Babel-17 (8 page)

The Eye spoke something ominous. Ordinarily, the corporate could only converse with the discorporate—and remember the conversation—over special equipment. Rydra solved the problem by immediately translating whatever they spoke to her into Basque before the weak synapses broke. Though the original words were lost, the translation remained: Those broken circuit plates weren't your imagination, was the gist of the Basque she retained.

She looked over the crew with gnawing discomfort. If one of the kids or officers was merely psychotically destructive, it would show up on his psyche index. There was among them, a consciously destructive one. It hurt, like an unlocatable splinter in the sole of her foot that jabbed occasionally with the pressure of walking. She remembered how she had searched them from the night. Pride. Warm pride in the way their functions meshed as they moved her ship through the stars. The warmth was the relieved anticipation for all that could go wrong with the machine-called-the-ship, if the machine-called-the-crew were not interlocked and precise. Cool pride in another part of her mind, at the ease with which they moved by one another: the kids, inexperienced both in living and working; the adults, so near pressure situations that might have scarred their polished efficiency and made psychic burrs to snag one another. But she had chosen them, and the ship, her world, was a beautiful place to walk, work, live,-for a journey's length.

But there was a traitor.

That shorted something. Somewhere in Eden, now . . . she recalled, again looking over the crew. Somewhere in Eden, now, a worm, a worm. Those cracked plates told her: the worm wanted to destroy not just her, but the ship, its crew and contents, slowly. No blades plunged in the night, no shots from around a comer, no cord looped on the throat as she entered a dark cabin. Babel-17, how good a language would it be to argue with for your life?

"Slug, the Baron wants me to come soon and see some of the latest methods of slaughter. Have the kids there decently early, will you? I'm leaving now. Eye and Ear, hop aboard."

"Righto, Captain," from Slug. The discorporate crew deperceptualized. She leaned her sled over the ramp again and slid away from the milling youngsters and officers, curious at the source of her apprehension.

"Gross, uncivilized weapons." The Baron gestured toward the row of plastic cylinders increasing in size along the rack. "It's a shame to waste time on such clumsy contraptions. The little one there can demolish an area of about fifty square miles. The big ones leave a crater twenty-seven miles deep and a hundred and fifty across. Barbaric. I frown on their use. That one on the left is more subtle: it explodes once with enough force 
to demolish a good size building, but the bomb casing itself is hidden and unhurt under the rubble. Six hours later it explodes again and does the damage of a fair-sized atomic bomb. This leaves the victims enough time to concentrate their reclamation forces, all sorts of reconstruction workers. Red Cross Nurses, or whatever the Invaders call them, lots of experts determining the size of the damage. Then poof. A delayed hydrogen explosion, and a good thirty or forty miles crater. It doesn't do as much physical damage as even the smallest of these others, but it gets rid of a lot of equipment and busybody do-gooders. Still, a school-boy's weapon. I keep them in my own personal collection just to show them we have standard fare."

She followed him through the archway into the next hall. There were filing cabinets along the wall and single display case in the center of the room.

"Now here is one I'm justly proud of." The Baron walked to the case and the transparent walls fell apart.

"What," Rydra asked, "exactly is it?"

"What does it look like?"

"A - . . . piece of rock."

"A chunk of metal," corrected the Baron.

"Is it explosive, or particularly hard?"

"It won't go bang," he assured her. "Its tensile strength is a bit over titanium steel, but we have much harder plastics."

Rydra started to extend her hand, then thought to ask, "May I pick it up and examine it?"

"I doubt it," the Baron said. "Try."

"What will happen?"

"See for yourself."

She reached out to take the dull chunk. Her hand closed on air two inches above the surface. She moved her fingers down to touch it, but they came together inches to the side- Rydra frowned,

She moved her hand to the left, but it was on the other side of the strange shard.

"Just a moment." The Baron smiled, picked up the fragment, "Now if you saw this just lying on the ground, you wouldn't look twice, would you?"

"Poisonous?" Rydra suggested. "Is it a component of something else?"

"No." The Baron turned the shape about thoughtfully. “Just highly selective. And obliging." He raised his hand. "Suppose you needed a gun"—in the Barons's hand now was a sleek vibra-gun of a model later than she had ever seen—'' or a crescent wrench.'' Now he held a foot long wrench. He adjusted the opening. "Or a machete." The blade glistened as he waved his arm back. "Or a small crossbow." It had a pistol grip and a bow length of not quite ten inches. The spring, however, was doubled back on itself and held with quarter inch bolts. The Baron pulled the trigger—there was no arrow—and the thump of the release, followed by the continuous pinnnnnng of the vibrating tensile bar, set her teeth against one another.

"It's some sort of illusion," Rydra said. "That's why I couldn't touch it."

"A metal punch," said the Baron. It appeared in his hand, a hammer with a particularly thick head. He swung it against the floor of the case that had held the 'weapon' with a strident clang. "There."

Rydra saw the circular indentation left by the hammerhead, Raised in the middle was the faint shape of the Ver Dorco shield. She moved the tips of her fingers over the bossed metal, still warm from impact.

"No illusion," said the Baron. "That crossbow will put a six inch shaft completely through three inches of oak at forty yards. And the vibra-gun—I'm sure you know what it can do."

He held the—it was a chunk of metal again—above its stand in the case. "Put it back for me."

She stretched her hand beneath his, and he dropped the chunk. Her fingers closed to grab it. But it was on the standard again.

"No hocus-pocus. Merely selective and . . . obliging."

He touched the edge of the case and the plastic sides closed over the display. "A clever plaything. Let's look at something else."

"But how does it work?"

Ver Dorco smiled. "We've managed to polarize alloys of the heavier elements so that they exist only on certain perceptual matrices. Otherwise, they deflect-That means that, besides visually—and we can blank that out as well—it's undetectable. No weight, no volume; all it has is inertia. Which means simply by carrying it aboard any hyperstasis craft, you'll put its drive controls out of commission. Two or three grams of this anywhere near the inertia-stasis system will create all sorts of unaccounted-for strain. That's its major function right there. Smuggle that on board the Invaders' ships and we can stop worrying about them. The rest—that's child's play. An unexpected property of polarized matter is tensile-memory." They moved toward an archway into the next room. "Annealed in any shape for a time, and codified, the structure of that shape is retained down to the molecules. At any angle to the direction that the matter has been polarized in, each molecule has completely free movement. Just jar it, and it falls into that structure like a rubber figure returning to shape." The Baron glanced back at the case. "Simple, really. There"—he motioned toward the filing cabinets along the wall—"is the real weapon:

Approximately three thousand individual plans incorporating that little polarized chunk. The 'weapon' is the knowledge of what to do with what you have. In hand-to-hand combat, a six-inch length of vanadium wire can be deadly. Inserted directly into the inner comer of the eye, piercing diagonally across the frontal lobes, then brought quickly down, it punctures the cerebellum, causing general paralysis; thrust completely in,' and it will mangle the joint of spinal cord and the medulla:

Death. You can use the same piece of wire to short out a Type 27-QX communications unit, which is the sort currently employed in the Invaders' stasis systems."

Rydra felt the muscles along her spine lighten -- The repulsion, which she had quelled till now, came flooding back.

"This next display is from the Borgia. The Borgia," he laughed, "my nickname for our toxicology department. Again, some terribly gross products." He picked a sealed glass phial from a wall rack. "Pure diphtheria toxin. Enough here to make the reservoir of a good-sized city fatal."

"But standard vaccination procedure—" Rydra began.

"Diphtheria toxin, my dear.Toxin! Back when contagious diseases were a problem, you know, they would examine the corpses of diphtheria victims and discover nothing but a few hundred thousand baccilli, all in the victim's throat. Nowhere else. With any other 
sort of bacillis, that's enough of an infection to cause a minor cough. It took years to discover what was going on. That tiny number of bacilli produced an even tinier bit of a substance that is still the most deadly natural organic compound we know of. The amount required to kill a man—oh, I'd even say thirty or forty men—is, for all practical purposes, undetectable. Up till now, even with all our advances, the only way you could obtain it was from an obliging diphtheria bacillus. The Borgia has-changed that." He pointed to another bottle. "Cyanide, the old war horse! But then, the telltale smell of almonds—are you hungry? We can go up for cocktails any time you wish."

She shook her head, quickly and firmly.

"Now these are delicious. Catalytics." He moved his hand from one phial to the next. "Color blindness, total blindness, tone deafness, complete deafness, ataxia, amnesia, and on and on." He dropped his hand and smiled like a hungry rodent. "And they're all controlled by this. You see, the problem with anything of such a specific effect is that you have to introduce comparatively huge amounts of it. All these require at least a tenth of a gram or more. So, catalytics. None of what I've shown you would have any effect at all even if you swallowed the whole phial." He lifted the last container he had pointed to and pressed a stud at the end and there was a faint hiss of escaping gas. "Until now. A perfectly harmless atomized steroid."

"Only it activates the poisons here to produce . . . those effects?"

"Exactly," smiled the Baron. "And the catalyst can be in doses nearly as microscopic as the diphtheria toxin. The contents of that blue jar will give you a mild stomachache and minor head pains for half an hour. Nothing more. The green one beside it: total cerebral atrophy over a period of a week. The victim becomes a living vegetable the rest of his life. The purple one: death." He raised his hands, palms up, and laughed. "I'm famished." The hands dropped, "Shall we go back to dinner?"

Ask him what's in that room over there, she said to herself, and would have dismissed the passing curiosity, but she was thinking in Basque: it was a message from her discorporate bodyguard, invisible beside her.

"When I was a child, Baron"—she moved toward the door—"soon after I came to Earth, I was taken to the circus. It was the first time I had ever seen so many things so close together that were so fascinating. I wouldn't go home till almost an hour after they had intended to leave. What do you have in this room?"

Surprise in the little movement in the muscles of his forehead.

She smiled. "Show me."

He bowed his head in mocking, semi-formal aquiescence. "Modem warfare can be fought on so many delightfully different levels," he continued, walking to her side as if no interruption of the tour had been suggested. "One wins a battle by making sure one's troops have enough blunderbusses and battle axes like the ones you saw in the first room; or by the well-placed six-inch length of vanadium wire in a Type 27-QX communications unit. With the proper orders delayed, the encounter never takes place. Hand-to-hand weapons, survival kit, plus training, room, and board: three thousand credits per unlisted stellarman over a period of two years active duty. For a garrison of fifteen hundred men that's an outlay of four million, five hundred credits. That same garrison will live in and fight from three hyperstasis battleships, which, fully-equipped, run about a million and a half credits apiece—a total outlay of nine million credits. We have spent, on occasion, perhaps as much as a million on the preparation of a single spy or saboteur. That is rather higher than usual. And I believe a six-inch length of vanadium wire costs a third of a cent. War is costly. And although it has taken some time, Administrative Alliance Headquarters is beginning to realize subtlety pays. This way. Miss—Captain Wong."

Again they were in a room with only a single display case, but it was seven feet high.

A statue, Rydra thought. No, real flesh, with detail of muscle and joint; no, it must be a statue because a human body, dead or in suspended animation, doesn't look that—alive. Only art could produce that vibrancy.

"So you see, the proper spy is important." Though the door had opened automatically, the Baron held it with his hand in vestigial politeness.' This is one of our more expensive models. Still well under a million credits, but one of my favorites, though in practice he has his faults. With a few minor alterations I would like to make him a permanent part of our arsenal."