Asgard's Conquerors (21 page)

"That's right," I said.

"It does not kill."

"It doesn't kill people with our kind of metabolism. Some of the
more peculiar races react badly to the anaesthetic."

"Although you did not kill the officers you shot," said the
blond-haired man, carefully, "you are still guilty of a crime which
carries the death-penalty. Under our law, I should have you shot."

I was grateful to note the word "should."

"Well," I said, with the air of one determined to be brave at
all costs, "it was difficult to see much future anyway. I knew the risk I
was taking.
Cest la
vie"
The last, of
course, I said in French. He asked me to explain it, and I did. When he
reported back to his companion, I thought the white-haired man seemed to be
impressed by my fatalism. I began to congratulate myself, unobtrusively, on
having laid down some good bait. I daren't get confident, though— there was
always a chance that they'd take me at my word and shoot me.

The man with the darker eyes delivered quite a long speech in his
native language, while his companion just nodded and made affirmative grunts.
Then Sky-blue turned to me, and said: "This is a very strange place to us,
with many strange people. We understand that your invasion of our world was
carried out in ignorance, and we have been restrained in trying to counter it.
The Tetrax and all the other races from the star-worlds must accept, though,
that Asgard—as you call it—is ours, and that we are prepared to defend it. We
intend to establish friendly relations with the races of the galaxy, if we can.
We will need assistance in order to do this. Although you have committed a
crime against us, we are prepared to be lenient. If you co-operate with us to
the full, you will not be shot. But I warn you that we expect you to help us to
the best of your ability, in order to cancel out your evil actions. Do you
agree?"

"Why not?" I said lightly. "Certainly I agree."

"Do you know how to repair the damage that you have done?"

"Not entirely," I said. "But I've been using Tetron
technics routinely for several years, and I'm not stupid. I can help you get to
grips with the city and its systems, and I know the Tetrax well enough to help
you deal with them."

"We are already finding ways to make the Tetrax tell us what we
need to know," he said, in tight-lipped fashion. I guessed that to mean
that they were sick of being gentle and were adopting more violent means of
interrogation. The Tetrax feel pain like everyone else, and it could only be a
matter of time before the invaders began to get on top of the situation here. I
wondered if the Tetrax planned to react to save their people from being maimed
or executed, or whether their notion of the individual's duty to his fellows
was powerful enough to let them sit back and continue to attempt to make
friendly contact through diplomatic channels. I didn't know the answer.

"The first thing we require of you," said the man with blond
hair, "is that you should answer many more questions that we have. We are
confronting a situation that is new to us. Nothing in our previous experience
prepared us for what we have found in this city, and what we now know to exist
beyond the dome. We know that we have much to learn, and there is much that you
can teach us. But I warn you that our patience is now worn thin. We do not care
very much whether you live or die, and if we find that you are not helping us
to the very best of your ability, we will shoot you. We have many other people
to help us, and the more we learn from them, the less useful you will become.
Do you understand that?"

"I understand," I said, flatly. "But I answer questions
better when I'm not so hungry."

He wasn't entirely pleased by the tone of my voice, but his displeasure
was tempered by understanding, and I thought I had just about won my case.

"You are hungry, and would like to eat?"

"Yes I am," I told him. It was perhaps the first entirely
honest thing I had said.

"Then I will take you to a place where we can eat. There you will
meet some of the other people who are helping us. Afterwards, you will begin
the work of repaying us for our generosity."

The man with sky-blue eyes stood up, and spoke for a couple of minutes
to the white-haired man, who remained seated. Then, having apparently obtained
approval for his proposals, he gestured to indicate that I should precede him
to the door.

When I opened it, I found myself looking down the guns of a couple of
guards, and I stood back to let my inquisitor pass. He spoke to them, and they
relaxed, but they didn't put the guns away. They fell into step behind us as we
went along the corridor.

The electric lighting system the invaders had rigged up here was
makeshift, and the light was much yellower than the brilliant white favoured by
the Tetrax. I looked up at the bulbs strung on a cable pinned to the ceiling,
and the man with sky-blue eyes took it as a criticism.

"It is very poor," he admitted. "But these are the
disconnected levels, where we cannot use the power-systems left to us by our
ancestors. Very regrettable. You will find things very different closer to the
Centre, where the ancestors' power is the motor of our civilization."

I would have liked to continue that conversation, because there were
at least as many questions that I wanted to ask him as he wanted to ask me, but
we were already arriving at a larger room kitted out as a refectory, with a
dozen long tables and hundreds of folding chairs. It was very noisy— the room
was full of invader troopers. I guessed that they

must be
eating in shifts. Hot food was being dished out from big tureens—flavoured
manna with a few trimmings that presumably made it seem a little more like the
stuff their mothers used to cook for them.

The odour of the food made my mouth water furiously. Tetron cuisine
never had that effect on me, even when I was pretty hungry, and it seemed
grounds for concluding that the invaders really did have a great deal in
common, both physically and biochemically, with my own kind. I hadn't had a
decent meal since leaving
Leopard Shark
, and although a cold-suit
will feed you, it can't satisfy your aesthetic sensibilities. I could feel my
stomach muscles churning in anticipation, though I knew I'd have to take it
easy until I got back into the habit of eating.

The crowd was so big, and my mind was so preoccupied, that although I
saw the group of Kythnans sitting at one of the tables I didn't really pay them
much attention until one of them suddenly stood up. She stared at me, and I
looked at her dazedly, not really knowing what was happening until the accusing
finger was pointed. She took the man with the sky-blue eyes by the elbow, and
guided him away from me, talking furiously into his ear in a low voice.

I just stood still, knowing that there was nothing else I could do. The
muzzles of the guards' guns swung once again to point at my chest, and I knew
that yet again my luck had turned completely arse over tit.

The Kythnan woman was Jacinthe Siani—a ready-made collaborator if ever
there was one—and she knew only too well who I really was. She might also know
that I'd left Asgard before the invasion, and that my presence here now was a
real twenty-four carat surprise.

The sky-blue eyes no longer seemed weak as they fixed me with an
astonished gaze when the hurried whispering

was over.
They seemed very, very hard.

"Well, Mr. Rousseau," said Jacinthe Siani, vindictively.
"This time, it seems, my evidence hasn't acquitted you."

"No need to be so smug about it," I told her, with as much
bravado as I could muster. "I don't think I can give you much of a
character reference, either."

But I couldn't conceal the fact that I was very frightened indeed. All
that trust which I had carefully built up was smashed to smithereens, and it
now looked odds-on that I was scheduled to be shot—or worse.

15

This time,
there was more urgency about the way I was manhandled. Surprisingly enough,
though, they didn't march me back outside again. They took me to a corner of
the room, sat me down, and gave me the food they'd promised. But Sky-blue
didn't sit down to eat with me—he went buzzing off like a startled hornet, with
Jacinthe Siani in tow. The guards watched me eat; the fact that they didn't
relax suggested that they'd had stern orders to look after me very carefully.

Long before I'd finished, Sea-blue was back again, and so was an even
older, smaller man with brow-ridges that looked big even on an invader. This
one looked to be a real top man. I carried on eating while they discussed the
situation, because I figured that if I were going to die, I might as well do
it on a full stomach. My appetite had dwindled, though, and I hadn't finished
when they indicated that it was time to go.

I was rushed through the corridors and into the open, where there was a
passenger car waiting on the nearest section of track. I was shoved in,
unkindly. Sky-blue, the old man, and Jacinthe Siani followed, plus a couple of
troopers.

As we got under way, I said to the man with pale blue eyes:
"Wouldn't it be easier to shoot me right here?"

"We're not going to shoot you, Mr. Rousseau," he said.
"You have far too much information that would be valuable to us. But we
can only assume that you are a spy, and hostile to our people."

That sounded ominously like a threat of torture.

"I came back because the Tetrax asked me to come," I told
him, quickly, "but I'm an ambassador as much as a spy. The Tetrax are very
keen to open up a dialogue. They want to make friends, and they don't
understand why you won't respond to their signals. When we get up to the
surface, I'll be more than happy to act as an intermediary, if you wish."

"We're not going to the surface, Mr. Rousseau," he told me.
"We're going in the opposite direction. And we have no desire to hurry in
making contact with anyone outside Asgard. There will be all the time in the
world to deal with the Tetrax, when we are ready. At the moment, much more
pressing matters concern us. What you can tell us will be most interesting—and
you will tell us everything that you know."

By this time I was getting used to being interesting. It seemed that
everyone in the universe was keen to talk to Michael Rousseau, and were
exceedingly reluctant to take no for an answer. I realised that Jacinthe Siani
hadn't just fingered me as a Tetron spy. She'd fingered me as the guy who'd
penetrated the lower levels—the man who'd talked to the super-scientists.

Everything I had seen of the invaders suggested that they were, by
galactic standards, country boys. They must know, by now, just how
unsophisticated they were by galactic standards. They knew that the Tetrax
were a long way ahead of them, although they seemed to be making what efforts
they could to stop the off-world Tetrax finding that out. But Jacinthe Siani
had told them that they had neighbours inside Asgard who were even more
advanced than the Tetrax. That had to be the main reason why they were playing
for time in refusing to talk to the Tetrax. They were hoping to find allies who
would help them keep the universe at bay!

And they were convinced that I could help them, once they had persuaded
me to talk. Unfortunately, they probably weren't going to believe me when I
told them that there wasn't a lot of help I could offer . . . and their
unbelief might cost me dearly if they really got tough in the business of persuasion.