Kenneth Bulmer - No Man's World

“They sure don’t,” Caradine said in mutual self-pity.

“You’ve never pushed a freight there?”

“Nope. Hoping to, one day. Any tips?”

“Only one.” The hollow tooth sucked ponderously. “Stay clear of anyone in uniform. But—” the guffaw exhaled bad breath—“they’re all in uniform in Horak. Haw, haw.”

Caradine laughed and went out. Horak it was, then. The scarcity of maps hadn’t bothered him when he had a perfectly good one among the agents’ papers. Transport might be a problem, but that would be solved by guile, bravado— or the gun.

He bought an inconspicuous suit of dark-gray synthetic twill and took a leisurely swing on public transport—huge, lumbering four-decked air omnibuses that ploughed ahead in the air lanes scattering lesser cars like fish before sharks-making a zig-zag journey into the jumping-off point for Horak. Everywhere he went the sprawling complexes of vast manufacturing plants covered the land and he saw the far-off glint of starship noses pointing to the sky.

Nearly every block had a scanning TV eye and a loudspeaker clump. Authority here kept a firm and square thumb harshly planted on private life. That, too, merely followed the pattern. Totalitarian worlds had been known to Caradine and before he’d cleaned them up he’d done an amount of field research. At the jumping-off point he felt confident of going right into the capital, a distant cluster of shining towers.

None of that confidence was shaken as two brown-uniformed policemen stopped him leaving the bus terminal and asked for his papers. Without hesitation he handed across the Chad license. Waiting for the ponderous official scrutiny, he looked about casually, without a care in the world—or the galaxy.

“Okay, Chad. Where’re you goin’?”

“Oh, I expect to pick up some freight here. Dunno the details yet. You know how it is.”

“No, fellow, we don’t. We’re policemen. Not freight bums. See?”

“Oh. Oh, sure. Sorry.”

The licence was returned. The policemen stalked on, began to stop others and ask for papers.

The unfortunate early demise of Constantin Chad had been very, very fortunate.

Entering a restaurant of the class suitable to his present station, he had a satisfactory meal. About him people were moving chairs and craning heads to see the wall-size TV screen across the end of the room. This, too, fitted. On a world like this, dominated by moguls demanding the last effort from their workers, regular and fully attended news bulletins formed an essential part of the structure of control. Conforming, Caradine moved his chair and watched.

It was like Gamma, only worse. Sheer, blatant, raw and frenziedly sickening war propaganda. No wonder little Jinny Jiloa had talked about blowing Ahansic up; judged on the content of this TV news coverage, if Horakah did not quickly attack and subjugate most of her interstellar neighbors, she would be invaded, raped, decimated, enslaved and forced under the yoke. He kept a face that was as wooden as those about him. Propaganda as unprocessed as this must have been going out for a long, long time to be accepted without a murmur or a laugh.

Outside news followed. A gigantic swarm of alien spaceships had been spotted approaching from a direction in which, as far as astronomers knew, lay only thinly scattered suns. Therefore this enormous fleet was either a war maneuver of Rag-nar or was a true alien force. No one seemed bothered. Cara-dine guessed they considered this just one more subterfuge in the game of nerves being played out there among the stars. Once propaganda goes beyond a certain limiting line of credibility, only the end of the galaxy has impact.

Figures quoted mentioned a hundred thousand starships. The moral was drawn. Horakah must speed up production! Even more battleships must be launched! Everyone must work twice as hard!

It was a relief to turn to the next item.

A shot came up on the screen of a starship and alighting passengers. The news reader said: “Direct from Gamma, this starship brings the latest in the long line of despicable spies to be caught by our brilliant security services. These underhanded and filthy vermin try to steal our secrets and to blow up the work of many patient hands. But never fear! They are all caught in the end.”

The screen showed Hsien Koanga and Allura, pale-faced under their golden tan, handcuffed, stumbling down the ramp and pushed into a waiting black air car. Allura paused for a moment and brushed back her heavy auburn hair. She was viciously prodded on. Caradine sat very still.

The news reader said: “Also on the starship coming here to answer unnamed charges was the travel official for Gamma, Harriet Lafonde.”

Harriet walked down the ramp, smiling. But Caradine did not miss the men with her, hard-faced men with their hands in their pockets.

So Harriet too, was here on Alpha-Horakah, under arrest.

This changed the degree, not the quality, of what Caradine had to do.

Long ago he had made up his mind that petty pilfering of interstellar secrets was not for him. Hsien Koanga had wanted the details of the Horakah space fleet build-up, and the probable way they would plan their tactics in the event of a space battle. All that was very fine, blood-stirring stuff, but Caradine had been used to dealing with the nerve-center of a stellar commonwealth, of himself arranging those details and of indicating the general line of mutual advancement.

Once upon a time men had glibly and non-understandingly talked of empires of a million planets, and of their being a Queen Planet ruling all with a just but heavy hand. That was nonsense, of course. Men hadn’t been able to rule themselves when compressed onto a single planet, onto a single continent, even. The complexities and magnitudes involved in interstellar groupings—empire was rather an outmoded term nowadays—meant inevitably that a cohesion based on more than mere big-fist obedience must operate. Caradine was well aware that the inevitable was only what you weren’t quick-witted enough to avoid.

You might have on file and cybemetically indexed all the details on all the inhabitants of your stellar grouping. But that didn’t stop one farmer on a planet fifty light years off from trading with a local produce firm. And if the produce firm dealt with another adjacent grouping that was in bad odor with the cybernetic index, then the index was going to have to do a lot of cog-whirring to do anything about it.

To run an interstellar commonwealth with any semblance of humanity and common sense you all had to feel friends. If graft and corruption crept in, then those responsible would be ditched fast. If you were of—well, dammit to hell— if you were of Earth, then your pride in belonging to the commonwealth with its advantages outweighed scruples of being the underdog and of being graft-ridden. Modern men had, at least, evolved from the dawn of civilization.

Caradine sat watching the rest of the TV news and he wondered. Horakah’s days were numbered, but she didn’t know that yet. Hsien Koanga was a very small cog in all the diiferent wheels, a cog along with the others of Rawson and Sharon. And now Harriet Lafonde had been dragged in.

He wondered how many of these people of this work-ridden planet, sitting around him in this restaurant now, would find their scruples vanish, and their desires to no longer be the underdogs strong enough to make them actually think. They weren’t quite ready yet. They hadn’t been brought all the way to the boil. Give them time, a few more whirls of their planet around their sun.

But Caradine didn’t have that time.

Three of his friends—he counted them all his friends on the relationship twining between them—were being held here in Alpha-Horakah’s central city of Horak. Cunning ploys, machinations, ferreting out of interstellar secrets—all those would have to wait. His direction of action had been subdy changed, and he didn’t have much time.