The Terexian priest looked at the colonel, then at Swelnior. He picked up his chair, and walked around the table to seat himself beside the colonel, who, with the other humans, had a considerable space between him and the nearest Terexians. Ignoring Swelnior, the priest looked at the colonel. “If I read your face rightly, Mr. Fisher, the balance has tilted too far, and the evil that has been done is about to be righted by the Sword of Justice. You are, I see, a soldier.”
The colonel recovered from the shock, and groped for a reply. But the priest had already turned toward Swelnior.
“You sack of wormy swine, do you imagine that one of the Faith will join in your folly? You, with the wisdom of a block of sawn wood, the polish of a lump of sandstone, and the self-discipline of an eel two days dead and afloat in scum, you dare invite the Select of the Faith to ape your depravity?”
There was a stunned silence. Swelnior opened his mouth.
“See here—”
“None of that. You have had the power and misused it. The accumulated worth of past deeds is used up, and you have forgotten how you came to where you are. Know then that there is a weight in the lives of men which, set in motion, overcarries, however the later acts of a man may seem to mock it. But it is only for a moment in the eyes of those who know. Now prepare to eat the ripened fruit that you have raised in your orchard.”
Swelnior turned pale, and looked around at the others. Most of them looked shaken. A few sat with outthrust jaws and steady gaze.
The priest looked up.
“I feel it come.”
The colonel glanced at his watch.
The room moved as if they were on a ship that swayed around them. Ornate water glasses slid and spilled. A heavy spiked candleholder smashed down on the table.
The roar seemed to go on forever.
It came to the colonel that the Skagas had had some backing that he hadn’t known about. This meeting was being held in an exclusive section of the capital city. From the roar and the shooting flames, it was obvious where a part of Mr. Swelnior’s wealth had come from.
Swelnior himself was frenziedly shouting. The bulk of the guests were screaming as chunks of plaster and ornate stone blocks smashed to the floor. The priest was looking on with a grim smile. The air was full of plaster dust, glowing pink from the flames glaring in the window. Major Brouvaird, from the Offloading Center, emerged from under the table with the other Space Force officers, stared around, and let loose a string of awed profanity.
” . . . The guerrillas?”
A younger officer said urgently, “How do we get out?”
There was a sizzling, cracking sound, the flames vanished, and a cloud of white vapor steamed up past the window. An instant later, the Interstellar Investigations ship loomed through the mist, dangling a flexible ladder, and an amplified voice boomed orders to climb onto the ladder. The Terexian priest seemed slightly disappointed by the rescue, but everyone else reacted with enthusiasm.
Once on the ladder, the ship swung away from the side of the building, where the flames were again starting to spring up, and now the rest of the city, the hills on three sides, and the bay on the fourth, came into view.
One whole section of the city was in flames, and from here and there in the surrounding wooded hills, sizable clouds of dust and smoke climbed up. In the exclusive hill section of the city, Swelnior’s house and two or three others nearby were a shambles.
As the ship set them down, all the Terexians at once crowded around the priest, anxiously seeking guidance. The priest was giving it to them in no uncertain language as the colonel, Major Brouvaird, and the other Space Force and “Interstellar Investigations” men looked around.
“That column of smoke,” said the Space Force major, “is the storehouse we built at the near end of the coastal canal. The damned pirates looted the place every feast day.” He stared at the hills. “That biggest column of smoke—where you can see flames shooting up—corresponds with the location of a guerrilla supply dump they’ve been rumored to have been building up.” He looked at the colonel again. “If what we can see from here is typical, the Skagas and the guerrillas have just gotten the stiffest jolt of the war. Do you mind if I ask what hit them?”
“Interstellar Investigations,” said the colonel gravely, “has its methods.”
“Ah,” said the major, going along with the joke, “but I thought Interstellar Investigations was hired to detect who was robbing the supply system.”
“That was the problem.”
The major looked around at the towering clouds of smoke.
“But—”
“Those that blew up,” said the colonel politely, “were guilty. We detected the criminals by seeing who got punished by his crime.”
Off in the distance, the Interstellar Investigations ship, having perhaps got special permission of the priesthood to use gravitors on this desperate occasion, had warped a huge column of water up out of the bay on a gravitor beam, and was dumping it on the burning section of the city.
The Space Force major wrestled with the colonel’s comment.
“But—”
“When you want to see who’s stealing all the cookies from the cookie jar,” said the colonel, “you can make up a batch filled with red pepper. It has the virtue of detecting the criminal, punishing him for his crime, giving him second thoughts for the future, and just possibly raising his respect for the chef.”
A number of highborn Terexians, looking pale and greenish, passed by the humans with markedly respectful bows.
The major’s eyes widened as the idea hit him, and as it dawned on him how much he still didn’t know.
Down in the city now, the holocaust had been reduced to a towering column of steam. The ship came back again, again lowering its ladder, but this time booming out instructions that only “Interstellar Investigations” personnel should climb aboard.
“Interstellar Investigations,” said the major dazedly, as the last deduction added itself up in his mind. With a sensation like a stiff jolt to the midsection, he realized what he’d really been dealing with.
The colonel, climbing swiftly, was now almost up to the ship. He waved goodbye just before he climbed in.
The major recovered his self-possession and threw a salute. There, at least, was an organization PDA couldn’t touch, and that knew you didn’t gain respect and cooperation by letting yourself be jumped on. There was an outfit that did things right!
* * *
The colonel stepped into the ship, and watched as the fake outer hatch swung shut. He shook his head, and stepped in through the massive hatch of the real ship. There had been a mess if he ever saw one. He’d almost got himself and some valuable recruits killed by going to Swelnior’s meeting, and the fact was inescapable that a number of innocent people, hopefully a small number, had got blown up along with the black marketeers and guerrillas. On the other hand, Space Force casualties should go down to where they should have been in the first place, and if PDA didn’t commit some new piece of stupidity, it might be possible to have peace on the planet for a while. Meanwhile, he’d picked up thirty-one highly promising recruits, and, when he got back, Roberts, Hammell, Morrissey, and Bergen should just be getting back from Basic. Maybe then it would be possible to get things straightened out so they could do things right for a change.
With these thoughts filling his mind, the colonel almost smashed into the highly polished, practically invisible column at the center of the ship. He had scarcely recovered when a shout came down from overhead:
“Colonel! The Chief’s on the screen!”
The colonel thrust through the jammed recruits, and started up the grav-shaft.
It would be nice to have things the way they should be.
But something told him there would be a slight delay first.
BASIC
Vaughan Roberts wiped the sweat out of his eyes and studied the sliding gate with its strong close-spaced horizontal bars. The gate was set in a chain-link fence fifteen feet high, topped with five strands of electrified barbed wire. The lower edge of the fence was embedded in a concrete base two feet thick. At the gate, this base swelled into a concrete apron twenty feet across. Set in the concrete, directly in front of the gate and close to it, was a round hole some fourteen inches wide at the top, with smooth sides sloping to a small round flat bottom about eighteen inches below. The bottom was metal, with several small vertical holes and several rods supporting flat upraised metal plates. Around the top of this hole was a circular brass rim bearing the words, INSERT KEY AND TURN TO OPEN GATE.