John Brunner Read online

"Haven't we seen that the pelts they were driving were ripe ones? Haven't I taken star-sightings, sitting up all night for breaks in the cloud while you two snored your heads off?"

  "And haven't you snored your head off while we sweat over these damned paddles?" Coberley thundered back.

  "Don't argue," Horst pleaded wearily. "We can't be certain we're on the right course—as you've pointed out, Coberley, they may be withholding some of the pelts for next year because there seem to be so many of them—but Victor is almost always right, and I don't know how he manages to keep track of so many calculations in his head."

  The others were both mollified by that, and for a while they simply forged ahead, turning a little to the right as directed when they approached the next mat of weed.

  Horst didn't look at it except to make sure they were running clear of its fringe of roots; he was far more concerned about the risk of it being grounded on a mudbank, in which case they'd have to backtrack and go around the other side after all. Getting around Zygra in a powerboat would have been a slow job; the only sensible transport would be a hovercraft, and at that you might run into a floating forest with trees of a sort rising fifty or sixty feet from a base ten miles long-

  "Lookl" Victor shrilled. "Look there, on the edge of the mat!"

  Their heads jerked around to see what he was pointing at, and they gasped.

  On the very edge of the mat, half in the water, lay a stocky man with one arm crudely bandaged.

  "Can we get him off?" was Hoist's first question, knowing that they had to. There was only one explanation for his presence, which Coberley voiced by implication.

  "Damn the Zygra Company! May Shuster rot eternity away!"

  "You think that's the latest of the supervisors?" Victor muttered.

  "How else could the poor bastard have got here?" retorted Coberley savagely.

  "Then we are in the right area of the planet!" Victor exclaimed. "What did I tell you?"

  "Oh, shut up!" Coberley blazed. "He may have been drifting for weeks! And in any case they wouldn't have trapped the poor bastard until the last possible moment, the same way we were trapped, so we can be damned sure the harvesting ship is due at any time now."

  "I wonder if he's still alive," Horst whispered.

  He was. The pain of having his arm touched while they wrestled him aboard the boat made him stir and moan, and when they revived him by squeezing the sour but nourishing juice of a dinglybell into his mouth he cursed loudly in a language they didn't know, musical and full of open vowel-ended syllables.

  The cursing ran dry. He licked his lips and rolled his eyes, surveying them in mingled wonder and dismay, naked as he was himself, sick-looking, wild-haired.

  "You too?" he said.

  "Us too," Horst agreed.

  And at that instant of time they heard the beginning of what they had hoped not to hear before sighting the main station: the faint drumming across the sky that marked the arrival of a spaceship to take away the annual yield of pelts.

  "Are we far from the main station now?" Victor asked hopefully.

  "How should I know?" the man with the broken arm answered bitterly. "For all I can tell, I've been unconscious for days on end."

  Shuster was a man capable of harboring a grudge, nurturing it, encouraging it until the time was ripe for getting even. Kynance realized the fact with a sinking heart and set about trying to elude him long enough to garner clues to his likely deceits from some sympathetic crewman.

  Even when the ship had set down at the main station on Zygra, however, he prevented her from talking to people.

  'The business of harvesting is no concern of yours," he snapped at her. "Your responsibility begins when this year's pelts are aboard, and ends when we come back next time—if you're still validly contracted, of course."

  He said that with a peculiar relish. It was a meager hint, but it was a hint. Kynance turned it over in her mind and decided that it yielded only the same conclusion she had previously reached: whether it was Shuster's private intention or the policy of the company, some effort was going to be made to invalidate her contract by trickery.

  Almost certainly, then, the trick would come right at the end of her tour, when she had lost the chance to apply for an extension. It would be less trouble simply to leave her here in the grip of the prosthetics designed to ensure survival after serious injury than to risk her doing something to revenge herself for being tricked—but others tricked in the same way might have tried and failed, and anyhow there was Laban Rex Chan versus Gunther Ranji, 2108, to consider: "The exercise of a contractual option is impossible if the party allegedly exercising it is not fully conscious and in his right mind," this ruling preventing an unconscious person supported by prosthetics from "occupying" Zygra indefinitely ....

  What horrible byways her mind was being led down by this disgusting man! She wiped her face wearily with the back of her hand. Now she was thinking in terms of being mutilated deliberately and left here to uphold the company's claim on the planet!

  Mustn't.Mustn't. That path led to insanity. She rose and sneaked a look out of her cabin. No one was in sight. If she very quietly stole out to some lock-door not currently in use, and watched the loading of the pelts, surely even Shuster wouldn't invoke that petty disobedience as grounds for invalidation. Or if he tried, she'd fight.

  She reached a lock unchallenged, and for some time stood drinking in the scene. Close at hand, men and machines were bringing up and crating treated pelts from the temporary store in which they were kept prior to shipment; the colors flared dizzily and the scents made the air almost unbreath-ably sweet. Russet and tawny, green and gold, white and scarlet and orange and black and other tints without names but all possessing the same fantastic beauty ....

  Further away, men conducted physical checks of the automatics: here on the main station, they were restocking the life-support systems with vitamins and proteins and fitting up the library with entertainment spools; out at the coating-station she saw them testing the distillation columns and the concentrators and the myriad other devices she had been taught about; others were overhauling monitors—one had a bad crack in its casing through which water had shorted out a handling unit—and installing newly devised programs for breeding from sports .... They'd said something about the possibility of evolving a striped pelt, which would always display its colors in regular parallel bands instead of randomly over the surface ....

  "Ah, there you are."

  The voice made her skin crawl. She turned and saw Shuster behind her. But he wasn't going to complain about her being here. He was simply saying, "The loading is almost complete, so it's about time I showed you around the station and gave you your on-the-spot briefing."

  He sounded almost affable. Kynance followed him with a sense of relief.

  Mentally she checked off all the ways in which she could be caught out in a breach of her contract; she planned to write them down in a list when she had the chance, and add to the fist as other points struck her later. For example, this alarm siren which might or might not indicate a genuine malfunction. It would be easy to arrange a false alarm when she was in the shower. She'd have to rig some sort of extension to the switch, so it could be inactivated from a dozen points instead of one.

  No, just a second: that might be construed as tampering with the automatics, hence sabotage .... Cancel that: Horace Bellamy versus Guy and Guy Starlines, 2084, specified that "a switch designed for manual operation is not and cannot be regarded as an automatic device."

  Good. The prospect of being able to do something to forestall Shuster's skulduggery cheered her enormously. Only one cloud still hung over her apart from those to which she had grown accustomed, and that became darker as they progressed further with the tour of inspection.

  Where was her predecessor? Why wasn't he being called on to give her tips he'd picked up during his own stay?

  She ventured to ask Shuster that when there was a lull in his flow of instructions. He didn't rep
ly; he simply curled his hp and showed his teeth.

  Her stomach turned over with a lurch.

  What can they have done to him? Could they have thrown him over the side, drowned him? Because—think, think— who's going to know?

  Nobody ever came to Zygra except company employees. By law there had to be a record of the operation of the automatics available for government inspection—Hughes and Le-blanc versus Mario della Casa, 2092—but in this case the government was that of Nefertiti, and she'd already recognized the stake that government had in Zygra.

  Panic gripped her. For all she knew, the contract was irrelevant, empty, a scrap of paper. No one from Earth would come hunting her if she failed to return; they could safely leave her a year here, let her elude the obvious pitfalls, and then invalidate the contract in the simplest way, by killing her.

  The world seemed to spin off its axis as she learned the reason behind Shuster's temporary geniality. He was saying now, "And one final thing which may interest you before I leave you and go aboard the ship for takeoff. You were asking why your predecessor isn't here to show you around. Well, he willfully infringed the terms of his contract. You're a great one for legalisms, so if you want to see the proof which we'll be displaying to the government when we get back you're welcome. He didn't get to the alarm in the prescribed thirty seconds—"

  So I was right; that is one of their main traps.

  "—and consequently he was no longer an employee of the Zygra Company."

  "What happened to him?" she whispered out of a fog of sick dismay.

  "How should I know?" Shuster shrugged. "Once he'd broken the contract, the automatics ceased to recognize his existence." He started to turn away, then paused.

  "Oh, and on a related point: of the last nine supervisors, not one has completed his contract without infringing one of its clauses. Didn't I tell you, right back at our first meeting, that you should reconsider your application and go along with my suggestion instead? Well, it's too late now, of course. On your own pretty head be it, my dear!"

  VIII

  SHE WAS NOT—not—NOT going to give that horrible man Shuster the privilege of seeing her break down. Somehow she maintained her self-control until the pelts were all loaded and the crew had gone back aboard the ship, doing it so well, in fact, that the last time Shuster glanced at her before entering the airlock his face revealed a hint of gratifying uncertainty, as much as to say: Am I the one who's overlooked something?

  She managed a smile and gave him a mocking wave, which he did not return.

  The steel deck of the main station—visibly lower in the water because of the massive cargo of pelts piled into the ship's holds—thrummed to the warming of the interstellar drive. Vast energies made the air prickly to the skin; a chance resonance-made the station's plates vibrate and stir the water into patternless ripples. Kynance watched impassively, repressing her impulse to dash out of the station's observation dome and hammer on the airlock for admission.

  The ship lifted. For the first few feet the station rose also, floating higher with the reduction in weight. A crack of daylight appeared under the polished hull; the station rocked gently, as if relieved to give up its burden. And the starship was on its way.

  That was when Kynance had to burst into tears.

  She had never in her life felt so exposed, so vulnerable, so psychologically naked. When the sobs allowed her to catch her breath, she cursed everyone she could think of to blame for her plight, beginning with Shuster and continuing through those bland college tutors who had made her believe in the actuality of galactic law, concluding with herself as the most responsible of all.

  The tears purged her of all the unvoiced terror she had stored so tightly and so long, and when they ended she was able to think with a clearer mind than for weeks previous. One factor dominated all her thoughts: the problem of enforcement of what Shuster had contemptuously called "legalisms."

  It hadn't been fair to curse her old tutors for making her regard legality as a solid concept. She'd been exposed to enough new information since leaving Earth, surely, to cure her of such academic illusions! It was time now or never to take a hard cold look at the predicament in which she had landed herself, and to gamble everything on the assumption that Shuster had been telling the truth when he had sourly complimented her on being the best candidate the Zygra Company had ever had for this post.

  Why? Start there, and perhaps the rest would follow.

  Well . . . Consider the fantastic underpopulation of the outworlds, compared with the standard of living and technological development they enjoyed. The same reason which prevented the Zygra Company from assigning this post to their own employees in rotation must operate when it came to finding an outside candidate. Anybody capable of making himself a career in outworld society would already be grabbed by some other employer. The demands of intensive training and incredibly high job-qualification would mean that people were reluctant—even for a year at an enormous salary—to quit their permanent employment and sit watching moss grow under automatic supervision.

  In effect, this was an unskilled post. If it weren't for the legal requirement that a celestial body must be occupied by a human being in order for the company to maintain its claim, nobody would live here at all.

  What unskilled labor was there available on worlds like Nefertiti, where ten-year-old children were already needed as productive members of society? Hardly any, and what there was fell neatly into two categories: social misfits, and immigrants unused to the pace, lacking qualifications with which they could compete on even terms against native outworlders.

  Put me in category two, Kynance told herself bitterly.

  Now moderate her original assumption that the government of Nefertiti had a vested interest in the continued operations of the Zygra Company. (At this point she felt a stir of optimism, which was very welcome.) Although the tax bills for the company must be enormous—large enough, more than likely, to figure as a separate entry in the planetary budget—wouldn't it be infinitely more profitable to dispossess the company, annex this unique world and operate it without intermediaries? Of course it wouldl Hence the Zygra Company would be constrained to some extent at least to comply with the galactic commercial laws. Minor infringements wouldn't be worth taking up; the company could so easily render expropriation profitless by triggering the poison reservoirs in its wandering monitors, when the situation became hopeless. But a major, flagrant violation would certainly drive the government to act.

  This much, then, was on her side: when Shuster talked of displaying records of the company's operation here to government inspectors, he wasn't referring to a mere formality, but to an essential condition of the company's continued existence.

  What of her predecessors, though? Legally or not, they had all been maneuvered into breaking their contracts. Why? Surely immigrants in despair, desperate for repatriation and lacking the funds to get home, would be a tiny minority among the unskilled workers who applied for this post. (It rankled to think of herself in this fashion, but she forced herself to recognize the truth of the term in an outworld context.)

  She made the tentative assumption that during a stay of a year on Zygra it was possible to pick up information that the company wanted to keep secret. Or—no, cancel thatl She tensed as a great light dawned on her.

  Short of finding some crazy hermit, who might go out of his head and start systematically sabotaging the fabulously complex automatics here, the company stood no chance at all of getting a permanent supervisor. This followed from the obvious premise that they advertised annually. After a period of several years, there would be, scattered around the local star-systems, several ex-supervisors of Zygra. Some enterprising rival firm might pick the brains of all of them, and thus gain sufficient data to make a successful raid on the Zygra Company. An accumulation of small facts might reveal far more than the superficially attractive method of planting a company spy to apply for the post.

  She frowned. So far she ha
d reached two diametrically opposite conclusions, one reassuring and one terrifying. On the one hand, she felt that the Zygra Company had to watch its step extremely carefully, but on the other, she felt it was probably desperately—paranoically—afraid that its secrets might somehow leak out and afford the opportunity for another firm to pirate its source of wealth.

  What could she do, stranded here with the powerful Zygra Company as her opponent, to ensure that the balance would tip the right way at the end of her tour? She had to take it for granted that the company could not just minder her and dump her body over the side of the station; if this were possible without the Nefertiti government stepping in, then she had been as good as lost the minute she had entered Shus-ter's office.

  After a little thought she decided it was safe to accept that the reason for her being the best-qualified candidate ever interviewed for the job was a little more complicated than had at first appeared.

  Typically, her predecessors would have been in what she had called category one: social misfits without permanent careers or outstanding qualifications enabling them to switch jobs with impunity. Even people like that, however, would normally have some kind of ties—wives, parents, brothers and sisters—and hence if they disappeared on Zygra someone might come making inquiries. None of the previous nine supervisors, Sinister had boasted, had lasted through his year of office. But if nine sets of relatives had proceeded to kick up a fuss, this might easily had excited enough public concern to cause the Nefertitian government to expropriate the company. So the company would ideally seek candidates who, first, were unskilled, and second, lacked kinfolk to ask awkward questions.

  (A corollary of this was the depressing point that it might well have been her remote Earthside origin, not her qualifications, that had secured her the post. She scowled at the idea and shoved it to the back of her mind.)

  But people with neither skills nor family would be very rare indeed on planets like Nefertiti. For one thing, under-population implied an almost obsessive urge to exploit human resources; for another, isolation would have made family ties more precious than at home on Earth; and finally, if the potential candidate got to a stage where he was actively antisocial, rather than just asocial, the government would step in and order psychiatric treatment to restore him or her as a contributing member of society.