Flicking on an intercom outlet before him he said, “Any news from home? Has the Grand Council adjourned yet, or is it still in session?” Sometimes the confabulations of the Common Mind occupied weeks of squirming altercation.
His communications creech answered, “No report yet, Marshal. I will inform you as soon as word comes through from our reps in the Council.”
It would take one Terran week for the ship from Ganymede, bearing the new civil administrator, to reach Tennessee following his appointment. And, added to this figure, one had to consider the administrator’s procrastination, the bale of Tennessee being the unappetizing prospect that it was. The appointee might in fact appeal, and litigation within the Common generally droned on for months.
Everything, to use the Terran expression, was A.O.K.
At that moment Marshal Koli’s second-in-command, Colonel Mawoi, entered the room carried by his creeches. Communicating telepathically Mawoi said, “Sir, may I make a minor point before you begin on other considerations with respect to the Percy X file?”
“Speak up,” Marshall Koli said irritably, aloud.
“I have recently, as you know, assisted in the processing of the file. There is one entry which perhaps you failed, due to the pressure of—”
“What’s the entry?”
Making no attempt to conceal his concern Colonel Mawoi said, “The Neeg, sir; he is a telepath. A graduate of the school of the Bureau of Psychedelic Research. So of course he can’t be spied upon, especially by someone such as Miss Hiashi, who would be physically close to him. He will instantly be aware of her mission and will, I imagine, not allow her to make a report on anything; he will very likely kill her on sight.”
With angry annoyance Marshal Koli said, “Radio her instantly. Warn her; call her back. We can’t throw away such a valuable contact for nothing.”
As the officer rushed away to carry out his order, Marshal Koli sighed gloomily.
“It would have been such a beautiful pelt,” he said at last, to himself and to the creeches within hearing.
Gus Swenesgard wiped his balding head dry with one energetic swipe of his red bandanna handkerchief and took a second look at the map in his hand. At the top of the map these words had been stamped: TOP SECRET! CLASS A MILITARY PERSONNEL ONLY! This, however, did not bother him. One of his Toms had found it in the ruins of the Oak Ridge Nuclear Power Station laboratories and now it was his to do with he pleased.
“This is the place, all right,” he said, peering into the great hole which grew deeper by the minute. He had no automated digging equipment, but that didn’t matter; he owned plenty of hard-working Toms and one good hollow-core shaft drill. And plenty of time.
“Aw come on, Gus,” his foreman Jack Haller yelled above the noise of the drill. “We know you’re not digging for any library. I mean, you got absolutely nobody foiled, so drop it.” He glared meaningfully at his employer.
“It says ‘library’ on the map.” Gus waved the worn and crinkled document in Jack’s general direction. It was true, though; Gus did not really believe that before the war the UN military had buried such a thing as a library here on his plantation. That was a code word for—something else.
It seemed so near that he could virtually taste it; his body ached for it.
“That map’s Army, isn’t it?” Haller demanded.
“And that’s against occupation law, to dig up anything military. So you had to keep up this noise about libraries.”
Gus said, grinning, “It’s fifty thousand UN soldiers all armed with C-head rapid fire weapons. Waiting for the day to come when they reconquer the whole goddam planet.”
“And you’re going to expose them?” Jack Haller stared at him. “And bugger up the whole enterprise?” His stare became fixed with outrage. “Where’s your patriotism?”
“I was only joking.”
“What, then?”
“Girls. Fifty thousand virgins.” Gus winked.
Disgusted, his foreman stalked off to resume supervision of Toms and the digging rig.
To himself, so that Haller and no one else could hear, Gus murmured, “I told you and you didn’t believe me. So don’t believe me; tough.” Because what he had said was true.
The UN had, in the final days of the war, selected by computer a quantity of the finest womanhood— genetically speaking—from all the races of the planet, had introduced them to a homeostatic subsurface totally sealed-off chamber . and then had gone to infinite trouble to destroy all records pertaining to the existence and location of the self-sustaining underground chamber—all this in case the invaders, now conquerors, had it in mind to abolish the human race in toto like the wriggly, slimy worms they were. However, the Ganymedians had no such plans; in point of fact, they had come in to occupy conquered Earth in the most deft, humane and circumspect manner—at least if their policies up to now constituted an index. So, Gus Swenesgard reasoned, this colony of first class females served no purpose, and, since undoubtedly life was miserable underground, he would be doing them a favor by liberating them. They would be grateful. They would honor him. All in all it looked pretty good.
And he had plans. In exchange for releasing them—he did not know for certain how many women he would find, maybe a hundred, maybe two hundred—he wanted reciprocity. As his lawyer, Ike Blitzen, might put it.
Several of the really big plantation Burgers, like Chuck Pepitone and Jesus Flores, just to name the two closest, had whole colonies of wives, both colored and white—although the colored ones technically, by Tennessee law, comprised “consorts,” not wives. In fact this made up the essence of Burger-hood; in this lay the ultimate criterion. He knew that. Everybody knew that. Because women had become expensive. They sold, in the bales of the South, for much more than Toms; one could pick up a good brawny buck Tom for, say, fifty UN dollars, but a woman well, that drew six times this price, assuming she came undamaged.
This, what he had here, this trove of girls—this constituted currency. Because the old pre-war UN money had become rapidly worthless as the Gany occupation authorities redeemed it or withdrew it or whatever they did, and the junk they issued no sane mortal would touch, it was so obviously phony; as for instance whose pictures appeared on it? President Johnson? Stalin? No; the Gany had dipped into history and come up with full-face steel-engraved portaits of such freaks as Kant and Socrates and Hume and old-time non-heroes like that. For instance, the ten dollar General Douglas Mac Arthur bill; in another month it would be gone entirely. And in its place somebody named Li Po, some sort of antique Chinese poet. It made a man blurk just to think about it.
So, anyhow, the occupation currency had become a racket by which the Ganys appropriated Terran valuables in exchange for worthless scrip. And everybody knew that, even up North where the worm-kissers, wiks for short, ran everything . that is, ran everything at the beck and call of the Gany military commanders, that being the nature of wiks.
Well, maybe his plantation was virtually the smallest in the whole bale of Tennessee; so what? It didn’t matter, not after his drilling rig burst through into the mammoth sealed subsurface living-chamber designed to last a century and jam-packed with pristine womanhood in its choicest flower, safe from the Gany worms—or snakes, however you thought of them, whichever you liked least. Snakes were wriggly and had fangs and injected poison. And worms; well, worms were blind. If not worse. Having raised sheep he had seen parasitic worms he had seen the bott fly. So to him the Ganys resembled worms, which was a lot worse than snakes.