The Currents of Space (14 page)

“Now.” Fife put his blunt fingers together. “I did not bring you all together for the reading of a crackpot letter. That, I hope, is understood. Actually I am afraid we have an important problem on our hands. First of all, I ask myself, why bother only with me? To be sure, I am the wealthiest of the Squires, but alone, I control only a third of the kyrt trade. Together the five of us control it all. It is easy to make five cello-copies of a letter, as easy as it is to make one.”

“You use too many words,” muttered Bort “What do you want?”

Balle’s withered and colorless lips moved in a dull gray face. “He wants to know, my Lord of Bort, if we have received copies of this letter.”

“Then let him say so.”

“I thought I was saying so,” said Fife evenly. “Well?”

They looked at one another, doubtfully or defiantly, as the personality of each dictated.

Rune spoke first. His pink forehead was moist with discrete drops of perspiration and he lifted a soft square of kyrt to mop the dampness out of the creases between the folds of fat that ran semicircles from ear to ear.

He said, “I wouldn’t know, Fife. I can ask my secretaries, who are all Sarkites, by the way. After all, even if such a letter had reached my office, it would have been considered a—what is it we say?—a crank letter. It would never have come to me. That’s certain. It’s only your own peculiar secretarial system that kept you from being spared this trash yourself.”

He looked about and smiled, his gums gleaming wetly between his lips above and below artificial teeth of chrome-steel. Each individual tooth was buried deeply, knit to the jawbone, and stronger than any tooth of mere enamel could ever be. His smile was more frightening than his frown could possibly be.

Balle shrugged. “I imagine that what Rune has just said can hold for all of us.”

Steen tittered. “I never read mail. Really, I never do. It’s such a bore, and such loads come in that I just wouldn’t have any
time.
” He looked about him earnestly, as though it were really necessary to convince the company of this important fact.

Bort said, “Nuts. What’s wrong with you all? Afraid of Fife? Look here, Fife, I don’t keep any secretary because I don’t need anyone between myself and my business. I got a copy of that letter and I’m sure these three did too. Want to know what I did with mine? I threw it into the disposal chute. I’d advise you to do the same with yours. Let’s stop this. I’m tired.”

His hand reached upward for the toggle switch that would cut contact and release his image from its presence in Fife.

“Wait, Bort.” Fife’s voice rang out harshly. “Don’t do that. I’m not done. You wouldn’t want us to take measures and come to decisions in your absence. Surely you wouldn’t.”

“Let us linger, Squire Bort,” urged Rune in his softer tones, though his little fat-buried eyes were not particularly amiable. “I wonder why Squire Fife seems to worry so about a trifle.”

“Well,” said Balle, his dry voice scratching at their ears, “perhaps Fife thinks our letter-writing friend has information about a Trantorian attack on Florina.”

“Pooh,” said Fife with scorn. “How would he know, whoever he is? Our secret service is adequate, I assure you. And how would he stop the attack if he received our properties as bribe? No, no. He speaks of the destruction of Florina as though he meant physical destruction and not political destruction.”

“It’s just too
insane
,” said Steen.

“Yes?” said Fife. “Then you don’t see the significance of the events of the last two weeks?”

“Which particular events?” asked Bort.

“It seems a Spatio-analyst has disappeared. Surely you’ve heard of that.”

Bort looked annoyed and in no way soothed. “I’ve heard from Abel of Trantor about it. What of it? I know nothing of Spatio-analysts.”

“At least you’ve read a copy of the last message to his base on Sark before he turned up missing.”

“Abel showed it to me. I paid no attention to it.”

“What about the rest of you?” Fife’s eyes challenged them one by one. “Your memory goes back a week?”

“I read it,” said Rune. “I remember it too. Of course! It spoke of destruction also. Is that what you’re getting at?”

“Look here,” Steen said shrilly, “it was full of nasty hints that made no sense. Really, I do hope we’re not going to discuss it now. I could scarcely get rid of Abel, and it was just before dinner, too. Most distressing. Really.”

“There’s no help for it, Steen,” said Fife with more than a trace of impatience. (What could one do with a thing like Steen?) “We must speak of it again. The Spatio-analyst spoke of the destruction of Florina. Coincident with his disappearance, we receive messages also threatening the destruction of Florina.
Is
that coincidence?”

“You are saying that the Spatio-analyst sent the blackmailing message?” whispered old Balle.

“Not likely. Why say it first in his own name, then anonymously?”

“When he spoke of it at first,” said Balle, “he was communicating with his district office, not with us.”

“Even so. A blackmailer deals with no one but his victim if he can help it.”

“Well then?”

“He has disappeared. Call the Spatio-analyst honest. But he broadcast dangerous information. He is now in the hands of others who are
not
honest and they are blackmailers.”

“What others?”

Fife sat grimly back in his chair, his lips scarcely moving. “You ask me seriously? Trantor.”

Steen shivered. “Trantor!” His high-pitched voice broke.

“Why not? What better way to gain control of Florina? It’s one of the prime aims of their foreign policy. And if they can do it without war, so much the better for them. Look here, if we accede to this impossible ultimatum, Florina is theirs. They offer us a little”—he brought two fingers close together before his face—“but how long shall we keep even that?

“On the other hand, suppose we ignore this, and, really, we have no choice. What would Trantor do then? Why, they will spread rumors of an imminent end of the world to the Florinian peasants. As their rumors spread the peasants will panic, and what can follow but disaster? What force can make a man work if he thinks the end of the world will come tomorrow? The harvest will rot. The warehouses will empty.”

Steen lifted a finger to smooth the coloring on one cheek, as he glanced at a mirror in his own apartments, out of range of the receptor-cube.

He said, “I don’t think that would harm us much. If the supply goes down, wouldn’t the price go up? Then after a while it would turn out that Florina was still there and the peasants
would go back to work. Besides, we could always threaten to clamp down on exports. Really, I don’t see how any cultured world could be expected to live without kyrt. Oh, it’s King Kyrt all right. I think this is a fuss about nothing.”

He threw himself into an attitude of boredom, one finger placed delicately upon his cheek.

Balle’s old eyes had been closed through all of this last. He said, “There can be no price increases now. We’ve got them at absolute ceiling height.”

“Exactly,” said Fife. “It won’t come to serious disruption anyway. Trantor waits for any sign of disorder on Florina. If they could present the Galaxy with the prospect of a Sark that was unable to guarantee kyrt shipments, it would be the most natural thing in the universe for them to move in to maintain what they call order and to keep the kyrt coming. And the danger would be that the free worlds of the Galaxy would probably play along with them for the sake of the kyrt. Especially if Trantor agreed to break the monopoly, increase production and lower prices. Afterward it would be another story, but meanwhile, they would get their support.

“It’s the only logical way that Trantor could possibly grip Florina. If it were simple force, the free Galaxy outside the Trantorian sphere of influence would join us in sheer self-protection.”

Rune said, “How does the Spatio-analyst fit in this? Is he necessary? If your theory is adequate it should explain that.”

“I think it does. These Spatio-analysts are unbalanced for the most part, and this one has developed some”—Fife’s fingers moved, as though building a vague structure—“some crazy theory. It doesn’t matter what. Trantor can’t let it come out, or the Spatio-analytic Bureau would quash it. To seize the man and learn the details would, however, give them something that would probably possess a surface validity to non-specialists. They could use it, make it sound real. The Bureau is a Trantorian puppet, and their denials, once the story is spread by way of scientific rumormongering, would never be forceful enough to overtake the lie.”

“It sounds too complicated,” said Bort. “Nuts. They can’t let it come out, but then again they will let it come out.”

“They can’t let it come out as a serious scientific announcement, or even reach the Bureau as such,” said Fife patiently. “They can let it leak out as a rumor. Don’t you see that?”

“What’s old Abel doing wasting his time looking for the Spatio-analyst then?”

“You expect him to advertise the fact that he’s got him? What Abel does and what Abel seems to be doing are two different things.”

“Well,” said Rune, “if you’re right, what are we to do?”

Fife said, “We have learned the danger, and that is the important thing. We’ll find the Spatio-analyst if we can. We must keep all known agents of Trantor under strict scrutiny without really interfering with them. From their actions we may learn the course of coming events. We must suppress thoroughly any propaganda on Florina to the effect of the planet’s destruction. The first faint whisper must meet with instant counteraction of the most violent sort.

“Most of all, we must remain united. That is the whole purpose of this meeting, in my eyes; the forming of a common front. We all know about continental autonomy and I’m sure there is no one more insistent upon it than I am. That is, under ordinary circumstances. These are not ordinary circumstances. You see that?”

More or less reluctantly, for continental autonomy was not a thing to be abandoned lightly, they saw that.

“Then,” said Fife, “we will wait for the second move.”

That had been a year ago. They had left and there had followed the strangest and most complete fiasco ever to have fallen to the lot of the Squire of Fife in a moderately long and a more than moderately audacious career.

No second move followed. There were no further letters to any of them. The Spatio-analyst remained unfound, while
Trantor maintained a desultory search. There was no trace of apocalyptic rumors on Florina, and the harvesting and processing of kyrt continued its smooth pace.

The Squire of Rune took to calling Fife at weekly intervals.

“Fife,” he would call. “Anything new?” His fatness would quiver with delight and thick chuckles would force their way out of his gullet.

Fife took it bleakly and stolidly. What could he do? Over and over again he sifted the facts. It was no use. Something was missing. Some vital factor was missing.

And then it all began exploding at once, and he had the answer. He
knew
he had the answer, and it was what he had
not
expected.

He had called a meeting once again. The chronometer now said two twenty-nine.

They were beginning to appear now. Bort first, lips compressed and a rough hangnailed finger rasping against the grain of his grizzly-stubbled cheek. Then Steen, his face freshly washed clear of its paint and presenting a pallid, unhealthy appearance. Balle, indifferent and tired, his cheeks sunken, his armchair well cushioned, a glass of warm milk at his side. Lastly Rune, two minutes late, wet-lipped and sulky, sitting in the night once again. This time his lights were dimmed to the point where he was a hazy bulk sitting in a cube of shadow which Fife’s lights could not have illuminated though they had had the power of Sark’s sun.

Fife began. “Squires! Last year I speculated on a distant and complicated danger. In so doing I fell into a trap. The danger exists, but it is not distant. It is near us, very near. One of you already knows what I mean. The others will find out shortly.”

“What
do
you mean?” asked Bort shortly.

“High treason!” shot back Fife.

Myrlyn Terens was not a man of action. He told himself that as an excuse, since now, leaving the spaceport, he found his mind paralyzed.

He had to pick his pace carefully. Not too slowly, or he would seem to be dawdling. Not too quickly, or he would seem to be running. Just briskly, as a patroller would walk, a patroller who was about his business and ready to enter his ground-car.

If only he could enter a ground-car! Driving one, unfortunately, did not come within the education of a Florinian, not even a Florinian Townman, so he tried to think as he walked and could not. He needed silence and leisure.

And he felt almost too weak to walk. He might not be a man of action but he
had
acted quickly now for a day and a night and part of another day. It had used up his lifetime’s supply of nerve.

Yet he dared not stop.

If it were night he might have had a few hours to think. But it was early afternoon.

If he could drive a ground-car he could put the miles between himself and the City. Just long enough to think a bit before deciding on the next step. But he had only his legs.

If he could think. That was it. If he could think. If he could
suspend all motion, all action. If he could catch the universe between instants of time, order it to halt, while he thought things through. There must be some way.

He plunged into the welcome shade of Lower City. He walked stiffly, as he had seen the patrollers walk. He swung his shock-stick in a firm grip. The streets were bare. The natives were huddling in their shacks. So much the better.

The Townman chose his house carefully. It would be best to choose one of the better ones, one with patches of colored plastic briquets and polarized glass in the windows. The lower orders were sullen. They had less to lose. An “upper man” would be falling over himself to help.