The Forever Hero (65 page)

The heavyset professor trudged from the entry portal into the small sitting room that opened onto the high balcony overlooking the University Lake.

“Who…who…” Her mouth grasped at the words as she saw the curly-haired man sitting in the recliner, sipping from one of her antique wine glasses.

“Professor Dorso, I believe.”

“Uh…who…what are you doing in my home?”

“I apologize for the intrusion.” His voice was light, but compelling, and his hawk-yellow eyes glimmered in the twilight dimness. “I've come to collect.”

“Collect? What in Hades are you referring to?”

“Roughly twenty years ago, you accepted a modest grant from the OER Foundation. In return, you promised to develop a certain line of biologics based on your published works, and to hold that material until called for, up to fifty standard years, if necessary. I have come to collect.”

The professor collapsed into the other chair with a plumping sound, the synthetic leather squeaking under her bulk.

“My god! My god!”

“Did you develop what you promised?” The man's tone was neutral.

“I…worked…just took the drafts…never questioned…but no one ever came…wondered if anyone ever cared.”

He had stood so quickly she had missed the motion, so quickly
she had to repress a shudder and failed. Taking a deep breath, then another, she could smell an acrid odor, a bitter smell, a scent of fear. Her fear.

“Did you ever attempt the work?”

She began to laugh, and the high-pitched tone echoed from one side of the room to the other.

Crack!

The side of her face felt numb from the impact of his hand.

She stared up at the slender man. For some reason, her eyes tried to slide away from his body, and she had to concentrate on his face. Hawk-yellow eyes, short and curly blond hair, sharp nose, a chin neither pointed nor square, but somewhere in between—he could have been either an avenging angel or a demon prince. Or both at once.

“I did what I promised.” Her voice was dull. “You don't know what it cost. You couldn't possibly understand. Don't you see? If I had failed…if I had died…but I didn't. I was right…and I couldn't tell anyone.”

His face softened without losing its alertness. “You will be able to. Before too long. Wish I could have come sooner. All of us pay certain prices. All of us.”

“How soon? When?” wheezed the professor as she struggled to sit upright.

He handed her a thin folder. “Study these specifications. I would like to have your spores packaged that way.”

He held up his hand to forestall her objections before she could voice them.

“The fabrication group you are to use is listed on one of the sheets. I have already set up a line of credit for your use. Your authorization is included, and I will confirm that tomorrow.

“I want it done right. That's why you're in charge. That was also in your contract.”

The woman sank back into her recliner, her eyes half-glassy.

The stranger turned and gazed out at the now-black waters of the University Lake, beyond the dim lights of the balcony, where the twilight submerged into the clouded start of night itself.

After a moment, he touched the panel. The armaglass door slid open, and a hint of a breeze wafted in, nearly scentless, except for the trace of water hyacinths underlying the cool air.

“Shocks…we all get them,” he mused. “Things are not what they seem. Memories from the past appear as real people. People who were real disappear as if they never existed. Work overlooked becomes critical after it seems forgotten…”

Abruptly he turned and stepped back before her.

“Look at the last sheet.”

“I can't see it.”

He laughed, a harsh bark, and touched the light panel, watching as the illumination flooded the room, as she fumbled with the sheets from the folder.

“Oh…oh…that much! Why?”

“Look at the date.”

“Five weeks from now? After twenty years?”

“That's for payment for your work, for your supervision in building the equipment. Turn it over.”

The professor slowly turned over the uncounterfeitable credit voucher drawn on Halsie-Vyr. The amount represented ten years' salary. On the reverse was a short inscription.

She read it once, then again.

“I can? I really could?”

He smiled, faintly, understanding that the recognition would be worth more than the massive credit balance she would receive.

“The actual release form is also in the packet. If you complete the work on schedule, you will be able to publish your work immediately, including all the earlier research results, and the ATI Foundation will undertake its wide-scale distribution.”

Her hands trembled as she methodically went through the sheaves of sheets, looking for the single release form, finally pulling it out, checking the authentications. Her dark brown eyes flickered from the certificate to the stranger and back to the certificate. Back and forth.

He turned again to the lake and beheld the darkness surrounded by the lights of the University Towers. Where the waters were clear of the hyacinths, reflections of the lights twinkled like the stars hidden above the clouds.

“Who are you?” Now her high voice was steady.

“I am who I am, Professor. No more and no less.” He did not turn away from his view of the darkness and the reflected lights in the black waters beneath the balcony.

“You won't tell me.”

“No. Except that I represent the foundation. That's what counts. That and the fact that your work will be spread throughout the galaxy. It will be. My purposes are more immediate and selfish.”

She pursed her lips, and her brow wrinkled, as if she were trying to remember something.

“Even so, it can't be that quick.”

“I know. And we should have recognized the value of what you did earlier. At least we have now.”

He turned back and faced her, looking down as if from an immeasurable height.

“The packet tells you where the packaged materials should be delivered.” He frowned, as if debating with himself. “Would you be interested in other biologically related research? Completing some unfinished projects from notes, fragmentary materials?”

“That would depend.”

“The conditions would be the same. Not that way,” he interrupted himself. “All results could be released within a year of completion, whether or not it was picked up or used. Each project would be separately compensated, and well.”

“Provided that I could start my own organization, with independent facilities, I would be very interested.”

“How much?”

“I don't know.”

“If you're interested, work up a proposal. Send it to the foundation. Probably be accepted. Plenty of work.”

“Who are you?” she asked again.

“I'd rather not say. Just a man with a job to do, and one running out of time.” His lips quirked before he resumed. “Once the applicators are finished, this job is done. If you really are interested in doing more work, send that proposal. If you do, I may see you again.”

“May?”

As she opened her mouth to ask the last question, the slender man had already turned and slipped toward the portal.

“Good night, Professor,” he called as the portal closed behind him.

Slowly, slowly, the woman stood, placing the folder on the table by the recliner, and looking down at the maroon-bordered patterns of the threadbare, but irreplaceable, ancient carpet.

Leaving the folder on the table, she took four long steps to the open door onto her railed balcony. She stood there, the light wind pushing her short brown hair back away from her ears, watching the muddled lights reflected from the blackness of the lake.

After a time, she sighted and turned back to pick up the material laid upon the table. She left the door gaping wide, remembering the feel of the wind in her hair remembering the stranger beholding the lake as if it were a treasure.

“Ser Wadrup?”

Hein Wadrup raised his slightly glazed eyes to the brown uniform of the guard, not bothering to offer a response.

“Ser Wadrup, your counsel has posted the necessary bond.” The guard's magnetic keypass buzzed as he touched it to the lock. The door swung open.

Wadrup frowned.

“I don't have a counsel. Don't have the funds for one. What kind of joke is this? Another one of your ‘build-his-hopes-up specials'?”

“No joke, Ser Wadrup. You make the jokes, it seems. Ser Villinnil himself posted the bond, and that one—he never works on good faith.”

Wadrup struggled off the flat pallet, his legs still rubbery from the going-over he had received from the guards the day before.

The sharp-nosed guard, a man Wadrup had never seen before, turned and led the way down the block.

None of the other prisoners, one each to the uniform cells, two meters by three meters, even looked up.

From what the former graduate student could tell, the guard was retracing the same route along which he had been dragged two weeks earlier.

By the time Wadrup had traversed the less than seventy-five meters to the orderly room, he was breathing heavily.

“That Wadrup?” asked the woman sentry stationed in the riot box outside the armored portal to the orderly room.

“That's him.”

“Ser Wadrup, please enter the portal.”

Wadrup paused. Either it was a subterfuge to get him to walk to his own execution, or he was being freed. He looked at the guard who had fetched him, standing ready with a stunner, and the sentry with a blastcone. Finally, he shrugged and stepped through.

The portal hissed shut behind him, and for the first time in two weeks, he was away from the cold black of the plasteel bars and flat floor pallets.

In the orderly room stood two men—a booking corporal of the
Planetary Police accompanied by a heavyset local wearing a gold-banded travel cloak and a privacy mask.

“Ser Wadrup?” asked the anonymous civilian.

“The same.”

“Could you trouble yourself to tell me the title of your unpublished article on the role of agriculture and government?”

Shaky as his legs felt, Wadrup almost grinned, but as quickly as the hope rose, he pushed it aside.

“I beg your pardon, but do you mean the last one submitted for publication, or the one rejected by the Aljarrad Press, to which I may owe my present residence?”

“Whichever one you sent to one Professor Stilchio.”

Wadrup wanted to scratch his scraggly beard and squint under the unaccustomed brightness of the lights.

“Oh, that one. That didn't have a title, because it was submitted for the ‘Outspeak' column, but the subheading was ‘Prosperity Without Force.' The other one was titled—”

“That will do.” The civilian turned to the police corporal. “I'll accept. Direct all further communications from the Court to my office. The bond is standard, nonrefundable if the charges are dropped.”

“Your print, honored counselor?”

“Certainly. Here is my card, and the verification of the credited bond deposit.”

Wadrup squinted again, fighting dizziness, trying to hold his vision in focus.

The civilian counselor turned.

“Ser Wadrup, if you can manage another fifty meters, my electro-car is waiting for us…”

“I'll manage.”

Wadrup followed the heavier man through another portal and down another corridor, passing Planetary Police as they went. A third portal opened into the main lobby of the University Police Station, from where the police insured order for the complex that included five colleges and three universities. There were no others on Barcelon, and the reasons for such centralization had become clear to Hein Wadrup only after he had been picked up after trying to obtain forged working papers necessary to get a job to raise the funds necessary to leave Barcelon.

Outside the station stood a squarish, high-status electrocar, shining black. The rear door was being held open by a narrow-faced and well-muscled woman in a tight-fitting olive uniform.

Wadrup collapsed through the opening and onto the soft seat.

Almost immediately, the door shut, and the car began to move, smoothly, but with increasing speed.

Wadrup relaxed, too exhausted to hold on to consciousness.

“Wadrup!”

“Just carry him. Get him to the flitter.”

The former student could feel himself being half carried, half lifted out of the car and through the dampness he had come to associate with Barcelon.

Hands strapped him to some sort of seat, and beneath him, he could hear the whine of turbines.

Again he lost consciousness.

When he woke, he could feel the stillness around him, broken only by the faint hiss of a ventilation system.

“Passenger is awake.”

“Thanks.”

“Passenger?” he blurted, even as he tried to sit up in the narrow bunk into which he was strapped.

“Just lie there. Nothing wrong with you that rest, food, and a good physical conditioning course won't solve.”

Wadrup turned toward the voice, but his eyes refused to focus on the blackness that seemed to speak.

“Don't worry about your vision. You can't see me. Partly for your protection, but mostly for mine.”

“I am obviously in your debt, whoever you are, but would you care to offer any explanation?”

“Let us say that there are few enough people around with the capability to think, and it would be a pity if the iron-fisted government of Barcelon or any other water-empire system wasted that ability.”

“You want something.”

“Yes, but not anything with which you would disagree.”

“Are you going to explain?”

“Shortly, but take a sip of this first.”

“Drugs?”

“No. High sustenance broth. Want you thinking more clearly.”

Wadrup watched as what seemed an arm of darkness touched the underside of the bunk, and the harness released. He sat up and took the cup of broth, half-amused that he could not see his benefactor, even while the man stood nearly beside him. From the light baritone timbre of the voice, he assumed that the speaker was male, but who could be sure? Who could be sure of anything these days?

He sipped the broth slowly.

“Be back in a moment. Please stay where you are.”

The graduate student found he could drink less than half the liquid, so shrunken was his stomach. Holding the cup, he surveyed his quarters.

The bunk where he sat propped up was set into metal walls. Across the room to his left was another metal wall, punctuated with a closed and narrow doorway, four lockers, and two sets of four drawers built into the wall. The actual floor space measured less than three by four meters, perhaps as little as two and a half by three. The metallic ceiling was slightly more than two meters overhead.

In the middle of the bulkhead which ran from the foot of the bunk to the wall with the lockers was a squared archway into another compartment, but from the bunk all that Wadrup could see was another indistinct metallic wall, lost in the dimmer light of the adjoining room.

Wadrup puffed out his cheeks in puzzlement. He was missing something obvious. He squinted and lifted the broth to his lips, taking another sip and slow swallow.

“Feeling better?”

“What can I call you? Ser Blackness? I don't like not being able to see people.”

“Well…you could use Blackness, or Hermer. That's not my name, but it means something to me without meaning anything to you.”

“All right, Ser…Hermer. You posted a fifty-thousand-credit bond. You didn't do it for nothing. What do you want?”

“It was a hundred thousand, all told. Fifty for you. Forty for Villinnil, and ten to bribe the police. That's the beginning.”

“Beginning?”

“Beginning. You need a new name, identity, prints, and enough financial backing to continue your work.”

“But what do you want?”

“For you to do what you've been doing. But with more understanding and a little more common sense. You've been acting like most student radicals, assuming you were half playacting, half gadfly.”

Wadrup sighed.

“I'm lost. Really lost. Could you start at the beginning?”

“Suppose so. We've got another five hours.”

“Until when?” The question was out of Wadrup's mouth before he understood what had been nagging him. The room where he was recovering looked like the crew room of an antique scout, the sort of
thing that might have come from the early days of the Empire, or even from the federation.

“Where are you taking me?” Wadrup demanded.

“For some rest and, after that, wherever we decide.”

“Who's we?”

“You and I.”

Wadrup sighed. “Questions aren't getting me anywhere. Why don't you start at the beginning?”

The unfocused black figure pulled up a ship chair and sat down across from Wadrup, who could see now that the man wore a black privacy mask over his face, and that the mask was the only feature that seemed to stay in focus.

“Too complicated. Let me start another way. With a series of questions. Let me ask them all. Don't try to answer.

“First, are there any truly powerful systems which do not produce an agricultural surplus? Second, could any system operate a centralized control of the economy and a large armed forces without control of the communications network and the food supply? Third, why is the Empire discouraging the biological and technical development of what might be called appropriate technology? Fourth, doesn't the use of centralized resources for local agriculture and communications actually reduce the energy and resources available for interstellar communications and travel? Fifth, hasn't history proven that State control is the least effective in maximizing resources for the overall benefit of the people?”

Wadrup took another sip of the broth before clearing his throat.

“I agree with you…I think, but aren't you assuming a great deal?”

“You will have a chance to make that evaluation firsthand. Assume for purposes of discussion that the Empire has resisted biological innovations. Assume that at least one system has attempted to destroy a tree genetically programmed to grow itself into an inexpensive house. Assume that someone has rediscovered the earth-forming techniques of Old Earth that created the biospheres of many Imperial systems, and that the Empire will shortly be hunting those techniques down.”

“Ser Hermer, assuming that such farfetched things have or will happen is asking a great deal, even in view of my deep gratitude for your actions.”

“Ser Wadrup. Think. You were imprisoned because you wrote a rather mild series of papers suggesting that war was not possible with
out the control of agriculture, that social control is linked to central control of the food supply, and that throughout history the people have been better fed when government refrained from meddling with agriculture and other forms of food production.

“Correct me if my reasoning is faulty, Ser Wadrup, but if you were wildly incorrect, why would anyone have bothered with you? Why would the government of Barcelon decide to spend hundreds of personnel hours chasing you long after you had stopped speaking publicly or writing? For no reason at all?”

“They jail people for no reason at all.”

“How many students do you know who disappeared?”

“Plenty.”

“How many? Name more than ten. You can't. Consistently, about ten students a year are jailed…or disappear. You were one of the ten. On a mere whim?”

“But no one paid any attention to my papers or speeches.”

“That's right. And as soon as it looked like someone might, you were jailed.”

Wadrup finished the broth and placed the cup on the ledge behind the bunk.

“So, Ser Hermer, what do you want?”

“I want you to found the ‘Free Hein Wadrup Society.'”

“What?”

“You disappeared on Barcelon. Your body has never been found. There is no record of your leaving the system. The Barcelon government will deny it, but cannot prove you were not disposed of. The last record of your existence that was open to public verification was your time in jail. If the Barcelon government denies your death, it will seem as though they lie. If they say nothing, they can be charged with ignoring their own unpleasant actions.”

“But it's suicide to go back to Barcelon, even with a new identity.”

“Who said you were going back? You'll tour the systems that permit free speech, ostensibly agitating for the release of Hein Wadrup, telling why the Barcelon government has secretly imprisoned poor Hein Wadrup. Because they're totalitarian despots who control their planet through their control of the food supply. You will praise, faintly, more enlightened planets, while saying that it's still too bad that there isn't a better way to produce quality food for people.”

“That's all you want?”

“Ser Wadrup, it seems a great deal to me. You give up your name, your family. You give up any fixed home for years to come. In return,
I supply the necessary funding and the factual information to supplement what you already know.”

“Hardly a great loss for me. My family is still working in the pump works on New Glascow, and I haven't been home in nearly ten years. I never had enough money to concentrate on what I believe in.” Wadrup paused. “I'm not sure I like the charade of freeing myself.”

“If you have a better way of getting the message across without ending up in prison again, I'm willing to listen.” The man in black stood. “I'll be back in a moment.”

Wadrup listened. He could hear another voice, impersonally feminine, cool, clear, nearly icy. He shivered. Compared to that tone, the man in black seemed to radiate heat.

“Interception course. Probability approaches point seven.”

“Lift one radian. See what they do.”