Part 5 (2/2)
”At least they don't have matter transmitters.”
The next piece of the plot came through Tillie. She sat chin on fist, talking tiredly through her hair in the general direction of my kneecaps.
”They estimate they can carry about seven hundred. It'll take them three days our time to unload, and another week to seal and atmospherize part of the cargo hold. The Bwanas bought the deal right off.”
”What's the difference to them?” I groaned. ”For the poor b.l.o.o.d.y Bantus the Capellan brand of slavery probably looks like cake.”
That was it, of course. The men of Capella were slaves. And there were relatively few of them. A cargo of exotic human males was worth a good deal more than ore. A h.e.l.l of a lot more, it seemed. On Terra we once called it ”black ivory”.
So much for galactic super-civilization. But that wasn't all. I had to yell hard for George before he showed, looking gray around the nose.
”A merchant privateer who runs into a rich source of pearls, or slaves, or whatever,” I wheezed, ”doesn't figure to quit after one trip. And he doesn't want his source to dry up or run away while he's gone. Or learn to fight back. He wants it to stay sweet, between trips. The good captain was quite interested in the fact that the Russians offered to get up to Luna so quickly. They could expect us to develop a defensive capability before they got back. What do they propose to do about that?”
”This may come as a shock to you,” George said slowly, ”but you aren't the only man who's read history. We weren't going to tell you because there's nothing you can do about it in that jungle gym.”
”Go on!”
”Mavrua-that's the man you called Leif Ericsson-he told me,” put in Tillie. ”They plan to turn off the sun a little. As they leave.”
”A solar screen.” George's voice was gray, too. ”They can lay it with their exhaust in a couple of dozen orbits. It doesn't take much, and it lasts, that is, there's an irreversible interaction. I don't understand the physics. Harry gave me the R&D a.n.a.lysis at lunch, but the waiter kept taking the mesons away. The point is, they can screen off enough solar energy to kick us back to the ice age. Without time to prepare we'll be finished. Snow could start here about June. When it does it won't quit. Or melt. Most of the big lakes and quite a lot of ocean will go to ice. The survivors will be back in caves. Perfect for their purpose, of course-they literally put us on ice.”
”What the h.e.l.l is being done?” I squeaked.
”Not counting the people who are running around cackling, there are two general lines. One, hit them with something before they do it. Two, undo it afterwards. And a ma.s.sive technological research depot is being s.h.i.+pped to Columbia. So far the word has been held pretty close. Bound to leak soon, though.”
”Hit them?” I coughed. ”Hit them? The whole U.N. military can't scratch that VTO that's sitting in their laps! Even if they could get a warhead on the mother s.h.i.+p, they're bound to have s.h.i.+elding. Christ, look at the deflectors they use to hold their atomics. And they know the state of our art. Childis.h.!.+ And as for dispersing the screen in time to save anything-””What do you think you're doing? Max?” They were pawing at me.
”Getting out of here.... G.o.d.a.m.nit, give me a knife, I can't untie this b.a.s.t.a.r.d! Let go. Nurse!
WHERE ARE MY PANTS?”.
They finally hauled me over to George's war room in a kind of mobile mummy-case and saw I got fed all the info and rumors. I kept telling my brain to produce. It kept telling me back Tilt. With the top men of ten nations working on it, what did I imagine I could contribute? When I had been grunting to myself for a couple of hours Tillie and George filed in with a purposeful air.
”In a bad position there is no good move: Bogoljubov. Give over, Max.”
”In a bad position you can always wiggle something,” I rasped. ”What about the men, Tillie?”
”What about them?”
”How do they feel about the plan?”
”Well, they don't like it.”
”In what way don't they like it?”
”The established harem favorites don't like to see new girls brought in,” she recited and quick looked me in the eye.
”Having a good time, baby?” I asked her gently. She looked away.
”Okay. There's our loose piece. Now, how do we wiggle it at a quarter of a million miles? What about that character Leif-Mavrua?” I mused. ”Isn't he some sort of communications tech?”
”He's chief commo sergeant,” Tillie said, and added slowly, ”he's alone on duty, sometimes.”
”What's he like? You were friendly with him?”
”Yes, kind of. He's-I don't know-like gay only not.”
I was holding her eye.
”But in this situation your interests coincide?” I probed her hard. The American black who goes to Kenya often discovers he is an American first and an African second, no matter what they did to him in Newark. George had the sense to keep quiet, although I doubt he ever understood.
She swung back her hair, slowly. I could see mad dreams dying in her eyes.
”Yes. They... coincide.”
”Think you can talk to him?”
”Yes.”
”I'll get over to Harry,” George jumped up, he was ahead of the play now. ”We'll see what we can lash up. Ten days, maximum.”
”Call the campus. I can take a meeting. But get me something so I don't sound like a frog's ghost.”
The chief we had then was all right. He came to me. Of course we had only the start of a plan, but n.o.body else had anything, and we had Tillie. He agreed we were nuts and gave us everything we needed.
The lateral channels were laid on by 1500; Jodrell Bank was to set us up.
The waning moon came over Greenwich before dawn that week, and we got Tillie through to Mavrua about midnightest. He was alone. It took her about a dozen exchanges to work out agreement in principle. She was good with him. I studied him on the monitors; as Tillie said, queer but not gay. Clean cut, muscular, good grin; gonads okay. Something sapless in the eyes. What in h.e.l.l could he do?
The chief's first thought had been, of course, sabotage.
”Stupid,” I husked to George. ”Harem slaves don't blow up the harem and themselves just to keep the new girls out. They wait and poison the new girls when they can get away with it. That does us no good.””Nor do historical a.n.a.logies, after a point.”
”a.n.a.logic reasoning works when you have the right reference frame. We need a new one. For instance, look at the way the Capellans overturned our psychic scenery, our view of ourselves as integral to this world. Or look at their threat to our male-dominant structure. Bigger, more dominant women who treat our males as s.e.x-slave material. Walking nightmares... notice that 'mare?' All right-what is the exact relations.h.i.+p between the Capellans and us? Give me that Danish report again.”
The two gorgeous Danes had at least gotten some biological information between orgies, maybe they were more used to them. They confirmed that the Capellans carried s.e.x-linked differences. Capellan males matured to Earth-normal size and s.e.xual features, but the adolescent females went through a secondary development spurt and emerged as the giantesses we had seen. With the specialized characteristics that I had inadvertently become familiar with. And more: some milennia back a mutation started cropping up among the women. Fallout from a war, perhaps? No answer. Whatever the cause, women began failing to develop. In other words, they stayed as earth-type normals, able to reproduce in what the Capellans regarded as immature form.
Alarmed, the Capellan matriarchate dealt with the problem in a relatively humane way. They rounded up all suspected mutant lines and deported them to remote planets, of which Terra was one.
Hence the old chart notation.
Our present visitors had been ore-hunting at nearly maximum range when they decided to check on the semi-mythical colony. No one else ever had.
”What about the Capellan's own history?”
”Not much. Look at that British quote: 'We have always been as we are.' ”
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