Planet in Peril Read online

  When it was over, Charles and Dinkuhl stood beside Preacher Robinson and made their informal good-bys to the faithful. They had decided that in the presence of Robinson they would not put their usual questions about Sara and Humayun. Charles stood in silence while the two Preachers listened to the small talk and small problems of the departing congregation. The comet was plainly visible at the top of the black chasm between two warehouses. A few yards away there was the slow lap of water against rotting piles.

  There was still a handful of the congregation left when Preacher Robinson started to talk. He said to Dinkuhl:

  “How long have you been telling the Wrath, Preacher?”

  “Not long, Preacher. The call only came to me a few weeks ago.”

  “You tell it well.”

  “An instrument of the Lord, Preacher.”

  Dinkuhl’s voice, Charles noted, had relapsed into the drawl that signified alertness. The remaining handful of the damned had moved in closer; they were surrounded by them. There could be very little doubt that they were followers of Preacher Robinson. It was not two to one; it was two to half a dozen.

  “Tell me, Preacher,” Robinson said, “these other two you have been asking questions about—a woman called Koupal, a man called Humayun—are they instruments of the Lord, too?”

  It might still be no more than a routine check-up; the fact that they knew of the questions they had been asking did not necessarily signify anything more than that the

  Cometeers were a tighter-knit organization than had seemed likely on the surface.

  Dinkuhl said: ‘‘Every man and every woman is an instrument of The Lord.”

  Preacher Robinson laughed, and his laughter was the dropping of a cloak. It was the laughter of cynicism. They had reached an inner circle; that was clear enough. And it was an inner circle dedicated to something other than the fanaticism of the Cometeers. But to what? The general inference was clear enough. Some managerial. But which? Which managerial was capable of controlling an organization like this—an organization of which Ledbetter and even Raven were unmistakably afraid?

  “You put that well, Manager Dinkuhl,” said Preacher Robinson. “We’re still curious, all the same. What do you want Koupal and Humayun for?”

  “Would you believe it,” Dinkuhl drawled, “if I told you it was for no other reason than the pangs of aching love?”

  “For both of them?”

  “Well, one each. Charlie for Koupal and me for Humayun. It’s just that I’m built that way.”

  Robinson laughed again. “You know,” he said, “I think we’d take you in for that sense of humor, if for no other reason.”

  “Take us in—where?” asked Dinkuhl. “And are we expected to come willingly?”

  “You’ll find out where. Willingly if you like. Otherwise not. We’ve come prepared.”

  Dinkuhl groaned. “Not astarate again.”

  “No,” Robinson said, “not astarate.” He drew something out from beneath his Preacher’s cloak. “We’re the more primitive type.”

  His followers were making similar dispositions. Charles recognized what it was they carried from having seen something of the sort on a Red League historical soap opera. They were old-fashioned blackjacks.

  Dinkuhl said: “Mind if I have a word with Charlie-on our own?”

  “A word. Don’t make it longer than half a minute.”

  Dinkuhl drew Charles to one side. “Can you swim?” Charles nodded. “The blunt instruments are all they’ve got; they would have produced something else if they had it. Probably don’t carry anything metal in case someone puts the detectors on them. Anyway, it’s worth trying a rush. There’s only a couple between us and the water. Right over them and in. Swim left. There’s a main artery within a hundred yards, and they can’t get at us before then because of the warehouses. They won’t try anything under lights.”

  Charles said: “O.K. When do we go?”

  “We’ll walk back to them and I’ll take out a cigarette pack and a lighter. When I toss the lighter in the Preacher’s face, we move.”

  The watchers appeared to relax as Charles and Dinkuhl walked back together to where Robinson stood. Dinkuhl drew his pack of cigarettes out, slowly. He felt in his pockets for the lighter.

  Robinson said: “Are you prepared to be reasonable? We play ball if you do.”

  Dinkuhl brought out his lighter, and pressed the flame button. The small blue glow shot up to its full height of three inches.

  “A lot depends,” Dinkuhl observed, “on the brand of ball you play. For instance—”

  He roared: “Now!” as he flicked the lighter in Robinson’s face, and Charles leapt for the man immediately between himself and the waterfront. The man went down, but he brought Charles down with him. Charles rolled clear, but by the time he had got to his feet another of them had him by the arm and yet another was between him and the water. Dinkuhl had got clear. He stood by the water’s edge, and looked back. They were making no attempt to go after him. Me again, Charles thought.

  He called: “Beat it, Hiram!”

  As he tore his arm free and dived for the man in his path, Charles saw Dinkuhl bull-rushing back to his assistance. He did not see anything eke. Something hit him on the back of the head.

  He came back to consciousness once to the sound of a high-pitched buzzing roar, recognizable as the noise of a stratoliner’s engines. He sat up, and had time to see that he was in the hold of a cargo-plane, and tied up. Dinkuhl, also tied up, lay a little way off.

  A voice said: "No trouble. We don’t want trouble.”

  Another blackjack blow smashed him back into oblivion.

  VIII

  The next time Charles came to, he was free of his bonds. He sat up carefully, and then stood up. His head ached, but no more than it had done after astarate; probably the bludgeoning effect of a blackjack was no worse than that of a drug.

  He was in a small neat cell of a room, but there was no question of this being a cabin in a real or fake spaceship. There was an armorplex window in one wall, and outside light came through it. His first attention was to Dinkuhl, though. Dinkuhl was lying on the floor; he had a nasty black and blue bruise on his left temple. Charles tried to rouse him, but without success. There was no water in the room, and slapping his cheeks brought no result. At least, he was alive.

  Leaving him for the moment, Charles went to the window and looked out. The building they were in was on a height, and looked across a city that pricked his memory without quite yielding to it. A mixture of styles, but predominantly very old, and with more than a hint of the oriental. A museum city. That narrowed the possibilities quite a bit—there were few cities that had escaped both the War’s destructions and the subsequent pattern of standardization in civic reconstruction that had marked the beginning of managerialism. He tried to think which this could be, but without being able to persuade himself of one likelihood over another. The sky was busy with gyros; that didn’t help either.

  It wasn’t until the door of the room opened, and he saw the man who stood in the threshold that he guessed where he was. A number of things fell into place then, not least the trace of unfamiliar accent in Preacher Robinson’s speech. He had never seen this man in the flesh, but he had seen a deep-view of him, and in the same dress.

  It was Dai Humayun, and the dress was the Siraqi military uniform.

  “You’re awake,” Humayun said. “But not Dinkuhl?”

  “He’s been roughed up badly.” Charles felt his own head. “Your men seem to get some pleasure in the use of blunt instruments.”

  Humayun smiled. He had a slow smile that warmed his normally severe features. “The need for secrecy precluded the use of more advanced methods of repression. I won’t say that some of them may not have been a little heavy-handed. Enthusiasm is a good fault in the military. But they know where to hit without doing permanent damage. And that was in their instructions— to avoid any permanent damage.”

  “Very thoughtful. Do you thi
nk something could be done about making Dinkuhl comfortable, now you’ve got us here?”

  Humayun nodded. He pressed a wall button. “You have not been here long. They dropped you here, and then informed me. I came almost at once. You must have been coming around when they left you.”

  “Anyway, we’re here.” Charles gestured toward the window. “In—”

  “The capital of the world.” Humayun smiled again. “El Majalem. The Averroes Institute. Seventh floor. Room ninety-three. I take it you recognize me? You will have seen my records. How are things in California?”

  “Yes, I recognized you. California—it’s a few weeks since I was there.”

  Two orderlies, also in uniform, brought a stretcher in.

  Humayun said: “He should have been taken to sickbay. See that he's looked after.”

  As they left the room, Charles said urgently: “Sara— she's all right?” Humayun nodded. “And her father?”

  The remark amused Humayun. “Yes. Professor Koupal is in good health and spirits. Very good spirits. He wants to see you.”

  “And Sara?”

  “That's a matter for Professor Koupal. We'll go along now, if you're ready.”

  Charles held his hands up. The rope had cut deeply, and it had been oily. “A wash would be useful.”

  “Yes, of course. Our sanitary arrangements are not quite managerial, but I have a lavatory attached to my office here. Come on down.”

  Humayun's office was two floors below; they went down and Humayun showed him to the lavatory.

  “You’ll find me back in the office when you're ready,” he told him. “Soap, towels—got everything?”

  Charles tidied himself up as well as he could, and went out to rejoin Humayun. He got up from his desk, and then sat down again.

  “Something you may be interested in, before we go along to Government House. Have a cigarette? Take a chair.”

  The cigarette was very welcome, and Charles was not reluctant to sit down. He glanced around the office. Nothing unusual, except that it was rather untidy. There was a TV screen inset in the wall.

  Humayun spoke into some land of tube: that was new.

  He said: “Get me Gathenya.” He glanced up at Charles. “We use wire more than you do for communications. A result of being closely knit and centralized. There's a saving on power, and we have had to learn ways of economy.”

  The screen lit up to show a man sitting at a desk. He apparently recognized Humayun, and saluted him.

  Humayun spoke to him in French, and he nodded. “Oui, General” The screen blanked, and opened up again to show a factory interior. It was a mass-production layout, but not automated: there seemed to be far too many workers. Humayun said something else in French, and the cameras switched to a close view of the end of the line. The products were being picked off the line and carefully stacked for transfer somewhere else. They were small, metal, egg-shaped.

  “Recognize them?”

  Charles shook his head. “Should I?”

  Humayun gave another instruction in French. This time the scene cut to a courtyard, enclosed but open to the sky. It was filled with a swarm of monstrous bees. Men flying.

  These, too, wore Siraqi military uniform. Each was encased in a skeletal framework of metal. The framework had a footrest, a seat, and a waistband with certain controls. From the waistband the metal rose in a hoop above the flyers head. At the top of the hoop were the vanes; horizontal for take-off and inclinable in various directions for routine flying and maneuver. As the scene became more clearly visualized in Charles’ mind, he understood that quite a complicated aerial parade was taking place. One flyer, hovering motionless at one end of the courtyard, was an instructor; the rest were obeying his commands.

  “A very neat design,” he commented at last. "Powered by ...?"

  “As you will have guessed, by the diamond-solar battery. Those were the batteries you have just seen coming off the assembly line.”

  “Congratulations. But I don’t know how you did it, in the time. I saw at least six months’ work in the development stage, quite apart from the time required for production-tooling up, and so on.”

  Humayun smiled. “Of course. That’s why I can’t accept the congratulations. We have had people working here on it right from the beginning. My job at San Diego was a stalling one for the last year. Not as easy as you might think.”

  Charles looked at him skeptically. “Two questions. How could you have people working on this here in Siraq, when you and the Koupals were refugees? And if you did have them, why give any information at all to United Chemicals? You gave enough to interest more than one managerial.”

  “So I understand. The answer to the first question is that this is a capitalist country, not a managerial one. Disorganized, ramshackle, inefficient. So inefficient that it was not at all difficult to carry out research work unknown to the government of the time. Professor Koupal was Director of this Institute before our misfortune. The President was badly misinformed; the man he appointed in succession was one of our group. It was quite easy to camouflage the work.

  “As for your second question, the idea was in a very embryonic stage indeed when we left Siraq. I needed a laboratory and funds very urgently. I had to wave some kind of carrot under the noses of those donkeys at Graz. And I had to continue to give them enough to persuade them to maintain the project—though I understand a good deal of what I did send was being intercepted by Ledbetter for another managerial?”

  Charles nodded. Humayun went on: “And I was fairly confident that there wasn’t one of them with the training and brains to make anything of the information, anyway. From what Sara told me about you, I discovered that I had made a mistake there. Our men tried to locate you, but various other groups got on to you first. I should be interested to learn why they didn’t manage to keep you. Anyway, you dropped very neatly into our hands.” “Into your hands?”

  “The Cometeers.”

  “The Cometeers are a Siraqi organization?”

  “Let’s say, we provided the first spark for the powder trail. Its success has rather overwhelmed us. Our psychological advisers plotted it out, but I think even they have been surprised by the results. The present membership figures are astonishing, and there's a steep upward curve for the rate of increase”

  “The instruments used by Siraq are not such that they commend Siraq to me,” Charles said.

  Humayun shrugged. “A pity. Unfortunately, the Cometeers are necessary to our plans. We aren't fond of them ourselves, but at the same time they could never have succeeded unless the society in which they flourished was corrupt. And there's another point. We expect them to be the means of saving thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of lives. The majority of them not Siraqi.”

  “In what way?”

  “You will be told, I fancy. We should be getting along. There's one other thing you might be interested in first.” Humayun spoke into the tube again, and again the TV picture changed. A larger courtyard. More of the flyers. They watched them drop down toward a row of black canisters laid out at about three-yard intervals on the ground. The frameworks supporting these flyers carried on each side a small barrel-like affair, terminating in a nozzle. Suddenly, and presumably at a word of command because the effects were nearly simultaneous, there was a lambent flickering around each of the nozzles, and on the ground the canisters—or all but two of them—burst into flame.

  “The heat ray,” said Humayun. “Beloved by managerial TV serial writers. The other diamond application. Unfortunately limited to use in conditions of sunlight, but, granted those conditions, most effective. Variable focus, but only between certain limits, of course, and the range is not very great. The heat, at point of impact, is. I won't give you a figure, because I don't think you would believe me. A surprise, you think?”

  “Only in its actual appearance,” Charles said grimly. “A few people have grasped the idea.”

  “Then they will be surprised, to see their idea marching on t
he wings of the wind.”

  Humayun switched off the screen, and got up to go. Charles said: “One thing. How much of all this did Sara know—when she was with you at San Miguel?” “Our conventions are perhaps peculiar. There are some things we don’t regard as suitable for women—they include counter-revolution and military strategy. Sara didn’t know anything.”

  Humayun said: “May I present you? Charles Grayner —Professor Koupal, President of Siraq.”

  The gyro had brought them to the grounds of a modest little house on the outskirts of El Majalem, and the room in which they now were was as unassuming. Professor Koupal got up to greet them from a scratched and shabby desk; there was no large TV screen in the room, but a portable callscreen beside the desk. Professor Koupal smiled, and Charles remembered and recognized the humorous slyness he had seen on the morning of Sara’s disappearance.

  Professor Koupal said: “Our apologies, Charles. I hear you’ve been somewhat roughly handled, too. That wasn’t intended. We’ve been inculcating aggressiveness into our soldiers, and it’s difficult to prevent them from overdoing it at times.”

  “President?” Charles asked. “Since when? I haven’t been seeing the newsreels very lately.”

  “Would your newsreels regard it as worth the recording? I suppose they might. But this has been a very secret palace revolution. We thought it best not to let the news leak out just yet. The coup d'etat coincided with Dai’s return here. It was well planned and went without a hitch. I was called back when it was all over.”

  “Sara—”

  “I felt it was necessary to bring Sara with me. There were a number of good reasons for that, not the least being her value as a hostage if left behind. She expressed unwillingness when I told her.” Professor Koupal looked at Charles keenly. “She wanted to tell you, but of course that was impossible. I was afraid she might have left some clue, though I took all precautions.”