S WANTED ON LEVEL 10 ALL CREDITS PAID SHORT TERM EMPLOYMENT*MEN WITH FAST REFLEXES WANTED ON LEVEL 10
S WANTED ON LEVEL 10 ALL CREDITS PAID SHORT TERM EMPLOYMENT*MEN WITH FAST REFLEXES WANTED ON LEVEL 10
Dan realized he had seen parts of this ad spelled out twice at the terminal entrance. He didn't know if it was a trap or something he could use. He said, "I'm interested in a job on Level 10."
"You have examined the record?"
Dan had no idea what this meant. He said, "I understand men with fast reflexes are wanted on Level 10."
"One moment."
There was a short pause, then a new voice. "What we offer you is a special credit allotment sufficient for all normal mating and purchase needs. On account of these latest restrictions, I can't tell you exactly what the job is, but I can say this: The rewards are great. But you also might end up getting sprinkled over the forest. We've got a situation down here that has to be cleaned up fast. With the special referendum tomorrow, it might boil over and make an interstellar mess. We want you for a night's work. At the end you're either rich or dead. How about it?"
Dan thought of the two words "interstellar mess," used in connection with a "special referendum." He had the sensation that he was getting close.
"All right," he said.
There was a blur as mataform stations shuttled him from one place to the next. Then he was walking into a large room holding about thirty men, all of whom had something of the look of big cats alert for prey.
Dan had hardly come in when a lithe man walked out on a raised platform, looked over the waiting men, and said, "I'd like to wait till there are more of us, but there isn't time. I'll come to the point without delay. I'll only explain it once, so listen carefully.
"On this level, we have the War Ruler's control center. Two levels up, there is the planetary zoo. Among the animals in the zoo is an ape about our size and general shape, with a thick layer of fur, strong muscles, and a sense of humor like a white-hot rivet dropped down your collar. By some process I don't understand, about fifty of these apes have gotten into a storeroom in an arms depot attached to the control center.
"With this referendum coming up to decide whether we should join the Stellar Union, every time there is a disturbance the election committee blames it on one faction or another. Using their emergency powers, they then clap on some new restriction to keep order till the referendum is over. If there is now a disturbance near the control center itself, tempers are going to shorten further. If the blame should be stuck on one side or the other, true or untrue, it could swing the vote either way.
"We have got to get those apes out of the arms depot right away. The trouble is, there's an alarm in the arms depot that can't be shut off except from the control center. Fire any kind of impact or vibration weapon in there, or change the composition of the atmosphere by pouring in gas, and the alarm automatically goes off in guard stations all over this level. If we had more time, we could starve them out. We don't have the time.
"The result is that we have to go after them with knives and clubs. Now, the apes are fast, they gang up, they throw things, and if they can, they'll grab you from opposite sides and pull your arms and legs off. That's very funny—for them. So we'll have to work together as a team and fight as hard as we know how."
After the speaker finished, there was a silence in the room. Dan was thinking over the idea and he liked nothing about it. He had little enough time to do his job, and he did not want to spend it being pulled to pieces by apes. He called out, "Mind if I make a suggestion?"
"I'm willing to try anything. Let's hear it."
Dan said, "I don't know about anybody else here, but I am no team player myself. Let me go in alone first. You wait half an hour and then come in and see if there are fifty apes left."
Everyone craned to see who was offering to fight fifty wild apes singlehanded.
The man on the platform turned pale, but said, "Agreed. And if you win, you received the combined credits of all."
Dan found himself walking down a corridor, surrounded by well-wishers, to a room where several tables were loaded with hand-weapons. He picked up a short weighted club, and a short double-edge, razor-sharp sword. A few minutes later, he arrived at a heavy metal door studded with rivets and painted green.
Dan had intended to hide a transceiver nearby on the outside and spend as little time in the storeroom as possible. But everything had happened so fast, and there were so many eyes watching him, that he had no chance to hide a mataform unit anywhere.
There was a loud clang as the heavy door swung shut behind him. Then he was in a big dimly lighted room with a twelve-foot aisle running down the center, a narrower aisle along each wall, and high piles of wooden crates and wirebound heavy cardboard cartons spaced five feet apart to either side of the central aisle. There was a strong smell of damp dirty fur. On the floor partway up the aisle lay what looked like a clothed human arm.
From the far end of the building came a series of low gruff barks. A humping motion ran along like a wave up the aisle and over the piles of crates toward Dan.
He glanced briefly to either side at the solid concrete walls of the building, felt behind him. The door was locked.
It flashed through his mind that up till now he had had good luck on this planet.
Dan saw, in the nearest corner of the room, several pipes that ran up from the floor and were bent to travel along near the ceiling. He quickly slipped a mataform unit behind these pipes on the floor, then cut into a cardboard carton about fifteen feet away and put another unit inside. He tossed a third on top of the nearest pile of cartons, mentally said a key word, and was on the pile slashing open a carton to slide the unit inside. Then he was on the floor in the corner.
In the dim light, the shadowy figures came toward him. Their long arms swung up and a barrage of rifle parts, bayonets, scabbards, and helmets smashed into the corner. Dan was fifteen feet away when they hit. An instant later, he was back, kicking the rubble out of the corner. There was a repeated gruff cough, then the aisles were jammed, and he had a brief view of bared teeth in fur-covered faces, and hairy arms that reached out to grasp him. There was a grisly laugh that started as a low chuckle and ended on a high-pitched wavering note.
Dan mentally pronounced a key word and he was on the pile of cartons with a half a dozen apes. The short sword flicked out and back. Other apes sprang from the next pile of cartons. Dan dropped the weighted club, threw his last mataform unit toward the top of a pile across the aisle, and an instant later had recovered it, dropped to the floor, and raced up the aisle.
There was noise like teeth clicking together and then the wavering laugh burst out again as the apes turned to chase him up the aisle. Dan slid the transceiver into a slit-open carton and whirled as the leaders rushed toward him. The short sword flashed out and back in rapid thrusts, and abruptly Dan was on top of the first pile of cartons. He recovered the weighted club, glanced down at the apes turning to rush up the aisles, and then suddenly he was with them, slamming the last few of them over the heads with the weighted club.
He thrust, stabbed, and smashed, now in one place, now another, always striking the gibbering horde where they were fewest and most off-balance.
After a long, hideous interval, there came a silence. Dan could see that there were four heaps of dead or unconscious apes, the only live ones were a few clinging to overhead beams with their eyes shut.
Dan recovered his transceivers and made his way to one of the few windows in the room. This was about seven feet from the floor, heavily barred, with its glass panes broken out. Dan pulled himself up and looked out at a walk and a high wall a few feet away. He cut the sleeve of his shirt into strips and knotted the strips together with a transceiver tied onto either end, so that one transceiver hung on the outside and the other on the inside.
Then Dan was outside, in an underground part of the planet where no one was supposed to be without an official permit.
The air seemed as fresh as outdoors, while overhead there was the appearance of the sky on a heavily overcast day. There was light enough to see by, but it was apparently dimmed to provide an artificial night.
Dan saw no one, and said mentally, "Kielgaard?"
Kielgaard's voice had a hoarse sound. "Are you out of that place?"
"I'm out of it—thank heaven."
"Amen. But listen, things have taken a nasty turn."
"What's happened?"
"We've questioned that prisoner. The outfit behind this trouble is Trans-Space. But they don't have the control center. Instead, they've got the headquarters of the election committee that controls the referendum. Trans-Space is representing itself as the government of an interstellar league of planets. They have everything set up to falsify the vote tomorrow."
Dan frowned. "What of it? I can still plant the mataform transceivers and we can bring men down from above."
"Yes, but Trans-Space has a mataform terminal set up in the terminal election headquarters. It hooks into the local system and connects with an outpost in the jungle on the surface. Trans-Space has been building up to this day for over three years. The election headquarters is manned like a fortress. It's in immediate touch with the outpost on the surface where they've got an army of reinforcements."
Dan stood still, thinking. He remembered the official with the carrying case in the corridor overhead, who had said to the angry crowd, "Go to the War Ruler." Dan mentioned the incident and said, "What about this War Ruler and his emergency powers?"
Kielgaard said, "It looked promising to us at first, but actually that's as if someone should say, 'England is in peril. Go to King Arthur.'"
"What?" said Dan, puzzled.
"The War Ruler is a myth. A thousand years or more ago, after a terrific internal war, they had a famine. They also had a huge army to disband, headed by a very popular leader. The army apparently threatened to take over the planet, but by a clever gimmick, the government put off the crisis. They announced that their scientists had discovered a way to halt the flow of time after the famine—and the War Ruler marched the whole army loyally into a kind of big mausoleum where they presumably killed the lot of them with a quick-acting gas. That is the War Ruler's Control Center.
"Ever since then, they've been making ritual gestures. They stock new arms of standard design nearby, and recruit a number of fresh soldiers to join the old—as a population control measure. To make the illusion complete, they say that any man or woman who sincerely believes the state to be in peril can enter the control center, by passing through a lethal field that kills the insincere and lets the sincere through alive. A number of people have tried it and got killed, so now they don't try any more."
"Where is this place?" asked Dan.
"If we read your map rightly, that wall in front of you marks the edge of the field surrounding it."
Dan set down one of the mataform units and mentally pronounced a keyword.
He was in the shelter under the river.
An instant later he was back by the wall, a glider and the control helmet in his hands. He clipped a transceiver to the glider and guided it toward a huge, dark-stained building with the look of a fortress. He sent the glider around to the front of the building and saw two huge bronze doors, one of which stood open. There was a totally still, motionless look about the place that Dan did not care for. But the glider had come to a closed inner door and that was as far as it could go. Dan took off the control helmet, drew a deep breath and said a key word.
He was standing in the huge hall, before the closed door. He opened the door.
Before him was a room with tall slit windows, and as Dan went in, he could see dimly, but, like a man in a hall of mirrors, what he saw did not make sense.
Distorted shapes and forms, with bright points and blots of light, shifted as he moved, and shifted again as he moved closer, to see one leg of what looked like a very old, faded table. A heavy cable ran up the leg to the top, where there was a switch, and a bronze plate with the words, "Open Switch."
Dan reached for the switch, and hesitated. If Kielgaard's theory was right, he would now be electrocuted, or otherwise disposed of.
He swallowed hard, reached the rest of the way, and opened the switch.
A pall of choking dust spread over the room, with the sound of coughing all around him and the rustle of clothing and stamping of feet.
Dan wiped his streaming eyes, and saw a man in uniform behind the desk, all but one corner of which looked new.
The man stared at Dan and said, "So soon? What's happened?"
Dan glanced around. The huge room was filled with tough, weary-looking men in combat uniform, all fully armed and equipped. He thought fast, turned back to the man behind the desk and said earnestly, "Peace is restored to the planet. It's been rebuilt and the damage is all repaired. But now, fantastic as it may seem, an enemy has come down to this world from outer space—"
The man at the desk angrily brought down his fist. "No one lives in outer space! That's foolishness!"
Dan said, his mind racing, "Whoever they are, they've seized a vital communications center! They've got men on guard, armed to the teeth. They've issued orders through captive government officials to seal off this part of the level from the public. They're trying to take over the whole government!"
There was a stir in the room and a low ugly rumble.
"I knew it," said the man behind the desk, jumping to his feet. "I knew they'd lie low and then creep back again when things are quiet. If we'd been demobilized, it would all have been for nothing. But wearen'tdemobilized!"
Abruptly there were shouted orders, and someone was gripping Dan by the arm. "Just lead the way. Show us where they are and we'll take care of the rest."
Dan said mentally, "Kielgaard?"
Kielgaard said, "Good Lord! Go straight outside and turn right."
Someone threw a switch beside the door. Outside, they followed Dan to the right. Behind him, Dan heard the mutter and cough of engines starting up. They were in a well-lighted street like that of a large city, but there was no traffic, either because it was late or because of the travel restrictions.
Kielgaard said, "Next left and it's in front of you."
Dan turned the corner. Directly before him was a large white marble building with a lawn on either side of a broad flight of steps, and guards on the sidewalk, the steps, and in emplacements in the shrubbery on either side of the steps.
One of them saw Dan and casually snapped a shot at him. Dan got back around the corner fast and looked around. On both sides of the street, men were lying flat at the bases of the buildings, or crouching in doorways. Down the street, they were running up a block to the left. Up the middle of the street came a tank. It paused just out of sight from the building around the corner, and an amplified voice boomed out, "This is the War Ruler. Get out of that building before the count of thirty, or we clean you out."
A voice began to count. There was a sound of fast footsteps on the sidewalk around the corner, and half a dozen men carrying guns came into view. Dan recognized some of the men who had searched the place where he'd landed his boat. One of them, not yet quite in a position to see the tank, called out irritably, "All right, you. Get out here!"
Then he caught sight of the men lying at the base of the buildings, and crouched in the doorways. He fired.
Flashes of light came from the men by the buildings. There was a roar and a grind and the tank rolled forward. A whistle blew. Dan heaved a mataform transceiver toward the emplacement at the base of the stairs, and an instant before it landed, he mentally pronounced a key word.
In the emplacement, he jerked the men away from their gun before they could fire a shot. He knocked them senseless, grabbed a rifle, and sprang up onto the staircase, with the intent of sprinting to the other side and diving into the emplacement there. Halfway across the steps, there was a sensation as if someone had smacked him between the shoulder blades with a rifle butt. He saw the stairs coming up to meet him, and then he saw nothing.
He came to with a pretty face smiling at him through a sort of fog. The fog cleared away, and a highly attractive nurse was looking at him very admiringly. She said, "Sir, you have a visitor."
Dan glanced around and saw Kielgaard, a sorrowful look on his face.
Dan said as the nurse went out, "She spoke Truthian, didn't she?"
"She did. You're still on the planet."
"What's this 'sir' business and the pleasant smile for?"
Kielgaard said. "You're a hero. It shows, incidentally, how the best experts can make awe-inspiring mistakes. We gave you fast reflexes, thinking that would make you safer. But it turns out that the planet has a class of authorized assassins who hunt down criminals for a livelihood, and never get too numerous because they fight each other for extra credits and prestige. With your fast reflexes and built-in wariness, the populace immediately spotted you for one of these lawful assassins, so you couldn't have been more conspicuous."
Kielgaard shook his head. "Meanwhile, Trans-Space was bringing in hired killers to knock off the planet's lawful assassins at a huge bonus per head, in order to create an uproar so that the election committee, which they had already captured and conditioned, would clap on more restrictions, thus creating more tension, so that Trans-Space could swing the referendum at the last minute. You see, the most dangerous thing we could have done to you was to give you these extra-fast reflexes. But now, because of it, you're a hero." Kielgaard looked sad.
"Luckily," said Dan, "I'm still alive. And so were all those soldiers."
"Another mistake of the experts," said Kielgaard. "The highest authorities on Truth strongly suspected something was wrong with the protective field around the control center. This made them fearful that the scientific device to halt the flow of time hadn't worked either. This would have been a terrible catastrophe, so by a set of rationalizations that would do credit to a bunch of habitual liars, they evaded the whole issue. The experts and I made the mistake of drawing the logical conclusion. I'm glad it wasn't so."
"What happened to Trans-Space?"
Kielgaard stopped looking sad and smiled a smile of deep satisfaction. "Galactic has its contract with this planet. Trans-Space is in a very anemic condition. The Truthians don't like people who lie, and they always settle their accounts very strictly."
Kielgaard's face subsided into its gloomy look.
Dan said, "What's wrong?"
"Well," said Kielgaard, "you see, you're a planetary hero for settling that business with Trans-Space. Also, you have—let's see"—he took out a slip of paper—"the equivalent of around six hundred thousand dollars spending money for cleaning out those apes, plus—I don't know how to translate this—six thousand mating credits. They have a weird system for romance, and these credits—"
Dan grinned. "Envious?"
"It isn't that," said Kielgaard. "I'm thinking how I'd feel in your place. These Truthians don't have any give in their system. Right's right, and wrong's wrong, and they hand out rewards and punishments irrespective of persons."
There was a sharp rap at the door.
Dan tried to sit up, but he was still too weak.
Kielgaard said sadly, "I tried to reason with them, but I might as well have talked to a wall."
"Listen," said Dan, becoming alarmed. "What's wrong?"
"I don't have the heart to tell you," said Kielgaard.
Picking up a large briefcase, he said, "Do what you think best. I might mention that we're giving you a bonus, though I suppose that's no consolation."
The rap at the door was repeated and there were sounds of arguments outside.
"What's in that briefcase?" said Dan.
"A big version of the kind of mataform transceiver you used. There's a dreadnaught of ours orbiting the planet with another transceiver like this on board. The key word, in case you should have use for it, is 'Krakior.'"
The door burst open and three men came in, arguing with a man in a white jacket.
"That doesn't matter," said the first man, a familiar-looking individual who was opening a square case with carrying handle. "The only question is, was it or was it not an unauthorized kill, and is this the man? We have our checker set up to answer this question and that's all there is to it." He glanced at Dan. "Hold out your fingertips, please, and touch those plates. Purely a routine check."
Behind the man with the case were two men with armbands and shields. One glanced disinterestedly at Dan and cocked his gun.
Dan looked at the head of A Section and said fervently, "Thank you, Kielgaard."
The doctor in the white jacket was arguing to no visible effect as the tube was held to Dan's eyes, snapped back into the case, and the case clapped shut, to give its loud alarm clang.
The assassin with the gun calmly leveled it at Dan and fired.
All he hit was a suddenly empty bed.
Dan had said the key word.