With unexpected humor the old man said, “Crudely put. But correct. And safer.”
“Do we need to vote?” said the chairman, looking around the table.
There was a chorus of noes.
“Carried, then,” said the presiding chief. “Hit hard, and hit for the small target, not the big one.”
“He is coming, father! He is coming.”
“Who is coming?” said the voice, like a great drum resounding.
E’lamelanie said it as though it were a prayer: “The blessed one, the appointed one, the guarantor of our people, the new messenger on whom the robot, rat and Copt agreed. With money he is coming, to help us, to save us, to open to us the light of day and the vaults of heaven.”
“You are blasphemous,” said the E’telekeli.
The girl fell into a hush. She not only respected her father. She worshiped him as her personal religious leader. His great eyes blazed as though they could see through thousands of meters of dirt and rock and still see beyond into the deep of space. Perhaps he could see that far… Even his own people were never sure of the limits of his power. His white face and white feathers gave his penetrating eyes a miraculously piercing capacity.
Calmly, rather kindly, he added, “My darling, you are wrong. We simply do not know who this man McBan really is.”
“Couldn’t it be written?” she pleaded. “Couldn’t it be written?” she pleaded. “Couldn’t it be promised? That’s the direction of space from which the robot, the rat and the Copt sent back our very special message, ‘From the uttermost deeps one shall come, bringing uncountable treasure and a sure delivery.’ So it might be now! Mightn’t it?”
“My dear,” he responded, “you still have a crude idea of real treasure if you think it is measured in megacredits. Go read The Scrap of the Book, then think, and then tell me what you have thought. But meanwhile — no more chatter. We must not excite our poor oppressed people.”
On this day Ruth thought nothing at all of Norstrilia or treasures. She was trying to do watercolors of the breakers and they came out very badly indeed. The real ones kept on being too beautiful and the water colors looked like watercolors.
“All the riffraff of all the worlds. They’re all going to make a run for that silly boy of ours.”
“Right.”
“If he stays here, they’ll come here.”
“Right”
“Let’s let him go to Earth. I have a feeling that little rascal Redlady will smuggle him out tonight and save us the trouble.”
“Right.”
“After a while it will be all right for him to come back. He won’t spoil our hereditary defense of looking stupid. I’m afraid he’s bright but by Earth standards he’s just a yokel.”
“Right.”
“Should we send along twenty or thirty more Rod McBans and get the attackers really loused up?”
“No.”
“Why not, Sir and Owner?”
“Because it would look clever. We rely on never looking clever. I have the next best answer.”
“What’s that?”
“Suggest to all the really rum worlds we know that a good impersonator could put his hands on the McBan money. Make the suggestion so that they would not know that we had originated it. The starlanes will be full of Rod McBans, complete with phony Norstrilian accents, for the next couple of hundred years. And no one will suspect that we set them up to it. Stupid’s the word, mate, stupid. If they ever think we’re clever, we’re for it!” The speaker sighed: “How do the bloody fools suppose our forefathers got off Paradise VII if they weren’t clever? How can they think we’d hold this sharp little monopoly for thousands of years? They’re stupid not to think about it, but let’s not make them think. Right?”
“Right.”
NEARBY EXILE
Rod woke with a strange feeling of well-being. In a corner of his mind there were memories of pandemonium — knives, blood, medicine, a monkey working as surgeon. Rum dreams! He glanced around and immediately tried to jump out of bed.
The whole world was on fire!
Bright blazing intolerable fire, like a blowtorch.
But the bed held him. He realized that a loose comfortable jacket ended in tapes and that the tapes were anchored in some way to the bed.
“Eleanor!” he shouted, “Come here.”
He remembered the mad bird attacking him, Lavinia transporting him to the cabin of the sharp Earthman, Lord Redlady. He remembered medicines and fuss. But this — what was this?
When the door opened, more of the intolerable light poured in. It was as though every cloud had been stripped from the sky of Old North Australia, leaving only the blazing heavens and the fiery sun. There were people who had seen that happen, when the weather machines occasionally broke down and let a hurricane cut a hole in the clouds, but it had certainly not happened in his time, or in his grandfather’s time.
The man who entered was pleasant, but he was no Norstrilian. His shoulders were slight, he did not look as though he could hit a cow, and his face had been washed so long and so steadily that it looked like a baby’s face. He had an odd medical-looking suit on, all white, and his face combined the smile and the ready professional sympathy of a good physician.
“We’re feeling better, I see,” said he.
“Where on Earth am I?” asked Rod. “In a satellite? It feels odd.”
“You’re not on Earth, man.”
“I know I’m not. I’ve never been there. Where’s this place?”
“Mars. The Old Star Station. I’m Jean-Jacques Vomact.” Rod mumbled the name so badly the other man had to spell it out for him. When that was straightened out, Rod came back to the subject.
“Where’s Mars? Can you untie me? When’s that light going to go off?”
“I’ll untie you right now,” said Doctor Vomact, “but stay in bed and take it easy until we’ve given you some food and taken some tests. The light — that’s sunshine. I’d say it’s about seven hours, local time, before it goes off. This is late morning. Don’t you know what Mars is? It’s a planet.”
“New Mars, you mean,” said Rod proudly, “the one with the enormous shops and the zoological gardens.”
“The only shops we have here are the cafeteria and the PX. New Mars? I’ve heard of that place somewhere. It does have big shops and some kind of an animal show. Elephants you can hold in your hand. They’ve got those too. This isn’t that place at all. Wait a sec, I’ll roll your bed to the window.”
Rod looked eagerly out of the window. It was frightening. A naked, dark sky did not have a cloud in sight. A few holes showed in it here and there. They almost looked like the “stars” which people saw when they were in spaceship transit from one cloudy planet to another. Dominating everything was a single explosive horrible light, which hung high and steady in the sky without ever going off. He found himself cringing for the explosion, but he could tell, from the posture of the doctor next to him, that the doctor was not in the least afraid of that chronic hydrogen bomb, whatever it might turn out to be. Keeping his voice level and trying not to sound like a boy he said,
“What’s that?”
“The Sun.”
“Don’t cook my book, mate. Give me the straight truth. Everybody calls his star a sun. What’s this one?”
“The Sun. The original Sun. The Sun of Old Earth itself. Just as this is plain Mars. Not even Old Mars. Certainly not New Mars. This Earth’s neighbor.”
“That thing never goes off, goes up — boom! — or goes down?”