Poul Anderson - The Long Way Home

“If you wish.” Valti got up and rummaged in a drawer. “But remember, Chanthavar or Brannoch may soon remove all choice from you. Your decision, if it is to be your own, must be made soon.”

He took out a small, flat plastic box and handed it over. “This is a communicator, keyed to a frequency which varies continuously according to a random-chosen series. It can only be detected by a similarly tuned instrument which I possess. If you want me, press this button and call; it need not be held to your mouth. I may even be able to rescue you from armed force, though it’s best to be quiet about this affair. Here... keep it next to your skin, under your clothes, it will hang on of itself and is transparent to ordinary spy-beams.”

Langley rose. “Thanks,” he muttered. “Decent of you to let me go.” Or is it only a trick to disarm me?

“It’s nothing, captain.” Valti waddled ahead of him to the outside flange. An armored police craft hovered just beyond its edge. “I believe transportation home is waiting for you. Good night, sir.”

“Good night,” said Langley.

Weather control had decreed rain for this area today, and Lora stood under a low gray sky with her highest towers piercing its mists. Looking out of the window which made one wall of his living room, Brannoch saw only a wet metal gleam, fading into the downward rush of rain. Now and then lightning flickered, and when he told the window to open there was a cool damp breeze on his face.

He felt caged. As he paced the room, up and down and around, there was rage in his heart, and he snapped his report as if every word had to be bitten off and spat out

“Nothing,” he said. “Not one damned sterile thing. They didn’t know. They had no idea where the creature might be. Their memories were probed down to the cellular level, and nothing turned up we could use.”

“Has Chanthavar any clue?” asked the flat mechanical voice.

“No. My Mesko agent’s last report said that a warehouse was broken into the night that flier was stolen, and several cases of space rations removed. So all the being had to do was hide these in whatever den he’s got, release the flier on automatic, and settle down to wait. Which he’s apparently been doing ever since.”

“It would be strange if human food would sustain him indefinitely,” said Thrymka. “The probabilities all favor his dietary requirements being at least slightly different from yours—there will be some small cumulative deficiency or poisoning. Eventually he will sicken and die.”

“That may take weeks,” snarled Brannoch, “and meanwhile he may find some way of getting what he needs—it may only be some trace element, titanium or—anything. Or he may make a deal with one of the parties looking for him. I tell you, there’s no time to lose!”

“We are well aware of that,” answered Thrymka. “Have you punished your agents for their failure to get Langley too?”

“No. They tried, but luck was against them. They almost had him, down in the Old City, but then armed members of the Society took him away. Could he have been bribed by Valti? It might be a good idea to knock that fat slug off.”

“No.”

“But—”

“No. Council policy forbids murder of a Society member.”

Brannoch shrugged bitterly. For fear they’ll stop trading with Centauri? We should be building our own merchant ships. We should be independent of everybody. There’ll come a day when the Council will see—”

“After you have founded a new dynasty to rule over a Centaurian interstellar hegemony? Perhaps!” There was the faintest lilt of sardonicism in the artificial voice. “But continue your report; you know we prefer verbal communication. Did not Blaustein and Matsumoto have any useful information at all?”

“Well... yes. They said that if anyone could predict where Saris is and what he’ll do, it’s Langley. Just our luck that he was the one man we did not succeed in grabbing. Now Chanthavar has mounted such a guard over him that it’d be impossible.” Brannoch ran a hand through his yellow mane. “I’ve put an equal number of my men to watching him, of course. They’d at least make it difficult for Chanthavar to spirit him away. For the time being, it’s a deadlock.”

“What disposition has been made of the two prisoners?”

“Why... they’re still in the Old City hideout. Anesthetized. I thought I’d have memory of the incident wiped from them, and let them go. They’re not important.”

“They may be,” said the monster—or the monsters. “If returned to Chanthavar, they will be two hostages by which he may be able to compel Langley’s cooperation: which is something we cannot do without showing our hands too much, probably getting ourselves deported. But it is dangerous and troublesome for us to keep them. Have them killed and the bodies disintegrated.”

Brannoch stopped dead. After a long time, during which the beat of rain against the window seemed very loud, he shook his head. “No.”

“Why not?”

“Assassination in the line of business is one thing. But we don’t kill helpless prisoners on Thor.”

“Your reason is logically insufficient. Give the orders.”

Brannoch stood quiet. The concealing wall pattern swirled slowly before his eyes; opposite it, rain was liquid silver running down the single big pane.

It struck him suddenly that he had never seen a Thryman. There were stereographs, but under the monstrous weight of their atmosphere, dragged down by a planet of fifty thousand miles diameter and three Earth gravities, no man could live. Theirs was a world in which ice was like rock to form mountains, where rivers and seas of liquid ammonia raged through storms which could swallow Earth whole, where life based its chemistry on hydrogen and ammonia instead of oxygen and water, where explosions of gas burned red through darkness, where the population of the dominant species was estimated at fifty billions and a million years of recorded history had united them in one inhuman civilization—it was not a world for men, and he wished sometimes that men had never sent robots down to contact the Thrymans, never traded instruction in the modern science which alone was able to maintain vacuum tubes against that pressure, for their chemicals.

He considered what was going on inside that tank. Four thick disks, six feet in diameter, slaty blue, each stood on six short legs with wide, clawed feet; between each pair of legs was an arm ending in a three-fingered hand of fantastic strength. A bulge in the center of the disk was the head, rigidly fixed, with four eyes arranged around a trunklike feeler on top and tympana for ears; underneath was the mouth and another trunk which was nose and feeder. You could not tell one from another, not by appearance or acts. It made no difference whether Thrymka-1 or Thrymka-2 spoke.

“You are debating whether or not to refuse,” said the microphonic voice. “You are not especially fond of us.”

That was the damnable part of it. At short range, a Thryman could read your mind, you could have no thought and make no plan which he didn’t know. It was one reason why they were valuable advisors. The other reason was tied in with the first: by joining feelers, they could discard spoken language, communicate directly by thought—nerve to nerve, a linkage in which individuality was lost and several intelligent, highly specialized entities became one brain of unimaginable power. The advice of such multi-brains had done much to give the League of Alpha Centauri its present strength.

But they weren’t human. They weren’t remotely human, they had almost nothing in common with man. They traded within the League, a swapping of mutually unavailable materials; they sat on the Council, held high executive positions—but the hookup ability made their minds quasi-immortal and altogether alien. Nothing was known of their culture, their art, their ambitions; whatever emotions they had were so foreign that the only possible communication with humankind was on the level of cold logic.