Planet in Peril (19 page)

It was Dai
Humayun
, and the dress was the
Siraqi
military uniform.

“You’re awake,”
Humayun
said. “But not
Dinkuhl
?”

“He’s been roughed up badly.” Charles felt his own head. “Your men seem to get some pleasure in the use of blunt instruments.”

Humayun
smiled. He had a slow smile that warmed his normally severe features. “The need for secrecy precluded the use of more advanced methods of repression. I won’t say that some of them may not have been a little heavy-handed. Enthusiasm is a good fault in the military. But they know where to hit without doing permanent damage. And that was in their instructions— to avoid any permanent damage.”

“Very thoughtful. Do you think something could be done about making
Dinkuhl
comfortable, now you’ve got us here?”

Humayun
nodded. He pressed a wall button. “You have not been here long. They dropped you here, and then informed me. I came almost at once. You must have been coming around when they left you.”

“Anyway, we’re here.” Charles gestured toward the window. “In—”

“The capital of the world.”
Humayun
smiled again. “El
Majalem
. The Averroes Institute. Seventh floor. Room ninety-three. I take it you recognize me? You will have seen my records. How are things in California?”

“Yes,
I recognized you. California—it’s a few weeks since I was there.”

Two orderlies, also in uniform, brought a stretcher in.

Humayun
said: “He should have been taken to sickbay. See that he's looked after.”

As they left the room, Charles said urgently: “Sara— she's all right?”
Humayun
nodded. “And her father?”

The remark amused
Humayun
. “Yes. Professor
Koupal
is in good health and spirits. Very good spirits. He wants to see you.”

“And Sara?”

“That's a matter for Professor
Koupal
. We'll go along now, if you're ready.”

Charles held his hands up. The rope had cut deeply, and it had been oily. “A wash would be useful.”

“Yes, of course. Our sanitary arrangements are not quite managerial, but I have a lavatory attached to my office here. Come on down.”

Humayun's
office was two floors below; they went down and
Humayun
showed him to the lavatory.

“You’ll find me back in the office when you're ready,” he told him. “Soap, towels—got everything?”

Charles tidied himself up as well as he could, and went out to rejoin
Humayun
. He got up from his desk, and then sat down again.

“Something you may be interested in, before we go along to Government House. Have a cigarette? Take a chair.”

The cigarette was very welcome, and Charles was not reluctant to sit down. He glanced around the office. Nothing unusual, except that it was rather untidy. There was a TV screen inset in the wall.

Humayun
spoke into some land of tube: that was new.

He said: “Get me
Gathenya
.” He glanced up at Charles. “We use wire more than you do for communications. A result of being closely knit and centralized. There's a saving on power, and we have had to learn ways of economy.”

The screen lit up to show a man sitting at a desk. He apparently recognized
Humayun
, and saluted him.

Humayun
spoke to him in French, and he nodded. “
Oui
,
General”
The screen blanked, and opened up again to show a factory interior. It was a mass-production layout, but not automated: there seemed to be far too many workers.
Humayun
said something else in French, and the cameras switched to a close view of the end of the line. The products were being picked off the line and carefully stacked for transfer somewhere else. They were small, metal, egg-shaped.

“Recognize them?”

Charles shook his head. “Should I?”

Humayun
gave another instruction in French. This time the scene cut to a courtyard, enclosed but open to the sky. It was filled with a swarm of monstrous bees. Men flying.

These, too, wore
Siraqi
military uniform. Each was encased in a skeletal framework of metal. The framework had a footrest, a seat, and a waistband with certain controls. From the waistband the metal rose in a hoop above the flyers head. At the top of the hoop were the vanes; horizontal for take-off and inclinable in various directions for routine flying and maneuver. As the scene became more clearly visualized in Charles’ mind, he understood that quite a complicated aerial parade was taking place. One flyer, hovering motionless at one end of the courtyard, was an instructor; the rest were obeying his commands.

“A very neat design,” he commented at last. "Powered by ...?"

“As you will have guessed, by the diamond-solar battery. Those were the batteries you have just seen coming off the assembly line.”

“Congratulations. But I don’t know how you did it, in the time. I saw at least six months’ work in the development stage, quite apart from the time required for production-tooling up, and so on.”

Humayun
smiled. “Of course. That’s why I can’t accept the congratulations. We have had people working here on it right from the beginning. My job at San Diego was a stalling one for the last year. Not as easy as you might think.”

Charles looked at him
skeptically
. “Two questions. How could you have people working on this here in
Siraq
, when you and the
Koupals
were refugees? And if you did have them, why give any information at all to United Chemicals? You gave enough to interest more than one managerial.”

“So I understand. The answer to the first question is that this is a capitalist country, not a managerial one. Disorganized, ramshackle, inefficient. So inefficient that it was not at all difficult to carry out research work unknown to the government of the time. Professor
Koupal
was Director of this Institute before our misfortune. The President was badly misinformed; the man he appointed in succession was one of our group. It was quite easy to camouflage the work.

“As for your second question, the idea was in a very embryonic stage indeed when we left
Siraq
. I needed a laboratory and funds very urgently. I had to wave some kind of carrot under the noses of those donkeys at Graz. And I had to continue to give them enough to persuade them to maintain the project—though I understand a good deal of what I did send was being intercepted by Ledbetter for another managerial?”

Charles nodded.
Humayun
went on: “And I was fairly confident that there wasn’t one of them with the training and brains to make anything of the information, anyway. From what Sara told me about you, I discovered that I had made a mistake there. Our men tried to locate you, but various other groups got on to you first. I should be interested to learn why they didn’t manage to keep you. Anyway, you dropped very neatly into our hands.” “Into your hands?”

“The
Cometeers
.”

“The
Cometeers
are a
Siraqi
organization?”

“Let’s say, we provided the first spark for the powder trail. Its success has rather overwhelmed us. Our psychological advisers plotted it out, but I think even they have been surprised by the results. The present membership figures are astonishing, and there's a steep upward curve for the rate of increase”

“The instruments used by
Siraq
are not such that they commend
Siraq
to me,” Charles said.

Humayun
shrugged. “A pity. Unfortunately, the
Cometeers
are necessary to our plans. We aren't fond of them ourselves, but at the same time they could never have succeeded unless the society in which they flourished was corrupt. And there's another point. We expect them to be the means of saving thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of lives. The majority of them not
Siraqi
.”

“In what way?”

“You will be told, I fancy. We should be getting along. There's one other thing you might be interested in first.”
Humayun
spoke into the tube again, and again the TV picture changed. A larger courtyard. More of the flyers. They watched them drop down toward a row of black canisters laid out at about three-yard intervals on the ground. The frameworks supporting these flyers carried on each side a small barrel-like affair, terminating in a nozzle. Suddenly, and presumably at a word of
command because the effects were nearly simultaneous, there was a lambent flickering around each of the nozzles, and on the ground the canisters—or all but two of them—burst into flame.

“The heat ray,” said
Humayun
. “Beloved by managerial TV serial writers. The other diamond application. Unfortunately limited to use in conditions of sunlight, but, granted those conditions, most effective. Variable focus, but only between certain limits, of course, and the range is not very great. The heat, at point of impact, is. I won't give you a figure, because I don't think you would believe me. A surprise, you think?”

“Only in its actual appearance,” Charles said grimly. “A few people have grasped the idea.”

“Then they will be surprised, to see their idea marching on the wings of the wind.”

Humayun
switched off the screen, and got up to go. Charles said: “One thing. How much of all this did Sara know—when she was with you at San Miguel?” “Our conventions are perhaps peculiar. There are some things we don’t regard as suitable for women—they include counter-revolution and military strategy. Sara didn’t know anything.”

Humayun
said: “May I present you? Charles
Grayner
—Professor
Koupal
, President of
Siraq
.”

The gyro had brought them to the grounds of a modest little house on the outskirts of El
Majalem
, and the room in which they now were was as unassuming. Professor
Koupal
got up to greet them from a scratched and shabby desk; there was no large TV screen in the room, but a portable
callscreen
beside the desk. Professor
Koupal
smiled, and Charles remembered and recognized the humorous slyness he had seen on the morning of Sara’s disappearance.

Professor
Koupal
said: “Our apologies, Charles. I hear you’ve been somewhat roughly handled, too. That wasn’t intended. We’ve been inculcating aggressiveness into our soldiers, and it’s difficult to prevent them from overdoing it at times.”

“President?” Charles asked. “Since when? I haven’t been seeing the newsreels very lately.”

“Would your newsreels regard it as worth the recording? I suppose they might. But this has been a very secret palace revolution. We thought it best not to let the news leak out just yet. The
coup
d'etat
coincided with Dai’s return here. It was well planned and went without a hitch. I was called back when it was all over.”

“Sara—”

“I felt it was necessary to bring Sara with me. There were a number of good reasons for that, not the least being her value as a hostage if left behind. She expressed unwillingness when I told her.” Professor
Koupal
looked at Charles keenly. “She wanted to tell you, but of course that was impossible. I was afraid she might have left some clue, though I took all precautions.”

Charles remembered the incident of the finger-watch; with the false-Sara’s explanation out of the way, it assumed its earlier importance. He smiled slightly.

“I gather she did,” Professor
Koupal
said. “Well, never mind that now. The point of all the preparations was to throw United Chemicals, and any other managerial that happened to be interested, off the scent. We seem to have been helped by the local rivalry; even when the genuineness of the deaths was suspected, they were too eager to lay the blame at each
other’s
doors.”

Charles nodded. Only now was he beginning to grasp the scope of the plan underlying the work of
Humayun
, the disappearances, his own abduction. Keeping his voice even, he said:

“Hi
s
idea, I suppose, is of some sort of aggression by
Siraq
against the rest of the world—a foray for fresh territory.” Professor
Koupal
was smiling at him benignly. “How long has that been in preparation?”

“A very long time. On an old Japanese analogy, Dai and I were members of the war party. There was a peace party; our temporary eviction was the result of a temporary defeat in an earlier skirmish. The position has now been rectified.”

“You want war. Why?”

Professor
Koupal
raised his hands. ‘Wanting doesn’t enter into it. The world outside is breaking up. There will be chaos there, anyway, within a couple of decades, and, as the only state with any vitality at all, we should have to go out then and reclaim the chaos. It would be a long job and a painful one—unnecessarily so. It is simpler, and a lot more efficient, to precipitate matters. Has Dai mentioned the
Cometeers
to you? We’ve found confirmation for our views there, and it is of great help in the softening-up.”