Empire of Two Worlds Read online

  “Sure, but what have you done for me lately?” Bec’s lips were curled. He was enjoying making Tone squirm. “Why didn’t you come and tell me about this dope before? You know dope is my business.”

  “I thought you knew … anyway it wouldn’t do you any good. They get it free. They don’t have to pay for it. It’s like a public service.”

  “Where does it come from? Tell me where it comes from and I might do something for you.”

  I knew Bec was only exploring. He didn’t care whether Tone got what he needed or not.

  “It’s all from one place. Some valley. That’s the only place where the stuff will grow.”

  There was a moment’s silence. “There’s only one place where the stuff will grow,” Bec repeated.

  “All right, Tone,” he said after another pause, “here’s what you’re going to do. You’re going to find that valley where they grow Blue Space. Klein is going to come with you. That’s the only way you’re going to get the stuff you need, because nobody is going to bring it here for you. Understand?”

  Tone was uncomfortable. “I don’t know where it is.”

  “The green people here — do they know?”

  “I think so. I’m not sure.”

  “Well, find out. The sooner you start the better. And not a word to your friends about what my interest is. Understand?”

  Tone understood all right. He’d seen this kind of operation enough times before.

  The best way to find where a source was was to get somebody who needed it bad. These people had a natural directional instinct. They were like bloodhounds and in their desperation could penetrate any screen. You did this by cutting off their usual supply and offering this one as their only hope. Tone had probably been put through the pipe before.

  When Tone had shuffled out and left us alone in the drape-hung room Bec was laughing.

  “Would you believe it! “

  I stroked my chin. “It’s certainly remarkable.”

  “You can say that again. It’s all just the same here as it is on Killibol. I’ll bet it’s the same all over the damned universe. People falling into the same traps. Dope. Pop. Blue Space.” He grunted. “The same old rackets will work every time.”

  “It is Earth, after all. Where we came from.”

  “Yeah, but a million years later.”

  “They’re still human,” I commented. “I guess humanity will always be the same, will always have the same weaknesses.”

  “I guess so. If this thing works out it could be big for us. How do you feel about the journey?”

  “Nervous. Having to nurse the Taker and all. What do you want me to do?”

  “Just scout this place and report back. Whether it’s defended and whether you think we can take it. Try not to be conspicuous.”

  Looking at myself in a mirror, thinking of those thick black goggles I would be wearing (we had had better ones made in a native workshop), I wondered just how I was going to do that.

  Seven

  There was a road leading out of Hesha, winding over the horizon between low hills. We made the journey in a Rheattic carriage driven by a light motor that burned some kind of oil. Towed behind us was a trailer carrying enough of it to see us through.

  We had a Heshan guide, too, who was supposed to know the way to the Blue Space Valley. He said it was five days’ journey away. I asked him if he knew why we wanted to go there. He said no. I told him it was for the sake of my friend, who was very sick without the special drug he could get there. The guide looked very doleful and told me the concentrated drug could not be lawfully used.

  While we travelled I wondered about a society completely swamped by a drug habit. Klittmann was riddled, of course, rotten with it, but only ever by a minority of people. Pop was a killer, raddling the body and distorting the mind. Blue Space, on the other hand, was comparatively mild in its effects. It seemed to induce a calm, fatalistic attitude in its users. The Rheattites had a fetish about beauty and beautiful things, and Blue Space seemed to open up their appreciation of them.

  I thought to myself that maybe I would try it some time. A few doses couldn’t hurt me. But I pushed the thought from my mind; how often had I heard people say the same about pop, only to turn up as pathetic wrecks a few years later? Besides, the attractiveness and harmlessness of the Rheattites wasn’t going to stop Bec from putting the squeeze on them if he could. With my background and my associates it would be just as well not to become infected with their way of looking at things.

  Only one incident in the outgoing journey is worth mentioning. We were crossing a flat, grassy plain. I heard a faint droning noise over our heads. Looking up, I saw something flying steadily across the sky from east to west.

  At first I thought it was a bird, but its wings were stiff and it had a long metallic body. It could only be a machine. I got my repeater ready, but it made no attempt to attack us but merely flew on out of sight. Our guide told us not to worry; it was a Rheattic aircraft.

  I wondered what else the green people had that we hadn’t seen.

  We left the road just before reaching the valley, which made our guide become suspicious and want to know why. I told him to shut up and lead the way.

  The carriage wouldn’t travel well over an unmade surface. We proceeded on foot and climbed up a steep slope, almost a mountain. It was covered in shale and nothing grew on it — something to do with the special qualities of the soil that allowed it alone to grow the Blue Space plants, I imagined. I thought of leaving our guide behind for the last stretch, but he might have lit out and caused us trouble. So I forced him down on his belly and we crawled the last few yards.

  The slope ended abruptly and curved away on either side in a sharp ridge. Actually the valley wasn’t a valley at all; it was a crater made by the impact of a meteor some thousands of years before. The slope on the other side was just as steep as the one we had scrambled up, but the depression was more shallow. There was a break in the crater wall, facing north, which I could see clearly and which the Rheattites used as an entrance.

  The whole of the crater floor was made into an orchard of small trees with impossibly luxurious, petal-like blossoms, all pink and red. There were no trees remotely like them in Hesha. As soon as we poked our heads over the rim of the crater we got a face full of the perfume from these blossoms that almost lifted us into the air. It was a sickly sweet smell, rising straight up like a convection current.

  Tone breathed it in and let out a shuddering, happy sigh. His system, straining with need, had recognised its panacea.

  I spent some minutes inspecting the valley closely, especially the entrance. A fair-sized road came through it and branched out all over the crater. Some buildings lined the crater walls; probably places for processing the dope, I thought.

  What I took to be barracks were lodged just inside the entrance, on either side of the road. They weren’t very big, but I thought I’d better see what they had on the outside of the crater. Telling Tone and Heshan to stay put, I worked my way round. There were guards posted on the outside of the entrance, that was all. I was in time to see a couple of wagons leave the valley, turning to circle it by a road that left to the south.

  According to what we had heard the valley was the producing and disseminating centre for a free public service, like protein was supposed to be (but wasn’t) back on Killibol. There was no need, in Rheattic eyes, for it to be heavily guarded; to my more predatory mind it was ludicrously vulnerable, especially in time of war. If I had been the Rheattic commander I would have stationed an army there.

  The place wasn’t even very big. I judged the valley to be three miles in diameter. Bec was going to be pleased.

  I slithered back to the others. “Let’s be on our way,” I said. “I think I’ve seen enough.”

  “Aren’t we going in?” Tone asked pleadingly.

  “Don’t be stupid, Tone,” I told him.

  “But you know what I want. Bec promised—”

  “You’l
l have to wait,” I said bluntly. “We have to report to Bec first. You’ll get your dope when we take the valley.”

  Tone stared down at the heady blossoms. His face looked like he was going to cry.

  “Come on, move it!” I said harshly. “You’ve held out this long, you can hold out a bit longer.” I turned to go.

  We had been speaking Klittmann, but the Heshan had been watching our exchange closely. He stood up uncertainly on the loose shale.

  “You come in secret and hide. You are not here for your friend. You mean some harm to Blue Space Valley.”

  “Pack it in, will ya?” I glared from one to the other, surreptitiously loosening the strap that held my repeater on my back.

  The Heshan backed away. “Let us go openly through the gate. I do not have to hide. I will go and tell them you are here.”

  I had to give him a score for guts. He set off down the outer slope at a slithering run. I yelled for him to stop, and reached for my repeater.

  But Tone had grabbed my elbow. “I’m sorry, Klein, I can’t go away now. Not when it’s so close. Just lemme—”

  He broke off and scrambled over the lip of the crater. I made a grab for him but it was too late.

  Cursing, I turned back to the Heshan, who was making good time down the slope now. If he made it to the entrance I would be in trouble. I took careful aim. My repeater hammered loudly. The Heshan took a tumble, the slugs knocking him yards further down the slope, and lay still.

  I flung myself to the crater brim, thinking I might still be in time to stop Tone. For a moment or two the sun flashed straight into my eye-shades, dazzling me. Then I saw him. He wasn’t running or clambering but rolling down the inside slope, plunging helter-skelter towards those blossoms that he hoped would give him peace of mind.

  Already he was a long way off. I threw a long burst from the repeater after him. The sound echoed across the valley. Then Tone was lost to sight beneath the pink and red blooms and I wasn’t sure if I had hit him.

  I quickly discarded the idea of going after him. A lot of people down in the crater might already have heard my repeater going off. There were too many of them. The only thing I could do now was get back to Hesha.

  Making the journey back alone was kind of lonely, a little frightening. I’d never been left alone in the middle of an Earth landscape before, seven days from my own people. But I made it without any trouble and gave Bec the news.

  “So you think this valley is wide open?” he asked after I’d finished.

  “Looks like it. Of course, they might have some way of sealing off the entrance that I didn’t see — a metal door or a rock fall. But I reckon we could be through before they have time to use it. The sloop could get over the wall of the crater in any case.”

  “Hmm. Do you think Tone will talk if he’s still alive?”

  “It’s hard to say. Not willingly, because he knows we’re going to turn up sooner or later and he doesn’t want us to have a score to settle. But if they hold the stuff out on him he’ll do anything.”

  Bec nodded. “It’s a chance we’ll have to take. We have to move fast anyway. Things are happening.”

  “Oh?” I had noticed that things didn’t seem quite the same in the village. The atmosphere was more subdued, more quiet.

  “Somebody came to the village to say that the Meramites are moving this way. The locals are pretty scared. They’re asking us to fight the Meramites for them.” He chuckled.

  “So how do we handle it?” I asked.

  “The first thing is to move on Blue Space Valley to give us some property to bargain with. I guess I should really send you to do that job, but I want you to stay here with me. Give Grale and the others the low-down and they can sort it out.”

  “It’s liable to get pretty hot around here, boss. After all we don’t know an awful lot about what these Moon guys can do.”

  “We’ll play it by ear,” he said, unperturbed.

  The sloop left the next day. I didn’t feel nearly so self-confident without it. Bec had given Harmen the option of leaving with the sloop or staying. He elected to stay and Bec conceived a plan for him to help us make contact.

  “We might need an amount of bluff here,” he explained. “It won’t do for them to meet the boss straight away. We’ll use Harmen for a front man. You know the old ‘Organisation Routine’? You think you’ve met the top man, then suddenly you find out he’s not the top man and you find yourself faced with somebody he’s dirt to. It makes a good impression.”

  He grinned sourly. “Besides, it might save us from getting our heads blown off.”

  We prepared a bunker at the opposite end of the village to that which the Meramites were approaching. Bec posted lookouts. He told the villagers he would handle things for them, but that was only to secure their co-operation. I guess they were better off with Bec in charge, though. He told them not to resist but to surrender, sending out envoys to say that the village was in the hands of an alien power not of Rheatt.

  He had reckoned without the Meramites’ way of doing things, however. Hesha was only a small village to them, an outpost of a nation they had already conquered, and they believed in a policy of punishment-in-advance. From the hillside we watched the approach of the Meramite column, sending up a cloud of dust. The Meramites were riding on wheeled platforms, circular in shape, carrying about twenty men apiece. They stopped not far outside the village and we saw our messengers deliver their news. We saw them slaughter those messengers and then roll forward mercilessly.

  “Get to the bunker,” Bec said in clipped tones. “This isn’t going to be so easy.”

  A withering fire swept the village, starting fires here and there. The Meramite soldiery carried lance-like poles that fired gouts of hot metal. You could just about see them when they shot from the tip of the lance, streaking out like a line of light. They didn’t seem to be very accurate, but they didn’t have to be in the circumstances.

  We made it to the bunker through clouds of smoke. It was a well-set-up position at the end of the main street, backed up by solid brick buildings. Its upper parts, jutting up above the road, had a step-like construction, one block being set more forward than the other, and into these two blocks we had set the Jains. The arrangement gave absolute command of the street ahead of us and good control over the environs, each gun being able to cover the other from attack from any side.

  Bec thrust guns into the hands of Harmen and two Heshans we had trained to use repeaters. We nestled down behind the Jains, peering through the firing slits in their shields.

  “Here they come!” yelled Bec. “Let ’em have it!”

  The Meramite carrier platforms appeared at the other end of the wide street. We saw big grey figures, considerably bigger than the Rheattites, arrogantly directing their glowing lances this way and that, indulging in the arbitrary destruction we later came to expect of them.

  We let them get well into the street before letting loose. They scarcely knew what had hit them. Deadly though their hot-lead poles were, they just weren’t in the same class as a pair of good Jains, the most effective, withering machine-guns ever designed. An almost solid sheet of lead ripped down the length of the street, the racket reverberating between the walls of the houses with a noise like ten thousand rivet-guns. We put in a mixture of explosive and spin-bullets, too. You can do a variety of such mixtures on a Jain gun, say one explosive, one spin to every ten straight. If a spin-bullet hits you it more or less turns you into a jelly.

  Our blast lasted only seconds. We had to watch the ammo. But the Meramites were wiped out, their riding platforms leaning crazily.

  “That’ll show them they’re up against something,” Bec grinned.

  Three times they tried to send men down the street, with the same result. We were beginning to conclude that the Meramites weren’t too bright, or else weren’t very skilled in war. By now the village was blazing merrily. We could hear screams and the zip-zip of the hot-lead poles. I wondered if they treated every vi
llage this way or if it was only us they were after.

  A few times they tried to infiltrate in from the sides but couldn’t get at us until our ammunition ran out, and we had enough to last for a while. However, this wasn’t quite as Bec had planned it, as far as I knew. We were bound to run out eventually.

  I looked across at him. “Still planning on contact?”

  “Sure.”

  “Mind telling me how?”

  Bec’s goggles scanned the street. “Leave it for a while. They’ll start thinking things out themselves pretty soon.”

  This time he was right. There was another movement at the far end of the street. A tall, broad Meramite was waving a banner.

  We held our fire as he strode nearer with an odd, jerky gait. He held the banner aloft on a tall pole. It depicted a man hanging upside down, suspended by his feet.

  “It is a flag of truce,” one of the Heshans told us. “They want to talk.”

  “Good,” said Bec. He climbed down from his Jain and relieved the Heshan of his repeater. “Get out there and tell him a representative of the Great Powers of Klittmann will speak to one of equal rank, if such an officer will present himself.”

  “Hey, Bec,” I said, speaking Klittmann. “You know what they did to the last Heshans we sent out.”

  “Sure, but it’s different now. Out you go, man.”

  He gave the Heshan a hefty shove to help him on his way. The poor guy was so scared he was shaking, but he climbed out and bravely walked towards the Meramite with the banner.

  The two of them looked strange together. Rheattites tended to be slightly taller than we are, but the invaders from the Moon were taller still. They averaged seven to eight foot. But they looked kind of lank and weak, thyroidal. They made me wonder how they managed to stand up. Later I found it wasn’t so easy for them.

  Their skins were slate-grey and so were their uniforms. Their broad chests were crisscrossed with black straps that made them look sinister and powerful. The truce-maker didn’t kill our Heshan, as I had half-expected, but listened while the green-skinned man, staring up at him like a child, delivered our message. Nodding curtly, he turned and walked away.