III.
Four-and-Twenty Geek Heads
Governor-General Sidney Harrington sat on the comfortably upholsteredbench on the dais of the Audience Hall, flanked by von Schlichten andEric Blount. He didn't look particularly regal, even on that highseat--with his ruddy outdoorsman's face and his ragged gray mustacheand his old tweed coat spotted with pipe-ashes, he might have been anyof the dozen-odd country-gentleman neighbors of von Schlichten'sboyhood in the Argentine. But then, to a Terran, any of the kings ofUller would have looked like a freak birth in a lizard-house at a zoo;it was hard to guess what impression Harrington would make on anUlleran.
He took the false palate and tongue-clicker, officially designated asan "enunciator, Ulleran" and, colloquially, as a geek-speaker, out ofhis coat pocket and shoved it into his mouth. Von Schlichten andBlount put in theirs, and Harrington pressed the floor-button with histoe. After a brief interval, the wide doors at the other end of thehall slid open, and the Konkrookan notables, attended by a dozenCompany native-officers and a guard of Kragan Rifles, entered. Thehonor-guard advanced in two columns; between them marched an uncladand heavily armed native carrying an ornate spear with a three-footblade upright in front of him with all four hands. It was theKonkrookan Spear of State; it represented the proxy-presence of KingJaikark. Behind it stalked Gurgurk, the Konkrookan equivalent of PrimeMinister or Grand Vizier; he wore a gold helmet and a thing like astring-vest made of gold wire, and carried a long sword with atwo-hand grip, a pair of Terran automatics built for a hand with sixfour-knuckled fingers, and a pair of matched daggers. He wasconsiderably past the Ulleran prime of life--seventy or eighty, tojudge from the worn appearance of his opal teeth, the color of hisskin, and the predominantly reddish tint of his quartz-speckles. Animmature Ulleran would be a very light gray, white under the arms, andhis quartz-specks would run from white to pale yellow. The retinue ofnobles behind Gurgurk ran through the whole spectrum, from aprinceling who was almost oyster-gray to old Ghroghrank, the KeegarkanAmbassador, who was even blacker and more red-speckled than Gurgurk.All of them carried about as much ironmongery as the PrimeMinister--the pistols were all Terran, and the swords and daggers weremostly made either on Terra or at the Terran-operated steel-works onVolund.
Four slaves brought up the rear carrying an ornately inlaid box onpoles. When the spear-bearer reached the exact middle of the hall, hehalted and grounded his regalia-weapon with a thump. Gurgurk came upand halted a couple of paces behind and to the left of the spear, andall the other nobles drew up in two curved lines some ten paces to therear, with considerable pushing and jostling and a _sotto voce_argument, with overtones of weapon-fingering, about precedence. All,that is, but Ghroghrank and another noble, who came up and plantedthemselves beside Gurgurk. Von Schlichten regarded the assemblagesourly through his monocle. Maybe Sid Harrington _did_ look regal,after all.
The Governor-General rose slowly and descended from the dais,advancing to within ten paces of the Spear, von Schlichten and Blountaccompanying him. Out of the corner of his eye, von Schlichten watcheda couple of Kragan mercenaries with fifty-shot machine-rifles moveunobtrusively to positions from whence they could, if necessary, spraythe visitors with bullets without endangering the Terrans.
"Welcome, Gurgurk," Harrington gibbered through his false palate. "TheCompany is honored by this visit."
"I come in the name of my royal master, His Sublime and IneffableMajesty, Jaikark the Seventeenth, King of Konkrook and of all thelands of the Konk Isthmus," Gurgurk squeaked and clicked. "I have thehonor to bring with me the Lord Ghroghrank, Ambassador of King Orgzildof Keegark to the court of my royal master."
"And I," Ghroghrank said, after being suitably welcomed, "am honoredto be accompanied by Prince Gorkrink, special envoy from my master,his Royal and Imperial Majesty King Orgzild, who is in your city toreceive the shipment of power-metal my royal master has been honoredto be permitted to purchase from the Company."
More protocol about welcoming Gorkrink. Then Gurgurk cleared histhroat with a series of barking sounds.
"My royal master, His Sublime and Ineffable Majesty, is prostratedwith grief," he stated solemnly. "Were his sorrow not so overwhelming,he would have come in His Own Sacred Person to express the pain andshame which he feels that people of the Company should be set uponand endangered in the streets of the royal city."
If he weren't doped to the ears, von Schlichten substituted mentally.There was a native drug which had, on its users, the combined effectsof hashish, heroin and yohimbine; Jaikark and all his court circlewere addicts. He probably hadn't even heard of the riot.
"The soldiers of His Sublime and Ineffable Majesty came most promptlyto the aid of the troops of the Company, did they not, General vonSchlichten?" Harrington asked.
"Within minutes, Your Excellency," von Schlichten replied gravely."Their promptness, valor, and efficiency were most exemplary."
Gurgurk spoke at length, expressing himself as delighted, on behalf ofhis royal master, at hearing such high praise from so distinguished asoldier. Eric Blount then contributed a short speech, beseeching thegods that the deep and beautiful friendship existing between theChartered Uller Company and His Sublime etcetera would continueunimpaired, and that His Sublime etcetera would enjoy long life andpeaceful reign, managing, by a trick of Konkrookan grammar, to implythat the second would be conditional upon the first. The KeegarkanAmbassador then spoke his piece, expressing on behalf of King Orgzildthe deepest regret that the people of the Company should be somolested, and managing to hint that things like that simply didn'thappen at Keegark.
The Prince Gorkrink then spoke briefly, in sympathy for the great andgood friend of all Ulleran peoples, Mohammed Ferriera, who had beeninjured, and hoping that he would soon enjoy full health again. Healso managed to convey King Orgzild's pleasure at having obtained theplutonium. Von Schlichten noticed that a few of his more recentquartz-specks were slightly greenish in tinge, a sure sign that hehad, not long ago, been exposed to the fluorine-tainted air which menand geeks alike breathed on Niflheim. When a geek prince hired out asa laborer for a year on Niflheim, he did so for only one purpose--tolearn Terran technologies.
Gurgurk then announced that so enormous a crime against the friends ofHis Sublime etcetera had not been allowed to go unpunished, signalingbehind him with one of his lower hands for the box to be broughtforward. The slaves carried it to the front, set it down, and openedit, taking from it a rug which they spread on the floor. On this, fromthe box, they placed twenty-four newly severed opal-grinning heads, infour neat rows. They had all been freshly scrubbed and polished, butthey still smelled like crushed cockroaches.
The three Terrans looked at them gravely. A double-dozen heads wasstandard payment for an attack in which no Terran had been killed.Ostensibly, they were the heads of the ringleaders: in practice, theywere usually lopped from the first two-dozen prisoners or over-ageslaves at hand, without regard for whether the victims had even heardof the crime which they were expiating. If the Extraterrestrial'sRights Association were really serious about the rights of thesegeeks, they'd advocate booting out all these native princes andturning the whole planet over to the Company. That had been the TerranFederation's idea, from the beginning; why else give the Company'schief representative the title of Governor-General?
There was another long speech from Gurgurk, with the nobles behind himmurmuring antiphonal agreement--standard procedure, for which therewas a standard pun, geek chorus--and a speech of response from SidHarrington. Standing stiffly through the whole rigamarole, vonSchlichten waited for it to end, as finally it did.
They walked back from the door, whence they had escorted thedelegation, and stood looking down at the saurian heads on the rug.Harrington raised his voice and called to a Kragan sergeant whosechevrons were painted on all four arms.
"Take this carrion out and stuff it in the incinerator," he ordered."If any of you think you can clean up this rug and this box, you'rewelcome to them."
"Wait a moment," v
on Schlichten told the sergeant. Then he disgorgedand pouched his geek-speaker. "See that head, there?" he asked,rolling it over with his toe. "I killed that geek, myself, with mypistol, while Them and Hid were getting Ferriera into the car. MissQuinton killed that one with the bolo; see where she chopped him onthe back of the neck? The cut that took off the head was a little low,and missed it. And Hid O'Leary stuck a knife in that one." He walkedaround the rug, turning heads over with his foot. "This was cut-ratehead-payment; they just slashed off two-dozen heads at the scene ofthe riot. I don't like this butchery of worn-out slaves and pettythieves any better than anybody else, but this I don't like either.Six months ago, Gurgurk wouldn't have tried to pull anything likethis. Now he's laughing up his non-existent sleeve at us."
"That's what I've been preaching, all along," Eric Blount took upafter him. "These geeks need having the fear of Terra thrown intothem."
"Oh, nonsense, Eric; you're just as bad as Carlos, here!" Harringtontut-tutted. "Next, you'll be saying that we ought to depose Jaikarkand take control ourselves."
"Well, what's wrong with that, for an idea?" von Schlichten demanded."Don't you think we could? Our Kragans could go through that army ofJaikark's like fast neutrons through toilet-paper."
"My God!" Harrington exploded. "Don't let me hear that kind of talkagain! We're not _conquistadores_; we're employees of a businessconcern, here to make money honestly, by exchanging goods and serviceswith these people...."
He turned and walked away, out of the Audience Hall, leaving vonSchlichten and Blount to watch the removal of the geek-heads.
"You know, I went a little too far," von Schlichten confessed. "Or toofast, rather. He's got to be conditioned to accept that idea."
"We can't go too slowly, either," Blount replied. "If we wait for himto change his mind, it'll be the same as waiting for him to retire.And that'll be waiting too long."
Von Schlichten nodded seriously. "Did you notice the green specks inthe hide of that Prince Gorkrink?" he asked. "He's just come back fromNiflheim. Not on the _Pretoria_, I don't think. Probably on the_Canberra_, three months ago."
"And he's here to get that plutonium, and ship it to Keegark on the_Oom Paul Kruger_," Blount considered. "I wonder just what he learned,on Niflheim."
"I wonder just what's going on at Keegark," von Schlichten said."Orgzild's pulled down a regular First-Century-model iron curtain. Youknow, four of our best native Intelligence operatives have beenmurdered in Keegark in the last three months, and six more have justvanished there."
"Well, I'm going there in a few days, myself, to talk to Orgzild aboutthis spaceport deal," Blount said. "I'll have a talk with HendrikLemoyne and MacKinnon. And I'll see what I can find out for myself."
"Well, let's go have a drink," von Schlichten suggested, consultinghis watch. "About time for a cocktail."