Isaac Asimov - Galactic Empire 02 Read online

  The old man said hoarsely, "This way! Quickly!"

  Terens held back. "In there?"

  The old man said, "This one is a dummy."

  First Rik, then Valona, then Terens crawled through the furnace door. There was a faint click and the back wall of the furnace moved slightly and hung freely from hinges above. They pushed through it and into a small room, dimly lit, beyond.

  They waited. Ventilation was bad, and the smell of baking increased hunger without satisfying it. Valona kept smiling at Rik, patting his hand mechanically from time to time. Rik stared back at her blankly. Once in a while he put a hand to his flushed face.

  Valona began, "Townman-"

  He snapped back in a tight whisper, "Not now, Lona. Please!"

  He passed the back of his hand across his forehead, then stared at the dampness on his knuckles.

  There was a click, magnified by the close confinement of their hiding place. Terens stiffened. Without quite realizing it, he raised clenched fists.

  It was the broad man, poking his immense shoulders through the opening. They scarcely fit.

  He looked at Terens and was amused. "Come on, man. We're not going to be fighting."

  Terens looked at his fists, and let them drop.

  The broad man was in markedly poorer condition now than when they had first seen him. His shirt was all but removed from his back and a fresh weal, turning red and purple, marked one cheekbone. His eyes were little and the eyelids crowded them above and below.

  He said, "They've stopped looking. If you're hungry, the fare here isn't fancy, but there's enough of it. What do you say?"

  It was night in the City. There were lights in the Upper City that lit the sky for miles, but in the Lower City the darkness was clammy. The shades were drawn tightly across the front of the bakery to hide the illegal, past-curfew lights away from it.

  Rik felt better with warm food inside him. His headache began to recede. He fixed his eyes on the broad man's cheek. Timidly he asked, "Did they hurt you, mister?"

  "A little," said the broad one. "It doesn't matter. It happens every day in my business." He laughed, showing large teeth. "They had to admit I hadn't done anything but I was in their way while they were chasing someone else. The easiest way of getting a native out of the way-" His hand rose and fell, holding an invisible weapon, butt-first.

  Rik flinched away and Valona reached out an anxious, protective arm.

  The broad man leaned back, sucking at his teeth to get out particles of food. He said, "I'm Matt Khorov, but they just call me the Baker. Who are you people?"

  Terens shrugged. "Well..."

  The Baker said, "I see your point. What I don't know won't hurt anyone. Maybe. Maybe. At that, though, you. might trust me. I saved you from the patrollers, didn't I?"

  "Yes. Thank you." Terens couldn't squeeze cordiality into his voice. He said, "How did you know they were after us? There were quite a few people running."

  The other smiled. None of them had the faces you three were wearing. Yours could have been ground up and used for chalk."

  Terens tried to smile in return. He didn't succeed well. "I'm not sure I know why you risked your life. Thank you, anyway. It isn't much, just saying 'Thank you.' but there's nothing else I can do right now."

  "You don't have to do anything." The Baker's vast shoulders leaned back against the wall. "I do this as often as I can. It's nothing personal. If the patrollers are after someone I do my best for him. I hate the patrollers."

  Valona gasped. "Don't you get into trouble?"

  "Sure. Look at this." He put a finger gently on his bruised cheek. "But you don't think I ought to let it stop me, I hope. That's why I built the dummy oven. So the patrollers wouldn't catch me and make things too hard for me."

  Valona's eyes were wide with mingled fright and fascination.

  The Baker said, "Why not? You know how many Squires there are on Fiorina? Ten thousand. You know how many patrollers? Maybe twenty thousand. And there are five hundred million of us natives. If we all lined up against them..." He snapped his fingers.

  Terens said, "We'd be lining up against needle-guns and blaster-cannon, Baker."

  The Baker retorted, "Yeah. We'd have to get some of our own. You Townmen have been living too close to the Squires. You're scared of them."

  Valona's world was being turned upside down today. This man fought with patrollers and spoke with careless self-confidence to the Townman. When Rik plucked at her sleeve she disengaged his fingers gently and told him to sleep. She scarcely looked at him. She wanted to hear what this man said.

  The broad man was saying, "Even with needle-guns and blaster-cannon, the only way the Squires hold Fiorina is with the help of a hundred thousand Townmen."

  Terens looked offended, but the Baker went on, "For instance, look at you. Very nice clothes. Neat. Pretty. You've got a nice little shack, too, I'll bet, with book-films, a private hopper and no curfew. You can even go to Upper City if you want to. The Squires wouldn't do that for you for nothing."

  Terens felt in no position to lose his temper. He said, "All right. What do you want the Townmen to do? Pick fights with the patrollers? What good would it do? I admit I keep my town quiet and up to quota, but I keep them out of trouble. I try to help them, as much as the law will allow. Isn't that something? Someday-"

  "Aah, someday. Who can wait for someday? When you and I are dead, what difference will it make who runs Fiorina? To us, I mean."

  Terens said, "In the first place, I hate the Squires more than you do. Still-" He stopped, reddening.

  The Baker laughed. "Go ahead. Say it again. I won't turn you in for hating the Squires. What did you do to get the patrollers after you?"

  Terens was silent.

  The Baker said, "I can make a guess. When the patrollers fell over me they were plenty sore. Sore in person, I mean, and not just because some Squire told them to be sore. I know them and I can tell. So I figure that there's only one thing that could have happened. You must've knocked down a patroller. Or killed him, maybe."

  Terens was still silent.

  The Baker lost none of his agreeable tone. "It's all right to keep quiet but there's such a thing as being too cautious, Townman. You're going to need help. They know who you are."

  "No, they don't," said Terens hastily.

  "They must have looked at your cards in the Upper City."

  "Who said I was in the Upper City?"

  "A guess. I'll bet you were."

  "They looked at my card, but not long enough to read my name."

  "Long enough to know you're a Townman. All they have to do is find a Townman missing from his town or one who can't account for his movements today. The wires all over Fiorina are probably scorching right now. I think you're in trouble.'

  "Maybe."

  "You know there's no maybe. Want help?"

  They were talking in whispers. Rik had curled up in the corner and gone to sleep. Valona's eyes were moving from speaker to speaker.

  Terens shook his head. "No, thanks. I - I'll get out of this."

  The Baker's ready laughter came. "It will be interesting to see how. Don't look down on me because I haven't got an education. I've got other things. Look, you spend the night thinking about it. Maybe you'll decide you can use help."

  Valona's eyes were open in the darkness. Her bed was only a blanket thrown on the floor, but it was nearly as good as the beds she was used to. Rik slept deeply on another blanket in an opposite corner. He always slept deeply on days of excitement after his headaches passed.

  The Townman had refused a bed and the Baker had laughed (he laughed at everything, it seemed), turned out the light and told him he was welcome to sit up in the darkness.

  Valona's eyes remained open. Sleep was far away. Would she ever sleep again? She had knocked down a patroller!

  Unaccountably, she was thinking of her father and mother.

  They were very misty in her mind. She had almost made herself forget them in the years t
hat had stretched between them and herself. But now she remembered the sound of whispered conversations during the night, when they thought her asleep. She remembered people who came in the dark.

  The patrollers had awakened her one night and asked her questions she could not understand but tried to answer. She never saw her parents again after that. They had gone away, she was told, and the next day they had put her to work when other children her age still had two years of play time. People looked after her as she passed and other children weren't allowed to play with her, even when worktime was over. She learned to keep to herself. She learned not to speak. So they called her "Big Lona" and laughed at her and said she was a half-wit.

  Why did the conversation tonight remind her of her parents?

  "Valona."

  The voice was so close that its light breath stirred her hair and so low she scarcely heard it. She tensed, partly in fear, partly in embarrassment. There was only a sheet over her bare body.

  It was the Townman. He said, "Don't say anything. Just listen. I am leaving. The door isn't locked. I'll be back, though. Do you hear me? Do you understand?"

  She reached in the darkness, caught his hand, pressed it with her fingers. He was satisfied.

  "And watch Rik. Don't let him out of your sight. And Valona." There was a long pause. Then he went on, "Don't trust this Baker too much. I don't know about him. Do you understand?"

  There was a faint noise of motion, an even fainter distant creak, and he was gone. She raised herself to one elbow and, except for Rik's breathing and her own, there was only silence.

  She put her eyelids together in the darkness, squeezing them, trying to think. Why did the Townman, who knew everything, say this about the Baker, who hated patrollers and had saved them? Why?

  She could think of only one thing. He had been there. Just when things looked as black as they could be, the Baker had come and had acted quickly. It was almost as though it had been arranged or as if the Baker had been waiting for it all to happen.

  She shook her head. It seemed strange. If it weren't for what the Townman had said, she would never think this.

  The silence was broken into quivering pieces by a loud and unconcerned remark, "Hello? Still here?"

  She froze as a beam of light caught her full. Slowly she relaxed and bunched the sheet about her neck. The beam fell away.

  She did not have to wonder about the identity of the new speaker. His squat broad form bulked in the half-light that leaked backward from the flash.

  The Baker said, "You know, I thought you'd go with him."

  Valona said weakly, "Who sir?"

  "The Townman. You know he left, girl. Don't waste time pretending."

  "He'll be back, sir."

  "Did he say he would be back? If he did, he's wrong. The patrollers will get him. He's not a very smart man, the Town-man, or he'd know when a door is left open for a purpose. Are you planning to leave too?"

  Valona said, "I'll wait for the Townman."

  "Suit yourself. It will be a long wait. Go when you please."

  His light-beam suddenly left her altogether and traveled along the floor, picking out Rik's pale, thin face. Rik's eyelids crushed together automatically, at the impact of the light, but he slept on.

  The Baker's voice grew thoughtful. "But I'd just as soon you left that one behind. You understand that, I suppose. If you decide to leave, the door is open, but it isn't open for him."

  "He's just a poor, sick fellow-" Valona began in a high, frightened voice.

  "Yes? Well, I collect poor sick fellows and that one stays here. Remember!"

  The light-beam did not move from Rik's sleeping face.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  THE SCIENTIST

  Dr. Selim Junz had been impatient for a year, but one does not become accustomed to impatience with time. Rather the reverse. Nevertheless the year had taught him that the Sarkite Civil Service could not be hurried; all the more so since the civil servants themselves were largely transplanted Florinians and therefore dreadfully careful of their own dignity.

  He had once asked old Abel, the Trantorian Ambassador, who had lived on Sark so long that the soles of his boots had grown roots, why the Sarkites allowed their government departments to be run by the very people they despised so heartily.

  Abel had wrinkled his eyes over a goblet of green wine.

  "Policy, Junz," he said. "Policy. A matter of practical genetics, carried out with Sarkite logic. They're a small, no-account world, these Sarkites, in themselves, and are only important so long as they control that everlasting gold mine, Fiorina. So each year they skim Fiorina's fields and villages, bringing the cream of its youth to Sark for training. The mediocre ones they set to filing their papers and filling their blanks and signing their forms and the really clever ones they send back to Fiorina to act as native governors for the towns. Townmen they call them."

  Dr. Junz was a Spatio-analyst, primarily. He did not quite see the point of all this. He said so.

  Abel pointed a blunt old forefinger at him and the green light shining through the contents of his goblet touched the ridged fingernail and subdued its yellow-grayness.

  He said, "You will never make an administrator. Ask me for no recommendations. Look, the most intelligent elements of Fiorina are won over to the Sarkite cause wholeheartedly, since while they serve Sark they are well taken care of, whereas if they turn their backs on Sark the best they can hope for is a return to a Florinian existence, which is not good, friend, not good"

  He swallowed the wine at a draught and went on. "Further, neither the Townmen nor Sark's clerical assistants may breed without losing their position. Even with female Florinians, that is. Interbreeding with Sarkites is, of course, out of the question. In this way the best of the Florinian genes are being continually withdrawn from circulation, so that gradually Fiorina will be composed only of hewers of wood and drawers of water."

  "They'll run out of clerks at that rate, won't they?"

  "A matter for the future."

  So Dr. Junz sat now in one of the outer anterooms of the Department for Florinian Affairs and waited impatiently to be allowed past the slow barriers, while Florinian underlings scurried endlessly through a bureaucratic maze.

  An elderly Florinian, shriveled in service, stood before him.

  "Dr. Junz?"

  "Yes."

  "Come with me."

  A flashing number on a screen would have been as efficient in summoning him and a fluoro-channel through the air as efficient in guiding him, but where manpower is cheap, nothing need be substituted. Dr. Junz thought "manpower" advisedly. He had never seen women in any government department on Sark. Florinian women were left on their planet, except for some house servants who were likewise forbidden to breed, and Sarkite women were, as Abel said, out of the question.

  He was gestured to a seat before the desk of the Clerk to the Undersecretary. He knew the man's title from the channeled glow etched upon the desk. No Florinian could, of course, be more than a clerk, regardless of how much of the actual threads of office ran through his white fingers. The Under-secretary and the Secretary of Florinian Affairs would themselves be Sarkites, but though Dr. Junz might meet them socially, he knew he would never meet them here in the department.

  He sat, still impatiently, but at least nearer the goal. The Clerk was glancing carefully through the file, turning each minutely coded sheet as though it held the secrets of the universe. The man was quite young, a recent graduate perhaps, and like all Florinians, very fair of skin and light of hair.

  Dr. Junz felt an atavistic thrill. He himself came from the world of Libair, and like all Libairians, he was highly pigmented and his skin was a deep, rich brown. There were few worlds in the Galaxy in which the skin color was so extreme as on either Libair or Fiorina. Generally, intermediate shades were the rule.

  Some of the radical young anthropologists were playing with the notion that men of worlds like libair, for instance, had arisen by independent but c
onvergent evolution. The older men denounced bitterly any notion of an evolution that converged different species to the point where interbreeding was possible, as it certainly was among all the worlds in the Galaxy. They insisted that on the original planet, whatever it was, mankind had already been split into subgroups of varying pigmentation.

  This merely placed the problem further back in time and answered nothing so that Dr. Junz found neither explanation satisfying. Yet even now he found himself thinking of the problem at times. Legends of a past of conflict had lingered, for some reason, on the dark worlds. Libairian myths, for instance, spoke of times of war between men of different pigmentation and the founding of Libair itself was held due to a party of browns fleeing from a defeat in battle.

  When Dr. Junz left Libair for the Arcturian Institute of Spatial Technology and later entered his profession, the early fairy tales were forgotten. Only once since then had he really wondered. He had happened upon one of the ancient worlds of the Centaurian Sector in the course of business; one of those worlds whose history could be counted in millennia and whose language was so archaic that its dialect might also be that lost and mythical language, English. They had a special word for a man with dark skin.

  Now why should there be a special word for a man with dark skin? There was no special word for a man with blue eyes, or large ears, or curly hair. There was no --

  The Clerk's precise voice broke his reverie. "You have been at this office before, according to the record."

  Dr. Junz said with some asperity, "I have indeed, sir."

  "But not recently."

  "No, not recently."

  "You are still in search of a Spatio-analyst who disappeared" - the Clerk flipped sheets - "some eleven months and thirteen days ago."

  "That's right."

  "In all that time," said the Clerk in his dry, crumbly voice out of which all the juice seemed carefully pressed, "there has been no sign of the man and no evidence to the effect that he ever was anywhere in Sarkite territory."

  "He was last reported," said the scientist, "in space near Sark."

  The Clerk looked up and his pale blue eyes focused for a moment on Dr. Junz, then dropped quickly. "This may be so, but it is not evidence of his presence on Sark."