The Long Result (9 page)

On the screen connected to the chlorine ward appeared a familiar figure, moving weakly but able to stand: Shvast, as
promised. He began to indicate with gestures what the suited surgeons should do.

Gobind’s face reappeared on the phone and unemotionally reported that if the surgeons could keep the casualties alive another hour, they should be able to synthesize the haemoglobin equivalent by then. And vanished as before.

‘Another hour,’ bin Ishmael muttered. ‘Allah, what a job! It’ll be a miracle if it happens. I tell you, Vincent!’ he added fiercely to me. ‘I’m going to have an inquiry into this business. I’m going to raise such a stink as there hasn’t been in fifty years. I want to know who in your damned Bureau landed us in this mess, handing us a group of aliens with no biological data, no medicine, no doctor in charge from their own planet… Some heads are going to roll, believe
me.’

‘I’m not on the alien contact side,’ I protested. ‘Don’t start taking it out on me!’

‘No, you’re at least here – though what help that is I don’t really know. I can’t find your boss, I can’t find the head of alien contact, the woman with the impossible name —’

‘Indowegiatuk,’ Jacky supplied. It meant something in an Eskimo dialect, they said; I’d never found out what.

‘That’s her,’ bin Ishmael agreed. He gazed at the vision screen again, then burst out, ‘Do you realize we’re having to guess the function of the organs in those bodies? If they die under the knife through even an honest mistake, what do you give for the chance of friendly relations with the Tau Cetians? They—’

A booming noise came from the speaker under the screen, making the objects on bin Ishmael’s desk rattle. He snapped his eyes shut, wincing.

‘That’s a scream. We have no anaesthetic for them yet, of course – we’ve just been praying they’d stay unconscious till we patched them up. Gobind! Gobind!’

But it was Helga who came to the phone in the analysis lab, holding up a flask of something blue and sluggish.

‘Anaesthetic,’ she said. ‘We think. Have it tried on the worst hurt one first in case there’s an allergic reaction or something.’

Jacky leaned close to me to whisper, as bin Ishmael issued orders about this new development. ‘Roald, did he only want someone from BuCult here so he could snap at us?’

‘Use your head,’ I whispered back. ‘Suppose one of the aliens recovers enough to complain, and there’s no one here to make the official apologies!’

‘I thought of that. But how are we going to tackle it? We can’t just say, “Sorry someone tried to murder you!”’

‘What?’ bin Ishmael said, turning away from the screen. ‘Don’t you believe it was attempted murder? I do! The evidence is absolutely —’

‘Just a second,’ I interrupted. ‘We can’t tell the Tau Cetians that, can we? It’ll make the Ark staff look bad, I’m afraid, but we positively
have
to say it was a mechanical fault – the valves got crossed, or however it might happen.’

‘I guess so,’ bin Ishmael conceded. ‘Though covering up for some bastard’s —’

‘Sssht! Don’t forget Shvast speaks Anglic,’ I said in horror. ‘He’s got to see we’re doing all in our power to put things right. Ah – get him a sight of the rescue workers, for instance; it’s an impressive operation you’re mounting.’

‘Shvast’s clever enough to tell if we’re faking.’

‘What’s going on right now is
not
faked – though some fakery might be a good idea, at that.’ My mind was in top gear now. ‘From what I saw of him earlier I think Ambassador Vroazh is the type to appreciate a scapegoat. Let’s stage what they’d regard as adequate punishment for some technician’s carelessness; pick someone who’s due for transfer or retirement, and act it out where they can see it.’

‘Yes, we might manage it,’ bin Ishmael said thoughtfully. ‘There’s an atmosphere engineer who’s put in for transfer to Australia…’

The surgeons broke in to report success with the anaesthetic and to demand quantities sufficient for all the unconscious aliens. Jacky and I sat silent till bin Ishmael had dealt with this request.

The moment he could catch the doctor’s attention again, though, Jacky spoke up. ‘Look, this business of calling it a murder attempt – I’ve been thinking. Even the Bureau didn’t know before last night that Tau Cetians were due to arrive. So how could a murderer —?’

‘Doesn’t matter,’ bin Ishmael grunted. ‘You go look at the airpipe, and if you can see how it could have been accidentally fractured, I’ll
eat
it. Every yard of it. And who said it was necessarily meant to be the Tau Cetians who died? My guess is that any aliens would do as well.’

‘But who’d do such a thing?’ Jacky demanded.

I almost wanted to scream at bin Ishmael; I knew what his answer would be, and I knew he’d aim it at me, not Jacky.

‘I would suggest the kind of people who crash alien wagons – who think aliens are inferior beings – who claim men have a divine right to rule the universe—’

‘The Stars Are For Man League?’ I said sourly, and to my amazement Jacky swung his dark head.

‘The bunch they think wrecked Anovel’s rocket?’ he blurted.

‘They did that too?’ bin Ishmael exclaimed.

‘Oh, for—!’ I could have wrung Jacky’s neck. I didn’t know where he’d picked up that wild idea – perhaps from Klabund who apparently subscribed to it. ‘Jacky, a moment ago you were questioning that this here is a murder attempt – now you’re tossing wild rumours around like purest gospel. I think we’d better leave bin Ishmael alone. Maybe we can look at this airpipe for ourselves, hm?’

I glanced at bin Ishmael. ‘Which way do we go?’

‘Oh – through G block and straight out. It’s not under gas any longer.’

The rooms the Tau Cetians had so briefly occupied had been flushed out with moistened air, and we picked our way through charred alien furniture made of substances resistant to chlorine but ready fuel for the more reactive oxygen. Firemen were playing sprays of inert gas on the few still-smouldering embers.

On the far side of the room where I had earlier met Shvast, Vroazh and their companions, an emergency access lock stood ajar. A police floodlight was focused on the opening, and as we went through to the exterior a man in police black came forward to challenge us harshly. We explained our business, and he turned with a curt, ‘Follow me!’

Through a tangle of forensic equipment he led us to a point on the outer wall of the block where four square metal pipes, supported at intervals of a yard by F-shaped brackets, ran at waist-height towards the gas-generating plant. Half a dozen men clustered here, scrutinizing the pipes carefully. At first I thought they must be examining the unharmed section, for on the side away from the wall – which of course we could see as we approached – the metal was apparently unmarked. But the policeman asked the workers to stand back for a moment, and gestured for us to look at the side nearer the wall.

A jagged hole had been torn in the pipe, a good three inches across.

‘But this is fantastic!’ Jacky said, stepping back. ‘How was it done?’

‘I wish someone would tell us,’ the policeman admitted. ‘Look, the pipes are only inches from the wall yet all the damage is on the inner side. And the wall’s untouched, except for a few splinters of the pipe itself. Any ideas?’

‘A – a bomb?’ I hazarded.

‘Out of the question,’ said one of the men working on the pipe. He wore a night-vision helmet and carried a black-light projector. ‘A bomb leaves traces – radioactivity or combustion compounds. So far the only substances we’ve found are due to the action of air on the gas in the pipe. Not a bomb.’

‘Someone could have cut it with a torch,’ Jacky suggested. Even I could see that didn’t hold water; the metal had been torn outwards from within the pipe.

The policeman said, ‘The only possibility, I’d have said, is a solid shot weighing about half a pound. But if you can tell me how to fire a bullet at the side of the pipe nearer the wall without damaging the side farther away, I’d be delighted to know. Anyhow, what became of it? There’s nothing scattered round here but the metal from the pipe.’

‘Why are the pipes exposed like this?’ Jacky asked.

A worried middle-aged woman in an airsuit – one of the staff technicians, presumably – answered him. ‘So we can service them while the accommodation’s in use. There are four pipes because the whole system is in duplicate … We switched to the spare pair as soon as we found the hole, but it wasn’t soon enough.’

‘Have you an aesthograph with you?’ the policeman demanded of the man in the night-vision helmet.

‘Think we need aesthograms on this?’ the man countered, not looking round.

‘Never can tell what may come in useful.’ He turned to the woman. ‘Do you keep such things here?’

‘Surely – I’ll get you one.’ She hurried off in search of one of the complex devices used in preparing Starhomer tactile-true flat reproductions like the one I’d found on the Tau Cetian file this morning. Rounding the corner of the building, she almost collided with a man looking for us.

‘Mr Vincent!’ he called. ‘Dr bin Ishmael wants you to come and have a word with Shvast, please!’

At sixteen next afternoon, my mind still seemed to be stuck in the small hours of the morning. I was due to take the midnight express to England and spend the week-end with Micky Torres; I wished furiously the clock would spin around and get the day over with.

We’d fed Shvast the story I’d suggested. I had no idea if it had convinced him, or whether he’d merely let himself accept it. And we couldn’t tell from what he later said to Vroazh and the others. The Starhomers might have saved themselves some trouble by teaching the aliens Anglic instead of learning a native language, but it made it impossible to eavesdrop. Jacky and I had got away at about three, though poor Helga had still been working. Some progress had been made on a transfusion-medium for the Tau Cetians by then, and today’s latest news was that all were expected to survive.

Indeed, by now they probably felt better than I did. I’d got home in time to catch some sleep, but I hadn’t been able to turn my mind off. I’d lain awake worrying. Then all of today I’d had to face a succession of interrogations, first from the alien contact staff – wanting to know subtle points about Tau Cetian behaviour which I didn’t have the training to spot and remember – then from Tinescu.

And that was where I’d fetched up against something I simply didn’t understand. Although the inquiry bin Ishmael was threatening would surely lay the blame for the mishandling of the Tau Cetian affair at his door – the Chief of Bureau was ultimately responsible for anything done by his subordinates – I’d acquired the definite impression Tinescu had had no control over the situation.

How was that possible? BuCult was supposed to be
in charge
of all cultural exchange, taking orders from no one
except the Minister for Extra-Terrestrial Affairs. We should have laid down inflexible terms to the Starhomers, saying what we wanted them to do before linking the Tau Cetians into our interstellar web of information exchange.

And it hadn’t happened that way.

Weary, mystified to bafflement, I dialled for the sixteen o’clock newscast. All five of the Tau Cetian delegation were on the way to recovery – good. The event was flagged as an accident – better still Inspector Klabund had been assigned to link up three investigations which now became
sub judice
and not open to public comment: the rocket crash, the wrecking of our alien wagon, and the negligence, stress
negligence,
which had endangered the Tau Cetians.

I whistled, not sure that was wise. The obvious associations would be made in too many people’s minds. But if that was how the government wanted to handle it, I couldn’t argue.

I was out of it now, as far as I could tell.

What I wasn’t out of was this disagreement with Patricia. I still couldn’t see what I’d done to make her so angry. I’d called her home; she wasn’t there. I’d called Area Met, where she worked, and she was ‘unavailable for personal calls.’

Damn!

I tried once more to lose myself in my work. Usually I managed this easily. Today, though, the affairs of peaceful, quasi-primitive Viridis, with its city-state democracy and communal music-making, seemed drab and insignificant. I could imagine human civilisation enduring indefinitely without sculpture in tactile-true plastic, their latest idea, but the possibility of making Tau Cetians hostile to man was fearful.

I was determinedly forging through an analysis of a new departure in Viridian slang, when I had a completely unexpected visitor: the Starhomer courier, Kay Lee Wong.

She wore a mannish cape and breeches of dark red, and her almond-eyed face was strikingly pretty – so much so, I almost failed to recognize her. Her rest had wiped out the masking strain of yesterday. I waved her to a chair.

‘I came to apologize for my behaviour yesterday,’ she began.

I smiled. ‘There’s no need. I’m coming to know what you must have felt like. I had no sleep last night, and this afternoon I’ve been saying things to my boss which – well, skip that. But what you said to me was nothing in comparison.’

‘That’s very kind of you. I suppose you must understand my special difficulties better than most people. You’re responsible for the social assay material from Starhome, aren’t you?’

I nodded.

‘Then I imagine if you went to Starhome, you’d find everything quite familiar.’

‘Oh – hardly. Though it would be easier for me, probably, than it is for a Starhomer visiting Earth.’

For a moment her face hardened, as though she took the remark as personal criticism. Then she relaxed and gave a soft laugh. ‘Yes, the free-and-easy surroundings of Earth are a bit unsettling to someone who’s used to Starhome. There’s a – well – a kind of dedication at home, that makes everyone very disciplined. But of course this hardly applies to someone like yourself who’s in a demanding job.’

Mentally I cocked my ears. She hadn’t just dropped in for a social chat, then; it was unlikely behaviour from a Starhomer on the face of it, and now I was sure. I said, fishing, ‘Your system certainly has some notable successes to commend it. The
Algenib,
for instance. I was discussing her last night with a spacecrew officer who watched you land.’