Гарднер Дозуа - The Good Old Stuff

And if we get to the spaceport and blast off without any trouble, keep your story to yourself.” He settled down in the back seat with Alen and maintained a gloomy silence. The young Herald was too much in awe of this stranger, so suddenly competent in assorted forms of violence, to question him.

They did get to the spaceport without trouble, and found the crew in the Customs shed, emptied of the gems by dealers with releases. They had built a fire for warmth.

“We wish to leave immediately,” said the trader to the port officer.

“Can you change my Lyran currency?”

The officer began to sputter apologetically that it was late and the vault was sealed for the night.

”That’s all right. We’ll change it on Vega. It’ll get back to you. Call off your guards and unseal our ship.”

They followed the port officer to Starsong’s dim bulk out on the field.

The officer cracked the seal on her with his club in the light of a flaring pressure lamp held by one of the guards.

Alen was sweating hard through it all. As they started across the field he had seen what looked like two closely spaced green stars low on the horizon toward town suddenly each jerk up and toward each other in minute arcs. The semaphore!

The signal officer in the port administration building would be watching too—but nobody on the field, preoccupied with the routine of departure, seemed to have noticed.

The lights flipped this way and that. Alen didn’t know the code and bitterly regretted the lack. After some twenty signals the lights flipped to the “rest” position again as the port officer was droning out a set of takeoff regulations: bearing, height above settled areas, permissible atomic fuels while in atmosphere—Alert saw somebody start across the field toward them from the administration building. The guards were leaning on their long, competent looking weapons.

Aien inconspicuously detached himself from the group around Starsong and headed across the dark field to meet the approaching figure.

Nearing it, he called out a low greeting in Lyran, using the noncom-to-officer military form.

“Sergeant,” said the signal officer quietly, “go and draw off the men a few meters from the star travelers. Tell them the ship mustn’t leave, that they’re to cover the foreigners, and shoot if—” Alen stood dazedly over the limp body of the signal officer. And then he quickly hid the bludgeon again and strolled back to the ship, wondering whether he’d cracked the Lyran’s skull.

The port was open by then and the crew filing in. He was last. “Close it fast,” he told the trader. “I had to—”

“I saw you,” grunted blackbeard. “A semaphore message?” He was working as he spoke, and the metal port closed.

“Astrogator and engineer, take over,” he told them.

“All hands to their bunks,” ordered Astrogator Hufner. “Blast off immediate.” Alen took to his cubicle and strapped himself in.

Blastoff deafened him, rattled his bones, and made him thoroughly sick as usual. After what seemed like several wretched hours, they were definitely space-borne under smooth acceleration, and his nausea subsided

Blackbeard knocked, came in, and unbuckled him.

“Ready to audit the books of the voyage?” asked the trader.

“No,” said Men feebly.

“It can wait,” said the trader. “The books are the least important part, anyway. We have headed off a frightful war.”

“War? We have?”

“War between Eyolf’s Realm and Vega. It is the common gossip of chancellories and trade missions that both governments have cast longing eyes on Lyrane, that they have plans to penetrate its economy by supplying metals to the planet without metals—by force if need be. Alen, we have removed the pretext by which Eyolf’s Realm and Vega would have attempted to snap up Lyrane and inevitably have come into conflict. Lyra is getting its metal now, and without imperialist entanglements.”

“I saw none,” the Herald said blankly.

“You wondered why I was in such haste to get off Lyra, and why I wouldn’t leave Elwon there. It is because our Vegan gems were most unusual gems. I am not a technical man, but I understand they are actual gems which were treated to produce a certain effect at just about this time.”

Blackbeard glanced at his wrist chronometer and said dreamily, “Lyra is getting metal. Wherever there is one of our gems, pottery is decomposing into its constituent aluminum, silicon, and oxygen. Flukes and glazes are decomposing into calcium, zinc, barium potassium, chromium, and iron. Buildings are crumbling, pants are dropping as ceramic belt-buckles disintegrate-”

“It means chaos!” protested Alen.

“It means civilization and peace. An ugly clash was in the making.”

Black-beard paused and added deliberately, “Where neither their property nor their honor is touched, most men live content.”

“The Prince, Chapter Nineteen. You are—”

“There was another important purpose to the voyage,” said the trader, grinning. “You will be interested in this.” He handed Alen a document which, unfolded, had the seal of the College and Order at its head.

Alen read in a daze, “Examiner Nineteen to the Rector—final clearance of Novice—” He lingered pridefully over the paragraph that described how he had “with coolness and great resource” foxed the battle cruiser of the Realm, “adapting himself readily in a delicate situation requiring not only physical courage but swift recall, evaluation, and application of a minor planetary culture.”

Not so pridefully he read, “... inclined toward pomposity of manner somewhat ludicrous in one of his years, though not unsuccessful in dominating the crew by his bearing—” And, “... highly profitable disposal of our gems; a feat of no mean importance since the College and Order must, after all, maintain itself.”

And, “... cleared the final and crucial hurdle with some mental turmoil if I am any judge, but did clear it. After some twenty years of indoctrination in unrealistic nonviolence, the youth was confronted with a situation where nothing but violence would serve, correctly evaluated this, and applied violence in the form of a truncheon to the head of a Lyran signal officer, thereby demonstrating an ability to learn and common sense as precious as it is rare.”

And, finally, simply, “Recommended for training.”

“Training?” gasped Alen. “You mean there’s more?”

“Not for most, boy. Not for most. The bulk of us are what we seem to be: oily, gun-shy, indispensable adjuncts to trade who feather our nest with percentages. We need those percentages and we need gun-shy Heralds.”

Alen recited slowly, “Among other evils which being unarmed brings you, it causes you to be despised.”

“Chapter Fourteen,” said blackbeard mechanically. “We leave such clues lying by their bedsides for twenty years, and they never notice them. For the few of us who do—more training.”

“Will I learn to throw a knife like you?” asked Alen, repelled and fascinated at once by the idea.

“On your own time, if you wish. Mostly it’s ethics and morals so you’ll be able to weigh the values of such things as knife-throwing.”

“Ethics! Morals!”

“We started as missionaries, you know.”

“Everybody knows that. But the Great Utilitarian Reform—”

“Some of us,” said blackbeard dryly, “think it was neither great, utilitarian, nor a reform.”

It was a staggering idea. “But we’re spreading utilitarian civilization!” protested Alen. “Or if we’re not, what’s the sense of it all?”

Blackbeard told him, “We have our different motives. One is a sincere utilitarian; another is a gambler—happy when he’s in danger and his pulses are pounding. Another is proud and likes to trick people. More than a few conceive themselves as servants of mankind. I’ll let you rest for a bit now.” He rose.