Imperial Stars 1-The Stars at War (3 page)

Brown was the code name. Kaempfert was the man. Blocky, with a square face and blunt fingertips, he was one of sixteen men who sat behind their crowded desks in the Agency's sparsely furnished Assignment Room.

"How are you, Bill?" Demaris said, shaking his hand. "How're Leni and the kids?"

"Fine, Thad. Getting healthier every day." He looked down at his stomach and chuckled. "All of us. Sit down. You got here fast. Champing at the bit, Thad?"

Demaris nodded expressively. "I can't take Earth any more." He grimaced distastefully. "Croquet, Mr. Demaris? Liqueur, Messire? Agh! Our society's like a translucent china dish, overlaid with gilt filigree and wrapped in cotton batting. It's beautiful, it's elegant, and safe—but you don't dare use it to eat from."

Kaempfert smiled, his eyes sparkling briefly. Then he flicked a hand toward the files on his desk.

"O.K., then—let's get you out where the red meat is. Briefly, here's the job:

"Farla's as good as gone. She may not know it, yet, but the only thing that's saved her for the time being is Marak's inability to move in without first slapping down Genis—and vice versa.

"So, Marak's asked us for a man who'll keep Genis off balance until Marak can move in on Farla and consolidate. That's you. You'll handle strategy, maybe do some on-the-spot generaling."

Demaris nodded. "Sounds good." He grinned fiercely. "Sounds damn good!"

Kaempfert handed him a file. "Here's most of your poop. You get a full-scale briefing tomorrow at eight. That's Ante Meridiem, son. You're scheduled for Make-up and Indoctrination at eleven."

Demaris whistled softly. "Shooting me out in a hurry, huh?"

Kaempfert nodded, his face grave. "It's faster than I'd like. One day isn't enough to set up an air-tight job. But it's a hurry-up situation. We'll just have to take our chances. If you think somebody's spotted you, you're hereby authorized to take the most logical preventive steps under the circumstances."

Demaris nodded as though in echo to Kaempfert's expression. The necessity was obvious, but nevertheless, the Agency didn't often work that way.

Kaempfert broke the silence. "Well. That's that. Where're you staying tonight, Thad?"

Demaris shrugged. "Hotel of some kind, I guess. I got here straight from the airport. Still got my bags out in the front office."

"Well, how about staying over with us?" Kaempfert stared down at his fingertips.

Demaris laughed. "I guess that's one way of making sure I won't get into a fight before morning. Sure, Bill. Be glad to, and thanks."

Kaempfert looked up at him with the traces of guilt fading out of the corners of his eyes.

Demaris winked at him. "Where'd you get the idea I was the pugnacious type, Bill?"

Kaempfert grunted.

Demaris sprawled his bulk in an easy-chair, his feet thrust out atop a hassock. He felt free and relaxed for the first time in weeks. He'd eaten a quick meal, unconstrained by any necessity for making intricate small-talk. No, he had a lazy evening to look forward to; something he hadn't had since the last time he'd known he was going out in the morning.

He whistled a snatch of "Heroes All" and chuckled softly.

Leni Kaempfert smiled fondly as she shut the nursery door behind her. "Adding a new verse, Thad?"

"Me? I never wrote that thing."

Leni's tongue bulged her cheek. "No?"

"Why, no."

She shrugged agreeably. "O.K. But if Old Man Sullivan ever proves his suspicions, you'll be in deep trouble." She looked at Demaris with mock-solemnity. "The Agency is a serious business enterprise. Let us not go around making snide remarks."

Demaris took a gulp of his drink. "To Hell with Old Man Sullivan!"

"It's his outfit, Thad," Bill Kaempfert reminded him. "We just work there. He runs things the way he wants them."

Demaris reached out spasmodically, as though unconsciously trying to seize hold of his fleeing peace. For an hour, he had forgotten the habitual tensity of his muscles. Now his jaw was hardening again.

"Yeah!" he spat out harshly. "He sits in an office somewhere, where nobody ever sees him, and he runs it. I just go out and bleed dollar bills for him." Demaris coiled his body into a tense crouch on the chair's edge.

"Now, come on," Kaempfert said, "it's not as bad as all that."

Demaris lashed out savagely. "Isn't it? If there were still a TSN—if there were even the faintest chance of working for Earth instead of messing up the stars for Sullivan's profit—would you stick with the Agency? Would you be selling yourself on every streetcorner, no reasonable offer refused?" He could see he was embarrassing the Kaempferts, but what he was saying was true.

Bill Kaempfert grinned uncomfortably. "That's a point, Thad," he admitted. "But you don't knock your bread and butter."

Demaris thumped his empty glass down on the side table. "Would we starve?" he asked. "Would we really wind up begging in the streets? You especially; couldn't you get a job as a personnel manager with any company you wanted?"

Kaempfert shrugged. "Maybe. If I could think up some explanation for not having any references. It's been ten years since I've held a legal job."

"O.K. So you'd have a little trouble. But not that much. Besides, we're off the point."

Kaempfert raised his eyebrows inquiringly. Demaris inhaled raggedly.

"Let's face it, Bill—we're bad enough off now, but we'd cut our throats if we gave it all up and tried to live in this teashop society. We just don't fit. Our personal frontier doesn't stop at Pluto." He grimaced.

"Here we sit. Two prime representatives of a race that used to have guts to spare—that scared the universe half-silly the first time we pushed a rickety tin can to Sirius. And here we sit now—the backwash of the Wave of the Future!"

Kaempfert put up a restraining palm. "Easy, Thad. Most people would figure Pluto was plenty far enough. Most people don't ever even leave Earth. And we may have scared the universe, but we sure didn't impress the Vilks."

Demaris brushed Kaempfert's palm down as effectively as though there'd been a physical contact. "All right. So the barbarians licked us. That was when the TSN was fifteen ships and a handful of cranky torpedoes. Now the Vilks are gone for good. It was an Earthman that licked 'em, too."

Kaempfert nodded. "Old Connie Jones."

"
Exactly!
Connie Jones—an Agency man hired by Farla. So who got the territory an Earthman won? Who moved in where Earthmen should have been the conquerors? It would have been Farla, buying its military brains from an Agency run by Earthmen. It happened to work out that Farla bled itself to death. So who
does
move in? Who takes the territory that's open by default? Does Earth have even that much ambition?

"No, it has to be rabble like the Maraks, or the Geneiids! A pack of jackals. And what does Earth government do about it? Earth government isn't even interested. And what do individual Earthmen do—the ones who still care? Why," Demaris suddenly simpered, "
we
work for Mr. Sullivan's Agency, and
we'd
be only too happy to hire out to one of the jackals, wouldn't we? We're for sale; lock, stock, and barrel, soul, body, and birthright. We do the dirty work for every stinking little race in the galaxy, and meanwhile Earth government sits primly on its solar system and keeps its hoopskirts dry."

"Thad?"

"Yes, Leni?"

"Thad, what you're angry at is that Bill and I don't protest as much as you do. But we
aren't
arguing. Bill thinks you're right, and so do I. Still, there's no way we can change Earth's present attitude. And we've at least got this substitute.

"And tell me this, Thad—honestly, now, and no heroics—will you quit? Will you ever quit, and settle for a life here on Earth? Going from one duel to the next until nobody dares associate with you and you blow out your own brains for lack of some other man to fight?"

Demaris looked at her helplessly. "No," he admitted.

 
"Though we are men, at the Agency,
We fight in peculiar skins.
Aptly taught, we're not caught—
We've been thoroughly trained,
In the lore of exotical sins."
 

The Agency building was dingy. Demaris and Kaempfert walked down the grimy hallway and up the splintered stairs to the second floor. They pushed through the chipped glass door labeled "Doncaster Industrial Linens" and were in the Agency's front office.

Demaris still felt the irritating memories of last night's adrenalin. He looked around and shook his head. "There's no place like home sweet home—even if it's a false beard."

Kaempfert shrugged. "Our customers don't know where the cash-and-carry heroes come from. Why should Earth government? Besides, I can just hear what the government would have to say about its nationals fighting alien battles and chancing all sorts of international complications if their origin is discovered."

"Government could use a jolt," Demaris growled.

"Your briefing room's down the hall," Kaempfert said. "You're due there."

Demaris nodded. "Uh-huh." He put out his hand. "Bill—I'm sorry I'm such a pop-off. I didn't really mean to give you a rough time last night. Be seeing you, huh?"

"Sure, Thad. Come home—nothing to forgive."

They shook hands, tapped each other on the biceps, and separated. Demaris walked down the hall, and Kaempfert went through the front office to his desk.

He'd memorized his Marak file. Now he turned it in to the technician at the door of the briefing room, who tagged it with his code name and dropped it into a similarly labeled filing cabinet.

"Strip," the technician said in a bored voice.

Demaris had already begun climbing out of his clothes. He handed the bundle to the technician, who tagged it and put it in a locker. "Stand still, please . . . no facial expression, if you please . . . hold it. . . thank you." The front and sideview photographs were clipped to Demaris' check card, and the card was handed to him. "Medical examination over in that corner, please."

Demaris bobbed his head impatiently. The doctor, standing beside his equipment, was thin but not invisible.

He was given a complete physical, with results noted on his card, and returned to the technician, who wordlessly handed him a set of light coveralls, noted their issue on his card, returned the card, and then nodded him over to the desk where his briefing officer had been sitting all this time.

"Mr. Blue?" the briefing officer said as Demaris came over, addressing him by his code name, "My name's Puce." He smiled slightly. "Sit down, please. May I have your card, please? Thank you."

Demaris handed the card over.

"You've studied your file?"

"Memorized it."

"Yes, yes, of course, Mr. Blue. Just a routine question. You know how it is—mass production. We treat everybody the same way—old hand, newcomer, special recruit; whatever he may be. It's not as informal as it might be, but—"

"I know."

"Uh. Well. Now, Mr. Blue—if your rank were that of Tjetlyn in the Marakian Interstellar Air Fleet, and I were a Klowdil, which of us would salute first?"

"Neither of us. You'd be my inferior, so I'd pretend to ignore you. If I wanted anything from you, I'd say so. The salute, as such, is unknown on Marak." Demaris gave the answer in a bored voice.

"Yes. Well—as a Tjetlyn, you might be invited to official functions at the homes of Chiefs of State. Would it be proper for you to drink three portions of
drasos?
"

"It would be mandatory—three and as many more as I could hold."

"Good. Very good, Mr. Blue. Now, assuming that you were on leave and fell into the company of a perfectly respectable but not hostile young
pavoja
: What would be your course of action?"

"I'd pretend she was Eileen deFleur—up to the point at which my normal Marakian biological urges would, unfortunately, suffer frustration due to accidental circumstances over which no one could possibly prove I had any control."

Mr. Puce chuckled. "Very good. Now, supposing—"

And so forth, through a veritable nightmare of possible pitfalls which might betray his un-Marakian nature. Demaris threaded his deliberate way through all the vicissitudes Mr. Puce could conjure up for him, and emerged unchallenged—and angry at the redundance of going through this college entrance examination when he knew that Indoctrination would supply him with the unconscious awareness of all these things, driving the knowledge not into his conscious information banks but into his reflexes.

Still and all, he could not deny that the Agency had remained undetected only because of this kind of thoroughness—and that in this case, especially, with no time for the usual three days' checking to be sure, every possible precaution still might leave some chink unguarded.

"All right, Mr. Blue," Puce was saying, "I think that about covers it. Now, if you'll just sketch out a situation map on this board, I think that'll be all—except for Make-up and Indoctrination, of course."

Yes— Except for that mere trifle. Demaris twitched his upper lip as he picked up Puce's stylus and laid out the map.

Farla was a cluster of stars shaped like a badly pitted furnace clinker. Adjoining it on the side away from Earth—which he represented by a contemptuous, zero-shaped speck at the foot of the board—was Marak, with its stars grouped like a rat's head, sniffing at the clinker. To Farla's right, Genis and her stars were a twisted, mold-eaten orange peel. Working quickly, he sketched in the profile view, which included such scattered breadcrumbs as Ruga, Dilpo, and Stain, all inextricably jumbled in by the fact that stars, unfortunately for diagramatics, occupied three dimensions, were anything but stationary, and were governed by countless dozens of little pocket empires that had seized in any and all possible directions once the Vilk yolk was taken off them.

The pure white stars, he thought—the pure white stars live in a garbage heap.

He turned the board around and pushed it toward Puce, who nodded approval. "Yes, that's fine. All right, that does it. Thank you, and good luck, Mr. Blue."