Earthworks (15 page)

“I thought you said it was to do with — having too many people?” He produced a thousand reasons for the state of the world, a new one with almost every book he managed to read, and I was confused. But he took me by the shoulders and shook me and laughed his split-faced laugh and said: “If you live to be a man, you’ll make a good arguer. Always listen to arguments, boy — sometimes there’s a grain of truth in them.”

Sometimes he seemed to treat me as if he thought I mattered. At other times, he growled that he was surrounded by fools like me and old Lamb and Hammer. Now that he was occupied with a customer, I crawled under the table and got under my blanket beside Hammer. March Jordill slept on top of the table, on a thick arrangement of wadding and pillows, for he suffered badly in his limbs from sciatic and other pains, so that sometimes we were scared by his groaning. The smell under the table was cosy and ripe, and we lay there against each other to keep out the cold, listening to the haggle with half an ear.

No conclusion was come to, for my master’s customer was clearly asking for the impossible. At last, my master showed the man to the door that led down the stairs to the street, and opened it.

A black-uniformed policeman came in, levelling a weapon at my master.

At the same time — we could see it from where we crouched — the door from the roof swung open, and another patroller appeared with a prison robot behind him. They must have been landed on the roof by whirleycab, and while the argument was going on we had not heard them.

March Jordill turned and saw he was trapped. His face went very white and old. It was funny: for the first time in my life, I realized that he was not a very old man, as I had hitherto thought of him, but a young man who was just all old on the inside. His limbs began to shake, almost like the man whose flesh we had watched fall off.

“What do you want?” he asked.

“March Jordill, you are charged with illegal trading on seventeen different counts,” one of the patrollers said. “You will come with us.”

“I want to hear the charges before I move from here,” my master said.

Boredly, the patroller brought out a little speaker and switched it on. It announced the seventeen charges, all of which Hammer and I recognized; they did not mention the Manskin idol, or any number of other deals, but I knew it was enough to get March Jordill shipped as a landsman for life.

Some mad ideas of helping him ran into my mind. I was going to jump out and shout at the cops, but before I could move, Hammer grabbed my shoulder and pulled me back into the darkness by him. He put a hand lightly over my mouth to show me that we must not speak or breathe.

My master was put into the prison robot. These things were legged and tracked devices, shaped roughly like a man; they opened up, and there was room for one person to be enclosed inside. The robot could then move under its own power, and take the person away for questioning in the police headquarters below the city.

And that’s what happened. In a minute, all the party was gone. I lay there absolutely stunned.

“Come on, grumble guts, we’re got to get out of here before they come back and search the place,” Hammer said, scrambling over me and climbing from under the table. “They’ll send us to the land just because we work for old Jordill. Get moving!”

I climbed out and stood staring at him miserably.

“You go,” I said.

“Too true I’m going — and if you’ve got any sense, you’ll get sparking too, Orphanage!” He was running round wildly. He had seized a clothes bag, and was stuffing various articles of value into it. I saw that March Jordill had stood the Manskin idol on a side ledge during his argument with the difficult customer (who had no doubt been planted by the patrollers); Hammer seized the idol and pushed it into his bag.

At the door, he paused and regarded me.

“Coming, Knowle?”

“Soon, I suppose.”

“Shake out of it, patient! The old boy’s gone for good, you know that. See me — right from now, I’m free and grown up. I’m going to make my own way. Why not come along?”

“Not yet.”

“Thumbs, then!” Lifting his thumb in salute, he left, the bag slung across one shoulder.

There was nothing in me. I went over to the dusty window and peered out. In a minute, Hammer appeared under the dim street lamp, for it was now dusk. As he stepped into the street, a uniformed man who had been watching the building came out of the shadows and grabbed him by the arm, twisting it and marching him off. Thus ended Hammer’s period of being free and grown up.

Now it was safe for me to make a getaway. But before leaving I stood there in tears, the first I had shed since orphanage days, tears for my solitude, tears for the darkness coming in like sludge, tears for my master, having his long and clever head punched far below, tears for things I would never know.

When, several years later, I became a landsman myself, I met Hammer again, now a guard, rough, crude, surviving. Throughout the years, I hoped that I would meet March Jordill again. It never happened. Instead, I found myself confronting, one particular hot day in Walvis Bay, the man called Peter Mercator, whom I had long known and loathed as “The Farmer”.

Chapter Ten

The surprise robbed me of the disadvantage I had. Yet perhaps what I did then surprised him more than anything else I could have thought of. I took off my dark glasses, folded them into a pocket, and said simply: “I’m Knowle Noland. You wanted to speak to me.”

He got up and came forward. With his white hair and black eyebrows, his face was very striking. I saw his eyes active under the eyebrows, searching me, summing me up.

“Certainly I want to speak to you. Let’s go and sit down over by the window.”

As I walked into the room, I saw that he had another man with him, a small and old man with a flabby face and restless hands that sought each other’s company. From his clothes and businesslike air, I guessed he was a professional man rather than a gunman — I was on the watch for trouble.

Mercator confirmed my guess by turning to the little man and saying: “I’d like you to leave us for a while, Doctor.”

The doctor hesitated. “Remember what I say. Drugs aren’t everything. You must rest more, or I won’t answer for the consequences.”

With quiet desperation (was it that?) Mercator said: “In two days’ time, Doctor, I will try to do as you bid, if we are still here.”

At that the doctor bowed stiffly and withdrew.

From the cushioned seats by the window, I could see down through the
Venetian blinds on to the promenade. In the brilliant afternoon’s sun, several people were strolling there, and I thought the place looked to be growing more crowded. It was a long way to the ground; I had forgotten for a while that this hotel room was seventeen storeys up.

“You are causing me a little trouble, Mr Noland,” Mercator said, seating himself so that he could scrutinize me as he had once done in an anonymous office, many years earlier. “I have no idea what whim drove you to walk in here like this, but I cannot allow you to walk out again a free man, at least until tomorrow night, when the fireworks are over and I am on my way back to England.”

“I have come to explain how innocently I am involved in your affairs. What you are doing here is of no interest to me, except in as much as it concerns Justine Smith.”

He raised an eyebrow, saying almost wistfully: “Justine...”

“Yes, Justine — your mistress!”

His face was more haggard than I recalled it. In the way he held himself, too, he looked not only older but ill. Deep lines ran down from his nose to his jaw. The lines accentuated themselves now as he said: “Certainly I am prepared to believe that you know very little about my organization if you believe that. Justine is not, in the sense you mean it, my mistress; nor could she be. She is a virgin. And in that sense, I also am a virgin.”

Angrily, I said: “You needn’t try to be funny.”

“I suppose you may find it funny, for I observe you are a pleb, but I am speaking of a matter of personal conviction; and on that conviction rests this present perilous enterprise. Justine!”

He called, and Justine herself came through from a side room. She looked as beautiful and as cool as ever. Her cheekbones, I noticed for the first time, were high, with shadows under them; and I wondered, with a flush of love, what nationality, or what mixture of nationalities, she might be. She went and stood by Mercator, who had risen, without touching him.

“Mr Noland has called on us, Justine.”

“I told you he promised to do so.”

“Justine!” I exclaimed. “You remember what I said to you — and you told me that you were Mercator’s prisoner. You lied to me!”

She said, frowning slightly: “You are very far from understanding this situation in which you flounder. Nor is it true that I told you I was Peter’s prisoner. If I said I was a prisoner, I was speaking metaphorically and meant merely a prisoner of necessity. What are we going to do with him, Peter?”

The glance they gave each other! Though both looked sick and harassed, there was complete trust in that look, a trust that inevitably excluded me, and I could not bear to see it.

I jumped up and faced Mercator.

“You do not recognize me,” I told him. “Why should you? We met only briefly many years ago, and then I was so stunned by long imprisonment and interrogation that to you I was just one of the many miserable landsmen dragged before you! To me you were then the Farmer, and I was too lowly even to know your real name. Now I am before you again, and in my right mind, and am not going to be fobbed off with the spoonful of scorn I was before!”

He sat down again. He put his brow against his hand, resting his elbow on his knee.

“How often I dreamed that nemesis would take the shape of a landsman he said, mainly to himself. “Noland, Noland...yes, weren’t you the man who gave evidence about the Traveller, Gipsy Jess?”

After all those years, my face burnt at the mention of that disgraceful night. Reading the affirmative he sought, Mercator continued: “And did you really think I treated you with scorn? Why, I did what I could for you! I saved you from the police cells. Didn’t I get you some sort of job?”

“You got me on to the
Trieste Star
as a bit of super-numerary human crew. I worked my way up to Captain long after you had forgotten all about me. I’ve come here to tell you that yesterday I had the pleasure of piling up that rotten ship of yours on to the shore not a dozen miles from here!”

He shook his head, looking at Justine as if for sympathy as he answered me. “I sold my interest in the Star Line freighters five years ago; most of my capital these days is tied up in the anti-gravity industry. That’s the up-and-coming thing; if you’ve saved any money, Noland, I’d advise you to put it in anti-gravity. Unless there’s a world war, of course.”

At that, he and Justine smiled wearily at each other.

“I’m offering the advice now, Mercator — I’ve suffered too much from you in the past.”

He rose and said: “I’ve no interest in past suffering. I’m too occupied with the present. I can’t let you go out of here, Noland. You obviously have a chip on your shoulder and aren’t entirely responsible for your own actions. Would you like a drink, and perhaps you’ll be good enough to tell me how you got mixed up with von Vanderhoot?”

Let me not say here how I hated this man who lived so easily, who enjoyed his power so easily, who turned aside my wrath so easily. Not only did I loathe what I thought of his attitude to life — I envied all the things and qualities he had that I had never found myself heir to.

“I’m explaining nothing, Mercator — kill me if you will. I told Justine what little I know and I’m not repeating myself. No doubt she repeated it to you. Nor will I have a drink with you.” Even as I spoke, to my added fury, my stomach rumbled loudly, reminding me how hungry I was.

He walked over to a cabinet and poured drinks for himself and Justine. Though he said nothing more, I saw with satisfaction that his hand trembled. Justine stood looking down at me. I could not interpret her dark gaze; my rough life had brought me nobody like Justine.

She said quietly: “You behave so strangely. You are ill in some sort of way, aren’t you? Would it help you if you understood what we are doing here?”

I burst into angry laughter.

“It’s a pleasure to hear you talk, Justine, whatever you say!”

She turned and walked into the next room. Mercator gave her a warning glance and a shake of the head, but she ignored him. I followed her. Mercator came meekly enough after her, handed her a drink in a slender glass and went out again, though he left the door open behind him.

Her voice when she spoke was low and conspiratorial. It was also husky with accusation. How hard it is to bear the contempt of a beautiful woman, even when your stomach grumbles its emptiness aloud!

“You are impossible with him, Knowle! Try — try and use some understanding of how others feel. Peter is a proud man, just like you — how can you expect any sort of agreement between you when you can speak to him the way you do?”

“Agreement? I can reach no agreement with him! He’s one of the men who have made my life a misery. But for him, I’d be — ”