Jase stirred in the darkness.
For a moment he was afraid he had broken a limb in his fall into this narrow space. But all his arms and legs responded. It was as he had thought-he was only bruised. Gratitude welled in him for the fact that he was only two seasons adult. An older man, with brittle bones… it did not bear thinking about.
He was not wedged in here so tightly as to be trapped, he found. He wriggled his way forward between the two surfaces until some other object blocked his way. He climbed up over this—another section of ductwork, it seemed—and emerged a second later into the open area.
It was empty, clear of natives as if it was actually the deserted building it pretended to be.
The local sun was well up in the center of the sky as he slipped out of the building. No one was in sight At a half-speed, limping run, he dodged along in the shade of a flanking building. Two minutes later he was safely through the gate and into the shelter of the trees paralleling the dirt road on each side—headed back toward his small, one-man ship.
The native fisherman was no longer beside the creek. No one at all seemed to be in sight in the warming day, with the sun now approaching the zenith overhead. He made it back to his ship, and only when he was safely inside its camouflaged entrance did he allow himself the luxury of a feeling of safety.
For—at that, he thought—he was not yet completely safe. He simply had a ship in which to make a run for it now, in case he was discovered. He throttled the feeling of safety down. It might lead to carelessness, and it would be nightfall before he could risk taking off. And that meant it must be nightfall before he took the final step in the securing of his Kingdom.
He got rid of the loathsome mufflings he had had to wear and tended the sore parts of his body. They were annoying, but a week or so would see them healed and forgotten. The button containing the recorder was intact on his jacket. The record of everything he had done would be available within it. No more would be needed back on the Homeworld, except Kator’s own unique and valuable knowledge of how the Muffled People reacted. Now—if night would quickly fall…
He waited, schooling himself to patience and dreaming of the faces of the sons he would have. He would name the first one Aton, after Aton Maternaluncle, the second Horaag, and the third Bela. As soon as they were out of the pouch long enough to comprehend the concept of Honor, he would tell each of them, personally, of the man from whom the name they bore was derived. And of the part those three honorable men had played in the Founding of their father’s Kingdom on the planet of the Muffled People.
He himself, the Kator, would live out his days and die here. But perhaps the second or third generation of his descendants would return, as was their right under his first son or grandson, to found a palace of the Katori on Homeworld. And, in time, from that palace of the Katori, would come one—perhaps several—more, to Found new Kingdoms of their own.
He would not know this. Long dust, his bones buried on this world of the Muffled People would never know. But his genes in the bodies of his descendants would know and Honor their name and call themselves truly of the Ruml. The Ruml, honorable as a race, ever growing, ever evolving toward that far and unimaginable future when man had burnt away all dross from his character and no longer knew anything but Honor.
…At last, the yellow sun, reddening and darkening, began to touch the horizon in the screen attached to the light collector outside the ship. Shadows flooded across fences and growing grain and under the clumps of trees. He sat down at the communications board of his small ship and keyed in voice communication,, through an untappable channel via the collapsed universe, with the Expedition ship on the moon.
The speaker crackled at him.
“Keysman?”
He said nothing.
“Keysman? This is the Captain. Your channel is sending. Can you hear us?”
He held his silence, the skin of his face stiffened slightly with emotion.
“Keysman!”
He leaned forward at last to the voice collector of the transmitter before him. He whispered into it.
“No use…” His whisper broke and became a voice, strangled and husky. “Natives… surrounding me, here. Captain…”
He paused. There was a waiting silence from the other end, then the Captain’s voice spoke again.
“Keysman! Hold on! We’ll get a ship down to take you out—“
“No time…” he husked. “No way out. Destroying self and ship. May you have water, have shade, have...”
He reached out to his controls and sent the little ship leaping skyward into the deepening dark. As it rose, he fired a cylindrical object back into the ground where it had lain.
Seconds later, the tiny, brief, but incredibly violent glare of rainbow colors that was the explosion of a collapsed-universe drive field lit up the peace of the county evening.
But Jase at the controls of the small ship was drilling upwards through the darkness. He headed back toward the moon, but he did not hurry. He went on conventional drive until he reached the practical limits of the atmosphere; and only then did he use the unharmed collapsed field drive aboard the ship to return to the far side of the moon, in three timeless jumps.
He had taken four hours, local time, by the hour he returned to the buried ship of the Expedition, There was no response as he approached the surface above the hidden ship and its connected network of rooms excavated out of the rock beneath the dust. He opened the passage by which he had left the ship in his smaller vessel, and re-entered. The ship had been emptied of atmosphere, and he was forced to refill it before he went on.
There was no one in the corridors or in the outer rooms of the ship. But when he got to the gym, they were all there, as he had expected, lying still in their ranks, with the officers and the Captain a little apart. With no hope of returning to Homeworld, with the ship locked and the Keysman lacking, they had ended their lives in honorable fashion and lain down to secure the ship for those who would come after.
He looked at them with affection flooding through him and went to examine the ship’s recorder log. He set it back to the moment of his call from the planet below and then played it forward. The Captain had recorded a full account of the conversation with him and the situation underlying the decision that was to follow. He had closed with the final word that completed Jase’s unfinished blessing the moment before the small ship had apparently been destroyed on the planet below.
Jase read into the recorder a brief account of his escape and return, after all, from the forces of the Muffled People that had apparently had him trapped and then returned to the gym.
The ship of the Expedition had ample storage space in the cargo area. He carried the dead bodies down there, one by one, arranged them, and set the space on airlessness and subfreezing temperatures. The bodies would be returned to their Families on Homeworld. It was not a necessary but an honorable thing to do on his part. Then he returned to the Controls room, unlocked the Controls, and set to work.
There was no great difference between any of the ships utilizing the collapsed universe field as a drive. He could handle this larger vessel alone as well as the small ship he had taken down to the planet of the Muffled People. He set a course for the Homeworld. It was a simple matter, now that the position of the star of this world of the Muffled People was identified, and the distance and direction from it to Homeworld possible for the ship’s computers to calculate. In contrast to the time they had taken coming, he should be able to return to Homeworld in three jumps through timelessness. No more than two days of Homeworld time—or a day and a half, measured by the turning of the Muffled People’s world on its axis.
He broke the ship free of its hiding place under the moon’s surface and took it well out from any solid solar bodies, before turning the programming of the first jump over to the computers. Then he went back to his own quarters.
There things were as they had been before he had gone down to the planet of the Muffled People. He opened a serv
ice compartment to take out food, and he lifted out also one of the alcohol-producing bacterial cultures. But when he had taken this last item back with the food to the table that held his papers, he found that he did not want to swallow the culture.
This was a moment that had its own intoxication—an intoxication that made small and petty the chemical drunkenness to be obtained from the culture. He threw the culture into a disposal slot in the desk. Doing so, he suddenly remembered something.
From a pouch in his harness that he had worn under the now discarded mufflings he took tine cube containing the dirtworm. He had not remembered to return it to the soil of its birth, after all. Well, there would be another time…
He held it in its transparent cube up to the light above the table with the papers. In that light the worm seemed almost alive. It seemed to turn and bow to him, acknowledging his Kingship over it and the world from which it came.
He laid the cube down on the table and walked across to put the button containing his recording device in a resolving machine that would project its stored information of sound and pictures in life-size dimensions on a cube of the atmosphere of the room. He touched the resolving machine’s controls. The lights of the room dimmed, and the morning he had seen as he emerged from his one-man ship came to life in the empty space in the room’s middle. He retraced his steps to the platform before his table and settled down on it, curling up with a sigh of satisfaction.
He watched the story of the day’s events, through the conversation with the native by the stream, the trip along the conveyor belt, the descent and return from the underground area. At the moment when he slipped and fell among the machinery, the picture suddenly blanked out and the sound ceased.
Evidently, he thought, the fall had broken the recording device, at that point. It would be blank from then on. It was too bad that had happened, but, after all, the important information had been safely recorded.
He was about to rise and turn off the recorder—when the cube of room atmosphere lighted up again. Facing him was the figure of the native he had seen by the stream, but with the walls of a room behind him instead of the outdoor scene.
The native took the container of burning vegetation from his mouth.
“Greetings. I trust I am among friends,” he said in Ruml as perfect as the native mouth and lips could pronounce. “Greetings to Kator Secondcousin Brutogas and to all those honorable Heads of Families who will be viewing this back on Homeworld—"
Kator sprang from his platform.
Chapter Twenty-One
Jase staggered a little, blundering against a high fence of black wrought-iron rods. The sudden pain in his bruised shoulder revived him a little. He made another automatic attempt to adjust his already turned-up raincoat collar against the steady draining of rain from the dreary skies above the capital city. He had been back in Washington, keeping steadily on the move, for over twenty hours now. As long as he kept moving and stayed away from his apartment or any place where he could be recognized, he thought he had a good chance of going uncaptured until the critical moment. He had made it this far-he calculated he had perhaps six more hours to kill.
Yielding for a moment to the seductive weariness of his legs, he paused now for a second, leaning against the hard vertical rods of wrought iron, and took the folded sheet of newspaper from his raincoat pocket. It was folded to show three columns of the front page, his own picture, and a portion of the headline SOUGHT BY F.B.I.
Below this a picture of him in shirt and slacks taken, luckily, a good three years before, looked out at him. With the automatic reflex of dull-mindedness, he found himself reading for the last of an unknown number of times, the opening words of the article.
By Will Uhlmann: Still being sought today was
Dr. Jason Barchar, wanted for questioning by the
F.B.I. in connection with the alleged betrayal of
government secrets to an unidentified foreign
power.
Jase wrenched his eyes away from the damp lines of type. What was written was not important. His picture was. Luckily, he had lost weight in the last few weeks, and over thirty-six hours of beard stubble hid his jaws. Now, if he could just remember not to stand, move, or act in his accustomed manner. It was by habit, carriage, and actions that most people betrayed their disguises—he had read once, somewhere so long ago that he could no longer remember where it was. At some time in that remote past before he had ever heard of a race of beings called the Rural.
“That’s not you,” he told himself, staring at the newspaper picture. “You don’t look like that, you don’t smile like that, you don’t feel like that. You’re twenty years older than that, stoopshouldered, a bum… somebody unimportant…”
He shoved the newspaper back into his pocket. Time to get moving again before he went to sleep leaning up against this iron fence. Wearily he pushed himself away from its. support, grimly he started his enormously heavy and aching legs to moving again. “It’s not true,” he thought, “that people can’t go to sleep on their feet.” He had done it himself in army training school, when they sprang a night hike of thirty miles on top of a day hike of thirty-two. Stumping along in the moonlight, he had watched the white pack of the man ahead of him, bobbing, bobbing, bobbing… Suddenly he would find himself stumbling, almost falling into the moonlit ditch beside the road and realize he had wandered out of line. He would pull himself back into line, look at other things for a while, and then the pack would start to catch his eyes again, bobbing and bobbing… And the whole process would start over again.
“So I mustn’t fall asleep walking here,” he thought. “If I fall asleep walking here, I may walk into the path of a truck. Or get into trouble some other way and attract attention.” His hand went to the pocket that contained the dexedrine, along with the other capsules with which he had filled the bottle when he had been planning for this time. But the dexedrine seemed to have had no effect on him the last two times he had taken it. Its only effect seemed to be to nauseate him, weakly.
The rain fell steadily from skies so dark that the streetlights had been turned on at midday. Thunder muttered in the distance from time to time. The lights in the office buildings of the city were on. The traffic signal lights glared through the mist of the rain when he came to corners.
His throat felt like dry sandpaper, his eyes were heavy and dry, and his face burned under the hat brim and inside the turned-up raincoat collar. This final exertion on top of the exhaustion of the past weeks had pushed him over the edge. He was sick, with something involving a high fever. At first he had been grateful for the fever, feeling that it woke him up and gave him additional alertness. But now he had swung full circle and hated it—it was draining his strength.
His feet tripped against each other, and he almost went down. A woman passing in the opposite direction looked at him with a passing glance that gave him a moment’s glimpse of tight lips and narrowed eyes, as she circled out a little bit to pass him at more than arm’s length.
‘It’s no good,” he thought suddenly. "I'm not going to be able to make it, out on the street, trying to keep moving this way.”
“Got to hole up somewhere,” he thought.
He shook his head to clear it and looked around, to find out where he was. For a moment he did not recognize the street—and then he did. A stab of alarm brought him all the way awake. He had wandered back once more into familiar territories—this time again he was only a few blocks away from the Foundation building.
His mind working momentarily sharply with the impetus of the feeling of alarm, for the first time since dawn he considered the possibility of the Foundation building. His original plan had been to return there, sneak in and hide in the stacks. He had put the plan aside because of the danger that, once he was suspected to be there, he would be easily trapped without a quick and easy exit. While, continually walking like this, he had freedom to change his plans quickly.
Now, with a mind that no longer worked quic
kly and physical collapse threatening to betray him into the hands of the local police—or, probably Just as bad, some good Samaritan who would call the police—the Foundation building was safer than trying to stay on his feet outside like this.
He headed for the building.
It was about three blocks away. As he got closer to it, it began to loom in his mind with all the promise of comfort in a warm fireside to a man stumbling and freezing through a night of blizzard. Visions of the bed in the basement room he had occupied until the day before yesterday swam before him, like a pit of yawning, merciful oblivion into which his uncertain feet could stumble him. He fought off the seductiveness of the thought of sleep in bed.
Now, one hand brushing against the damp brick of the blank side of the Foundation Building to steady himself, he was coming up to the entrance of the alley that ran along behind it. He turned into the alley. About thirty feet in was the back entrance to the building—the entrance to the hallway opening on the kitchen of the old cafeteria and to the steps down to the basement. There would be people working in the kitchen this midday. With luck he might get past them. He had had a half-thought-out scheme…
He came to the blank, metal-faced door set in the back wall of the building. In the dim light it was just possible to see the scratches and scribblings on its outer, sheet-metal surface. He paused, leaning against the closed door, which opened inward, and thought out carefully what he planned to do, so that it would be all clear in his swimming head.
He filled his lungs so that his voice would not sound cracked and exhausted. He swallowed a couple of times to moisten his throat. Thunder muttered off in the distance, and the rain streamed down. Straightening up, he beat on the metal surface of the door with his fist as he swung it open.
“Meter reader!” he shouted and went on into the hallway without stopping, letting the door bang shut behind him.