“An extremely compact inertialess tachyon drive system,” Hum Kenn offered.
“Which, of course,” Rob-Allen Mustache tossed in, “could also be used as a weapon—”
“Rendering the suit’s wearer virtually omnipotent!” Spoonbender concluded.
“Except,” Vulnavia Spoonbender—her nose red and her cheeks streaked with tears—flipped her welding visor back, “when it killed the wearer, instead.”
“Quite so.” A. Hamilton Spoonbender sighed. “I suppose, under the circumstances, the boy’s entitled to hear the entire story. Where’s my coffee cup?”
“Right on the bench in front of you!” said everybody except Berdan at the same time.
Even now, the details weren’t clear.
Covered with near-microscopic propulsive tachyon laser cells and generating a field which cancelled its inertia, the Brightsuit, as Spooner had called it, ought to have succeeded, accelerating its wearer to velocities exceeding that of light. The principle was well-established and simple—it was what drove the Tom Edison Maru through the galaxy—although more miniaturized than ever before. It was unfortunate that well-established, simple principles sometimes produce differing results in differing circumstances.
During a routine final test, two of the suits, MacDougall’s and Erissa’s, had been destroyed in a cataclysmic explosion, leaving not one atom clinging to another. Unable, after two years of investigation, to determine what had caused the tragedy, Laporte Paratronics had abandoned further experiments, salvaged the third suit’s ’com gear (the only portion not integral with the new design—Spoonbender claimed they’d been afraid to try further dismantling), and sold the suit for scrap prices, demanding a waiver of liability from the purchaser.
Spoonbender had bought it for exhibit in the museum he maintained—and which Berdan hadn’t yet seen—next door to his workshop. The boy also suspected the man harbored dreams of trying to solve the technical riddle it presented—or had, before the inexplicable theft of the otherwise worthless artifact.
“Somehow,” Berdan told Spoonbender when the story—what there had been of it—was finished, I’m going to recover that suit, for personal reasons. That’s why I’m here.”
Berdan felt bad, not telling his new friends about his grandfather but thought it just as well. He was beginning to believe the old man must have been desperate to make some kind of mark in a universe where he felt he was regarded with contempt, and, whatever else he might think about it, it was private family business. Let them think his reasons had only to do with his mother and father.
“The trouble is, Mr. Spoonbender, I’ve never done anything like this before. To tell the truth…” He thought, with that same old sinking feeling, about the failed desserts at Mr. Meep’s. “I’ve never managed to do much of anything at all, and I don’t know how to start.”
“Upon the incomparably beautiful planet of Sodde Lydfe where I was born and reared,” Ommot suggested, a ripple passing through her fur, “a backwater podunk of the quintessential order and a terrific place to be from, we’ve a saying: ‘Grot yt siidaikmo ad yt hai’s, dit yt nydviimon, niivdoef eth nrais.’”
“Which means?”
A suspicious expression dragged Spoonbender’s bushy eyebrows into near-collision.
“Roughly translated,” Mustache replied, “‘If at first you don’t succeed, cut your throat and watch it bleed.’”
“But Berdan hasn’t even begun yet!” one of the Spoonbender scions protested.
“Maybe,” said the other one, “Ommot means ‘Give up now and avoid the last-minute rush.’”
Ommot’s fur drooped. “It was merely an attempt at raffish, Earthian humor, intended to raise his spirits and stiffen his moral fiber. Something must have been lost in the translation.”
“Well, by Lysander Spooner’s long and snowy beard,” Spoonbender swore to Berdan, “I’d certainly pay you a modest quittance to get the Brightsuit back. How might that affect your spirits and your moral fiber? Nothing lavish, I’d give you to understand, but something equitable. And generally one initiates such an undertaking—only a figure of speech, of course—by assessing one’s capital assets. Briefly, and in the vernacular, you got any bread, son?”
With reluctant fingers, Berdan opened his father’s briefcase and handed Spoonbender the plasma gun.
“I have this.”
“Well I’ll be a monk—” Spoonbender stopped, glanced up at Rob-Allen Mustache, and cleared his throat. “Er, a dirty bird. A genuine Model 247 B&G! A veritable captain’s sidearm! I’d have this removed, though.”
He pointed at the butt of the pistol to a lanyard swivel, clinking and rattling as he turned the weapon over in his hands.
“Much too noisy when stealth might be better advised.”
“I need…” Berdan hesitated, embarrassed. “I mean, I thought maybe you might want to buy it from me for your museum or at least lend me money against it.”
Spoonbender laid the fusion-powered pistol back in the briefcase and examined the boy over the tops of his spectacles, said nothing, but instead picked up the heavy gun belt and subjected it to scrutiny, letting the leather run through his hands. At one point he stopped, with a brief grunt of surprise.
At long last, he spoke. “Son, I know I’m going to hate myself for this in the morning, but what you really need is a recharge and some gun-handling and shooting lessons. You’ve no need at all to sell this fabulous weapon or to borrow money from anyone.”
Berdan moved closer. “How’s that?”
“Observe…” Spoonbender ran a thumbnail along the top of the belt, where it parted and the lining peeled back of its own accord. Between the layers, a long row of large coins had been concealed, each over a quarter of an inch thick, at least an inch and a half in diameter, bearing the portrait of the heavy-bearded historic president every Confederate recognized, and made of solid gold.
“…twenty-four, twenty-five, twenty-six, twenty-seven! Two-ounce gold superlysanders, minted by Gary’s Bait & Trust late in the last century. Relatively rare and hardly the most convenient of denominations, but, my boy, you’re a wealthy man!”
Berdan’s mind reeled. Just thirty seconds before, he’d been destitute and desperate. Now, he realized two things. First, he owed a great deal to the honesty of this peculiar individual, who might have bought his father’s pistol for a song and never told him about the gold. Second, MacDougall Bear hadn’t been altogether trusting of Dalmeon Geanar and had supplemented the financial arrangements he and Erissa had made through the old man for their son’s future.
Reaching out, Berdan plucked three coins—as close to ten percent as he could get—from the pliable lining which, over the years, had molded itself to the metal disks.
“Mr. Spoonbender, you’ve given me valuable information, and I believe I owe you—”
Spoonbender assumed a melodramatic posture and let his eyes flash with theatrical anger. “Sirrah, you impugn my motives, insult my integrity, dishonor my ancestors, and…”
“Sully your escutcheon?” Rob-Allen Mustache suggested.
Spoonbender glared at the chimpanzee. “I was getting to that.”
His expression softened as he turned back to Berdan. “Besides, kid, you need the money, and your daddy intended you to have it. Many heartfelt thanks for the kind thought, but virtue is its own punishment.”
Berdan blinked. “Don’t you mean, ‘virtue is its own reward’?”
Spoonbender gazed down at the gleaming coins and sighed. “Believe me, son, I know exactly what I’m saying.”
Chapter VI: Hot Pursuit
Not quite two hours had passed since Dalmeon Geanar had departed the small apartment he shared with his grandson in the wake of a large, mysterious crate.
To Berdan, left on his own for the first time in his life, it seemed like an eternity.
He’d spent some uncounted amount of time trying to decide whether his suspicions about his grandfather—that the old man had stolen the fabulous Brigh
tsuit—were justified, more time figuring out what to do about it, and almost an hour in the congenial bedlam of Spoonbender’s Museum and Friendly Finance Company.
Now, having succeeded where Diogenes had failed, and having obtained some useful advice from the honest man he’d found, Berdan was on his own again. Making his way toward the Broach depot on the lowest level of the ship, he wished he felt up to wearing the broad, heavy gun belt which, instead, he still carried in the briefcase where his father had left it for him over a decade ago. The trouble was—and it seemed to Berdan this typified everything he was going through at the moment—he knew nothing about operating the Borchert & Graham plasma pistol it had been built for (he couldn’t even tell if the thing was loaded, let alone shoot it), and didn’t have any time to learn.
In the same sense, trying as he was to catch up with his grandfather, trying to discover the truth about the old man’s activities and about the experimental smartsuit he appeared to have stolen, Berdan didn’t have the faintest idea how to accomplish those things either and, again, didn’t have time to learn.
Nevertheless, if he didn’t do something, it would soon be too late—if it wasn’t already. For once in his otherwise cautious life, it appeared to him the proper course consisted of leaping before he looked. He might fall on his face or into a hole, but nothing was going to get accomplished any other way.
Berdan’s hesitant footsteps—and a complicated series of trips through the Tom Edison Maru’s transport system—brought him at last to the lowest level in the ship. As usual—although Berdan had no way of recognizing it—he was preoccupied and therefore unconscious of the wonderful sights surrounding him.
The size of a small city, over seven and a half miles from rim to rim, the full diameter of the starship, this level accommodated far more than just a few hundred Thorens Broach terminals, those wondrous devices capable of transmitting passengers and cargo across space-time in an instant. Overhead, a huge transparent bubble permitted an amazing view—from the sandy bottom of Tom Edison Maru’s second level indoor ocean. Drawn to the warm light coming from below—or perhaps to the many fish attracted by the light (or the opulent plant growth it engendered)—a giant squid rolled over and across the curved outer surface of the bubble, reaching out an occasional long and lazy tentacle to snag a swimming snack and stuff it into his parrot-beaked mouth.
Berdan walked by beneath this incredible spectacle and never even knew it existed.
Here in Tom Edison Maru’s basement, many other things were going on as well. This was where the ship’s auxiliary craft—shuttles such as Geanar had been hurrying to get aboard—were based. Miniatures of the giant dome-shaped interstellar craft herself, they nestled into her flattened underside, blending into her outline and contributing the output of their tachyon lasers to her own.
All along Berdan’s path airlocks holo-decorated with advertising urged him to hire the services of this or that shuttlecraft. He walked right by without noticing a thing.
Away from the mother ship, the shuttles left behind great inverted bowl-shaped empty docking bays in her underside. The largest of these auxiliary craft, seven of them in all, carried seven smaller craft in the same manner. Each of these tertiary vessels housed seven even smaller vessels, and so on, from the giant starship down to scouting machines which carried a single passenger.
It never occurred to Berdan, who’d grown up in the Confederacy, to wonder why a civilization with something like the Thorens Broach needed starships and auxiliaries. While a Broach could reach out from its anchor point in time and space to place people and cargo anywhere within a range of several light years, it was difficult, dangerous, and expensive to do so without a second, receiving station at the destination end. Most of the smaller spaceships were equipped, as their primary function, to carry and install such a receiving station.
Others did preliminary exploration.
The driving machinery—no more than a turn of phrase, since it contained not a single moving part—of the Tom Edison Maru herself was to be found on this lowest level, along with everything required to maintain her environment and accomplish her mission: circulation pumps, filtration plants, chemical refineries, and fusion reactors. In this sense, the ship was rather like any of the vast industrial cities of Earth or her better developed colonies.
This was the one portion of Tom Edison Maru where one was always aware—unless one was a fifteen-year-old boy on a desperate mission of his own—he was aboard a starship, itself a giant machine, pulsing and throbbing with more pent-up energy than humanity had expended during the first ten thousand years of its Earthbound history.
Berdan, however, and even his less-preoccupied fellow travelers, were given small opportunity to see any of this. Stepping out of the final transport patch his implant had directed him to, he faced what, to an inhabitant of an earlier age, would have seemed like a huge hotel lobby or airport terminal, surrounded at its perimeter by an endless bank of small, glass-sided booths.
Here and there, people were entering these booths and disappearing. At the opposite end of the terminal, heavy-wheeled containerized loads were being guided into double- and quadruple-sized booths. Elsewhere, a smaller number of individuals were appearing inside certain booths, to all appearances from nowhere, and coming out into the terminal area, most of them with a look of relief on their faces.
Berdan noticed this much and shuddered, wondering what it must be like down there on the planet Majesty, which Tom Edison Maru was orbiting.
Along the center of the enormous room, a series of several circular information desks was manned—or, rather, beinged—by living entities of several species, ready to answer questions and solve problems for the Broach company’s customers. It was an old-fashioned touch, but, like Mr. Meep’s insistence on live waiters, one which lent a friendly, personal feeling. It may also have been necessary to encourage nervous first-time Broach passengers.
Berdan, considering himself one of these, was glad to have someone to consult about it. None of them seemed busy at the moment, and he had his choice.
He walked up to the nearest desk.
“May I help you?” The receptionist was a pretty human girl not much older than Berdan himself.
“I hope so. I want to go planetside, or whatever you say, to Majesty. How do I do it?”
“Do you have any particular destination in mind? And please don’t just repeat ‘planetside’ or ‘Majesty’—that’s a whole world down there, you know.”
“Well,” he told her, “it’s like this: my grandfather took one of the shuttles, but…” Berdan hesitated, uncomfortable and aware he was treading on someone’s rights to personal privacy.
Again.
The girl, accustomed to some hesitation on the part of certain of her clientele, was patient with Berdan, although she might not have been if she’d known the reason. “Yes?”
“Er, I thought I’d surprise him, that is if I could find out where he went.”
The girl looked at Berdan in an odd way, but without, he hoped, too much suspicion. “Your grandfather, you say.”
“Yes, ma’am. Dalmeon Geanar, Lindsay Arms Apartments, Number Two-C, Five Eighty-seven Claypool Street, Sector Twenty-nine, Fourth Level. My name’s Berdan Geanar.
“I’m his grandson.”
He realized, just as the last three words came out of his mouth, how stupid and redundant they must have sounded. The girl smiled an apology, although it wasn’t her fault, Berdan thought, he couldn’t think of anything intelligent to say to her. Girls always had that effect on him, even in the best of circumstances. He’d long ago decided he incurred less risk keeping his mouth shut, although this policy wasn’t going to be of much help here and now.
“Well, if you want to surprise him, I guess there isn’t much point in calling ahead, is there?”
“No,” Berdan agreed. “Can I find out who went down in what shuttles earlier—about two hours ago?”
The girl shook her head. “To tell the absolute
truth, the shuttle traffic wasn’t very heavy this morning. This is just a stopover, if you know what I mean, a milk run, not a popular or important destination. Just see how few Broaches are being used this afternoon.”
In fact, Berdan had noticed he had the whole huge place almost to himself.
“However,” the girl continued, “I’m sorry I must inform you none of the shuttle service companies operating aboard Tom Edison Maru keep passenger lists. It’s a matter of personal privacy, you see. Nobody’d do business with them if they did.”
A disappointed expression must have appeared on Berdan’s face despite himself, for she hurried on.
“There are only two arrival points on Majesty of any significance, anyway: Geislinger, the settlement at the north pole, and Talisman at the south pole.”
Visions of winter hurricanes and glaciers two miles deep swept through Berdan’s mind.
“I see. Well…”
“It isn’t quite as bad as that.”
It was as if the girl could read Berdan’s thoughts. She reached down, lifted a heavy, streamlined pistol-shape which had been lying on the counter in front of her, and pointed it at him. Too polite—and far too tongue-tied—to refuse, he let her place the cold, dime-sized muzzle against his forehead.
A flash! filled his mind. He relaxed, letting his implant absorb the data, words and pictures the brochure projector contained, and which he’d “read” later when he had the chance.
“Just wait until you get down there,” the girl told him. “You’ll see. The whole planet’s covered by some kind of jungle. The only cleared areas are the poles, and it says here they’re almost temperate by human standards. The larger of the two Confederate settlements is Talisman, and it’s likeliest your grandfather—”
Berdan’s eyes lit with sudden inspiration. “If you don’t mind my asking, which of the two is more unsavory—you know, pirates, portside dives, suspicious characters, disreputable bars, and so forth.”
Once again, Berdan was depending on all the adventure stories he’d ever seen—and in all probability, he realized, embarrassing himself. The girl peered at Berdan, an odd look of speculation dancing in her eyes (which, he noticed, were a deep, beautiful blue), but she didn’t say anything about what she was thinking.