“Here on Venus our origins go clear back to the rapprochement between Cyrus Buchanan and the dominant natives. On Mars, in addition to many humans—more about them later—the organization is affiliated with what we call the ‘priest class’—a bad translation, for they aren’t priests; ‘judges’ would be closer.”
Sir Isaac interrupted. “Elder brothers.”
“Eh? Well, maybe that is a fair poetical rendering. Never mind. The point is, the whole organization, Martian, Venerian, Terrestrial, has been striving—”
“Just a minute,” put in Don. “If you can answer me one question, it would clear up a whole lot. I’m a soldier of the Venus Republic and we’ve got a war on. Tell me this: is this organization—here on Venus, I mean—helping in our fight to chuck the Greenies out?”
“Well, not precisely. You see—”
Don did not then find out what it was he was supposed to see; another voice cut through Phipps’ words: “Don! Donald!”
He found himself swarmed by a somewhat smaller and female member of his own race. Isobel seemed determined to break his neck. Don was embarrassed and upset and most happy. He gently removed her arms from his neck and tried to pretend that it had not happened—when he caught sight of her father looking at him quite oddly. “Uh, hello, Mr. Costello.”
Costello advanced and shook hands with him. “How do you do, Mr. Harvey? It’s good to see you again.”
“It’s good to see you. I’m mighty glad to see you folks alive and in one piece. I thought you had had it.”
“Not quite. But it was a near thing.”
Isobel said, “Don, you look older—much older. And how thin you are!”
He grinned at her. “You look just the same, Grandma.”
Phipps interrupted, “Much as I dislike breaking up Old Home Week we have no time to waste. Miss Costello, we want the ring.”
“The ring?”
“He means,” explained Don, “the ring I left with you.”
“Ring?” said Mr. Costello. “Mr. Harvey, did you give my daughter a ring?”
“Well, not exactly. You see…”
Phipps interrupted again. “It’s the ring, Jim—the message ring. Harvey was the other courier—and it seems he made your daughter sort of a deputy courier.”
“Eh? I must say I’m confused.” He looked at his daughter.
“You have it?” Don asked her. “You didn’t lose it?”
“Lose your ring? Of course not, Don. But I had thought—Never mind; you want it back now.” She glanced around at the eyes on her—fourteen, counting Sir Isaac’s—then moved away and turned her back. She turned around again almost immediately and held out her hand. “Here it is.”
Phipps reached for it. Isobel drew her hand away and handed it to Don. Phipps opened his mouth, closed it again, then reopened it. “Very well—now let’s have it, Harvey.”
Don put it in a pocket. “You never did get around to explaining why I should turn it over to you.”
“But—” Phipps turned quite red. “This is preposterous! Had we known it was here, we would never have bothered to send for you—we would have had it without your leave.”
“Oh, no!”
Phipps swung his eyes to Isobel. “What’s that, young lady? Why not?”
“Because I wouldn’t have given it to you—not ever. Don told me that someone was trying to get it away from him. I didn’t know that you were the one.”
Phipps, already red-faced, got almost apoplectic. “I’ve had all this childish kidding around with serious matters that I can stand.” He took two long strides to Don and grasped him by the arm. “Cut out the nonsense and give us that message!”
Don shook him off and backed away half a step, all in one smooth motion—and Phipps looked down to see the point of a blade almost touching his waistband. Don held the knife with the relaxed thumb-and-two-finger grip of those who understand steel.
Phipps seemed to have trouble believing what he saw. Don said to him softly, “Get away from me.”
Phipps backed away. “Sir Isaac!”
“Yes,” agreed Don. “Sir Isaac—do I have to put up with this in your house?”
The dragon’s tentacles struck the keys, but only confused squawking came out. He stopped and started again and said very slowly, “Donald—this is your house. You are always safe in it. Please—by the service you did me—put away your weapon.”
Don glanced at Phipps, straightened up and caused his knife to disappear. Phipps relaxed and turned to the dragon. “Well, Sir Isaac? What are you going to do about it?”
Sir Isaac did not bother with the voder. “Remove thyself!”
“Eh?”
“You have brought dissension into this house. Were you not both in my house and of my family? Yet you menaced him. Please go—before you cause more sorrow.”
Phipps started to speak, thought better of it—left. Don said, “Sir Isaac, I am terribly sorry. I—”
“Let the waters close over it. Let the mud bury it. Donald, my dear boy, how can I assure you that what we ask of you is what your honored parents would have you do, were they here to instruct you?”
Don considered this. “I think that’s just the trouble, Sir Isaac—I’m not your ‘dear boy.’ I’m not anybody’s ‘dear boy.’ My parents aren’t here and I’m not sure that I would let them instruct me if they were. I’m a grown man now—I’m not as old as you are, not by several centuries. I’m not very old even by human standards—Mr. Phipps still classes me as a boy and that was what was wrong. But I’m not a boy and I’ve got to know what’s going on and make up my own mind. So far, I’ve heard a lot of sales talk and I’ve been subjected to a lot of verbal pushing around. That won’t do; I’ve got to know the real facts.”
Before Sir Isaac could reply they were interrupted by another sound—Isobel was applauding. Don said to her. “How about you, Isobel? What do you know about all this?”
“Me? Nothing. I couldn’t be more in the dark if I were stuffed in a sack. I was just cheering your sentiments.”
“My daughter,” Mr. Costello put in crisply, “knows nothing at all of these things. But I do—and it appears that you are entitled to answers.”
“I could certainly use some!”
“By your leave, Sir Isaac?” The dragon ponderously inclined his head; Costello went on, “Fire away. I’ll try to give you straight answers.”
“Okay—what’s the message in the ring?”
“Well, I can’t answer that exactly or we wouldn’t need the message ourselves. I know that it’s a discussion of certain aspects of physics—gravitation and inertia and spin and things like that. Field theory. It’s certainly very long and very complicated and I probably wouldn’t understand it if I knew exactly what was in it. I’m simply a somewhat rusty communications engineer, not a top-flight theoretical physicist.”
Don looked puzzled. “I don’t get it. Somebody tucks a physics book into a ring—and then we play cops-and-robbers all around the system. It sounds silly. Furthermore, it sounds impossible.” He took the ring out and looked at it; the light shone through it clearly. It was just a notions counter trinket—how could a major work on physics be hidden in it?
Sir Isaac said, “Donald, my dear—I beg pardon. Shucks! You mistake simple appearance for simplicity. Be assured; it is in there. It is theoretically possible to have a matrix in which each individual molecule has a meaning—as they do in the memory cells of your brain. If we had such subtlety, we could wrap your Encyclopedia Britannica into the head of a pin—it would be the head of that pin. But this is nothing so difficult.”
Don looked again at the ring and put it back in his pocket. “Okay, if you say so. But I still don’t see what all the shooting is about.”
Mr. Costello answered, “We don’t either—not exactly. This message was intended to go to Mars, where they are prepared to make the best use of it. I myself had not even heard about the project except in the most general terms until I was brought here. But the main i
dea is this: the equations that are included in this message tell how space is put together—and how to manipulate it. I can’t even imagine all the implications of that—but we do know a couple of things that we expect from it, first, how to make a force field that will stop anything, even a fusion bomb, and second, how to hook up a space drive that would make rocket travel look like walking. Don’t ask me how—I’m out of my depth. Ask Sir Isaac.”
“Ask me after I’ve studied the message,” the dragon commented dryly.
Don made no comment. There was silence for some moments which Costello broke by saying, “Well? Do you want to ask anything? I do not know quite what you do know; I hardly know what to volunteer.”
“Mr. Costello, when I talked to you in New London, did you know about this message?”
Costello shook his head. “I knew that our organization had great hopes from an investigation going on on Earth. I knew that it was intended to finish on Mars—you see, I was the key man, the ‘drop box,’ for communication to and from Venus, because I was in a position to handle interplanetary messages. I did not know that you were a courier—and I certainly did not know that you had entrusted an organization message to my only daughter.” He smiled wryly. “I might add that I did not even identify you in my mind as the son of two members of our organization, else there would have been no question about handling your traffic whether you could pay for it or not. There were means whereby I could spot organization messages—identifications that your message lacked. And Harvey is a fairly common name.”
“You know,” Don said slowly, “it seems to me that if Dr. Jefferson had told me what it was I was carrying—and if you had trusted Isobel here with some idea of what was going on, a lot of trouble could have been saved.”
“Perhaps. But men have died for knowing too much. Conversely, what they don’t know they can’t tell.”
“Yes, I suppose so. But there ought to be some way of running things so that people don’t have to go around loaded with secrets and afraid to speak!”
Both the dragon and the man inclined their heads. Mr. Costello added, “That’s exactly what we’re after—in the long run. That sort of a world.”
Don turned to his host. “Sir Isaac, when we met in the Glory Road, did you know that Dr. Jefferson was using me as a messenger?”
“No, Donald—though I should have suspected it when I learned who you were.” He paused, then added, “Is there anything more you wish to know?”
“No, I just want to think.” Too many things had happened too fast, too many new ideas—Take what Mr. Costello had said about what was in the ring, now—he could see what that would mean—if Costello knew what he was talking about. A fast space drive, one that would run rings around the Federation ships…a way to guard against atom bombs, even fusion bombs—why, if the Republic had such things they could tell the Federation to go fly a kite!
But that so-and-so Phipps had admitted that all this hanky-panky was not for the purpose of fighting the Greenies. They wanted to send the stuff to Mars, whatever it was. Why Mars? Mars didn’t even have a permanent human settlement—just scientific commissions and expeditions, like the work his parents did. The place wasn’t fit for humans, not really. So why Mars?
Whom could he trust? Isobel, of course—he had trusted her and it had paid off. Her father? Isobel and her father were two different people and Isobel didn’t know anything about what her father was doing. He looked at her; she stared back with big, serious eyes. He looked at her father. He didn’t know, he just didn’t know.
Malath? A voice out of a tank! Phipps? Phipps might be kind to children and have a heart of gold, but Don had no reason to trust him.
To be sure, all these people knew about Dr. Jefferson, knew about the ring, seemed to know about his parents—but so had Bankfield. He needed proof, not words. He knew enough now, enough had happened now, to prove to him that what he carried was of utmost importance. He must not make a mistake.
It occurred to him that there was one possible way of checking: Phipps had told him that Malath carried the other half of the same message—that the ring carried only one half. If it turned out that his half fitted the part that Malath carried, it would pretty well prove that these people had a right to the message.
But, confound it all!—that test required him to break the egg to discover that it was bad. He had to know before he turned it over to them. He had met the two-piece message system before; it was a standard military dodge—but used and used only when it was so terribly, terribly important not to let a message be compromised that you would rather not have it delivered than take any risk at all of having it fall into the wrong hands.
He looked up at the dragon. “Sir Isaac?”
“Yes, Donald?”
“What would happen if I refused to give up the ring?”
Sir Isaac answered at once but with grave deliberation. “You are my own egg, no matter what. This is your house—where you may dwell in peace—or leave in peace—as is your will.”
“Thank you, Sir Isaac.” Don trilled it in dragon symbols and used “Sir Isaac’s” true name.
Costello said urgently, “Mr. Harvey—”
“Yes?”
“Do you know why the speech of the dragon people is called ‘true speech’?”
“Uh, why, no, not exactly.”
“Because it is true speech. See here—I’ve studied comparative semantics—the whistling talk does not even contain a symbol for the concept of falsehood. And what a person does not have symbols for he can’t think about! Ask him, Mr. Harvey! Ask him in his own speech. If he answers at all, you can believe him.”
Donald looked at the old dragon. The thought went racing through his mind that Costello was right—there was no symbol in dragon speech for “lie,” the dragons apparently never had arrived at the idea—or the need. Could Sir Isaac tell a lie? Or was he so far humanized that he could behave and think like a man? He stared at Sir Isaac and eight blank, oscillating eyes looked back at him. How could a man know what a dragon was thinking?
“Ask him!” insisted Costello.
He didn’t trust Phipps; he couldn’t logically trust Costello—he had no reason to. And Isobel didn’t figure into it.
But a man had to trust somebody, some time! A man couldn’t go it alone—all right, let it be this dragon who had “shared mud” with him. “It isn’t necessary,” Don said suddenly. “Here.” He reached into his pocket, took out the ring and slipped it over one of Sir Isaac’s tentacles.
The tentacle curled through it and withdrew it into the slowly writhing mass. “I thank you, Mist-on-the-Waters.”
XVI
Multum In Parvo
DONALD looked at Isobel and found her still solemn, unsmiling, but she seemed to show approval. Her father sat down heavily in the other chair. “Phew!” he sighed “Mr. Harvey, you are a hard nut. You had me worried.”
“I’m sorry. I had to think.”
“No matter now.” He turned to Sir Isaac. “I guess I had better dig up Phipps. Yes?”
“It won’t be necessary.” The voice came from behind them; they all turned—all but Sir Isaac who did not need to turn his body. Phipps stood just inside the door. “I came in on the tail end of your remark, Jim. If you want me, I’m here.”
“Well, yes.”
“Just a moment, then. I came for another reason.” He faced Don. “Mr. Harvey, I owe you an apology.”
“Oh, that’s all right.”
“No, let me say my say. I had no business trying to bully-rag you into cooperating. Don’t mistake me; we want that ring—we must have it. And I mean to argue until we get it. But I’ve been under great strain and I went about it the wrong way. Very great strain—that’s my only excuse.”
“Well,” said Don, “come to think about it, so have I. So let’s forget it.” He turned to his host. “Sir Isaac, may I?” He reached toward Sir Isaac’s handling tentacles, putting out his palm. The ring dropped into it; he turned and handed it to Phi
pps.
Phipps stared at it stupidly for a moment. When he looked up Don was surprised to see that the man’s eyes were filled with tears. “I won’t thank you,” he said, “because when you see what will come of this it will mean more to you than any person’s thanks. What is in this ring is of life and death importance to many, many people. You’ll see.”
Don was embarrassed by the man’s naked emotion. “I can guess,” he said gruffly. “Mr. Costello told me that it meant bomb protection and faster ships—and I bet on my hunch that you people and I are on the same side in the long run. I just hope I didn’t guess wrong.”
“Guess wrong? No, you haven’t guessed wrong—and not just in the long run, as you put it, but right now! Now that we have this—” he held up the ring, “we stand a fighting chance to save our people on Mars.”
“Mars?” repeated Don. “Hey, wait a minute—what’s this about Mars? Who’s going to be saved? And from what?”
Phipps looked just as puzzled. “Eh? But wasn’t that what persuaded you to turn over the ring?”
“Wasn’t what persuaded me?”
“Didn’t Jim Costello—” “Why, I thought of course you had—” and Sir Isaac’s voder interrupted with, “Gentlemen, apparently it was assumed that…”
“Quiet!” Don shouted. As Phipps opened his mouth again Don hurriedly added, “Things seem to have gotten mixed up again. Can somebody—just one of you—tell me what goes on?”
Costello could and did. The Organization had for many years been quietly building a research center on Mars. It was the one place in the system where the majority of humans were scientists. The Federation maintained merely an outpost there, with a skeleton garrison. Mars was not regarded as being of any real importance—just a place where harmless longhairs could dig among the ruins and study the customs of the ancient and dying race.
The security officers of the I.B.I. gave Mars little attention; there seemed no need. The occasional agent who did show up could be led around and allowed to see research of no military importance.
The group on Mars did not have the giant facilities available on Earth—the mastodonic cybernetic machines, the unlimited sources of atomic power, the superpowerful particle accelerators, the enormous laboratories—but they did have freedom. The theoretical ground-work for new advances in physics had been worked out on Mars, spurred on by certain mystifying records of the First Empire—that almost mythical earlier epoch when the solar system had been one political unit. Don was warmly pleased to hear that his parents’ researches had contributed largely at this point in the problem. It was known—or so the ancient Martian records seemed to state—that the ships of the First Empire had traveled between the planets, not in journeys of weary months, or even weeks, but of days.