The Nail and the Oracle (26 page)

“In every city,” said the Archive Master patiently, “on every settled human planet in all the known universe, there is a free public clinic where stress reactions of any sort may be diagnosed, treated or prescribed for, speedily, effectively, and with dignity. I trust you will not regard it as an intrusion on your privacy if I make the admittedly unprofessional observation (you see, I do not pretend to be a therapist) that there are times when a citizen is not himself aware that he is under stress, even though it may be clearly, perhaps painfully
obvious to others. It would not be a discourtesy, would it, or an unkindness, for some understanding stranger to suggest to such a citizen that—”

“What you’re saying, all wrapped up in words, is I ought to have my head candled.”

“By no means. I am not qualified. I did, however, think that a visit to a clinic—there’s one just a step away from here—might make—ah—communications between us more possible. I would be glad to arrange another appointment for you, when you’re feeling better. That is to say, when you are … ah …” He finished with a bleak smile and reached toward the calling stud.

Moving almost like a Drive-ship, Bux seemed to cease to exist on the visitor’s chair and reappeared instantaneously at the side of the desk, a long thick arm extended and a meaty hand blocking the way to the stud. “Hear me out first,” he said, softly. Really softly. It was a much more astonishing thing than if the Archive Master had trumpeted like an elephant. “Hear me out. Please.”

The old man withdrew his hand, but folded it with the other and set the neat stack of fingers on the edge of the desk. It looked like stubbornness. “I have a limited amount of time, and your folio is very large.”

“It’s large because I’m a bird dog for detail—that’s not a brag, it’s a defect: sometimes I just don’t know when to quit. I can make the point quick enough—all that material just supports it. Maybe a tenth as much would do, but you see, I—well, I give a damn. I really give a high, wide, heavy damn about this. Anyway—you just pushed the right button in Charli Bux. ‘Make communication between us more possible.’ Well, all right. I won’t cuss, I won’t holler, and I won’t take long.”

“Can you do all these things?”

“You’re goddamn—whoa, Charli.” He flashed the thirty-thousand-candlepower smile and then hung his head and took a deep breath. He looked up again and said quietly, “I certainly can, sir.”

“Well, then.” The Archive Master waved him back to the visitor’s chair: Charli Bux, even a contrite Charli Bux, stood just too tall and too wide. But once seated, he sat silent for so long that the
old man shifted impatiently. Charli Bux looked up alertly, and said, “Just getting it sorted out, sir. A good deal of it’s going to sound as if you could diagnose me for a stun-shot and a good long stay at the funny farm, yeah, and that without being modest about your professional knowledge. I read a story once about a little girl was afraid of the dark because there was a little hairy purple man with poison fangs in the closet, and everybody kept telling her no, no, there’s no such thing, be sensible, be brave. So they found her dead with like snakebite and her dog killed a little hairy purple man and so on. Now if I told you there was sort of a conspiracy to keep me from getting information about a planet, and I finally got mad enough to go there and see for myself, and ‘They’ did their best to stop me; ‘They’ won me a sweepstake prize trip to somewhere else that would use up my vacation time; when I turned that down, ‘They’ told me there was no Drive Guide orbiting the place, and it was too far to reach in real space (and that’s a God, uh, doggone
lie
, sir!) and when I found a way to get there by hops, ‘They’ tangled up my credit records so I couldn’t buy passage; why, then I can’t say I’d blame you for peggin’ me paranoid and doing me the kindness of getting me cured. Only thing was, these things did happen and they were not delusions, no matter what everybody plus two thirds of Charli Bux (by the time ‘They’ were done with me) believed. I had an ounce of evidence and I believed it. I had a ton of opinion saying otherwise. I tell you, sir, I
had
to go. I had to stand knee-deep in Vexvelt sweet grass with the cedar smell of a campfire and a warm wind in my face,”
and my hands in the hands of a girl called Tyng, along with my heart and my hope and a dazzling wonder colored like sunrise and tasting like tears
, “before I finally let myself believe I’d been right all along, and there is a planet called Vexvelt and it does have all the things I knew it had,”
and more, more, oh, more than I’ll ever tell you about, old man
. He fell silent, his gaze averted and luminous.

“What started you on this—this quest?”

Charli Bux threw up his big head and looked far away and back at some all-but-forgotten detail. “Huh! I’d almost lost that in the clutter. Workin’ for Interworld Bank & Trust, feeding a computer
in the clearin’house. Not as dull as you might think. Happens I was a mineralogist for a spell, and the cargoes meant something to me besides a name, a quantity and a price. Huh!” came the surprised I’ve-found-it! little explosion. “I can tell you the very item. Feldspar. It’s used in porcelain and glass, antique style. I got a sticky mind, I guess. Long as I’d been there, feldspar ground and bagged went for about twenty-five credits a ton at the docks. But here was one of our customers bringing it in for eight and a half F.O.B. I called the firm just to check; mind, I didn’t care much, but a figure like that could color a statistical summary of imports and exports for years. The bookkeeper there ran a check and found it was so: eight and a half a ton, high-grade feldspar, ground and bagged. Some broker on Lethe: they hadn’t been able to contact him again.

“It wasn’t worth remembering until I bumped into another one. Niobium this time. Some call it columbium. Helps make steel stainless, among other things. I’d never seen a quotation for rod stock at less than a hundred and thirty-seven, but here was some—not much, mind you—at ninety credits
delivered
. And some sheets too, about thirty percent less than I’d ever seen it before, freight paid. I checked that one out too. It was correct. Well-smelted and pure, the man said. I forgot that one too, or I thought I had. Then there was that space-hand.”
Moxie Magiddle—honest! That was his name. Squint-eyed little fellow with a great big laugh bulging the walls of the honky-tonk out at the spaceport. Drank only alcohol and never touched a needle. Told me the one about the fellow had a big golden screwhead in his belly button. Told me about times and places all over—full of yarns, a wonderful gift for yarning
. “Just mentioned in passing that Lethe was one place where the law was ‘Have Fun’ and nobody ever broke it. The whole place just one big transfer point and rest-and-rehab. A water world with only one speck of land in the tropics. Always warm, always easy. No industry, no agriculture, just—well, services. Thousands of men spent hundreds of thousands of credits, a few dozen pocketed millions. Everybody happy. I mentioned the feldspar, I guess just so I would sound as if I knew something about Lethe too.”
And laid a big fat egg, too. Moxie looked at me as if he hadn’t seen me before and didn’t like what he saw. If
it was a lie I was telling it was a stupid one. “Y’don’t dig feldspar out of a swamp, fella. You puttin’ me on, or you kiddin’ y’rself?” And a perfectly good evening dried up and blew away
. “He said it couldn’t possibly have come from Lethe—it’s a water world. I guess I could have forgotten that too but for the coffee beans. Blue Mountain Coffee, it was called; the label claimed it descended in an unbroken line from Old Earth, on an island called Jamaica. It went on to say that it could be grown only in high cool land in the tropics—a real mountain plant. I liked it better than any coffee I ever tasted, but when I went back for more they were sold out. I got the manager to look in the records and traced it back to through the Terratu wholesaler to the broker and then to the importer—I mean, I
liked
that coffee!

“And according to him, it came from Lethe. High cool mountain land and all. The port at Lethe was tropical all right, but to be cool it would have to have mountains that were really mountains.

“The feldspar that did, but couldn’t have, come from Lethe—and at those prices!—reminded me of the niobium, so I checked on that one too. Sure enough—Lethe again. You don’t—you just do
not
get pure niobium rod and sheet without mines and smelters and mills.

“Next off-day I spent here at Archives and got the history of Lethe halfway back, I’ll swear, to Yiem and the Big Bang. It was a swamp, it practically always has been a swamp, and something was wrong.

“Mind you, it was only a little something, and probably there was a good simple explanation. But little or not, it bothered me.”
And besides, it had made me look like a horse’s ass in front of a damn good man. Old man, if I told you how much time I hung around the spaceport looking for that bandy-legged little space-gnome, you’d stop me now and send for the stun-guns. Because I was obsessed—not a driving addiction kind of thing, but a very small deep splinter-in-the-toe kind of thing, that didn’t hurt much but never failed to gig me every single step I took. And then one day—oh, months later—there was old Moxie Magiddle, and he took the splinter out. Hyuh! Ol’ Moxie … he didn’t know me at first, he really
didn’t. Funny little guy, he has his brains rigged to forget anything he doesn’t like—honestly forget it. That feldspar thing, when a fella he liked to drink with and yarn to showed up to be a know-it-all kind of liar, and to boot, too dumb to know he couldn’t get away with it—well, that qualified Charli for zero minus the price of five man-hours of drinking. Then when I got him cornered—I all but wrestled him—and told about the feldspar and the niobium and now the mountain-grown coffee, all of it checked and cross-checked, billed, laded, shipped, insured—all of it absolutely Lethe and here’s the goddamn proof, why, he began to laugh till he cried, a little at himself, a little at the situation, and a whole lot at me. Then we had a long night of it and I drank alcohol and you know what? I’ll never in life find out how Moxie Magiddle can hold so much liquor. But he told me where those shipments came from, and gave me a vague idea why nobody wanted much to admit it. And the name they call all male Vexveltians
. “I mentioned it one day to a cargo handler,” Bux told the Archive Master, “and he solved the mystery—the feldspar and niobium and coffee came from Vexvelt and had been transshipped at Lethe by local brokers, who, more often than not, get hold of some goods and turn them over to make a credit or so and dive back into the local forgetteries.

“But any planet which could make a profit on goods of this quality at such prices—transshipped, yet!—certainly could do much better direct. Also, niobium is Element 41, and Elkhart’s Hypothesis has it that, on any planet where you find elements in Periods Three to Five, chances are you’ll find ’em all. And that coffee! I used to lie awake at night wondering what they had on Vexvelt that they liked too much to ship, if they thought so little of their coffee that they’d let it out.

“Well, it was only natural that I came here to look up Vexvelt. Oh, it was listed at the bank, all right, but if there ever had been trade, it had been cleared out of the records long ago—we wipe the memory cells every fifty years on inactive items. I know at least that it’s been wiped four times, but it could have been blank the last three.

“What do you think Archives has on Vexvelt?”

The Archive Master did not answer. He
knew
what Archives had
on the subject of Vexvelt. He knew where it was, and where it was not. He knew how many times this stubborn young man had been back worrying at the mystery, how many ingenious approaches he had made to the problem, how little he had gotten, how much less he or anyone would get if they tried it today. He said nothing.

Charli Bux held up fingers to count. “Astronomical: no observations past two light-years. Nothing but sister planets (all dead) and satellites within two light-years. Cosmological: camera scan, if ever performed (but it must have been performed, or the damn thing wouldn’t even be listed at all!), missing and never replaced. So there’s no way of finding out where in real space it is, even. Geological: unreported. Anthropological: unreported. Then there’s some stuff about local hydrogen tension and emission of the parent star, but they’re not much help. And the summation in Trade Extrapolation: untraded. Reported undesirable. Not a word as to who reported it or why he said it.

“I tried to sidle into it by looking up manned exploration, but I could find only three astronauts’ names in connection with Vexvelt. Troshan. He got into some sort of trouble when he came back and was executed—we used to kill certain criminals six, seven hundred years ago, did you know that?—but I don’t know what for. Anyway, they apparently did it before he filed his report. Then Balrou. Oh—Balrou—he did report. I can tell you his whole report word for word: ‘In view of conditions on Vexvelt contact is not recommended,’ period. By the word, that must be the most expensive report ever filed.”

It was, thought the Archive Master, but he did not say it aloud.

“And then somebody called Allman explored Vexvelt but—how did the report put it—’it was found on his return that Allman was suffering from confinement fatigue and his judgment was so severely impaired that his report is discounted.’ Does that mean it was destroyed, Archive Master?”

Yes, thought the old man, but he said, “I can’t say.”

“So there you are,” said Charli Bux. “If I wanted to present a classic case of what the old books called persecution mania, I’d just have to report things exactly as they happened. Did I have a right
to suspect, even, that ‘They’ had picked me as the perfect target and set up those hints—low-cost feldspar, high-quality coffee—bait I couldn’t miss and couldn’t resist. Did I have the right to wonder if a living caricature with a comedy name—Moxie for-god’s-sake Magiddle—was working for ‘Them’? Then, what happened next, when I honestly and openly filed for Vexvelt as my next vacation destination? I was told there was no Drive Guide orbiting Vexvelt—it could only be reached through normal space. That happens to be a lie, but there’s no way of checking on it here, or even on Lethe—Moxie never knew. Then I filed for Vexvelt via Lethe and a real-space transport, and was told that Lethe was not recommended as a tourist stop and there was no real-space service from there anyhow. So I filed for Botil, which I
know
is a tourist stop, and which I know has real-space shuttles and charter boats, and which the star charts call Kricker III while Lethe is Kricker V, and that’s when I won the God—uh, the sweepstakes and a free trip to beautiful, beautiful Zeenip, paradise of paradises with two indoor 36-hole golf courses and free milk baths. I gave it to some charity or other, I said to save on taxes, and went for my tickets to Botil, the way I’d planned. I had it all to do over because they’d wiped the whole transaction when they learned about the sweepstakes. It seemed reasonable but it took so long to set it all up again that I missed the scheduled transport and lost a week of my vacation. Then when I went to pay for the trip my credit showed up zero, and it took another week to straighten out that regrettable error. By that time the tour service had only one full passage open, and in view of the fact that the entire tour would outlast my vacation by two weeks, they wiped the whole deal again—they were quite sure I wouldn’t want it.”