Heym murmured: «The whole planet has been—acting?»
«Yes.» Goram chuckled. «Rather fun for all concerned. You’d be surprised at the installations we have, out of spy-machine range. As soon as they are old enough to carry out the deception, our children are told the truth. It has actually made little difference to our lives except for those few million who are out in the Galaxy taking it over.»
«Taking… it… over?» Heym’s mind seemed to be turning over slowly, infinitely slowly and wearily.
«Of course.» A strange blend of sternness and sympathy overlay Goram’s harsh features. «One planet obviously cannot fight the Galaxy, nor do we wish to. Yet we cannot permit it to menace us. The only answer is—annexation.»
«And… then?»
«I’m sorry.» Goram’s voice came slowly, implacably, «but I’m afraid you overrated the good intentions of the pure genius strain. After all, Homo intelligens can no more be expected to serve Homo sapiens than early man to serve the apes.
«We’re taking over barbarians and Empire alike. After that, the Galaxy will do as we wish. Oh, we won’t be hard masters. Man may never know that he is being ruled from outside, and he will enter a period of peace and contentment such as he has never imagined.
«As for you—»
Heym realized with vague shock that he had not even wondered or cared what was to become of him personally.
«You are sympathetic to us—but your loyalty is to the Empire. You have thought of us only in relation to our usefulness to the Imperium. Perhaps we could trust you to keep our secret, perhaps not. We can’t take the risk. You might even release the truth inadvertently. Nor can we erase your memory of this—it would leave traces that an expert psychiatrist could detect, and all high officials undergo regular psychoanalytic checkups.
«I’ll just have to report you as accidentally killed on the planet.» Goram smiled. «I don’t think you’ll find life exile on this world, out of sight of the observers, uncongenial. And we might as well see about making your successor one of our men. It was about ready for that.»
He added thoughtfully: «In fact, the Galaxy may be ready for a new Solarian Emperor.»
THERE WILL BE OTHER TIMES
There will be other times, my comrades, there will be
A day of trumpets. This we must believe.
Now when all flags guide corpses to the sea
And ships lie hollow on a smoking shore,
Broken of bone, and windy shadows weave
A dark about tall windows turning whore
To feed gashed children, I must say that more
Days shall remain then hobnailed victors thieve.
And if our iron’s broken, there’s still ore—
Stones of our sharded cities lying free
To sharpen it; and if you should perceive
Rust and the dimness in us, do it silently.
THE LIVE COWARD
The fugitive ship was pursued for ten light-years. Then, snapping in and out of subspace drive with a reckless disregard of nearby suns and tracer-blocking dust clouds, it shook the Patrol cruiser.
The search that followed was not so frantic as the danger might seem to warrant. Haste would have done no good; there are a million planetary systems affiliated with the League, and their territory includes several million more too backward for membership. Even a small planet is such a wilderness of mountains, valleys, plains, forests, oceans, icefields, cities, and loneliness—much of it often quite unexplored—that it was hopeless to ransack them meter by meter for a single man. The Patrol knew that Varris’ boat had a range of three hundred parsecs, and in the course of months and man-years of investigation it was pretty well established that he had not refueled at any registered depot. But a sphere two thousand light-years across can hold a lot of stars.
The Patrol offered a substantial reward for information leading to the arrest of Samel Varris, human, from the planet Caldon (No. so-and-so in the Pilots’ Manual), wanted for the crime of inciting to war. It circulated its appeal as widely as possible. It warned all agents to keep an eye or a feeler or a telepathic organ out for a man potentially still capable of exploding a billion living entities into radioactive gas. Then it waited.
A year went by.
Captain Jakor Thymal of the trading ship Ganash, operating out of Sireen in the primitive Spiral Cluster area, brought the news. He had seen Varris, even spoken to the fellow. There was no doubt of it. Only one hitch: Varris had taken refuge with the king of Thunsba, a barbarous state in the southern hemisphere of a world known to the Galactics—such few as had ever heard of it—as Rylin’s Planet. He had gotten citizenship and taken the oath of service as a royal guardsman. Loyalty between master and man was a powerful element in Thunsban morality. The king would not give up Varris without a fight.
Of course, axes and arrows were of small use against flamers. Perhaps Varris could be taken alive, but the patrol would kill him without whiffing very many Thunsban. Captain Thymal settled complacently back to wait for confirmation of his report and the blood money. Nothing ever occurred to him but that the elimination of Varris would be the simplest of routine operations.
Like hell!
Wing Alak eased his flitter close to the planet. It hung in cloudy splendor against a curtain of hard, needle-shape spatial stars, the Cluster sky. He sat gloomily listening to the click and mutter of instruments as Drogs checked surface conditions.
«Quite terrestroid,» said the Galmathian. His antennae lifted in puzzlement above the round, snouted face and the small black eyes. «Why did you bother testing? It’s listed in the Manual.»
«I have a nasty suspicious mind,» said Alak. «Also an unhappy one.» He was a thin, medium-tall human with the very white skin that often goes with flaming red hair. His Patrol uniform was as dandified as regulations allowed.
Drogs hitched three meters of green, eight-legged body across the cabin. His burly arms reached out to pick up the maps in three-fingered hands «Yes… here’s the Thunsba kingdom and the capital city… what’s it called?… Wainabog. I suppose our quarry is still there; Thymal swore he didn’t alarm him.» He sighed. «Now I have to spend an hour at the telescope and identify which place is what. And you can sit like my wife on an egg thinking beautiful thoughts!»
«The only beautiful concept I have right now is that all of a sudden the Prime Directive was repealed.»
«No chance of that, I’m afraid… not till a less bloodthirsty race than yours gets the leadership of the League.»
«Less? You mean more, don’t you? ‘Under no circumstances whatsoever may the Patrol or any unit thereof kill any intelligent being.’ If you do—» Alak made a rather horrible gesture. «Is that blood-thirsty?»
«Quite. Only a race with as gory a past as the Terrans would go to such extremes of reaction. And only as naturally ferocious a species could think of making such a commandment the Patrol’s great top secret… and bluffing with threats of planetwide slaughter, or using any kind of chicanery to achieve its ends. Now a Galmathian will run down a farstak in his native woods and jump on its back and make a nice lunch while it’s still running… but he wouldn’t be able to imagine cold-bloodedly sterilizing an entire world, so he doesn’t have to ban himself from honest killing even in self-defense.» Drogs’ caterpillar body hunched itself over the telescope.
«Get thee behind me, Satan… and don’t push!» Alak returned murkily to his thoughts. His brain was hypnotically stuffed with all the information three generations of traders had gathered about Thunsba. None of it looked hopeful.