The Man Who Lost the Sea (8 page)

“Yeah,” agreed Deeming, “Nantha, Sirione, and that devil’s world Keth.” He shuddered. “Glad they keep us off that one. Guess you’re right—the Angels know what they’re doing just this once.… What’s so special about Revelo, that it’s Proscribed?”

“As usual, the Angels won’t say. It might be anything. As I say, I trust them for that, and I’m not going to be the one who spreads around a device to make it possible for anyone to penetrate any of ’em.”

“Except Donald.”

“Except Donald,” Rockhard conceded. “For that I have no excuse. If something there kills him, it’s a chance he was willing to take. If he brings something out inadvertently, it will be taken care of on Grebd. And I know he won’t bring out anything on purpose, like yinyang seeds. Explain it all away, don’t I?” His voice changed, as if some internal organist had shut down all the stops and grouped out new ones. “Don’t tell me I shouldn’t have done it. I know that. I knew it then. But I’d do it again, hear? I’d do it again if it was what he wanted.”

There was silence for a time and Deeming turned his head away as a decent person might, offering privacy to another. Rockhard said, “We found out how the little alien flickers penetrate the Proscribed planets. They turn it inside out. An analogue might be the way a surge of current will reverse the polarity on a DC generator. We found out,” he said bleakly, “that if that happens, the flicker goes in harmlessly. And then when it comes out, the field will kill anyone aboard.” He raised his head and looked at Deeming blindly. “Don doesn’t know that,” he whispered.

Deeming said, “Oh.”

After a while he spoke again, incredulously. “I think you’re saying that I … that somebody has to go there and tell him.”

“Tell him? What would he do if you told him?”

“Wouldn’t the flicker reverse the polarity a second time?”

“Not from the inside. Besides, that polarity reverse is only an analogy, Deeming. No, what has to be done is to take him this,” and from the desk drawer, he scooped two tiny cylindrical objects. Both together were less than the length of his little finger, smaller in diameter than a pen. Deeming rose and went to the desk and took one of them up. There were four separate coils rigidly mounted on the cylinder, toroids, each wound with what seemed to be thousands of precise turns of microscopically fine wire. At one end was an octagonal recess, meant apparently to receive a rotating shaft, as well as a spring collar designed to clamp the device down. The other end faded to insubstantiality, neither transparent nor opaque, but both and neither, and acutely unsettling to watch for more than a second or two.

“Replacement freak coils for the flickerfield,” he diagnosed. “But I never saw them this tiny. Are they models?”

“The real thing,” said Rockhard tiredly. “And actually an improvement on the one the aliens put on those boats. Apparently they never encountered the kind of deathtrap the Angels use, or they might well have designed one like this.”

“What do they do?”

“Put a certain randomness in the frequency of the flickerfield, when it approaches a Proscribed area. Just as a flickerfield works by
making a ship, in effect, exist and cease to exist in normal space, so that it doesn’t exist at any measurable time as real mass, and can therefore exceed the velocity C, so this coil detects and analyses the frequency of the Angel’s death-field, and phases with it. The death-field doesn’t kill anything because the approaching ship ceases to exist before it enters the field and does not exist again until it is through it. Unlike the one Donald tried, it doesn’t affect the field or reverse its direction.”

“So if Donald gets one of these and replaces his frequency coil with it …”

“He can forget the existence of the Angel’s field.”

“On Revelo or any other Proscribed planet.” Deeming tossed the coil and caught it. He held it up and sighted past it at Rockhard. “I’ve got a whole cosmos full of bad trouble here in my hand,” he said steadily.

“You have every rotten plague and dangerous plant pest known to xenology, right here in your hand,” agreed Rockhard.

“And yinyang weed. Lots of money in yinyang weed,” said Deeming reflectively. Yinyang (derived from the old Chinese yin and yang), the two-colored disc divided by an S-shaped line, and representing all opposites—good and evil, light and dark, male and female, and so on—as well as the surprising fact that the flowers were an almost perfect representation of the symbol in red and blue, was by far the most vicious addictive drug ever known, because not only was it potent and virtually incurable, it increased the addict’s intelligence fivefold and his physical strength two to three times, and he became an inhuman behemoth with the sole desire to destroy anything and everything between himself and his source of supply, able to outlast, outthink, outfight and outrun anyone of his species.

“If you’re really thinking about making money out of yinyang, you’re a swine,” said Rockhard evenly, “and if that was meant as a joke, you’re an oaf.”

Deeming locked eyes with him for a moment, then dropped his eyes. “You’re right,” he muttered. He put the coil carefully down on the desk next to its mate.

Rockhard said, “You worry me, Deeming. If I thought you’d use
these coils for any such thing I’d … well, Donald can die. He’d die gladly, if he knew.”

Deeming said soberly, “Can you find a man willing to breach an Angel’s command who is not also willing to take anything that comes his way?”

“Touché,”
said Rockhard, with a bitter and reluctant grin. “You have a head on your neck. Well, have you got the picture? You’re to go to Revelo in the other alien lifeboat, equipped with this coil. Slip through the field, locate Donald, tell him what’s happened, and see that his coil is replaced with this other one. Then off he goes to Grebd for his—his camouflage job.”

“And what do I do?”

“Come back with a message from Don. He’ll know which one. When I hear it I’ll know if you’ve done the job.”

“If I haven’t I won’t come back,” said Deeming bluntly, and realized as he said it that, incredibly, he had at some point decided to do this crazy thing. “And what do you do if I come back and say ‘Mission accomplished’?”

“I’m not going to name a figure. It’s a little like the way top executives get paid, Deeming. After a certain point you stop talking salary, and a man begins drawing what he needs for expenses—any expenses—against the value of his holdings. When his holdings go up to a certain level the company stops keeping books on what he draws. It’ll be like that with you. You just take what you want, as often as you like, for as long as you live. One man might break up this organization by throwing assets away, but he’d have to work all day every day for a good long while to do it.”

“We … ah … have no contract, Mr. Rockhard.”

“That’s right, Mr. Deeming.”

He’s saying, thought Deeming, you can trust me. And I can. But I can’t say that to him. He’d have to answer no. He said cruelly, “You ought to let him die.”

“I know,” said Rockhard.

“I’m a damn fool,” said Deeming. “I’ll do it.”

Rockhard held out his hand and Deeming took it. It was a warm firm hand and when it let go it withdrew slowly as if it regretted the
loss of contact, instead (like some) of falling away in relief. This was a man who meant what he said.

Which of course, he thought, is only another species of damn fool, when you get down to it.

Why me?

That was the base thought, the kingpin thought, the keystone thought of everything that happened between that first meeting and the day he coined off for Revelo. By that time he knew the answer.

Begin at Earth, go to Revelo, do a little job, and return. If it had been just that, and that’s all, there wouldn’t have been a reason for Deeming’s presence in the matter. The nameless pudgy man could have done it; the old man could have done it himself. But there were—details.

There were the two interminable briefing sessions. He had the new coil; all he had to do was plug it into the alien ship.

But the alien ship was hidden far from Earth.

All right; given the ship, all he needed was to drop a Revelo course-coin into his autopilot and push the button.

But he didn’t have a Revelo course-coin. Nobody had a Revelo course-coin. Few people even knew where it was. There was a coin, certainly. In the files at Astro City on Ybo. He’d have to get that one. The files …

The files were in the Angel Headquarters building.

Well, if he got the ship, and if he got the coin, and if Rockhard was right and the new coil worked properly, not only to get him through the death-field but back out again, and if this could be done without alerting an Angel (Rockhard’s reasoning was that by turning the field inside out, Don had almost certainly alerted them, but that the new design, which would not—he hoped—touch or affect the field, would permit Deeming to get in and both of them to get out again without activating any alarms. So that for an indeterminate time the Angels must operate on their original information—that one ship had gone in, none come out), and if Donald Rockhard were alive, and if he knew what message to give Deeming and if Deeming got back all right and if Rockhard understood the message
properly and if, after all this, Rockhard paid off, why then, this looked like a pretty good deal. And also clearly something that only a man like Deeming could possibly accomplish.

So there were the two long briefings with Rockhard and his scientific assistant Pawling (of whose discourse Deeming caught not one word in nine), and a hurried trip back to his own quarters, where he wrote suitable letters to the hotel and to his housing and food depots and maintenance and communications services and so on and on, including the mailing of the goat’s wrist-watch where it would do him the most good, and the paying of bills for liquor and clothing and garage, and, and … (“How doth the little busy bee/Keep from flipping his lid like me?” he sang insanely to himself as he did all the things that would assure the hive that it could rest easy, nobody was doing anything unusual around here, honest.) When he was finished with it his affairs were ready for him to resume in a couple of weeks, or, if not, a small secondary wave of assurances to the trades, comforts, and services would go out announcing a minor accident, and making arrangements for another two weeks’ absence, and then another ripple reporting a new job on Bluebutter, which was somewhere among the Crabs, and at last a line to a bartender,
How are you Joe?
to be mailed at the end of two years. If that one ever got mailed, he’d be eighteen months dead, and if he thought he had cold feet before, he was afraid to bend his toes when he wrote it.

The day came (was it really only four days since he started out to fence a watch and faced a knocking door?) for departure. Rockhard shook his hand, and Deeming for the second time felt that warm contact and, along with it, a thing in the old cold eyes that could only be covered by the word ‘pleading.’ If the pleading had words, what would they be?
Bring my boy out
. Or,
Let me trust you
. Or maybe,
Don’t doubt me: don’t ever doubt me
. Perhaps,
You’re my kind, boy—a pretty sleazy edition, but anyway my kind, so … take care of yourself, whatever
. He handed Deeming more cash money than he had had in his hand since the night he gathered up the big pot at the poker game and handed it over to the guy who won it from him on the next hand. But this time it was only expense money,
not even figured in. Rockhard probably never knew how close he came to losing his man by the size of that pittance. Or maybe he did. The pudgy man and the chauffeur were about as easy to shake from that moment until coin-off as a coat of shellac.

And did he lean back in cozy cushions and watch a band of loving friends waving from the blockhouse? He did not. He left the house in the back of a utility truck, which pulled up in utter darkness inside a building somewhere. He was hustled wordlessly into a side room, shoehorned into a power suit, and rammed into a space fully as tall as the underneath of a studio couch and round—torturously, about two hand-breadths less than he was tall, so that he couldn’t straighten out. They welded him in, at which point he discovered that his honey-pipe had not been given the quarter turn necessary to open it to the converters. He spent almost the entire night trying to grip it with his southern cheeks, which he found indifferently prehensile and, as time went on, demanding of differential subtleties that he would have sworn were beyond his control. He was wrong; he succeeded by laborious fractions and got it open and at last lay sweat-drenched and limp with effort and relief. And then more time flowed through his prison than any small space ought to hold, when he had nothing to do but think.

And the only thing he could think about, and that over and over, was that he really wasn’t too uncomfortable or distressed by this imprisonment, because he seemed to be conditioned to it. He had, after all, for some years lived huddled in mediocrity with his hotel job pulled no less tight around him than this welded steel pillbox. His excursions as the disappearing Jimmy the Flick were no less confined; confined by limited time, limited targets, and the ubiquitous golden Angels with their wise kind faces and understanding voices, God burn ’em all. They were supposed to be unkillable, but he’d sure like to get one for Christmas and make some simple tests lasting till, say, Midsummer Eve. They, more than anyone, kept the sky closed over him, so he had to walk everywhere with his head bent. He tried to imagine what it would be like to walk in a place where his personal sky had room for a whee of a jump and a holler that anyone could hear and the hell with them; but the wish was too far
from his conditioning and bounced him right back to the uncomfortable thought that he was not uncomfortable here, and so around he went again on the synapse-closed box, closed sky. Damned strong gentle Angels—how would it be to run tall someplace? But I can’t quite grasp that, here in this closed sky.

And then he slept, and then the surface under him rumbled and tipped, and, lo and behold, it was only the next morning after all.

He switched on his penetroscope and waited impatiently while the pseudo-hard radiation fumbled its way through the beryl hull metal and the image cleared. His prison was being lifted by a crane onto a lowboy trailer, which began to move as soon as it had its load. It tumbled out to the apron where the ship waited, belly down like some wingless insect, with its six jointed jacks, one of which was footless and supported by a tall gantry which had thrust out a boom to hold up the limb, like a groom holding up a horse’s split hoof while the stableboy runs for the liniment.