Part 1 (1/2)
Talents, Incorporated.
by William Fitzgerald Jenkins.
_Part One_
Chapter 1
Young Captain Bors--who impatiently refused to be called anything else--was strangely occupied when the communicator buzzed. He'd ripped away the cord about a thick parcel of doc.u.ments and heaved them into the fireplace of the office of the Minister for Diplomatic Affairs. A fire burned there, and already there were many ashes. The carpet and the chairs of the cabinet officer's sanctum were coated with fine white dust. As the communicator buzzed again, Captain Bors took a fireplace tool and stirred the close-packed papers to looseness. They caught and burned instead of only smouldering.
The communicator buzzed yet again. He brushed off his hands and pressed the answer-stud.
He said bleakly: ”Diplomatic Affairs. Bors speaking.”
The communicator relayed a voice from somewhere else with an astonis.h.i.+ng fidelity of tone.
”_s.p.a.ceport, sir. A s.h.i.+p just broke out of overdrive. We don't identify its type. One s.h.i.+p only, sir._”
Bors said grimly;
”You'd recognize a liner. If it's a s.h.i.+p from the Mekinese fleet and stays alone, it could be coming to receive our surrender. In that case play for time and notify me.”
”_Yes, sir.--One moment! It's calling, sir! Here it is--._”
There was a clicking, and then there came a voice which had the curious quality of a loudspeaker sound picked up and relayed through another loudspeaker.
”_Calling ground! Calling ground! s.p.a.ce-yacht_ Sylva _reports arrival and asks coordinates for landing. Our ma.s.s is two hundred tons standard.
Purpose of visit, pleasure-travel._”
A pause. The voice from the s.p.a.ceport:
”_Sir?_”
Captain Bors said impatiently, ”Oh, let him down and see if he knows anything about the Mekinese. Then advise him to go away at once. Tell him why.”
”_Yes, sir._”
A click. Young Captain Bors returned to his task of burning papers.
These were the confidential records of the Ministry for Diplomatic Affairs. Captain Bors wore the full-dress uniform of the s.p.a.ce navy of the planet Kandar. It was still neatly pressed but was now smudged with soot and smeared with ashes. He had burned a great many papers today.
Elsewhere in the Ministry other men were burning other doc.u.ments. The other papers were important enough; they were confidential reports from volunteer- and paid-agents on twenty planets. In the hands of ill-disposed persons, they could bring about disaster and confusion and interplanetary tension. But the ones Captain Bors made sure of were deadly.
He burned papers telling of conditions on Mekin itself. The authors of such memoranda would be savagely punished if they were found out. Then there were papers telling of events on Tralee. If it could be said that he were more painstakingly destructive than average about anything, Captain Bors was about them. He saw to it that they burned to ashes. He crushed the ashes. He stirred them. It would be unthinkable that such morsels could ever be pieced together and their contents even guessed at.
He went on with the work. His jaunty uniform became more smeared and smudged. He gave himself no rest. There were papers from other planets now under the hegemony of Mekin. Some were memoranda from citizens of this planet, who had traveled upon the worlds which Mekin dominated as it was about to dominate Kandar. They, especially had to be pulverized.
Every confidential doc.u.ment in the Ministry for Diplomatic Affairs was in the process of destruction, but Captain Bors in person destroyed those which would cause most suffering if read by the wrong persons.
In other ministries and other places similar holocausts were under way.
There was practically nothing going on on Kandar which was not related to the disaster for which the people of that world waited. The feel of bitterness and despair was everywhere. Broadcasting stations stayed on the air only to report monotonously that the tragic event had not yet happened. The small s.p.a.ce-navy of Kandar waited, aground, to take the king and some other persons on board at the last moment. When the Mekinese navy arrived--or as much of it as was needed to make resistance hopeless--the end for Kandar would have come. That was the impending disaster. If it came too soon, Bors's task of destruction couldn't be completed as was wished. In such a case this Ministry and all the others would hastily be doused with incendiary material and fired, and it would desperately be hoped that all the planet's records went up in the flames.
Captain Bors flung more and more papers on the blaze. He came to an end of them.