“What about all the others?” Smovia wanted to know. “I heard you talking to Swft about repatriation, but failed to gather the gist of the matter.”
“In return for the lessons you gave to the volunteers,” I told him, “Swft agreed personally to see to the orderly return of all captive humans to their respective points of origin. The last traveler will carry a cargo of gold bars as partial compensation to them for their inconvenience.”
“Do you think we can really trust Swft, once we’re gone?” Helm wondered.
“I’m certain of it,” I answered him, “and so is Minnie.” I looked at Smovia and the others.
“Sure,” they agreed. “Her Majesty will see to it.”
“But what about this Grgsdn?” Andy demurred. “He could still start trouble.”
I wasn’t paying much attention; I was looking at something over in a roped-off corner of the big shed. I strolled over for a closer look. Tarps were hung from some ropes to afford a half-hearted gesture toward privacy. I went between the tarps and was looking at an old-fashioned (maybe twenty years out-of-date) model Net Shuttle. It was partly disassembled, apparently under study by the Ylokk. It was thickly covered with dust, so it had been here the best part of that twenty years.
“Wonder what that is,” Gus muttered beside me. I had noticed him trailing along and said nothing. He went past me and peered into the warped interior.
“No room in there for a man to breathe, hardly,” he commented.
I went over beside him. “Time to tell all,” I informed him. “Start with how you deserted from a probe mission after it had blundered into Zone Yellow, and how the closest the Ylokk could come to pronouncing ‘Gunderson’ was ‘Grgsdn.’ ”
“Crazy as hell,” old Gus remarked. “You seen yourself, I was a slave here, just like all the other folks. Ask Ben and Marie. They’ll tell you.”
“We wondered about Gus,” Marie spoke up. “Come up to us the day after we slipped off into the woods, all important and bossy, he was. Had a rat with him, but he sent it away. Acted like he was capturing us. In good with the rats, too. Acted like he hated ‘em, but we could tell he’d thrown in with them. Damn traitor!”
For gentle Marie, that was quite a speech. Ben was nodding his head, but didn’t say anything. Old Gus took a swing at Marie that missed because I left-hooked him in the gut.
“Got no call―” he gasped. “I done nothin’. ’Cept brain as many rats as anybody else!”
“You found a peaceful gathering society here,” I told him. “You started trouble by telling them they were fools to work when they could have all the work done for them. You hatched the idea of a mass invasion of your home locus, to scoop up as many slaves as possible in a hurry, and settle back and watch them do all the work.”
“Plain sense,” Gus grunted. “Plenty of idle folks back home never had no use for me; jest set around and enjoyed life while the likes o’ me broke my back doing all the hard labor. Same thing here. This damn ‘Jade Palace’ stuff, and the big shots living high―and then I seen a chance. Rumors started about no heir to the throne: I never started em, but I give ‘em all the help I could. Lotsa folks listened when I first started making speeches. I was a curiosity, you see, they never seen a critter like me before. Thought I knew it all. Revered me, like. There’s always folks’ll listen to somebody telling ‘em they got a bad deal. Then I went underground and left it to my followers. And I got even with alia the fancy folks treated me like dirt!”
“Overthrowing a government in Zone Yellow is hardly a punishment for the educated classes back in the Zero-zero line,” I told him. “Most of them have never heard of Zone Yellow.”
Gus grunted. “Damn blood-suckers!”
“The Ylokk were quick studies,” I reminded Gus. “They duplicated the shuttle circuitry and began their own exploration of what they decided to call the Skein.”
“Not my fault,” Gus muttered.
“You saw your chance for what seemed to be the perfect revenge on society,” I went on, ignoring his head-shaking and dismissing motions. “You’d lead the Ylokk back home, and they’d loot and enslave the very people who had rejected you.”
He came closer, a sorrowful look on his blunt features. “Naw, feller, you got that wrong. I never―” He interrupted himself to try a sneaky right jab, which I blocked with my left; then I hit him on the point of the chin hard enough to put a glaze on his eyes. He dropped like a sack of meal. Funny thing about old Gus, he always complained when I socked him, but he never hit back. This time he was out cold.
The others had gathered around to ask questions. I gave them a brief explanation, and Ben and Marie nodded knowingly. “Explains a lot of things about Gus,” she said. “He knew all about the invasion, and a lot of other stuff. Asked him how he knew so much about what the rats were planning, and he just laughed.”
“We thought maybe he was a spy for the rats at first,” Ben added. “He walked in on us when we were hiding out, and just sort of took over, noisy. Wasn’t much scared of the rats finding us. Said he had their number. We finally got him quieted down, and once we got into the woods he didn’t have much to say. Marie and I were thinking about ditching him when we ran into you folks.”
“Colonel,” Andy said, in an uncertain tone, “how much time has passed? How long have we been away? Doc and I were in that hut for a good ten years, but you said―”
“To me, it seemed like perhaps a couple of weeks,” I told him. “I don’t know. When we begin meddling with the time/space/vug equations, strange things can happen. In normal Net travel, if I can use the word for something as out-of-the-ordinary as the M-C drive, temporal parity is carefully retained. The circuits are balanced specifically for that purpose. But we’ve ducked in and out of temporal stasis, changed machines―we don’t know how temporally stable the Ylokk transports are―so we’ve probably built up at least a slight discrepancy. Not too great, I hope.”
“There’s no telling what’s been happening back home,” Andy remarked. “Who do you think is winning, Colonel?”
“I’m sure we are,” I told him. “Especially since we cut off the supply of reinforcements.”
We trussed old Gus up like a Christmas turkey and got back to the business at hand.
“Do we take him along, Colonel?” Andy asked. I told him Gus would get a fair trial if the Palace faction found him here. We stowed him out of the way in the cargo bin.
“You’ll be comfy here for a few hours, Gussie,” Helm told him. “Until the Palace guards find you.”
He couldn’t answer with the gag we’d tied in his mouth, but he rolled his eyes a lot.
I made a final check of the alien instrument readings, not all of which I understood, and threw in the big main drive lever.
I had warned everybody they’d feel a strange sensation as the field took hold, but they’d all felt it before and lived through it, and in a moment it passed.
All these machines had been designed for the sole purpose of travel between Zone Yellow and the Zero-zero line, so there was no navigation to worry about. We watched the red line on the big chronometer as the needle moved closer, and when they coincided, the drive cut automatically.
“Home!” Helm said reverently. I tried various controls, trying to activate the external-view screens, but got nothing. The only thing left to do was open up.