Bob Shaw - The Ceres Solution

The late evening and night seemed to stretch out before her like a Mollanian lifespan. Warden Vekrynn had told her that in his service she would have no need of a life recorder with which to preserve happenings of interest. Her experience on Earth had ratified his promise, but nothing could have prepared her for the mind-numbing rush of events in the past forty-eight hours.

She had a cold inner certainty that her lapses in conduct, especially the failure to make a full report to Vekrynn, were casting long shadows into the future, and yet she continued to leave things unresolved. What made it worse was the feeling that virtually everybody she knew would have acted with much greater decisiveness. Even the embittered little Terran, Denny Hargate, in spite of all his dreadful handicaps, would have plotted his own course through the tides of circumstance and it would have taken a great deal to deflect him, whereas she… You’re a typical product of Mollanian non-education , a remembered voice told her. But that had not been Hargate. It had been…

The pounding on the outer door of her apartment was totally unexpected.

She jumped up and listened for several seconds before realising there was nothing peremptory in the sound. It was slow and deliberate, as though the person responsible assumed right of entry, and somehow that had the effect of increasing her alarm. With one hand holding her blouse closed at the throat, she considered the range of possibilities and with ready prescience selected the most likely.

Lorrest tye Thralen .

She went to the door, irrationally choosing to move in complete silence, tilted her head and said, “Who’s there?”

“William McGonagall, poet and tragedian,” came the immediate answer, followed by a pause in which she heard laboured breathing. “Don’t make me laugh, Gretana—I’m hurt.”

She opened the door and saw the tall figure clutching his left arm. “What do you want?”

He shook his head. “Can’t do any more funny answers—I’ve got a broken arm.”

“You can’t stay here.”

“I believe it’s a greenstick fracture…typical Mollanian resilience…but I’m not used to this kind of pain, Gretana, and they’re hunting me.”

Gretana’s fear increased. “You can’t stay here.”

“Tell you what,” Lorrest said, moving forward and forcing her to retreat. “Why don’t you do what women in your position are supposed to do? You could bring me in and tend to my wounds and pretend to be sympathetic, but all unknown to me you’ve sent a secret signal to Vekrynn.”

“That’s impossible, and you know it.”

“Yeah—I’m not stupid.” Lorrest walked into the kitchen and turned to face her and she saw that his face was haggard. He unbuttoned his overcoat, withdrawing his left arm from the sleeve with great care, and draped the garment over a stool.

“Don’t you think you’re presuming a lot?” Gretana said.

“Not really.” Lorrest’s smile became a grimace as he slipped off his jacket and began to unbutton his shirt.” If you were the hotshot Preservationist you think you are you’d have tipped the Warden off about me and I wouldn’t have made it to the top of your stairs.”

“I see.” Gretana’s sense of responsibility increased. Previously she had only suffered forebodings, but here was confirmation that in a single dereliction of duty she had influenced a train of events about which she had no understanding. She watched in silence as Lorrest partly took off his shirt to reveal a left arm which was so massively bruised that between elbow and shoulder it had the appearance of being carved from a blackish marble veined with green. The ghastly discoloration extended down Lorrest’s left side, indicating that the muscles there had been torn by the impact which had wreaked such spectacular damage on his arm.

“You’re really hurt,” she exclaimed. “What happened?”

“A bunch of the Warden’s men showed up at my hotel and I went out on some steelwork next door to get away from them. Then I did something you’re not supposed to do on steelwork—I fell off.”

Gretana weighed up the story, one Mollanian to another. “You climbed around a high building?”

“They were carrying weapons. I had to get away.”

She sighed her exasperation. “Are you still claiming the Warden would harm you?”

“Harm me?” Lorrest looked thoughtful. “For the time being Vekrynn will do everything in his power to make sure I’m not harmed—that’s because I know something he needs to know—but if he gets his information he’ll do me harm, and that’s for sure. The sort of harm you inflict on an ant when you stand on it.”

“That’s ridiculous,” Gretana snapped. “What are you going to do about that arm?”

“Could you fix up a splint?”

“If I do that will you promise to leave?”

“Leave?” Lorrest appeared to weigh up the idea. “For you, sweetheart, I’ll get off the planet altogether. All you have to do is tell me where…”

“Forget it!” Gretana’s former fears were displaced by anger. “Why is it that people like you can never listen to reason?”

To her surprise, Lorrest smiled in what could have been genuine pleasure. “I do believe you’re turning into a political animal,” he said mildly. “The first big hurdle is the realisation that nobody on the other side is capable of seeing the obvious. Once you’re over that, though, you come to the second and even bigger hurdle—what are you going to do about these people who can’t see the obvious? You can arrange to demonstrate to them that you’re right and they’re wrong, but that can take an awfully long time, and at the end of it…guess what?…they still can’t see what you’ve so carefully laid out in front of them. That brings you to the well-tried solution—stop them seeing anything at all.”

“You think you know everything,” Gretana said. Acutely aware that the retort had been both predictable and inadequate—exactly the sort of thing to trigger one of Lorrest’s painful laughs—she went to a drawer and took out a bamboo place mat. “Would this work?”

“Could do, if we bind it around my arm and fix up some kind of a sling. I knew you’d help.”

“I’m not helping with anything—all I want is for you to get the hell out of here.”

“Don’t pretend to be tough.”

“Do you know I’ve been to Station 23? That I went back to report on you?”

Lorrest glanced around the apartment with narrowed eyes. “What did they say?”

“Nothing. I didn’t get to make the report.”

“Oh? Why not?”

Gretana hesitated, wondering why she was further entangling herself. “I took a Terran back with me and it caused a bit of a furore.”

“You took a…” Lorrest’s shoulders gave a preliminary heave and he sat down on the nearest stool, his face already darkening. “That’s wonderful. I’ll bet Vekrynn wasn’t pleased.”

“He was furious.” Gretana smiled in spite of herself, comforted by Lorrest’s reaction. While padding the bamboo mat with cotton and binding it around his upper arm, she described how she had seen Denny Hargate at the nodal point and how on sheer impulse she had teleported him with her to Station 23. She noticed however that Lorrest’s expressions of amusement became muted as she outlined the subsequent events, and by the time she finished speaking his face had acquired a look of brooding solemnity.

“You sound as though you liked this man Hargate,” he said.

“He’s about the most sarcastic and short-tempered being I’ve ever met, but I suppose I did start to admire him in a way. You know, before I left Mollan that would have sounded grotesque.”

Lorrest gave her a wry smile. “Well, the thing you’ve got to keep uppermost in your mind is that when you first saw him he was obviously trying to end his life.”