John Wade Farrell
Destiny Deferred
Sevridge sat down without waiting to be asked. “Three days I wait to see you, Blount. How important can you get?”
Blount’s side-of-beef face was impassive. He looked at Sevridge from under up-curled grey eyebrows with little eyes like a shoemaker’s tools. “You suffer. You kill me.”
“I want to see the plan, Blount. Aren’t you dizzy sitting on the top rung of the ladder? Maybe you forgot that three years ago we were drawing the same pay for the same dirty work, and when you did the cooking, it stank.”
“Don’t get shirty, Sevridge. You can be replaced.”
“I want to see the plan for R eighty-eight. I may have something to say about it.”
Blount sighed. “Habilitation Service is not paying you for anything you have to say, Bob. You draw your pay for making the surveys, organizing the equipment and making the planet fit the plan.”
“Let’s see the plan, Blount. And don’t try to bluff me. You can replace me and get some kid that’ll be running back panting every time he breaks the jaws on a BX pulverizer. I capsuled all the photos and projections back here and you’ve had the seven months I was in transit to work it out. So let’s see it.”
Blount shrugged and swung around in his chair. He dialed the index and waited until the requested objects thudded into the scoop. He slid the door back and took out the first globe. “There she is now,” he said.
He flipped the almost weightless globe, on a scale of ten thousand miles to a foot, over to Sevridge. It was the result of forty thousand separate pieces of datum, so exact that microscopic examination would reveal no variation between it and the actuality — the newly-charted world, R-88, ninety-one light years distant, one of a score of current projects of Habilitation Service.
Sevridge spun it in his fingers and set it aside casually. It was the second map-globe that he cared about. Blount handed Sevridge the second globe, settled back in his chair with the hooded expression of a poker player.
Sevridge made a careful examination. The mountain ranges were gone, the seas’ ragged borders geometrized, polar caps and tropic belt sterilized into featureless flatness, the asceptic cubes of the power transmitters dotted in checkerboard pattern over the whole face of the planet.
He set it gently on the desk in front of him. “I thought so,” he said heavily. “I heard the rumor but I couldn’t believe it.”
“It’s a natural answer,” Blount said, his voice casual. “I don’t see why you should be so excited. Even you should have seen it coming when you knew we’d taken the regular options on the whole five planets of the system. If we made a normal habilitation, it would give us just R eighty-eight. But by turning R eighty-eight into an automatic power station transmitting to the other planets it gives us four instead of one. That’s simple economics, Sevridge. Common sense.”
“How about sun-boost stations on each one, giving you five planets?”
“You know better than that. Too bulky, too expensive. And less net habitation space in the end.”
“They giving you a bonus for this, Blount?”
“That’s hardly any of your business. But maybe if you get this plan through ahead of deadline I can arrange you a bonus.”
“You can’t buy me like you bought Species Rating.”
Blount’s heavy face reddened. “Watch what you say, Sevridge,” he said softly.
“I’m saying it. You saw my reports. I’m an amateur at it, but I rated them. They came out sixteen point three on the scale — well over the minimal sentience rating of nine point nine. But if Species Rating puts them officially over nine point nine your little plan is licked. You’ve got to leave them their planet and their little civilization. Who did you buy off, Blount, to have the Cheeps put through at a nine point eight?”
“Cheeps? I thought they—”
“I call them that because they make that sound more often than any other. Like a box of baby chicks. And I got to know them pretty well. Wouldn’t it make a bit of a stink on Earth if they learned that Habilitation Service was going to wipe out a race that had already devised a crude internal combustion engine?”
“The official rating is nine point eight. There’s no use talking about it. R eighty-eight is ideal for the power station. You’ll follow orders.”
“Oh, great!” Sevridge said. “After they got over their first fright, they made me a guest of honor. So I pull the switch that drops half a billion tons of auto-control construction equipment onto their planet. Push the mountains into their laps and chew up their cities and spit out the pieces.”
“Aren’t you getting a little emotional, Sevridge?”
“Not emotional. Just sick to the stomach. I thought that Species Rating was one outfit that couldn’t be bought like a cookie. Congratulations, Blount. I quit. Get yourself another boy.”
“It isn’t that easy, Sevridge.”
“Just what do you mean?”
“If you returned to Earth and started spreading that sort of nasty rumor it might hurt our competitive position. You might remember for a moment where you are. On C seventeen. There’s not a soul on this planet who isn’t an employee of Habilitation Service. No craft leaves C seventeen except on company business. I don’t think you’re going anywhere.”
Sevridge grinned. “That won’t work, Al. Not for a minute. I’ll demand to see old C.B. He may be a ruthless old monkey, but he isn’t crooked.”
Blount said, very gently, “Maybe you were so mad when you stormed in here that you didn’t notice the title on my door. Take a look. You can read it in reverse through the glass.”
Sevridge turned his head slowly. He looked back at Blount. “So you made it, eh? All the way to the top. The big boss now. Where’s C. B.?”
“Dead. A little accident. He was inspecting some new equipment.”
“Very handy. Play ball or else, eh? You’re rotten all the way through, Al. Maybe I’ll take the ‘or else’. Maybe I’m just that stubborn.”
“The ‘or else’ as you put it, Sevridge, is a diagnosis of space fever and a little excitation of neuron patterns. We’ll give you a post-excitation fix that will make you do the assigned job, willing or unwilling. So you might just as well give up and do it willingly.”
Sevridge stared at the ceiling. “What a sucker I’ve been!” he said softly. “Walking right in here, knowing you as well as I do, and still thinking that there might be a scruple or two tucked away in all that beef.”
“You’ll find the performance bonus satisfactory, Sevridge.”
“No doubt. Then you’ve bought me and you can put me on the next dirty job and the next. Anyway, here’s the trump card. Take a look.”
Sevridge unbuttoned his tunic pocket. It bulged. A small head popped up out of the pocket and stared at Blount with two intensely curious brown eyes. The wrinkled skin of the face was a pale aqua, and the two huge front teeth were a soft shade of rose. “Meet the Big Cheep,” Sevridge said.
Blount could barely restrain his anger. “You know the penalty for bringing alien life forms here!”
Sevridge picked the creature out of his tunic pocket with a thumb and forefinger in the armpits and set him on the edge of the desk. It was about six inches tall, a biped with two multi-jointed arms ending in three articulated fingers and an opposed thumb. It wore a skirt of woven fabric, a shirt of overlapping metallic plates, a toy gun in the holster at its waist.
Sevridge said, “It took, me a long time to figure out what they reminded me of. Then I remembered the exhibit on primitive art forms. Maybe you saw it. They had a rabbit. Bugs Bunny, they called him. Every Cheep looks like Bugs Bunny without the ears. See? The same sassy look. Sort of jaunty, isn’t he?”