The Long Result (21 page)

He went on, and went on, and went on. After a while I gave up trying to listen. It was only at the very end of his fulsome compliments that he said something which startled me back to alertness.

‘As far as I can see, the only reason why Starhomers should be involved in this is that they’re hoping to break off their dependence on Earth, and —’

‘Inspector! Have you mentioned this idea to anyone?’

‘Not yet.’ He blinked at me, puzzled. ‘But I must report it – to my mind, it’s so important it ought to go straight to government level.’

‘Before you talk to anyone else about it, governmental or not, call my chief – call Tinescu. This is dynamite, Inspector, and I’m not exaggerating.’

‘I’ll do as you say,’ he promised, and rang off.

So there it was. I looked at the heap of work waiting in the conveyor box, laid a small mental bet that there was nothing among it to lose me a single night’s sleep, and won the bet.

I shoved the whole lot back, counted off three minutes to give Klabund time to finish talking to Tinescu, and went to the chief’s office.

He seemed to have been waiting for me; at any rate, his desk was clear of work and he was leaning back in his chair, gazing at the door with pursed lips, when I entered. He indicated the guest-chair.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said abruptly. ‘Klabund was just on the phone and told me what happened.’

‘I asked him to have a word with you,’ I said, forcing my voice to remain steady. ‘He’s worked out why the Star-homers —’

‘Blazes,
that’s
not important. Klabund’s an astute man, and something of the sort was inevitable. Torres wrote in a chain of side-factors to take care of it yesterday.’ Tinescu waved it away irritably. ‘No, what concerns me is the state to which one of my right-hand men is being reduced through his own silly fault. Roald, what possessed you to fall for the line this woman fed you?’

I said stonily, ‘Have you ever met her?’

‘No, but – oh, forget it. What’s done is done. I was going to tell you that in spite of everything I feel proud of you, and of my own judgement. It takes a high order of courage to sacrifice your personal feeling the way you’ve done, for the sake of an ideal.’

‘It wasn’t for any such reason,’ I grunted. ‘It was half spite and half revenge.’

‘I don’t think so. I think you discovered you couldn’t stand a certain kind of person – a kind we as a race are very ashamed of, though the fault which made them as they are is by no means entirely theirs. I’m pleased. Which brings me to the point.

‘You know, of course, that you’re the youngest person to be appointed to your rank in over a century?’

‘There was enough fuss about it when you promoted me,’ I muttered.

‘Not enough, apparently, to get the implications through that armoured skull of yours. It may, however, have crossed your mind that I’ve held down this chair for almost a quarter-century, and sooner or later I’d ossify and move on?’

He was getting sarcastic; I recognized the danger sign and tried to make out what he was driving at.

‘I don’t intend to stretch the regulations as Indowegiatuk has done. She has unrivalled experience which would mean she was wasted in any but a Bureau post. I have no such excuse, and this business with the Tau Cetians has finally borne it in on me that I’m wearing out. So! This is no news, of course – I’ve known it must eventually happen. And I’ve taken certain steps.

‘For example, you’ll recall that before taking on your present position you were given certain aptitude tests. We already knew you possessed high intelligence, fast reactions, ability. What we were looking for was a rare and precious extra talent – the ability to draw correct conclusions from barely adequate data. Intuition, you might call it. Without a little of that gift, it would be hard to hold down any responsible post in modern government. Certainly it would be impossible to cope with the Bureau.’

I suddenly recalled Micky saying that Tinescu had that talent – he’d even described it by the same term, intuition.

‘Well, over the past few days you’ve turned that talent on full, haven’t you? Klabund can hardly stop talking about
the way you figured out the method used to attack the Tau Cetians; bin Ishmael was delighted with what you did round at the Ark; Indowegiatuk is beside herself because you —’

‘Please,
chief,’ I said.

‘Come to the point? I’m coming, all right. If you will kindly consent to get the hell out of your cosy office for the next two years and go see what’s happening with the Regulans and the Sags and all the rest of them, I propose to nominate you as the next Chief of Bureau.’

I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t.

‘Well? What’s got your tongue?’ Bright sharp eyes transfixed me. ‘There’s a precedent, you know. You won’t be as young as my predecessor Brown. I know he broke under the strain – I saw him cave in, and it was pitiful! But he didn’t have what you’ve got.’

‘But I haven’t anything so special that —!’

‘Oh,
shut up
and let me finish. You put on a front of thoroughness and taking pains. It’s a front. It hides the fact that you’re damnably lazy. I know as well as you that if you don’t work till your guts burst you’ll go the way Brown went. But I also know that right now, because of what’s happened, you’re feeling sufficiently annoyed with yourself to take me seriously. If I don’t get at you before your shell seals over, I’ll find you’re too comfortable to make your own mind up. I won’t fire you if you refuse the offer – you’re worth something even operating at your usual half-pressure. But you’ll spend the rest of your life in the Bureau wondering whether you could do better than whoever does take over my chair, and I’m glad I’ll be safely dead before you start regretting the chance you missed, because by then you won’t be fit company.’

‘Chief, I —’

‘Get out, Roald. Take the rest of the day off and think about it. And you’d better come to the right conclusion!’
Know thyself!
I didn’t look up at the huge letters over the entrance to the Bureau, but I could feel them burning into my nape as I crossed the street, randomly wandering away into the city. I’d believed that I did. I’d thought of myself as a happy, well-adjusted person, doing a good job and doing it well, enjoying but not obsessed with the pleasures of life, having enough friends, enough girls…

Yet Tinescu was right. And he’d picked the only possible moment to tell me the truth: the time when I was so disgusted with my own gullibility that I’d found the resolve needed to alter the whole basis of my existence.

The
bastard.
But it was as well he’d seized the chance.

Take over the Bureau? Could I? Did I want to, even if I could?

Yes. Only in a negative sense, though. It wasn’t so much that I had the ambition to hold the chief’s post; more, it was that I no longer felt content to go on as I had done.

I’d been planning to marry, raise some children, stabilize my life for ever under a load of personal responsibility; the only other move I’d envisaged was one late in life, perhaps to a university where I’d lecture in Viridian sociology and leer at the fresh young female students from the window of rooms like Micky’s at Cambridge. Or, conceivably, I might have gone for a while to some formal diplomatic post, been nursed through a tour by underlings and gone home with a glow of empty satisfaction.

Ach! Now these half-hearted ideas made me want to throw up!

I was furious with everyone: with Tinescu, for confronting me with a choice I didn’t feel fit to make, I was so confused; with the League for bringing back a kind of violence I’d hoped Earth was cleansed of for ever; with Patricia most of all.

I was dismayed to find I hated her so much I wanted to visualize her in the impersonal setting of a hospital ward,
while the orthopsychists rebuilt her mind to a sane, safe, stable pattern.

I didn’t any longer want safety and stability. It was time I made some mistakes, even if I had to pick up the pieces myself. It was time I did something to test myself, to find out what I could do if I was driven to the utmost.

Accept Tinescu’s offer? That was demanding enough, surely – first, cramming myself with two years’ worth of data on alien contact, knowing I’d have to be able to argue with specialists boasting fifty years’ experience; then sorting out the friction which would develop among the staff, making them recognize that I was in charge; and, of course, working out Micky’s marvellous programme over its long-term span …

No.

It wasn’t right. It was a challenge, but not the challenge I wanted. I’d already thought of something better. I frowned for a long time. Going to Regulus with a zoo ship – was that it? No, what challenge in offering oneself as a passive object of scientific study?

Yet I did want to get off Earth. It seemed bland and sickly to me now; I’d thought of Patricia as embodying its delights, and —

That’s it.

How in the galaxy I’d failed to realize this before, I was never able to explain. I’d dismissed it; refused to take it seriously ; come near to forgetting it. And it was exactly the answer I was looking for.

I took from my pocket a little card bearing an address. I went straight to the address. When the door was opened to me I put my shoulders back, drew a deep breath, and said, ‘I’ve come to apply for the post of Chief of Bureau which you offered me.’

Kay Lee Wong stared at me as though unable to believe her ears. She was wearing another of her mannish cape-and-breeches outfits, but dark green instead of red, and her face rose like a pale golden flower out of leaves.

At last she said, ‘But – but I thought you’d hate us so much you’d never … Oh, come in, come in! This is the most wonderful news!’

I had been going to ask what she meant, when the clock on the far wall of the room caught my eye. I said incredulously, ‘Is it after sixteen already?’

‘Yes, I’ve only just got back from your Bureau. Sit down, please! Roald, I can’t tell you how glad I am that you’re going to accept!’

I must have wandered, lost in thought, for hours on end. Well, it wasn’t so surprising; I shrugged and went back to the question of a moment ago.

‘Did you say you thought I’d hate you? You mean Star-home?’

‘Well, after what we did to you …’ She bit her lip. ‘I mean your girl-friend Patricia. It was our doing, wasn’t it?’

‘It was much more my own,’ I said. And then, after a pause, ‘What were you doing at the Bureau?’

She seemed unable to meet my gaze. Eyes roving everywhere, she said, ‘I was talking to someone I think you know, a young man called Micky Torres. And because of what he’s been saying I’ve realized – look, let me begin at the beginning.

‘I’m not a courier who came here to escort the Tau Cetians. And the tour of recruiting stations I’ve been doing for the last week was a cover for my real job. I was sent
because it was decided that a half-pint girl was the last person you’d expect to be a spy or a saboteur.’

I said slowly, ‘Not recruiting stations. Local chapters of the Stars Are For Man League.’

‘Right.’ There was bitterness in her voice. ‘You must understand, Roald, how much we resented being treated by Earth as a sort of planet-sized sociological experiment. At first that’s all we were. But when we started to do things like visiting Tau Ceti, discovering the people there, and building starships of our own, superior to anything you have, we began to wonder how long this had to last.

‘It’s nothing new. Micky Torres has been explaining it to me. In the eighteenth century when this country – America, as it used to be – was a colony of Britain, it broke away from its old rulers and went on to become one of the greatest world powers in history. We saw the parallel, back home, and we thought this was the only way the process would work. We laid plans to force a break and make you acknowledge our independence. The League was only the – the
hors d’oeuvres.
You’ve no idea how much trouble and ingenuity was spent on fomenting crises here. We planned to give you so much to handle in your own back yard you’d
have
to cede us our independence.

‘And what did it all go for? For nothing.’ She turned her big sad eyes on me last. ‘Because your friend Micky Torres has spent the whole day showing me the arrangements you’ve already made to give Starhome not just its freedom but its head, to do as it likes. Roald, I never imagined such generosity – and before we’d asked for it, too. I’m ashamed. That’s the truth. I’m ashamed of the things I was going to do.’

‘How did they find out about you?’ I said.

‘I don’t know. They just quietly shadowed me the whole time I was touring the League chapters, and then today a
polite policeman came and said would I please come to the Bureau and – and that’s all.’

‘It figures,’ I nodded. ‘Having a few people in positions of influence at Starhome, who know the full details in advance – that’s a sensible precaution.
Kenekito-madual,
as it were.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Never mind. A Regulan term I learnt recently. Seems to fit the situation very nicely.’ I leaned back in my chair. ‘I can very well see how you didn’t anticipate this treatment, of course. Out at Starhome, your society is disciplined, tightly organized and aggressive. It had to be, to turn you from a struggling colony into a new world. But on Earth, you see, we didn’t start with the basic idea of co-operation. We had to learn it, very painfully, and came near to wiping the whole race out before we absorbed the lesson.

‘Perhaps there’s a kind of evolution among planetary societies, too. Starhome, founded on the idea of achievement through co-operation, will take over where Earth leaves off after millennia of achievement through competition. And after all, the greatest single co-operative effort in our history has got to go into the next couple of generations.’

Kay was staring out of the window over the city. She said, ‘I only hope my people will understand it was strength, not weakness, which brought you to this decision.’

A memory came to mind. I said, ‘I was talking to Anovel the other night – the Regulan who was in the rocket which crashed. The League seems to have sabotaged it in order to kill him. Since then, another fanatic had tried to murder him under the guise of making some lab tests on him. But his reaction was this – he said approximately, “When one is invulnerable, one can afford to be detached about such things.” In a sense, Earth is invulnerable here. We’ve made
such a contribution to human history, nothing can take it away.’