H. Piper - The Greatest Works of H. Beam Piper - 35 Titles in One Edition

I get into the spaceport administrative area about once in twenty or so hours. Oughourlian is a somewhat less frequent visitor. The others had never been there, and they were visibly awed by all the gleaming glass and brightwork, and the soft lights and the thick carpets. All Port Sandor ought to look like this, I thought. It could, and maybe now it might, after a while.

There were six chairs in a semicircle facing Guido Fieschi's desk, and three men sitting behind it. Fieschi, who had changed clothes and washed since the last time I saw him, sat on the extreme right. Captain Courtland, with his tight mouth under a gray mustache and the quadruple row of medal ribbons on his breast, was on the left. In the middle, the seat of honor, was Bish Ware, looking as though he were presiding over a church council to try some rural curate for heresy.

As soon as Joe Kivelson saw him, he roared angrily:

"There's the dirty traitor who sold us out! He's the worst of the lot; I wouldn't be surprised if—"

Bish looked at him like a bishop who has just been contradicted on a point of doctrine by a choirboy.

"Be quiet!" he ordered. "I did not follow this man you call Ravick here to this ... this running-hot-and-cold Paradise planet, and I did not spend five years fraternizing with its unwashed citizenry and creating for myself the role of town drunkard of Port Sandor, to have him taken from me and lynched after I have arrested him. People do not lynch my prisoners."

"And who in blazes are you?" Joe demanded.

Bish took cognizance of the question, if not the questioner.

"Tell them, if you please, Mr. Fieschi," he said.

"Well, Mr. Ware is a Terran Federation Executive Special Agent," Fieschi said. "Captain Courtland and I have known that for the past five years. As far as I know, nobody else was informed of Mr. Ware's position."

After that, you could have heard a gnat sneeze.

Everybody knows about Executive Special Agents. There are all kinds of secret agents operating in the Federation—Army and Navy Intelligence, police of different sorts, Colonial Office agents, private detectives, Chartered Company agents. But there are fewer Executive Specials than there are inhabited planets in the Federation. They rank, ex officio, as Army generals and Space Navy admirals; they have the privilege of the floor in Parliament, they take orders from nobody but the President of the Federation. But very few people have ever seen one, or talked to anybody who has.

And Bish Ware— good ol' Bish; he'sh everybodysh frien' —was one of them. And I had been trying to make a man of him and reform him. I'd even thought, if he stopped drinking, he might make a success as a private detective—at Port Sandor, on Fenris! I wondered what color my face had gotten now, and I started looking around for a crack in the floor, to trickle gently and unobtrusively into.

And it should have been obvious to me, maybe not that he was an Executive Special, but that he was certainly no drunken barfly. The way he'd gone four hours without a drink, and seemed to be just as drunk as ever. That was right—just as drunk as he'd ever been; which was to say, cold sober. There was the time I'd seen him catch that falling bottle and set it up. No drunken man could have done that; a man's reflexes are the first thing to be affected by alcohol. And the way he shot that tread-snail. I've seen men who could shoot well on liquor, but not quick-draw stuff. That calls for perfect co-ordination. And the way he went into his tipsy act at the Times —veteran actor slipping into a well-learned role.

He drank, sure. He did a lot of drinking. But there are men whose systems resist the effects of alcohol better than others, and he must have been an exceptional example of the type, or he'd never have adopted the sort of cover personality he did. It would have been fairly easy for him. Space his drinks widely, and never take a drink unless he had to, to maintain the act. When he was at the Times with just Dad and me, what did he have? A fruit fizz.

Well, at least I could see it after I had my nose rubbed in it. Joe Kivelson was simply gaping at him. The Reverend Zilker seemed to be having trouble adjusting, too. The shipyard man and the chemical engineer weren't saying anything, but it had kicked them for a loss, too. Oscar Fujisawa was making a noble effort to be completely unsurprised. Oscar is one of our better poker players.

"I thought it might be something like that," he lied brazenly. "But, Bish ... Excuse me, I mean, Mr. Ware..."

"Bish, if you please, Oscar."

"Bish, what I'd like to know is what you wanted with Ravick," he said. "They didn't send any Executive Special Agent here for five years to investigate this tallow-wax racket of his."

"No. We have been looking for him for a long time. Fifteen years, and I've been working on it that long. You might say, I have made a career of him. Steve Ravick is really Anton Gerrit."

Maybe he was expecting us to leap from our chairs and cry out, "Aha! The infamous Anton Gerrit! Brought to book at last!" We didn't. We just looked at one another, trying to connect some meaning to the name. It was Joe Kivelson, of all people, who caught the first gleam.

"I know that name," he said. "Something on Loki, wasn't it?"

Yes; that was it. Now that my nose was rubbed in it again, I got it.

"The Loki enslavements. Was that it?" I asked. "I read about it, but I never seem to have heard of Gerrit."

"He was the mastermind. The ones who were caught, fifteen years ago, were the underlings, but Ravick was the real Number One. He was responsible for the enslavement of from twenty to thirty thousand Lokian natives, gentle, harmless, friendly people, most of whom were worked to death in the mines."

No wonder an Executive Special would put in fifteen years looking for him. You murder your grandmother, or rob a bank, or burn down an orphanage with the orphans all in bed upstairs, or something trivial like that, and if you make an off-planet getaway, you're reasonably safe. Of course there's such a thing as extradition, but who bothers? Distances are too great, and communication is too slow, and the Federation depends on every planet to do its own policing.

But enslavement's something different. The Terran Federation is a government of and for—if occasionally not by—all sapient peoples of all races. The Federation Constitution guarantees equal rights to all. Making slaves of people, human or otherwise, is a direct blow at everything the Federation stands for. No wonder they kept hunting fifteen years for the man responsible for the Loki enslavements.

"Gerrit got away, with a month's start. By the time we had traced him to Baldur, he had a year's start on us. He was five years ahead of us when we found out that he'd gone from Baldur to Odin. Six years ago, nine years after we'd started hunting for him, we decided, from the best information we could get, that he had left Odin on one of the local-stop ships for Terra, and dropped off along the way. There are six planets at which those Terra-Odin ships stop. We sent a man to each of them. I drew this prize out of the hat.

"When I landed here, I contacted Mr. Fieschi, and we found that a man answering to Gerrit's description had come in on the Peenemünde from Odin seven years before, about the time Gerrit had left Odin. The man who called himself Steve Ravick. Of course, he didn't look anything like the pictures of Gerrit, but facial surgery was something we'd taken for granted he'd have done. I finally managed to get his fingerprints."

Special Agent Ware took out a cigar, inspected it with the drunken oversolemnity he'd been drilling himself into for five years, and lit it. Then he saw what he was using and rose, holding it out, and I went to the desk and took back my lighter-weapon.