Andre Norton - Postmarked the Stars

“That gives us something—if we have daylight when we get near enough. But we have to make time. I don’t like the idea of something flying south. Pilot arrives with a warning, and they’ll lift off-world. Then—” He spoke to Finnerstan. “You may have finished their scheme here and now, but all you will have left are the pieces they have left behind. I can imagine they will leave precious few of those. What they can’t lift with them, they’ll destroy. And that’s the last thing we must let them do. Once we’re out of range of that sonic, you’d better code in a call. See if you can get help from the port. The Queen isn’t armed well enough to take on a ship in space. What about your cutter?”

“She can try,” but Finnerstan did not sound too certain. And Dane thought that with the curious devices these jacks appeared to have for their equipment, he could well understand the other’s apprehension.

If Finnerstan thought dark thoughts, they did not prevent him from experimenting with the flitter’s com until it was clear. Then he sent out a call, repeating it several times in code numbers, until a click of acknowledgement came. He dropped the mike back in its holder and said, “The cutter will space and go on patrol. Maybe she’ll be in time—They are widening their radar, so anything taking off from this continent will register.”

“Time,” Jellico echoed. “Well, we have no way of buying time unless we can anchor them some way. But there is no use making plans until we are sure we have something concrete on which to base them.”

“What is going on?” Dane turned to Rip, wedged in beside him.

“What isn’t?” returned the other, ambiguously, but then he explained. “We don’t know it all yet, but the Trosti foundations, here and apparently on other worlds, too, have been engaged in double work. The

surface stuff is all that has always been accredited to them, what their reputation is founded upon. But underneath that, well, the Patrol has evidence now that they are the power behind at least four planetary governments in widely separated sections and that they have been building up an undercover net of control—”

“Who are they?” Dane interrupted. “Trosti is gone—or is he?”

“That’s just one of the mysteries, though there are two explanations for that. One is that he is still very much among the living and the brain behind this all, or else the brain who has selected the brains, for the conspiracy is a composite effort, and not only of one species either. The other suggestion is that Trosti was never anything but a front for a devious and diverse organization who used clever publicity to promote him as a romantic figure to center attention.

“Anyway the Trosti foundations are a form of shadow government by now, though apparently the Patrol has been suspicious for some time. But it was only when they made the slipup on the Queen that enough of their plans were revealed here to give the law a loose end.”

“I know they have an outlaw experimental station here with the retrogressed monsters,” Dane said. “But is that all?”

“It might have begun so. Then they discovered something else.”

“The rock!”

“Ore,” corrected Rip, “and a very special kind. It is useful in esper work—a conductor for low-level telepathy, able to step up that and other esper talents to a remarkable degree. It exists on several planets, but it was not recognized until they built the retrogress machines and probably is one of those chance discoveries that happen as a side effect of a main experiment when the scientist in charge is intrigued enough to follow it up. There is reason to believe that most of this experimentation had been going on right here. They wanted Trewsworld. The holdings were a threat to any open work. Hence the monsters, which were developed and released gradually to drive the settlers out.”

“The Patrol knew this and didn’t act?”

“The Patrol suspected. Then we came in. The Trosti man at the port wanted us silenced. But short of killing us off, he couldn’t do that. The captain appealed to the Board of Trade representative, and since the Patrol was in on that appeal, they had their opening. Though the Trosti had the Council here very much tied to them, they did not have any control over the Patrol. Where the Council tried to make things hot for us, once the captain had made his statement, the whole thing blew up in their faces, like a gas ball.

“And, as a gas ball, it was a knockout for them. They probably knew it, thought they could buy some time to ship their important records off-world by loosing the monsters—”

“We did that—or rather the brach did.” Dane cut in with his story of the force field barrier and the fact he had overheard the jacks’ talk of the monsters being drawn north by the other box. “But those prospectors”—he remembered suddenly—“if they weren’t Trosti men, how did they—Or,” he ended, “did they know about the rock?”

“Our guess is that they had some kind of new detect, and it registered enough of the unusual radiation from the ore to make them believe they had found something. They took samples, but it must have been from a vein the Trosti crowd had mapped, and they were killed, the rock taken. It was a quick job and another botched one. I would say that lately the Trosti has not been too well served by its people. That elaborate affair of shipping the box on the Queen—”

“Yes, and if they already had the ore and such boxes here, why take the chance of shipping another in?”

“One of the minor mysteries. Perhaps, this—our box—was from another one of their labs, sent in for checking. And it must have been from a place where there was need for extra cover, so that it had to be sent so. It was their bad luck that we had the brachs and the embryos in the cargo and that their man died.

If he had made it undetected to port, all he would have had to do was rip off the mask and disappear. But it was a chance, and there must have been some pressing need to take it. When the Patrol backtracks we may know why someday—unless this will all be top security.”

“Trosti—hard to believe that Trosti—”

“That statement will be echoed on a good many different worlds.” One of the Patrolmen broke into their exchange. “Trouble is that the discoveries they did make for the benefit of the worlds on which they set up are generally so beneficial that we will have to have direct proof that those were only a cover or we can’t go against public opinion—plus the fact that they will summon top legal talent and be able to fight a delaying action in every court we take them to. We are hoping that this, now being the most open of their secrets, will give us evidence—records, tapes, enough to smash this foundation, with clues to uncover leads to others.”

“If we get there in time,” Dane pointed out. “They could ship out the most important material and destroy the rest.”

His head was starting to ache again. Perhaps the remedies of the Patrol medic were not as long lasting as he hoped. He could understand the need to conquer time, which was driving the captain, all of them on board. Also, they had no idea of what defenses beside the distort were in the basin. There was the control beam that had negated the power of the other flitters and brought them down at the will of the enemy. And such could be used to deliberately crash a ship. The jacks need only have one of those in order, and their pursuers would lose before any fight began.

There were plenty of other weapons to snap them out of the sky at the press of a button. Unfortunately, memory presented too many in all their savage details to Dane. But once more it might have been that his thoughts were as plain to his companions as if his forehead was a transparent visa-screen.