Secret of the Stars Page 3

  “And where’s that?” demanded the space officer.

  “Fenris.”

  The name meant nothing to Joktar but he detected an appeased note in the other’s answer.

  “Fenris!” The officer laughed. “That should do for him all right. Can you get him out on that ship?”

  “If we hurry him through. And what if he doesn’t get all the shots? Who’s going to care if he doesn’t wake up on the other side?”

  The last thing Joktar heard was the judicial reply of the policeman: “Seems like you boys have it all figured out. No, I guess no one is going to worry. This whole thing’s off record, remember. And you’ll have to cook up a tale to satisfy your front office. Me, I’m not going to be dragged into any hassle with them.”

  They gathered their victim up from the floor and that pushed him over the border of unconsciousness. When he half-aroused again he had been dumped on a flat surface with force enough to set his body aching.

  “. . . stupid fools. Bring in this one late . . .” voices ebbed and flowed over him.

  “What happened? He looks to me like an accident case.”

  “You aren’t paid to ask questions. Probably a fight in one of the pens and this one started it. They hauled him out to keep the peace. We get enough of those.”

  Hands were stripping off his coverall. There was a sharp stab of pain, then another. A persistent buzzing, then black and cold—a cold so intense he shriveled, as a man shriveled under a force blade slash.

  Joktar did not know or feel when he was rolled from the table into that waiting box with an unhealthy resemblance to a coffin, when the lid of that was made fast in impatient haste with skimped attention to various dials and indicators. A placard was slapped on the top, and the box became one of many in a truck waiting to roll.

  Then came the spaceport where the transport waited under the crane projecting from the E-ship’s hatch. The jaws of the crane bit into one box after another and they swung up, over into the maw of the cargo hold, each to be pegged down in a niche from which the cargo would eventually be discharged alive or dead as chance willed it. This would be months later in planet time and half the galaxy away in space. The last box was wedged in, the hatch sealed.

  Not too long afterwards, the ship trembled to the push of jets, arose on her tail flames, moved out on course.

  In the E-station front office, a man waited with a packet of credit notes. He grew impatient, demanded action, at last made a closed com-call to a number which surprised, irritated, and faintly alarmed the man in whose office he waited.

  Another man, also equipped with credits, heard a rumor in the waiting room, confirmed it in two surreptitious and hurried interviews, and left the E-station. He debated the necessity of the return of the credits to their proper owner. And, because he was not foolhardy, he went back to the streets, found a hideout and admitted to the man there that certain plans had gone wrong. The man named Kern was disappointed enough to take several steps in the direction of retrieving his own prestige by a few sharp lessons. But once those orders were given, he forgot the whole affair for a while.

  A third man in a small, discreet office received a com-call. As a result five men in widely separated points on Terra found themselves embarking on new assignments and three took off by jet for N’Yok.

  Two E-guards were questioned, shipped out for Melwambe Port after being warned that if they talked they were going to be given the same processing they had given others. This was done within the month in spite of their protestations. The service could not stand another scandal, not now when there was an alarming new stirring behind scenes. Both E-guards eventually reached a planet named Blore and within the year one died from pal-pest and the other was killed by his fellows for informing on a gang break.

  Another man, in the gray uniform of the scouts, went to a jeweler’s shop in N’Yok the same hour the Griffin lifted. He had an ident-disc forced open. But when he read the name inside he went white under his space brown, remembering certain old stories. He was tempted to drop the disc into the nearest rubbish disposal when he left, but he finally decided to see it destroyed in his ship’s atom-break. On his way back to the port, his pocket was picked. When he discovered his loss he was frightened, thoroughly frightened, for the first time in years.

  A councilor, making a wide-flung inspection of frontier planet conditions, was scheduled to visit the second planet of the star, Zeta Lupi, in the Wolf Constellation. The name of that world was Loki and its closest neighbor was Fenris. There were hints of trouble on Fenris.

  In an outlaw camp on Fenris, a man challenged the mob boss for a blast out. The man was named Samms and had once been an emigrant, now an escapee from the alibite mines. At present he nursed a long-range plan and the call for a blast out was the second move in it. Because the day was an unusually cold one and his opponent had been running a trap line, Samms was a fraction of a second faster and became the leader of the Kortoski mob that night.

  (Report from Hudd and Rusto, N’Yok to B. Morle, redirected to Kronfeld, Director, Colonization Project 308)

  Subject was questioned by space scout, disc taken from him, later opened by jeweler. Ident was for Marson, O-S-S-D 451. Scout took disc away from him. Thought subject was responsible for fatal mugging of his partner, Kender, which occurred on streets three weeks ago. Must stress difficulty dealing with E-station. Believe records there purposefully suppressed. Kern also tried to buy-out subject.

  (Closed com between Kronfeld and Morle):

  Kronfeld: Put men on this space scout. I don’t altogether buy this friend-being-mugged story. Might just be something else. The boys in gray are getting upset all along the line. I want a full report on this scout. Will deal with the E people myself. Forget Kern, he’s out of the picture now.

  (Interdepartmental com)

  E-S 59641—7/20

  From: E-Service Station, N’Yok Port, Irson, Agent in charge

  To: Kronfeld, Director, Colonization Project 308

  Subject:

  Report concerning emigrant, male, age about eighteen, race, Terran, picked up in raid on SunSpot, fourth day of March. This man shipped out on E-ship Griffin, destination planet Fenris for service in alibite mines. Correctly attested “unlawfully employed, unnecessary to the well-being of Terra.” Micro of record attached.

  (Closed com, Kronfeld to Morle)

  K: Are you sure this is the man? Record from E-people way off on age alone.

  M: They omitted some facts turned up in his physical, too. This record was edited. Certainly wrong on age, I have witnesses who can prove that. But if you are right there would be such a difference. They’re working hard to cover up the irregularity in his ship out. But he was the one sent to Fenris all right. What can you do about that?

  K: Nothing until he arrives. I’ll alert our agent there. Trouble is that is a critical point just at present. He would land in a place such as that! With luck we may be able to bid him in at the auction. Fenris! It looks as if someone would like to get rid of him just as badly as we want to pull him into the fold. Blast those damn scouts. This was badly muddled straight from the beginning. I hope Thorn and Cullan can roast their tails straight up their spines! Send me everything you can dig up as fast as the boys feed it to you.

  (Excerpt from Galactic Guide)

  Fenris: Third planet in the system of star Zeta Lupi, Constellation Wolf. With the two other planets in this system, Hel and Loki, it shares a climate and terrain hardly endurable for native Terran stock.

  Principle export: alibite and some furs. Traces of earlier native race, now extinct, exist in form of stone work and mounds. Subject to severe storms and nine months of freezing winter weather per solar year. One port: Siwaki. Two towns: Siwaki, Sandi, center of mining territory. Posted by survey as unsuitable for tourist travel. An “A” certificate required from anyone engaging passage to Siwaki.

  At another camp, on the other side of a small mountain range, a spaceman who had been cashiered from the service
and only recently had been bought out of a labor gang, listened carefully to the man who had put up the credits for his release. Then he talked himself, describing an event in his own past in detail. His benefactor was thus enabled to fit another piece into a very wide and broken puzzle, rounding out a pattern to please the man in the discreet office on Terra.

  But the Griffin rode on, snapped into hyper-space, carrying in her cargo the missing element which would influence movements from Terra, to Fenris, to Loki. And an ex-star-and-comet dealer from the streets began the first step towards realizing a bizarre future.

  3

  About the Port of Siwaki the landscape was almost lunar in starkness. Only the harshness of the jagged peaks which enclosed the cup of the valley were muffled—one could not say softened—by a thick growth of vegetation on the lower slopes. This vegetation existed in the cold months as odd spongelike skeletons with stem surfaces which could withstand even a tri-steel blade, and was a slate-blue in color.

  That blue stain spread up to meet the snow. And always the cold bit deep, through thermo underclothing and furs, through the heated walls of the living domes, stinging inward to a man’s bones.

  Fenris was alibite. Men went to the mines, ore came back. A fringe of businesses based on that two-way traffic made up Siwaki. And there were a few fools mad enough to try trapping for furs in the river valleys. But they were only a handful, the remnants of men who had pioneered Fenris before the companies fastened their strangleholds on the port and the three-quarters-frozen world.

  This morning four of those independents had paused to scan the notice of an E-ship auction posted on the government board. Two of them shrugged, one spat eloquently, but the fourth continued to read on into the fine print of the clipped code of governmental language, until one of his companions tugged at the sleeve of his outer fur coat.

  “No use trying to buck that.”

  The reader’s eyes, which were all that showed between the shielding roll of lamby wool about his hood and the frost mask covering nose and mouth, still held to the poster. Although the outdoor garb of Fenris added bulk to the body it covered, there was a hint of youthfulness in the way he shook off his fellow’s hold.

  “We’ll stay,” he spoke flatly, the authority of his tone not muffled by his mask. The man with him shrugged, but his mittened hand rested on the second belt about his middle, the one which supported the universal blaster of the frontiersman and a twenty-inch knife in a fur-tufted sheath.

  At that moment, the numbed cargo mentioned in the poster was beginning to revive. Joktar, his memories of the E-station very hazy now, heard the muted chorus of mutters, moans, and such other symptoms of distress as he had heard in the N’Yok pens.

  “This one’s breathing.”

  He was grabbed, armpits and feet, swung out on a flat surface. Swift jabs of pain, then he was flung back to the misery of full revival. For misery it was, as the torture of returning circulation carried with it a belated realization of where he must be and why.

  Sitting up, he blinked at the lights in the room, rubbing his hands over his bare body as if their pressure could relieve the tingling. For some reason he seemed to have recovered more quickly than the rest, for of the twenty men lying along the shelflike projection, he was the first to move freely. Memory supplied a name . . . Fenris. Just a name . . . he had no idea what kind of world lay outside the walls of this room.

  “Stir up!” Men appeared in the doorway, wearing coveralls with the symbol of the port service on back and breast. They worked with rough efficiency to rouse the rest of the captives. Joktar sat where he was, a dull hatred seething inside him, wise enough not to resist. But his desire for escape was fast crystallizing into a drive almost as basic as his will to live.

  The head guard reached him, gave a half-grin as he surveyed Joktar’s slim body.

  “The E’s must be baby snatching now,” he commented. “You’ll end up on the bargain counter, sonny.”

  “All right, all right! On your feet, you dead heads!” The captives were pushed into a ragged line. “Get these on.”

  A duffel bag was produced and from it the guards pulled small bundles of cloth, tossing one to each man in line. Joktar drew on the pair of shorts, snapped the belt cord about his narrow waist.

  “Mess . . .” They were pushed past the door, each handed a pleasantly warm container. Joktar felt real hunger, twisting off the top to swallow down a thick liquid, half-stew, half-soup.

  “Now get this!” The head guard mounted a platform at the end of the room. “You’re on Fenris. And this is no planet where you can go over the hill and live to get away.” He snapped a terse word to his underlings and they put up a video projector. “There’s only two places a man can live here. Right at this port, and up at the mines. You try to blast off, and this is what’ll happen.”

  At a second snap of his fingers, a series of vivid video scenes appeared on the wall above his head. If the horrors they pictured had been faked, the creator had had a very morbid imagination. Joktar did not believe that they had been. Every stark detail of what could happen to a runaway was there in three-dimensional color: blanket storms, lamby on the prowl, poison springs, and half a dozen other terrors native to this wolf world. Even breathing without any protection meant that the icy crystals in the winds could bring a quick and fatal lung disorder. As a lesson against escape the show was very forceful. But the pictures did not in the least modify Joktar’s private plans to stage a break-out at the first opportunity.

  “Now you’re going up for auction,” the guard told them. “You’ll probably be mine fodder. Play along with the rules, don’t try any tough stuff, and you can maybe buy your time someday. First ten of you, this way.”

  By chance, Joktar was numbered among that ten. He was hustled on into a larger room, standing with his group on the platform facing a small audience of perhaps a dozen or so. Most of them were seated at ease, their outer furs slung back. But there were three or four others to the rear of the room who did not look so much at home.

  “. . . certified fit and able for labor . . .” someone droned. A man in E-service uniform was reading from the ship record.

  The Fenrian guards thrust their charges into line again. One by one, they took a man by the shoulders, turned him slowly about for the inspection of the buyers. As they reached him, Joktar heard a voice rise from the bidders.

  “What’s that kid doing here? Nobody could get a full week’s worth out of a skinny little worm like that!”

  “I dunno, Lars, those skinny ones sometimes are tougher than you think.” Another man arose and came forward to the edge of the platform. “Let’s see your paws, kid.”

  The guard didn’t give the Terran time to obey on his own. Clamping a grip on the captive’s elbows, he swung his arms out. The bidder stabbed critically at the nearest palm.

  “Soft. Well, that’ll harden up using a digger. Might make a sorter of him. Only they’d better take a mark down on his price.”

  Joktar was shoved back into line and his neighbor brought out. The bidding began and, when they reached Joktar once again, he saw one of the men by the doorway move forward.

  “Ten skins, prime lamby,” the words broke through the monotonous offers of credits. The man who had examined Joktar’s hands swung around in his seat, scowling.

  “Who let this woods beast in?” he demanded.

  The newcomer continued to thread a way between the seats until he stood by the E-officer.

  “E-auction, right?” he asked, his tone holding much the same bite as had that of the mine man.

  “Yes.” The officer was plainly bored by it all.

  “No privileged bidders, at least the notice didn’t say so.”

  “No privileged bidders.”

  “Then I offer ten prime lamby skins.” He stood there, his feet in their fur-lined, fur-cuffed boots, slightly apart, his body balanced as if he were about to issue a call out for a blaster meeting.

  “Ten prime lamby skins bid,”
repeated the E-officer.

  “Fifty credits!” snapped the challenging company man.

  “Fifteen skins.”

  “One hundred credits!” a second of the miners cut in.

  The E-officer waited a moment and then spoke to the other. “You still interested?”

  Joktar watched the newcomer glance to his fellows by the door as if in appeal. When there came no answer from them, he shrugged, walked back. A snicker arose from the company men.

  “Stay out in your mountain dens and freeze!” called the victorious bidder. Then he turned to the business at hand. “Well, do I get him for a hundred?”

  The E-officer nodded and Joktar became the property of one of the companies.

  They were sorted out into company groups at the end of the sale, fed, given quarters for the night, and each a suit of thermo clothing. Joktar listened eagerly to the guards, treasuring every scrap of information. He was now owned by the Jard-Nellis Corporation and their holdings were in a newly opened sector edging into the Kamador mountains; he had not been particularly fortunate. He tried to learn something about that other bidder, but discovered only that he was a trapper and that his bid was probably only another move in the old struggle between the companies and the handful of men who had pioneered Fenris on their own.

  Early the next morning, the emigrants were loaded into the cargo hold of a crawler bound for the mines. Aircraft was not practical on the wolf world. Freakish storms had brought about too many crashes during the early days of settlement. Now transportation followed the archaic modes of travel, the roads themselves patrolled constantly against washout and storm damage. And against something or someone else, Joktar surmised, when he assessed the number and quality of the weapons carried by an unnecessarily large number of guards riding the crawler.