“I will pay you twice the price.”
“Ten times the price will not buy it. It is gone.”
The woman turned away, then hesitated.
“Will you sell me a little of your food? Just a little—”
The voice from the grilled window was pitying.
“No one will sell you their own food. What good is silver to a corpse?”
The woman turned, and walked slowly away, passing close by Roberts and Hammell as if not seeing them. Roberts had his hand in his pocket, and if the woman had even looked at him, he would have given her all the local money he had left. But she looked neither to the right nor the left as she walked by.
After she’d passed, Hammell shook his head. “It would have done no good anyway. The trouble here is, there isn’t enough food. When you give money, you merely shift the food from one mouth to another.
Roberts felt sick and weary.
“Let’s go on back. We’ve seen enough.”
On the way back to the ship, they passed a small group of men and women beside a felled tree, The men were methodically stripping away the bark, while the women with sharp knives clipped off the ends of the twigs, dropping them into large baskets. They worked methodically and steadily, only looking up fearfully from time to time, as if afraid someone might come and take away what they had.
Back at the ship, Roberts and Hammell discovered a visitor in the form of a smaller ship marked with a string of numbers, and the letters, PDA. The colonel was just coming out, shaking his head.
“There is nothing I can do. It’s a question of time and freight capacity. Let’s say a pound of food per person per day will barely sustain their lives. How many people do you say are involved?”
An earnest-looking man appeared in the hatchway of the PDA ship.
“We don’t know. We lack the facilities to say accurately, but on the whole continent—it could be anywhere from ten million to one hundred million persons.”
The colonel shook his head. “If it’s one hundred million, it will require a shipping capacity of fifty thousand tons per day. Where will we get the shipping? The food itself is problem enough. I know of no stocks in frontier regions on any such scale as that. And we’re well out at the edge of the frontier. Now, this food will have to be brought from a great distance, and that will take time. When we get it here, it will have to be distributed. Can you begin to conceive of the organization this will require? I’m not equipped to begin to do this. Possibly PDA has the organization to handle it.”
“I . . . I’ve received word we cannot handle it. I’d hoped you—”
“It’s entirely beyond me. I realized, of course, when I suggested this road as a means to facilitate surface transport and . . . ah . . . cultural interchange, that some slight dislocation might result, but I didn’t realize—You know, in a way I feel responsible—”
“Not at all, sir. We at Planetary Development have all been most impressed with the humanitarian selflessness of this project.”
“Well . . . thank you. That means a great deal to me. All I can say is, we did urge that a sufficient proportion of the population be retained in essential occupations—”
The colonel paused, and glanced around at a jangling, clattering noise.
A glittering carriage, driven by a well-fed coachman and drawn by four sleek beasts of burden, came to a stop in a cloud of dust. A footman riding in back sprang off and pulled open the door. A second footman leaped off the back, ran around, and swung down a heavily-braced step. An immensely fat man in gold and scarlet robes, glittering rings on every finger, lunged out of the carriage, his face purple with rage, and faced the PDA representative.
“It is a trick . . . a swindle! I demand aid of the Star Men! You are their consul—you must help me!”
The PDA official said considerately, “We are right now trying to find some means to assist your people, Your Supremacy. But—”
“Assist my people? Why worry about them? Enough of them will live over to breed back to normal. We’ve had famines before. It’s this Iatulon of Mardukash—He’s the one who makes the trouble!”
The PDA consul’s head drew back at the words, “Enough of them will live over to breed back to normal.” He stared at the local king, started to speak, and then his jaw snapped shut.
“Now,” said the enormous scarlet-robed figure, “You will see how crafty this fellow is. I have just had word, by messenger on my Road, that he will sell me ‘enough grain to feed your people, at only a hand of coppers the half-measure,’ but I have to buy in bulk, and pay for it myself in big lots. And I must send word back at once!”
The consul stared, then suddenly became excited. “Your hereditary enemy offers food? Then you must take it!”
“Take it? Not so fast. This is a high price!”
“But food is bound to be high. There is a famine!”
“Not in Mardukash, there isn’t. The low born vermin keep their storehouses better than the palace. It is a high price. If I buy this food, my treasury will run out, I will not be able to pay my own army. That means ruin. But I have to buy, because word of this offer is being spread amongst the people. I will have a revolt if I do not buy! It’s all this cursed Road! If it were not for that, the peasants would have raised their crops, and—even if we had a famine—no one could have got food in over the roads, so no outsider could have interfered.” He shook his fist. “I demand that you destroy the Road!”
The consul looked staggered, then outraged. With an effort, he unclenched his fists.
“I am afraid I cannot associate myself with such an attitude, Your Supremacy.”
“You, too, eh?” The local king whirled around, and lunged back into the carriage, which sagged and swayed with loud creaks from the springs. “Back to the palace!”
The footmen snapped up the step, shut the door, and sprang on in back. The driver cracked his whip. The carriage whirled around in a cloud of dust, and shot out of sight down the road.
The consul stared at the dwindling cloud of dust.
“Incredible! A pure paranoid reaction!”
The colonel shook his head sadly, “In view of his attitude, possibly a change to a . . . er . . . more stable executive . . . might actually be a blessing in disguise.”
“Yes. It certainly would. If the Iatulon actually brings food from his storehouses, he, at least, is showing the right attitude!”
The colonel nodded approvingly.
The PDA consul slowly passed his hand over his face. “If only they were all like the Iatulon!”
Three days later, his offer having been refused, the Iatulon’s army came down the Royal Road like an avalanche, brushed aside a small force sent out to guard the border, clashed in a savage fight with the main body of the defending army, and was just entering the capital when the local king, surrounded by his mounted elite guard, shot out of the palace in a war chariot studded with double-edged knives, with a heavy oblong chest strapped into the chariot, gained the Road, and headed for the neighboring kingdom of Fazir. The Road offering excellent speed, he was steadily approaching the border of Fazir when a fast moving body of troops appeared in the distance ahead. This developed into the slitted and loop-holed armored coach and household guard of the Arawak of Fazir, who was himself seeking sanctuary from the Ribar of Zaroom, the Ribar having fomented an uprising by offering food to the starving populace of Fazir.
As the two kings conferred, there appeared from each direction the rapidly-advancing cavalry of the Iatulon and the Ribar.
The two trapped kings briefly gripped each other by the arms. They whipped out their swords, and sprang back into their vehicles.
The chariot and the armored coach whirled around, pointed toward the enemy, and two angry voices rang out together.
“Charge!”
The household cavalry leveled their lances. The war vehicles thundered ahead of them down the road. The cavalry of the Iatulon and the Ribar went from a trot to a gallop.
As the antagonists met in a final bloody clash, already from Mardukash and Zaroom the grain wagons were creaking, heavily-laden, down the Royal Road from the swollen storehouses toward their famine-stricken neighbors.
XII
The colonel, looking like himself again, sat back at his desk, and looked over his four promising new recruits, once more recognizable as Roberts, Hammell, Morrissey, and Bergen.
“You see, gentlemen, a chain of events, if properly made, appears, one link after the other, very logically and inescapably. And here”—he picked up a yellow message form—”is the final link we’re interested in, so far as this chain of events is concerned.”