The Outposter

  "I promise," he said.

  She looked at him suspiciously. For a long couple of seconds they watched each other without words, and then something began to move between them that did not need words. Abruptly Mark got to his feet, picked up some papers, and put them away in a file drawer so that he turned away from her. When he turned back and sat down again, his face was settled.

  "Now you've made up your mind," she said.

  "I'm always making up my mind," he said lightly.

  "Stop it!" she said. "Don't play words with me. You know what I mean. You've reached that point in your plans where you always thought you'd go and throw your life away to make sure what you started kept going. May­be for some reason you aren't actually going back with those two, but some way or another you're planning on giving yourself up to the crowd back on Earth for execution."

  He sobered.

  "And you're here to save me, is that it?" he said.

  "I can't save you against your will if that's what you mean," she said. "The others think I can, but I know better. All I can do is ask you to save yourself."

  He shook his head.

  "Don't do that," she said. "You act like you hate people, but you really love them—and we all know it. You love them so much you're pre­pared to believe the worst about them and go right on working to make life better for them, even though you expect them to kill you for it. But you're part of people, too. Why can't you love yourself enough to save yourself from the rest of them?"

  He shook his head again, this time with finality.

  "Lions have teeth," he said, "and they can't help using them. That's lion nature. Take a thorn out of the paw of one of them and in spite of the folk tales he's not likely to lick your face." He smiled a little. "The human race always turns on the man who makes it live—and pays its debt by getting rid of him. The war leader gets tossed into the rubbish heap in peacetime; the man of peace is cruci­fied once fighting starts."

  He stopped speaking. He had not meant to say so much, and he was a little startled to hear the words pour out. But, looking across the corner of his desk at her, he saw that even with this he had not convinced her.

  "I'm sorry, Ulla," he said more gently. "But it comes down to this—there's a physics to human events, and one of the natural laws of that physics is that if you do a good deed, you've got to pay for having done it. You don't understand this, Brot doesn't understand it, Wilkes doesn't understand—but that doesn't change anything. The law goes right on work­ing, just the same, and there's nothing I can do about it."

  She got to her feet. Her eyes were hard.

  "I don't believe you!" she said. "All right, maybe there are laws like that. But I don't be­lieve a man who could figure out how to change history can't figure out how to save himself, once the change is made. I just don't believe it! The trouble with you, Mark, is you've made yourself face the possibility peo­ple could turn on you for so long that you've forgotten it's only a possibility, not a cer­tainty. Now you're going to lie down and die when you don't have to, rather than admit you don't have to!"

  She turned and went to the door. With her hand on the latch button, she turned around again.

  "I can't make you change," she said. "But I can do one thing. I can make sure whatever you let them do to you, they do to me, too! Try that on your conscience about people! If you let them destroy you, now, you'll be letting them destroy someone else as well—someone who didn't even do your good deed for them!"

  She went out.

  He sat where he was for a little time with­out moving. Then, slowly, he went back to his paperwork.

  A little over two hours later, his desk com­municator buzzed.

  "Yes?" he said.

  "Flagship crewed and ready for lift-off on twenty-hour cruise as ordered," the voice of Paul answered.

  "Good," said Mark. "I'll be right there."

  He broke connection on that call and made another.

  "Bring those outposter colonels back here," he said into the communicator. "And get us a couple of ground cars. Tell them I'm taking them for a short trip."

  He took the two to board the flagship by a circular route that hid their boarding from the small ship that had carried them from Earth. Five minutes after they were all on board, the flagship lifted off.

  "Where are you taking us?" the older colo­nel asked once they were in orbit.

  "Colonel—" Mark began, and broke off. "I don't know your name."

  "Branuss," said the colonel stiffly. He nodded at his companion. "Colonel Ubi."

  "All right, gentlemen," said Mark. "To answer the question, I'm not going to take you anywhere. I'm going to let your ship take us someplace. Colonel Branuss, will you be good enough to get on the communications, there, and talk to your ship back at Abruzzi Four­teen? Tell them to lift off and join us here, and also, Colonel—"

  Branuss, halfway to the communications equipment, stopped and turned.

  "Remind them that they may be a very good ship, but that this cruiser has the armament to turn them into junk in two minutes—and at any attempt by them to do anything but follow orders, we'll open fire."

  Branuss turned sharply on his heel and went on the communications equipment. Mark heard him relaying both the directions and the warning to the ship on the planet's surface below.

  The ship from Earth had been standing by ready for an emergency lift-off at any minute; but the lift-off they had been ordered to make was not an emergency. It took them nearly an hour to run a routine countdown check and nearly another hour to come alongside the cruiser in orbit.

  "Now," said Mark to Branuss, who was back at the communications equipment and waiting. "They know where the world is that holds the Meda V'Dan city we hit some days ago to start all this. Tell them to navigate both ships there. They navigate and give us the figures. We'll follow. That's so you won't have any doubt you've been to the right place after­ward. And tell them, too, I've arranged to have three other cruisers follow one shift behind. If they try to duck away from us by shifting someplace else while we make an oncourse shift, the following vessels will spot them in their scan cubes and hunt them down."

  "That's not necessary," said Branuss tight­ly. "If I order our ship to go to a particular destination, it'll go there."

  "Good," said Mark. "But those three cruisers will still be following, just in case. We'll be calculating our own navigation on this ship too, just in case they think to navi­gate to somewhere else than the Meda V'Dan world."

  Branuss relayed the orders.

  Five shifts in a direct line from Garnera system to the system containing the Meda V'Dan world brought them to orbit around it. The two colonels watched the view screens tensely as the alien world appeared upon it. For a few seconds they stared at it; then Branuss swung about to face Mark, who was standing a few feet away.

  "No ships," he said.

  His voice was tight, and his face was not exactly pale, but its features were set hard.

  "You didn't think we'd get this far and live, did you?" asked Mark.

  He waited for an answer.

  "No," said Branuss grudgingly.

  "No," said Mark. "And now we have. And now, for the first time, it begins to occur to me that the reaction of the Meda V'Dan to my raid on their city may not have been exactly what the Navy and the Earth government assumed it would be. Isn't that right?"

  Again he waited.

  "Possibly," said Branuss, as if the word were a part of him that had to be amputated before it could be uttered.

  "Possibly," echoed Mark gently. "Shall we go down to the city itself, then?"

  He had to repeat the question before Branuss turned to the communications equip­ment and ordered the smaller ship to lead them down to the location of the alien city.

  Once again, as on the day of the raid by the Abruzzi Fourteen cruisers, there was a cloud cover only a few thousand feet above the city site. The smaller ship from Earth gave the cruiser the coordinates for approach, and to­gether, the two
vessels descended, until they broke through the thick white layer of the cloud-stuff to emerge into the grey day below above the bare plain and the slagged rock that encircled the city site.

  The two ships, having emerged over loca­tion, hung still, and their viewers looked down to show on screens what was beneath. For a long moment in the cruiser there was silence as everyone—not just the two colonels from Earth—looked.

  Then Branuss turned his head sideways to look at Mark, and spoke. "There's nothing there," he said.

  Mark nodded, at him and at the screen which showed five square miles of bare, scarred bedrock littered with metal and other junk, as if some monster picnic had been held and abandoned there.

  "That's right," Mark said. "They're gone. They're gone for good. There isn't a Meda V'Dan within light-years of this world, or Earth—and there never will be again."

  Chapter Seventeen

  When the two ships landed again back at Abruzzi Fourteen, Mark escorted the two colonels over to their own vessel.

  "Here," he said, as they parted at the fore air lock of the smaller ship. He handed Bra­nuss two grey wire spools and a black report tape.

  "These greys," he said, "are copies of our recorded action with the Meda V'Dan follow­ing their attack on the Navy patrol and our raid on their city. The black tape report spool has a message from us to the Earth-City gov­ernment, explaining why we acted the way we did, and why the Meda V'Dan moved out. It also offers an agreement to the Earth-City by which it and we, the Independent Colonies, can both benefit from our new relationship. I'll expect a favourable answer to the general points hi the agreement in ten days. If we haven't got it by that time, we'll assume the re­action of Earth-City government is negative, and go ahead with plans that don't include Earth."

  Branuss took the spools without question. There was about him something of the same air of dazed belief and automatic obedience that had characterized the colonists Mark had seen loading aboard the Wombat on his way to Abruzzi Fourteen, months earlier.

  "They can't answer in ten days," the colonel muttered. "That's impossible,"

  "So was the Meda V'Dan situation out here," said Mark. "Now it's not impossible. Ten days. Good-bye, gentlemen."

  He watched them board, and the small ship seal and lift. Then he went back to the Resi­dence. But he was barely once more immersed in his mass of paperwork when he found himself invaded by Brot, Wilkes, Ulla, and Lily, all together.

  "The Meda V'Dan have gone?" demanded Brot as soon as the group was inside the li­brary door. "And you knew they'd go? Why'n hell didn't you tell the rest of us?"

  Mark leaned back in his chair and wearily rubbed the inside corners of his eyes.

  "I didn't know," he said. "I only guessed they would. I bet on it, in fact. But the bet paid off."

  "If you were guessing that far ahead," said Lily, "why did you need me digging into the Meda V'Dan philosophy and character? I never guessed they could be scared out just by a few ships attacking their city. Particularly a city where they must have had thousands of their own vessels and weapons, and every­thing else. I still can't believe it."

  "They weren't scared out," said Mark.

  "No," said Wilkes thoughtfully, "I see what you mean. They went because that's their be­haviour pattern. But what Lily asks is a good question, and I'd like to ask it, too. You didn't need me, or her, after all? Then why did you just pretend to give us work to do? I thought" —his voice was a little husky—"I really thought I was being useful to you."

  "You were," said Mark. "So was Lily. You ought to know me better than that. I was out to get rid of the aliens. But we had to learn as much about them as possible before we lost them, because we're going to have to know as much as we can when we start trying to deal firsthand with the Unknown Races, further in toward the galaxy's centre. You and Lily, and her assistants, have been putting together what we have to know to make the Inde­pendent Colonies work."

  "So, now we're going to trade with the aliens farther in?" Brot demanded. "You planned that from the start too?"

  "If we got rid of the Meda V'Dan, yes," said Mark. "There's a market on Earth for alien goods, and plainly there's a market among the Unknown Races somewhere for human goods, or it wouldn't have been worth the time of the Meda V'Dan to steal from us, or trade with us for what they couldn't use themselves. We can take those markets over to pay for the things from Earth-City we'll still need, until we get heavy manufacturing and other industry set up out here."

  "All right—" began Brot.

  "Forgive me," said Mark, "but this is some­thing I'd rather not go into now. I'll be bring­ing it all out at the meeting with the other out-posters in just a few days, now. Can you wait until then? I've got"—he waved at the desk— "more than I can do here between then and now as it is, and once I start explaining, it won't be easy to stop. There are certain things that have to be done before that meeting, no matter what else happens."

  He stopped talking. They looked at him. Then Brot grunted and swung his power chair around. Following him silently, everyone but Ulla turned and went out.

  "I'm afraid," said Mark to her, looking at the door that had closed behind the other three, "I've made everybody think I didn't trust them."

  "No," said Ulla. "They'll understand. But give them a little while to get used to the Meda V'Dan being gone. It's a big thing, you know, and no one else expected it the way you did."

  "No," said Mark. "That's true."

  "I'll talk to them," she said, and left him.

  He returned to the unrelenting pressure of the work on the desk before him.

  Four days later, the last of the other Out­post commanders invited to the meeting had been gathered from their various worlds and stations. There were one hundred and forty-three of them, one for each of the active Colo­nies that had been guarded by Navy Base. They met in the auditorium of Abruzzi Four­teen's Section One village.

  Up on the stage at one end, Mark sat in the centre of a long table facing the audience, with Brot and the other station outposters to his right, and Wilkes, Lily, Jarl, Maura Vols, and Age Hammerschold to his left. A voice pickup overhead carried their voices from the stage to the far end of the auditorium, and other pickups out over the heads of the audi­ence waited to air the questions or comments from the floor.

  "Before we invited you here," said Mark without preamble, as soon as Brot had intro­duced him, "you knew our Abruzzi Fourteen ships had smashed a gang of Meda V'Dan ves­sels that cut up a Navy patrol, and that we'd gone on to hit the Meda V'Dan city. I take it there's no one here who thinks our action wasn't justified?"

  There was a mutter quickly rising to a growl of approval from the audience and a burst of hard, brief applause.

  "All right," said Mark, "since then, up until this moment, you've heard that the Navy has abandoned Navy Base and pulled back to Earth, that Abruzzi Fourteen has declared its status as an Independent Colony, and that a few days ago I went to the Meda V'Dan city with a couple of outposter senior officers from Earth who were here to arrest me and we found the Meda V'Dan city was gone."

  Another burst of applause, brief but thunderous.

  "All right," said Mark. "Then you're all pretty well briefed on the situation as it stands right now. Abruzzi Fourteen's gone ahead and declared its independence, and we're going to stick to that. The rest of you can do what you want, of course, but to put it bluntly, what's needed right now is for all of us to go independent together and form a community of colonies that can react as a group—toward Earth or any of the Unknown Races we run across. In fact, I've sent what amounts to an ultimatum to the Earth-City, tailored to the idea that we're all going to be united eventually in independence. You've all been handed copies of that message, and I suppose most of you've had a chance to read it by now. But to save time here, suppose I run over the important points of it."

  He paused and reached for a typescript that was lying on the table in front of him.

  "There are two parts to it," he said. "T
he first is an explanation of what happened, and why the Meda V'Dan left. This explanation isn't just guesswork. It's a series of conclu­sions drawn about the Meda V'Dan character by Abruzzi Fourteen's team of experts, who are here this evening." He nodded to his left. "Mr. Wilkes Danielson, one of the Earth-City's foremost anthropologists, and just beyond him, Miss Lily Betaugh, one of our colonists who was formerly a full professor at the Uni­versity of Belgrade. Mr. Danielson is responsi­ble for the theory about the Meda V'Dan char­acter on which the research of Miss Betaugh and her staff was based."

  He broke off.

  "While I'm at it," he said, "I'd better intro­duce the rest of our colony's experts. Just beyond Miss Betaugh is Jarl Rakkal—you probably recognize the name from banking matters back in the Earth-City—who's set up a highly successful economic system, not only for this colony, but potentially for all our Colonies in association if and when we reach that point. Mr. Rakkal's come up with trade goods that interested the Meda V'Dan for trade with the Unknown Races and should un­doubtedly interest the Unknown Races them­selves. Mrs. Maura Vols, just beyond, has been our lead navigation and positions officer and also head of our school for student navi­gators—a school we plan to expand into all areas of ship handling, under her direction. At the end is Mr. Age Hammerschold, our fac­tory executive."

  He turned to his right.

  "And, of course," he said, "you all know or know of Brot Halliday, whom we've got to thank for organizing the watch on the Navy patrols and for the success of our encounter with the Meda V'Dan in space and at their city—"

  "What the bloody hell?" snarled Brot under his breath. "Why are you trying to put off all the credit onto somebody else? Why?"

  "Thanks to all these people, and not forget­ting the other outposters at Abruzzi Four­teen"—and Mark nodded to his right at Race, Paul, Orval, and an outposter named Soone who had finally filled the vacancy left by Stein—"I was able to put together the half of the message that explains the Meda V'Dan leaving and tells Earth what we want from them, and what we can give them in exchange."