The Florians Read online

  Perhaps wisely, the young man failed to comment on any of this, but remained intent on his controls. It was obvious that nothing was happening and that his intense concentration was contrived. He undoubtedly wished that Jason had taken up his suggestion and gone somewhere else to worry. Nothing was likely to happen at this time in the morning that would demand instant reaction. Nothing, that is, except something completely crazy like the two missing Earthmen turning up on the doorstep to listen in at the keyhole.

  I contemplated the scene within. Jason seemed like a very worried man—and maybe with good reason. But where, I wondered, were the Planners? Why weren’t they gathered around a table planning like crazy? Their dynasty was on the brink of its greatest crisis, and where were they? In doubt, apparently, about what to do with Nathan as a consequence of what Jason had “fed” them. The implications of that word, I mused, might be very significant indeed. Could it be, perhaps, that the Planners didn’t actually know how critical the situation was? Jason and his agents, it appeared, were the Planners’ eyes and ears, arms and legs. If the men at the top of this aristocracy, like the men at the top of most aristocracies, were all old, all fat, all useless, then whose was the hand that really pulled the puppet strings here on Floria...?

  As I watched Jason through the crack, that question suddenly seemed very important.

  And then the giant turned, and—without warning—headed for the door. I jumped back reflexively, and there was nearly a nasty accident as Karen and I collided in the dark. Luckily, however, she was lightning fast on the uptake, and she danced back toward the bend in the corridor at top speed.

  It was a long way, and had Jason come straight out he might well have seen us as we went for cover. But he didn’t come straight out. As he flung the door back he turned to address some parting shot to the man at the controls. By the time he turned into the corridor we were out of sight. He was even obliging enough to turn the other way and walk away from us.

  “Right,” whispered Karen, as soon as he was out of range. “Let’s get in there and call the ship.”

  “Wait a minute!” I hissed anxiously.

  She had already pushed past me, but I grabbed her arm.

  “It’s all right,” she said, in a voice rather too loud for my comfort, “I won’t hit him hard. I’ll use the blunt end.”

  I couldn’t argue. There are limits to the amount of earnest debate you can engage in when you’re crouching in a lighted stairwell hoping against hope to avoid discovery until you can find something useful and constructive to do. Calling the ship might serve no particular purpose, but it seemed like a better idea than anything I could come up with on the spur of the moment. I let her go. She went.

  I came into the room a couple of paces behind her. The body seemed to hit the floor with a colossal thump, but he never managed to squeeze so much as a yelp of surprise out of his throat. She didn’t waste any time going for the controls, but simply threw the crowbar at me in the fond hope that I’d catch it. She flung it, I thought, a little more aggressively than was necessary.

  I caught it, and it stung my blistered hands fearfully. I looked down at it helplessly. She’d wielded it two handed, bringing it down to strike a glancing blow to the back of the young giant’s head. The bar had been roughened by rust and the blow had drawn blood from his scalp.

  I knelt to assure myself that no real harm had been done. He was well out, and I guessed that she must have hit him just about as hard as she could, trusting on his thick skull to hold up under the treatment. He was still alive, and the bleeding wasn’t copious. I remembered the harsh treatment measured out to the back of my own head, and I couldn’t muster any genuine remorse. If the game was to be played rough, adopting the role of pacifist might be something of a handicap.

  Karen was holding a pair of earphones in her left hand, holding them to the side of her head, while the fingers of her right hand jabbed at the knobs on the set.

  “Damn stupid way to design a radio,” she muttered. I closed the door quickly, and felt a lot safer for it.

  She paused, listening hard, and then began drumming her fingers on the console. Every ten seconds or so she reached out to reverse one of the switches.

  “Come on, you idle bastards,” she said urgently.

  I presumed that the signal she was sending would trigger an alarm of some kind aboard the ship—an alarm sufficient to wake a sleeping crewman.

  Then came success.

  “Pete?” she said, her voice rising above a whisper now. “It’s Karen.”

  She beckoned to me, and I came closer, putting my ear close to the receiver. I heard the tail end of what Pete Rolving was saying: “...get hold of a transmitter?”

  “It’s the one I carry in my pants pocket,” she replied. “How the hell do you think I got hold of a transmitter? It’s one of theirs.”

  “I thought….”

  “I know what you thought. All the time you’ve been sitting around contemplating your arse you could have been eavesdropping on their broadcasts.”

  It didn’t sound to me like the way a good spaceman should talk to her captain, and I daresay Rolving thought the same, but she didn’t stop for complaints.

  “Look,” she said. “I’m with Alex. We’ve made it to the island which is where the whole mess is being managed...or not managed as the case may be. We’re pretty sure Nathan’s here. I think they got Mariel but I’m not sure where. Do you know anything?”

  “Conrad and Linda are with me,” said Rolving, not wasting any time. “Not hurt. They tried to bluster their way in and then decided to use muscle. I don’t think it was planned—they just fancied their chances because they were so big and Conrad was so small. We’re sealed up tight waiting for them to come knocking. So far, it’s as silent as the grave. We’re worried...the very least they could do is start delivering ultimatums so we know where we stand.”

  “At present,” I said quickly, “nobody knows where we stand.”

  “That,” said a voice from the door, “is truer than you know, Mr. Alexander.”

  I turned, feeling as if something supporting my stomach had just been whipped out from under me.

  It was Jason, his hand still on the doorknob.

  He looked at me, and at the crowbar in my hand.

  “Try me, Mr. Alexander,” he invited.

  I didn’t try him.

  “Hello, Pete,” said Karen, speaking in a remarkably level tone. “We just got caught. Figure out their frequencies and tune in on their messages, will you? We’ll call you again, if we can. Or maybe now the secret’s blown they’ll call you themselves.”

  Throughout this speech, Jason didn’t move. He just stood in the doorway and waited. Karen switched off the transmitter and laid the earphones down. We waited for the big man to make the next move. He seemed to be in no hurry.

  Finally—and surprisingly—he closed the door behind him. He extended his hand, and I passed the crowbar over to him. It all seemed very civilized.

  Jason looked at the weapon and peered closely at the small bloodstain. He looked down at the fallen man but made no move to check up on his condition.

  “He isn’t dead,” I said helpfully.

  He looked at me calmly. “You’ve done very well, Mr. Alexander,” he said. “Very well indeed. I didn’t expect this...not at all.”

  He wasn’t being sarcastic, but he wasn’t complimenting us on our excellent showing either. I knew that somehow we’d played into his hands.

  “Why did you come back?” I asked.

  “I heard him fall,” Jason replied. It seemed that the luck which had brought us so far had run out very abruptly.

  “What are you going to do now?” I demanded aggressively. “Drop us in the sea and claim Vulgan did it?”

  “So you did overhear,” he purred. “You mustn’t take what I said too seriously. It was an expression of...frustration. I never really contemplated killing you. Not then.”

  “And now?” asked Karen.

 
He gestured at the man on the floor. “There are easier ways,” he said. “After this, you don’t have a prayer so far as winning the Planners around to your way of thinking goes. They’re going to command you to get off our world and never to come back.”

  I was slightly puzzled. “Is that what you want?” I asked.

  “That’s what I want,” he confirmed. “Just that. That’s why I didn’t acknowledge your signal originally. Afterward, I realized that you’d land anyway, and that there was no way of concealing your existence. And so....”

  “You thought you’d try to persuade us to leave,” I said. “You were taking two of us to see the Planners, and in the meantime you tried to hijack the ship. The Planners don’t know about that, do they? In fact, the Planners probably don’t know very much at all about the way you’re running things in their name. I’m surprised you haven’t disposed of them altogether. But you need them too much, don’t you? You need the knowledge which is the key to their power. and you need them because it’s they who command the loyalty of most of the men who take your orders—and most of the people in the colony, come to that. While the Planners control the people with ignorance, you control the Planners the same way. Is that it? Is that the way you play the game?”

  “You’re very astute, Mr. Alexander,” was all he said.

  “You want us out of the way because we’re a big threat to your power,” I said. “The Planners will probably think the same way. But you’re afraid, aren’t you, that it won’t quite work out? You’re not sure the Planners will refuse to have anything to do with us. You’re afraid they might make a deal—in fact, you’re almost as afraid of the Planners making a deal as you are of Vulgan and his friends making a deal...because it’s you, and you alone, who is desperate to maintain the status quo.”

  “I’m glad you have it all worked out,” he said, without any trace of anger or animosity. “It saves me explaining.”

  It didn’t take any additional brainwork to see what he was getting at. Now he wanted to make a deal. It was a three-cornered contest. I’d been right when I’d said that the plot could get sicker yet.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Once Jason had decided that he had to negotiate with us—whether he liked it or not—he was prepared to treat us with a degree of civility. He did not, however, work hard to cultivate the illusion that we were or might ever become the best of friends. There was always a note of mockery in his politeness. He still thought that his was the best hand in the whole game.

  He took us down to the kitchens and procured some food for us. He didn’t exactly cook it with his own hands, but he wasn’t averse to fetching and carrying it from the various storage cupboards. He didn’t bring in anyone else—I think he wanted his talk with us to remain as private as possible.

  I washed my hands at a sink, and he watched with a degree of amusement as I gingerly mopped out the wounds left by the blisters. He seemed to think that it was appropriate in some way that we had suffered somewhat in getting here.

  He waited, patiently, while we ate, and then led us to a small sitting room which was presumably his own. I slumped gratefully into the proffered chair like a bag of bones, drained of all strength and just about all feeling. Karen remained uneasy and unrelaxed. She gave the impression that she was still on edge, still ready to leap into action at the slightest provocation. It was useless.

  “I didn’t expect you to come here,” said Jason. “After you refused my invitation, I thought you would go back to your ship.”

  “And suppose I had accepted your invitation?” I said. “Would I have been brought here? Or secreted somewhere, like Mariel?”

  “To be quite honest,” he replied, “I’m not sure. It might have depended on the answers you could provide to certain questions. However, it really doesn’t matter now. The situation has changed. Now, we can work together...because your best interests coincide with mine.”

  “I find that difficult to believe.”

  “I’ve heard the arguments which your associate has put to the Planners. I’ve also heard what the Planners have had to say in reply. They were hostile from the start—you must have realized that by now, and you must know why. You represent a threat to everything that they hold dear. Contact with Earth, to them, means contact with all the mistakes that they think they have avoided here. It isn’t that they fear the importation of technological knowledge and methods, you understand...that’s the error that Vulgan has made. What they fear is the importation of certain ideas: what they see as mistaken perspectives and corrupt ethics. The Planners are trying to keep violence out of the history of this colony—they feel very strongly about violence. Don’t misunderstand me...they’re not trying to eradicate violence altogether, certainly not at a personal level. They recognize the bounds of possibility. But what they do want to do—and what they believe that they can do, given the chance—is to provide for a world without wars. They want to extend this colony over the whole surface of the globe, make Floria a human world, without the large-scale bloodshed which has...haunted, shall we say?...the history of your world.

  “Perhaps you will consider the Planners naïve, Mr. Alexander. But you must try to see their point of view. The original colonists left Earth determined to make a better world, not simply another one. Perhaps that determination has become dilute and meaningless in the colony at large...but here, in this building, it remains as strong as ever. It has been handed down from mind to mind over the years, with all the attendant passion. The Planners are fanatics.

  “You see, then, why they were prejudiced against you from the start. But they are, it seems, not quite as dedicated to their fanaticism as even I might have expected. For one thing, they recognized—as perhaps their ancestors had realized—that contact with Earth might, in the long run, be inevitable. As long as Earth has ships, we cannot keep them away....

  “And so they were prepared to talk to Mr. Parrick. Listen to what he had to say. They were prepared to drive as hard a bargain as they could, but they were prepared to listen to anything which would not compromise their basic principle. They want no more colonists here, and no Earthmen polluting the minds of their beloved people. But they were prepared to try to buy that freedom, if there was any way that they could...rather than simply refusing point blank to have anything to do with you.

  “The extremists among them have argued that any contact with Earth is intolerable—a threat to the whole future of the colonists. At the other extreme, some have argued that we have something to gain from limited, controlled contact with Earth. The issue is balanced. The main factor affecting that balance, Mr. Alexander, could well be this.”

  The object which he held up, of course, was Karen’s crowbar.

  “Injuring one man helped,” Jason went on. “Injuring a second—and within the Planners’ own home—will almost certainly underline the anti-contact arguments powerfully. The Planners will hear you tomorrow, of course, and you’ll have a chance to talk your way out of it...but somehow I don’t really think you can do it. Do I make myself clear?”

  “Not exactly,” I said. “I know where we stand...but what about you?”

  “Mr. Alexander,” he said levelly, “I rule this world. I say that openly because you know by now. We have no secrets from one another. The Planners are old and fat. Their minds live on under mountains of flesh...but they have nothing except the power of thought and knowledge. And that isn’t enough. It isn’t enough to do what they want to do, to do what they think they are doing.

  “I stand in the middle, between the ignorant, helpless colonists and the all-knowing, helpless Planners. I am the body of one side and the brain of the other. Both sides need me...and because of that need I control everything. Fm not talking about ambitions, as Vulgan must have...I’m talking about the way things are. I rule this colony because the way things are arranged permits no one else to rule.

  “When you come here to deal with this colony, you come here to deal with me. Not the Planners, not the farmers, not the
Colony Manager.”

  “That’s not so,” I said. “We came to deal with the colony as a whole.”

  “But I’m the only man who can speak for the colony as a whole,” he countered.

  “I don’t accept that,” I told him.

  “You have no real alternative,” he said coldly. “That is the fact. But that’s not really the point. The point is that the best course for both of us, at this stage, is for you simply to return to your ship and fly away into space. Go back to Earth, or on to other colonies. But if your intentions are peaceful, and you came to help, and you have no intention of landing more colonists here in opposition to our wishes—and these are all statements your associate has made—then there is only one way that you can prevent trouble and violence...and that is to go away and stay away.”

  “You can’t stave off the inevitable,” said Karen. “Even the Planners recognize that.”

  He turned to look at her. “I can try,” he said. “And I can succeed. You forget that we have different points of view. They are interested in the future...in the whole future history of the colony. When they think about avoiding contact, they think about avoiding contact forever. That’s impossible...perhaps. But I’m not interested in forever. I’m interested in ten years, in twenty years. I’m interested in now.”

  “How old are you?” I asked him.

  He smiled. “Oh, I have twenty years in me yet,” he said. “I won’t turn into a mass of flesh that can’t even walk. I’m active, Mr. Alexander. I use my body. That’s....”

  “I know,” I said rudely. “That’s why you run this world and not the Planners.”

  He looked at me steadily for half a minute or so. His temper was still under control. “It seems that you don’t want to go away,” he said softly. “You’re very determined to help us in spite of ourselves, aren’t you? I don’t really understand that...unless, of course, you have motives which you aren’t declaring. But tell me this, Mr. Alexander. Exactly what alternative do you think you have? You can’t deal with the Planners—and if you ally yourselves with Vulgan and Ellerich you’ll help us straight into strife and make a mockery of all the promises Parrick has made. Is that what you intend to do?”