By the time I barged into his office, I was spoiling for a fight.
The Secret Service office was full of grayish-pink morning and yellow lights left on from the night before. Magnusson, at his desk, looked as if he"d slept in his rumpled uniform. He was a big bull of a man, and his littered desk looked, as always, like the track of a typhoon in the salt flats.
The clutter was weighted down, here and there, with solidopic cubes of the five Magnusson youngsters, and as usual, Magnusson was fiddling with one of the cubes. He said, not looking up, "Sorry to pull this at the last minute, Race. There was just time to put out a pull order and get you off the ship, but no time to explain."
I glared at him. "Seems I can"t even get off the planet without trouble!
You raised h.e.l.l all the time I was here, but when I try to leave--what is this, anyhow? I"m sick of being shoved around!"
Magnusson made a conciliating gesture. "Wait until you hear--" he began, and broke off, looking at someone who was sitting in the chair in front of his desk, somebody whose back was turned to me. Then the person twisted and I stopped cold, blinking and wondering if this were a hallucination and I"d wake up in the starship"s skyhook, far out in s.p.a.ce.
Then the woman cried, "Race, _Race_! Don"t you know me?"
I took one dazed step and another. Then she flew across the s.p.a.ce between us, her thin arms tangling around my neck, and I caught her up, still disbelieving.
"_Juli!_"
"Oh, Race, I thought I"d die when Mack told me you were leaving tonight.
It"s been the only thing that"s kept me alive, knowing--knowing I"d see you." She sobbed and laughed, her face buried in my shoulder.
I let her cry for a minute, then held my sister at arm"s length. For a moment I had forgotten the six years that lay between us. Now I saw them, all of them, printed plain on her face. Juli had been a pretty girl. Six years had fined her face into beauty, but there was tension in the set of her shoulders, and her gray eyes had looked on horrors.
She looked tiny and thin and unbearably frail under the scanty folds of her fur robe, a Dry-town woman"s robe. Her wrists were manacled, the jeweled tight bracelets fastened together by the links of a long fine chain of silvered gilt that clashed a little, thinly, as her hands fell to her sides.
"What"s wrong, Juli? Where"s Rakhal?"
She shivered and now I could see that she was in a state of shock.
"Gone. He"s gone, that"s all I know. And--oh, Race, Race, he took Rindy with him!"
From the tone of her voice I had thought she was sobbing. Now I realized that her eyes were dry; she was long past tears. Gently I unclasped her clenched fingers and put her back in the chair. She sat like a doll, her hands falling to her sides with a thin clash of chains. When I picked them up and laid them in her lap she let them lie there motionless. I stood over her and demanded, "Who"s Rindy?" She didn"t move.
"My daughter, Race. Our little girl."
Magnusson broke in, his voice harsh. "Well, Cargill, should I have let you leave?"
"Don"t be a d.a.m.n fool!"
"I was afraid you"d tell the poor kid she had to live with her own mistakes," growled Magnusson. "You"re capable of it."
For the first time Juli showed a sign of animation. "I was afraid to come to you, Mack. You never wanted me to marry Rakhal, either."
"Water under the bridge," Magnusson grunted. "And I"ve got lads of my own, Miss Cargill--Mrs.--" he stopped in distress, vaguely remembering that in the Dry-towns an improper form of address can be a deadly insult.
But she guessed his predicament.
"You used to call me Juli, Mack. It will do now."
"You"ve changed," he said quietly. "Juli, then. Tell Race what you told me. All of it."
She turned to me. "I shouldn"t have come for myself--"
I knew that. Juli was proud, and she had always had the courage to live with her own mistakes. When I first saw her, I knew this wouldn"t be anything so simple as the complaint of an abused wife or even an abandoned or deserted mother. I took a chair, watching her and listening.
She began. "You made a mistake when you turned Rakhal out of the Service, Mack. In his way he was the most loyal man you had on Wolf."
Magnusson had evidently not expected her to take this tack. He scowled and looked disconcerted, shifting uneasily in his big chair, but when Juli did not continue, obviously awaiting his answer, he said, "Juli, he left me no choice. I never knew how his mind worked. That final deal he engineered--have you any idea how much that cost the Service? And have you taken a good look at your brother"s face, Juli girl?"
Juli raised her eyes slowly, and I saw her flinch. I knew how she felt.
For three years I had kept my mirror covered, growing an untidy straggle of beard because it hid the scars and saved me the ordeal of facing myself to shave.
Juli whispered, "Rakhal"s is just as bad. Worse."
"That"s some satisfaction," I said, and Mack stared at us, baffled.
"Even now I don"t know what it was all about."
"And you never will," I said for the hundredth time. "We"ve been over this before. n.o.body could understand it unless he"d lived in the Dry-towns. Let"s not talk about it. You talk, Juli. What brought you here like this? What about the kid?"
"There"s no way I can tell you the end without telling you the beginning," she said reasonably. "At first Rakhal worked as a trader in Shainsa."
I wasn"t surprised. The Dry-towns were the core of Terran trade on Wolf, and it was through their cooperation that Terra existed here peaceably, on a world only half human, or less.
The men of the Dry-towns existed strangely poised between two worlds.
They had made dealings with the first Terran ships, and thus gave entrance to the wedge of the Terran Empire. And yet they stood proud and apart. They alone had never yielded to the Terranizing which overtakes all Empire planets sooner or later.
There were no Trade Cities in the Dry-towns; an Earthman who went there unprotected faced a thousand deaths, each one worse than the last. There were those who said that the men of Shainsa and Daillon and Ardcarran had sold the rest of Wolf to the Terrans, to keep the Terrans from their own door.
Even Rakhal, who had worked with Terra since boyhood, had finally come to a point of decision and gone his own way. And it was not Terra"s way.
That was what Juli was saying now.
"He didn"t like what Terra was doing on Wolf. I"m not so sure I like it myself--"
Magnusson interrupted her again. "Do you know what Wolf was like when we came here? Have you seen the Slave Colony, the Idiot"s Village? Your own brother went to Shainsa and routed out The Lisse."
"And Rakhal helped him!" Juli reminded him. "Even after he left you, he tried to keep out of things. He could have told them a good deal that would hurt you, after ten years in Intelligence, you know."
I knew. It was, although I wasn"t going to tell Juli this, one reason why, at the end--during that terrible explosion of violence which no normal Terran mind could comprehend--I had done my best to kill him. We had both known that after this, the planet would not hold the two of us.
We could both go on living only by dividing it unevenly. I had been given the slow death of the Terran Zone. And he had all the rest.
"But he never told them anything! I tell you, he was one of the most loyal--"
Mack grunted, "Yeah, he"s an angel. Go ahead."
She didn"t, not immediately. Instead she asked what sounded like an irrelevant question. "Is it true what he told me? That the Empire has a standing offer of a reward for a working model of a matter transmitter?"
"That offer"s been standing for three hundred years, Terran reckoning.
One million credits cash. Don"t tell me he was figuring to invent one?"
"I don"t think so. But I think he heard rumors about one. He said with that kind of money he could bargain the Terrans right out of Shainsa.