The Long Result (7 page)

‘No? I wish you hadn’t caught on so quickly, Roald – I’d have liked to see confirmation of the denial you didn’t get around to making …’ Tinescu wiped his face with a weary hand.

‘All right, I’d better give it to you straight. You’ve been having trouble with your Starhomer social assay data, haven’t you?’

‘Of course I have. There’s been a shocking delay on processing the 8c material through Integration – if you hadn’t sent me to the spaceport, I was going to chase it today and raise a little hell.’

‘I know. Well, the delays you’ve suffered haven’t been accidental. There’s a cell of League sympathizers in Integration – two key programmers included. And they’ve been weighting the findings of our survey missions with false data. Tomas discovered this some days ago and reported to me; I told him to say nothing until we had a clearer picture of what alterations were being made and the likely reason for such sabotage. Also we hoped – Yes?’ Tinescu cocked an eyebrow on seeing that I wanted to say something.

My anger was subsiding; I might have known it would take something really serious to make Tinescu commit such a flagrant breach of good manners as asking for me to be tested on a lie-detector.

‘Micky Torres knows,’ I said. ‘This was why I was going to call him today – in fact, it’s the main reason I’m due to see him in England this week-end. He’s been complaining about anomalies in the 8a and 8b data, which we sent him last month. I thought he was being excessively critical, and I had it in mind to soothe him and make him look over the files again. But this of course changes everything. I still don’t see, though, how it connects with me.’

‘I was just about to explain. We hoped that by leaving the League sympathizers alone for a while, we could tempt them into being over-bold. I believe we’ve succeeded. They began to look around for new recruits, and not unnaturally one of the first people their eyes lighted on was – you.’

‘Not unnaturally?’ I echoed. ‘Damn it, chief —!’

‘Why not?’ His tone was bitter. ‘Roald, you’re one of the most talented people in this whole Bureau, and you prefer to spend your time fiddling away with Viridis material, nice soft cosy cultural data, instead of doing what anyone with your gifts damned well ought to do. Which is get stuck into alien contact work and tackle a job with substance!’

‘Now look here—!’ I exploded.

‘Oh, shut up. Even if it’s unpleasant, it’s the truth. And
it’s not my personal opinion alone. It’s so obvious that even these lame-brained League members spotted it and concluded the only explanation must be that you didn’t care to dirty your hands working for alien races. So they took it for granted you were temperamentally in sympathy with them.’

Klabund gave a cough. ‘I don’t think there’s any point in my staying any longer, is there?’ he suggested. I noticed he was avoiding my eyes; Tinescu had tempted him into what was strictly a breach of legal investigatory procedure, and – as one might have expected – he’d taken a dislike to me in consequence, as the indirect cause of his lapse of discretion and the absolutely direct cause of it being exposed. I hoped I wouldn’t have any more to do with this brown-haired man, and I was fairly sure he’d keep from further contact if he could.

Tinescu agreed that he should go, and the moment the door had closed I let go the pent-up fury which I hadn’t wanted to release in a stranger’s presence. I was really amazed at myself, for normally I’d never have talked back to my boss in this violent fashion.

‘Now you can say what you like about my preferring to stay in social assay instead of going over to alien contact! But there’s one fact you can’t deny, isn’t there? My department gets run! Have I ever had a foul-up as bad as this one that’s just broken on the alien side? The Bureau has let the Starhomers stampede it into a hopeless mess over these Tau Cetians – a delegation brought in without warning, a courier on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and that’s probably not more than half the story!’

‘Roald!’ Tinescu shot to his feet. ‘Who’s in charge of BuCult? Me, or you? If you’re so proud of your ability to run a smooth department, try tackling something
difficult!
Name of disaster, I could slot a dozen competent people into your present post – I could put Micky Torres on,
straight from college and without even a year’s fieldwork. Well, couldn’t I?’

‘Now Micky Torres is an exception,’ I countered feebly.

‘Exception be –
Ach!’
He thrust his fingers into his lank hair. ‘He’s still twenty years your junior. The point stands: you have no right to accuse me of letting the Bureau be – what did you say? –
stampeded
by the Starhomers, unless you show you could have handled the situation better yourself. I won’t deny you might have done. But how the hell am I or anybody to know that unless you come out from your snug little office and prove it?’

Breathing heavily, he sat down. For long moments I think I literally gaped at him, unable to frame words.

‘Go home and calm down, Roald,’ he sighed at length. ‘And take this with you, hm? It’s my impression that everybody has confidence in you except yourself. And if you can see the truth of that, you’ll do what I want because you want it too.’

By the time I got home to my apartment, I’d added one more accusation to the list Tinescu had fired at me. I wasn’t really riled any longer; I’d accepted that the chief must have been under tremendous pressure to avoid putting a foot wrong with the touchy Starhomers, and the strain accounted for his snapping my head off. I was still wound up of course – losing my temper was such a rare occurrence the let-down took nearly as long as the build-up, and my pulse was running fifteen above normal. But a relaxing hot bath would take care of that, I figured.

It was this additional accusation, which he’d refrained from hurling at me, that mainly engaged my mind. I’d let myself make a stupid error. Presumably because I disliked Starhome and its conceited inhabitants, I’d never looked closely enough at the recent social assay material from it to spot the faked information added between receipt and
dispatch. And I should have been sufficiently thorough to detect it long before Tomas did in Integration.

How much of the altered material had related to the Tau Cetians?

At that point I really began to feel ashamed of myself. As the Bureau file had informed me, that race was roughly where we’d been in the nineteenth or twentieth century. They were competent engineers, astronomers, chemists and architects; they were laying the foundations of the more difficult, because ‘softer’, disciplines like psychology. Such a race was potential dynamite. In the last resort I should have been able to say, from the cultural survey missions’ reports, that the Starhomers were likely to use their existence as a weapon against Earth. I’d never come out and said so: I’d let it be inferred from other sources.

All right: I recognized my shortcomings and I was determined to make up for them. Why, then, should I not be able to let go of my tension even now that I was lying in this hot tub, being massaged by the automatic rubbers?

The reason came to me with shocking suddenness. I spoke it aloud.

‘Of course,’ I said. ‘I’m afraid of being
killed.’

It wasn’t logical. But it was powerful. The survival level of a modern man’s brain was still at the stage it had reached long ago in the process of evolution, reacting blindly to any threat of danger. Its only concession to progress had been to widen the range of the cues to which it responded, matching the increased span of human life. I could expect a hundred and ten years of healthy, productive existence on current averages; naturally, like anyone in my position I took fewer risks and watched myself more closely than someone who’d subconsciously accepted that he was lucky to have survived his birth.

And what my reflexes had pieced together, obviously, was the suggestion Klabund had made – last night’s rocket crash
might have been sabotage – with knowledge of the fact that I’d come to the attention of the League which might well be responsible.

Might!
I stressed the word to myself savagely. I’d be scared of shadows next.

I got out of the tub in a depressed mood and went for fresh clothes. Just as I was dressed, the phone went, and it was Patricia calling. At once I forgot my worries – except that she might be annoyed at me for breaking our lunch date, unavoidable though that was.

But she smiled at me and puckered her lips in a mock kiss close to the camera at her end, then drew back to reveal that she was wearing nothing but an enormous towel.

‘How are you, sweet?’

‘Better for seeing you,’ I said. ‘Look, about lunch —’

‘Oh, you don’t have to say sorry!’ Her eyes widened. ‘Jacky told me you had an urgent call away – out to the spaceport, I think he said.’

‘Yes, that’s right. I had to go and meet the Tau Cetians, and this wildcat of a female courier from Starhome.’

‘Running around with another woman, hey?’

‘She called me a damnfool Terran bureaucrat, if you
must
know.’

Patricia burst out laughing and almost lost control of the towel. ‘Did you say you were meeting Tau Cetians? I thought they weren’t here yet – surely they’re the race the Starhomers found before we did?’

‘That’s right.’ I summarized the day’s events.

‘Well, I’m glad you didn’t have any worse trouble,’ she said finally. ‘Did you manage to find room in the Ark for these aliens?’

‘Oh yes, there was no problem there.’

‘I’ll look out for them, then. I pass the Ark on my way to work. Would I see them from the road?’

‘No, they’re in G Block, round the back of the site. Tonight I shall think of them all snug in bed or whatever they do, and I shall say, “There but for a kindly Mother Nature go I”’.

‘Wouldn’t you like to be a Tau Cetian?’ Patricia teased.

‘Of course not. I’d hate to be any kind of alien – principally because if I was an alien I’d find you repulsive, and that would be ridiculous.’

‘You say the nicest things, Roald – when you remember. Are you coming here to pick me up before we go to Jacky’s?’

‘I’d love to. Maybe you hadn’t better bother getting dressed …?’

‘If that was how you wanted to spend the evening, you ought not to have let Jacky invite us.’ She was chuckling. ‘No, come around at nineteen-fifteen and you’ll find me party-smart.’

‘Pity,’ I sighed. ‘Well – there’s always afterwards, isn’t there?’

As things turned out, when I’d finished saying hullo she had to make herself smart all over again – not that she seemed to object to the extra trouble – and we eventually got to the party half an hour late. Madeleine Demba met us at the door: a slender, very pretty woman older than Jacky, of Dutch and Indonesian extraction. They had folded back most of the ground-floor walls, so that Jacky, mixing drinks at a liquor console the far side of the living area, caught sight of us as we came in.

‘You’re late!’ he shouted. ‘But don’t worry, you’re not the
last. Anovel hasn’t arrived – I told him to come at twenty, give everyone else a chance to get acquainted before he turns up to monopolise our attention. Drink?’

As he’d promised, this was a fairly small gathering. I knew two of the others already: one was Helga Micallef, who worked in the Bureau’s biochemical section, and the other was Jack’s ten-year-old daughter Janna, busy being on her best behaviour with a pale young man in the far corner.

Then, while Jacky was fussing around Patricia as he always did with attractive women guests, I realized that there was someone else here I ought to recognize. A man in a formal evening tweed suit.

Suddenly the tweeds melted in imagination into the red of spacecrew uniform, and I identified him as the navigation officer I’d spoken to at the spaceport, waiting for the elevator to crawl up to the Starhomer ship. I went across and introduced myself, and found that he remembered our meeting.

‘Glad to know you,’ he said, taking my hand. ‘I’m Martin van’t Hoff, Madeleine’s cousin.’

‘Did you figure out what was unusual about the ship from Starhome?’ I inquired, for the sake of conversation.

‘Not yet. I asked one of the officers if I could go on board, but he told me off rather rudely. Starhomers do tend to be big-headed, don’t they? Though of course if that ship is a sample of what they can do nowadays, they have every excuse … You won’t catch that beauty losing herself in deep space!’

‘Losing herself?’ I echoed. ‘I never heard of a starship getting lost!’

‘Didn’t you? Why, we lost the first one we ever built on Earth – out beyond Alpha Centauri, with a crew of ten on board. That was when we found out the hard way that you can only use a stardrive engine once. You see, the drive-fields permanently warp the electron orbits at the centre of
the generators – the physical characteristics of the matter from which they’re built become irreversibly changed. This is the reason why starflight is so enormously expensive, of course. When a ship has to carry five or six spare engines…’

He broke off, eyes widening, and thumped his fist into his palm. ‘Why, maybe
that’s
what —!’

But I didn’t hear the rest. A mellifluous chime from the annunciator rang out, and since there was only one guest now due – a very unusual visitor indeed – a dead hush fell and everyone’s eyes fixed on Jacky, going to the door.

I realized how right he had been to say the Regulan would monopolize our attention. With the doubtful exception of Helga Micallef, I suspected that no one here had thought of meeting an alien socially before. It was odd to reflect that even a century and more after the discovery of the first alien intelligence, it was still not generally possible for ordinary people of different races to break through the barrier of strange air and strange food.

‘Anovel!’ Jacky exclaimed. ‘I’m really delighted you were able to come. Friends,’ he added, turning and ushering the alien forward, ‘you probably heard there was a Regulan passenger in the rocket which crashed last night, who did a lot of wonderful rescue work. Well, here he is.’

The Regulan seemed to turn a slightly brighter blue, as if blushing – though I knew it must be my imagination. The superb evolutionary process responsible for these incredible creatures would long ago have shed such superficial reflexes.