“You should know that my men are very efficient and always carry out their orders,” Bec put in.
Imnitrin glanced round at his officers as if inviting comment. One of them stirred.
“Your story is ridiculous. We will simply set up production of the trees elsewhere.”
“They won’t grow anywhere else,” I explained. “The valley was created by a meteor impact. The meteor must have contained special minerals that enable the trees to synthesise the drug, because they’re a peculiar strain that’s evolved there alone. They won’t grow anywhere else. I guess if you did take over the valley eventually from our men you might find some seeds that had survived and could grow a new crop then, but that would take years.”
Big meteors occasionally fell on Killibol. Everybody knew of the one that had destroyed the city of Chingak, spreading radio-active wastes for miles around.
“You can check these facts with the Rheattites themselves — as you should have done long ago,” Bec supplemented. “Well, that’s the position, Commander. Now let’s talk terms.”
“Your behaviour is threatening and insolent.”
“I don’t see it that way,” Bec said, smiling. “We’re here to help you, not to harm you. Our interests are identical. Why, already we’ve made you better off than you were before. You know about the Blue Space drug and why your slaves aren’t able to work. You can even find out where the valley is.”
“Very well. What are your interests?” Imnitrin leaned over the table. I saw that despite his indulgence in answering Bec’s questions, despite the blunders and oversights that were typical of his race, he was hard, calculating and merciless. “You have not yet answered our questions. Where is your planet? Do you also plan invasion of Earth? What do you want here?”
“Our planet is so far away that it can’t be seen in the sky,” Bec answered. “It’s in another galaxy, if you know what galaxies are. There’s a special way of getting to it which only we know. As for your other questions, I may as well be perfectly frank. Then you’ll know you can trust me. We’re not here to conquer Earth; quite the reverse. No more of my people will be coming from our own planet. There are only us you have prisoner and my other men, with more powerful weapons you haven’t seen, in Blue Space Valley. We are outcasts from our own world. Our wish is to make a place for ourselves here and eventually to raise strong forces to return to our own planet and destroy our enemies. So that’s what we can offer you, Commander: not only the means to rule Rheatt with ease but also a new world to conquer, with our help. In return we wish to be given positions of honour in your empire.”
It looked as if Imnitrin was going to spit. “Men of other tribes are not honoured by the Rotrox. It would be necessary to swear oaths of allegiance.”
“That’s fine by me, Commander Imnitrin. We’ll swear allegiance. We’ll become men of the tribe of Rotrox.”
Imnitrin gazed at us thoughtfully, speculatively.
Nine
A few weeks later I stood with Becmath, Imnitrin and three of his high-ranking officers, looking at the battleground below through the open side of one of their flying cylinders.
The plain was flanked by gently rising hills to our left, and broke into a series of gullies on the right. All morning Rheattite infantry had been filing into the plain, advancing towards the Rotrox columns camped at one end.
Imnitrin peered down at the massing Rheattites. “They are many, and well-armed,” he said in his chilling, incisive voice. “Could it be that your plan has gone wrong?”
“We’ll find that out when the fighting starts,” Bec answered gruffly.
We were floating about fifty feet above a round-topped hill. A few other cylinders drifted slowly above the landscape, casting shadows on the green-skinned Rheattites. Behind us in the cavernous interior of the cylinder was Rotrox communications equipment: oval screens of a pale blue colour, like icy mirrors, surmounting grey metal cabinets.
The television system had quite startled me when I first saw it in operation. We had vision phones back in Klittmann, but their definition was crude and blurred compared with the Rotrox sets. The Rotrox could send in colour, too, but the colours came out odd and wrong. Most surprising, they used Hertzian transmission without wires. On Killibol wireless sending of sound or pictures was never considered a practicable proposition, but then we lacked Earth’s ionosphere. The Rotrox, however, used television even to keep in touch with their Council of Chiefs back on Merame.
It was funny, I thought, how the Rotrox were ahead of us in some things but so backward in others. I guess different life styles produce different technologies.
I picked up a telescope to scan the faces of the Rheattites. They didn’t seem to be as shaky as we had hoped. I knew Bec was worried. A lot hung on the outcome of this battle.
My mind went back over the past few weeks. Bec’s gamble had paid off. The Rotrox had allowed him to send me to Blue Space Valley with a television transceiver and I had arrived to find Grale, Reeth and Hassmann firmly in command. Tone the Taker was there, too — my bullets had missed him — but he was barely conscious. The stuff he was taking now had put him in a permanent trance. The expression on his face was something dreamy and weird.
Straight away Bec had shown his genius for administration. He drew up a plan for distributing Blue Space to the populations under Rotrox control, sending me detailed instructions on what to give each collector that called. Using both Rheattites and Meramites, he was already setting up a pusher organisation, holding the Rheattite population in a rigid web of supply and demand. At one stroke he had begun the process of drawing the strings of power towards his own person.
The Rotrox were impressed. They admired success, by whatever method. Bec had a knack of getting along with them and they co-operated with his suggestions. Consequently we had all (leaving aside Tone and Harmen) taken oaths of fealty, mingling our blood with that of Imnitrin himself. The ceremony was pretty messy and the wound in my arm still hadn’t healed. But we belonged to the Rotrox Tribe now.
Imnitrin had made an attempt to put Blue Space Valley in Rotrox hands. Bec had firmly resisted the idea and in the end the Meramites, realising that we had to be cautious on our own account, had not pressed the matter. Reeth and Hassmann were still there now, making sure nothing sneaky happened behind our backs.
Bec had instantly cut off the pipeline to the army massing further along the border. Why they hadn’t taken the trouble to invest and hold Blue Space Valley themselves is just another example of Rheattite ineptness — but it had become clear that they already had reserves of the dope. Not enough to be completely happy, perhaps, but enough not to be falling over themselves the way we had hoped. Bec had practically promised the invaders victory and if they didn’t get it their attitude towards us would change. They might even wipe us out. If they won, on the other hand, they would treat us like brothers. To try to lower the opposition’s morale Bec had sent in agents to pass the word around that there would be Blue Space available if the Rheattites threw down their arms, surrendered or even simply lost.
Imnitrin was also using a telescope, studying, not the ground, but the sky. “The enemy approaches,” he announced. “Battle begins.”
He stepped further back into the cylinder and began speaking into the television apparatus in the clipped Rotrox tongue. Sweeping over the horizon, fairly high in the sky, was a squadron of Rheattite fighter aircraft. They were similar to the machine I had seen earlier but appeared somewhat smaller and moved more swiftly. At the same time a great shout went up from the horde below and the infantry began to advance.