Masters of Everon (21 page)

Bill came in, staring steadily at him all the way. Then he reached the entrance to the communications room and his gaze went past Jef to the equipment. His face paled above its beard.

He turned and looked full into Jef's face once more; and Jef felt his breath pause in his chest. Now, Bill's eyes bore out the reputation Jarji had given the older man. But he only turned and walked to a small phone handset on one of the side walls. He took it down and pressed its call button several times.

"Beau?" he said after a second. "I found him—in the room at the back of the store building. That's right... I was looking outside for him and thought I saw someone moving down this way, so when I got here I checked and the front door was broke open. Beau, the equipment's wrecked. Lasered to ribbons."

"I wasn't the one who did that," Jef said. "A man named Martin Curragh, who's posing as a John Smith, wrecked it. —Listen!"

In fact, even Jef's civilization-dulled ears could hear, distantly through the log walls, the faint mutter of a light plane's internal combustion engine that had sounded suddenly, and was now quickly dying away out of hearing.

Bill's eyes burned above the handset, at Jef.

"You hear the plane, Beau?" Bill said into the phone. "Robini says Curragh did it—and that'll be him getting away now. That'll be one of our birds he took. He'd not have risked having anyone land one of his own in so close here, we could hear him come in. Shall I question Robini? No, I didn't guess Curragh was, either... all right, then. All right, if you say so, Beau. We'll wait here."

He replaced the handset. They waited.

A few minutes later there were the sound of boots in the darkened outer room and a man came into the corridor who dwarfed Bill—a man even larger than the Constable.

Like Bill, the newcomer wore a beard; but his was a great red mass, cascading halfway down the wide front of his thick, russet jacket. A knitted maroon stocking cap sat on a mass of hair as red as the beard, so that the overall impression he gave was like that of some great red-furred animal. He threw one quick glance at the destroyed equipment, then stopped and turned to face Jef. For a moment the eyes in his wide face were like chips of green bottle glass. Then, abruptly, they softened, and his beard parted in a smile.

"Hello, Jef," he said in a soft baritone. He held out a huge hand. "How are you? Bill, I'm surprised at you. Will Robini's brother wouldn't do anything like this to us. Will was a friend of mine, Jef. I want you to know that. I wouldn't have come here the way I did, just now, if I'd thought you weren't someone only posing as his brother. But you're a close relative, all right, one look at you tells me that. You couldn't be anyone else with that face."

"Of course," said Jef warily. His nerves had been screwed too tightly for him to relax quickly, even in the face of Beau's apparent friendliness.

"You say it was Martin Curragh did the damage, here?" Beau went on.

"That's right," said Jef. He told the large man the story of his own acquaintance with Martin, winding up with his recent discovery that Martin had deliberately set him up to be deported by the Constable.

When he was done, Beau took off his stocking cap and ran thick fingers through his stack of hair. For a second the gesture made him look weary and much older. Then he put the cap back on and was imposingly vigorous again.

"And you've got no idea where he's going, or who he's working with?" Beau asked.

"No. I mean, I don't know where he'd go. I accused him of working for the wisent ranchers and the city crowd, but he said they just thought he was working for them—you remember, I told you that just now."

"So you did," Beau said. He looked again at the ruined communications board. "We made a mistake in taking on Curragh. Do you know, Jef, it would have been a lot easier if your brother was still alive. He had the experience to handle this equipment and we could have trusted him."

"Will?" Jef felt another sudden shock. What Beau said made no sense. "But you're planning to bring in contraband eland embryos. That's going to upset the natural ecological balance here. It's against E. Corps regulations. Will worked for the E. Corps."

"He was my friend," rumbled Beau. "He was one of us."

"I know, but—" Jef tried to think of some way of saying it that would make plain what he meant without insulting Beau and the other game ranchers in general. "Will wouldn't do something like that. He always believed in the E. Corps and the E. Corps regulations. No matter how good a friend you were, he wouldn't break regulations—"

"Listen to me!" said Beau grimly. "I said he would have been the man to do it; I didn't say he'd agreed to do it. This was back before we'd even thought of... all this. He knew, even back then, the wisent ranchers were behind our eland poisoning. In fact he was in the process of putting in a complaint for us to the E. Corps."

"He was going to put in a complaint?"

"He was," Beau said, "although I'd told him it was already too late for that. All the E. Corps could do if it came in was stop the wisent ranchers from expanding their lands any further by clearing our forests. If there'd been some criminal complaint, or something to do with off-Everon people, it'd have been different. But we were already into Second Mortgage. Even eight years ago, the wisent ranchers were already too far ahead of us."

"What do you mean, too far ahead of you?" asked Jef.

"I mean we'd been too slow catching on—to the fact they were poisoning our eland to get themselves a legal excuse for clearing our forest," Beau said. "They'd cleared too much land already. Everon's already headed toward being a grazing planet for wisent only, and a lop-sided economy. The only way to even it up is to import enough eland to turn the scale the other way."

"And make it a lop-sided economy with eland only?"

Beau's face hardened.

"I'm trying to explain things to you," he said. "Do you want to listen, or not?"

"I'll listen," said Jef. "But why didn't Will put in a complaint, anyway? I'd think—"

"He disappeared before he could," Beau said. His eyes met Jef's squarely. "That's all I know. All anyone knows. He left here to go back to his office at the spaceport—it was the end of a weekend—but he never showed up at the spaceport."

"And none of you looked for him!" said Jef.

"What are you talking about? Of course we looked for him!" rumbled Beau. "We've got men who know how to track. We tracked him right down into plains country; and then lost his trail where a whole herd of wisent had covered it, going in the same direction for miles."

"Maybe," said Jef. "If you'd just show Mikey and me where—"

"Not now," said Beau. He got to his feet abruptly and lightly. "I owed you that much of an explanation; but now we've got our own problems to look after. The ship with the eland is still in orbit up there and the equipment to land it back here in the woods is beyond fixing."

"We're licked," said Bill Eschak.

Beau shook his head like a red-furred bear.

"Not yet," he said. "We're not going to lose those eland after all this. There's one more set of landing equipment on this planet that can bring that ship down to surface, here at our place, and that's the control equipment at the regular spaceport." Bill gazed at him.

"Who'll handle it?" the bearded man asked.

"Curragh," said Beau. "All we have to do is take over the spaceport for an hour at the most, to give him time to do it."

"I—" Jef hesitated to intrude on the conversation of the other two, but it seemed necessary. "I don't think Martin'll do it for you."

"We'll pay him," said Beau briefly. "If he sold us out to the downcountry, he's buyable. We'll just meet his price."

"Or," said Bill, with one of his near-noiseless laughs, "give him a choice."

Beau looked a little sourly at his lieutenant.

"I think we can name a price this man'll go for," he said. He turned back to Jef. "Where do you think we might find Curragh, now?"

"I don't have any idea," said Jef. He thought. "At a guess, if he was actually working with the city people, he'd head for the Constable."

"That's what I think," said Beau to Bill. "There's no place for him to put down safely in the woods. Too many of our own kind around. There's nothing for him on the open plains; and he won't want to show up in the open in the city, where somebody might recognize him and pass word of it back to us. He'll be meeting Avery Armage some place quietly. Where?"

"Constable's place outside the city," said Bill. "Nice, quiet, plenty of room to put other people up overnight if they want to get a whole bunch together."

"How many planes have we got, ready to go?"

"Well, there's the usual five, Beau. And the courier plane just needs routine overhaul. We could fuel her up and use her if we had to."

"That's fifteen people." Beau thought for a minute. "I think we can raid that place of his with fifteen."

He suddenly seemed to become aware that Jef was still standing there.

"Oh, Jef," he said. "We're going to have to put you up here for a few days until I've got time to talk about Will with you. You can find your own way back to your room, can't you?"

"You never did ask him," said Bill, "how he got here?"

Jef had had time to think about an answer to that question.

"I thought I heard Mikey—that's that young maolot of mine—outside," he said. "Mikey ran off yesterday. I went out to see if I could catch him and got turned around in the dark. I thought this building was the one I'd been in; and then, when I found the door open and saw it wasn't, I saw a light back here and came in to find someone who could tell me how to get back to where I'd started."

"Sure," said Beau a little impatiently. "Bill, why don't you go to the door with Jef and point the right building out to him?"

Bill nodded and started out the door. As Jef was about to follow the older man, a question came to him. He had a good deal of advice against asking questions, but this one seemed harmless.

"Tell me something," he said, as he turned to follow Bill, "is it just Earth variform animals who react to native plants that disagree with Earth stock, or do some of the native animals react, too? I was just thinking Mikey's been eating everything in sight lately; and having grown up on Earth, he may not have the instincts to keep him away from things on Everon that might not be good for him—"

"No, no," said Beau. Bill had come to a complete stop and turned back. "There's nothing to worry about. Nothing at all. Nothing poisons maolots. They can eat anything. The wisent ranchers have tried everything under the sun, and short of shooting a maolot dead center, nothing stops them."

"That's right," said Bill.

Beau's voice had been soothing and entirely convincing in its tone. But Bill's voice suddenly had a new note.

"I wouldn't worry, if I were you," went on Beau warmly. "You know—on second thought, Bill, why don't you walk Jef all the way back to his building? Just to make sure he doesn't go astray again?"

"It'd be a pleasure," said Bill. "Come on, Robini."

He led off. Jef followed. But in this answer, to his ears, once more, rang the same odd note that he had heard from Bill a moment before. Belatedly, alarm signals began to sound in his mind; and, in the short length of time that it took him to follow the other to the door of the building, fresh suspicion soared into a certainly. He would not have been so sure if he had not seen the look on Bill's face when the other had come in and found him with the ruined equipment. Jarji had not exaggerated. Bill was not only capable of murder—he obviously enjoyed it. And there was a long dark walk between the buildings with Beau's injunction to the older man to see the Jef did not "go astray again." Those three words now rang again in Jef's head with all the authority of a secret command.

Bill was waiting for Jef just outside the door. In the gloom of the barely moonlit night, they started across the grass.

"Too bad about that control equipment," Jef said to break the silence, after half a dozen steps.

"Too bad," echoed Bill. His voice was strange and remote as if he spoke from some distance off, in spite of the fact he was walking at Jef's side. Together they were drawing away from the building they had just left, and the open doorway from which a little light still spilled out. With each step they were getting deeper into dimness.

"Did you know my brother?" Jef asked. "Beau said Will was one of his best friends. I suppose you must have known him, too."

"I knew him."

Bill's voice now seemed to come from even a slightly greater distance. Turning his head, Jef saw that the other man was lagging behind slightly. Jef slowed down, but Bill apparently slowed also, for he did not catch up.

"You weren't one of the ones who tracked him, the way Beau said?" Jef asked.

"No, Robini," said Bill. His voice was almost harsh, now. "I didn't track him. Turn around."

"Turn—?" Jef stopped and looked back.

Bill was a full pace behind him now and standing still. He had one hand inside his shirt past a button that was now unbuttoned. "That's right," said Bill.

The bearded man was speaking with a peculiar, thick-tongued slowness. Also, his hand was withdrawing from his shirt with the same odd slowness. Jef saw the white of the skin on the back of that hand flash palely in the darkness—and then there was something like a rush of air, a heavy thump, and Bill went sprawling on the ground. In the same second a huge shape loomed up before Jef in the dark, a massive head dipped, clamped teeth on Jef's belt and lifted him easily into the air. He was swung about, and the next moment whatever had seized him was galloping off with him into the night forest as if he had been a small rag doll in the mouth of a playful dog.

The jolting he was taking was making Jef's senses reel. He reached up instinctively to cling to the neck to which the heavy head was attached and touched familiar-feeling skin and muscles. Steel bands under warm-furred velvet.

"Mikey!" he grunted, hardly knowing how he knew but suddenly completely certain that it was, indeed, Mikey and not simply some wild maolot. "Mikey, stop a moment! Put me down.
Mikey!"