Poul Anderson: The Long Night

“Thank you,” she whispered.

He sat down on his own bunk and looked up at us. I loomed over him, a blond giant against his squatness. My family had been old and cultured and wealthy before the wars, and he was the nameless sweeping of a hundred slums and spaceports, but from the first there was never any doubt of who was the leader.

“Here’s the story,” he said in his curt way. “I knew enough practical engineering in spite of having no formal education to get myself a fairly decent master in whose factories I learned more. Two years ago he sold me to the captain of this ship. I got rid of the so-called chief engineer they had then. It wasn’t hard to stir up a murderous quarrel between him and a jealous subordinate. But his successor is a drunken bum one generation removed from the forests.

“In effect, I’m the engineer of this ship. I’ve also managed to introduce my master, Captain Venjain, to marijuana. It hits a Gorzuni harder than it does a human, and he’s a hopeless addict by now. It’s partly responsible for the condition of this ship and the laxness among the crew. Poor leadership, poor organization. That’s a truism.”

I stared at him with a sudden chill along my spine. But it was Kathryn who whispered the question: “Why?”

“Waiting my chance,” he snapped. “I’m the one who made junk out of the engines and equipment. I tell them it’s old and poorly designed. They think that only my constant work holds the ship together at all: but I could have her humming in a week if I cared to. I can’t wait too much longer. Sooner or later someone else is going to look at that machinery and tell them it’s been deliberately haywired. So I’ve been waiting for a couple of assistants with technical training and a will to fight. I hope you two fit the bill. If not—” He shrugged. “Go ahead and tell on me. It won’t free you. But if you want to risk lives that won’t be very long or pleasant on Gorzun, you can help me take over the ship?”

I stood for some time looking at him. It was uncanny, the way he had sized us up from a glance and a word. Certainly the prospect was frightening. I could feel sweat on my face. My hands were cold. But I’d follow him. Before God, I’d follow him!

Still—“Three of us?” I jeered. “Three of us against a couple of hundred warriors?”

“There’ll be more on our side,” he said impassively. After a moment’s silence he went on: “Naturally, we’ll have to watch ourselves. Only two or three of them know Anglic. I’ll point them out to you. And of course our work is under surveillance. But the watchers are ignorant. I think you have the brains to fool them.”

“I—” Kathryn stood, reaching for words. “I can’t believe it,” she said at last. “A naval vessel in this condition—”

“Things were better under the old Baldic conquerors,” admitted Manuel. “The kings who forged the. League out of a hundred planets still in barbaric night, savages who’d learned to build spaceships and man atomblasts and little else. But even they succeeded only because there was no real opposition. The Commonwealth society was rotten, corrupt, torn apart by civil wars, its leadership a petrified bureaucracy, its military forces scattered over a thousand restless planets, its people ready to buy peace rather than fight. No wonder the League drove everything before it!

“But after the first sack of Terra fifteen years ago, the barbarians split up. The forceful early rulers were dead, and their sons were warring over an inheritance they didn’t know how to rule. The League is divided into two hostile regions now, and I don’t know how many splinter groups. Their old organization is shot to hell.

“Sol didn’t rally in time. It was still under the decadent Commonwealth government. So one branch of the Baldics has now managed to conquer our big planets. But the fact that they’ve been content to raid and loot the inner worlds instead of occupying them and administering them decently shows the decay of their own society. Given the leadership, we could still throw them out of the Solar System and go on to overrun their home territories. Only the leadership hasn’t been forthcoming.”

It was a harsh, angry lecture, and I winced and felt resentment within myself. “Damn it, we’ve fought,” I said.

“And been driven back and scattered.” His heavy mouth lifted in a sneer. “Because there .hasn’t been a chief who understood strategy and organization, and who could put heart into his men.”

“I suppose,” I said sarcastically, “that you’re that chief.”

His answer was flat and calm and utterly assured. “Yes.”

In the days the followed I got to know more about Manuel Argos. He was never loath to talk about himself.

His race, I suppose, was primarily Mediterranean-Anatolian, with more than a hint of Negro and Oriental, but I think there must have been some forgotten Nordic ancestor who looked out of those ice-blue eyes. A blend of all humanity, such as was not uncommon these days.

His mother had been a day laborer on Venus. His father, though he was never sure, had been a space prospector who died young and never saw his child. When he was thirteen he shipped out for Sirius and had not been in the Solar System since. Now, at forty, he had been spaceman, miner, dock walloper, soldier in the civil wars and against the Baldics, small-time politician on the colony planets, hunter; machinist, and a number of darker things.

Somewhere along the line, he had found time to do an astonishing amount of varied reading, but his reliance was always more on his own senses and reason and intuition than on books. He had been captured four years ago in a Gorzuni raid on Alpha Centauri, and had set himself to study his captors as cold-bloodedly as he had studied his own race.

Yes, I learned a good deal about him but nothing of him. I don’t think any living creature ever did. Hewas not one to open his heart. He went wrapped in loneliness and dreams all his days. Whether the chill of his manner went into his soul, and the rare warmth was only a mask, or whether he was indeed a yearning tenderness sheathed in armor of indifference, no one will ever be sure. And he made a weapon out of that uncertainty. A man never knew what to await from him and was thus forever strained in his presence, open to his will.

“He’s a strange sort,” said Kathryn once, when we were alone. “I haven’t decided whether he’s crazy or a genius.”

“Maybe both, darling,” I suggested, a little irritably. I didn’t like to be dominated.

“Maybe. But what is sanity, then?” She shivered and crept close to me. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

The ship wallowed on her way, through a bleak glory of stars, alone in light-years of emptiness with her cargo of hate and fear and misery and dreams. We worked, and waited, and the slow days passed.

—The laboring old engines had to be fixed. Some show had to be made for the gray-furred giants who watched us in the flickering gloom of the power chambers. We wired and, welded and bolted, tested and tore down and rebuilt, sweltering in the heat of bursting atoms that rolled from the radiation shields, deafened by the whine of generators and thud of misadjusted turbines and, the deep uneven drone of the great converters. We fixed Manuel’s sabotage until the ship ran almost smoothly. Later we would on some pretext throw the whole thing out of kilter again. “Penelope’s tapestry,” said Manuel, and I wondered that a space tramp could make the classical allusion.

“What are we waiting for?” I asked him once. The din of the generator we were overhauling smothered our words. “When do we start our mutiny?”

He glanced up at me. The light of our trouble lamp gleamed off the sweat on his ugly pockmarked face. “At the proper time,” he said coldly. “For one thing, it’ll be while the captain is on his next dope jag.”