Pastour tried an experimental first cough.
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
The cafeteria had several advantages, but they were not visible to normal citizens. To them, the large converted storage building stank of grease and the unwashed, and it was up a side street in a very bad part of the port city of Soward. It looked like a very good place to get either ptomaine or a shank inserted between the third and fourth ribs.
That was an accurate summation.
But it did have very definite advantages: It was not automated. Instead, it was run by living beings who really did not care what happened so long as the blood was mopped up afterward. Caff was a tenth-credit, and alk a half-credit. The alk, of course, had never seen an Imperial tax stamp.
Anyone was welcome to hang out as long as he, she, or it wanted. A cup of caff could be nursed for half a day, and no one would object. It was an excellent place to make an illegal drug deal, plan a job, or just hang out, as an alternative to sitting in one's apartment, letting the four walls close in.
To Chapelle, the cafeteria had still other advantages.
He could stare for hours at the blank concrete building across the street and listen to the voices. Every day he learned of a new iniquity and injustice caused by the Emperor.
Sullamora's operating team had removed the subaudible projectors weeks earlier. Chapelle listened to voices of his own making, and the stories they told were fascinating.
A few days earlier, he had realized that he had to do something. Just what, he was not sure. The only possibility he could think of was the cafeteria's other advantage—its proximity to the Democratic
Education Center.
Any war, no matter how "just," had opponents. Opposition ranged from true pacifism, through a quite logical reluctance to get one's ass shot off for any reason whatsoever, and on into less savory areas.
It was a constant battle for the Emperor to keep his intelligence organizations somewhat under control. Someone who merely thought—or even said—that the Eternal Emperor was full of drakh was not a danger to society, the Emperor had to remind his CI types.
It was a nice theory. At present, however, it was not widely practiced. Freedom of speech, like many other civil liberties, was not encouraged at that time. There were many thousand dissenters, who had merely mildly suggested that the Eternal Emperor did not have all the answers, and were spending the war in internment centers.
The Democratic Education Center was something else entirely. Its philosophy was very simple: that the Empire had overreacted to the Tahn and that more peaceful means could have been used. Before the war the center had lobbied for Imperial funding to establish other centers within the Tahn Empire. The good people of the society believed that truth would win out—once a Tahn, no matter what his class, was shown that his society was inhumane, that society would be changed. Fortunately, funding was not granted, and none of the theorists ended up as missionary stew.
The Tahn being what they were, they had loudly welcomed the existence of the Democratic Education Centers as long as they were all located on Imperial worlds. And they had promptly used the organization as a front.
All the active agents had been rounded up at that point, of course. But the center continued to exist—at the Emperor's teeth-gritted acceptance. The organization provided an excellent means of locating future dissidents and was riddled with Imperial Intelligence operatives. Imperial Intelligence did not realize that if it were not for their own agents, the center would have gone bankrupt years earlier. Even a front organization required regular dues paying, and very few of the center's members were considered politically employable at anything above the janitorial level.
Chapelle had known of the center for some time. How he had learned about it, he was not sure. The information, of course, had been planted in an early subaudible broadcast.
Not that Sullamora actually wanted Chapelle to join the organization. But once the man had reached that decision, the fourth stage of his education could begin.
The problem was that Chapelle appeared to be somewhat brighter than Sullamora's profile would have suggested. Even though Chapelle was a nдif, he had somehow thought that the evil Emperor's agents might have penetrated the center. His walking through that door, Chapelle knew, would be his death. The Emperor would use that as an excuse to grab and torture Chapelle and then put him into a lethal chamber, just as the voices had told him had happened to millions of others.
But there appeared to be no alternative, Chapelle brooded.
Realizing were was somebody standing beside his table, Chapelle brought himself back and cowered. Not that he had ever been threatened in the cafeteria—the other patrons realized that it was very unlikely that Chapelle had anything worth stealing. Plus there was a certain sheen in his eye that suggested that even pushing the man around for sport could produce unpleasant ramifications.
The man did not belong in this dive, Chapelle thought; in fact, he belonged even less than Chapelle did. He was older. Gray-haired. Soberly and expensively dressed. Chapelle wondered why the man had not been instantly jackrolled, then eyed the bulging muscles and the barely visible scar on the man's neck. No. The man was not an easy target.
The man looked sternly at Chapelle. "You don't belong here," he said flatly.
Chapelle stammered—and the man suddenly smiled.
"I don't, either. But I seem to have a problem."
Somehow, unasked, he was sitting across from Chapelle.
"My problem is that I'm lost." He laughed—a rich bass laugh that showed a man who had learned the vagaries of the world and appreciated them. "I thought that just because I still had that built-in compass I could find my way around a city. Wrong again, Colonel General Suvorov."
Chapelle gaped. "You're a general?"
"Forty years. Pioneer Development Corps. Retired. Guess it's a courtesy title now. At least the clottin' Empire hasn't figured out a way to take that away from me, too. Or at least not yet.
"At any rate, I'm new here on Prime World. Thought I knew my way around. Got lost. Looked for somebody who might be able to help. Everybody I saw looked like the only help they'd give me is into a dark alley.
"Except you."
Chapelle was embarrassed.
"I'd be grateful," the man who called himself Suvorov said, "if I could get a guide back to the nearest pneumostation and out of this slum."
Chapelle was only too grateful to volunteer.
At the station Suvorov checked the schedule and muttered. "Typical. Very typical." He elaborated—the first pneumosubway run out to where he had rented quarters was an hour away. "Talk about your bureaucracies. Makes sense not to schedule runs out to where people who can pay live. But not when you've blocked all the gravcabs out of business.
"Wartime contingencies.
"You know, Sr. Chapelle, and I probably shouldn't be saying this to a stranger, but this is sure a good example of the way the Emperor thinks."
Chapelle nodded eagerly.
"Although," Suvorov went on, "you'd have to have been out on some of the Pioneer Sectors to see what it's really like. Out where there aren't any laws. Except the kind one person makes.
"And out there, you better not talk too loudly about things like that.
"Guess I was lucky. All that happened to me was I got requested to resign. And then the agrofarm I'd built up got requisitioned by the Imperial Quartermaster Corps.