Barrington Bayley - Empire of Two Worlds

“It don’t look good to you because you can’t see any further than the end of a gun barrel.” Bec’s voice was heavy with sarcasm. “You want it all handed to you. Sure I don’t know what we’re going to find, or when. I do know that whatever it is, we’ve got to be ready to handle it. If we don’t find food we’ll find people. Where there’s people there are angles — and then there’ll be food. You’ll see Klittmann again: we’ll break it open like a mud pie and drown the bosses in their own tanks,”

Grale’s florid face became dangerous. “What are you trying to pull, Bec?” he raged. “There’s five of us! We’ve got no mob to back us up. We’re finished, washed out! How are we gonna take Klittmann, Bec? How?”

“Quit squalling like a kid and shut up.”

Grale stormed into the sloop to clean his guns, which he always did when he was feeling moody.

Everybody avoided saying anything. Even Harmen looked pensive.

Later Bec sent Reeth and me to climb a hill to spy out the land. All we saw of interest was a lake glinting in the distance. I stood there on top of the hill, under an open blue sky, trying not to feel naked and vulnerable (even now I still can’t stand under an open sky without feeling naked) and trying not to think of close-packed, grey Klittmann where everything was machinery, artificial and familiar.

“Tell me,” Reeth said in a dry, matter-of-fact voice, looking into the distance, “do you think Bec’s cracking up?”

“Why should he be?”

“Well, he talks about going back to Klittmann. About taking it over as if nothing had happened. Grale’s right — we’ve been knocked out of the game. Bec’s ravings don’t make sense.”

I glanced thoughtfully at Reeth’s narrow, sharp face. He had buck teeth that puckered up his features and made him appear shrewd, which he was. He was also nimble-minded and cool-headed. I could never understand why Bec had always ranked him below Grale.

“What I mean is,” Reeth went on calmly, “I would feel like some kind of dummy following a guy who’s flipped in the head.”

“That sounds reasonable,” I said, “but I don’t think you need worry. I think Bec was getting interested in Earth a long time before we got hit. Ever since he met Harmen. He always seemed to reckon we would find something useful there.”

Reeth gave an open-handed gesture, shrugging hopelessly. “But let’s face it. We’re mobsters. We’re way out of our element here. Bec talks as if we’re going to find cities here just the same as on Killibol. We’re not. It’s all different here.”

“Bec has a theory about that,” I told him confidentially. “He banks on there being a civilisation here. Where there’s a civilisation there has to be mobsters. Once we contact them we can learn how they operate, what the angles are. Then we move in.”

Simple. It takes a genius like Bec to see things that simple.

Reeth snorted delightedly. “And what if these other mobsters don’t like us, if they wipe us out?”

“Bec has an angle there too,” I said, grinning ruefully. “I hope he’s right. He reckons we should be smarter than they are. Life here on Earth is a lot easier than where we come from. In Klittmann we were struggling for survival since we were born. It’s a law of evolution that we’ll be better in the survival business than they are.”

“Well, maybe,” Reeth sighed. “It all sounds pretty theoretical to me. I trust facts, not theories.”

“You can trust Bec. Who else could have got us out of that jam in Klittmann?”

“Who else could have got us into that jam? Klein, I’m wondering what will happen if we don’t find any food. How long will this mob hang together if we don’t find some action soon? If you ask me Bec’s dipping into a pack and hoping to draw a card that isn’t even there.”

He sighed and indicated the stretching prairie. “I don’t understand why we can’t eat this stuff.”

“Maybe it’s like raw protein straight out of the tank,” I surmised. “It could be that it has to be processed.”

“But that needs factories and skilled technicians. If life’s like that on Earth too then we’ve got it all wrong.”

Regardless of my secret oath of loyalty to Bec, I couldn’t think of an answer.

We went back down the hill to report. Hassmann, Grale and Bec were playing cards. Tone the Taker sat skulking by himself some yards away. He had a miserable existence on the sloop; none of the mob deigned to notice him, apart from Bec, and Bec was too busy to bother with him. Now he sat clutching his box of pop, which he almost never put down. He was trying hard to ration himself, but the supply was dwindling day by day and his situation was pretty desperate. Lately his twitches had become more pronounced, which made the others despise him all the more despite that their fortunes in Klittmann had been partly founded on pop.

Only Harmen treated him like a human being, and now the alk also sat by himself, apparently contemplating.

As the sun went down everybody disappeared one by one into the sloop to get some sleep, until I was alone with Bec again. I told him about Reeth’s misgivings, and added my own for good measure.

Bec was just finishing a tube of weed. He threw the stub down.

He said: “When a bullet is fired from a gun, sometimes it hits its target, and sometimes it misses. Whether it hits or not, it carries the same force. It can’t do anything else. I’m that bullet.”

“So that’s all there is to it,” I said dully. “We missed.”

“Not at all. I’m a bullet with a name written on it. You know the old saying: sooner or later the bullet’s going to hit the guy with that name. In other words, I’ve got a destination. Maybe it looks hopeless to you. But not to me, or to Harmen either.”

“Harmen?”

Bec smiled, “You ought to talk to Harmen some time, Klein. He’s got quite an outlook. I get inspiration from listening to him. He makes everything sound like a big machine that just has to keep on working. And the laws of the machine are the same on Killibol, on Earth, or anywhere in the universe.”

“All right,” I said with a shrug, “so what?”

“So if a thing will work in one place it will work in another. Take the lever: the principle of the lever is the same everywhere. You need a load, a fulcrum, and a force. You boys, yourself, Grale, Reeth and Hassmann, are my lever. I’m the force. Together we make up a machine, a lever that moved things for us back there in Klittmann. So why shouldn’t it move things for us in the same way here? It will, once we find the right angle. We need a load to move and the right fulcrum. Then we have power.”

I shook my head. “It’s a little too abstract for me.”

I decided to change the subject.

“You’re going to have trouble with Grale, Bec. He’s getting wild.”

Bec laughed shortly. “Grale’s a good man. He’s dependable. But for you, he’d be my second. That puzzles you, doesn’t it?”

“Yes,” I admitted sourly.

He laughed again. “I grant you Reeth is smarter, but then he’s got that individualistic streak. He’s always liable to take off on his own. Grale is always shooting off his big mouth, but he sticks with it every time.”

“Doesn’t it bother you that we hate one another’s guts?”

“No, it doesn’t. It keeps you both on your toes.” My resentment seemed to amuse him. “You’ve still got a few things to learn about leadership, Klein.”

Maybe I had. There was still something left to learn about Becmath, too.

On the seventh day we found the village.

Scents. That was the first thing I noticed as we poised on the breast of the hill overlooking the village. A mingle of scents drifting in through the sloop’s windows.