Governor-General Sidney Harrington, on the comfortably-upholstered bench on the dais of the Audience Hall, didn"t look particularly regal. But then, to a Terran, any of the kings of Ullr would have looked like a freak birth in a lizard-house at a zoo; it was hard to guess what impression Harrington would make on the Ullran psychology.
He took the false palate and tongue-clicker, officially designated as an "enunciator, Ullran" and, colloquially, as a geek-speaker, out of his coat pocket and shoved it into his mouth. Von Schlichten and Blount put in theirs, and Harrington pressed the floor-b.u.t.ton with his toe. After a brief interval, the wide doors at the other end of the hall slid open, and the Konkrookan notables, attended by a dozen Company native-officers and a guard of Kragan Rifles, entered. The honor-guard advanced in two columns; between them marched an unclad and heavily armed native carrying an ornate spear with a three-foot blade upright in front of him with all four hands. It was the Konkrookan Spear of State; it represented the proxy-presence of King Jaikark. Behind it stalked Gurgurk, the Konkrookan equivalent of Prime Minister or Grand Vizier; he wore a gold helmet and a thing like a string-vest made of gold wire, and carried a long sword with a two-hand grip, a pair of Terran automatics built for a hand with six-four-knuckled fingers, and a pair of matched daggers. He was considerably past the Ullran prime of life--seventy or eighty, to judge from the worn appearance of his opal teeth, the color of his skin, and the predominantly reddish tint of his quartz-speckles. The retinue of n.o.bles behind Gurgurk ran through the whole spectrum, from a princeling who was almost oyster-gray to the Keegarkan Amba.s.sador, who was even blacker and more red-speckled than Gurgurk.
Four slaves brought up in the rear, carrying an ornately inlaid box on poles. When the spear-bearer reached the exact middle of the hall, he halted and grounded his regalia-weapon with a thump. Gurgurk came up and halted a couple of paces behind and to the left of the spear, and most of the other n.o.bles drew up in two curved lines some ten paces to the rear; the amba.s.sador and another n.o.ble came up and planted themselves beside Gurgurk.
The Governor-General rose slowly and descended from the dais, advancing to within ten paces of the Spear, von Schlichten and Blount accompanying him.
"Welcome, Gurgurk," Harrington gibbered through his false palate. "The Company is honored by this visit."
"I come in the name of my royal master, His Sublime and Ineffable Majesty, Jaikark the Seventeenth, King of Konkrook and of all the lands of the Konk Isthmus," Gurgurk squeaked and clicked. "I have the honor to bring with me the Lord Amba.s.sador of King Orgzild of Keegark to the court of my royal master."
"And I," the amba.s.sador said, after being suitably welcomed, "am honored to be accompanied by Prince Gorkrink, special envoy from my master, His Royal and Imperial Majesty King Orgzild, who is in your city to receive the shipment of power-metal my royal master has been honored to be permitted to purchase from the Company."
More protocol about welcoming Gorkrink. Then Gurgurk cleared his throat with a series of barking sounds.
"My royal master, His Sublime and Ineffable Majesty, is prostrated with grief," he stated solemnly. "Were his sorrow not so overwhelming, he would have come in His Own Sacred Person to express the pain and shame which he feels that people of the Company should be set upon and endangered in the streets of the royal city."
"The soldiers of His Sublime and Ineffable Majesty came most promptly to the aid of the troops of the Company, did they not, General von Schlichten?" Harrington asked, solemn-faced.
"Within minutes, Your Excellency," von Schlichten replied gravely.
"Their promptness, valor and efficiency were most exemplary."
Gurgurk spoke at length, expressing himself as delighted, on behalf of his royal master, at hearing such high praise from so distinguished a soldier. Eric Blount contributed a short speech, beseeching the G.o.ds that the deep and beautiful friendship existing between the Chartered Ullr Company and His Sublime etcetera would continue unimpaired. The Keegarkan Amba.s.sador spoke his piece, expressing on behalf of King Orgzild the deepest regret that the people of the Company should be so molested, and managing to hint that things like that simply didn"t happen at Keegark.
The Prince Gorkrink then spoke briefly, in sympathy. Von Schlichten noticed that a few of his more recent quartz-specks were slightly greenish in tinge, a sure sign that he had, not long ago, been exposed to the fluorine-tainted air which men and geeks alike breathed on Niflheim. When a geek prince hired out as a laborer for a year on Niflheim, he did so for only one purpose--to learn Terran technologies.
Gurgurk then announced that so enormous a crime against the friends of His Sublime etcetera had not been allowed to go unpunished, signalling behind him with one of his lower hands for the box to be brought forward. The slaves carried it to the front, set it down, and opened it, taking from it a rug which they spread on the floor. On this, from the box, they placed twenty-four newly severed opal-grinning heads, in four neat rows. They had all been freshly scrubbed and polished, but they still smelled like crushed c.o.c.kroaches.
The three Terrans looked at them gravely. A double-dozen heads was standard payment for an attack in which no Terran had been killed.
Ostensibly, they were the heads of the ringleaders; in practice, they were usually lopped from the first two-dozen prisoners or overage slaves at hand, without regard for whether the victims had ever heard of the crime they were expiating.
There was another long speech from Gurgurk, with the n.o.bles behind him murmuring antiphonal agreement--standard procedure, for which there was a standard pun, geek chorus--and a speech of response from Sid Harrington. Standing stiffly through the whole rigamarole, von Schlichten waited for it to end, as, finally, it did.
They walked back from the door, whence they had escorted the delegation, and stood looking down at the saurian heads on the rug.
Harrington raised his voice and called to a Kragan sergeant whose chevrons were painted on all four arms.
"Take this carrion out and stuff it in the incinerator," he ordered.
"Wait a minute," von Schlichten told the sergeant. Then he disgorged and pouched his geek-speaker. "See that head, there?" he asked, rolling it over with his toe. "I killed that geek, myself, with my pistol. And Hid O"Leary stuck a knife in that one." He walked around the rug, turning heads over with his foot. "This was a cut-rate head-payment; they just slashed off two-dozen heads at the scene of the riot. Six months ago, Gurgurk wouldn"t have tried to pull anything like this. Now he"s laughing up his non-existent sleeve at us."
"That"s what I"ve been preaching, all along," Eric Blount took up after him. "These geeks need having the fear of Terra thrown into them."
"Oh, nonsense, Eric; you"re just as bad as Carlos, here!" Harrington tut-tuted. "Next, you"ll be saying that we ought to depose Jaikark and take control ourselves."
"Well, what"s wrong with that, for an idea?" von Schlichten demanded.
"My G.o.d!" Harrington exploded. "Don"t let me hear that kind of talk again! We"re not _conquistadores_: we"re employees of a business concern, here to make money honestly, by exchanging goods and services with these people...."
He turned and walked away, out of the Audience Hall, leaving von Schlichten and Blount to watch the removal of the geek-heads.
"You know, I went a little too far," von Schlichten confessed. "Or too fast, rather."
"We can"t go too slowly, though," Blount replied.
Von Schlichten nodded seriously. "Did you notice the green specks in the hide of that Prince Gorkrink?" he asked. "He"s just come back from Niflheim. Probably on the _Canberra_, three months ago."
"And he"s here to get that plutonium, and ship it to Keegark on the _Oom Paul Kruger_," Blount considered. "I wonder just what he learned, on Niflheim."
"I wonder just what"s going on at Keegark," von Schlichten said.
"Orgzild"s pulled down a regular First-Century-model iron curtain. You know, four of our best native Intelligence operatives have been murdered in Keegark in the last three months, and six more have just vanished there."
"Well, I"m going there in a few days, myself, to talk to Orgzild about this s.p.a.ceport deal," Blount said. "I"ll have a talk with Hendrik Lemoyne and Colonel MacKinnon. And I"ll see what I can find out for myself."
"Well, let"s go have a drink," von Schlichten suggested.
But he kept remembering the falsehood of Gurgurk"s indemnity. When the Ullrans started making a mockery of such things, it was no time for Harrington"s trusting policies. The smell of trouble was suddenly stronger in his nostrils.
IV
Von Schlichten and Blount entered the bar together. Going to a bartending machine, von Schlichten dialed the c.o.c.ktail they had decided upon and inserted his key to charge the drinks to his account, filling a four-portion jug.
As they turned away, they almost collided with Hideyoshi O"Leary and Paula Quinton. The girl wore a long-sleeved gown to conceal a bandage on her right wrist, and her face was rather heavily powdered in spots; otherwise she looked none the worse for recent experiences. Von Schlichten invited her and her escort to join him and Blount. Colonel O"Leary was carrying a c.o.c.ktail jug and a couple of gla.s.ses; finding a table out of the worst of the noise, they all sat down together.
"I suppose you think it"s a joke, our being nearly murdered by the people we came to help," Paula began, a trifle defensively.
"Not a very funny joke," von Schlichten told her. "It"s been played on us till it"s lost its humor."
"Yes, geek ingrat.i.tude"s an old story to all of us," Blount agreed.
"You stay on this planet very long and you"ll see what I mean."
"You call them that, too?" she asked, as though disappointed in him.
"Maybe if you stopped calling them geeks, they wouldn"t resent you the way they do. You know, that"s a nasty name; in the First Century Pre-Atomic, it designated a degraded person who performed some sort of revolting public exhibition...."
"As far as that goes, you know what the geek name for a Terran is?"
Blount asked. "_Suddabit_."