The World Swappers (9 page)

CHAPTER XVII

“At a rough guess,” Counce had said thoughtfully, “it will take us four months to visit every world we intend sending Ymirans to–which is to say
every
world. That allows for traveling time.”

Bassett had given him a cynical smile. He had come to accept Counce as a declared enemy turned temporary ally. The understanding between them was complete, if peculiar. He had said, “You could shorten that period considerably with your matter transmitter.”

Counce had shaken his head in amusement. “For one thing,” he lied straight-faced, “we haven’t the power resources to use it regularly. For another, I’ve no doubt at all that you would then proceed to pack your entourage with technicians who would seize every chance of inspecting the machinery. You’ve got a Metchnikov driver in your private ship–that will be quite fast enough for our purposes.”

So it was done.

There was no doubt that Bassett’s reputation had spread since he achieved his position of influence on Earth; certainly the respect with which the Grand Lama of K’ung-fu-tse received his visitor was considerable.

“They are indeed said to be diligent and industrious on Ymir,” the Grand Lama conceded. “From all accounts, they are compelled to be by the harsh nature of their world.”

He glanced complacently at the pleasant expanse of greenery about him; he held audience in the open air, under a sacred tree imported from Earth, with two attendants fanning him.

“
But,
” he added, “they are also reported to be hard and intolerant. I doubt that they will harmonize with my people.”

Smoothly, with considered reasoning, the visitors demolished his misgivings. They oiled the bargain with certain valuable technical consignments which were badly needed on K’ung-fu-tse. And when they departed, the Grand Lama congratulated Bassett on his desire to assist his fellow men.

The President of Boreas had had dealings with Bassett before, on a slightly different but essentially similar question. They got nothing better out of him than a promise of careful consideration, but they could tell from the avaricious look in his eyes that he would come around sooner or later.

After all, a third of a million Ymirans could be given some land nobody else would think fit for use, and what they did after that was their own affair.

“Why the devil do they want to leave Ymir?” snapped the Tryant of Zeus. “Don’t tell me,” he added, holding up a carefully manicured hand. “This is a bunch that’s finally gotten sick of living like fakirs between icebergs and mountains. A third of a million is a hell of a lot to wake up to sanity all at once, though.”

“It seems to be a movement which has been growing for a considerable time,” Bassett explained.

“Must have been! Well, what’s your interest in the matter?”

Bassett gave a conspiratorial smile. “Three hundred thousand people who’ve decided that mortifying the flesh isn’t such a good idea after all are going to want to buy a lot of worldly comforts,” he explained. “A lot of them, of course, they’ll buy on Zeus, but I’d venture to suggest that I could arrange imports, dutiable imports …”

The Tyrant gave an emphatic nod. This was his language. He called for paper and a pen to sign an agreement.

And so it went At the end of four months they had organized homes on decent planets for all but half a million of the people of Ymir.

“The rest Earth can take, right?” Counce demanded of Bassett. The other shrugged.

“Probably. However, it seems to me that we’ve gone ahead rather rapidly. Do the Ymirans know yet that there are these new homes waiting for them?”

“Not yet,” said Counce with a hint of grimness. “But I bet there are a lot of them who wish they were already off the planet. …”

The next time the
Amsterdam
called on Ymir, Jaroslav was not at home. Puzzled, Captain Leeuwenhoek confronted the elders of Festerburg and demanded to know what had happened.

“No one knows,” the elders assured him, desperately attempting to convey their sincerity. Leeuwenhoek looked them over contemptuously from his much greater height.
Runts,
he reflected.

“All right!” he snapped. “We warned you that if anything happened to Jaroslav Dubin, we’d be happy to forget about this icebox of a world. I call here out of charity more than anything else, and that goes for my colleagues too. Last time I was here, you were trying to frame Jaroslav on some charge involving a girl. I guess you realized we’d see through a fake like that one, but I should have thought experienced liars like you could come up with a better answer than a plain denial.”

The elders exchanged cowed glances. In the holds of the
Amsterdam
was a supply of live sperm for their next season’s cattle; bulls fed on the exiguous diet of Ymiran cattle-food were more often sterile than not. There was also cold-resistant wheat, which they badly needed.

But their protests were in vain, and in a towering rage Leeuwenhoek headed for space with his cargo still aboard. He knew plenty of other markets for what he carried. His parting shot was a promise never to come back.

Shaken, the elders called their custodians and set them to searching for Jaroslav Dubin. They had never expected to
want
to see the man. But the truth–the surprising truth–was that until Leeuwenhoek accused them of making away with Jaroslav Dubin, they had no inkling that he was not where he always was: in his sinfully luxurious home.

They turned Festerburg upside down; hunted his house from floor to roof. Even to discover his dead body would have meant that they could plead with the space traders. But they found nothing.

Jaroslav had vanished off the face of Ymir.

As one of the elders remarked, it looked as though the man had dug himself a hole, climbed in, and pulled the hole in after him. He had no idea how literally exact that was. Jaroslav had climbed through his transfax, and had pulled that off Ymir when he had used it, so the parallel was in fact precise. But all the puzzled searchers found was an empty cavity leading nowhere.

Their puzzlement turning rapidly to apprehension, they awaited the visit of the next spaceship, and this time got their disclaimers in first. The captain of the ship was as adamant in disbelieving them as Leeuwenhoek had been, and he too departed without unloading, swearing he would not be back.

“They cannot all say the same!” the more optimistic elders declared.

But they did. And within two months the specter of famine hung gaunt and ghastly across the face of Ymir.

In vain the elders tried to argue that it was a gift from heaven, enabling the weak-willed to fulfill the original aims of the founding fathers. That line cut no ice with parents whose ears were sore with the continual crying of hungry children; with mothers who could not feed their newborn babies; with adults whose conversation was always being interrupted by the grumbling of their unfilled bellies.

The most indignant of all the population were the young people–those between childhood and maturity. Now the fruits of Jaroslav’s campaign of subversion became plain to the appalled elders. Boys and girls whom everyone had believed well-behaved and strictly moral openly admitted that they had been friendly with Jaroslav and that they believed he was right and the elders wrong. Moreover they began openly to accuse the elders of having done away with Jaroslav and thus of having brought this terrible situation about.

Then the visits from spaceships stopped altogether. The word must have gone around. And the Ymirans realized that they were totally isolated and completely helpless, for they were too poor as a planet ever to have acquired even a single spaceship of their own. They had no means of getting a message to another inhabited planet except at the tardy velocity of light; long before an SOS had been received, they would have starved to death.

Even the elders, faced with this prospect, were unable to maintain that they wanted to reap the rewards of righteousness forthwith.

Now the long-pent hatreds began to burst forth. Parents could no longer cow their children; gangs of young people began to roam the streets, stoning the houses of the elders and jumping any custodians who ventured to interfere. “If they’re going to starve us to death, we might as well get back at them first!” they maintained, and proceeded to beat the custodians savagely with their own night sticks.

But their cries grew weaker as hunger grew stronger.

Those who had thought to hoard a little extra food, and were unwise enough not to be careful about pretending to be hungry when among strangers, found their stocks rifled; sometimes they were publicly execrated or spattered with filth. And then there came the day when a half-eaten child’s body was found on the street. …

“Never again will an Ymiran be able to pretend he is any better than another man,” said Counce, stony-faced. He raised his eyes to meet Bassett’s. “I think we can now begin.”

Bassett nodded. The spaceship in which he and Counce were traveling was only one of a huge fleet circling Ymir–these were the kind of resources Counce had chiefly needed to implement his careful plan. Ships and men. And power.

Now, at Bassett’s command, the ships broached air and made towards their landing points. The most expert pilots to be found had been enlisted for this task; only a fortunate few would be able to set down at the regular port in Festerburg, and the rest would have to make do with what flat ground they could find.

To the frightened people of Ymir, the arrival of the ships was like a miracle. When they had been sure they would die out, unknown, they found life promised them anew. Their directionless anger subsided; they looked again to their elders, and it was a quiet crowd that surrounded the first of the ships to put down.

Counce went down with the group headed for Festerburg, since it was the capital of the planet. He had half expected the ships to be stormed by a mob demanding to be fed; as it turned out, the Ymirans seemed unable to convince themselves the ships were really there, and did not want to risk destroying the illusion.

He came out of the lock of the ship which had brought him and found a group of elders, drawn of face, drab of dress, waiting a few paces ahead of the silent crowd of watchers. He looked down on them thoughtfully.

“We have brought food,” he said, and an amplifier carried his words to every corner of the crowd. A ragged, half-hearted cheer broke out, died swiftly.

“We have not brought much, and we shall bring no more,” Counce asserted. “We–all men–have better things to do than to give charity to fools.”

A slow grumbling sound; it, like the cheer, died swiftly.

“Yes, you’re fools! With a score or more pleasant worlds to choose from, planets on which men can live like men instead of like burrowing animals, your ancestors condemned you to dependence on the charity of others. Because this world is not fit for human beings to live on!”

A boy of eighteen in the front rank of the crowd jumped forward a yard and shook his fist at the small group of elders. “It’s the truth!” he screamed.

“You’ve had long enough to play at being a chosen people,” said Counce. Now he was looking straight down at the elders again, and they were shuffling their feet on the cold ground. “I think the last few weeks have taught you that you are proud, stupid, and stiff-necked. But all your pride was not proof against the complaining of your bellies.”

The elders did not reply.

“So we are going to give you a last chance,” Counce concluded. “Because we do not think that anyone who acts differently from ourselves is necessarily an enemy, we have gone to much trouble and much difficulty, first, to bring you food enough to keep you alive for a day or two, and secondly, to arrange homes for you on decent planets with decent climates. I’m giving you a choice now: stay and starve, or leave Ymir.”

He waited. But not for long.

After that, although a few fanatics maintained it was better to stay and starve, there was negligible opposition, and the ships opened their holds and discharged their cargoes. The fanatics warned those who accepted the food that they were selling their souls; the answers they got revealed that despite the rigors of Ymiran discipline a surprisingly complete vocabulary of abuse had survived.

But the spaceships did not only carry food; part of their cargo consisted of knocked-down spaceships hulls. With drivers, emergency rations, and oxygen-generators, they could shift Ymirans by the thousand, cramped, still hungry, but hopeful.

As the reports came in from the four other cities on the planet, and revealed that the situation in all of them was the same, Bassett glanced at Counce.

“Your agents on Ymir seem to have been remarkably efficient,” he said, drawing his eyebrows together. “I’d never have credited that such a response could be obtained from Ymirans.”

Counce answered dryly, “Maybe you didn’t give sufficient credit to the power of the basic instincts. They don’t have hungry men on Earth these days, do they?”

Bassett fell silent again; his eyes seemed to be looking into the future. Doubtless he still imagined he would be able to carry his schemes to fruition; doubtless he was picturing the future in which he would be the acknowledged unifier of the human race.

Fortunately for the human race–and for the Others–he was imagining the wrong future.

CHAPTER XVIII

“i don’t understand,” said Lecoq savagely. “There hasn’t been
any
trouble! These Ymirans have just been swallowed up on every world we’ve taken them to–gone as meekly as lambs to the slaughter. Only there hasn’t been any slaughter.”

“There’s no clue to where this man Counce went, I suppose,” Bassett said meditatively. He made it a statement, not a question.

Outside, a dull afternoon had blurred the view of Rio; it matched the mood he was in perfectly.

So these mysterious people had fulfilled their promise; everything had gone as they had said it would–Ymir evacuated, its people accepted, tolerated, laughed at here and there for their peculiar ways of speech and behavior, but without real problems. The dam had been breached. Now, if the possibilities were carefully developed, there could again be a flow of people from world to world. …

He grew aware that Lecoq was answering him. “Not a sign,” he was saying in disgusted tones. “We kept as close a watch on him as we possibly could during the whole operation, trying to find some clue to relate him to others of his group; there was nothing. Then, at the end, he just vanished when my man’s back was turned. I dismissed the man, of course, but it probably wasn’t altogether his fault.”

“Well, two things are clear,” Bassett said abruptly. “We can’t tolerate a powerful secret society like this–we need that matter transmitter of theirs, for one thing–and what’s more, we can’t continue to let them use us.”

Lecoq’s eyes held puzzlement. He said, “I can’t make out what it is they want. They seem to have done everything
we
wanted.”

“But not for the same reasons, that’s definite. Did we manage to identify anyone who could perhaps be an associate of Counce’s?”

“Several people who
could
be.” Lecoq opened a bulky folder on his knee and selected documents from it. “Almost beyond a doubt, this Ymiran, Jaroslav Dubin; unfortunately he could be anywhere in the galaxy right now. We’re looking for him. His disappearance was too neat, too patly timed, to have been coincidental. And look at the consequences.”

“But we can’t rule out the possibility that he was merely kidnapped by Counce’s group,” Bassett remarked heavily. “And who else?”

“Probably someone on the staff of Video India. I’ve investigated the people involved in the Falconetta Show, and there are half a dozen of them who disappear unaccountably for short periods. Falconetta herself is one.”

Bassett raised his eyebrows. “Really! It doesn’t surprise me, I must say. How about this old man who produces the show–the one who’s been complaining to our advertising department about the copy we sent them?”

“Him too. And then there are individuals on all the outworlds who may conceivably be connected with Counce. They turned up on the spot when we delivered the Ymirans, took charge, and walked off again when things were straightened out. We haven’t been able to establish that any of them arrived or departed by matter transmitter, though. They’re all respected and influential local citizens–civil servants, scientists, doctors, psychologists–but none of them would have been expected to make himself responsible for a group of immigrants without some special reason.”

Bassett nodded, his eyes skimming rapidly down the pages of the reports. “There’s a sort of picture emerging,” he said. “The impression I get is of a long-established undercover organization which recruits its members very carefully and offers them advantages such as the matter transmitter in return for unquestioning obedience. It’s the scope of the things they can offer which makes our job so difficult. I doubt whether we could easily buy one of them, even if we managed to identify him beyond doubt.”

“There’s a warning in the way they managed to get the Ymiran girl away from us, too,” said Lecoq mournfully. “I suspect they keep a careful watch on all their members, and if one of them is unaccounted for, they take steps to make certain he isn’t selling the organization out.”

“We must have the matter transmitter,” Bassett said flatly. “I doubt whether this group could have been set up in the first place without it. Why hasn’t someone else invented it by now?”

“Maybe they are so well organized they can find out whenever there’s a risk of that happening,” Lecoq suggested. “And they buy the inventor off, or silence him.”

Bassett shook his head. “They’d need to be hellishly efficient to do that without any news leaking out at all. I don’t want to give them credit for more than is reasonable. By the way, how many people have you involved directly in this? I mean, how many people besides ourselves know now about the existence of Counce’s group?”

“So far as the staff of the company is concerned, and all the other people who were involved in the evacuation of Ymir, it doesn’t exist. I can say that quite definitely. The idea of evacuating Ymir was yours, and I put it into practice. I think it would be bad for morale if we let it be known that we were acting under–well, under blackmail.”

“Agreed.” Bassett thumbed through the papers Lecoq had given him. “Well, what we must do now is obvious. We must investigate the most likely of these people whose names are on the list, and somehow get the facts from them.”

“Starting with Video India?” Lecoq suggested. Bassett inclined his head.

Counce had in fact stepped back across the parsecs to Regis as soon as he judged the remainder of the evacuation could be left to Bassett’s capable staff. There was much to be done–with Friend, the alien survivor; with Enni Zatok; with Anty Dreean. Besides, it was absolutely certain that Bassett would not rest content with what he had. Sooner or later he was going to find the existence of their group intolerable, and seek a way of attacking it.

He had been congratulating Anty on the way in which he had restored Enni’s self-confidence and alert brightness–admitting only to himself, for it was a cynical thought, that a fundamental question of human nature had done more than Anty’s actual help. He was standing with the young man alongside the transfax platform, watching the Ymiran girl, who lay in the sunlight fifty yards distant, eyes closed. She wore nothing but dark glasses, and her pale, sun-starved skin had tanned to golden brown.

It was the measure of a considerable achievement, to have rid her of her deep-seated irrational conditioning about clothes. Counce had said so.

“It’s like everything else. An individual who is at the mercy of a reaction not based on necessity is that much a malfunctioning person. Take our attitude towards the the Others, for instance.”

Anty blinked. “I don’t see the connection.”

“No? Think it over. When they came out fighting from their ship, they were motivated by such a reaction. We, by contrast, were acting strictly from logical necessity. The chance of hostile contact between our races is a disaster; we’re free to maintain that our efforts to promote peaceful understanding are idealistic and all that, but when you reduce it to essentials, it’s the necessity of saving our own skins, not the hope of some future benefit for both our races, which really drives us on.”

“I’m with you,” Anty nodded.

Counce gave him a sidelong glance. He really was quite handsome in his new body. A stir of envy rose in Counces mind, and subsided again at once.

“Pretty, isn’t she?” he said casually.

“Who, Enni? Yes, she is,” Anty answered with an unsuccessful attempt at equal casualness, and Counce gave him a grin before turning away.

As he passed the door of Wu’s office, the door was flung back and the director hailed him. “News from Ram, Saïd!” he called. “Bassett’s put two and two together.”

“Has he now!” Counce went into the cool shadow of the office; Wu had four fans going so hard they were almost blowing the files off his desk.

“It can’t be coincidence that four of his firm’s staff have been making casual inquiries about where Ram, Falconetta and our other two agents spend their off-duty time.” Wu kept his eyes on Counce’s face, watching for his reaction.

“That’s the other two at Video India, you mean,” Counce said with irritating obtuseness. Wu took a deep breath and nodded.

“What do you recommend we should do about it?”

“Why, tell them, of course.” Counce didn’t blink or smile.

“
Tell
them? You’re out of your mind!”

“Not at all. We knew we had to come at least partly into the open to impress Bassett and enlist his help. If he’s been a little quicker than we anticipated in picking up the unavoidable clues we left, we can’t help that.” Counce took a chair, swung it round, and sat down facing Wu across the back of it.

“Now as I see it, the problem is perfectly simple. So long as Bassett gets enough information about us to keep him happy, there’s small risk of him finding out something about us that we don’t know he knows. I want you to tell Ram to supply Bassett with enough data to lead him to Regis.”

“What for?”

“I want Bassett out here, on his own. Where we can deal with him on our terms.” Counce’s eyes seemed to cloud over, as though he were looking at a memory. “It seems to me, Wu–without wishing to be conceited–that in essence there are two human beings. Archetypes, if you like. I’m one. Bassett is the other.

“Do you know, I was just about his age when I stumbled across the transfax? Bassett is brilliant. So was I, in a different field. But we think differently. We both plan, take thought for the consequences of our actions, but our motives are parsecs apart.”

Wu sat down silently. He had a feeling that he was not really meant to be listening, that Counce’s soliloquy was for himself alone.

“Maybe if Bassett had been in the same situation as I was, if he’s seen he had the chance of not just one lifetime, but many lifetimes, to work out his plans, he would have done as I did. But I can’t really believe that. He wouldn’t have given a damn for the fact that the Ymirans were living under conditions unfit for any decent person, if it hadn’t happened to provide him with a means of implementing his plans for himself.”

He roused himself and stood up. “Ram will be able to fix things,” he said briskly. “I want Bassett here, in his private ship, not knowing quite what he expects to find. And I’ll handle him after that.”

Wu nodded.

“Meantime,” Counce continued, “I’m going to step up to the polar base and check on how Friend is getting on. I have a sneaking suspicion we may have been wrong about him.”

Wu looked slightly alarmed. “How?”

“Well, Falconetta seems to have made such strides in gaining his confidence, I’m inclined to think we could scrap our plans for preventing contact with the Others, and merely limit it. After all, Ymir stands empty now, waiting for them. Why should we not give it to them at once, as proof of our good intentions? So long as we make it perfectly plain that the gift is conditional on their not infringing human-occupied space elsewhere, I think we could safely intermingle with them–even invite them to maintain a base on Regis, perhaps. We dictate the circumstances, naturally. But the information this will give us about their psychology and their emotional attitudes would more than make up for the trouble of undertaking all the contact work ourselves.”

“That seems reasonable,” nodded Wu. “In fact,” he added, enthusiasm mounting, “it sounds thoroughly attractive. How soon would you want to do it?”

“At once,” said Counce, and went out.