John Rackham (4 page)

It
wasn't nearly enough for Jack, and his mind buzzed with questions, but now his
taste buds were reporting a host of new and delightful
sensations,
and he concentrated on those for a while. Jasar must have been hungry
too,
by the way he dealt with his own portion. But then,
after a while, he sighed and sat back a little from the table.

"Forgive
me again," he said, "if I seem hasty. This is all very fine, a rare
and pleasant interval in a hectic life, and I am grateful for it, but I have
work to do that must not be kept waiting too long. I think you know what a war
is, both of you?"

"A
child knows as much," Jack said. "Even now all this land is at war
with the infidel Saracen, who
defile
the holy places
of our Christian faith."

"A holy war?
That's the worst kind. Well, I'm in a war too, of a slightly different
stamp. Perhaps I can explain a little of it to you." He rummaged in his
broad belt and brought out a flat package to
lay
on
the table. In the next moment he had unfolded it to twice its length. Then from
the inside of it he drew out and up a thin sheet of pearly-white stuff, up and
up until it was half the length of an arrow above the table, and as wide. With
a quiet click it became suddenly taut and smooth. "This," Jasar
said, "is a reader-screen. I'm afraid this
has
to be magic, so far as you are concerned. I can't think of any simple
way to explain it that you'll understand. Let's just say it shows pictures
and diagrams. Just watch a moment." He made careful adjustments to a row
of buttons along the bottom edge and the pearly sheet acquired a shimmering
glow. Then color, and there, suddenly and perfectly, was the sunlit glade, the
trees, and Brownie
...
and . . .

"That is
myself
!"
Jack gasped, backing hurriedly away.
"As I stood
...
as you came down out of the sky!"

"That's
right. But it's only a picture, Jack, nothing to fear. And it is important that
you grasp this first bit, because all the rest follows from it. Watch
again." The images shivered and changed, and Jack stared, realizing that
he was seeing what Jasar must have seen, from above, on his way down.
Fascination overcame fear. He came closer.

"That
is how you descended," he muttered, seeing it happen again. "But
where did you come from?"

"One
nice thing about you, lad, is that you ask the right kind of questions for me
to handle. Hold onto your imagination now, and
I’ ll
show you." The quiet warning was timely. Jack stared breathlessly as the
action ran backward. The quiet green glade sharply shown shrank away. In a
breath the cottage slid into the picture.
Then the winding
river.
There was Castle Dudley as a bird might see it. And now the
recognizable details were lost in smallness, a vast-ness of green forest,
thread-like roads. Then they too were gone and it became a shape of green and
brown, and ragged traces of clouds. The sea slid in at one edge, and more
detail disappeared under more rolling clouds.

"Above the sky!"
he breathed, and Jasar grunted softly.

"This is just the
beginning. Keep watching."

Now
Jack saw something beyond all belief. The green land gone beyond sight and part
of a greater
mass,
became edged, curved, rimmed in
black, and the black was jeweled with stars.

"It
is like the moon!" he gasped, and Jasar grunted again.

"Right.
A ball of earth and rock.
A
planet.
You live on a planet, lad, a world of rock and soil, sea and
mountain.
One of many.
And all of them, with their
many moons, swim around a star that you call the sun. And there it is
now."

Jack
winced at the tremendous edge of fire, heard how his mother groaned in her
throat "This is all
...
true,
Jasar?"

"It's true."

"Then where are you from, Heaven or
Hell?"

"Nothing like that, Jack.
IT1 get to my home in a while. Right now, to
make this easier for you,
I’ ll
switch to schematic."
He fiddled with his buttons again, and the terrifying picture dissolved,
became a drawing, a thing of points and loops and spirals. "This is the
way your world works, Jack. This is your sun, and this is its family. That spot
is your Earth. And the whole thing is a star-system. Your sun is a star, just
like all the other stars you see in the sky at night, except that the others
are very much farther away, so far away that you see them only as pinpoints of
light. The distances are very much greater than you—or even I—can properly
imagine, but that is not important at the moment. We have ships that fly from
one to another of the stars. My ship can do that. It is small, able to cany
only four at most. We have other ships that carry many hundreds, or great
burdens of stuff, in trade and exchange. Apart from the vast distances
involved, that must be an understandable thing to you, trade with other lands?
You do understand that?"

"We
get strange spices, and silks, from Cathay.
Jewels, and
gold-work, and wines, from France and the south.
I have heard of such
things."

"Then
you understand, madam, the main point of what I am trying to say. And now let
me show you this." The drawing disappeared to show a view of the night sky
that was reasonably familiar to Jack, but with many more stars than he had ever
seen.
"This is a part only," Jasar ex-pained.
"To show you the whole range of the stars would need a screen like the
inside of a ball. But now I can show you most, in a special kind of
projection," and again the picture changed, to shrink the familiar sky
scene down to just a part, and still there were stars to fill the area.
"You are looking at many worlds, more than either of us can count to make
sense. Not all have planets. Not all planets have people like us, or as near
like us as to be understandable. But there are enough, even then, to stun the
mind. And most, you must know, are friendly toward each other, come and go
freely, share blessings and skills, and trade, each with the other. Let me show
you that much." Jasar touched a button and instantly there was change.
More than half those pinpoints of light became vivid blue. In the next breath
a vast network of spidery blue lines came to link and interlink
the blue stars.

"This now," Jasar went on, "is
the Federation of Free-Trade Planets, as it was about a hundred of your years
ago. I could give you all the lesser federations and groups within the whole,
but it isn't important at this point. What matters is that we were all
friendly, assembled under one general belief, what you might call fair dealing.
Long long ago, in the history of each of our worlds, we knew a time when we
used violence, and power, and threats. We knew about wars, and fighting, and we
had all grown out of that infantile and barbaric state. That peaceful
Federation you see there had existed for many thousands of your years
. . .."

"What you just said," Jack
interrupted in some doubt "Fighting against an enemy, in war
...
is juvenile and barbaric? Is that what
you think?" He eyed the little man indignantly. "You think it is
wrong so to do?" "Yes, I do."

"What then should one do with an enemy, if not kill him?"

Jasar
hunched one shoulder ruefully. "As I've said, you ask good questions. Let
me ask you one. Why is an enemy?"

"What manner of
question is that?"

"I
apologize for it.
I’ ll
try again. A man is against
you for some reason or other. Either he fears you, fails to understand you,
believes
that you have injured him in some way, or you have
something he wants. All these can be overcome without killing, Jack. To put it
simpler still, if you and I were enemies, and fought each other—one would die,
one would remain. But if we were friends, working together, we could achieve at
least twice as much as singly. Which is better?" But that was too stark
for Jack, and his face showed it. The little man sighed.
"Never
mind.
This is not the time or place to discuss philosophy. The facts
are what count, now. A little more than a hundred of your years ago, this
peaceful picture suddenly changed. With cunning and stealth, a small group of
those many worlds had conspired together to seize power over the rest. There is
another philosophical point to chew over some time. Which is the more
attractive: to earn what you get, or to steal it from someone else? This group,
for a set of reasons all their own, decided to choose the easier way.

"They
secretly revived many of the old skills in weaponry and offense. They built
special ships, designed to hit and cripple unarmed and defenseless traders.
They struck without warning, and in a very short time they had cut and split
the whole web of the Federation. Like this." He touched another button,
and now large areas of blue points and webs winked out and became angry red.

"They call themselves the Hilax Combine.
For a while they came very close to their goal. Great devastation was done,
whole planets burned to ash and ruin, many lives lost, but their calculations
didn't quite make it. The rest of us formed a counter effort. We are the
Salviar Federation, and I am a scout of the Salviar Fleet. We too have revived
a lot of old forgotten skills and arts, out of necessity. And it is no easy
task, lad. We have to do all this, to mount both defense and offense, and at
the same time maintain the channels and sinews of our Federation in production,
safety, and security. It is not easy."

"This
much I can understand." Widow Fairfax spoke up sadly. "Even with us,
a man may tend his home and crops, or go away to war, but he cannot do both."

"You
make my point exactly, madam.
But now, to come away from the
big picture to my small part in one small section of it."
The
screen blurred again, and settled to show a network of stars, closer, more
finely detailed, and nearly equally divided between blue and red. "This is
close to here. Close as such things are in this context. Here and here, you
see, the Hilax hold a barrier against the whole area. So long as they hold this
line, we are split. And it has become known to us that the key point to this
whole barrier is here, a central control and information station, hung in the
space ways between the stars. It is strong, screened, and defended, and it
gathers and serves out vital information over the whole area. If we could
eliminate that, we would break the whole line. And it is my mission to try to
do just that."

Jack
drew his bewildered gaze from the magic of the screen and looked around him at
the rugged but familiar and cozy interior of the cottage. And sighed, and shook
his head. "It may sound all of a piece to you, Jasar," he said,
"but very little of it seems real to me. You talk easily of vast numbers
and great spaces, distances that I cannot imagine.
And then
of a war.
How can a war be fought over such reaches? How can men throw
arrows and spears so far? When you speak of the weapons and sinews of war, this
I understand well. But, to my thinking, the win or lose of a war turns on men.
Strong-thewed and stouthearted men, ready and willing to fight, and
fight on, until either their weapons or their arms fail them.
Is your
way of it different from mine?"

"No."
Jasar smiled grimly. "You're right. It comes down to men, when all else is
accounted for.
Men.
And guts.
Daring enterprises, craft and cunning.
A pinch or two of good fortune here and there.
Technology"—he hunched his shoulders again, tilted his head
aside—"that is just a bigger and better club. Throughout our culture, a
mighty mixture of races and nations, there has been a persistent strain of
wishful thinking that somehow, someday, we would be able to build an automatic
weapon that would do the fighting for us. But it has never worked out in
practice. The final decider has always been man against man, cunning against
r
unnin
g,
purpose against purpose.

And
that can't be designed into a machine. Not yet, at least. But—I apologize
again—I speak of matters that are far above your grasp. To be frank, they are a
little up in the air for me, too!" He softened the words with a grin that
warmed his nut-brown severity, but Jack had his mental teeth into an idea now,
and was not to be distracted that easily.

"You
say," he quoted, "that it has to be man against man. This I can
accept and understand. The pictures you show," he nodded to the
screen—"tell of many hundreds of great fortifications wonderfully
defended. You are but one solitary man. What can you do alone against a
host?"