Gordon R. Dickson (19 page)

“No, there’s nothing wrong with you,” said the physician, yanking Jim’s pajama top down and tossing the covers up on him again. “As for me—I don’t believe it. The only thing I believe is what I saw when you came in here—and that was a small perforation in your right side.”

“What is it you don’t believe, then?” asked Jim.

“I don’t believe that you had a burned area where that perforation was, a burned area at least two inches wide and six inches deep, six days ago,” said the physician. “Yes, I’ve seen the pictures of your ship on television, and I know what that tall girl told me, but I don’t believe it. In the first place, with that kind of damage done to you internally, you’d be dead long before you got here. Now, I can believe in a small perforation that heals without a visible scar. But I can’t swallow the larger story.”

“Is there any reason you should?” asked Jim gently.

“No, there isn’t,” said the physician. “So I’m not going to worry about it. As far as I’m concerned, you’re well and ready for anything—and I’ll so advise them.”

“Who’s them?” asked Jim.

The physician stared down at him.

“Doctor,” said Jim quietly, “for some reason you seem to have a bad opinion of me. That’s your privilege. But I don’t think it’s your privilege to keep a patient in the dark—not only about where he is, but about who it is who are evidently concerned with him. You mentioned a tall girl who told you about me. Is she outside right now?”

“No, she isn’t,” said the physician. “As for answering your question, the people who are concerned with you are officials of the world government. And I’ve been told that it’s my duty not to talk to you except as required in your treatment. You don’t require any more treatment, and so I’ve got no more excuse to talk to you.”

He turned and headed for the door. With his hand on the knob, he seemed to experience a twinge of conscience, for he paused and turned back to Jim.

“They’ll be sending someone in to see you shortly after I tell them you’re well,” he said. “You’ll be able to ask him all the questions you like.”

He turned away from Jim once more, tried the door, and found it locked. He pounded on it with his fist and shouted through it to someone who was evidently on the far side. After a moment the door was cautiously unlocked, and he was allowed to slip out through the least possible opening. The door slammed and clicked shut once more.

The wait was considerably shorter this time. It was no more than fifteen or twenty minutes before the door opened again—and immediately clicked shut once more—behind a man about ten years younger than the physician, with a brown, tanned face and a gray business suit. He came in, nodded unsmilingly at Jim, and briskly drew one of the chairs up to the bed. Jim sat up on the edge of the bed.

“I’m Daniel Wylcoxin,” the man said. “Call me Dan, if you like. There’s going to be a Government Committee Inquiry, and I’ve been assigned as your counsel.”

“What if I don’t want you?” asked Jim mildly.

“Then, of course, you don’t have to have me,” said Wylcoxin. “Actually, the Inquiry has nothing to do with a court trial. That’s to come later, if the Inquiry decides to take that course of action. Actually, you don’t legally need counsel, and if you don’t want me, I’m not going to be forced on you. On the other hand, it’s not likely the Committee would recognize someone else as counsel for you, since—as I say—counsel really isn’t supposed to be necessary for you.”

“I see,” said Jim. “I’d like to ask a few questions.”

“Fire away,” said Wylcoxin, leaning back in his chair and laying his arms flat on the armrests of it.

“Where am I?” asked Jim bluntly.

“That, I’m afraid, I can’t tell you,” said Wylcoxin. “This is a government hospital for special people and situations where secrecy is required. I was brought here in a closed car myself. I don’t know where we are, except that we’re no more than twenty minutes’ ride from Government Center, where my own office is.”

“Where’s my spaceship? And where are the woman and the man who came with me?”

“Your ship is at Government Center spaceport,” said Wylcoxin, “surrounded by security guards that keep everyone at a quarter-mile distance. Your two companions are still aboard the ship—for which you can thank the Governor of Alpha Centauri III. He’s here on Earth, and when government people wanted to move your two friends out and put their own men aboard the ship, the Governor evidently talked them out of it. It seems the woman you have with you is what they call a Highborn, and the Governor is evidently scared silly of anyone in that classification. I suppose I can’t blame him—”

Wylcoxin broke off to look curiously at Jim.

“I understand the Highborn run the Empire?” he wound up.

“They do,” said Jim flatly. “What am I doing here?”

“This lady, this Highborn—”

“Her name is Ro,” interrupted Jim grimly.

“Ro, then,” said Wylcoxin, “met the first government people to come aboard your spaceship after it landed. There was quite a well-known group, I understand, because the Alpha Centauri Governor, who’s visiting Government Center here, recognized the ship as being one belonging to these Highborn. Anyway, Ro let them aboard and told them quite a story, including how you got wounded fighting some kind of duel with a Prince of the Empire. She said you were a lot better, but she didn’t object when the government offered to take you to one of our own hospitals for care. Evidently they convinced her that whatever she could do, the kind of medicine you were used to might do you more good in the long run.”

“Yes,” murmured Jim. “She’s not the suspicious kind.”

“Evidently,” said Wylcoxin. “At any rate, she let them take you. And here you are. And the Committee’s scheduled to start its Inquiry as soon as you’re well enough to appear before it. I understand the doctor’s already certified you in that respect, so the proceedings will probably start tomorrow morning.”

“What are they inquiring about?” asked Jim.

“Well …” Wylcoxin leaned forward in his chair. “That’s the point. As I say, the Inquiry has no relation to any court procedure. Theoretically it’s called simply to supply the government with information, so that it will know how to act about you, your friends, and your ship. Actually, and I imagine you expected something like this, it’s merely a get-together to determine if there’s any reason why they shouldn’t set the wheels in motion to bring you to trial for treason.”

The final words of Wylcoxin’s sentence fell softly on the still air of the hospital room. Jim looked at him for a second.

“You said I ‘expected’ it?” Jim echoed quietly. “What makes you think I expected something like this when I got back here?”

“Why”—Wylcoxin paused and shot him a keen glance—“Maxwell Holland came back after you left Alpha Centauri III for the Throne World with those other Highborn, and evidently he reported you as saying then that you meant to pay no attention to your orders, but to raise any kind of hell you felt like raising at the Imperial Court. Certainly Holland is going to testify to that effect tomorrow before the Committee. Didn’t you say what he says you said?”

“No,” said Jim. “I said I’d have to follow my own judgment from there on.”

“That might sound like the same thing to the Committee,” said Wylcoxin.

“It sounds,” said Jim, “like this Committee has already made up its mind to consider me guilty of—what was it—treason?”

“I’d say they have,” said Wylcoxin. “But then, I’m automatically on your side of it. And your side of it doesn’t look too good from where I sit. You were carefully selected to be the man sent in to the Throne World, and trained at a great deal of trouble and expense, so that you could go among these Highborn and observe them. Then you were to report back to Earth with your observations, so government could make up its mind whether we were really a lost bit of this Empire, and bound to consider ourselves a part of it, or whether there was a chance we’d evolved on Earth here entirely separately—and really were a different race entirely from the so-called human beings of the Empire. Right?”

“Yes, that’s right,” said Jim.

“Good, so far,” said Wylcoxin. “But now, according to this Ro, instead of merely observing, you started out by getting into a fight with one of the Highborn and knifing him aboard the ship going to the Throne World, then followed that up by joining some military bodyguard belonging to the Emperor when you got there, winding it all up by involving yourself in some kind of intrigue in which the Emperor’s uncle and cousin were killed, as well as several bodyguards. Is that right?”

“It covers the physical facts of what happened,” said Jim evenly, “but it distorts them, and the situations that gave rise to them, completely out of recognition.”

“You’re saying that this girl Ro is a liar?” Wylcoxin demanded.

“I’m saying that she didn’t tell it that way,” said Jim. “Tell me, did you get the story direct from her, or secondhand from somebody else who heard it from her?”

Wylcoxin sank thoughtfully back in his chair and rubbed his chin.

“I got it secondhand,” he admitted. “But if the man who reported what she said to me can make it sound the way I made it sound just now to you, then that’s the way government witnesses will be making it sound to the Committee tomorrow morning.”

“It sounds more than ever like a hanging Committee,” said Jim.

“Maybe… .” Wylcoxin rubbed his chin thoughtfully again. Suddenly he jumped to his feet and began to walk up and down the room.

“I’ll tell you,” he said, stopping in front of Jim. “I wasn’t too happy about being assigned as your counsel. Maybe I’d been brainwashed a little myself.”

He checked himself.

“I don’t say that because so far you’ve said anything to make me alter my own feelings about you and the situation,” he said hastily. “I say that simply because you’ve opened my eyes to the fact that there might—I say might—be a certain amount of prejudice on the other side.”

He sat down again in his chair before Jim.

“Well,” he said, “let’s hear your side of it. What happened from the time you left Alpha Centauri III until you landed back here?”

“I got myself taken to the Throne World,” said Jim, looking straight at the other man, “to find out, as you say, whether the Empire was populated by humans we were related to, or whether we were a separate stock from them entirely. Everything else happened after that as necessity dictated.”

Wylcoxin sat for several seconds after Jim had stopped talking, almost as if he expected Jim to continue.

“Is that all you’ve got to say?” he demanded then.

“That’s all for now,” said Jim. “I’ll tell a more complete story to that Committee tomorrow if they care to listen.”

“You’re deliberately not telling me anything you know that might help you, then,” said Wylcoxin. “Don’t you understand, I can’t be of any use to you unless you’re as open with me as you possibly can be?”

“I understand it,” said Jim. “Quite frankly, I don’t trust you. I trust your goodwill and honesty toward me, but I don’t trust your capability to understand what I tell you, any more than I’d trust the capability of anyone else who hadn’t been to the Throne World himself.”

“Why, man,” said Wylcoxin, “that takes in everyone on Earth!”

“That’s right,” said Jim. “I don’t think anyone from Earth could help me much. Not if Max Holland, as you say, is there to testify against me, and the Committee seems determined to find grounds for bringing me to trial for treason.”

“Then I can’t be any good to you!”

Wylcoxin jumped to his feet out of the chair and headed toward the door.

“Wait a minute,” said Jim. “Perhaps you can’t help me by defending me, any more than any other Earth-born human can. But you can help me in other ways.”

“How?” Wylcoxin turned almost belligerently, with one hand on the doorknob.

“To start off with,” said Jim quietly, “by considering me innocent until I’m proven guilty.”

Wylcoxin stood for a second with his hand on the doorknob; then his hand dropped free. He came slowly back and sat down in the chair once more.

“My apologies,” he said, looking up to Jim. “All right. You tell me what I can do.”

“Well,” said Jim, “for one thing, you can go to that Committee meeting with me tomorrow as my counsel. For another thing, you can answer a few questions. First—why should the Committee and the government and people in general be so eager to find me guilty of treason when all I’ve done is come back safe, with a valuable spaceship and a couple of people from the Throne World? I don’t see how either of those things could suggest that I had treason in my heart when I was on the Throne World. Of course, there’s Max Holland wanting to nail me. But if it was just him, it doesn’t seem to me that I’d have too much to worry about.”

“Why, don’t you understand?” Wylcoxin frowned up at him. “All this talk of treason—all this is because they’re afraid that you did things on the Throne World that will make the Empire want to take it out on Earth, in payment or revenge.”

“Why?” asked Jim.

“Why …” Wylcoxin did not quite sputter, but he came close to it. “Maybe it’s because of you that an uncle and a cousin of the Emperor are dead. Isn’t it possible that this Emperor would want to make somebody pay for those deaths?”

Jim chuckled. Wylcoxin’s eyebrows rose in astonishment and bafflement.

“You think that’s funny?” the other man demanded.

“No,” said Jim. “It’s just that I suddenly see where it all came from, this fear that has me threatened with a charge of treason. Treason carries the death penalty, doesn’t it?”

“Sometimes …” said Wylcoxin, grudgingly. “But what’re you talking about?”

“I’m afraid I couldn’t explain it to you,” said Jim. “Tell me, can you go and see Ro aboard the spaceship?”

Wylcoxin shook his head.

“I tried that earlier,” he said. “The authorities wouldn’t let me go out to the ship.”

“Can you send her a message?” asked Jim.

“I think I can do that.” Wylcoxin frowned. “I don’t know if I can get an answer for you, though.”

“An answer won’t be necessary,” said Jim. “Ro gave me up to Earth’s doctors without any protest. So she must be trusting them, where I’m concerned. That leads me to believe that she doesn’t know what this Committee is aiming at with me tomorrow. Could you get word to her of what they’re after, and what their attitude toward me is likely to be?”