Poul Anderson - The Long Way Home

His company evaporated. He sat down, ordered another drink, and tried to control his impatience.

Time dragged. How much of life went in simply waiting!

A girl came up with a suggestion. Langley sent her off to look too. He nursed his beers: now, as never before, he had to have a clear head.

In two hours and eighteen minutes, a breathless little man panted back to the table. “I’ve found her!”

Langley’s heart jumped. He stood up, taking it slow. “Seen her?”

“Well, no. But a new maid answering her description did hire out to a Slimer—a merchant from Srinis, I mean—just eleven days ago. The cook told me that, after somebody else had tracked down the cook for me.”

The spaceman nodded. His guess had been right: the servant class would still know more gossip than a regiment of police could track down. People hadn’t changed so much. “Let’s go,” he said, and went out the door.

“How about my reward?”

“You’ll get it when I see her. Control your emotions.”

Five thousand years ago, a bibliophile acquaintance had made him read a tattered book some hundred years old—the Private Eye school—claiming it was something unique in the annals of pornography. Langley had been rather bored by it. Now, recognizing the prototype of his action-pattern, he grinned. But any pattern would do, in this amorphous world of low-level.

They went down a broad street full of strangeness. The little man stopped outside a door. “This is the place. I don’t know how we get in, though.”

Langley punched the scanner button. Presently the door opened, to reveal a human butler of formidable proportions. The American was quite prepared to slug a way past him if necessary. But he wasn’t a slave—aliens weren’t permitted to own humans. He had been hired once, and could probably be hired again.

“Excuse me,” said Langley. “Do you have a new maid, a tall red-head?”

“Sir, my employer values his privacy.”

Langley ruffled a sheaf of large bills. “Too bad. It’s worth a good deal to me. I only want to talk with her.”

He got in, leaving his informant to jitter outside. The air was thick and damp, the light a flooding greenish yellow which hurt his eyes. The outworlders would employ live servants for prestige, but must have to pay rather well. The thought that he had driven Marin to this artificial swamp was like teeth in his soul.

She stood in a chamber full of mist. Droplets of fog had condensed to glitter in her hair. Unsurprised eyes watched him gravely.

“I’ve come,” he whispered.

“I knew you would.”

“I’m... can I say how sorry I am?”

“You needn’t, Edwy. Forget it.”

They returned to the street. Langley paid off his informant and got the address of a hotel. He walked there, holding her hand, but said nothing till they were safely alone.

Then he kissed her, half afraid that she would recoil from him. But she responded with a sudden hunger. “I love you,” he said; it was a new and surprising knowledge.

She smiled. “That makes it mutual, I think.”

Later, he told her what had happened. It was like turning on a light behind her eyes. “And we can get away?” she asked softly. “We can really start over? If you knew how I’ve dreamed of that, ever since—”

“Not so fast.” The grimness was returning, it put an edge in his voice and he twisted his fingers nervously. “This is a pretty complicated situation. I think I know what’s behind it—maybe you can help fill in the gaps.

“I’ve proven to myself that the Technon founded the Society and uses it as a spy and an agent of economic infiltration. However —the Technon is stuck away in a cave somewhere. It can’t go out and supervise affairs; it has to rely on information supplied by its agents. Some of these agents are official, part of the Solar government; some of them are semiofficial, members of the Society; some are highly unofficial, spies on other planets.

“But two can play at the same game, you know. There’s another race around which has a mentality much like the Technon’s—a cold, impersonal mass-mind, planning centuries ahead, able to wait indefinitely long for some little seed to sprout. And that’s the race on Thrym. Their mental hookup practice makes them that kind: an individual doesn’t matter, because in a very real sense each individual is only a cell in one huge unit. You can see it operating in a case like the League, where they’ve quietly taken over the key position, made themselves boss so gradually that the Thorians hardly realize it even today.”

“And you think they have infiltrated the Society?” she asked.

“I know they have. There’s no other answer. The Society wouldn’t be turning Saris over to Brannoch if it were truly independent. Valti tried hard to rationalize it, but I know more than he does. I know the Technon thinks it still owns the Society, and that it’d never give Centauri an advantage.”

“But it has, you say,” she protested.

“Uh-huh. Here’s the explanation as I see it. The Society includes a lot of races. One of those races is Thryman. Probably they’re not officially from Thrym. They could have been planted on a similar world, maybe with some slight surgical changes in their appearance, and passed themselves off as natives. They got members into the nomad bureaucracy by the normal process of promotion and, being very able, eventually these members got high enough to learn the truth—that the Technon was behind the whole show.

“What a windfall for them! They must have infiltrated the Society on general principles, to get control of still another human group, but found they’d also gotten a line into the Technon itself. They can doctor the reports it gets from the Society—not every report, but enough. That power has to be saved for special occasions, because the machine must have data-comparison units, it must be capable of ‘suspicion’, to do its job. This is a special occasion.

“Chanthavar, Brannoch, and Valti were all acting at cross purposes because there hadn’t been time to consult the Technon; otherwise it would normally have told Valti to keep hands off the affair, or at least to cooperate with Chanthavar. When it was informed, you know, it ordered Valti’s release.

“But then the Thrymans got busy. Even imprisoned, they must have been in touch with their agents outside, including high-ranking Thrymans in the Society.

“I don’t know exactly what story has been fed the Technon. At a guess. I’d suggest something like this: A trading ship has just come back with news of a new planet inhabited by a race having Saris” abilities. They were studied, and it turned out that there is no way to duplicate that nullifying effect artificially. The Thrymans are perfectly capable of cooking up such a report complete with quantitative data and mathematical theory, I’ll bet.

“All right. This report, supposedly from its own good, reliable Society, reaches the Technon. It makes a very natural decision: let the Centaurians have Saris, let them waste their time investigating a blind alley. It has to look real, so that Brannoch won’t suspect; therefore, work through Valti without informing Chanthavar.

“So... the end result is that Centauri does get the nullifier! And the first news the Technon has of this is when the invading fleet arrives able to put every ship in the Solar System out of action!”

Marin made no reply for a while. Then she nodded. “That sounds logical,” she said. “I remember now... when I was at Brannoch’s, just before coming to you, he spoke with that tank, mentioned something about Valti being troublesome and ripe for assassination, and the tank forbade him to do it. Shall we tell Chanthavar?”

“No,” said Langley.