Phil grinned. “That’d be worth the trip up from Fort Roye all by itself.”
Beulah looked pleased. “Not much else I can do for my great-grand nephew nowadays, is there?”
Phil said, after a moment, “Have you given any further thought to—”
“Moving down to Fort Roye?” Beulah pursed her thin lips. “Goodness, Phil, I do hate to disappoint you again, but I’d be completely out of place in a town apartment.”
“Dr. Fitzsimmons would be pleased,” Phil remarked.
“Oh, him! Fitz is another old worry wart. What he wants is to get me into the hospital. Nothing doing!”
Phil shook his head helplessly, laughed. “After all, working a tupa ranch—”
“Nonsense. The ranch is just enough bother to be interesting. The appliances do everything anyway, and Susan is down here every morning for a chat and to make sure I’m still all right. She won’t admit that, of course, but if she thinks something should be taken care of, the whole Feeney family shows up an hour later to do it. There’s really no reason for you to be sending a dozen men up from Fort Roye every two months to harvest the tupa.”
Phil shrugged. “No one’s ever yet invented an easy way to dig up those roots. And the CLU’s glad to furnish the men.”
“Because you’re its president?”
“Uh-huh.”
“It really doesn’t cost you anything?” Beulah asked doubtfully.
“Not a cent.”
* * *
“Hm-m-m. Been meaning to ask you. What made you set up that . . . Colonial Labor Union?”
Phil nodded. “That’s the official name.”
“Why did you set it up in the first place?”
“That’s easy to answer;” Phil said. “On the day the planetary population here touched the forty thousand mark, Roye became legally entitled to its labor union. Why not take advantage of it?”
“What’s the advantage?”
“More Earth money coming in, for one thing. Of the twelve hundred CLU members we’ve got in Fort Roye now, seventy-six per cent were unemployed this month. We’ll have a compensation check from the Territorial Office with the next ship coming in.” He smiled at her expression.
“Sure, the boys could go back to the tupa ranches. But not everyone likes that life as well as you and the Feeneys.”
“Earth government lets you get away with it?” Beulah asked curiously. “They used to be pretty tight-fisted.”
“They still are—but it’s the law. The Territorial Office also pays any CLU president’s salary, incidentally. I don’t draw too much at the moment, but that will go up automatically with the membership and my responsibilities.”
“What responsibilities?”
“We’ve set up a skeleton organization,” Phil explained. “Now, when Earth government decides eventually to establish a big military base here, they can run in a hundred thousand civilians in a couple of months and everyone will be fitted into the pattern on Roye without trouble or confusion. That’s really the reason for all the generosity.”
Beulah sniffed. “Big base, my eye! There hasn’t been six months since I set foot here that somebody wasn’t talking about Fort Roye being turned into a Class A military base pretty soon. It’ll never happen, Phil. Roye’s a farm planet, and that’s what it’s going to stay.”
Phil’s lips twitched. “Well, don’t give up hope.”
“I’m not anxious for any changes,” Beulah said. “I like Roye the way it is.”
She peered at a button on the go-chair’s armrest which had just begun to put out small bright-blue flashes of light. “Pies are done,” she announced. “Phil, are you sure you can’t stay for dinner?”
Phil looked at his watch, shook his head. “I’d love to, but I really have to get back.”
“Then I’ll go wrap up the pies for you.”
Beulah swung the go-chair around, sent it slithering up the stairs and out the door. Phil stood up quickly. He stepped over to the fireplace, opened his coat and detached a flexible, box-shaped object from the inner lining. He laid this object on the mantle, and turned one of three small knobs about its front edge to the right. The box promptly extruded a supporting leg from each of its four corners, pushed itself up from the mantle and became a miniature table. Phil glanced at the door through which Beulah had vanished, listened a moment, then took the Geest gun from the wall, laid it carefully on top of the device and twisted the second dial.
The odd-looking gun began to sink slowly down through the surface of Phil’s instrument, like a rock disappearing in mud. Within seconds it vanished completely; then, a moment later, it began to emerge from the box’s underside. Phil let the Geest gun drop into his hand, replaced it on the wall, turned the third knob. The box withdrew its supports and sank down to the mantle. Phil clipped it back inside his coat, closed the coat, and strolled over to the center of the room to wait for Aunt Beulah to return with the pies.
* * *
It was curious, Phil Boles reflected as his aircar moved out over the craggy, plunging coastline to the north some while later, that a few bold minds could be all that was needed to change the fate of a world. A few minds with imagination enough to see how circumstances about them might be altered.
On his left, far below, was now the flat ribbon of the peninsula, almost at sea level, its tip widening and lifting into the broad, rocky promontory on which stood Fort Roye—the only thing on the planet bigger and of more significance than the shabby backwoods settlements. And Fort Roye was neither very big nor very significant. A Class F military base around which, over the years, a straggling town had come into existence. Fort Roye was a space-age trading post linking Roye’s population to the mighty mother planet, and a station from which the otherwise vacant and utterly unimportant 132nd Segment of the Space Territories was periodically and uneventfully patrolled. It was no more than that. Twice a month, an Earth ship settled down to the tiny port, bringing supplies, purchases, occasional groups of reassigned military and civilians—the latter suspected of being drawn as a rule from Earth’s Undesirable classification. The ship would take off some days later, with a return load of the few local products for which there was outside demand, primarily the medically valuable tupa roots; and Fort Roye lay quiet again.
The planet was not at fault. Essentially, it had what was needed to become a thriving colony in every sense. At fault was the Geest War. The war had periods of flare-up and periods in which it seemed to be subsiding. During the past decade it had been subsiding again. One of the early flare-ups, one of the worst, and the one which brought the war closest to Earth itself, was the Gunderland Battle in which Uncle William Boles’ trophy gun had been acquired. But the war never came near Roye. The action was all in the opposite section of the giant sphere of the Space Territories, and over the years the war drew steadily farther away.
And Earth’s vast wealth—its manpower, materials and money—was pouring into space in the direction the Geest War was moving. Worlds not a tenth as naturally attractive as Roye, worlds where the basic conditions for human life were just above the unbearable point, were settled and held, equipped with everything needed and wanted to turn them into independent giant fortresses, with a population not too dissatisfied with its lot. When Earth government didn’t count the expense, life could be made considerably better than bearable almost anywhere.
Those were the circumstances which condemned Roye to insignificance. Not everyone minded. Phil Boles, native son, did mind. His inclinations were those of an operator, and he was not being given an adequate opportunity to exercise them. Therefore, the circumstances would have to be changed, and the precise time to make the change was at hand. Phil himself was not aware of every factor involved, but he was aware of enough of them. Back on Earth, a certain political situation was edging towards a specific point of instability. As a result, an Earth ship which was not one of the regular freighters had put down at Fort Roye some days before. Among its passengers were Commissioner Sanford of the Territorial Office, a well-known politician, and a Mr. Ronald Black, the popular and enterprising owner of Earth’s second largest news outlet system. They were on a joint fact-finding tour of the thinly scattered colonies in this remote section of the Territories, and had wound up eventually at the most remote of all—the 132nd Segment and Roye.
That was one factor. Just visible twenty thousand feet below Phil—almost directly beneath him now as the aircar made its third leisurely crossing of the central belt of the peninsula—was another. From here it looked like an irregular brown circle against the peninsula’s nearly white ground. Lower down, it would have resembled nothing so much as the broken and half-decayed spirals of a gigantic snail shell, its base sunk deep in the ground and its shattered point rearing twelve stories above it. This structure, known popularly as “the ruins” in Fort Roye, was supposed to have been the last stronghold of a semi-intelligent race native to Roye, which might have become extinct barely a century before the Earthmen arrived. A factor associated with the ruins again was that their investigation was the passionately pursued hobby of First Lieutenant Norman Vaughn, Fort Roye’s Science Officer.