Planet in Peril (11 page)

“Exactly,” Ledbetter said. He glanced from his finger-watch to Charles, including him again in that managerial warmth from which
Dinkuhl
, with all his many qualities, had excluded himself. “I must streak. Have a good time.”

Charles walked on his own in the grounds some days
later. He was glad of the solitariness, and glad also to be away, for a time, from the centrally-heated Cottage and its sub-tropical roof-garden. The
weather outside had turned sharply cold, and it was bracing to walk through the bare outdoor garden and into the scattered timber beyond. The deciduous trees were bare, of course, but there was a belt of evergreens to the north and east from which the house was completely hidden.

The main track from the house led through these evergreens to a massive gate in the barrier fence which, heavily wired and with the ground cleared for five yards on either side, stretched around the perimeter of the grounds. Charles stood for a while gazing curiously at the gate. It was a check-point; a guard in UC uniform nursed his
Klaberg
rifle inside a small sentry-box with a plastic bubble top. The small nozzle in the plastic, just above the box’s waistline, would be the
astarater
: a touch from the guard’s finger could blanket the area around in a few seconds.

Quite an adequate safeguard. Theoretically someone might shoot the guard through the plastic, but that would actuate an alarm system, touch off the
astarate
, and bring a gyro from the house almost as quickly. A situation that would be infuriating to someone anxious to escape; he was pleased that he was not in that frame of mind himself.

He watched the guard changed. The gyro side-slipped through the air from the roof of The Cottage, and dropped on to the track just inside the gate. The new guard got out and, after a word or two, the old guard took his place. The gyro climbed back to its eyrie through the damp wintry air. Informal but effective. Charles walked on, his footsteps deadened by pine needles.

As he reached the edge of a clearing among the pines, he heard a low whistle. He turned quickly.
Dinkuhl
was standing by the side of a tree, watching him. He beckoned Charles over.

Dinkuhl
said: “Charlie boy, time is short. Come over here and sit down.”

There was a fallen tree. They made themselves comfortable and
Dinkuhl
brought out cigarettes. They lit up. The smoke rose in straight plumes; it was cold but there was no wind this morning.

Dinkuhl
said: “You happy here?”

“Tolerably.” Charles glanced at him. “You seem to be.” “What's the difference between being held here and being held by Interplanetary—ruling out Lima City for the moment.”

“That's a lot to rule out. Quite a difference.”

The important difference—that here he was with his own managerial—was one it would have been embarrassing to put plainly to
Dinkuhl
.

Dinkuhl
glanced at him, smiling a little. “Such as being in the bosom of United Chemicals?”

“I wouldn't rule that out. It's what I'm used to.” “And what makes you confident this is a UC set-up? That they wear the right badges?”

Charles looked at him in complete astonishment. He saw what
Dinkuhl
might be driving at, but it was a conception so fantastic as to be hardly within the bounds of sane speculation.

He said reasonably: “You forget something, Hiram. Ledbetter was my Manager at Detroit.”

Dinkuhl
nodded. “For your work in the lab here—you said you were going to ask Ledbetter for your old assistant from Saginaw. Did you ever do that?” Charles nodded. “And—”

“He wasn't available. Reasonable enough. Ledbetter told me they have a couple of good youngsters they're bringing over from Europe.”

“So, apart from Ledbetter, there aren't any UC people here you can recognize?”

“It isn't likely there would be. They're mostly Contact Section, after all.”

Dinkuhl
wrinkled the top of his head. “Let that go. Where would you say we were before Ledbetter and the boys launched their Men of the Mounties rescue stunt?” Whatever harebrained notion
Dinkuhl
had got hold of, the sensible way of treating it, Charles recognized, was to meet his points logically and sensibly. He said:

“In one of
Interplanetary's
spaceships—freighter, type seven, by your reckoning—in the Toledo pits.”

Dinkuhl
grinned. “Quite some Contact Section, as Ledbetter said. Breaking and entering the Toledo pits at a time when Interplanetary had their most treasured possession stowed away on a freighter there. But that wasn't what roused my suspicions. I told you when I first met you in that
phoney
messroom
that we should keep quiet about everything that mattered. One of the things that mattered was that that freighter was wrong in small details. Minor things. They had pop-out tables, but they'd missed the pop-up ash-trays; I had to stub my cigarette on the TV control panel. And the corridors hadn't taken the battering all round that they get from use in free fall—the track was all worn on the floor. Something else, too. I’ll come to that.

“Anyway, the thing to do was to string them along, whoever they might be, and wait for something else to happen. In due course, it did. United Chemicals to the rescue. Virtue triumphant.”

Charles said: “It strikes me as crazy. I hope you don't mind my saying that. Why should UC—or whoever you think it is masquerading as UC—do something as complicated as that? And what about the offer Interplanetary made me? I might have accepted it—what then?”

“That puzzled me a little,”
Dinkuhl
admitted. “I wondered how they would fake the take-off, and the space flight, and the lunar conditions. Not impossible, but very
very
tricky. But there was no real need for them to do so. Had you taken the offer, there was nothing to stop them changing their minds and keeping you on an Earth base; it's easy enough to think of adequate reasons. You were never meant to take the offer, of course: it was put simply to soften you up psychologically, to ensure you were properly grateful for being rescued. Even if you had taken the offer, the rescue might still have taken place, for much the same reason.

“As for the complications, the people who pulled this job are not inartistic. They have you summed up as loyal to your managerial, and unlikely to be genuinely at ease under terms of constraint to any other. At the same time, you had shown signs of initiative and some rebelliousness, so if they put on the UC cloak at the beginning and clapped you in custody for your own good, you might very well be awkward about it. Their solution was good: have you captured by—as you thought-interplanetary, and then rescued by—as it seemed— United Chemicals. Up goes loyalty and gratitude; down goes rebelliousness.”

Thinking he saw a flaw, Charles said:

“The fact that the spaceship was a fake may show that it wasn’t Interplanetary who had us at first, but it doesn’t mean it wasn’t UC—”

He broke off.
Dinkuhl
said: “It does, though, doesn’t it? When I woke up and saw Ledbetter, I wondered. When I heard him talk about rescuing us from Interplanetary, I knew the play was still going on. If it had been a genuine business, he would have mentioned the name of the real villains.”

“But what if the whole scheme you’ve outlined was planned by UC—for the reasons you gave, which would apply almost as well in that case as in the other?” ^ours,”
Dinkuhl
said, “was a simple-minded managerial, as
managerials
go. But in any case, I happen to know we are not now being run by UC. Come back to that. You didn’t feel quite easy in your own mind, when you first woke up in The Cottage, did you?”

Charles said: “It didn’t amount to much. As I recall, it was you that put me at ease again.”

“I’m rather pleased with the way I’ve handled this.”
Dinkuhl
smiled. “I have my vanity, difficult as it may be to observe it. But luck has run my way, too. The fact that I made such a business of warning you, on the spaceship, that the walls had eyes and ears, told in my favor when I carefully didn’t warn you after Ledbetter and the boys picked us up. I played everything for the audience when I was talking to you. The safest man is the man who thinks he can see through things—so I let them see I thought I could. Like that spaceship being a seven freighter. This is the major league. No fooling.” Charles said slowly: “It’s hard to believe that.”

"If it were easy to believe it, they would have slipped up. And they don’t slip up on atmospheres—they’ve had plenty of training in them.”

There was a moment’s silence. Then Charles said:

"If they’re not UC, who are they?”

Dinkuhl
flicked the stub of Ids cigarette up into the gloomy branches of the firs.

"Who,” he asked, "would be likely to have a mock-up of a spaceship? That was the big question. If not Interplanetary—who?”

“Go on. It doesn’t mean anything to me.”

"It did to me. Something else confirmed it—a certain land of track, marking the surface both in the corridors and the
messroom
. I knew what caused that track. TV camera cables. It was a mock-up Telecom had built for shooting spaceship interiors for the space opera serials. I made my final check after we landed here. Remember I told Ledbetter I wanted to send a message through to my assistant on KF—technical advice? Ledbetter said yes without hesitating. He would have hesitated all right if he had been UC, because UC don’t have anyone who knows enough about TV operational jargon to be sure I wasn’t passing a message outside. Telecom do.”

“Telecom,” Charles said. "Well, I’m damned.”

Dinkuhl
grinned. “We both are. You’ll soon see. It would take Telecom to have the kind of spy equipment this house has, too, incidentally.”

Anger was beginning to replace confusion in Charles’ mind. He said tightly to
Dinkuhl
:

“What are we going to do?”

Dinkuhl
looked at him. “You’re the H-bomb. The way I see it, you can do one of three things. You can go back and get on with the job for your new employers.

I see it, you can do one of three things. You can go back and refuse to get on with the job. I don’t advise that. Ledbetter has plenty on the ball, and he’s playing for big stakes, remember.”

The confusion returned. Charles said:

“Ledbetter
toes
UC. How does he come to be working for Telecom. I just don’t get it.”

“Sancta
simplicitas
,”
Dinkuhl
commented. “You wouldn’t get it. I know a little about Ledbetter. He had a tough start—a background that would have been damn bad even in previous centuries. Both parents drunkards and fighting. He was a bright lad. He fought his way up to the top. But the top goes right up to the sky for that kind of climber. And managerial loyalty is only skin-deep, if that. No, George isn’t the kind of playmate I recommend for you.”

“The third thing. What was that?”

Dinkuhl
eyed him steadily. “Escape.”

Charles looked around. Through the trees the barrier fence was visible, rising to perhaps ten feet.

He said: “Easy. Which way do we do it? I throw you over first, and then you throw me over?”

Dinkuhl
smiled. He consulted his wrist-watch again. “The time
approacheth
. Leave it to your Uncle Hiram.” “I’d prefer to have some idea of what you propose.”
Dinkuhl
took his arm. “We’re going to borrow a gyro. There isn’t time to explain everything right now. Down to the sentry-box. We’ve got a friend in the camp, though he doesn’t know it yet.”
Dinkuhl
had begun to walk down the wooded slope toward the gate, and Charles, automatically responding to the pressure on his arm, walked with him. “I told you—I never forget a face.” Charles could see the gate now, and the upright figure of the guard inside his
plaspex
bubble.
Dinkuhl
went on talking, in a slow drawl that might be concealing nervousness.

“I’ve had enough time thinking about this. It should go O.K. I thought maybe it would be rushing things to try it this morning, but my principle is that it’s always safer to act at once, unless you can act sooner. If not now, we would have had to leave it till tomorrow afternoon. That’s when our friend is on guard again.”

They were approaching the sentry-box. Charles could see the tall immobile figure through the
plaspex
; he looked a very ordinary character, in UC uniform, with the UC badges. His eyes were fixed coldly on them as they approached.

“That was another thing,”
Dinkuhl
said. “When I saw him before, he was wearing a Telecom badge. Though since his activities on that occasion would properly be classed as subversive, that wasn’t conclusive in any way.”

Dinkuhl
tapped on the
plaspex
. The guard
unseamed
his sentry-box and came out toward them; he had his
Klaberg
at the ready and was wearing the nose filter against
astarate
—presumably the
Klaberg
was fitted with an
astarate
release.