Selected Stories (16 page)

I wondered, too. “Well,” I said, “I haven’t exactly made up my mind, you might say—and a couple of things have got in the way—but I did have a kind of offer.” I told him just in a general way about how big a man Mr. Costello was on Borinquen now, and how he wanted me to come in with him. “It’ll have to wait, though. The whole damn Space Navy has a cordon around Borinquen. They wouldn’t say why. But whatever it is, Mr. Costello’ll come out on top. You’ll see.”

Barney gave me a sort of puckered-up look. I never saw a man look so weird. Yes, I did, too. It was the old Iron Man, the day he got off the ship and resigned.

“Barney, what’s the matter?” I asked.

He got up and pointed through the glass door-lights to a white monowheel that stood poised in front of the receiving station. “Come on,” he said.

“Aw, I can’t. I got to—”

“Come
on!
”

I shrugged. Job or no, this was Barney’s bailiwick, not mine. He’d cover me.

He held the door open and said, like a mind reader, “I’ll cover you.”

We went down the ramp and climbed in and skimmed off.

“Where are we going?”

But he wouldn’t say. He just drove.

Nightingale’s a beautiful place. The most beautiful of them all, I think, even Sigma. It’s run by the U. E. one hundred per cent; this is one planet with no local options, but
none.
It’s a regular garden of a world and they keep it that way.

We topped a rise and went down a curving road lined with honest-to-God Lombardy poplars from Earth. There was a little lake down there and a sandy beach. No people.

The road curved and there was a yellow line across it and then a red one, and after it a shimmering curtain, almost transparent. It extended from side to side as far as I could see.

“Force-fence,” Barney said and pressed a button on the dash.

The shimmer disappeared from the road ahead, though it stayed where it was at each side. We drove through it and it formed behind us, and we went down the hill to the lake.

Just this side of the beach was the coziest little Sigma cabana I’ve seen yet, built to hug the slope and open its arms to the sky. Maybe when I get old they’ll turn me out to pasture in one half as good.

While I was goggling at it, Barney said, “Go on.”

I looked at him and he was pointing. There was a man down near the water, big, very tanned, built like a spacetug. Barney waved me on and I walked down there.

The man got up and turned to me. He had the same wide-spaced, warm deep eyes, the same full, gentle voice. “Why, it’s the Purser! Hi, old friend. So you came, after all!”

It was sort of rough for a moment. Then I got it out. “Hi, Mr. Costello.”

He banged me on the shoulder. Then he wrapped one big hand around my left biceps and pulled me a little closer. He looked uphill to where Barney leaned against the monowheel, minding his own business. Then he looked across the lake, and up in the sky.

He dropped his voice. “Purser, you’re just the man I need. But I told you that before, didn’t I?” He looked around again. “We’ll do it yet, Purser. You and me, we’ll hit the top. Come with me. I want to show you something.”

He walked ahead of me toward the beach margin. He was wearing only a breech-ribbon, but he moved and spoke as if he still had the armored car and the six prowlers. I stumbled after him.

He put a hand behind him and checked me, and then knelt. He said, “To look at them, you’d think they were all the same, wouldn’t you? Well, son, you just let me show you something.”

I looked down. He had an anthill. They weren’t like Earth ants. These were bigger, slower, blue, and they had eight legs. They built nests of sand tied together with mucus, and tunneled under them so that the nests stood up an inch or two like on little pillars.

“They look the same, they act the same, but you’ll see,” said Mr. Costello.

He opened a synthine pouch that lay in the sand. He took out a dead bird and the thorax of what looked like a Caránho roach, the one that grows as long as your forearm. He put the bird down here and the roach down yonder.

“Now,” he said, “watch.”

The ants swarmed to the bird, pulling and crawling. Busy. But one or two went to the roach and tumbled it and burrowed around. Mr. Costello picked an ant off the roach and dropped it on the bird. It weaved around and shouldered through the others and scrabbled across the sand and went back to the roach.

“You see, you
see
?” he said, enthusiastic. “Look.”

He picked an ant off the dead bird and dropped it by the roach. The ant wasted no time or even curiosity on the piece of roach. It turned around once to get its bearings, and then went straight back to the dead bird.

I looked at the bird with its clothing of crawling blue, and I looked at the roach with its two or three voracious scavengers. I looked at Mr. Costello.

He said raptly, “See what I mean? About one in thirty eats something different. And that’s all we need. I tell you, Purser, wherever you look, if you look long enough, you can find a way to make most of a group turn on the rest.”

I watched the ants. “They’re not fighting.”

“Now wait a minute,” he said swiftly. “Wait a minute. All we have to do is let these bird-eaters know that the roach-eaters are dangerous.”

“They’re not dangerous,” I said. “They’re just different.”

“What’s the difference, when you come right down to it? So we’ll get the bird-eaters scared and they’ll kill all the roach-eaters.”

“Yes, but why, Mr. Costello?”

He laughed. “I like you, boy. I do the thinking, you do the work. I’ll explain it to you. They all look alike. So once we’ve made ’em drive out these—” he pointed to the minority around the roach—“they’ll never know which among ’em might be a roach-eater. They’ll get so worried, they’ll do anything to keep from being suspected of roach-eating. When they get scared enough, we can make ’em do anything we want.”

He hunkered down to watch the ants. He picked up a roach-eater and put it on the bird. I got up.

“Well, I only just dropped in, Mr. Costello,” I said.

“I’m not an ant,” said Mr. Costello. “As long as it makes no difference to me what they eat, I can make ’em do anything in the world I want.”

“I’ll see you around,” I said.

He kept on talking quietly to himself as I walked away. He was watching the ants, figuring, and paid no attention to me.

I went back to Barney. I asked, sort of choked, “What is he doing, Barney?”

“He’s doing what he has to do,” Barney said.

We went back to the monowheel and up the hill and through the force-gate. After a while, I asked, “How long will he be here?”

“As long as he wants to be.” Barney was kind of short about it.

“Nobody wants to be locked up.”

He had that odd look on his face again. “Nightingale’s not a jail.”

“He can’t get out.”

“Look chum, we could start him over. We could even make a purser out of him. But we stopped doing that kind of thing a long time ago. We let a man do what he wants to do.”

“He never wanted to be boss over an anthill.”

“He didn’t?”

I guess I looked as if I didn’t understand that, so he said, “All his life he’s pretended he’s a man and the rest of us are ants. Now it’s come true for him. He won’t run human anthills any more because he will never again get near one.”

I looked through the windshield at the shining finger that was my distant ship. “What happened on Borinquen, Barney?”

“Some of his converts got loose around the System. That Humanity One idea had to be stopped.” He drove a while, seeing badly out of a thinking face. “You won’t take this hard, Purser, but you’re a thick-witted ape. I can say that if no one else can.”

“All right,” I said. “Why?”

“We had to
smash
into Borinquen, which used to be so free and easy. We got into Costello’s place. It was a regular fort. We got him and his files. We didn’t get his girl. He killed her, but the files were enough.”

After a time I said, “He was always a good friend to me.”

“Was he?”

I didn’t say anything. He wheeled up to the receiving station and stopped the machine.

He said, “He was all ready for you if you came to work for him. He had a voice recording of you large as life, saying ‘Sometimes a man’s just
got
to be by himself.’ Once you went to work for him, all he needed to do to keep you in line was to threaten to put that on the air.”

I opened the door. “What did you have to show him to me for?”

“Because we believe in letting a man do what he wants to do, as long as he doesn’t hurt the rest of us. If you want to go back to the lake and work for Costello, for instance, I’ll take you there.”

I closed the door carefully and went up the ramp to the ship.

I did my work and when the time came, we blasted off. I was mad. I don’t think it was about anything Barney told me. I wasn’t especially mad about Mr. Costello or what happened to him, because Barney’s the best Navy psych doc there is and Nightingale’s the most beautiful hospital planet in the Universe.

What made me mad was the thought that never again would a man as big as Mr. Costello give that big, warm, soft, strong friendship to a lunkhead like me.

B
IANCA’S MOTHER WAS LEADING
her when Ran saw her first. Bianca was squat and small, with dank hair and rotten teeth. Her mouth was crooked and it drooled. Either she was blind or she just didn’t care about bumping into things. It didn’t really matter because Bianca was an imbecile. Her hands …

They were lovely hands, graceful hands, hands as soft and smooth and white as snowflakes, hands whose color was lightly tinged with pink like the glow of Mars on snow. They lay on the counter side by side, looking at Ran. They lay there half closed and crouching, each pulsing with a movement like the panting of a field creature, and they looked. Not watched. Later, they watched him. Now they looked. They did, because Ran felt their united gaze, and his heart beat strongly.

Bianca’s mother demanded cheese stridently. Ran brought it to her in his own time while she berated him. She was a bitter woman, as any woman has a right to be who is wife of no man and mother to a monster. Ran gave her the cheese and took her money and never noticed that it was not enough, because of Bianca’s hands. When Bianca’s mother tried to take one of the hands, it scuttled away from the unwanted touch. It did not lift from the counter, but ran on its fingertips to the edge and leaped into a fold of Bianca’s dress. The mother took the unresisting elbow and led Bianca out.

Ran stayed there at the counter unmoving, thinking of Bianca’s hands. Ran was strong and bronze and not very clever. He had never been taught about beauty and strangeness, but he did not need that teaching. His shoulders were wide and his arms were heavy and thick, but he had great soft eyes and thick lashes. They curtained his eyes now. He was seeing Bianca’s hands again dreamily. He found it hard to breathe …

Harding came back. Harding owned the store. He was a large man whose features barely kept his cheeks apart. He said, “Sweep up, Ran. We’re closing early today.” Then he went behind the counter, squeezing past Ran.

Ran got the broom and swept slowly.

“A woman bought cheese,” he said suddenly. “A poor woman, with very old clothes. She was leading a girl. I can’t remember what the girl looked like, except—who was she?”

“I saw them go out,” said Harding. “The woman is Bianca’s mother, and the girl is Bianca. I don’t know their other name. They don’t talk to people much. I wish they wouldn’t come in here. Hurry up, Ran.”

Ran did what was necessary and put away his broom. Before he left he asked, “Where do they live, Bianca and her mother?”

“On the other side. A house on no road, away from people. Good night, Ran.”

Ran went from the shop directly over to the other side, not waiting for his supper. He found the house easily, for it was indeed away from the road, and stood rudely by itself. The townspeople had cauterized the house by wrapping it in empty fields.

Harshly, “What do you want?” Bianca’s mother asked as she opened the door.

“May I come in?”

“What do you want?”

“May I come in?” he asked again. She made as if to slam the door, and then stood aside. “Come.”

Ran went in and stood still. Bianca’s mother crossed the room and sat under an old lamp, in the shadow. Ran sat opposite her, on a three-legged stool. Bianca was not in the room.

The woman tried to speak, but embarrassment clutched at her voice. She withdrew into her bitterness, saying nothing. She kept peeping at Ran, who sat quietly with his arms folded and the uncertain light in his eyes. He knew she would speak soon, and he could wait.

“Ah, well …” She was silent after that, for a time, but now she had forgiven him his intrusion. Then, “It’s a great while since anyone came to see me; a great while … it was different before. I was a pretty girl—”

She bit her words off and her face popped out of the shadows, shriveled and sagging as she leaned forward. Ran saw that she was beaten and cowed and did not want to be laughed at.

“Yes,” he said gently. She sighed and leaned back so that her face disappeared again. She said nothing for a moment, sitting looking at Ran, liking him.

“We were happy, the two of us,” she mused, “until Bianca came. He didn’t like her, poor thing, he didn’t, no more than I do now. He went away. I stayed by her because I was her mother. I’d go away myself, I would, but people know me, and I haven’t a penny—not a penny … They’d bring me back to her, they would, to care for her. It doesn’t matter much now, though, because people don’t want me any more than they want her, they don’t …”

Ran shifted his feet uneasily, because the woman was crying. “Have you room for me here?” he asked.

Her head crept out into the light. Ran said swiftly, “I’ll give you money each week, and I’ll bring my own bed and things.” He was afraid she would refuse.

She merged with the shadows again. “If you like,” she said, trembling at her good fortune. “Though why you’d want to … still, I guess if I had a little something to cook up nice, and a good reason for it, I could make someone real cozy here. But—
why
?” She rose. Ran crossed the room and pushed her back into the chair. He stood over her, tall.