Flandry snapped his legs and streaked to meet the thing. The white belly turned toward him, a cliff, a cloud, a dream. He fired once and saw his harpoon bite. Once more! A’u bent double in anguish, spoke blood, somehow sensed the man and plunged at him. Flandry looked down a cave of horrible teeth. He looked into the eyes behind; they were blind with despair. He tried to scramble aside. A’u changed course with a snake’s ease. Flandry had a moment to wonder if A’u knew him again.
A man flew from the blood-fog. He fired a harpoon, holding himself steady against its back-thrust. Instead of letting the line trail, to tangle the beast, he grabbed it, was pulled up almost to the side. The gills snapped at him like mouths. He followed the monster, turn for turn through cold deeps, as he sought aim. Finally he shot. An eye went out. A brain was cloven. A’u turned over and died.
Flandry gasped after breath. His helmet rang and buzzed, it was stifling him, he must snatch it off before he choked… Hands caught him. He looked into the victory which was Derek Umbolu’s face.
“Wait there, wait, Terra man,” said a remote godlike calm. “All is done now.”
“I, I, I, thanks!” rattled Flandry.
His wind came back to him. He counted the men that gathered, while they rose with all due slowness toward the sun. Six were dead. Cheap enough to get rid of A’u.
If I had been cast away, alone, on the entire world of a hideous race… I wonder if I would have had the courage to survive this long.
I wonder if there are some small cubs, on a water planet deep among the Merseian stars, who can’t understand why father hasn’t come home.
He climbed on deck at last, threw back his helmet and sat down under Tessa Hoorn’s anxious gaze. “Give me a cigarette,” he said harshly. “And break out something alcoholic.”
She wrestled herself to steadiness. “Caught you the monster?” she asked.
“Aye,” said Derek.
“We close to didn’t,” said Flandry. “Our boy Umbolu gets the credit.”
“Small enough vengeance for my father,” said the flat voice of sorrow.
The submarine’s captain saluted the pale man who sat hugging his knees, shivering and drinking smoke. “Word just came in from Rossala, sir,” he reported. “The Sheikh has yielded, though he swears he’ll protest the outrage to the next Imperial resident. But he’ll let the constables occupy his realm and search as they wish.”
Search for a number of earnest, well-intentioned young patriots, who’ll never again see morning over broad waters. Well-I suppose it all serves the larger good. It must. Our noble homosexual Emperor says so himself.
“Excellent,” said Flandry. His glance sought Derek. “Since you saved my life, you’ve got a reward coming. Your father.”
“Hoy?” The big young man trod backward a step.
“He isn’t dead,” said Flandry. “I talked him into helping me. We faked an assassination. He’s probably at home this minute, suffering from an acute case of conscience.”
“What?” The roar was like hell’s gates breaking down.
Flandry winced. “Pianissimo, please.” He waved the snarling, fist-clenching bulk back with his cigarette. “All right, I played a trick on you.”
“A trick I could have ‘waited from a filthy Impy!” Tessa Hoorn spat at his feet.
“Touch me, brother Umbolu, and I’ll arrest you for treason,” said Flandry. “Otherwise I’ll exercise my discretionary powers and put you on lifetime probation in the custody of some responsible citizen.” He grinned wearily. “I think the Lightmistress of Little Skua qualifies.”
Derek and Tessa stared at him, and at each other.
Flandry stood up. “Probation is conditional on your getting married,” he went on. “I recommend that in choosing a suitable female you look past that noble self-righteousness, stop considering the trivium that she can give you some money, and consider all that you might give her.” He glanced at them, saw that their hands were suddenly linked together, and had a brief, private, profane conversation with the Norn of his personal destiny. “That includes heirs,” he finished. “I’d like to have Nyanza well populated. When the Long Night comes for Terra, somebody will have to carry on. It might as well be you.”
He walked past them, into the cabin, to get away from all the dark young eyes.
A Message in Secret
I
Seen on approach, against crystal darkness and stars crowded into foreign constellations, Altai was beautiful. More than half the northern hemisphere, somewhat less in the south, was polar cap. Snowfields were tinged rosy by the sun Krasna; naked ice shimmered blue and cold green. The tropical belt, steppe and tundra, which covered the remainder, shaded from bronze to tarnished gold, here and there the quicksilver flash of a big lake. Altai was ringed like Saturn, a tawny hoop with subtle rainbow iridescence flung spinning around the equator, three radii out in space. And beyond were two copper-coin moons.
Captain Sir Dominic Flandry, field agent, Naval Intelligence Corps of the Terrestrial Empire, pulled his gaze reluctantly back to the spaceship’s bridge. “I see where its name came from,” he remarked. Altai meant Golden in the language of the planet’s human colonists; or so the Betelgeusean trader who passed on his knowledge electronically to Flandry had insisted. “But Krasna is a misnomer for the sun. It isn’t really red to the human eye. Not nearly as much as your star, for instance. More of an orange-yellow, I’d say.”
The blue visage of Zalat, skipper of the battered merchant vessel, twisted into the grimace which was his race’s equivalent of a shrug. He was moderately humanoid, though only half as tall as a man, stout, hairless, clad in a metal mesh tunic. “I zuppoze it was de, you zay, contrazt.” He spoke Terrestrial Anglic with a thick accent, as if to show that the independence of the Betelgeusean System-buffer state between the hostile realms of Terra and Merseia-did not mean isolation from the mainstream of interstellar culture.
Flandry would rather have practiced his Altaian, especially since Zalat’s Anglic vocabulary was so small so to limit conversation to platitudes. But he deferred. As the sole passenger on this ship, of alien species at that, with correspondingly special requirements in diet, he depended on the captain’s good will. Also, the Betelgeuseans took him at face value. Officially, he was only being sent to re-establish contact between Altai and the rest of mankind. Officially, his mission was so minor that Terra didn’t even give him a ship of his own, but left him to negotiate passage as best he might… So, let Zalat chatter.
“After all,” continued the master, “Altai was firzt colonized more dan zeven hoondert Terra-years a-pazt: in de verry dawn, you say, of in-terztellar travel. Little was known about w’at to eggzpect. Krazna muzt have been deprezzingly cold and red, after Zol. Now-to-days, we have more aztronautical zophiztication.”
Flandry looked to the blaze of space, stars and stars and stars. He thought that an estimated four million of them, included in that vague sphere called the Terrestrial Empire, was an insignificant portion of this one spiral arm of this one commonplace galaxy. Even if you added the other empires, the sovereign suns like Betelgeuse, the reports of a few explorers who had gone extremely far in the old days, that part of the universe known to man was terrifyingly small. And it would always remain so.