Gordon R. Dickson Read online

  In spite of the rejection, Will had made his own way to the new worlds and finally caught on with the E. Corps in a subordinate position. He had gone on to give more than half a decade in faithful duty, ending here on Everon, his last post. And how had the Corps rewarded that service...?

  Jef wrenched his mind from the memory. He thought again of Martin with a harsh contempt. What could someone like him know of what went into the making of a John Smith—

  "Landing in one minute!" The voice of a ship's officer from a ceiling speaker sounded over Jef's head and he came back to himself with a start. All this time the spaceship had been dropping steadily down toward the surface of Everon and the space there without his realizing it. "Landing in one minute. Exit by the debarkation lounge airlock only, please. A local official will be at the foot of the landing stair to direct you through entrance procedures."

  A few seconds later there was the slightest of jars as the ship touched down. Suddenly, beyond the partitions around Jef and Mikey, people were standing up, collecting their portable belongings and beginning to move toward the still-closed airlock of the debarkation lounge. As the first of the passengers from behind the rear partition enclosing Jef and Mikey began to pass, Mikey lifted his head sharply.

  "Easy..." said Jef, putting his arm around the heavy shoulders of the maolot. "We'll just wait. Wait, Mikey. Let the rest of them off first."

  Chapter Two

  the lounge emptied. Jef snapped a leash to a collar around Mikey's neck and led the maolot out. They went down a short corridor to their left and out through the opened airlock at its end, to step down on to the landing stairs leading toward the cement pad below.

  The brilliance of Everon's large sun, Comofors, dazzled Jef's eyes as he stepped out of the relative shadow of the ship's lighting. The light did not glare, but it was so strong Jef could not focus. Everything seemed touched with glints of gold. The air itself appeared alive with shimmers of it. Jef was aware of Mikey beside him, lifting his head sharply, sniffing deeply at the native atmosphere he had not breathed since William had carried him, then no larger than a month-old St. Bernard pup, aboard just such a spaceship as this, on his voyage to Earth eight years ago. A violent current of excitement seemed to wash out from the maolot and stain Jef himself.

  He found himself, also, spreading his nostrils to the Everon air, inhaling deeply; for it was strange, with soft odors resembling those of cinnamon and crushed clover—unlike anything he had ever smelled on Earth. Automatically he began to descend the narrow landing stair, with Mikey's head bumping into him from behind at every step.

  All at once he was caught up in an awareness he could only remember feeling a few times before in his life. Without warning, what was Everon—and what Everon was to him—had sprung upon him like a tiger from cover. His vision was dazzled, but at the same time he saw everything with sharp-edged clarity. He was intensely conscious of the three-dimensional reality into which he now descended. He could feel, so sensitively that the touch of it was almost painful, the hard roundness of the metal handrail against his palm and fingers. He saw as if in a carving the faces of the people on the field below, the woman in a dark blue Customs uniform standing at the foot of the ladder, the landing attendants in their white coveralls, the silver-gleaming metal posts of a fenced enclosure holding a handful of the passengers, and the large mass of other passengers, boarding a grey and green airbus a little farther off. Beyond the fenced enclosure, some two hundred meters distant, was the yellow-brown building that was the spaceport terminal—lounges and foreign officers' headquarters under one roof. It, and the silver metal of the fence enclosure, were the only two touches of color in the landscape that did not seem gilded and transmuted by the golden light from Comofors, standing now at a little past midday in the sky.

  It was one of those rare and aching moments in life. Sensations poured in on Jef, overloading him as he went blindly down the landing stair. There was too much to absorb all at once, and he was absorbing it all involuntarily. This was part of what he had come here to find. It was differentness; it was freedom after the boredom and the crushing restrictions, the drabness, overcrowding and loneliness of Earth. Here, without conscious effort, he had become suddenly a part of everything around him. He breathed with the grass beyond the white concrete landing pad, he warmed with the soil of the low, forested hills on the horizon. The breeze brought him a thousand separate messages at once, and the whole world of Everon, this world he had never in his life seen before, called to him with a voice stronger than the voice of his own familiar world of home.

  "Passport?" said the Customs official at the bottom of the landing stair. He had reached ground. Looking at her from centimeters of distance, now he saw a tall, middle-aged woman with faded auburn hair and tired brown eyes.

  "Here," said Jef, dazedly, handing his papers over, along with the special Ecological Service permit for the cabin transportation of Mikey. "We're red-flagged."

  "I see," she said, glancing at the red-tape sticker at the top of the passport. "Research. All right. Left, there. Move along, please...."

  Jef turned left, entering the small cluster of people standing waiting inside one steel-fenced area. Through the golden sunlight he stared at the wide windows on the upper level of the terminal, where the foreign officers' headquarters would be. It would have been up there that William would have had his office for most of the year before his death that he had been stationed here.

  Mikey rubbed his head against Jef's hip. Remembering the official's directions, Jef moved off toward the enclosure where the six other people—undoubtedly, like himself, red-flagged for special handling by the Everon Customs authorities—were waiting.

  As he brought Mikey up to them, Jef recognized only one of the six. Martin Curragh was deep in conversation with a small, heavy-set, grey-haired man. The others, Jef guessed, had all been from the individual cabins up front in the first-class passenger section. Unexpectedly, Martin interrupted his conversation to give Jef an odd, penetrating look, a look almost of warning. Jef blinked, but the black-haired man turned immediately back to his conversation without further gesture.

  To their left the airbus was filling up with the mass of general passengers, but the red-flagged six in the enclosure as yet had no transportation visible. However, several of them were keeping a watch toward the south, over the tops of the variformed oaks that enclosed the spaceport, in the direction of Spaceport City as Jef remembered it from his brother's maps. A minute or so later a small, ducted-fan aircraft emerged above the oaks in that direction and came swiftly to hover a dozen feet above their enclosure before settling straight down to a landing. From the aircraft-some sort of police courier ship, to judge from the markings on it —stepped a very big man, tall as well as heavy, in a khaki-and-blue uniform with gold stars on the shirt pocket and carrying a clipboard in one hand.

  He did not come to the waiting people, but took two steps only out from under the shadow of the ducted fans in the wings of his aircraft and halted. He looked at his clipboard.

  "Robini, Jef Aram," he called, without looking up. "Also a maolot."

  The rest of the red-flagged passengers turned to stare at Jef and Mikey. Jef led Mikey forward until they stopped in front of the man. As they did so, Jef realized that unconsciously he had been stretching himself up as tall as he could, and this effort was making him as tense and stiff as a guy wire under load. In spite of Jef's own height, this individual had six centimeters of height on him, and outweighed him by at least forty kilos.

  The other said nothing, but held out his hand. A stubborn coal of anger began to kindle inside Jef; and instead of responding he merely looked at the hand.

  "Passport," said the big man sharply.

  "Sir," said Jef, slowly taking the passport and Mikey's permit from the inside pocket of his jacket, "may I ask who I'm speaking to?"

  "Avery Armage. Everon Planetary Constable." Armage pulled the papers from Jef's grip. "I'll take those."

  "Cons
table?" Jef stared. The title meant that this man was the top police official of Everon. "Can I ask why we're being met by the Planetary Constable?"

  Armage chuckled. For a second he looked cheerful and friendly, his face squeezed into small bunches like knots of muscle. But the sound of his humor was throaty and lacked warmth.

  "You can ask..." he said. He was busily scanning Jef's papers. "What's this about bringing in your maolot permanently? We've got enough trouble with the ones we've already got killing off our wisent herds, now. All right—the animal's impounded, by my order."

  "Hold it a minute!" said Jef, as the other started to turn away. "I've got a Research Service permit. It says—"

  "I know what it says." Armage turned back to him, smiling; and Jef abruptly understood that what the Constable might find amusing was not necessarily what most people would consider so. "But the situation's changed since you applied for your grant over two years ago. Everon paid off its First Mortgage to Earth early last year. The Corps hasn't owned us for a year and a half. All they have is supervisory rights. The minute you and your maolot touched ground here, both of you became subject to local law, Everon law; which law reads that any maolot caught within settled or ranching areas is to be impounded or destroyed."

  "Destroyed!" Jef stared at Armage for a moment that was too stark for speech. "You can't destroy him! Look at the reason for travel on my passport. This is an experimental animal concerned in a grant from the Xenological Research Service. I've been sent out with him from Earth specifically to study his reactions to being reintroduced to his native habitat after being laboratory-raised on Earth. The results of this study can affect the way native life forms are handled on a dozen different worlds, worlds already colonized as well as worlds that haven't been settled yet. You can't just destroy an animal like that—"

  "Well, now, that's too bad—what you tell me," said Armage softly. His dark eyes caught points of light, as a cat's eyes might, from the yellow sun overhead. "But the law's the law. I'm sorry about it, of course, but—"

  "Come now, don't be sorry, Constable," broke in the voice of Martin Curragh; and the black-haired man was suddenly there, standing together with Jef and Armage, his thin-lipped mouth quirking in a friendly curve at the huge police official. "Instead, why don't you just wait for a moment to hear the whole of the matter, before you do something you might later regret. Surely Everon's not so rich and powerful yet that it can ignore the wishes of the Xenological Research Service, which has as its concern the good of all humanity—as we all know, don't we?"

  Armage's face drew into hard lumps again, but this time not humorously.

  "And who are you?" he said to Martin.

  "Who am I? I've a dozen or two different names, if it comes to that," said Martin cheerfully. "But I won't trouble you with them."

  He handed Armage a thick sheaf of papers topped by a red-flagged passport.

  "You can call me John Smith," he said, "seeing that's the name folks like myself are best known by. The fact is, I'm a Planetary Inspector, sent out to pay you a small visit. It seems Ecolog Corps headquarters were thinking it was time one of us Smiths had a look here to see all was in order. I heard you saying how you'd paid off your Mortgage, but there's supraplanetary law yet to be thought of. I'm sure there're no violations here, and all that; but you understand I'll have to look about a bit, anyway, just to satisfy the order that sent me out."

  Armage stood holding the papers Martin had handed him. The Constable had not moved or changed expression. He looked to Jef like a three-dimensional image in a cube of transparency.

  "And as far as Mr. Robini's concerned," Martin said, "of course his work is no concern of mine. My only concern is how Everon fits in with the family of worlds in which we all are children, as the saying goes. But for your private advice, I might mention that I had quite a talk with Mr. Robini aboard the ship, and found myself impressed indeed with this research of his. It may well be that not only Everon, but worlds yet unsettled may have cause to bless the name of Mr. Robini and his beast for the work they'll be doing here to benefit all humanity. But of course, my dear Constable, as you point out, it's up to you entirely and your local laws how you deal with him, the maolot, and the whole matter."

  Armage had been staring unmovingly into the smiling countenance of Martin all the time Martin was talking. The face of the big man still had not moved a muscle. Now, however, he smiled as if he was seeing not only Martin, but Jef, for the first time.

  "It's a great pleasure to have you both visiting us, gentlemen," he said. Almost absently, without looking at Jef, he handed Jef's papers back. "Everon can use as much good attention as she can get. You'll be guests of mine, of course, while you're here in Everon City. I insist."

  "And of course I accept," said Martin, "and without being able to speak for Mr. Robini, I would venture the thought that he would find being your guest pleasant as well. Now, I do hate to be rushing you, Constable, but Mr. Robini and I both have schedules that leave little spare time. Perhaps we could take off for Everon City with no further delay? You could possibly have us flown in by your craft, here; and it could come back for these five other good, red-flagged folks right after dropping us off at your place?"

  As if in a dream, Jef found himself leading Mikey and following Martin on board the aircraft. He remarked, without having the freedom of mind to dwell on it at the moment, that Armage seemed to have taken his acceptance of the Constable's hospitality for granted, following Martin's smooth rush of words. He coaxed Mikey into a seat beside him. Up front in the craft Armage was giving orders to the pilot.

  There was no more talk of impounding and destroying Mikey. In fact, as far as any casual observer might have been able to deduce, the Constable seemed entirely to have forgotten the existence of the young maolot.

  Chapter Three

  seen from the air as the aircraft approached it, half an hour later, Armage's home—by the standards of housing on a world occupied by humans for less than twenty standard years—could safely be called a mansion. Several acres of ground-hugging native vine made a green lawn that surrounded it completely, sweeping past a large, hourglass-shaped swimming pool and scattered, thick-trunked variform oaks, to a windbreak of smaller variform spruce and fir, planted to the side of the building facing the misty ridges that were mountains, far to the north.

  The house itself was a white, two-story building, apparently constructed of color-impregnated metal panels obtained from some dismantled space cargo vessel, rather than of the cheaper native stone, wood, or local concrete. The architecture of it was vaguely colonial. It even had a semblance of a porch across its front and four tall, entirely unnecessary pillars.

  During the flight out, Jef had occupied the rear row of seats alone with Mikey, who was continuing to show a good deal of interest in his surroundings, clambering excitedly back and forth across Jef to push the heavy muzzle of his blind head against the cabin windows of the aircraft, first on this side, then on the other. After their near-miraculous deliverance from the law of Everon, Jef had thought it wisest not to let the maolot intrude on the Constable. Consequently, he had kept to the back of the craft with Mikey and left the Constable to sit up front with Martin behind the pilot.

  As a decision, it had no doubt been a good one. But it had the drawback of putting Jef in no position to ask Martin why he had, a second time, come to their rescue. It was not unreasonable that a John Smith should be concerned with justice and fairness to that extent—it was just unusual, and perhaps a little too good to believe.

  Moreover, if there was a question naturally to be raised about that, there was as much of a question to be made about the behavior of Armage in meeting the red-flagged passengers personally, the moment they had stepped off the spaceship. Again, there was nothing obviously unreasonable about such behavior; it was just not what might normally be expected.

  A Planetary Constable was a highly-placed elected official in the government of a world like Everon. He was much more tha
n a local chief of police, even a chief of police of the largest city on a world—which Everon City was. The natural expectation would be to find one of his staff meeting red-flagged passengers off an incoming spaceliner and then, if necessary, conducting them to meet the Constable at his office.

  If Armage had been expecting a John Smith to show up, that might have been a good reason for his appearance at the landing pad in person. But it was difficult to believe that he had—otherwise he would hardly have been so openly indifferent to Jef's papers and a grant backed by the Xenological Research Service. Like all the international Services of powerful Earth, Research was not something to be taken lightly by a newly-settled planet that was still very much dependent for its existence on help from the mother world.

  No, Jef was willing to swear that Armage had been as surprised when Martin turned out to be a planetary inspector as Jef himself had been.

  Why, then, had Armage met the ship? What had drawn him to greet the passengers personally? And what, if anything, had his being there to do with his arbitrary and devastating decision about Mikey, before Martin had stepped in to object?

  This warm, golden-lit planet had turned out to be darkly shadowed by more uncertainties than Jef had imagined. His plan had been to stop overnight in an Everon City hotel, just long enough to arrange for his heavy gear to be shipped to meet him upcountry; and then tomorrow morning he would take off on foot with Mikey for the mountains, to accustom the maolot to being back in his native environment as gradually as possible. Instead, here he and Mikey had been shoved into the spotlight of a VIP situation, a situation he would have been uncomfortable in back on Earth.

  At the same time he had to admit to a small pleasure in being where he was. After being treated like a pariah and worse by the Everon people aboard the spaceship, to be invited to stay at the home of their Planetary Constable gave him a certain amount of satisfaction. More than that, he could hope it signaled the beginning of a more friendly relationship between him and the colonists. There had been a definite uneasiness nagging at him that he might find himself in the position of being refused help generally by his fellow humans here on this alien world.