Promised Land Read online

  He stepped forward, and I didn’t budge an inch.

  Mr Tyler would never have won prizes for diplomacy. Quite the reverse. But he didn’t have it in him to force his own way. He was just as tall and heavy and muscular as I was, but he hadn’t had the practice. He wasn’t a fighter. A bully perhaps, but not a fighter.

  ‘Look,’ said Lanning, as Tyler and I stood toe to toe sizing each other up. ‘There’s no sense to all this. I mean, look at us. We aren’t thugs. We aren’t rapists.’

  I looked at him, as he so kindly invited me to. He was right. He wasn’t a thug. It didn’t endear him to me, though. They obviously weren’t the type any man would hire to do his dirty work for him, so they were probably absolutely on the level. But they’d stirred me up somewhat, and I’m naturally stubborn anyhow.

  ‘You can check with Charlot back at the camp,’ said the pale man. ‘We’ve got a call circuit with priority. He’ll tell you it’s all okay.’

  That decided me. I didn’t want to be brought on the carpet before Charlot so he could tell me off while Lanning and Tyler had a quiet chortle.

  ‘I don’t think I want to give you boys a lift,’ I said.

  ‘What about the girl?’ said Tyler, in a low voice.

  ‘That’s different,’ I said. ‘I don’t mind helping out a lady.’

  They couldn’t think of anything to say.

  ‘I came out for a pleasure cruise,’ I said pensively. ‘I guess the young lady must have stepped out to sample the evening air for similar reasons. You morons are spoiling her good time. You can reassure everyone back at the camp that she’s in good hands, and I’ll have her home within a couple of hours.’

  ‘You can’t do that,’ said Lanning.

  ‘Watch me,’ I said.

  He was already taking a caller out of his pocket. He was going to report me to someone at the colony, who would presumably use their priority circuit to alert Charlot. But I was too late changing my mind. I’d already declared my intentions. Perhaps I shouldn’t interfere. But I wanted to, and I had.

  ‘Now just you wait a minute,’ said Tyler, who had not yet recognised the inevitable.

  ‘Did you speak?’ I said pleasantly, looking him in the eyes and smiling. I hope I looked really evil. He backed off a step, pleasing me immensely in the process.

  ‘There’s no need for that,’ said Lanning. ‘You just do what you want to, Mr Grainger. We’ll tell everybody concerned that the girl is safe with you. Everything will be fine.’

  ‘That’s right,’ I said, ignoring his sarcasm. ‘Everything will be fine.’

  I offered a hand to the girl. She’d calmed down a lot while we three were acting out our little farce. I think she’d gathered that I wasn’t in total harmony with her oppressors. She watched Lanning and Tyler turn away. I reached out a hand to her, and she let me help her up. That’s a language anyone can understand. I ushered her gently into the front passenger seat of the Lamoine. I took my time moving around into the driver’s seat. Tyler was watching me from a few yards away. Lanning was talking rapidly into the caller.

  Before I started the car again, I paused and looked around at the deepening night. I drew an appreciative breath and used my face to try and indicate my enjoyment to the girl. Then I smiled.

  She smiled back. She was obviously used to the company of humans. She knew what I meant.

  After all, I thought, even Titus Charlot smiles.

  Sometimes.

  CHAPTER TWO

  I rolled the Lamoine around at eighty or ninety for ten minutes or a quarter of an hour while she settled down to the conclusion that everything was pretty much okay.

  I tried her with ‘What’s your name?’ and ‘Where were you going?’ but it was obvious that she didn’t know even that much English. I didn’t bother to descend to the ‘Me Tarzan, who you?’ level of attempted communication, and the fancy sign language which works so well in all the soap operas has never appealed to me as a way of getting along. I was quite happy failing to communicate. Nobody needs small talk that badly.

  You’re a defeatist, accused the wind.

  I’m practical, I assured him—not only silently but without moving my lips. I didn’t want the young lady to get hold of the idea that I was the kind of filbert who talks to himself.

  That has to be a joke, he said, after the way you went barging in and casually picked her up, not knowing who she is or what she was up to.

  You know me, I told him. My sympathies are always with the guy who’s dodging the gorillas. Damsels, I admit, are not really my line in romantic comedy—not as young as this one, anyhow—but I can always be persuaded to make an exception by some representative of the scum of the earth trying hard to get on my wick.

  He did know me, of course, and he was getting to the stage where he didn’t bother to criticise me too much. I mean, there comes a point when criticism just defeats its own object. I’m impulsive and I’m perverse and I don’t mind a bit. And the wind, by virtue of his position, just had to live with it, exactly as I was having to live with him. As time went by, we made a much better job of it. By this time, I think, we were well past the loathing and repulsion à la Grainger and the hauteur and intimidation à la wind. We were getting to be just good friends. We had reached the stage where I quite appreciated his tired wisecracks and he didn’t mean them seriously.

  One thing I liked was that he was no kind of a backseat driver. Not in the literal sense, that is. He didn’t tell me how to fly, whether I was in deep space or a handspan off the ground. A parasite who can respect his host’s professional expertise can’t be all bad.

  We didn’t manage much of a joyride. I was pointing vaguely back toward the suspected direction of the colony, having no real intention of running the kid around till all hours, when I heard a horribly familiar sound. It was the wailing of a siren.

  ‘Hell,’ I said pensively, and a little fatalistically. ‘The fun’s over, folks.’

  The girl looked at me strangely with her big orange eyes. Her face looked tragically sad, but that was purely illusion. She might have learned to smile, but she sure as hell hadn’t learned to play Hamlet yet. For all I knew, she might be as happy as a skylark.

  I made a wry smile, but she didn’t return it.

  ‘It’s the cops,’ I told her, speaking softly and maintaining my rueful grin despite the fact that she didn’t seem able to figure it out.

  I pulled the Lamoine to a full stop and stepped out. The police were using a flipper, not a car, so it was probably a special consignment, not a regular patrol. I wasn’t really worried—not because I imagined that they would understand, but because I was pretty confident that Charlot would bail me out of any trouble short of mass murder.

  The cop from the passenger seat dropped to the ground from the hovering flipper and came over. Cops have two styles of movement. They either swagger with a kind of free-dance interpretation of a Texan drawl, or they stride purposefully like a second lieutenant with an inflated ego.

  This one strode.

  He got quite close before I recognised him as my old buddy Denton.

  ‘Jesus,’ I said. ‘They even put you to work, hey?’

  ‘Hello, Grainger,’ he said. ‘You’re in trouble. Item: one stolen car. Item: one abducted girl. Yep, it’s all here.’

  ‘I admit it,’ I said. ‘I am now and always have been in complete personal control of all organised crime on this world and two hundred others. What are my chances of bail?’

  It wasn’t very funny. Sometimes I’m a distinct failure when it comes to raising a laugh.

  ‘The girl has to go back in the flipper,’ said Denton. ‘I have to drive you back to Corinth in the car.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said, with more than a hint of sullenness. ‘Carry on. Don’t mind me.’

  He walked around the car and yanked the far door open. He gestured to the girl to step out. She didn’t move. He took her gently by the arm, but didn’t pull. She got the message, and stepped into the road. He led her
with consummate gentleness over to the flipper. She looked up at the machine, which was humming sulkily as it hung suspended in the air. She didn’t want to get up into it, but she was beyond arguing by now. I think she’d had enough and wanted to go home. I couldn’t blame her. Denton lifted her by the waist and she took his seat beside the pilot. The pilot strapped her in while his erstwhile companion sealed the door.

  The flipper rose into the sky again.

  I waved.

  ‘Goodbye,’ I said levelly, keeping an eye on the cop. ‘It was nice meeting you. We must do it again sometime.’

  Denton planted himself squarely in front of me and shook his head tiredly.

  ‘Okay, lover boy,’ he said. ‘Let’s go home and explain to Daddy.’

  ‘Is Charlot mad?’ I asked him. ‘Or do you mean the chief of police?’

  ‘I mean Charlot,’ he said. ‘This is too big for the poor old chief.’

  It figured. Nothing moved in Corinth without Charlot’s seal of approval. I had a nasty feeling that, old though he was, he could rip a leatherbound copy of the Statutes of New Rome in half with his bare hands.

  ‘I suppose you’re going to insist on driving,’ I said.

  ‘Orders,’ he replied.

  ‘Typical,’ I commented. ‘It’s no way to treat an honest man, you know.’

  I was still trying to capture a whimsical mood.

  ‘What’s an honest man doing in a stolen car?’ he wanted to know.

  ‘Borrowing it,’ I told him.

  ‘I believe you,’ he assured me, ‘but it’s not my car.’

  We took up our assigned positions within the Lamoine and he slid her into gear, taking off with a nasty jerk.

  ‘Clumsy,’ I commented. That killed any possible conversation for at least twenty miles.

  ‘Do I take it correctly,’ I said finally—to break up the silence—‘that I am not actually under arrest: You are, I assume, taking me home solely in the interests of serving the community, as you would assist, say, a lost kitten or a stray alien?’

  ‘I’m just tidying up,’ he told me.

  ‘Sweeping the dust under the carpet,’ I said humourlessly. ‘Who was the girl and why were the two guys chasing her and what the hell would you have done?’

  He turned to look at me soberly. ‘They told you who she was and why they were chasing her,’ he said, cop-fashion. Then he added: ‘Probably something like you. Only I’d have been a damn sight smarter getting her home. I wouldn’t have waited for the trouble to catch up.’ That was just because he knew me. I think he’d have given anyone else the usual line—the I-got-a-job-to-do, honest-cop-taking-home-a-steady-wage-to-wife-and-kid line. Cops almost always pretend that they don’t know nothing from nothing and they don’t much care. I could never be a cop.

  I didn’t think it was necessary to explain, and I was dead certain that there was no point in protesting. He knew me. We both knew what had happened. I didn’t ask him any silly questions about what was going to happen.

  Less than half an hour later I was able to ask my questions of the guy with all the answers.

  ‘I don’t pay you to act like a crazy kid,’ he said, deliberately vulgarising his language to add to the weight of his sneer.

  ‘You don’t pay me at all,’ I said.

  ‘I pay enough,’ he said. ‘I’m doing you no disservice by rescuing you from the unfortunate situation in which you found yourself after Caradoc picked you up in the edge of the Drift. I know that you consider that situation quite unjust, but it’s the one you have to live with. I know that you don’t like me. But you’re a reasonable man. Is it too much to ask of you that you cooperate with my men instead of interfering with them just for the hell of it?’

  ‘I’m sorry I borrowed one of your cars without asking,’ I said evenly.

  ‘I don’t care about the car,’ he said, rising snappishly to the bait—which surprised me somewhat. ‘I’m talking about the girl.’

  ‘Titus,’ I said, in the warmest possible tone, ‘if you were riding in your car and saw a very small girl being chased by two not-very-small men who didn’t look a bit like sterling citizens, what would you do? Would you really entrust her to their care on their mere say-so?’

  ‘Why didn’t you take them all back to the colony?’ he said. ‘That’s what they wanted you to do.’

  I considered suggesting that they might have hit me over the head once I turned my back on them, but decided that it was not a wise tack to take. I decided to tell the truth.

  ‘I didn’t like them,’ I said.

  He sighed. ‘You’re more trouble than you’re worth,’ he said.

  ‘I couldn’t agree more,’ I said. ‘Shall I pack my bags?’

  ‘No,’ he said.

  I shrugged. ‘Up to you,’ I commented.

  ‘Look,’ he said. ‘You know perfectly well what kind of work I do. I synthesise patterns of thought. I work with a lot of aliens over a long period of time with a large staff. There are half a dozen colonies on New Alexandria. The people live here. They have their homes and their families and their children here. They need a certain amount of looking after. I don’t put them in prison camps or on reservations, but they do live together, and to them this is an alien world. The girl was born here, but her parents come from Chao Phrya. She doesn’t even speak English, because she isn’t concerned with the project. She knows hardly anything about the world except that she’s a stranger here. Her education is in the hands of her own people. It was for them that Tyler and Lanning went out to fetch her home. Tyler and Lanning are troubleshooters out at the colony. They do lots of odd dirty work. They have a difficult job to do. It isn’t made any easier by interference from disinterested parties with some kind of warped quixotic streak. Will you please, in future, leave my staff alone.

  ‘That’s all.’

  I wanted to tell him to go to hell, but I thought that the time had come for a little graceful retirement. We parted on not the best of terms, but we had never really reached the best of terms. We’d been at war ever since the party at Hallsthammer.

  I accepted everything he said, of course. It was none of my business. Why should I even suspect that he was lying? I could have asked to look around his Anacaon colony, but he’d probably have told me to drop dead, and it wouldn’t have told me that he had anything to hide.

  I have a suspicious mind, but it wasn’t always up to coping with Titus Charlot’s brand of deviousness.

  CHAPTER THREE

  After that incident, I decided that irresponsibility was definitely no longer the in thing. I elected to devote myself to more mature and approved pursuits, such as improving my mind and occasionally partaking (always judiciously) of a little intoxicating liquor. I found that my mind could still react favourably to a little improvement. It was more than two years since I’d been able to devote serious time to reading. I’d been too flattened back on Earth before I joined the delArco outfit to do anything except square-eye the HV.

  The wind approved thoroughly of my getting deeply into a printed-word bonanza, although his tastes in literature weren’t mine by any means. It probably speaks well for my general mood that I compromised instead of having it all my own way. If, that is, you call 80/20 a compromise rather than a concession.

  I knew that the peace couldn’t last long, but I didn’t expect it to be broken in quite the way it was.

  I was lying on my bed in the late afternoon when there was an insistent knocking at my door. I couldn’t be bothered to get up, so I simply yelled out an invitation to enter.

  I didn’t expect the Spanish Inquisition.

  It was the cops, and there were three of them. That seemed to me to be overdoing things. My old friend Denton was with them (naturally), and he came to talk to me while his buddies stood about flatfooted and looked around suspiciously.

  ‘Where have you been all day?’ demanded Denton. I’d already gathered that it wasn’t a social call, but he was making sure I retained no illusions. He was still st
riding instead of walking like normal people, and he talked like a cheesegrater.

  ‘I didn’t do it,’ I said. ‘Whatever it was’

  ‘Never mind the patter,’ he whipped back. ‘Just answer the questions.’

  ‘Honest,’ I said, whimsically stubborn, ‘I distinctly remember not doing it and I’ve got six witnesses who didn’t see me.’

  ‘Get up,’ he said. ‘Let’s go’

  ‘To the station?’ I inquired. ‘Or are we still cutting out the middleman?’

  ‘Charlot,’ he said, succinctly.

  ‘Poor old desk sergeant,’ I commented. ‘Never gets in on any of the fun.’

  Denton took the book out of my hand as I eased myself off the bed. He closed it without glancing at it and threw it on to the pillow.

  ‘You lost my place,’ I said.

  ‘This isn’t funny,’ he said. ‘This time it’s real trouble.’

  ‘What’s up?’ I wanted to know.

  ‘You answer my questions first.’

  ‘I’ve been here all day. Also most of the week, except a couple of evenings I’ve been down the street to the bar and the store, for most of which time my alibi is you. I’ve got no witnesses for this afternoon, but people see me all the time when I’m outside and at most mealtimes. I haven’t touched any of the cars and I haven’t committed any other crimes except kicking slot machines and being rude to robots. Now who killed whom?’‘

  ‘Have you see the girl you picked up in the Lamoine last week?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did you see her at any other time than the one you gave her the ride?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Have you been in communication with any Anacaon?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Right,’ he said, reaching under his lapel to switch off his concealed recorder. ‘You’re probably clean. You can stop being a suspect and join the good guys just as soon as Charlot is convinced.’ He stepped back, and one of his cronies opened the door. Denton went out and I followed him. The other two didn’t join us.