John Brunner Read online

  "Damned near!" Coberley muttered. His eyes were switching fearfully from side to side, as though he expected the automatics to pitch them into the sea at any moment.

  "No!" the girl insisted. "The mere fact that you're here proves my point, doesn't it? Ah—I take it you are some of the nine of my predecessors who failed to complete their tour of duty?"

  "That's right," Horst agreed. "Uh—I'm Horst Lampeter. This is Giuseppe Coberley—Dickery Evan, who's the latest arrived of us four—and Victor Sjoberg is the one going around and around the deck there."

  "I'm Kynance Foy," the girl said. "I come from Earth."

  "And you've given up your chance of being repatriated?" Horst demanded, as two and two slotted together in his mind.

  "What else could I do? What could anyone have done?"

  "But—what's the use?" Horst countered. "I mean, here you've voided your contract, so apart from being able to feel a solid floor instead of that disgusting mud there's not much benefit in—"

  "Proper food?Medical attention? A hot shower? Even"— Kynance curled her lip into a shadow of a smile, glancing at his bare body with engaging frankness—"clothes?"

  "But you're not employed by the company any longer!" Coberley exclaimed. "The automatics won't obey you now!"

  "It just so happens," Kynance said in a judicious tone, "that I'm rather particular about automatics which are supposed to look after me. I've been doing a check of several of the important systems, and at the moment when I—ah— infringed my contract, quite a few of them were disconnected so that I could check their condition. I don't suppose it will be difficult to convert them to manual operation; all of them except the circuit-restorer are still receiving power."

  "But you were forbidden to touch the automatics at alll" That was Dickery Evan, raising his broken arm as mute witness to the truth of his statement.

  "Not exactly," Kynance murmured. "Not even the Zygra Company can rewrite galactic legal precedents to suit its own convenience. I assure you that the only thing I've done which did entitle them to fire me was to wave to you, and that might not stand up too long in court .... However, before we get it to a court we have to attend to you. Come along—this wayl"

  XII

  WITHIN AN HOUR, Horst's bewilderment had given way to awe. Nothing much had visibly altered here in the familiar environment of the main station, but in the dragging years since he had been dismissed from his post for trying to rewire a faulty book-projector classed as "crucial equipment" by virtue of its theoretical use for supplementary briefing, his memory of it had been distorted by nightmares into a kind of hell.

  And indeed it had been a gigantic trap for him, ready to spring at the most trivial excuse.

  Not for Kynance, though. This astonishing young woman had opened the back of the medicare unit and manually revised the settings first for Evan's arm—now comfortable in a proper plastic healing-sheath instead of his own rough splints —and then for Victor's deficiency disease. Vitamins, proteins, and God-knew-what had gone streaming into his knobbled veins, and now he lay snoozing on the supervisor's bunk for the first time in—how many years had he been a starving wanderer across the face of Zygra?

  Not starving any longer. While Horst and Coberley took their turns in the shower-cabinet and borrowed her comb to impose order on their shaggy hair and beards, Kynance had re-routed the organic synthesizer flow supplying the autochef so that it would cope with demands for five portions instead of one, and when they were clean and dressed they found platters of unbelievable food waiting; it had all started its existence as forms of what they had been eating for years, but the transformation was like a miracle. She had even refrained from setting the autochef to salad, rightly judging that their diet of uncooked Zygran plants had soured them forever on anything remotely similar.

  Coberley merely tucked in, grunting, as though the source of his energy—hate against the universe in general and the Zygra Company in particular—had dried up and left him without initiative. Horst, though, found himself staring at Kynance and eating by touch alone.

  "You must be an extraordinary person!" he burst out at last.

  "What have I done?" Kynance parried. "You're the ones who are astonishing. How long have you been out there without help, resources, or"—gesturing at the loaded table—"terrestrial food?"

  "That's not so ... Horst passed his hand over his face; the fingers were trembling. "Not so important," he finished emptily. "What I mean is—well, if I'd done some of the things you seem to have done here, like trying to bring the automatics under control without the computer, I'd have expected to be treated like Dickery here and tossed aside on a clump of floating weed as though I were garbage!"

  He repressed a shiver. He still had the sense that he was in a maze full of dangerous traps, and had to keep reminding himself that this mere girl, so much younger than he was, had drawn at least half the teeth of the machinery.

  "You must have done something much worse than just interfering with one of the automatics, then," Kynance said, glancing at Evan.

  "I guess I did," came the sullen answer. "When this happened to me and the automatics wouldn't listen, I got so mad I wanted to ruin the pelt-crop."

  "I thought so." Kynance leaned forward earnestly. "If you hadn't done that, you could have stayed here indefinitely— it's a matter of galactic law that a person in distress and especially in danger of his life, which you could have argued you were, being injured and unable to fend for yourself, commits no crime if he helps himself to someone's property in order to sustain himself."

  "Fat lot of good telling me now," Evan answered sharply.

  "Shut up," Coberley said, raising his eyes and checking an enormous gobbet of food on the way to his greasy mouth.

  He turned his gaze to Kynance. "You mean I could have stuck around and just taken whatever I wanted, and they couldn't have stopped me?"

  "Goodness, yes. Food and drink and medical supplies, anyway."

  "The hell you say," Coberley muttered. "Well, it wouldn't have done me much good, anyhow. I reacted the same as Dickery—got crazy-mad at the company."

  "If you'll forgive my saying so . . ." Kynance began, and hesitated.

  "Say whatever you like," Horst told her. "You've earned the right." He gestured to indicate the station around them.

  "Well, it sounds pretty unfair after what you've all been through . . . ." She bit her lip. "Frankly, though, I think you walked into this with your eyes shut, and it was damned silly of you."

  "Think we don't realize that?" Horst exclaimed. "I've kicked myself twice around the planet! I got into this because it looked like a shortcut to getting a girl I wanted. I was no prize and I thought I could make myself into one. I'd been a damned fool all my life, skipping from one course of study to another until I'd wound up without a decent degree in anything, and that meant I couldn't hold a job drawing the kind of salary this girl had in mind, so I volunteered for Zygra against the advice of what few friends I had . . ."

  He broke off. Kynance was looking at4iim oddly. "A bit of a romantic, hm?" she said. "The outworlds aren't kind to romantics, as I've recently learned."

  "Call trying to buy a girl with a year of your life romantic'?" Coberley jeered. Some of his spirit seemed to have returned with the food he'd engulfed.

  "I didn't quite mean that," Kynance said. "What I had in mind was this bit about skipping from subject to subject instead of buckling down and fitting himself into the right sort of mold for Nefertiti. You are Nefertitian?" she added. Horst gave a nod. "There can't be many people like that on the outworlds, and it's one of the things I've missed most: people who like to associate with people, spend times chatting idly, instead of driving themselves around the clock. I'd figured out that at least some of the volunteers for Zygra must have been like you, because there's sc little room for them anywhere off Earth. The outworlds don't offer them the chance for a decent living."

  "I often thought I'd like to go to Earth," Horst admitted. "But there was n
othing I could have done—except come here —where I'd have a chance of making the cost of the fare." He paused briefly. "And you know something else? I guess that's why I never made any real friends at home. Everybody else on the whole damned planet seemed to be so involved in making a career, earning a fortune—while to me it simply didn't seem like enough to give purpose to a man's life."

  "Listen to him!" scoffed Coberley. "He's been going on like this ever since I first knew him, playing the same tape over and over."

  "What induced you to come to Zygra?" Kynance inquired.

  "Me? I was stupid, same as Horst and Dickery and Victor. Wouldn't think it to look at me now, but when I was Horst's age I had muscles and there was a big demand for men who were built, back on Loki—which is my home world. I didn't have too many brains to go with the muscles, though, and I got kind of left behind by events. So I jumped at what I thought was a snap."

  "Dickery?"

  He told her, with many sighs, about what he had planned to do with the salary he would have collected on leaving here. It made him seem like what she had at first guessed: a rather nice, but lazy, man not bright enough to invest twenty years' hard work in some other job against the promise of later enjoyment. Easy meat for the Zygra Company. All of them were, including Victor, about whom the others reported that in a fit of deep depression he'd decided he wanted to get the hell away from the entire human race, and had grabbed this job as a hermitage. Of course, when his condition had cycled back to the upward phase, he'd regretted it.

  "Do any of you know why the Zygra Company adopted this policy of changing its supervisors annually, recruiting them on this absurd basis and deliberately trapping them into infringing their contracts?" she asked next.

  "I think so," Horst answered. "Victor knew the man before him, who knew the first of these nine Shuster told you about. It seems that there was a man called Zbygniewski who was planted by another company to find out what he could about this place and the life-cycle of the pelts. He must have been armored up to the roof of his skull with post-hypnotics and drugs, because he got through the company's routine interrogation, joined the staff, was assigned to his tour of duty here—it was farmed out among permanent employees then, you see—and after his year's stay he got away with information that enabled his bosses to launch the most nearly successful of all the raids on Zygra. He'd also planted a boobytrap for his successor, the idea being that this would make the planet legally unoccupied so that someone else could land and claim possession before the harvesting ship came to pick up the next crop."

  He broke off. Something in Kynance's expression had given him a clue to what she was thinking. He said, listening to his own words in near-bewilderment, "Legally—unoccupied . . .?"

  "Not so fast," Kynance objected, raising a hand. But she also gave him a wink. "I assume that this boobytrap he left was what started the company on its present course?"

  "I gather from hints I've picked up that it was Shuster's idea, the thing that advanced him in the company," Hoist said.

  "That fits," Kynance nodded. "A swine like him wouldn't be much liked even by the fellow swine who must run the Zygra Company, so you'd expect him to have done something exceptionally nasty to get ahead to where he is now. And the dirty underhandedness of the traps people run into-matches his personality."

  "You can say that again," agreed Dickery Evan fervently.

  "Just how underhanded?"Kynance went on, disregarding the interruption. "Would you please tell me how each of you was inveigled into breaking his contract?"

  So they did. Horst wondered optimistically if some of the means employed would turn out to be illegal—Kynance seemed to know a great deal about the law. But that hope was quenched as time after time she cited reasons to justify the company's position.

  To Evan she said, "I'm afraid tampering with an officially-required record of your work does count as sabotage and voids the contract without chance of appeal: Levi Rico versus Free Space Haulage Company, 2153."

  And to Horst she said rather sadly, "I know they might never have used that book-projector to give you supplementary instructions, but legally you were not entitled to do anything that risked garbling vital information from your employers. Computers are legally non-conscious machines, hence devoid of intelligence, so you should have told the record that you suspected a malfunction needing manual repairs-then you'd have been within your rights."

  And to Coberley, who had been snared through trying to reset the autochef when it had burned his breakfast: "The computer was bound to consider the chance that you might alter another of its settings and perhaps poison yourself— Fernando Duquesne versus the Osceola Food Company, 2099, is quite clear on that."

  "All right, since you're so smart," Coberley spat, "now tell us what we can do to get off this stinking mudballl"

  "I'm not sure I can do that," Kynance admitted.

  "Then what in the name of—?"

  "Coberley, pipe down!" Horst rapped. "This girl has done things you and I wouldn't have had the guts to try even if we'd thought of them."

  "That's nothing very special," Kynance said. "You see-well, it strikes me that you outworlders are too used to relying absolutely on machines. It's only natural; you've done miracles with integrated automatic systems which were never needed on Earth, like this one which looks after Zygra so efficiently. When your life depends on them, you don't interfere with their operations. The moment I caught sight of you paddling your boat along, I realized I'd fallen into the same trap—swallowed whole what the Zygra Company told me about the planet being impossible to colonize and even the single supervisor needing life-support equipment costing millions of credits."

  "I thought you wouldn't have sacrificed your contract without some plan in mind," Horst said softly.

  "If it's not a plan to get us out of here I'm not interested," Coberley snapped.

  "It may well lead to that," Kynance told him. "Though at best it's going to involve a delay of a year—a Zygran year, I mean. There are one hell of a lot of compensations, nonetheless. You might say there's a fat prize attached which will more than make up for the salaries we've lost."

  Dickery sat up and began to take notice, and she unfolded to them the fantastic scheme which had come to her in a flash of inspiration.

  XIII

  THE REAL IRONY of the whole thing, Kynance reflected as she tried to stifle her boundless impatience, was the way the situation kept turning on little pivots of time, a few days or even a few hours in size, separated by enormous gulfs of months or years when they did nothing except sit around and wish for the future to catch up with them, because they dared not do anything.

  If, for example, the four men had been a couple of days later in reaching the main station aboard their clumsy raft, her inspired plan would have been impossible to implement for at least another year, and then they would have had to wait the compulsory year following until the harvesting ship made its regular trip.

  So now, too, they had to wait, hating every minute's limping progress, for an arbitrary deadline—whereupon they would have to cram into a few narrow hours the fruit of months upon months of scheming, plotting, thinking, arguing, examining and re-examining.

  And it might all come to nothing in the end—some petty snare might still catch a foot and bring the enterprise to a foolish halt.

  They were assembled in the observation dome, where she had rigged a remote for the calendar clock in the supervisor's quarters. The hands were ticking now towards the red line she had carefully inscribed across the face first thing today. One by one they had fallen silent; the chattering that had signaled the release of old tension, now that the day of their revenge was here, hadn't lasted, and now they sat and sweated, or paced up and down, or went to the head from nervousness rather than need.

  "Can't we?" Dickery suggested, and didn't have to specify what, but he closed his hand on the can of paint beside him on his bench-seat.

  "No!" Horst rasped. "Kynance has explained over and over
—this has got to be done so watertight that nobody, not even a dozen Zygra Companies, could spring a leak in it!"

  "I don't know how much longer I can bear to wait," Victor complained. But he had been saying the same thing daily for half a year, and they ignored it as a formality.

  At first, Kynance remembered, she had scarcely expected to survive to this moment. The strain of knowing that yet one more year must leak away had almost climaxed in murder—it had caused at least three fights between Evan and Coberley, and one between Evan and Horst. But that kind of thing had stopped; the pressure behind it had seeped away as one by one they'd begun to accept the consequences of their joint action.

  She had first begun to let herself believe in success the day she'd come upon Coberley—of all the men, Coberley!—standing by himself at the edge of the huge steel deck of the station, staring at the white sunlight on the pools of water pitting the nearest mudflats, at the matted vegetation, at the drab olive-dun shapes of some unripe pelts drifting ahead of a tireless monitor.

  He'd stood several moments longer without realizing he was being watched; then, noticing her, he'd turned and given a scowl. He'd said, "Damned bastards in the Zygra Company —trying to pretend this isn't a fit world for human beings!"

  After that, it had become possible to regard her companions as colleagues, and the tone of their discussions together had altered from desperate—a search for escape—to proud. Even Victor, whose bitterness was too deeply ingrained in his personality by years of privation ever to be eliminated completely had done his best to spare the others the effects of it, and had taken to stealing away on his own to sweat out his indefinable fear.

  What a bunch of misfits! Kynance thought, and then added with a burst of near-affection: Yet there's something special about anyone, neurotic or normal, who'll accept the responsibility of looking after a whole damned planet!