Masters of Everon

She paused to look at him narrowly.

  "Of course," she said, "that takes guts—more guts than the late buyers have. But is it any wonder that we've got some people here who don't give a damn for anyone but themselves and their own profit, and are willing to tear everything apart for everyone else just to make their property here as rich as they can, before comes time for them to sell out?"

  "No," said Jef. She was right, of course.

  "Certainly," said Martin, "that's it, in principle. But it's not by principle that situations like this have to be dealt with. It's by the effects of that principle—and those are none so simple." Jef turned on him.

  "You're still claiming to be a John Smith, are you?"

  "That's what I am." Martin met his gaze dead-on.

  "The Constable doesn't seem to think so. Beau seems to have an entirely different picture of you. And what they both think matches with that other set of identification papers I saw."

  "In my luggage, that is, with never an apology or a feeling that you had no right to look," said Martin. Jef felt uncomfortable.

  "You've got to admit you don't look or act like a John Smith."

  "So you said once before," said Martin softly. "But what you mean is, I don't look or act as you imagined a John Smith. And both Jarji and I have just been pointing out how little your picture of things has to do with the facts."

  "If you're one of the E. Corps top representatives, why don't you do something about what's going on, instead of hobnobbing with Armage and tangling yourself up with Beau, pretending in both cases to be something you're not?"

  "Because," Martin said, "as I continue to tell you, matters are not that simple. Not just matters here on Everon. Matters on Earth. Matters wherever our race of humans are to be found."

  "You've got the authority and the power—"

  "That's just what I don't have," said Martin, "in fact."

  Jef stared at him.

  "Oh, to be sure, the powers are there for me and those like me, in theory. But have you any idea what would actually happen if I was injudicious enough to actually recommend quarantine for a world like this, with billions of credits tied up in it—back on Earth as well as here? In theory I've the power to right any wrong. But in fact I have to sail by the available winds in all I do. Did you think we were heroes, as the advertising legends say, we John Smiths? Just the opposite. We're trained villains, indeed we are, and measure our success by the depths of our villainies, performed in what we believe—but can never be sure—are good causes."

  The emotion that had brought Jef up out of the sleeping bag to his feet, had begun to drain out of him. His knees felt weak enough to begin trembling.

  "I've got to sit down," he said. He looked around. "Why don't we sit down by the fire?"

  He led the way over to the fire and dropped down cross-legged next to it. It was good to be sitting, and the heat of the fire felt good to a body that had grown used to the cocoon of warmth provided by the sleeping bag.

  Martin and Jarji joined him. He felt his left shoulder bumped from behind and discovered that Mikey had moved up and was now lying crosswise, right behind him. He leaned back against the backrest of the massively muscled side.

  "I'm sorry," Jef said, looking across at Martin. "But I can't believe in your being what you say you are."

  "You've a good deal of company" was all Martin offered by way of explanation.

  But now Jarji was on the other side.

  "That's right," she said to Jef. "You don't know anything about it, but that's all right. Just go ahead and make up your mind anyway."

  "I'm willing to listen to him," said Jef doggedly. "He just hasn't told me anything."

  "Have you asked him to?"

  "Look," said Jef, "I may not be as fast with my tongue as either of you two—"

  "Have you ever asked him?"

  "All right," said Jef. He turned to Martin. "Tell me why you really are a John Smith." Martin raised his eyebrows. "I take it that's a question?"

  "Of course," said Jef.

  "In that spirit, then," said Martin, picking up a half-burned branch and using it to poke the fire, "I'll answer. I'm a John Smith because I'm doing a John Smith's job—in the only way that's available to me, or anyone, to do that job."

  "Why can't you do it the way you're supposed to? Who's stopping you?"

  "The human race is stopping me," said Martin. "You heard Jarji tell you about the human truths behind the people who plant a new world. Multiply that by the human truths behind all those on all the inhabited worlds—particularly behind those on the world called Earth—and you might begin to see for yourself why I can't do my job as you and the fictioneers of the popular press would see me doing it."

  "All right," said Jef. "I can see you having troubles. I can't see you not being able at all to use your legal powers."

  Martin signed a little, looking at the fire.

  "You grew up on Earth," he said. "What's it like there? I know, it's not easy to stand back and look at something when you're down inside it. But you've had a little time on Everon, now, and you claim to have been much enlarged by it. Tell me what you think of Earth from where you stand at the moment."

  "Well," said Jef, "it's crowded, of course—particularly compared to a completely open, new world like this. It'd be bound to be."

  He stopped. Neither Martin nor Jarji said anything.

  "Of course," Jef said, "it's crowded. If you like, it's overcrowded —by definition. There're too many people, and not enough room. So there're too many restrictions. So competition is unbelievable; and there's very little left of what the wild Earth was to begin with—compared to a world like this one where everything's still natural. We live on concrete, and inside walls, back there. We have to. We breathe artificially cleaned air, because there's no breathable air that hasn't been artificially cleaned. The weather's got to be controlled to make sure the crops produce. People have to fit patterns, or there'd be chaos."

  He found himself talking with a sense of relief that he had not believed was in him. He was saying things he had never said before, and it struck him suddenly that they were things he had wanted to say for many years.

  "The people—" he said. "Maybe it's not their fault, but because of the way it is, if there's rough competition here, it's twice as rough there—only where it's in hot blood here, it's in cold, there. You step on other people back on Earth, because you know the machinery will chew up whoever's underneath, and that'll be you if you don't. Nobody talks about neighborliness back there— and means anything by it. There's no room for neighborliness, even if you wanted to practice it."

  He looked at Jarji.

  "You remember saying to me here we call it neighborliness—' or something like that, when I asked you why you were going along with me to Beau's camp? You know, I didn't really understand what you meant by the word! I've never known any neighborliness. I've never known any real kindness between strangers. To tell you the truth, now that I stop to think of it, I've never known any real kindness between individuals anywhere, except inside my own family. It's not that people were deliberately unkind, it's just that nobody had anything left over, after the struggle to stay alive and make a living."

  He stopped, to listen to the echo of his own words in his head.

  "No, you're right," he said. "It's not very happy, back on Earth. Oh, maybe it's all right for the people who are on top of the heap —the political heads, the people in power wherever power is. No, I take that back. Not even for those people; because even when they're at the top, they bargain and trade off with other people in power for what they want; and in the end they're caught up in the machinery like everyone else. Yes, by God!"

  He turned sharply to Martin.

  "It's the machinery—all the social and governmental machinery —that's the real villain back there!" Martin nodded.

  "It is, indeed," he said. "I don't know what the figure is now, but less than half a dozen years ago, over thirty percent of the job-holding population w
as working for one organ of government or another. Some twenty-odd percent were involved in the private power structure—in banking, the big cooperatives and corporations, twenty percent were in private occupation or illegals. It's a worldwide community of organizations and bureaucracies, our Earth, nowadays; and such have no human feelings or responses, for all they've got human parts to their mechanisms."

  He poked at the fire. Jef waited for him to say more, but he did not. Jef opened his mouth to speak, but found himself without anything certain to say. He was still shocked at the emotional reaction in him that Martin's earlier question had evoked.

  "What other way could it be?" he said at last.

  "I don't know," said Martin. He threw the stick into the fire.

  "But some other way has to be found, or there's no justification for the human race to exist. Are we to be nothing more than a devouring plague upon the universe? All we can hope is that another way does turn up—maybe on one of the new worlds. And there's the hope."

  "The hope?" Jef echoed.

  "Of course." Martin looked up from the fire at him. "I can't do the job I was trained and sent out to do. The E. Corps is a bureaucracy—in your words, it has to be—just one of the organizations. When you get right down to it, E. Corps doesn't really care what happens to Everon or any other world. All it cares about is that it, itself, goes on forever, getting more and more powerful, adding more and more staff, controlling more and more wealth and resources. Aside from that it has no desires—and no morals. Nor have the people in power within its mechanism—or else they'd not stay in power long. Others who agreed better with the soullessness of the organization would displace them, being an easier fit for their positions."

  He paused. Jef could still think of nothing to say.

  "So I can't crack down officially on illegal practices on Everon," said Martin. "I can't, because if you trace those illegal practices home to where they start, you find them rooted in the very organizations and the people in power in those organizations that sent me out here. My superiors aren't going to let me cut off their nose to spite their face—oh, not that they'd break the law themselves. But there's no end of ways of frustrating me within the regulations."

  "Then—you might as well not be here," Jef said.

  "Not at all, not at all!" said Martin with a thin grin. "I can still do anything I can get away with—illegally. And so I do. Under the cover of being what I am not, I work for what I believe in, in ways that my cover specifically rejects and condemns."

  Jef shook his head.

  "And what do you believe in?" he asked at last.

  "I believe," said Martin slowly, and he looked from Jef to Jarji and back again before going on, "I believe there's a way out. I believe that people deserve better than the mess they've got us into back on Earth, and if we can just keep them alive long enough, they'll find a way to be something more than selfish animals in clothes. So that's my real work. I do what I can to keep things going until that day."

  "What are you doing now, then?" asked Jef. "And what's it all got to do with me—or Jarji?"

  "A secret shared," said Martin with one of his thin grins, "is a secret no longer. You'll have to content yourself with the fact that I tell you I'm your friend."

  "Still—" began Jef, and was interrupted by another shove from Mikey's broad head against his shoulder. "Mikey—not now!"

  He turned, and felt a sudden powerful wave of feeling from the maolot, impacting in that same area of his perceptions that had already been sensitized by his long ride and the wisent drive.

  "What is it?" asked Jarji sharply.

  "I think he wants me to leave again—" said Jef, still watching Mikey. "No, Mikey. Not now. Tomorrow, maybe."

  Mikey's closed eyes stared directly at Jef's face. The wave of feeling emanating from him intensified.

  "Tomorrow!" said Jef, out loud to him. "I've just come to after the last trip. I need more rest; and food—"

  He broke off and looked around. It was late afternoon and the blue of the sky was dulling to grey in the east.

  "Mikey, I've got to eat and rest."

  He was not at all sure how he was managing to interpret levels of specific meaning into the flow of emotion he was getting from Mikey, but he got the very clear impression from Mikey that besides the urgency of their leaving there were reasons he should not, in any case, eat anything.

  "Why not?"

  No explanation was forthcoming, only a renewed, overwhelming pressure to leave, and to leave without eating.

  "He wants me to go right away," said Jef, turning helplessly to Jarji and Martin. They looked back at him in silence for a long moment, and then Jarji spoke.

  "Well," she said. "What are you going to do?"

  Jef opened his mouth, took a deep breath and shook his head, wearily.

  "I don't know—yes, I do," he said, getting slowly to his feet as Mikey also rose. "I can't let him down. For some reason it's more important than anything else to him. I don't know why—but I've got to go."

  "Wait a minute." Jarji swung aside to the pile of equipment and supplies, a little way from the fire. "I'll get some supplies together for you."

  "No supplies—I don't know why that, either," said Jef. "But he acts as if it's a matter of life or death. I'm sorry. Thanks anyway."

  Stiffly, he began to climb on to the waiting Mikey's back. Jarji had halted and half-turned back to face him. Her face was hard.

  "You sure your head's working right?" she asked.

  "I'm sure," said Jef, now on Mikey's back. "I'm sorry, Jarji. I've just got to go along with him, no matter how crazy it seems. It's not just that I owe it to him, after all these years—it's just that after that ride I told you about, I know he's got reasons for what he wants. I don't know what they are, but I know now they've got to be good reasons."

  He looked from her to Martin.

  "Maybe you'll see me again before you expect," he said, and tried to grin.

  "We'd better," said Jarji.

  "We will, I think," said Martin. "I've a feeling you can trust this Mikey of yours."

  As if these last words had tripped a trigger releasing him, Mikey turned and moved off through the trees. He was following the course of the creek by the camp, upstream. They would be heading through the pass that led on to the mountains.

  There was nothing for Jef to do but hold on. Gradually he recognized that, once again, Mikey was causing his arms and legs to hold on instinctively. There was no danger of falling off, then, and no duty on him but to ride. Where Mikey was getting the energy to carry him so, without food on his part either, there was no way of telling.

  After a while the day waned into darkness. Clinging without will to Mikey's working back, Jef found himself falling into intermittent dozes that finally flowed together into full sleep.

  Chapter Seventeen

  he woke at last to find Mikey standing still. As Jef blinked in the dim light around them, Mikey sat down and Jef slid off the maolot's back. He landed with a jolt, tried to stand up, and grunted with the sudden pain of movement.

  His body felt like wood and each muscle twanged with agony on being stressed. He hobbled to a large boulder and sat down.

  They were in a small, rocky depression holding a dark blue lake that was hardly more than an acre or two in area. Above the walls of the depression, mountain peaks stood up in all directions. The air was cold and thin; and it was just about daybreak, bright enough to see, but with the sun not up yet. Only a scattering of coniferlike Everon trees interrupted the rubbled slopes around the lake. As he watched, a small breeze ruffled the blue, lake surface and a second later touched cool fingers to his face and hands.

  Jef woke suddenly to a terrible thirst. He pushed himself up from the boulder, staggered for a dozen steps or so down to the water's edge and fell on his face there. He drank deeply, and the stone-cold water made each tooth in his head ache separately, but his body seemed to expand like a sponge with the inflowing of the moisture.

&nbs
p; Having satisfied thirst, he sat up and looked around at Mikey, who was standing now just behind him. "Where are we?" Jef asked. "What's this place?"

  The response he got indicated a distance yet to go. Mikey stepped around him to the water's edge and drank in his turn, crouching like a cat, but sucking up the water, rather than lapping it.

  "Why are we stopping, then?" Jef asked, when Mikey was done.

  Mikey's blind eyes turned toward him. An impression of an inability emanated from him, which puzzled Jef until suddenly his understanding awoke.

  "You mean you can't carry me any farther." He was abruptly overwhelmed with guilt. It had been hard enough on him, riding. Granted that Mikey was now incredibly strong—to turn himself into a riding animal carrying a hundred and eighty pounds Earth-weight for over twelve hours, on top of having done an even heavier carrying job just a few days earlier, was incredible.

  But Mikey had read his reaction and was now disagreeing with it.

  "I don't understand—" began Jef; and then he did. It was not that Mikey was becoming more comprehensible. It was rather as if Jef was developing a stronger insight. He was beginning, he found, to interpret Mikey's emanations with an almost occult skill. It was as if the fatigue and lightheadedness from lack of food that he was feeling had touched him with the abilities of a seer.

  "You mean," he said, "that from here on it's not possible to carry me over the terrain we'll be facing. We both have to go on foot. That's fine. That's quite all right. It'll feel good to me to walk for a change...."

  He was hearing his own words as if they were being spoken by someone else a little way off. Now that he had let himself notice it, he was lightly shocked to realize how hungry and exhausted he was.

  "I don't know how far I can hike, though," he said.

  Reassurance from Mikey.

  "If only I had something to eat."

  Negative. Not only should Jef not eat, there was nothing to eat. "Can I rest a little while, first?"

  That was all right—for a while. Mikey would like to rest, too.

  They sat while day came to the sky overhead and the lake and the rocky hollow before them took on its full three-dimensional depths and shadows. Finally Mikey got to his feet. Jef tried to follow; but he tottered, once he was upright, and only kept himself from falling by grabbing at Mikey's solid shoulder.