The Florians Read online

  The cop arrived, and paused. He looked at us questioningly. I considered his face. It wasn’t handsome—the expanded faces of the Florians all looked rather repellent to me—but it wasn’t aggressive or cruel.

  “The ship’s that way,” I told him, pointing.

  He nodded, and waited. He obviously intended to stay with us all the way. He was welcome, so far as I was concerned.

  I let the horse carry me forward again, feeling the ache in my thighs as I moved slightly, knowing that I was going to be feeling it for some time to come, and hoping that I’d be able to stand up and walk when I got down again.

  “I wish I didn’t feel as if I were walking right into a shark’s jaws,” commented Karen.

  I felt exactly the same way.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  They saw us coming, and were waiting for us.

  I felt very shaky as I dismounted at the gate, and it took me several seconds to find my legs. I paused for a good while before opening the gate and moving inside, with Karen and the cop right behind me.

  The yard in front of the house was bordered by barns and pig-sties. There were a couple of men in the shadow of the barn door, watching us as we marched across the open space. There was no sign of Joe Saccone or his wife and children, and though the pigs were making just as much noise as pigs usually do, it seemed preternaturally quiet.

  Jason came out of the house as we approached. There was another man with him—a well-dressed, self-assured man.

  My eyes met and joined with Jason’s while we were still a long way apart. Some time passed before my hesitant stride consumed the distance between us. Eventually, however, we stood face to face. I had to look up at him. He looked like a cat confronted by a mouse with its hind legs tied.

  “We didn’t expect you so soon,” he said.

  “You shouldn’t have left in such a hurry,” I said. “We could have come with you.”

  “Did the rowing hurt your hands?”

  “Not in the least,” I assured him. “One of the Planners rowed us across. He’s talking to Vulgan now.”

  His smugness didn’t slip.

  “I’d like to see Mariel,” I said, when he didn’t reply. “Then I’d like to go back to my ship. We can discuss the situation when I’m certain that everyone is safe.”

  It was an optimistic suggestion.

  “Come in,” he said.

  Both men stood aside while I passed between them. Karen followed me into the house, but they moved to exclude the policeman. He looked bewildered for a moment, but didn’t turn away. I don’t think it was duty so much as curiosity that impelled him forward. He brushed past Jason and got in.

  Once the door had closed behind the well-dressed man, the main room of the house was pretty crowded. The farmer’s wife was watching from the kitchen door. Mariel was sitting in an armchair beside the newly set fire that burned in the grate. Standing beside her was Lucas.

  And Lucas had a gun.

  Behind me, Jason leaned to pick something up, and when I turned he had a gun as well. They weren’t sophisticated firearms by any means—they looked like a cross between a sawed-off shotgun and a blunderbuss—but someone had put them together with loving care and was very proud of them. There were no prizes for guessing who.

  I’d feared this, and also half expected it.

  “What’s that for?” I asked, pointing at the one Jason held. I knew damn well what it was for. I also knew that the sheer pride in having brought it into the world was likely to go to Jason’s head. A man who brings an engine of destruction into a world where such things are unknown is bound to have an exaggerated idea of its efficacy and worth. I knew that irrespective of which course was wisest or most likely to get him something of what he wanted, Jason was going to try to use that gun to get it all. But what did he want, now?

  “Don’t worry about the gun,” he said. “It won’t go off. If you’re sensible.”

  It wasn’t hard to tell that he was new at the game. The words were from way back. And so was the thought behind them.

  I walked over to Mariel.

  “Are you all right?” I asked.

  She nodded. “They didn’t lock me up,” she said quietly. “But there was nowhere to run. I didn’t expect the guns. The men here watching the ship didn’t know about them.”

  “It’s OK,” I said. There wasn’t much point in trying to reassure her further. She knew as well as I did that I was worried.

  I turned, and pointed at the stranger. “Who’s he?” I said to Jason.

  But the stranger spoke for himself. “My name is Paul Ellerich,” he said.

  “Congratulations,” I said. “I hear you just inherited a planet. Or has Jason already disabused you of the notion?”

  “We’re on the same side,” said Jason smoothly. “We want the same thing and we have it within the palms of our hands. All we have to do is take it.”

  “The thing between the palms of his hands,” I said, aiming the words at Ellerich, “is a gun. And he intends to rule you with it just like the rest of the world.”

  Ellerich wasn’t impressed.

  “Well,” I said, redirecting my attention to Jason. “What’s the deal now? Do you still want us to get out and leave you to it?”

  He shook his head. “Not now,” he said.

  “What do you want?”

  “I want control over your ship, and I want control over everything your party does while it remains here. You will work for us, Mr. Alexander, and not for the Planners. And we will decide how vital you are to the future of this colony, and in what way you may help us.”

  “And how do you intend to exercise that control?” I asked politely.

  “I want both your pilots to surrender themselves as hostages. We will look after them—and the little girl—very well, until it is time for you to leave. In the meantime, you will do as we ask.”

  I glanced briefly at Mariel, wondering how he knew that we had only two people capable of handling the ship. But we hadn’t made any secret of the number and makeup of the ship’s personnel when we’d first landed.

  “We can’t do that,” I said quietly. I had to remember that it was time to be diplomatic.

  The only trouble was that Jason had already abandoned his diplomatic pretensions. He was determined.

  “You have no choice,” he told me. “We’ve already issued an ultimatum to the ship. If your people within don’t surrender before noon, then we use the guns.”

  “Mariel,” I said casually. “Is he bluffing?”

  Jason was confused for a moment, but he didn’t say anything.

  “I don’t know,” replied Mariel. “I don’t think he does, either.”

  It wasn’t a very helpful reply.

  “There’s no need for unpleasantness,” Ellerich intervened. “The simple fact is that we now control this colony. You have no alternative but to deal with us. And we have the right to determine what you will do while you are here.”

  “Then why do it at the point of a gun?” I demanded.

  “We have to make sure of your cooperation. The internal difficulties of the colony are not going to be settled overnight. We cannot let you work with the Planners against us...and that is what you have tried to do. You must not help to sustain the situation which leaves the Planners in effective control of Floria. You must, instead, help us to break their stranglehold. We cannot take any risks...you must do as we ask.”

  “We’ll cooperate with you to the best of our ability,” I said. “But you must let us all return to the ship. There will be no hostages taken.”

  “You’re behind the times,” said Jason, in a voice that grated slightly with implied threat. “We already have hostages. Three of you. What we want is recognition of that fact and capitulation. No doubt your ship can take off and go home right now...but what good would that do any of us? You’d still be here, still in a position to give us much of the information we want...but not, perhaps, in a position to help us as fully as you might wish. Be re
asonable, Mr. Alexander...if the ship takes off, everybody suffers. If you do as you’re told, we can all gain.”

  “Only yesterday,” I said, “you were trying to persuade me to clear out altogether. Now you want me to stay. What’s changed, in the meantime? Why were we all to suffer yesterday, whereas now we’re all to gain? The difference is that you’ve changed sides. The only thing that concerns you is your gain. Nobody else’s. It wouldn’t have bothered you yesterday if I’d agreed to your proposition, and in consequence the whole colony and all of its people would have suffered for generations to come. You didn’t stay to hear what I had to say to the Planners—to hear why our presence here is vital to your health, and perhaps your survival. Why not? Because you weren’t interested. You didn’t want to know what kind of trouble this colony is in and what we can do to help you...you only wanted to get a head start on us, smashing the radio, sinking the boats, so that you’d have time to shift all your eggs to a different basket. As soon as we threatened your position with the Planners, you decided you’d find a new position with the rebels. You don’t give a damn about the prospects of the colonists as long as you can be the man on top. You don’t care who holds notional control as long as you’re the man who controls them.”

  I turned to Ellerich and continued. “Is this the kind of man you want to run your revolution? Is this the man you’d like to have pulling your strings? The Planners thought that while he was working for them they could keep him in check—a balance of power in which he thought he was controlling them and they thought they were controlling him. Is that what you think? Or are you just going along with him because what’s good for his personal ambitions looks like being good for yours? How many years do you think he’ll give you before that gun is pointed at you? You know his methods...you’re watching them in operation right now. Is this really the way you want to set things right here?”

  Ellerich didn’t answer. But I knew he had to be wondering. He had to be in doubt as to whether he’d jumped the right way. Until yesterday, Jason had been the enemy. Today he was the crucial ally. But even a saint would have his cynical suspicions. The thing was, could Ellerich control Jason? What could he do, now, except go along? It was Jason who was holding the gun. Ellerich, like every other man on Floria, must have a quasi-supernatural regard for the weapon. He didn’t know much about them but he knew they were terrible enough to be a dread secret. He believed in the awesome power of the gun...and while Jason controlled it, he was likely to stick with Jason. At a later date, of course, he might get one of his own, at which time things might be different, but until then...

  I could see the whole thing unfolding into the alternate realms of possibility. The Planners’ attempt to alter human nature and redirect the course of human history looked pretty sick at this particular moment. All it took was one committed man...one man who wasn’t even sure whether he was bluffing or not, who had faith in his power even though there was no way he could estimate its extent. All it took was one messiah of the gun...and a lot of converts, a host of believers.

  When the silence had gone on just long enough, Jason spoke again. “You have no alternative,” he said, pressing his point hard. “Either you do what we say, or you do nothing at all. You may even die.”

  I glanced back at the policeman who’d brought us here, and I looked at Joe Saccone’s wife, still hovering half out of sight by the kitchen door. I even looked at Lucas. I would have liked to know that someone was listening.

  “This is what the Planners have worked seven generations trying to save you from,” I said, directing my comments into the empty air. “Guns spit hot metal. They kill people. They kill you just as dead as poison, but quicker.”

  I dried up. I couldn’t think of any more. It didn’t seem to be any use. They didn’t know what the hell I was talking about. They didn’t come from earth. They were Florians, with some kind of unreachable innocence protecting them from all the bitterness I was trying to show them.

  It was pointless.

  Jason gripped his weapon purposefully. He was aiming it at me. I was talking too much. He was just about pig sick of me. Maybe sick enough to shoot.

  “I want you to talk to your pilot,” he said. “Tell him to surrender the ship. Now. The ultimatum is running out.”

  My mouth was dry. I wanted to protest the fact that I couldn’t give Rolving orders and even if I could he wouldn’t have obeyed them. I wanted to say that there was no way at all they could force or seduce their way into the Daedalus. I wanted to make Jason understand that it was all futile.

  Instead, I simply said, “No.”

  I knew that it wasn’t the way Nathan Parrick would have gone about it, and I was almost certain that Rondo would have found another way. But there was only one way I could see, and though it scared me very badly, it seemed to be the only way I could go.

  Jason moved half a stride closer. Imperceptibly, the men on either side of him moved back. “I’ll kill you, Mr. Alexander,” he said.

  He was mad at me. Absurdly, I thought that in the old melodramas you could always get out of a situation like this by insulting the bad guy’s courage and shaming him into fighting you barehanded. Then you licked the hell out of him. Only Jason was seven feet tall and his bare hands could have broken me as easily as the shot in his crude firearm.

  “So kill me,” I said, feeling about ready to keel over and die anyway. My heart was going like a train and I was afraid my legs would start shaking any second.

  “Tell him, Miss Valory, since you’re so very clever, whether I know whether I’m bluffing now,” said Jason. It was a clumsy sentence but his tongue didn’t stumble once.

  “I think he intends to shoot,” said Mariel softly.

  There are times when a lie detector is a liability.

  “You’d better do as I say,” said Jason. “Unless the more recent wonders of Earthly science include a technique for resurrecting the dead.”

  “We haven’t found anything like that,” I said, surprised by the levelness of my voice. “But things have changed in two hundred years. Abilities...and attitudes. There are new medical methods...and there are also new beliefs. And maybe the beliefs are almost as important as the methods. I have a son back on Earth who believes, among other things, that Earth ought to be made into a better world before we try to build better worlds among the stars. He wants to make Earth into the kind of planet that the Planners—and perhaps most of the people—would like to see Floria become. On Earth, the job seems rather more difficult, for any number of reasons; one of which is that on Earth gun use and gun logic are already endemic. But my son subscribes to a belief that the way to beat a gun is not to give in to it. He believes that to render a gun powerless, you have to say no.

  “On Earth, every day—I don’t know how many times—people get threatened with guns. A lot of them say no, because they believe it’s the only way. A lot of them get shot, still believing that it’s the only way. They believe that by getting shot they demonstrate that force has no power to compel...only power to kill. A lot of people think my son’s ideas are crazy. The faith to which he belongs is opposed by authority, and lives almost on the fringe of legality. That’s a compliment...an acknowledgment that it may just work. It may be stupid...every man a potential martyr...and it may not last out the century...and it may cost a hell of a lot of lives...but it may be the only way.

  “If you’re going to shoot, shoot. But what do you do for an encore?”

  I thought I could talk him out of it. I really did. I thought I was being clever rather than brave. I couldn’t believe that he was really so desperate.

  “You’re a fool,” he said, and raised the barrel of the gun slightly to aim at my ribs.

  It’s all so pointless, I thought. You made all this trouble for yourself, out of your own vanity, your own crazy pretensions. You could have kept all the power that ever really meant anything....

  He pressed the trigger.

  And the gun blew apart in his hands.

/>   I had spun away, my face turned and my arms coming up reflexively to shield me from the shot. I felt tiny stings in my shoulder, as if I had been attacked by a host of wasps. I went down, not realizing what had happened. But I fell. I wasn’t thrown backward by the impact.

  I was hit...but Jason was screaming and clawing at his face. The wreckage of the gun had been hurled aside by a convulsive jerk. There seemed to be blood everywhere. His blood.

  I was curling up, but still conscious. I realized that I was alive and likely to stay that way. I could have laughed.

  Jason was still alive, too, but it seemed something of a miracle. He seemed to have taken most of the explosive force in his face and upper chest, although he had held the stock of the gun no higher than his waist. He was thrashing convulsively in the grip of some chaotic chain of reflex. He would be in pain for a long, long time to come.

  I felt Karen’s hands on my shoulders. She was trying to help me up. I resisted.

  Nobody else had moved, but at least one other person bad screamed. I didn’t know who.

  I watched Lucas slowly relax the hands with which he gripped his own gun. The barrel drooped and fell. Then he dropped it, and looked down at it with offended horror.

  “The trouble with homemade guns and ammunition,” I said, in a remote voice, “is that they can’t be standardized properly. You’re always likely to get a cartridge that explodes in the breech.”

  There was another thought crossing my mind...something about the mercy of the unpredictable...but I couldn’t form it. I had caught sight of my own blood, staining my sleeve deep red. It still hurt.

  I fainted.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  I woke up a couple of times before they finally got me back into the ship, but consciousness didn’t seem like a good idea, and I wasn’t sorry when Conrad finally put me out with a hypodermic. I think people kept reassuring me that everything was all right.

  I slept for a long time, even after the drug had worn off. I was in a state of advanced exhaustion. A couple of days had gone by before I was eventually allowed to sit up and consume a little liquid nourishment by the conventional route. I was passed fit for visitors, but with the size of a star-ship cabin being what it is they had to come in one by one. It fell to Karen’s lot to bring me up to date.