Murray Leinster - The Pirates of Zan

“Evidently,” said Hoddan in relief, “you believe me when I say that my gadget doesn’t make death rays.”

The ambassador looked slightly embarrassed.

“To be honest,” he admitted, “I’ve no doubt that you invented it independently, but they’ve been using such a device for half a century in the Cetis cluster. They’ve had no trouble.”

Hoddan winced.

“Did you tell the minister that?”

“Hardly,” said the ambassador. “It would have done you no good. You’re in open revolt and have performed overt acts of violence against the police. It was impolite enough for me to suggest that the local government was stupid. It would have been most undiplomatic to prove it”

Hoddan did not feel very proud, just then.

“I’m flunking that the cops — quite unofficially — might try to kidnap me from the embassy. They’ll deny that they tried, especially if they manage it. But I think they’ll try.”

“Very likely,” said the ambassador. “We’ll take precautions.”

“I’d like to make something — not lethal — just in case,” said Hoddan. “If you can trust me not to make death rays, I’d like to make a generator of odd-shaped microwaves. They’re described in textbooks. They ionize the air where they strike. That’s all. They make air a high-resistance conductor. Nothing more than that.”

The ambassador said:

“There was an old-fashioned way to make ozone…” When Hoddan nodded, a little surprised, the ambassador said, “By all means go ahead! You should be able to get parts from your room vision-receiver. I’ll have some tools given you.” Then he added, “Diplomacy has to understand the things that control events. Once it was social position. For a time it was weapons. Then it was commerce. Now it’s technology. But I wonder how you’ll use the ionization of air to protect yourself from kidnapers! Don’t tell me! I’d rather try to guess.”

He waved his hand in cordial dismissal and an embassy servant showed Hoddan to his quarters. Ten minutes later another staff man brought him tools. He was left alone.

He delicately disassembled the set in his room and began to put some of the parts together in a novel but wholly rational fashion. The science of electronics, like the science of mathematics, had progressed away beyond the point where all of it had practical application. One could spend a lifetime learning things that research had discovered in the past, and industry had never found a use for. On Zan, industriously reading pirated books, Hoddan hadn’t known where utility stopped. He’d kept on learning long after a practical man would have stopped studying to get a paying job.

Any electronic engineer could have made the device he now assembled. It only needed to be wanted, and apparently he was the first person to want it. In this respect it was like the receptor that had gotten him into trouble. As he put the small parts together, he felt a certain loneliness. A man Hoddan’s age needed to have some girl admire him from time to time. If Nedda had been sitting cross-legged before him, listening raptly while he explained, Hoddan would probably have been perfectly happy. But she wasn’t. It wasn’t likely she ever would be, Hoddan scowled.

Inside of an hour he’d made a hand-sized, five watt, waveguide projector of waves of eccentric form. In the beam of that projector, air became ionized. Air became a high-resistance conductor comparable to nichrome wire, when and where the projector sent its microwaves.

He was wrapping tape about the pistol-like hand-grip when a servant brought him a scribbled note. It had been handed in at the embassy gate by a woman who fled after leaving ft. It looked like Nedda’s handwriting. It read like Nedda’s phrasing. It appeared to have been written by somebody in a highly emotional state. But it wasn’t quite — not absolutely — convincing.

He went to find the ambassador. He handed over the note. The ambassador read it and raised his eyebrows.

“Well?”

“It could be authentic,” admitted Hoddan.

“In other words,” said the ambassador, “you are not sure that it is a booby trap — an invitation to a date with the police?”

“I’m not sure,” said Hoddan. “I think I’d better bite. If I have any illusions left after this morning, I’d better find ft out. I thought Nedda liked me quite a bit.”

“I make no comment,” observed the ambassador. “Can I help you in any way?”

“I have to leave the embassy,” said Hoddan, “and there’s almost a solid line of police outside the walls. Could I borrow some old clothes, a few pillows, and a length of rope?”

Half an hour later a rope uncoiled itself at the very darkest outside corner of the embassy wall. It dangled down to the ground. This was at the rear of the embassy enclosure. The night was bright with stars, and the city’s towers glittered with many lights. But here there was almost complete blackness and that silence of a city which is sometimes so companionable.

The rope remained hanging from the wall. No light reached the ground there. The tiny crescent of Walden’s farthest moon cast an insufficient glow. Nothing could be seen by it.

The rope went up, as if it had been lowered merely to make sure that it was long enough for its purpose. Then it descended again. This time a figure dangled at its end. It came down, swaying a little. It reached the blackest part of the shadow at the wall’s base. It stayed there.

Nothing happened. The figure rose swiftly, hauled up in rapid pullings of the rope. Then the line came down again and again a figure descended. But this figure moved. The rope swayed and oscillated. The figure came down a good halfway to the ground. It paused, and then descended with much movement to two-thirds of the way from the top.

There something seemed to alarm it. It began to rise with violent writhings of the rope. It climbed.

There was a crackling noise. A stun-pistol. The figure seemed to climb more frantically. More cracklings. They were stun-pistol charges and there were tiny sparks where they hit. The dangling figure seemed convulsed. It went limp, but it did not fall. More charges poured into it. It hung motionless halfway up the wall of the embassy.

Movements began in the darkness. Men appeared, talking in low tones and straining their eyes toward the now motionless figure. They gathered underneath it. One went off at a run, carrying a message. Someone of authority arrived, panting. There was more low-toned argument. More and still more men appeared. There were forty or fifty figures at the base of the wall.

One of those figures began to climb the rope hand over hand. He reached the motionless object. He swore in a shocked voice. He was shushed from below. He let the figure drop. It made no sound when it landed.

Then there was a rushing, as the guards about the embassy went furiously back to their proper posts to keep anybody from slipping out. The two men who remained swore bitterly over a dummy made of old clothes and pillows.

Hoddan was then some blocks away. He suffered painful doubt about the note ostensibly from Nedda. The guards about the embassy would have tried to catch him in any case, but it did seem very plausible that the note had been sent him to get him to try to climb down the wall. On the other hand, a false descent of a palpably dummy-like dummy had been plausible too. He’d drawn all the guards to one spot by his seeming doubt and by testing out their vigilance with a dummy. The only thing improbable in his behavior had been that after testing their vigilance with a dummy, he’d made use of it.

A fair distance away, he turned sedately into a narrow lane between buildings. This paralleled another lane serving the home of a girl friend of Nedda’s. The note had named the garden behind that other girl’s home as a rendezvous. But Hoddan was not going to that garden. He wanted to make sure. If the cops had forged the note…