Kankad introduced the rest of his people, and von Schlichten introduced the Terrans from the telecast-station. Then Kankad looked at the watch he was wearing on his lower left wrist.
"We will have plenty of time, before the ship comes, to show Paula the town," he suggested. "Von, you know better than I do what she would like to see."
He led the way past a pair of long 90-mm. guns to a stone stairway.
Von Schlichten explained, as they went down, that the guns of King Kankad"s town were the only artillery above 75-mm. on Ullr in non-Terran hands. They climbed into an open machine-gun carrier and strapped themselves to their seats, and for two hours King Kankad showed her the sights of the town. They visited the school, where young Kragans were being taught to read Lingua Terra and studied from textbooks printed in Johannesburg and Sydney and Buenos Aires. Kankad showed her the repair-shops, where two-score descendants of Kragan river-chieftains were working on contragravity equipment, under the supervision of a Scottish-Afrikaner and his Malay-Portuguese wife; the small-arms factory, where very respectable copies of Terran rifles and pistols and auto-weapons were being turned out; the machine-shop; the physics and chemistry labs; the hospital; the ammunition-loading plant; the battery of 155-mm. Long Toms, built in Kankad"s own shops, which covered the road up the sloping rock-spine behind the city; the printing-shop and book-bindery; the observatory, with a big telescope and an ingenious orrery of the Beta Hydrae system; the nuclear-power plant, part of the original price for giving up brigandage.
Half an hour before the ship from Konkrook was due, they had arrived at the airport, where a gang of Kragans were clearing a berth for the _Aldebaran_. From somewhere, Kankad produced two cold bottles of Cape Town beer for Paula and von Schlichten, and a bowl of some boiling-hot black liquid for himself. Von Schlichten and Paula lit cigarettes; between sips of his bubbling h.e.l.l brew, Kankad gnawed on the stalk of some swamp-plant. Paula seemed as much surprised at Kankad"s disregard for the eating taboo as she had been at von Schlichten"s open flouting of the convention of concealment when he had put in his geek-speaker.
"This is the only place on Ullr where this happens," von Schlichten told her. "Here, or in the field when Terran and Kragan soldiers are together. There aren"t any taboos between us and the Kragans."
"No," Kankad said. "We cannot eat each others" food, and because our bodies are different, we cannot be the fathers of each others" young.
But we have been battle-comrades, and work-sharers, and we have learned from each other, my people more from yours than yours from mine. Before you came, my people were like children, shooting arrows at little animals on the beach, and climbing among the rocks at dare-me-and-I-do, and playing war with toy weapons. But we are growing up, and it will not be long before we will stand beside you, as the grown son stands beside his parent, and when that day comes, you will not be ashamed of us."
It was easy to forget that Kankad had four arms and a rubbery, quartz-speckled skin, and a face like a lizard"s.
"I want Little Me, when he"s old enough to travel, to visit your world," Kankad said. "And some of the other young ones. And when Little Me is old enough to take over the rule of our people, I would like to go to Terra, myself."
"You"re going," von Schlichten a.s.sured him. "Some day, when I return, I"ll see that you make the trip with me."
"Wonderful, Von!" Kankad was silent for a moment. When he spoke again, it was in Kragan, and quickly. "If we live so long, old friend. There is trouble coming, though even my spies cannot find what that trouble is. And two days ago in Keegark, two of my people died trying to learn it. I ask you--be careful!"
Then he switched hastily back to the language Paula could understand, apologizing. It gave von Schlichten time to wipe the worry from his face before she turned back to him, though it was worse news than he had expected. If Kankad thought things were bad enough to add his own spies to those of the Company, things couldn"t be much worse. In fact, anything that brought whatever it was out into the open would be better.
He was still fretting over it as they said their good-byes to Kankad and boarded the _Aldebaran_ for Skilk.
V
The last clatter of silverware and dishes ceased as the native servants finished clearing the table. There was a remaining clatter of cups and saucers; liqueur-gla.s.ses tinkled, and an occasional cigarette-lighter clicked. At the head table, the voices seemed louder.
"... don"t like it a millisol"s worth," Brigadier-General Barney Mordkovitz, the Skilk military CO, was saying to the lady on his right. "They"re too confounded meek. Nowadays, n.o.body yells "_Znidd suddabit!_" at you. They just stand and look at you like a farmer looking at a turkey the week before Christmas, and that I don"t like!"
"Oh, bosh!" Jules Keaveney, the Skilk Resident-Agent, at the head of the table, exclaimed. "If they don"t bow and sc.r.a.pe to you and get off the sidewalk to let you pa.s.s, you say they"re insolent and need a lesson. If they do, you say they"re plotting insurrection."
"What I said," Mordkovitz repeated, "was that I expect a certain amount of disorder, and a certain minimum show of hostility toward us from some of these geeks, to conform to what I know to be our unpopularity with many of them. When I don"t find it, I want to know why."
"I"m inclined," von Schlichten came to his subordinate"s support, "to agree. This sudden absence of overt hostility is disquieting. Colonel Cheng-Li," he called on the local Intelligence officer and Constabulary chief. "This fellow Rakkeed was here, about a month ago.
Was there any noticeable disorder at that time? Anti-Terran demonstrations, attacks on Company property or personnel, shooting at aircars, that sort of thing?"
"No more than usual, general. In fact, it was when Rakkeed came here that the condition General Mordkovitz was speaking of began to become conspicuous."
Von Schlichten nodded. "And I might say that Lieutenant-Governor Blount has reported from Keegark, where he is now, that the same unnatural absence of hostility exists there."
"Well, of course, general," Keaveney said patronizingly, "King Orgzild has things under pretty tight control at Keegark. He"d not allow a few fanatics to do anything to prejudice these s.p.a.ceport negotiations."
"I wonder if the idea back of that s.p.a.ceport proposition isn"t to get us concentrated at Keegark, where Orgzild could wipe us all out in one surprise blow," somebody down the table suggested, and others nodded.
"Oh, Orgzild wouldn"t be crazy enough to try anything like that,"
Commander Dirk Prinsloo, of the _Aldebaran_, declared. "He"d get away with it for just twelve months--the time it would take to get the news to Terra and for a Federation s.p.a.ce Navy task-force to get here. And then, there"d be little bits of radioactive geek floating around this system as far out as the orbit of Beta Hydrae VII."
"That"s quite true," von Schlichten agreed. "The point is, does Orgzild know it? I doubt if he even believes there is a Terra."
"Then where in s.p.a.ce does he think we come from?" Keaveney demanded.
"I believe he thinks Niflheim is our home world," von Schlichten replied. "Or, rather, the string of orbiters and artificial satellites around Niflheim. Where he thinks Niflheim is, I wouldn"t even try to guess."
"Yes. After he"d wiped us out, he might even consider the idea of an invasion of Niflheim with captured contragravity ships," Hideyoshi O"Leary chuckled. "That would be a big laugh--if any of us were alive, then, to do any laughing."
"You don"t really believe that, general?" Keaveney asked. His tone was still derisive, but under the derision was uncertainty. After all, von Schlichten had been on Ullr for fifteen years, to his two.
"Any question of geek psychology is wide open as far as I"m concerned; the longer I stay here, the less I understand it." Von Schlichten finished his brandy and got out cigarette-case and lighter. "I have an idea of the sort of garbled reports these spies of his who spend a year on Niflheim as laborers bring back."
"You know the line Rakkeed"s been taking, of course," Colonel Cheng-Li put in. "He as much as says that Niflheim"s our home, and that the farms where we raise food, here, and those evergreen plantings on Konk Isthmus and between here and Grank are the beginning of an attempt to drive all native life from this planet and make it over for ourselves."
"And that savage didn"t think an idea like that up for himself; he got it from somebody like Orgzild," the black-bearded brigadier-general added. "You know, the main base off Niflheim is practically self-supporting, with hyproponic-gardens and animal-tissue culture vats. And it"s enough bigger than one of the _City_ ships to pa.s.s for a little world. Yes; somebody like Orgzild, or King Firkked, here, could easily pick up the idea that that"s our home planet."
"The Company ought to let us stockpile nuclear weapons here, just to be on the safe side," another officer, farther down the table, said.
"Well, I"m not exactly in favor of that," von Schlichten replied.
"It"s the same principle as not allowing guards who have to go in among the convicts to carry firearms. If somebody like Orgzild got hold of a nuclear bomb, even a little old First-Century H-bomb, he could use it for a model and construct a hundred like it, with all the plutonium we"ve been handing out for power reactors. And there are too few of us, and we"re concentrated in too few places, to last long if that happened. What this planet needs, though, is a visit by a fifty-odd-ship task-force of the s.p.a.ce Navy, just to show the geeks what we have back of us. After a show like that, there"d be a lot less _znidd suddabit_ around here."
"General, I deplore that sort of talk," Keaveney said. "I hear too much of this mailed-fist-and-rattling-sabre stuff from some of the junior officers here, without your giving countenance and encouragement to it. We"re here to earn dividends for the stockholders of the Ullr Company, and we can only do that by gaining the friendship, respect and confidence of the natives...."
"Mr. Keaveney," Paula Quinton spoke. "I doubt if even you would seriously accuse the Extraterrestrials Rights a.s.sociation of favoring what you call a mailed fist and rattling sabre policy. We"ve done everything in our power to help these people, and if anybody should have their friendship, we should. Well, only five days ago, in Konkrook, Mr. Mohammed Ferriera and I were attacked by a mob, our native aircar driver was murdered, and if it hadn"t been for General von Schlichten and his soldiers, we"d have lost our own lives. Mr.
Ferriera is still hospitalized as a result of injuries he received. It seems that General von Schlichten and his Kragans aren"t trying to get friendship and confidence; they"re willing to settle for respect, in the only way they can get it--by hitting harder and quicker than the natives can."
Somebody down the table--one of the military, of course--said, "Hear, hear!" Von Schlichten came as close as a man wearing a monocle can to winking at Paula. Good girl, he thought; she"s started playing on the Army team, and about time!
"Well, of course...." Keaveney began. Then he stopped, as a Terran sergeant came up to the table and bent over Barney Mordkovitz"
shoulder, whispering urgently. The black-bearded brigadier rose immediately, taking his belt from the back of his chair and putting it on. Motioning the sergeant to accompany, he spoke briefly to Keaveney and then came around the table to where von Schlichten sat, the Resident-Agent accompanying him.
"Message just came in from Konkrook, general," he said softly.
"Governor Harrington"s dead."
It took von Schlichten all of a second to grasp what had been said.
"Good G.o.d! When? How?"