“I heard that.” Percy threw himself down on the grass. “And for once you’re right. Nobody can free someone else; each man has got to do that for himself, right?”
“You make it sound so easy,” Lincoln said, brushing away one of the ubiquitous flies.
“Sure it’s easy. Any man can have freedom if he’s willing to die for it.”
“You mean kill for it,” Lincoln said absently.
“Right again.” Percy punched him on the arm.
“Damn it, man—that hurt. You always got to act like a goddam clown?”
“How do you want me to act?”
“With a little dignity. You’re the leader of a major political movement; how can you expect anybody to respect you or what you stand for if you always act like a goddam clown?”
“You think maybe I ought to carry a ceremonial sword?” Percy said, amused.
“You’d stick yourself in the rear with it.” Lincoln glanced up briefly, blinked nearsightedly, then returned to fiddling with his glasses. “But I’ll tell you one thing for sure,” he added. “If you act like dirt, people will treat you like dirt.”
Percy’s hand shot out and clamped viciously onto Lincoln’s wrist. “Listen, man. You see the color of my skin? It’s dirt-color. I’m dirt and so are you and so is everybody else in this so-called ‘political movement,’ and if you were a farmer instead of an egghead Northern intellectual you’d know that the best dirt is the blackest dirt. You’re dirt, man, and don’t forget it.”
“Yassuh, massuh boss,” Lincoln said, his usual overly-perfect English giving way to a whining parody of Good Old Uncle Tom. Percy laughed and released his grip.
“As a clown you got me beat from the word go,” Percy chuckled, but Lincoln only shrugged and returned to his work.
Alone in his office the worm Marshal Koli ruminated languidly in a torpor of wish-fulfillment fantasy as to the successful capture of Percy X. One final coup before he returned to Ganymede; before, mandatorily, he relinquished his post.
Peculiar that here on Terra the dark races held the lowest caste; it was obvious to every Ganymedian that the order was inverted from its natural hierarchy. After all, the Negroes presented a pleasing appearance and were endowed with—by and large—a natural, balanced philosophy of life, a moderation and subtle humor. Whereas the Whites tended to hang frantically on the twin horns of ambition and fear. Fear of failure, greed to rise; a bad mixture, indicating an unstable temperament.
Nonetheless, since the Terrans had achieved only the sixth level in evolution and possessed both pedal and manual extremities—and not vestigial but functional—they could be viewed only as animals. Hence Marshal Koli felt no qualms in the dreamy anticipation of the capture of Percy X; the Neeg-part commander would be mercifully killed and his virgin pelt would be removed, processed (including the head); glass eyes would be installed, though of course the organic teeth—if good—would be retained. What a magnificent wall-hanging! Or, if not that, if the pelt turned out to be furry enough, what a delicious rug to slither over!
In his villa on Ganymede, Marshal Koli possessed several excellent pelts already installed attractively, impressing the casual or formal visitor; he had expertly taken advantage of his location here on Terra throughout the war. Trophies constituted primary symbols of victory; they were not mere toys or art objects. They represented what had been achieved, and the wall-mounted pelt of Percy X would be the crowning acquisition.
—If he could acquire it before the termination of his position of authority.
From the Percy X file he lifted, with his jaws, a 3-D color still photo of the Neeg and examined it with relish. What a fine forehead. And chin. The entire face squared off, full of strength, even beauty; no wonder the creature had risen to become the charismatic leader of all the remaining Neeg-parts in the mountains.
As soon as Miss Hiashi had contacted Percy X she was to communicate, via a miniaturized transmitter concealed in the right cup of her bra, with Marshal Koli’s office. And, continually, she would report concerning the whereabouts and activities of Percy X until such time as Koli saw fit to snap shut his trap on the Neeg-part leader. Everyone would be happy. Miss Hiashi would have her recordings of the music of a vanishing cult and Koli would have his pelt. He felt admiration for the girl. It was just such boldness combined with guile that had gained her the high position she held in the show business world, together with the approval of the Ganymedian Bureau of Cultural Control.
Flicking on an intercom outlet before him he said, “Any news from home? Has the Grand Council adjourned yet, or is it still in session?” Sometimes the confabulations of the Common Mind occupied weeks of squirming altercation.
His communications creech answered, “No report yet, Marshal. I will inform you as soon as word comes through from our reps in the Council.”
It would take one Terran week for the ship from Ganymede, bearing the new civil administrator, to reach Tennessee following his appointment. And, added to this figure, one had to consider the administrator’s procrastination, the bale of Tennessee being the unappetizing prospect that it was. The appointee might in fact appeal, and litigation within the Common generally droned on for months.
Everything, to use the Terran expression, was A.O.K.
At that moment Marshal Koli’s second-in-command, Colonel Mawoi, entered the room carried by his creeches. Communicating telepathically Mawoi said, “Sir, may I make a minor point before you begin on other considerations with respect to the Percy X file?”
“Speak up,” Marshall Koli said irritably, aloud.
“I have recently, as you know, assisted in the processing of the file. There is one entry which perhaps you failed, due to the pressure of—”
“What’s the entry?”
Making no attempt to conceal his concern Colonel Mawoi said, “The Neeg, sir; he is a telepath. A graduate of the school of the Bureau of Psychedelic Research. So of course he can’t be spied upon, especially by someone such as Miss Hiashi, who would be physically close to him. He will instantly be aware of her mission and will, I imagine, not allow her to make a report on anything; he will very likely kill her on sight.”
With angry annoyance Marshal Koli said, “Radio her instantly. Warn her; call her back. We can’t throw away such a valuable contact for nothing.”
As the officer rushed away to carry out his order, Marshal Koli sighed gloomily.
“It would have been such a beautiful pelt,” he said at last, to himself and to the creeches within hearing.
Gus Swenesgard wiped his balding head dry with one energetic swipe of his red bandanna handkerchief and took a second look at the map in his hand. At the top of the map these words had been stamped: TOP SECRET! CLASS A MILITARY PERSONNEL ONLY! This, however, did not bother him. One of his Toms had found it in the ruins of the Oak Ridge Nuclear Power Station laboratories and now it was his to do with he pleased.
“This is the place, all right,” he said, peering into the great hole which grew deeper by the minute. He had no automated digging equipment, but that didn’t matter; he owned plenty of hard-working Toms and one good hollow-core shaft drill. And plenty of time.
“Aw come on, Gus,” his foreman Jack Haller yelled above the noise of the drill. “We know you’re not digging for any library. I mean, you got absolutely nobody foiled, so drop it.” He glared meaningfully at his employer.
“It says ‘library’ on the map.” Gus waved the worn and crinkled document in Jack’s general direction. It was true, though; Gus did not really believe that before the war the UN military had buried such a thing as a library here on his plantation. That was a code word for—something else.
It seemed so near that he could virtually taste it; his body ached for it.
“That map’s Army, isn’t it?” Haller demanded. “And that’s against occupation law, to dig up anything military. So you had to keep up this noise about libraries.”
Gus said, grinning, “It’s fifty thousand UN soldiers all armed wit
h C-head rapid fire weapons. Waiting for the day to come when they reconquer the whole goddam planet.”
“And you’re going to expose them?” Jack Haller stared at him. “And bugger up the whole enterprise?” His stare became fixed with outrage. “Where’s your patriotism?”
“I was only joking.”
“What, then?”
“Girls. Fifty thousand virgins.” Gus winked.
Disgusted, his foreman stalked off to resume supervision of Toms and the digging rig.
To himself, so that Haller and no one else could hear, Gus murmured, “I told you and you didn’t believe me. So don’t believe me; tough.” Because what he had said was true.
The UN had, in the final days of the war, selected by computer a quantity of the finest womanhood—genetically speaking—from all the races of the planet, had introduced them to a homeostatic subsurface totally sealed-off chamber…and then had gone to infinite trouble to destroy all records pertaining to the existence and location of the self-sustaining underground chamber—all this in case the invaders, now conquerors, had it in mind to abolish the human race in toto like the wriggly, slimy worms they were. However, the Ganymedians had no such plans; in point of fact, they had come in to occupy conquered Earth in the most deft, humane and circumspect manner—at least if their policies up to now constituted an index. So, Gus Swenesgard reasoned, this colony of first class females served no purpose, and, since undoubtedly life was miserable underground, he would be doing them a favor by liberating them. They would be grateful. They would honor him. All in all it looked pretty good.
And he had plans. In exchange for releasing them—he did not know for certain how many women he would find, maybe a hundred, maybe two hundred—he wanted reciprocity. As his lawyer, Ike Blitzen, might put it.
Several of the really big plantation Burgers, like Chuck Pepitone and Jesus Flores, just to name the two closest, had whole colonies of wives, both colored and white—although the colored ones technically, by Tennessee law, comprised “consorts,” not wives. In fact this made up the essence of Burgerhood; in this lay the ultimate criterion. He knew that. Everybody knew that. Because women had become expensive. They sold, in the bales of the South, for much more than Toms; one could pick up a good brawny buck Tom for, say, fifty UN dollars, but a woman…well, that drew six times this price, assuming she came undamaged.
This, what he had here, this trove of girls—this constituted currency. Because the old pre-war UN money had become rapidly worthless as the Gany occupation authorities redeemed it or withdrew it or whatever they did, and the junk they issued no sane mortal would touch, it was so obviously phony; as for instance whose pictures appeared on it? President Johnson? Stalin? No; the Gany had dipped into history and come up with full-face steel-engraved portraits of such freaks as Kant and Socrates and Hume and old-time non-heroes like that. For instance, the ten dollar General Douglas MacArthur bill; in another month it would be gone entirely. And in its place somebody named Li Po, some sort of antique Chinese poet. It made a man blurk just to think about it.
So, anyhow, the occupation currency had become a racket by which the Ganys appropriated Terran valuables in exchange for worthless scrip. And everybody knew that, even up North where the worm-kissers, wiks for short, ran everything…that is, ran everything at the beck and call of the Gany military commanders, that being the nature of wiks.
Well, maybe his plantation was virtually the smallest in the whole bale of Tennessee; so what? It didn’t matter, not after his drilling rig burst through into the mammoth sealed subsurface living-chamber designed to last a century and jam-packed with pristine womanhood in its choicest flower, safe from the Gany worms—or snakes, however you thought of them, whichever you liked least. Snakes were wriggly and had fangs and injected poison. And worms; well, worms were blind. If not worse. Having raised sheep he had seen parasitic worms…he had seen the bott fly. So to him the Ganys resembled worms, which was a lot worse than snakes.
“The hollow-core shaft,” Haller called to him suddenly. “It’s bringing up fragments of metal. It seems to be drilling into what looks like chrome steel.”
“How far down?” Gus asked.
“Exactly what you predicted: seven thousand feet.”
“Okay,” he said, nodding, “Use the fat shaft, the one we can descend in. I want to go down there. Me first; I’ll tell you when you can follow.”
Shortly, in a harness suit, greased with a smelly plastic slime so that he would not become stuck, he found himself being lowered, cautiously, a lantern dangling below him to reveal the way. Directly behind him, just to make sure, followed a Tom with a dart pistol. In his left hand Gus gripped a rapid-fire phosphorus-cartridge revolver; in his right a fistful of documents identifying him as the legal Burger of the Fifteenth Plantation of the bale of Tennessee…so they would not mistake him for an invading Gany wik. Plus newspaper accounts published since Capitulation Day which recounted the lenient policies of the Ganys especially as regards the continuation of the human race: accounts which gave the lie to wartime scare stories of sterilization plans and so forth.
He felt confident, even cheerful, and as he descended he hummed a jazzy tune, then wondered how it had happened to come into his head. Of course; he must have gotten it somehow from that girl Joan Hiashi whom he had met earlier in the day at his Olympus Hotel. And he wondered, idly, if she had managed to reach the unpacified hills and if so had Percy X’s trigger-nutty zealots massacred her. If so that would be too bad; he had had plans for her.
At seven thousand feet his dangling lantern flashed broadly, into a cavern whose size could not be distinguished. And, as he swung downward, eager to reach the horizontal plane, he saw—
Electronic equipment, of some strange design such as he had never come across before. There seemed to be tons of components, wires and printed circuitry and helium batteries and transistors and peculiar crystalline objects of unguessable use glinting in the lantern light.
As he came to rest numbly on the floor of the cavern, he thought, Then that about the girls, that was just to lure us into digging. In case we had become barbaric and didn’t care about science. They conned us, those UN psychologists. They—
His neck stung. An anti-personnel homotropic dart. He prayed, as his consciousness abruptly ebbed away and he stumbled to his knees, that it was just a stunner, not a metabolic toxin arranged for cardiac arrest. He managed to turn his head far enough to make out the Tom who had descended behind him. Why didn’t the Tom do something? Then he realized the truth. It was the Tom who had fired the dart. Gus thought, he must be working for Percy X!
In Gus’ earphones Haller’s voice dinned in an anxious squeak, “Hey, Gus; how come your dead-man’s throttle’s registering? What’s wrong?”
It’s registering, Gus thought dimly, because I’m dead.
A moment later Haller came hurtling down the shaft, spinning and twisting like a rag doll, and screaming.
IV
AS THE IONOCRAFT reached the northern border of the plantation, its articulation circuit creaked on and it declared, “This is as far as I am licensed to go. I’ll either have to alter course or deposit you here, miss. Take your choice.”
“I’d like,” Joan Hiashi said, “for you to carry me to those hills over there.” She pointed.
“Go ahead and like away,” the taxi said, and veered to follow the perimeter of the plantation. The hills receded.
“Okay,” Joan said wearily. “Let me off here.”
The ionocraft settled into a deserted, unclaimed marshland, miles from the hills. Getting out, Joan watched gloomily as the cab unloaded her recording equipment. She had been prepared, to some extent, for this; she had on high boots.
“Lots of luck, miss,” the taxi said, and, slamming its door, rose into the sky. She watched it until it had disappeared from sight and then she sighed heavily, wondering what came next.
Possibly she could walk the rest of the way to Percy’s hills, but she could not carry the re
cording gear; it would have to be left here. In which case, why go to the hills at all?
A voice said, “Miss Hiashi?”
She glanced around, startled, then realized that it came from the right-hand cup of her bra. “Yes,” she said. “What is it?”
“A small error,” said the voice which she now recognized as belonging to Marshal Koli. “I neglected, in your briefing, to inform you that your friend, Percy X, has, since last being in contact with you, taken special intensive training at the school of the Bureau of Psychedelic Research.”
“So what?” She did not like the Gany’s tone; he was trying, obviously, to break some sort of bad news indirectly.
“He’s a telepath, Miss Hiashi.”
Seating herself on her recording gear she let the full impact of this news sink in. Finally she said, “What am I going to do? Just wait for him to kill me? He may be zeroing in on me telepathically right this minute.”
“Be calm, Miss Hiashi,” the far-from-calm worm said. “If you will set your bra transmitter to continuous broadcast we will be able to triangulate a fix on you in a short time and come to pick you up.”
“Pick me up?” she demanded. “Or pick up what’s left of me?” Savagely she unzipped her nylon coveralls, tore off her bra, placed the right cup on a rock and raised a booted heel above it.
“Miss Hiashi,” squeaked the bra, “I warn you; if—” The voice ceased as she brought down her heel, hard, and heard a satisfying crunch as the delicate microscopic device disintegrated. The bra lay there, dead. She felt then a sudden sense of freedom. All the years of a faithful, cooperative wik—canceled out in a moment’s impulsive gesture. Or perhaps she might in time find her way back into the good graces of the authorities. But—she couldn’t afford to let such thoughts cross her mind right now; Percy might be scanning them.
The noise of motors. She glanced up. And felt fear.
Another ionocraft, even more seedy and in disrepair than the first, came clatteringly in over the treetops; it settled to earth, somewhat bumpily, a few yards from her. Its door slid rustily half-open, stuck, shuddered; then at last, with a final surge of effort, moved fully aside to reveal a shabby, little-used interior that dated from years before the war.