Since Flandry had used the name of equivalent native insects, Warouw scowled. “Please, Captain!”
The Terran swept eyes across one horrified attendant and two indignant Guards. “Ah, yes,” he said, “Little Eva and the Sunshine Twins. Sorry, I forgot about them. Far be it from me to do away with anyone’s intellectual maidenhead.”
Warouw put his hands to a scanner. The inner door opened for his party and they entered a sterilizing chamber. Beyond its UV and ultrasonics, another door led them into a sort of lobby. A few earnest young shavepates hurried here and there with technical apparatus. They gave the sense of a task forever plagued by clumsy equipment and clumsier organization. Which was to be expected, of course. Biocontrol was not about to modernize its plant. And, like all hierarchies not pruned by incessant competition, Biocontrol had proliferated its departments, regulations, chains of command, protocols, office rivakies, and every other fungus Flandry knew so well on Terra.
A creaky old slideramp bore Warouw’s group up several floors. Two purely ornamental Guards lounged on blast rifles outside a gilded door of vast proportions. Several men cooled their heels in the room beyond, waiting for admission to the main office. Warouw brushed past them, through a small auxiliary sterilizing chamber and so into the sanctum.
Solu Bandang himself sat among many cushions. He had removed his flexisuitbut not donned a robe again. His belly sagged majestically over his kilt. He looked up, heavy-lidded, and whined, “Now what is the meaning of this? What do you mean? I gave no appointment to-Oh. You.”
“Greeting, Tuan,” said Warouw casually. “I had not expected to find you on duty.”
“Yes, it is my turn, my turn again. Even the highest office, ah, in the… the world, this world… does not excuse a man from a tour of-Necessary to keep one’s finger on the pulse, Captain Flandry,” said Bandang. “Very essential. Oh, yes, indeed.”
The desk didn’t look much used. Flandry supposed that the constant presence of some member of the governing board was a survival of earlier days when Biocontrol’s stranglehold wasn’t quite so firm.
“I trust, ah, you have been made to… see the error of your ways, Captain?” Bandang reached for a piece of candied ginger. “Your attitude has, I hope, become-realistic?”
“I am still arguing with our guest, Tuan,” said Warouw.
“Oh, come now!” said Bandang. “Come now! Really, Colleague, this is deplorable, ah, dilatoriness on your part. Explain to the Captain,
Warouw, that we have methods to persuade recalcitrants. Yes, methods. If necessary, apply those methods. But don’t come in here disturbing me! He’s not in my department. Not my department at all.”
“In that case, Tuan,” said Warouw, his exasperation hardly curbed, “I beg you to let me proceed with my work in my own fashion. I should like to show the Captain one of our vats, I think it might prove convincing. But of course, we need your presence to get into that section.”
“What? What? See here, Warouw, I am a busy man. Busy, do you hear? I have, er, obligations. It is not my duty to—”
“Perhaps,” snapped Warouw, “the Tuan feels he can take care of the situation single-handed, when the outworlders arrive?”
“What?” Bandang sat up straight, so fast that his jowls quivered. The color drained from them. “What’s that? Do you mean there are out-worlders? Other, that is, than the Betelgeuseans-uncontrolled outworlders, is that, ah, is that—”
“That is what I have to find out, Tuan. I beg you for your kind assistance.”
“Oh. Oh, yes. Yes, at once. Immediately!” Bandang rolled to his feet and fumbled at his hung-up flexisuit. The two Guards hastened to assist him in donning it.
Warouw checked an electronic bulletin board. “I see Genseng is on watch at Vat Four,” he said. “We’ll go there. You must meet Colleague Genseng, Flandry.”
The Terran made no answer. He was considering what he had seen. Bandang was a fat fool, but without too many illusions. His horror at the idea of out-planet visitors proved he knew very well what Flandry had already deduced:
God, what an overripe plum. If only the pills could come from somewhere else, this Biocontrol boobocracy and its comic opera Guards wouldn’t last a week.
If any adventurers do learn the truth, they’ll swarm here from a score of planets. Unan Besar is rich. I don’t know how much of that wealth is locked in Biocontrol vaults, but it must be plenty. Enough to make the fortune of an experienced fighting man (like me who’d serve as a revolutionary officer for a share in the loot.
Unless the revolution happens too fast to import filibusters. I suspect that would be the actual case. The people of Unan Besar would rip their overlords apart bare-handed. And, of course, the real money to be made here is not from plundering, but from selling cheap antitoxin without restrictions… Which is less my line of work than a spot of piracy would be. But I’d still like to get that juicy commission from Mitsuko Laboratories.
The lightness faded in him, less because he remembered his immediate problems than because of certain other recollections. The man who screamed and died in a cage where the stone gods danced. Swamp Town, and humans turned wolf to survive. Hungry men chipping a mountainside by hand, women and children in rice paddies. Ojuanda, with nothing left him but pride, leaping off the wall. Luang’s eyes, seen across the room where she sat bound. The Guard who struck her with a club.
Flandry had no patience with crusaders, but there are limits to any man’s endurance.
“Come, then,” puffed Bandang. “Yes, Captain, you really must see our production facilities. A, ah, an achievement. A most glorious achievement, as I am sure you will agree, of our, ah, pioneering ancestors. May their, their work… ever remain sacred and undefiled, their blood remain, er, pure.”
Behind the plump back, Warouw winked at Flandry.
Passing through the office sterilizer, and the waiting technicians who bowed to Bandang, the conducted tour took a slideway down corridors where faded murals depicted the heroic founders of Biocontrol in action. At the slideway’s end, a glassed-in catwalk ran above a series of chambers.
They were immense. Up here near the ceilings, Flandry saw technicians down on the floor scuttle like bugs. Each room centered on a gleaming alloy vat, ten meters high and thirty in diameter. With the pipes that ran from it like stiff tentacles, with the pumps and stirrers and testers and control units and meters clustered around, it could have been some heathen god squatting amidst attendant demons. And on more than one face, among the men who went up and down the catwalks, Flandry thought he recognized adoration.
Warouw said in a detached tone: “As you may know, the process of antitoxin manufacture is biological. A yeast-like native organism was mutated to produce, during fermentation, that inhibitor which prevents the bacterial formation of acetylcholine. The bacteria themselves are destroyed within a few days by normal human antibodies. So, if you left this planet, you would need one final pill to flush out the infection. Thereafter you would be free of it. But as long as you are on Unan Besar-each breath you take, each bite you eat or drop you drink, maintains an equilibrium concentration of germs in your system.
“Unfortunately, these omnipresent germs kill the yeast itself. So it is critically important to keep this place sterile. Even a slight contamination would spread like fire in dry grass. The room where it occurred would have to be sealed off, everything dismantled and individually sterilized. It would take a year to get back in operation. And we would be lucky to have only one vat idled.”