Eric Russell - Wasp

“He stays poor.”

“Well, what if he agrees but refuses to believe I can find the money? How am I going to convince him?”

“Don’t bother to try,” Mowry advised. “He has to speculate in order to accumulate, same as everyone else. If he won’t do it let him remain content with grinding poverty.”

“Maybe he’d rather stay poor than take the risk.”

“He won’t. He’s running no real risk and he knows it.

There’s only one chance he could take and he’ll avoid it like the plague.”

“Such as?”

“Suppose we arrive to make the rescue and are jumped on before we can open our mouths or show the requisition-form, what will it prove? It’ll show that this fellow fooled you for the sake of the reward. The Kaitempi will pay him five thousand apiece for laying the trap and tipping them off. He’ll make an easy and legal ten thousand on top of the twenty thousand we’ve already paid him. Correct?”

“Yar,” said Skriva, uneasily.

““But he’ll lose the eighty thousand yet to come. The difference is plenty big enough to ensure his absolute loyalty up to the moment he gets it in his hot little hands.”

“Yar,” repeated Skriva, brightening considerably.

“After that— zunk !” said Mowry. “Immediately he’s got his claws on the lot we’d better run like hell.”

“Hell?” Skriva stared at him. “That’s a Spakum curse-word.”

Mowry sweated a bit as he replied offhandedly, “Sure it is. One picks up all sorts of bad language in wartime, especially on Diracta.”

“Ah, yes, on Diracta.” echoed Skriva, mollified. He got out the car. “I’ll go see this jailer. We’ll have to move fast. Phone me this time tomorrow, hi? ”

“All right.”

Mowry remained where he was until the other’s dyno had gone from sight. Then he jockeyed his own off the verge and drove into Pertane.

The next day’s work was the easiest to date though not devoid of danger. All he had to do was gossip to anyone willing to listen. This was in accordance with the step-by-step technique taught him by the college.

“First of all you must establish the existence of an internal opposition. Doesn’t matter whether it is real or imaginary so long as the enemy becomes convinced of its actuality.”

He had done that much.

“Secondly, you must create fear of that opposition and provoke the enemy into striking back at it as best he can.”

He’d done that too.

“Thirdly, you must answer the enemy’s blows with enough defiance to force him into the open, to bring his reaction to public attention and to create the general impression that the opposition has confidence in its own power.”

That also had been achieved.

“The fourth move is ours and not yours. We’ll take enough military action to make hay of the enemy’s claims of invincibility. After that the morale of the public should be shaky.”

One bomb on Shugruma had done the shaking.

“You then take the fifth step by sowing rumours. Listeners will be ripe to absorb them and whisper them around—and the stories will lose nothing in the telling. A good rumour well planted and thoroughly disseminated can spread alarm and despondency over a wide area. But be careful in your choice of victims. If you pick on a fanatical patriot it may be the end of you!”

In any city in any part of the cosmos the public park is a natural haunt of idlers and gossips. That is where Mowry went in the morning. The benches were occupied almost entirely by elderly people. Young folk tended to keep clear of such places lest inquisitive cops ask why they were not at work.

Selecting a seat next to a gloomy looking oldster with a perpetual sniff, Mowry contemplated a bed of tattered flowers until the other turned. toward him and said conversationally, “Two more gardeners have gone.”

“So? Gone where?”

“Into the armed forces. If they draft the rest of them I don’t know what will happen to this park. It needs someone to look after it.”

“There’s a lot of work involved,” agreed Mowry. “But I sup-pose the war comes first”

“Yar. Always the war comes first” Sniffy said it with cautious disapproval. “It should have been over by now. But it drags on and drags on. Sometimes I wonder when it will end.”

“That’s the big question,” responded Mowry, making himself a fellow spirit.

“Things can’t be going as well as they’re said to be,” continued Sniffy, morbidly. “Else the war would be over. It wouldn’t drag on the way it does.”

“Personally, I think things are darned bad.” Mowry hesitated, went on confidingly, “In fact I know they are.”

“You do? Why?”

“Maybe I oughtn’t tell you-but it’s bound to come out sooner or later.”

“What is?” insisted Sniffy, consumed with curiosity.

“The terrible state of affairs at Shugruma. My brother came home this morning and told me.”

“Go on-what did he say?”

“He tried to go there for business reasons. but couldn’t get to the place. A ring of troops turned him back forty den from the town. Nobody except the military, or salvage and medical services, is being allowed to enter the area.”

“That so?” said Sniffy.

“My brother says he met a fellow who’d escaped the disaster with nothing but the clothes he was wearing. This fellow told him that Shugruma was practically wiped off the map. Not one stone left upon another. Three hundred thousand dead. The stench of bodies would turn your stomach. He said the scene is so awful that the news-sheets daren’t describe it, in fact they refuse to mention it.”

Staring straight ahead, Sniffy said nothing but looked appalled.

Mowry added a few more lurid touches, brooded with him for a short time, took his departure. All that he’d said would be repeated, he could be sure of that. Bad news travels fast. A little later and half a mile away he had another on the hook, a beady-eyed, mean-faced character only too willing to hear the worst.

“Even the papers dare not talk about it,” Mowry ended. Beady-eyes swallowed hard. “If a Spakum ship can dive in and drop a big one so can a dozen others.”

“Yar, that’s right”

“In fact they could have dropped more than one while they were at it. Why didn’t they?”

“Maybe they were making a test-run. Now they know how easy it is they’ll come along with a real load. If that happens there won’t be much left of Pertane.” He pulled his right ear and made a tzzk! sound between his teeth, that being the Sirian equivalent of showing thumbs down.

“Somebody ought to do something about it,” declared Beady. unnerved.

“I’m going to do something myself,” informed Mowry. “I’m going to dig me a deep hole way out in the fields.”

He left the other half-paralysed with fright, took a short walk, picked on a cadaverous individual who looked like a mortician on vacation.

“Close friend of mine—he’s a fieet leader in the space-navy—told me confidentially that a Spakum onslaught has made Gooma completely uninhabitable. He thinks the only reason why they’ve not given Jaimec the same treatment is because they’re planning to grab the place and naturally don’t want to rob themselves of the fruits of victory.”

“Do you believe all that?” demanded the Embalmer.

“One doesn’t know what to believe when the government tells you one thing and grim experience tells you another. It’s only his personal opinion anyway. But he’s in the space-navy and knows a few things that we don’t.”

“It has been stated authoritatively that the Spakum fleets have been destroyed.”

“Yar, they were still saying so when that bomb fell on Shugruma,” Mowry reminded.