The Long Result (2 page)

‘Hell and
confusion
! Roald, all I’m asking you to do is go out to the port, take over from this courier – the name is Kay Lee Wong – and get them settled at the Ark. And I’m picking on you half because you’re least tied up today with urgent work, half because I think you’ve got the tact to handle it.’

Ark – spelt, strictly, A A C for Alien Accommodation Centre. It sounded straightforward enough put this way, but I had a sinking suspicion that it wouldn’t turn out that easy in the long run. I said feebly, ‘Couldn’t Jacky or Tomas—?’

‘Roald!’ Tinescu got up. He was shorter than me, but if he got really furious he liked to tower over other people who were seated. ‘It’s no business of mine if your ambition is limited to supervising trade in sonnets and string quartets
from Viridis – you can stick at that job till you rot, for all I care. But you
are
a department head in this Bureau, and this Bureau has had a problem dumped on its doorstep which it has
got
to clean up. I’d go myself for the sake of seeing the thing smoothed over, but I’ve got Ministers and other parasites on my back.’

He slapped the desk with his open palm. The gesture sent a gaily-coloured pamphlet sliding to the floor; I hadn’t noticed it before. He dived for it and stuffed it into the destructor slot. From his face, he would cheerfully have done the same to me if I hadn’t hurried out of the door.

A good plain day’s work! Hah!

I dropped into my own office chair again and punched for filing centre. ‘Get me the file on the Tau Cetians,’ I told the autoclerk. ‘There’s an imperative-reserve on it for me.’

‘Priority noted,’ the machine said in its irritatingly sweet voice, and I hit the off switch as though it had done me a personal injury.

Frankly, I was smarting under the rebuke Tinescu had given me. No matter how true it was that I was contented in my present work, with no great wish to be promoted to a tougher grade of problems – no matter how unfair it might be to dismiss what I did at present as ‘trading in sonnets and string quartets’ – I retained my original admiration for Tinescu as an able man and a first-rate administrator, and to have him snap at me did hurt.

But – blazes: even if I was the ranking person in the Bureau with free time available, even if the job was a plain and simple one, why couldn’t he have picked one of the sixty-odd staff on regular alien contact duty?

I sighed. I’d been assigned, and I’d have to save the arguments for later. I just hoped nothing would go seriously amiss.

So: clear away today’s work. I told the secretary to postpone the Viridis items, neither of which was urgent. That left, first, my scheduled call to Micky Torres. A shame to lose that, but I was intending to fly to Cambridge over the week-end and see him personally, so it didn’t really matter. I filed a cancel-with-regret at the exchange.

And, second, my lunch-date. I spoke to the secretary again. ‘Get me a person-to-person call to Patricia Ryder at Area Meteorological Centre, and call me as soon as it goes through.’

I didn’t wait for the acknowledge. I was too busy rehearsing my excuses to Patricia. She was by far the biggest thing in my life right now, Bureau or no Bureau. I’d never been married because I’d always felt it was a serious project to be undertaken only with children in mind, and somehow even though I felt I’d had at least my fair share of attractive women – so far I and the current girl-friend had never managed to agree that long enough had gone in looking for the right partner. An early marriage, after all, theoretically implied the daunting prospect of eighty years together, with modern life-expectancy.

But with Patricia … maybe the time had arrived. I couldn’t be sure. All I did know was that I hated missing this lunch with her, in spite of knowing that I could see her tonight.

The phone said with its inevitable horrid sweetness, ‘Patricia Ryder is unavailable at Area Met.’

Damn! Well, I’d just have to get Jacky to keep the date for me. I shuffled that to the side of my mind and tried to give some serious thought to what Tinescu had said.

Frankly, I didn’t like Starhomers much. My impression – borne out by cultural analysis – was that they were jealous
of Earth and determined to outdo the mother world in every possible way. Exactly what kind of insecurity had led to this situation, I wasn’t entirely sure, but apparently it was reflected in their rigid, almost deterministic and intensively computer-planned social system. Of course, since they were dealing with intractable material when they tried to apply to human beings the same methods that they found so successful in physical sciences and engineering – where no one could doubt their remarkable achievements – they fell down occasionally. Earth’s great successes nowadays were in precisely those areas where Starhome was most likely to make errors. This seemed to be the obvious explanation for the dirty trick they were playing on the Bureau – and via us, on the mother world.

And it
was
a dirty trick. We had refrained deliberately from interfering when they contacted the Tau Cetians, in case their jealousy led them to accuse us of trying to muscle in; we’d stood by, and made admiring noises in the intervals of chewing our nails with anxiety lest they foul up the interracial situation through ignorance or arrogance. To bring a delegation of Tau Cetians to Earth without prior warning was explicable only on the assumption Tinescu had made: before admitting they hadn’t got the experience to complete the job, the Starhomers wanted to see us run in little circles and perhaps make a bad mistake in our own speciality.

There was no denying it: dealing with the Viridians was infinitely more pleasant than either alien contact or the Starhome side of the Bureau.

I heard the flopping sound from my conveyor which presumably announced the arrival of the Tau Ceti file. Before reaching for it, I remembered a couple more items I should tell the secretary.

‘Take a memo for tomorrow. I can accept no appointments owing to pressure of work. Make that standard
response to non-urgent calls until further notice. And get me a car for eleven-thirty hours.’

Then I dipped into the reception box of the conveyor.

There was something else besides the file. There was also a gaudy pamphlet whose arrival must have preceded mine this morning, for sure as hell it hadn’t been in the box when I left yesterday. I unfolded it and stiffened.

In bold letters it was headed:
THE STARS ARE FOR MAN
!

Wording ran in a narrow column down the left of the page. On the right was a picture of an idealized man and woman, both tall and graceful, wearing light spacekit with the helmets thrown back on their shoulders. They were gazing up at a night-black sky in which gleamed a single star of fluorescent ink.

Half sick, half furious, I read the text.
YOU are being robbed – by the fools who have let the harvest of the stars slip away from the rightful owners, HUMAN BEINGS!

That was how it started. The rest of it was devoted to an attack on BuCult, heavily sown with emotionally loaded terms like
coward
and
incompetent,
concluding with a veiled accusation that we were traitors to our species.

I turned it over. This side bore a cartoon. It showed members of the four most familiar alien races – Regulan, Fomal-hautian, Gamma Ophiuchian and Sigma Sagittarian subtly distorted to appear bestial, helping themselves from a richly stocked storeroom labelled in red letters
TERRESTRIAL KNOWLEDGE,
while a deformed human labelled
BuCult
cowered snivelling in the corner.

Below, there was more text:

Who discovered starflight? MEN DID!

Has any other race a right to take advantage of our
achievement? NO!

Why should we go on pandering to animals? YOU
TELL US!

The time has come for men to claim their birthright of SUPREMACY!

And finally, in small print at the foot of the page:
Issued by the Stars Are For Man League.

By this time I was almost shaking with fury. I punched the phone for Tinescu’s code; when I saw the chief’s face, I didn’t trust myself to speak, but could only hold up the pamphlet.

‘Oh, you’ve got one of those too, have you?’ he sighed. ‘Put it in the destructor, the way I did. You have work in hand.’

‘But aren’t you going to do anything about it?’ I forced out.

‘Such as what? The thing crackpot organisations of that sort most dearly desire is to have official status accorded them as a menace. I had the police check on them three years ago, and the report said they were a two-bit cult, better ignored.’

‘But
blazes
!’ I leaned almost into the screen. ‘This is turning up inside the Bureau! I found mine in the conveyor box. The conveyors don’t connect to the outside tubes.’

‘Oh, so was mine!’ he rapped. ‘I’m having it investigated – but there are a dozen ways someone could get in and plant them, using a trumped-up excuse. Roald, swallow your righteous indignation and get back to those damned Tau Cetians!’

He broke the circuit. I stuffed the pamphlet, as directed, into the destructor slot, and at once regretted not having torn it to pieces first; I felt that strongly about it. Then my watch caught my eye, and I suddenly realized that I had to absorb everything we knew about an entire alien race and prime myself to courier standard in barely an hour and a half.

Bastard Tinescu
… But I slapped open the file.

As I’d expected, it was a randomly compiled, confused
mess of assorted facts. The Starhomers simply didn’t have our century-long experience to help them organize their data on alien cultures. The photographs, of course, were excellent, and there were plenty of them. Beneath the first, which showed a member of the new species, there had been affixed a slip of tactile-true plastic, a Starhomer invention. It was dull, and the date stamped on it showed it was overdue for re-energizing, but I received three distinct sensations when I touched it: firmness, dryness and a slight chill.

The last could be due to the low energy level, or genuine. The environmental data said it was genuine. The Tau Cetians liked an almost sub-arctic climate …

I raced ahead as fast as I could go.

None the less, when eleven-thirty overtook me and my car was signalled to take me to the spaceport, I was still far from the end of my self-briefing. I tucked the file under my arm and rose; I’d just have to do the rest in the car.

On the way out, I pressed the annunciator button of Jacky’s office, next to mine, and asked if I could see him a moment. He invited me in with a chuckle, having apparently recovered his habitual good-humour.

‘What did the chief want you for? Bawl you out for being late, hm?’

‘Not exactly.’ I didn’t want to chat, just to ask one favour. ‘He’s given me a job that’ll tie me up most of the day and I was supposed to have lunch with Patricia at the Kingdom.’

‘You want me to keep the date for you? It’ll be a pleasure. Though the way you cling to that woman, I’m amazed you trust me enough to ask me.’

I felt myself flushing, which was ridiculous. I tried to cover my embarrassment with a bantering answer.

‘Exposing you to temptation, Jacky – that’s what it is. You know I’ve always had my eye on Madeleine! Well, thanks a million. I must open jets and get to the spaceport.’

‘Hey!’ The call caught me within range of the door’s
sensors. It dithered with a soft mechanical complaint over the dilemma of staying open or sliding shut again. ‘Roald, Madeleine and I are giving a little party tonight – about eight or nine people is all. We start at nineteen-thirty. Would you like to come?’

‘Well…’ I hesitated, wondering whether to invent a previous arrangement for myself and Patricia, in order to have her all to myself for the evening. Then I realized with wry amusement that Jacky was absolutely right – I was clinging to her with as much tenacity as a teenager to his first girl, at the age when one can’t conceive of the second time being as wonderful as this first one.

Mistaking the reason for my not answering, Jacky added hastily, ‘I meant you and Patricia both, of course!’

‘Look, ask her over lunch, will you?’ I said at last. ‘If she hasn’t set her heart on anything special, she can accept for both of us. Okay?’

‘Okay,’ he grinned, and waved a dark brown hand before bending back to his work.

The door, finding its problem resolved, shut with the mechanical counterpart of a sigh of relief.

In the exact centre of the eight-mile circle of cleared ground which formed the spaceport, there was a smaller concrete circle a mere thousand yards across, founded direct onto bedrock to take the enormous deadweight of the starships. Its surface was blackened and scarred with the ferocious heat of the jets which had settled on it, but the grass around grew green and unmarked.

None the less, there was always a chance of an error developing in the remote controls which took over the visiting
ships at the edge of the stratosphere and guided them to a safe and precise Earthfall. For that reason the port buildings crouched back at the very rim of the field, were firmly anchored to rock and mostly hidden below ground, and had walls and roofs all of ten feet thick. Surrounding them was an impenetrable fence, with only three gates to the road.

Word had apparently got around that something special was happening today. The routine traffic handled by the port always attracted a few sightseers, of course; it was a good place to bring the kids for an hour or two in the hope of seeing a Lunar freighter take off, or a ferry bring in a load from one of the mining colonies on Mars or Venus. But nowadays those were Earth’s back yard, a matter of mere days away even at sublight speeds. The landing of a starship, though: that was really something!

Moreover, though spring for the northern hemisphere wasn’t officially due until tomorrow, the weather men had decided to give us a preview, and it was a warm clear day with three or four high white clouds gleaming in the sunshine.

Consequently the last couple of miles of the journey were a crawl through thousands of close-packed vehicles. The snub, sheathed antenna on the nose of my car wove its search pattern to the accompaniment of the Bureau’s official siren – so rarely used, that this was the first time I’d ever been in a vehicle uttering it. The noise drew the stares of the crowd, and fathers held their children up to look at me. I tried to adopt an official expression, but I was frankly worried. I knew that if anything else had gone wrong since Tinescu briefed me he could have called me in the car and warned me, which he hadn’t done; nonetheless, my guts were tight with nervous anticipation.