enough to occupy themselves. The viewing screen had been turned off at their request; there was nothing to see except the looming silhouette of the transfer station and Quarm’s distant, silvery crescent. The one was uninteresting and none of the refugees wanted to look at the other.

Biag-n was sharing a small compartment with four factors and their families. He considered himself fortunate, but this did not prevent him from finding the factors boring, their wives and mates disgusting, and their children an infernal nuisance. Eventually he would have to move in with them; in the meantime, he was living in the lounge. He liked it there.

He liked being alive. He had fully expected the rabid mob to tear him to pieces, but the proctors had marched him off to the Interstellar Trade Building, held him captive with other foreigners for three suspenseful days and nights, and finally transmitted the lot of them to a transfer station, where they were assigned to ships.

All cargos had been jettisoned and the ships’ hulls packed with passenger compartments, and these now held four times their planned capacity. No one knew how much longer the Quarmers would hold the ship in the paralyzing safety field of the transfer station. The captain, worried about his reserves of air and water and food, had imposed strict rationing.

Biag-n was hungry, but he made no complaint. Eventually they would reach safety, and he liked being alive. He even enjoyed the crowded lounge, where occasionally he could eavesdrop on the conversation of a colossus of interstellar trade, or watch his wife carelessly squandering solvency at a game of jwur. In normal circumstances he was not even privileged to glimpse such fabulous animates from afar. The warp of fortune was indeed crossed with both good and bad.

Biag-n quietly got to his feet and trailed after the captain, who was carrying the vain appeal for accommodations to the other end of the lounge. Gul E-Wusk, an enormous old trader and a giant even among the colossuses, sprawled near the entrance to the night lounge in a complicated ooze of arms and legs, proboscis dangling limply in a long-necked goblet of clear liquid. Common gossip had it that he drank water; Biag-n was curious, but lacked the temerity to ask him. The door to the night lounge lay open, and E-Wusk was conversing with a nocturnal invisible in the darkness beyond. An awed group of young undertraders stood nearby, listening with polite fascination.

The captain stated his problem, and E-Wusk quivered with laughter. “Oh, ho ho! A hundred more? I didn’t even know there were so many foreigners on Quarm! Where were they hiding?”

“Under rocks, with the rest of the slime,” the captain said gloomily.

“Oh, ho ho! Take my compartment. There’s room for twenty there if I stay out of it. Take Gul Meszk’s, too, and send him back to Quarm. He’s a Quarmer at heart—they didn’t even burn his warehouses!”

Gul Meszk, an angular sexrumane, was shuffling past with a look of constrained boredom on his pebbly face. He said resentfully, “Is it my fault that I don’t stock combustibles? Anyway, they did burn them. They burned all of them. You just didn’t happen to see it.”

E-Wusk delivered a long, gargling laugh. “You saw my warehouse burn. I hope the rascals singed their knobs.”

Meszk looked at him slyly. “Now that you mention it, your warehouse did produce an unusual smudge.”

“Smudge! You saw the flames. The Quarmers had to run home for their light shields. Oh, ho ho!” Rippling waves of laughter encircled his body. “I saw it coming. You can’t say I didn’t warn you. I cleared out my warehouse ten days ago. I told you then—”

“You told me,” Meszk agreed resignedly. “I thought it was another of your jokes.”

“Oh, ho ho!” E-Wusk flopped out supinely, gasping for breath. “Thought it was a joke!” He gurgled helplessly. “Oh, ho ho! That is a joke!”

“I hadn’t forgotten that gag of yours about the frunl,” Meszk grumbled. “I dumped my whole stock at a loss. So did everyone else.”

‘That wasn’t my gag,” E-Wusk said. “It was Gul Rhinzl’s. I saw what he was doing and cut myself in on it.”

“Anyway, the two of you cornered every scrap of Quarm, and then you doubled the price. With operators like you fleecing them at every turn, no wonder the Quarmers revolted.”

E-Wusk shook with merriment.

“So when you came around with that tale of doom and disaster, naturally I didn’t believe it. All I did was check through my inventory to try to figure out what items you were after that time. Tell me something. If you cleared out your warehouse ten days ago, what made it burn so spectacularly?”

“I leased my warehouse—oh, ho ho—to a native! He just got it filled with mron oil in time for the fire!”

The undertraders laughed uproariously; Meszk seemed puzzled. “If it was native oil, why did the Quarmers burn it?”

“Quarmer reasoning,” E-Wusk gasped. “It was a foreigner’s warehouse, don’t you see, so they had to burn it. But they were careful to set fire only to the building. They didn’t disturb the contents at all!”

The joke spread through the lounge in widening circles. Meszk laughed and moved away, and Biag-n edged closer to E-Wusk. He was smitten with a severe palpitation of the conscience. He had his full report indited and ready to send at the earliest opportunity, and he suddenly realized that he knew nothing at all about the critical question, the only one he had been specifically instructed to investigate. He had forgotten the Weapon.

The wealth of detail provided by a world in revolt had overburdened his senses. He had eagerly inventoried every aspect of the Quarmers’ behavior except the one that mattered. He had not once asked himself why.

He said timorously, “Excuse me, Excellency, but you—you say that you—saw it coming?”

E-Wusk regarded him curiously. “I don’t believe that we’ve met.”

“Biag-n, at Your Excellency’s service,” Biag-n said, with a sweeping genuflection.

“Biag-n. I don’t seem to recall—what is your line?”

“Textiles, Sire,” Biag-n said humbly.

“Textiles? I still can’t place you. Where was your office?”

“I—I sold direct,” Biag-n stammered, face suffused with humiliation.

“Ah! But you needn’t be apologetic about it. One must start somewhere. I, too, have ‘sold direct.’ Don’t look so startled. I sold direct on Jorund. I had to. I arrived there completely destitute of solvency, after having been evicted from Utuk. The natives took everything. I was also evicted from Jorund, but that didn’t cost me much. I may be old, but I haven’t forgotten how to learn. After Utuk, I had the good sense to record my surplus solvency in a safe place.”

“You’ve experienced the Dark three times?” Biag-n asked breathlessly.

“Four. After Jorund I went to Suur, with distressingly similar results. Now it’s Quarm. The Blight, or Dark, or whatever you choose to call it, seems to be pursuing me. But as I said, I’ve learned. On Quarm I lost almost nothing.”

“Excellency, what is it?”

“Who knows? Not I, certainly, but I don’t think it’s any thing. It’s merely a state of mind.”

“Ah! Mind!”

“It’s a form of madness, as any fool should be able to see. And it’s sweeping the galaxy. These idiots think they’re going to transfer to a nice safe world where it’ll never bother them again. Nonsense. Intelligent beings can lose their reason any time and anywhere. The Dark, if you want to call it that, will move again. And again. There’s no point in trying to run away from it. I’m going only as far as the first world that will let me in. When the Dark next moves, I’ll be moving just ahead of it.”

“But if it’s madness, why didn’t we catch it? Why did it affect only the natives?”

E-Wusk delivered himself of a monumental shrug. “As a trader, I deal exclusively in inanimate objects. I’ve never had occasion to regret that. As long as I know what, and I can make a reasonably accurate guess as to when, I’ll leave the why to others. Did you lose much?”

“I didn’t have much to lose. Just a few personal effects and my sample case—and they let me keep my sample case!”

“Congratulations! You’ll be ready for business the moment you land.”

Biag-n withdrew discreetly. He had a new line for his report, and he wanted to think about it. The Weapon, whatever it was, induced a state of madness. That much was obvious—was already known and accepted. And for some inexplicable and highly complicated reason, it worked only on the natives. That, too, was known and accepted.

But a foreigner who had experienced the Dark several times might become aware of the Weapon, might even be able to predict the Dark’s coming. Biag-n felt certain that Supreme would find this very interesting.

* * * *

Miss Effie Schlupe was indeed a dear. She was over twenty-one and under seventy; a year before she’d had to stop saying she was over twenty-one and under sixty, for she refused to tell a lie except for money. She typed 130 words per minute from her office rocking chair, though when her rocking got too rambunctious her accuracy suffered somewhat. She could peer innocently over her old-fashioned, rimless spectacles at a policeman while picking the pocket of the man behind her. If the subject she was tailing sought solace in a bar, she could drink him under the table while he sobbed out his troubles to her. Three purse snatchers who thought her a likely victim had regained consciousness in hospitals with broken bones. Darzek loved her as he would have loved his own mother if she’d been a jujitsu expert and owned an unsurpassed secret recipe for rhubarb beer. He paid her more money than she had ever earned before, and she retaliated by trying to do all of his work for him.

But now he had fired her. Her pride was hurt. She felt that her employer was unjustly casting aspersions on both her loyalty and her competence, and she resented it.

He was also underestimating her stubbornness, and she resented that, too.

With binoculars she watched from a curtained window across the street while Jan Darzek packed his suitcase.

She knew the suitcase. It had been made to Darzek’s specifications, and it would thwart forcible entry by any device less potent than an acetylene torch. Once when Darzek temporarily mislaid his keys an expert locksmith had toiled for five hours trying to open it—unsuccessfully.

Miss Schlupe watched openmouthed as Darzek methodically fitted equipment into the suitcase. “Isn’t he taking any clothing at all?” she wondered.

He always carried extra ammunition on a trip—but so much? And were those the gas grenades he’d told her about? And could that be a submachine gun?

“Gracious!” she murmured awesomely. “He’s going to start a war!”

* * * *

In the basement of a house in an old, eminently respectable section of Nashville, Tennessee, Jan Darzek stepped through an oddly designed transmitter frame.

He emerged in a small circular room, bare except for the transmitting receiver. Through two arched openings could be seen a larger circular room that surrounded it. Curiously he released his heavy suitcase, watched it settle slowly toward the floor, caught it again.

He turned to greet Smith, who emerged from the transmitter on his heels.

“So here we are,” he said.

Smith reached for the instrument panel. “Yes—”

A third party shot out of the transmitter and crashed into Smith. The momentum carried both of them through an arch and into the room beyond. Smith lay dazed, too bewildered for speech. Miss Effie Schlupe picked herself up and primly smoothed down her skirt.

“Where are we?” she asked innocently.

“Schluppy!” Darzek exclaimed. His suitcase floated away as he collapsed in laughter. “You followed us—” He wiped his eyes. “You followed us to Nashville?”

Miss Schlupe perched on the wide ledge that ran around the circumference of the outer room. “A hell of a chase you gave me,” she complained.

“How’d you get into the house?”

“I picked the lock. You didn’t really think you could get away with it, did you? Firing me from the only job I ever had that I really liked. The idea!”

Smith got slowly to his feet and tried unsuccessfully to speak.

“It’s my fault,” Darzek told him. “I should have expected something like this. Miss Schlupe has a certain bulldog tenacity—female bulldog tenacity, which is the worst kind. Just what were you trying to do, Schluppy?”

“I’m coming along,” Miss Schlupe said. “Isn’t that obvious?”

“Obviously you’ve come along, but this is where you get off. Sorry, Schluppy. I’m going to be gone a long time, and Smith thinks the odds are decidedly against my ever coming back. Even when I allow for his naturally pessimistic disposition, I have to admit that the outlook isn’t good. There will be dangers the likes of which neither of us have ever imagined. I won’t have you mixed up in it. Do your stuff with the controls, Smith, and we’ll send Miss Schlupe back to Nashville. Then you’d better throw the switch fast. She has an uncanny sense of timing. Another two seconds, Schluppy, and your dive through the transmitter would have brought you nothing more than an embarrassing familiarity with the basement wall.”

“Poo!” Miss Schlupe said. “I’d have made it with plenty of time to spare if you hadn’t kept me waiting on those creaky basement stairs until my leg went to sleep. Don’t think you can scare me. If there are dangers the likes of which I’ve never imagined, I want to see them.”

Smith spoke for the first time. “Impossible. I could not permit it.”

Darzek turned slowly. “What do you have to say about it?”

“My instructions are precise on that point. Supreme requested yourself only.”

“Our agreement,” Darzek said coldly, “was that I accept your commission and its general objectives, but that I am to have complete freedom in accomplishing these. Did I misunderstand you?”

“No. That arrangement should be fully satisfactory to Supreme.”

“Surely that freedom includes the right to select an assistant.”

Smith did not answer.

“Miss Schlupe and I wish to converse privately,” Darzek said. “No, just stay where you are.” He led Miss Schlupe to the far side of the circular room.

“Where are we?” she asked.

“According to Smith, we’re on a spaceship somewhere beyond the orbit of the planet Pluto.”

“That’s nice,” Miss Schlupe said cheerfully. “Is there a view?”

“Be serious.”

“What do you expect when you make silly statements like that?”

“Miss Schlupe,” Darzek said sternly. “If I weren’t an abnormally sane man, the events of the past few days would have reduced me to gibbering idiocy. They still may do so if I have to argue with you about them.”

“All right. We’re on a spaceship. What are we doing here?”

“Our Able-Baker-Charlie-Dog tandem hails from outer space. That’s why they had all of us running in circles. They know tricks I don’t even believe after seeing, and they have gadgets I never will believe. How did you ever manage to get a line on that Nashville headquarters?”

“I didn’t follow Smith-Dog. I followed you. But—outer space?”

“It’s true. They wear a synthetic epidermis to make them look human, and it succeeds remarkably, in a dead-fish sort of way. I made Smith remove his, and I have never seen more convincing proof of anything. They really are from outer space.”

“What do they want with you?”

“It seems that I once did some work for them. I don’t remember it, but I must have given satisfaction. Now they’ve hired me again.”

“And me,” Miss Schlupe said confidently. “I never had any fun in my life until I went to work for you. You’re not firing me now. What did they hire us to do?”

“That’s where things start getting complicated. It seems that this galaxy of ours, which we vulgarly call the Milky Way, has habitable worlds without number, with equally numerous intelligent life forms whose appearances would tax the imagination if it weren’t for the fact that any healthy imagination would reject them out of hand. Our galaxy also has something that might be loosely referred to as a government; with most of the burdensome appurtenances that this implies. One outstanding exception is a military establishment, which has never been needed. Our galaxy is made up of maybe millions of worlds existing peacefully in free association with each other.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“It is not only beyond comprehension, but also beyond knowledge,” Darzek agreed. “One has to accept it on faith. These worlds get along together under one loosely organized galactic government in a peace that defies the laws of nature. So Smith describes it, and if he’s capable of either mendacity or subterfuge I haven’t been able to catch him at it. The main reason for this halcyon condition is that any world that might upset it is kept isolated and not permitted to play with the others until it’s demonstrated that it can be trusted to observe the rules. Which is why we humans don’t know anything about it. We have a well-documented predilection for making up our own rules. Earth is what they call an uncertified world. Smith’s cohorts belong to a certification group that takes our temperatures at regular intervals and seeks to stuff medicine into us without our knowing about it. When they decide that we’ve been cured of our disposition for foul play, they’ll certify us. That doesn’t seem likely to happen in the foreseeable future.”

“You haven’t answered my question. What did they hire us to do?”

“Well—their system worked very well until, as their time goes, recently. Now they’re afraid that this galaxy—don’t laugh—is being invaded from outer space. A neighboring galaxy, known to us as the Large Magellanic Cloud, is suspect. It has arms trailing in our direction, and several expeditions sent in that direction vanished from the ken of mortal men, if it is correct to refer to the galaxy’s collective populations as ‘men.’ A logical inference would be that whoever or whatever resides in the Large Magellanic Cloud got curious as to where the unwelcome expeditions were coming from, and decided to investigate. Hence our Milky Way galaxy is being invaded from outer space. Now what’s the matter?”

Miss Schlupe had burst into wild, uncontrolled laughter. “Excuse me,” she said, raising her spectacles to dab at her eyes. “But it’s so silly! The galaxy is being invaded. That sounds like a military operation on a scale that would make World War II look like a fracas in a flowerpot. So what do they do about it? They call in a private detective!”

“Smith couldn’t explain it, so don’t ask me to. Supreme, whoever that may be, asked for me by name, and what Supreme asks for Supreme gets. Look. Some menace from outer space, which they refer to as the Dark, is gobbling up worlds in huge gulps. They haven’t been able to figure out what it is, or how it manages to do the gobbling. That’s the job they’re handing to me. I’ll be a spy, with a very good chance of being shot at the dawning of some sun I never knew existed.”

“Then I’ll be shot with you. It’ll be better than rusting away in my rocking chair.”

Darzek smiled at her. “This will be a grim sort of business. I’m tempted to take you along for the laughs. I may need a few.”

“Ha ha. I’m coming along to work.”

“You will,” Darzek promised. “And you may not like it. We start by going to school. Before we can move freely in a strange civilization we’ll have to learn everything from the language to how to hold our teacups. It won’t be easy.”

“Can I go back to New York before we leave?”

“You’ll have to. If you don’t do something about your apartment, Missing Persons will be looking for you. If you don’t pack a suitcase—carefully—you may be doing some looking yourself. Macy’s won’t have any branches where we’re going.”

“I gave up my apartment before I left, and I have a suitcase packed. Carefully. It’s in Nashville.”

“Then why do you want to go to New York?”

“My sister has what was left of my rhubarb beer. I want to take some along.”

Darzek threw up his hands despairingly. “Smith, our departure will be delayed while Miss Schlupe inventories her beer.”

Smith stepped into view and said blankly, “I don’t understand.”

“Miss Schlupe comes with us. Her suitcase is in Nashville and her beer is in New York. A deplorable state of affairs. Get her to both places, so we can leave.”

Smith stoically turned toward the transmitter.