John Brunner (5 page)

"Look out!"

Who
called?
Horst
realized with amazement that it had been his own voice, and he had spoken too
late. The handling unit on the other side of the monitor was intact, and it
sprang into action. Two huge arms snatched Solomon off the deck. The power
surged and the stern-jets screamed, driving the hull into mid-channel again.
The arms shot out to full stretch and let Solomon go. He plunged into the
bladderwrack
beyond the channel, screaming, and the scream
ended abruptly as the glugging noise of collapsing floats greeted his fall.

There was a period of worse than silence,
during which the monitor evaluated its own damage, decided it was still
serviceable, and resumed the pursuit of its pelts. When it was out of sight,
Horst stirred.

"Now, we have no choice," he said.
"If we're going to get off
Zygra
alive we'll
have to tackle the main station."

"You're crazy!" Victor shrilled.
"If we can't even take
a
monitor,
what
chance have
we of—?"

"I'd
rather be crazy than dead," Horst whispered. "At least
...
I
think
I would."

V

When
the
announcement
reached
Kynance
, it was bald and
to
the point:

The
previous incumbent of the post of supervisor of
Zygra
has failed to exercise his option of a further year's employment. Kindly ready
yourself for departure aboard the starship
Zygra
One
at fourteen hundred tomorrow.

She looked at it a second time and gave a
sigh. She reminded herself about the repatriation clause and wondered if the
attraction of a guaranteed trip home was going to lose its glamour in the same
way as
zygra
pelts already had.

Suppose
the "previous incumbent" had exercised his option: what would they
have done with her, having stuffed her mind full of so much information? Washed
it all out again? Kept her on the staff in some minor capacity for a year and
then sent her to
Zygra
after all?

No,
more likely just turned her loose. In the history of the company someone at
some stage must have decided to stay on a second year at the last moment, but
the trainee replacement would have learned the same crucial fact that
Kynance
had grown to accept: just as the
Zygra
Company had given up misleading its rivals by making
them think the pelts were animal skins, so it had given up worrying about how
much an outsider knew of the technicalities involved. There was no place in the
universe where the data were of value except on
Zygra
itself. Launching an attack on the planet with a view to taking it over was
still a possibility—there were other operators in this sector of the galaxy
capable of mounting one or even two assaults fierce enough to defeat the
Zygra
Company's best efforts. But the main station and
substations were all
boobytrapped
; if they ceased to
receive a signal being broadcast by the orbital
guardposts
,
they released a flood of poison into the water, and for at least the next fifty
years, until the pelts reestablished themselves, there would be no crop worth
harvesting. And without destroying all the
guardposts
there was no chance of making a landing.

Moreover,
there was nowhere to
land
in the literal sense, so
that a ship designed to put down on the marshes instead of aboard the deck of
the main station was bound to be a somewhat peculiar vessel, bulging with
flotation chambers and equipped with some sort of seagoing propulsion. As part
of her training
Kynance
had been shown the record of
one ill-starred venture along these lines: the
Zygra
Company's spies had discovered the preparations being made to adapt a ship
belonging to a company on Loki, had waited till the work had been almost
done—involving the expenditure of half the rival company's capital—and then had
blandly notified the
Nefertitian
government, which
had a considerable stake itself in the
Zygra
operation, through the tax bills it imposed on the company's headquarters.

There had followed a protest to the
Lokian
authorities, a swoop by a team of inspectors from
the Bureau of Interstellar Trade, and a huge claim for damages which had
bankrupted the would-be pirates.

It
was with something of a shock that, towards the end of the didactic recital,
Kynance
had recognized a case which had been dinned into
her many times in college. "Manufacture of a device or devices uniquely
fitted to conditions pertaining on a world not legally accessible to the
manufacturer is
prima
facie
evidence of piratical
intent"—the
Zygra
Company and the Government of
Nefertiti versus Wade, Wang and
Hoerbiger
, 2113,
otherwise irreverently known as the smile on the face of the
zygra
.

At
first she had wondered why the company didn't simply assign members of its own
staff to hold down the chair for a year at a time, perhaps on a
rota
basis. Later she had realized this was contrary to
outworld
psychology; anyone making a career with the
company was trained for work far more important than sitting on
Zygra
and watching a lot of machines tending a lot of moss.
Any casual applicant, reasonably greedy and moderately intelligent, would
suffice, and would cost no more than salary for a year and ship-room to and from
the
Zygra
system plus a course of training that
occupied a mere fraction of the computers' attention, and would be
dismissable
on his return without the company having to
worry any more about him.

If
someone with inside information about harvesting the pelts wanted to sell out
to another company, he'd have to have experience at the headquarters end as
well as on
Zygra
, and if he worked well enough to
rise in the firm to a level where his knowledge was likely to be useful to a
third party, he'd have to be either a fool or a maniac to risk the gamble.

Kynance
was coming to admire the
Zygra
Company in an upside-down fashion.
There was no denying the efficient cynicism
with which they conducted their operations.

As
the reluctant admiration grew, so her original doubts subsided. This was no
chiseling two-bit undertaking which could add to its profit margin by a fat
percentage if it weaseled on its employment contracts. This was a firm big
enough and inarguably profitable enough to tolerate such minor budget items as
repatriation of an
Earthsider
. An extra five percent
on the freight charges for a single consignment of
Earthbound
pelts would more than absorb her passage home.

And
she was not going to give them the slightest hint, the slightest suggestion of
a hint, that she had infringed the contract.

Since the interview at which she'd been
engaged, she hadn't seen Shuster again. But he was the first person she spotted
when she presented herself at the spaceport an hour ahead of the scheduled
time, and she recalled with sick anticipation that he had claimed to be
directly in charge of the
Zygra
supervisors, so there
was no chance of eluding him.

She
mentally squared her shoulders, and marched boldly towards him. The group of
spacemen with whom he was talking noticed her before he did, and one or two of
them stared in a flattering manner. Then the senior among them, a lean type
with second-mate braids on his tunic, tapped Shuster's arm and pointed towards
her.

"What's
the girl doing here,
d'you
know?" The words carried
distinctly above the racket from the
stemgates
of the
ship, where
autohandlers
were packing in empty
pelt-crates that rang with hollow booms every time they were moved.

Shuster
half-turned, and recognized her. Was he still smarting from the smack on the
face? She couldn't tell by his expression, nor by the tone
he
used
to answer the inquiry.

"Her?
Oh, that's the new supervisor taking over from Evan."

"What?"
The second mate recoiled as though he'd been struck under the chin, and two or
three of his companions exclaimed simultaneously. "Now look here,
Executive! You can't do a thing like that to—"

"Shut
your mouth," Shuster told him coolly. "If you want to keep your berth
aboard this ship . . . ?" The last word rose to a gently questioning note,
and the second mate swallowed hard and held his tongue.

Eyes
searching for some clue to the reason for the outburst, all her misgivings
returning in full force,
Kynance
stopped a pace
distant from Shuster.

"Congratulations,"
he said icily. "I'm informed you're the best trainee the company has ever
had for the post you're taking on."

"Thanks,"
Kynance
muttered. It seemed safest to stifle her dislike of the man until he made some
overt reference to the reason for it.

Let him
fust
try and talk me out of it again!

"Executive!"
the second mate said. "Does that mean you won't—?"

"If you poke your snout in one more time
where it doesn't belong," Shuster snapped, "I'll cut it off. Is that
clear?"

Kynance
shivered. The looks on all these faces,
except Shuster's own, were such as she would only have expected to see at a
funeral. There must be a catch in the deal after ail-that was the only
explanation!

But she'd persuaded herself there couldn't
be, because the
Zygra
Company was too prosperous to
bother with cheating its casual employees. Anyway, what sort of cheating was
possible? By now she could have recited the contract word for word from
memory, and there wasn't a loophole. The grounds for voiding it were set forth as
clearly as anyone could wish, and provided she kept her head she'd last out the
year.

"Go
to your cabin," Shuster was saying. "It's clearly arrowed from this
lock here: number ninety. And remember that you are not to interfere with the
running of this ship in any way. Delaying a crewman in the exercise of his duty
constitutes interference, and when the ship is at space all crewmen are
considered to be on duty twenty-four hours a day. In short, you will break your
contract and lose your chance of repatriation if you talk to anybody except me.
Is that understood?"

He
could have been reading her mind. Her plan had been formed a moment earlier: to
corner one of these glum-looking men and pump him for explanations. He'd
sensed it and forestalled her with orders given before witnesses. Pretty girl
or no pretty girl, a spaceman in the lucrative
zygra
trade wasn't going to jeopardize his career for her sake.

Was he?

Hopefully
she surveyed the men one last time, and read in their shrugs that they were
resigned to her fate, whatever it was.

Why not? It's not going to happen to them!

Abruptly
she discovered that she hated the
Zygra
Company and
Shuster as its personification, because contact with him had made her so bitter
that she seemed like a stranger to herself.

With
weary apathy she entered the ship and found her cabin. Surrounded by the noise
of preparations for takeoff, she stowed her gear and sat down on the bunk.

In
five or ten minutes—she had lost track of the time— Shuster came calling.

Shifty-eyed, he slipped through the door and
pushed it closed quickly. He gave her a quick false smile and spoke in low
tones.

"I'm
sorry I haven't been able to see you since our first meeting, my dear, but I've
been tremendously busy—you'll understand that the company's business follows
the same life-rhythm as the pelts themselves, ha-ha!, and as the time for
harvesting approaches so we find ourselves more and more frantically busy—but I
have kept a close eye on your progress and I must say that despite your lack
of what we generally lay down as minimum qualifications for entering our
employment, that is to say a scholar degree in some major field, you've done
very well and it might easily be possible to arrange for you to join the
company's permanent staff on completion of your tour at
Zygra
. . . . "

All
this time he had been closing the distance between them, and now he was sitting
next to her, hands returning to the very same positions from which she had
pushed them on the former occasion.

She
detested men who were so egotistical that their preliminaries to love-making
followed a pattern like a computer program, fixed and unalterable, so that a
girl could never tell if they were thinking of her, or the last partner, or the
next. She gritted her teeth, forcing herself to stay calm in the hope of
picking up some clue to the pitfall she had overlooked.

There
must be one. She was convinced she had deluded herself.

"I
think perhaps that during the voyage we could become quite good friends, don't
you? And a word from me in praise of your ability could carry a lot of weight
with the firm, you know . . . . "

Fumble,
maul, squeeze—no, it was more than she could stand. She didn't slap him this
time, but made her voice sound as though she wanted to when she said stonily,
"I'm sorry, but I'm not interested in a career with the company. I want to
get home, and if it takes a year on
Zygra
to do it
I'll spend a year on
Zygra
."