Meeting at Infinity (12 page)

D
AWN BEGAN
to stain the sky. The great office on top of The Market filled and emptied incessantly as people came and went. The communicator panel was never dark for more than seconds together. In the midst of chaos Clostrides sat with his face growing haggard, but his voice still crisp and authoritative.

“From Dewitt Yorell, Bailiff,” said a messenger, handing across a signal slip. “Demanding to know what is the reason for postponing the attack.”

“Still no acknowledgment of your message from Lanchery, Bailiff,” said another messenger, briefly, turning and going almost as he spoke.

“From Dr. Knard, Bailiff,” said a third, proffering a small sheet of paper with a few cryptic numerals on it. “He’s got the co-ordinates of Akkilmar out of Erlking’s mind, he says.”

Rapidly Clostrides scanned the numbers. He said, “That’s fortunate—Yorell has a portal operating within a few miles of there. Now if we could put an invasion force through that! But what the hell can I use for troops if the Directors won’t play?”

Sitting inconspicuously at the side of the room, Jockey Hole stirred. “What’s the problem, Bailiff?” he said softly.

Clostrides shrugged. “The Market’s staff can’t cope with an invasion, that’s all. I’ve told the Directors to call off their attacks until we know what Akkilmar represents and how great a danger we’d be walking into; I also asked them to put troops at my disposal. They won’t. They’re scared-jealous of me and of each other, especially of each other. Let’s face it; whether the Akkilmar people manipulated them or not, what they’re after is Lyken’s prosperous franchise, and each one
of them is hoping he’ll be able to establish a decisive foothold there and squeeze out the others.”

“But you just need manpower? That’s all?” Jockey pressed.

Clostrides nodded.

“How would a couple of thousand yonder boys suit you, all tough as Tacketing and so bored they don’t mind what they do?”

Clostrides stared at Jockey with astonishment. He said, “Who
are
you, anyway, Hole?”

Jockey gave a faint grin. “I sort of run some things in the Eastern Quarter,” he said. “I have spoons in a lot of dishes. How else do you think I got Erlking away from both Lyken’s men and yours? It’s a good organization, though I’m saying so. I made it that way. Do you want my boys?”

“Do I want them? You produce them, I’ll use them. Two thousand—you’re sure of that many?”

Jockey spread his hands. “It may be two, it may be ten. Two is free falling on an hour’s notice.”

Clostrides spun in his chair and barked at the communicator panel, catching it between calls. An aide appeared on the screen, looking up wearily from his desk.

“Inform Yorell that we’re requisitioning the use of his Southern-K Portal,” Clostrides ordered. “And I want transport and weapons for two thousand men on—where shall I have the transport assembled?” he interrupted himself, with a glance at Jockey.

“I’d sort of like it in East Hundredth Street,” said Jockey. “They call it Holy Alley—after me. That’s where most of my boys hang out.”

“A hell of a lot one doesn’t know about this city,” said Clostrides, and finished giving orders to his aide.

From a pale smear in the east, the dawn spread until more than half the sky was blue. In the bowels of the rocky pillar where Lyken had his operations room, only the clock reported
the arrival of day. Around the room, the squat bulk of Tacket detectors searched for the first signals indicating the importation of mass into the franchise and found nothing but fugitive hints.

Shane Malco said, “What can be
keeping
them?”

Lyken raised his drawn face, on which the hours of waiting had etched their traces, and said, “You
want
them to come?”

“They’re going to anyway, aren’t they?” said Malco. His edgy voice was louder than he had intended; technicians working around a three-dimensional map of the area, ready to plot the attackers’ breakthrough points, looked up briefly.

“There may have been a hitch,” Lyken pointed out sourly. “If there is, that’s all to the good from our point of view.”

“Is it?” Malco was beginning, when one of the mysterious men from Akkilmar crossed the room at the far end, swept the people present with a curious, searching glance, and went out again. Lyken followed Malco’s gaze and guessed the reason why he said nothing further.

“What have you got against Akkilmar, Shane?” he demanded.

Malco shrugged and half turned away from his chief. “Nothing,” he said after a pause. “Except that—Ahmed, if you located these people more than five years ago, why have you never made anything out of them until now? I didn’t know of them, and I was your baseman!”

Lyken spread his hands, but they shook noticeably. He was struggling perhaps with growing anger. He said curtly, “They had nothing much to offer—only the perceptor, which we couldn’t use properly. They were never a proposition for trade. They never bothered us, so we never bothered them.”

“You’re too astute to say things like that and mean them, Ahmed,” Malco replied. “There’s a reason beyond that, and I’d give a lot to know what it was. Shane, have you any idea how many of these people there are going around the
base now, with
carte blanche
to open whatever doors and pry into whatever secrets they feel inclined?”

“That’s not quite true,” said Lyken, making himself sound patient to the point of exaggeration. “But as for how many there are—well, I don’t know. A dozen or two, perhaps.”

“You think so? I’ve been around the base a few times. I did a tour of the fire posts as well. There aren’t less than a hundred people here from Akkilmar. Maybe twice as many.”

Lyken didn’t answer except to shake his head.

“Ahmed, that’s not good enough!” Malco lost his temper at last. “I think these men from Akkilmar have duped you—blinded you! I think they’ve been stringing you along for who knows how long, and now they’ve tied the string tight around your neck.”

“I’m not going to take that, even from you,” said Lyken in a voice like ice. “Go away, Shane. And don’t come back.”

“If this goes on, I’ll have nothing to come back to!” Malco flared, and spun on his heel. He had taken a step forward before he saw that one of the men from Akkilmar had come silently up behind them on bare feet, and was standing facing him now with legs a little apart, fingers curled over like claws on the ends of his relaxed but poised arms.

The newcomer said very coldly, “There has been a betrayal.”

“What?” said Lyken. The newcomer fastened his eyes on Malco’s face, and did not look away as he continued.

“Our leader has been killed. There has been interference from your world, and one of us who went to rectify it has been ambushed by policemen. Who has spoken of us, Lyken?” Still his eyes did not wander from Malco’s face. Uneasily, Malco met the gaze with as much steadiness as he could.

“There is one of your staff, who is in your confidence,” said the man from Akkilmar, “who was not here before—whom we have not learned to trust!”

“Shane, Shane!” said Lyken sorrowfully. “How could you do such a thing?”

Thunderstruck, Malco felt his jaw drop. He stammered, “Ahmed! You’re not going to swallow a baseless accusation with no evidence like that! Are you?”

Lyken said nothing.

“What have these people done to you?” said Malco, stepping slowly backwards, away from the man from Akkilmar. His voice was dead, drained of emotion. But he uttered the question because he had to.

There was no answer. From a nearby door, two more of the men from Akkilmar appeared, and one of them held in his hand a black box like those which had made their kidnapped cannon fodder into invariably obedient soldiers. Malco’s eyes fell on the box with horror, and his mind raced like a machine suddenly opened out to maximum power.

He said, “Ahmed! Just a moment! Just a moment! Did you hear what this man said? He said that someone from Akkilmar went to deal with interference from our own world. He was ambushed by policemen. There are no policemen here. Ahmed, we have no portals open to our own world since we blew up the base. Don’t you see what that means? It means they went by some other portal! It means they must be collaborating with our enemies!”

Lyken’s turn to be thunderstruck, Malco noted with grim relief.

But before Lyken could speak, the man from Akkilmar had gestured to the new arrivals. The one carrying the black box shifted it deftly from left hand to right and brought it up with a bang against Shane Malco’s forehead. Almost in the same smooth movement, he rapped it against Lyken’s face also.

The one who had accused Malco said, “Now it is necessary to control you also. We need only await the arrival and
defeat of the invaders, and we shall be able to send whoever we wish under our control into your world.”

To Curdy Wence, city-bred, as to the other involuntary soldiers defending Ahmed Lyken’s base, this wild, rocky country was alien and incomprehensible. Even to those in command who had worked in the franchise for perhaps years, there were still strange things aplenty, which they had never taken the trouble to look into.

Therefore when Curdy Wence saw the brown figure move among the rocks, he did not fire at it. He tensed, because he was under orders to react to the sight of a man moving towards his fire post, and he brought up and sighted his gun. But a sharp order made his brain reel, bludgeon-like.

“That’s not an invader! That’s a wild man! He’s naked and savage.”

Curdy lowered his weapon uncertainly. The invaders would come with guns, wearing battle armor against energy bolts, and they would not move in such a casual fashion among the rocks. These must be local inhabitants, going about their ordinary business. The man he had caught sight of carried what appeared to be a pointed spear.

But he didn’t look like the scout of an invasion force.

Curdy’s vague guess that he might have been a hunter was borne out a few moments later, when a mob of wild pigs came grunting and squealing over the lanes of soil deposited among the rocks, pausing to burrow for a root here and there. The group consisted of a huge boar, who looked to Curdy at least as big as a man, with sows and some young ones already almost fully grown.

They moved around the fire post, skirting it forty or fifty yards distant. Abruptly Nevada caught sight of them, and his fevered mind must have acted before he could be slapped down by the searing mental command which had stopped
Curdy. He jerked up his gun and launched a bolt at the nearest of the pigs.

“Fool!” Curdy spat. “You’re not meant to waste your charge on
animals!”

The bolt had splashed on a rock within feet of one of the young ones, scorching its hide and singing away its coarse coat of bristles. At once the air was hideous with squeals like men being tortured.

Like lightning, then, the brown savage reappeared from among the rocks. He threw back his head and voiced a squeal indistinguishable from that of the pigs; then he flung himself forward and raced towards the fire post as though the rocky ground had been a smooth athletics track. He gathered himself in a vast leap and soared straight over its mushroom of armored roof.

Nevada was too dizzy from the mental blow which had followed his wasting of a valuable charge on a mere animal, or panic would certainly have made him shoot the wild man down. But neither he nor Curdy—looking half-backward over his shoulder because Nevada was facing the pigs at the moment, and he had not revolved the fire post’s turntable base—had time to react before the boar had lowered his head with its tusks like battering-rams and hurled himself screaming forwards.

The edge of the armored mushroom came to two feet from the ground; then there was a gap, then a low parapet on which the occupants would rest their guns to sight them for long distance shots. The parapet was only of native wood. The boar’s impetus smashed it down; the huge hoofed body slammed against Nevada’s head, jerked it back, snapped his neck like a dry stick, hammered Curdy Wence flat with concussion and two broken ribs—and was gone like a tornado.

T
HEIR FACES
already reflected their weariness, and it was only the beginning. With every additional fact, it looked more as though it was going to go on for a long time. They would have to start drugging themselves awake shortly.

The realization flashed briefly over Clostrides’s mind as he heard Sergeant Carr out. Knard was listening; so was Jockey Hole. The sergeant was a simple policeman and hardly understood the significance of what he was saying, but he had memorized his message well, and it made sense to his listeners.

“She said to tell you that the perceptor is an analogue not just of one reality, but of all realities. It doesn’t depend on matter, so its fine discrimination depends only on the practice you have in using it. After a long time you get to control it—first you influence people to set events in train that you desire, and in the end you can impose yourself on it so strongly that you can sort of create yourself in another Tacket world. She said she’d done it. She said she had been to Lanchery’s franchise and told him to disobey your orders.”

“What?” Clostrides jerked forward.

Carr gave a dogged nod. “She said to explain to you that she suggested the idea to Lanchery in the first place. She said the idea is that the people from Akkilmar will be looking for an invasion of soldiers with modern armor and energy guns. What they’ll get will be animals they can’t control, and savages with spears that the defenders will take at first for local natives out hunting. She said to say it’s bound to work.”

“But—” Clostrides began. Knard raised his hand.

“I’m beginning to understand a lot of things,” he said. “What has happened here is that Allyn has been driven by her desire to revenge herself on her husband to explore far
more of the potentialities of the rho function field than anyone else has outside Akkilmar.”

“That’s about what she said,” Carr confirmed. “And she said that any perceptor reflects all other perceptors, too—that’s why the people out there gave the perceptor to us, just to have some in our world. That was all they needed to know what was going on here. Seems it’s easier, she told me, than doing it without—though that’s possible.”

“But if they can come and go between the Tacket worlds as they like, they could just invade us and wipe us off the map.” Clostrides had to wipe sweat from his face.

“They don’t think in terms of invading us and wiping us out. They’ve schemed this attack on Lyken to get a large number of us under their mental control. They work like that, always at a distance, manipulating people and sort of inching them into the right actions to give what’s wanted as a result.”

Clostrides folded his hands tightly together, making him hurt himself. He thought of being a puppet, moved as though by strings from a distance. He found the idea loathsome.

“She said, too,” Carr went on, “that they felt superior to us because we haven’t their mental disciplines, because we have to use portals to get from one Tacket world to another, and all like that. She said they knew she was taking a hand, right from way back—and they even told her they knew, sort of. Or let her guess it. But they thought so little of us—I mean, like they’d already given us the perceptor and been sure we couldn’t use it properly—they were sort of patronizing, and treated her like a kid playing a game for grownups. It wasn’t till they got wind of her having been to Lanchery’s franchise and interfering there in some way they didn’t know about that they got to taking her seriously.”

“Was that all?” prompted Clostrides.

“Just about. Except that she said she didn’t care about getting back at her husband any more, and maybe it was an
accident that burned her, not a try at murder. She said it was because her beauty was all burned off.”

Knard breathed a gusty sigh of relief. Clostrides shot a keen glance at him.

He said, “Well, one thing is clear. We’ve got to start taking Allyn Vage seriously, if she’s really so skilled with the perceptor now.”

“Was she all right when you left her?” Knard demanded of Carr, who shrugged and nodded.

“I guess so. I left a guard in case one of these characters who spring from nowhere turned up again. And she showed me what to do to her—her gadgets, the medical things she’s all done up in.”

“She what?” said Knard, in a chill voice like a sudden death knell.

Carr looked bewildered. “Like I said. She explained I had to turn a stopcock and pull a couple of switches—said it was to wake her up properly because she was kind of low at night—”

Knard stood up with his face white as paper, his hands suddenly clenching, and took half a step forward. He barked at Carr, “Don’t you realize what you’ve done, you fool? If you turned a cock and pulled two switches, you turned off her nutriment supply—her blood-flow, her
heart!
—and you turned off her perceptor!”

Carr’s mouth worked. He shrank back from the threatening glare of the doctor, and tried to speak. Only the rushing sound of exhaled breath gave form to his words. He said, “But she
told
me to do it …”

“Does that mean that—?” began Clostrides, and could not finish. Knard moved slowly back to his chair and sat down again, like a zombie, without conscious intention.

“Allyn Vage, then,” he said, “is dead. Any more ideas?”

Into the pause which followed broke a call on the communicator. His face lowering, Clostrides answered it, and the
harassed aide whom he had earlier instructed to assemble the weapons and transport for two thousand appeared on the screen.

“We got our forces down to Yorell’s Southern-K Portal, Bailiff,” he said in a lifeless voice. “Personnel in charge there refuse to let them through without Yorell’s personal authority. Yorell sent back a reply to our requisition which I don’t think I ought to repeat. What do I do now?”

Clostrides frowned with the effort of having to shift his attention. That was new to him. He could never remember having felt like this before. Nor did he usually have to look about him—look at people who were not even his comparative equals, the Directors of The Market—for guidance in a decision. He thought suddenly he was getting old.

“Do we go ahead, in view of what we know now?” he said. It cost him a great deal to ask that question.

Jockey stirred in his seat. He said, “If I’ve untied the string right, Bailiff, we’re scared that maybe people involved have been sort of prodded into doing what the numbers at Akkilmar want. Gold?”

Clostrides gave a heavy nod.

“This I tell you, Bailiff,” Jockey went on. “Whoever got prodded, it wasn’t my boys or me. We’re down the bottom of the pile. We’re the dregs of society. We’re the half that lives on a pension and what we can graft off the pleasure pads and the rest of all that. If these numbers at Akkilmar feel all superior to you and Lyken and whoever else, they won’t notice the yonder boys at all. You use my boys, Bailiff. Get me a line to Gaffles at this place of Yorell’s where they’re being sticky. Let me tell him how to make it free falling all the way, gold?”

Why he did what he did next, Clostrides did not know until it was over. He got out of his chair. He stepped aside from it, and indicated to Jockey Hole that he was to take his
place. There was a long silence. The aide stared out of the screen, bewildered, waiting for orders.

“Gold!” said Jockey at last, and moved to the chair. He closed his eyes for a moment, as though feeling the aura of power which came from it, then snapped them open again and barked at the man in the screen.

Neither Gaffles, who was in command as far as it was possible to command this wild force, nor any member of the two thousand-strong gang of yonder boys that swarmed into Yorell’s southern import center knew very much about what they were doing or why. They knew they were doing something, and it seemed to be something important. That meant a lot to them. Down on the bottom of the pile where they came from, there wasn’t anything important to do, except what they made important for themselves. They could run for Jockey Hole, the biggest frog in their little puddle. That was as close to real importance as they could get.

Jockey knew that. He’d been where they still were; he knew better than they did that he had never got very far away from there. He had told Gaffles that because of this the two thousand would not be a simple rabble—they might not take strict orders or accept much discipline, but they would act in concert and they would get things done the way they thought best. His final order was as straightforward as the rest.

“Turn ’em on and let ’em run!”

They had never handled anything more deadly than a whangee stick or a knife, most of them. Now they had gas guns and some energy guns. One bolt was fired, and that was for a purpose, in the storming of the high blue citadel which housed Yorell’s Southern-K Portal. Two hundred out of the two thousand set to work preventing interference while a group of amazed and worried technicians, who had come down from The Market with instruments calibrated to locate
Lyken’s franchise, zeroed in the portal on the right world among thousands.

There were qualms when the yonder boys saw the soap-like film stretch before them, leading into the alien world; city-nurtured, all of them, they distrusted the country before them. They paused, crowding the great hall into which Yorell brought the trade goods from his franchise by the hundred bales or the hundred tons at a time, and wondered again about what they were doing.

Across the hall, Gaffles caught the eye of Tad, who had helped him capture Erlking in the fight at the Pleasuredrome. He curled his lip with a hint of a sneer, as though to imply, “Yellow!”

Tad went through, and the rest went after him, in a stream a half-mile long.

They tramped two miles, and there the determination almost had time to leak away. Somehow it lasted out. And they came to Akkilmar, a town of wooden buildings with grass between them as smooth as well-kept lawn, close to the sea. On a rise overlooking it, there were woods, among which Gaffles mustered his forces and enjoined them to utter silence. It seemed that the woods breathed, but that was all.

Cautiously, accompanied by the technicians who had made their arrival at Akkilmar possible, he crept forward to the very edge of the woods, and from a hiding place behind a thick clump of bushes studied the town with binoculars.

There were some people visible, moving about among the houses, who wore little more than metal ornaments and seemed as primitive as any aboriginals on any known Tacket world. But these were few. Far outnumbering them, men and women, wearing elaborate harnesses of dull gray over drab costumes so bulky that Gaffles guessed instantly they must be armored, gathered in the grassy lanes. Around them, these people had weapons girded. Some of them were attending to huge ovoidal devices of shiny wire which they set spinning
on blocky cubical pedestals. Others were assembling loads of square black boxes on platforms which hummed above the ground and could be moved from place to place by operators walking behind and touching them lightly to steer them.

Beside Gaffles, the technician who was nearest drew in a sharp breath. He said, “Those are no savages!”

Gaffles shook his head. “They’re the enemy,” he said. “I think—”

Abruptly one of the platforms loaded with black boxes rose from the ground at a steep angle and began to soar towards the north. There was the spitting hiss, from somewhere along the edge of the wood, of an energy gun, and the bolt it launched struck the flying platform squarely, like a clay pigeon, and melted it into a fiery ball.

Gaffles checked what he had been going to say. He cursed under his breath, and regretted it. There was nothing to be done now except one thing. He threw back his head and gave a tremendous yell.

He shouted, “
Fire!
”