Tales of the Flying Mountains (31 page)

Purloined letter
, I thought.
Maybe what I'm after is in plain sight in some cabinet, listed here under a misleading code
——

“Winston, boy.”

I whirled. My heart slammed. Furlow stood in the doorway. Clifflike behind him was J. P.

They moved toward me. Furlow's affability was extinguished. “You're supposed to be in your office,” he said.

“I—well—that is, it occurred to me, uh, somewhere we might already have a formulation—” My voice dried up.

“And you couldn't wait till tomorrow to ask me.” Furlow halted a few meters off. His gaze was unblinking upon me. “I've been wondering about you. I really have.”

“What—” My tongue felt like a strip of sandpaper. “What's the matter?”

“I want to find that out. I guessed you would—no, stay where you are! Grab him, J. P.!”

The giant came across the deck faster than I could scuttle. He caught one of my arms, spun me around in front of him, and applied a hammerlock. Pain shot through my joints.

“Don't break him,” Furlow said.

We stood for a moment, I panting, he brooding, J. P. robotic at my back. “What's got into you?” I finally groaned.

“I have the floor.” Furlow took a cigar out of his tunic and struck it on a desk. Lounging back with one fat thigh on that surface, he drew smoke into his throat and streamed it out again.

“I suspect you suspect me of wrongdoing,” he said. “When you behaved so eager tonight, I thought it'd be smart to come check on you.”

“Let me go!”

“Not till you tell me things, Win.”

“If you use force on me, you're convicting yourself.”

Furlow shook his head. “No. If you've been acting paranoiac, my duty is to restrain and interrogate you. I've got to make sure you're no menace to the ship. If it turns out I'm mistaken, why, I'll apologize. But I'm in my legal rights as ranking officer aboard. What do you suspect me of, Win?”

I glowered.

“A little twist, J. P.,” Furlow said. “Not too hard.”

I couldn't help yelling. When the hands stopped racking me I hung on them. Darkness closed in.

It faded. “Sorry,” Furlow said. “He gets a mite overzealous sometimes.”

I decided that heroism was all very well in its place, but when it gained nothing except the risk I'd be crippled or killed, this wasn't the place. Bracing myself against the fires that licked in elbow and shoulder, I said:

“Okay. I'll tell you what I think. Nothing's wrong with the grid. No unit was ever ruined, except the sample you prepared. You wrote a special program and substituted its tape in the main computer whenever you got a chance. It makes various boxes cut out as if they'd been overloaded. Your underlings being a clot of drones and nincompoops, you get away with it. You send the ‘spoiled' units off for ‘salvage.' Actually they're resold. You and your confederates in Mountain King pocket the difference. The scheme doubtless wouldn't work on Earth. This is the Republic, though. The asteroids are scattered across millions of kilometers; the government is committed to noninterference in private enterprise; most transactions are not a matter of public record. Eventually, I suppose, you'd've quit this job on some pretext and gone off to spend your loot.”

“Not nice,” J. P. piped. He started to take me apart. A shout from Furlow stopped him in time.

“Let him go,” the engineer ordered.

“He don't like you,” J. P. said.

“Let him go, and fetch the whisky from my office.”

The moron grunted, released me, and shuffled off. I collapsed into a chair at the desk where Furlow rested.

He looked down on me, not unkindly. “What a weird obsession you've picked up,” he said.

“Proof—” I breathed deeply until a measure of steadiness came. Rallying my nerve, I met his eyes and said: “I blundered tonight, but I was never so stupid as to try playing solitary detective. Did you notice Jake Jaspers requisitioned a boat several days ago and left for Ceres? He claimed he wanted to discuss some anomalies in the manifests. We weren't sure we could trust the ship's communications. He's gone to see the authorities. A squad with a warrant ought to arrive soon.”

“Let them,” Furlow shrugged. “They won't find anything. Won't be anything to find.”

“No,” I said bitterly, “now that you're warned, you'll destroy the tape. Are you considering destroying me?”

“Why should I? Even if I were a murderer, which I'm too squeamish for. Hell, I'm sorry you were roughed up. I didn't intend J. P. should do more than throw a scare into you.”

“Do you admit here in privacy, what you were doing?”

Furlow laughed. “I don't admit one damn thing, my boy. When the police come, it'll be your groundless accusations against my blameless record.”

“Investigation elsewhere, like at Mountain King, ought to furnish evidence.”

“It ought to, assuming I m guilty, which is your assumption and not mine. But do you seriously expect the police to bother? This is the Republic, my boy, not Earth. The police are spread too thin, they have too much important work like rescue operations, to spend time sniffing out petty peculations. They won't act on those unless the case is open and shut—and I assure you this one isn't.”

“I know. That's why private detectives do so well in the Belt. If the Foundation hired men to dig up the proof of your carryings on.…”

Furlow looked smug. “It won't,” he said. “I've got more experience than you with the Foundation, and it won't. Among other things, it's terrified of scandals, after the fuss about recruitment. I prediet it won't even fire me on suspicion—after
I
report I've licked the power grid problem. This boat has such a shortage of people who know their jobs.” He blew a smoke ring. “If anything, Win,” he continued, “you're the one whose paycheck is in danger. Telling fantastic slanders to cover the fact you were failing in your assignment—tsk, tsk. But I feel generous. Let's get together and work out how this whole miserable business can be smoothed over and hushed up.”

An answer hit me, hard as the original solution had done. I sat straight in my chair and barked a delighted oath.

“What now?” Furlow's calm was the least bit rattled.

It had cause to be. “My boy,” I said, “you're not merely going to confess your misdeeds to the Foundation's representative, you're going to describe your modus operandi in loving detail.”

“Why in cosmos—? I mean, that is, there isn't any!” he bellowed. “Explain yourself!”

I leaned back, cocked my feet on the desk, waved in lordly style the arm that wasn't sore, and told him, “I prefer to wait till the whisky arrives.”

So much for that small melodrama. The real climax came later.

Jake Jaspers and I sat in the office Joseph Amspaugh had taken when he came with the police. He had assumed responsibility rather than Captain Davidson, whose concern lay more with operating the ship than the folk inside. Already we expected Amspaugh's election to presidency of the civil government, once the expedition was fully manned. The cabin was austere, but champagne goblets bubbled in front of us.

“Do you really feel we dare keep Furlow on?” Amspaugh inquired.

“Oh, he'd better be demoted,” I said, “but he's too useful to let go. As he pointed out to me, competent officers are precious jewels in this vessel. And any expert who checks the false tape he prepared will agree he's downright brilliant where it comes to power grids—as well as being liked by the crew and rascally enough to spot anyone else's chicaneries early in the game.”

“But what he's cost us—”

“He'll make restitution of most of the money,” Jaspers said, “and he expects Mountain King will come through with a large donation to the project if we don't hurt their good name by pressing charges.”

“Doesn't he feel any shame?” Amspaugh's tone was indignant.

I grinned. “Who cares? If it'll make you happier, sir, he is chagrined at the way we've trapped him. He never intended to go traveling.”

But I had explained to him that a third party was concerned which could not wink at this affair like police or Foundation—my company, the contractor. It would have to protect its own reputation by showing there had been nothing wrong with the grid it built; and this it could best do by putting detectives on the trail of Furlow and his confederates. He would have ended in a labor camp.

His alternative was to show us the tape and thus demonstrate an ability which made it worth our while to forgive and retain him.

“I feel somewhat like a blackmailer,” Amspaugh fretted.

I lifted my glass and sipped. The wine was tart, the bubbles tickled my nose. Fine stuff; and from this ship, too, where a vineyard had already been started. “Would you rather be vindictive and get him jailed, sir?” I asked. “Or let him go to pull another crime somewhere else? He'll be all right here. Once under weigh, he can't do any harm and in fact, with his own dear hide to worry about, he'll be valuable.”

“Till we do start, what about him?”

“Well, I did say he'd better not remain in charge of the department. We can keep watch on him.”

“We?” Jaspers murmured slyly.

Amspaugh's eyes kindled. “Then we shall need a new chief power engineer,” he said.

Epilogue

Polaris lies behind us; the star by which we steer is Alpha of the Centaur leftward of the Southern Cross.

Conchita says “We don't want the schools to hurt anyone's feelings. Let them, the majority of the present generation, let them play their pathetic little game of being bold pioneers. By now most of them believe in it. I only hope their children won't be too brutally frank … after seeing through them.”

“That's good of you,” I say to her. Leaning close: “And very like you.”

We share a smile and a fleeting touch of fingers,
Yes
, I think,
I'm glad I decided to come. Excellent company, indeed! And fascinating work; and at the end, whole new worlds to wander across with my sons
.

“I still don't see where it matters exactly what goes into the texts otherwise,” Dworczyk grumbles.

“I must concur,” Echevaray says in his diffident manner. “What is important is how we train our young to meet the demands that will be laid on them at journey's end.”

“Why, that's known,” Missy says. “We planned it along with the ship herself.”

She doesn't need to recite the possibilities. This mobile planetoid has ample room for athletics, even for camping and hunting in the forests we have planted. Besides formal education, we will develop elaborate ceremonies for the children. Those will do more than fill time; they will inculcate discipline and a sense of belonging to each other.

She does comment: “It's happened in the past, the evolution of a personality type that can live an easy life without going soft, without losing the ability to meet trouble. Think about, oh, to name one, Earth's Polynesian islanders. We might borrow from them, at that. It may seem a little odd, extra-Solar spacefarers going in for tattoos of rank, and ritual dances, and gorgeous feather cloaks—but why not?”

“Remember something, though,” Orloff cautions. “A major part of their culture, of any culture, was their stories about the great ancestors. And that, Tom, is where our history books come in. They will create our myth. Its truth or falsity has nothing to do with its function as a myth—a narrative embodiment of those things, those beliefs, those chosen destinies by which men live.

“What shall we choose for our children?”

I have finished my drink and rise to fetch another. But my gaze falls on the stars, and for a while I lose myself among them. When I return, everyone else is looking at me.

“Oh.” I shake myself and laugh. “Sorry. Got to thinking.” I point out, into the illimitable night which is not night at all, being filled with suns. “Isn't that, the real universe, isn't that enough? What more do we need?”

“Do you mean,” Lindgren asks, “that we may as well tell the undisguised truth about what brought us here?”

“Yes,” I reply, “because the only thing that matters is that we
are
here.”

My attitude alone does not decide them, yet I have spoken the idea toward which we have been groping together. One by one, they begin to voice agreement.

Missy Blades clinches it with a word which is not really cynical, but smilingly affectionate. “Sure. Go ahead. Let them have the truth. When they grow up, they'll gloss it over anyway.”

About the Author

Poul Anderson (1926–2001) grew up bilingual in a Danish American family. After discovering science fiction fandom and earning a physics degree at the University of Minnesota, he found writing science fiction more satisfactory. Admired for his “hard” science fiction, mysteries, historical novels, and “fantasy with rivets,” he also excelled in humor. He was the guest of honor at the 1959 World Science Fiction Convention and at many similar events, including the 1998 Contact Japan 3 and the 1999 Strannik Conference in Saint Petersburg, Russia. Besides winning the Hugo and Nebula Awards, he has received the Gandalf, Seiun, and Strannik, or “Wanderer,” Awards. A founder of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America, he became a Grand Master, and was inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame.

In 1952 he met Karen Kruse; they married in Berkeley, California, where their daughter, Astrid, was born, and they later lived in Orinda, California. Astrid and her husband, science fiction author Greg Bear, now live with their family outside Seattle.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.