Keith Laumer: Assignment in Nowhere

“The light’s a bit bright,” he said in his musical voice. “I’ve been in the dark for so long now…”

I gulped, flicked off the lighter. “Sorry,” I mumbled. “Wha—who did you say you were?”

“You look a trifle startled,” Dzok said in an amused tone. “I take it you haven’t encountered my branch of the Hominids before?”

“I had a strange idea we Homo sapiens were the only branch of the family that made it into the Cenozoic,” I said. “Meeting the boys outside was quite a shock. Now you…”

“Ummra. I think our two families diverged at about your late Pliocene. The Hagroon are a somewhat later offshoot, at about the end of the Pleistocene—say half a million years back.” He laughed softly. “So you see, they represent a closer relationship to you sapiens than do we of Xonijeel…”

“That’s depressing news.”

Dzok’s rough-skinned hand fumbled at my arm, then gripped it lightly while he dabbed at the abrasion. The cool ointment started to take the throb from the wound.

“How did they happen to pick you up?” Dzok asked. “I take it you were one of a group taken on a raid?”

“As far as I know, I’m the only one.” I was still being cautious. Dzok seemed like a friendly enough creature, but he had a little too much hair on him for my taste, in view of what I’d seen of the Hagroon. The latter might be closer relatives of mine than of the agent, but I couldn’t help lumping them together in my mind—though Dzok was more monkey-like than ape-like.

“Curious,” Dzok said. “The pattern usually calls for catches of at least fifty or so. I’ve theorized that this represents some sort of minimum group size which is worth the bother of the necessary cultural analysis, language indoctrination, and so on.”

“Necessary for what?”

“For making use of the captives,” Dzok said. “The Hagroon are slave raiders, of course.”

“Why ‘of course’?”

“I assumed you knew, being a victim…” Dzok paused. “But then perhaps you’re in a different category. You say you were the only captive taken?”

“What about you?” I ignored the question. “How did you get here?”

The agent sighed. “I was a trifle incautious, I fear. I had a rather naive idea that in this congeries of variant hominid strains I’d pass unnoticed, but I was spotted instantly. They knocked me about a bit, dragged me in before a tribunal of nonagenarians for an interrogation, which I pretended not to understand—”

“You mean you speak their language?” I interrupted.

“Naturally, my dear fellow. An agent of Class Four could hardly be effective without language indoctrination.”

I let that pass. “What sort of questions did they ask you?”

“Lot of blooming nonsense, actually. It’s extremely difficult for noncosmopolitan races to communicate at a meaningful level; the basic cultural assumptions vary so widely—”

“You and I seem to be doing all right.”

“Well, after all, I am a Field Agent of the Authority. We’re trained in just such communicative ability.”

“Maybe you’d better start a little farther back. What authority are you talking about? How’d you get here? Where are you from in the first place? Where did you learn English?”

Dzok had finished with my arm now. He laughed—a good-natured chuckle. Imprisonment in foul conditions seemed not to bother him. “I’ll take those questions one at a time. I suggest we move up to my dais now. I’ve arranged a few scraps of cloth in the one dry corner here. And perhaps you’d like a bit of clean food, after that nauseous pap our friends here issue.”

“You’ve got food?”

“My emergency ration pack. I’ve been using it sparingly. Not very satisfying, but nourishing enough.”

We made our way to a shelf-like flat area high in the right rear corner of the cell, and I stretched out on Dzok’s neatly arranged dry rags and accepted a robin’s-egg-sized capsule.

“Swallow that down,” Dzok said. “A balanced ration for twenty-four hours; arranged concentrically, of course. Takes about nine hours to assimilate. There’s water too.” He passed me a thick clay cup.

I gulped hard, got the pill down. “Your throat must be bigger than mine,” I said. “Now what about my questions?”

“Ah, yes, the Authority; this is the great Web government which exercises jurisdiction over all that region of the Web lying within two million E-units radius of the Home Line…”

I was listening, thinking how this news would sit with the Imperial authorities when I got back—if I got back—if there was anything to go back to. Not one new Net-traveling race but two—each as alien to the other as either was to me. And all three doubtless laying claim to ever-wider territory…

Dzok was still talking, “…our work in the Anglic sector has been limited, for obvious reasons—”

“What obvious reasons?”

“Our chaps could hardly pass unnoticed among you,” Dzok said drily. “So we’ve left the sector pretty much to its own devices—”

“But you have been there?”

“Routine surveillance only, mostly in null time, of course—”

“You use too many ‘of courses’, Dzok,” I said. “But go on, I’m listening.”

“Our maps of the area are sketchy. There’s the vast desert area, of C—” he cleared his throat. “A vast desert area known as the Desolation, within which no world lines survive, surrounded by a rather wide spectrum of related lines, all having as their central cultural source the North European technical nucleus—rather a low-grade technology, to be sure, but the first glimmering of enlightenment is coming into being there…”

He went on with his outline of the vast sweep of A-lines that constituted the scope of activities of the Authority. I didn’t call attention to his misconceptions regarding the total absence of life in the Blight, or his seeming ignorance of the existence of a line with Net-traveling capabilities. That was information I would keep in reserve.

“…the scope of the Authority has been steadily extended over the last fifteen hundred years,” the agent was saying. “Our unique Web-transit abilities naturally carry with them a certain responsibility. The early tendency toward exploitation has long been overcome, and the Authority now merely exercises a police and peace-keeping function, while obtaining useful raw materials and manufactured products from carefully selected loci on a normal commercial basis.”

“Uh-huh.” I’d heard the speech before. It was a lot like the pitch Bernadotte and Richthofen and the others had given me when I first arrived at Stockholm Zero-zero.

“My mission here,” Dzok went on, “was to discover the forces behind the slave raids which had been creating so much misery and unrest along the periphery of the Authority, and to recommend the optimum method of eliminating the nuisance with the minimum of overt interference. As I’ve told you, I badly underestimated our Hagroon. I was arrested within a quarter-hour of my arrival.”

“And you learned English on your visits to the, ah, Anglic Sector?”

“I’ve never visited the sector personally, but the language libraries naturally have monitored the developing dialects.”

“Do your friends know where you are?”

Dzok sighed. “I’m afraid not. I was out to cut a bit of a figure, I realize now—belatedly. I envisioned myself reporting back in to IDMS Headquarters with the solution neatly wrapped and tied with pink ribbon. Instead—well, in time they’ll notice my prolonged absence and set to work to find my trail. In the meantime…”

“In the meantime, what?”

“I can only hope they take action before my turn comes.”