Entities: The Selected Novels of Eric Frank Russell (40 page)

“The police will take you away and my responsibility will cease.”

The way in which it was voiced bore irresistible suggestion that there were special, unmentionable reasons why he should then feel free of responsibility. He had the air of one with an entire police force in his pocket.

His mere nod was enough to cause an arrest, his wink sufficient to guarantee that someone would be shot in the back while allegedly attempting to escape. Obviously Thorstern had power and plenty of it.

“You’re quite a character,” declared Raven, openly admiring him. “Too bad you insist on balling up the works.”

“You are impertinent,” pronounced Thorstern. “And it is intentional. You hope to disconcert my mind by creating irritation within it. But I am not so childish. Unreasoning emotion is a luxury only fools can afford.”

“But you do not deny the accusation.”

“I can neither confirm nor deny that which is completely meaningless.” Raven sighed and went on, “If that is your stance, it makes our task so much the harder but no less necessary.”

“What task?”

“To persuade you to call off the undeclared war you are waging against Terra.”

“Heavens above!” Thorstern widened his eyes in mock astonishment. “Do you really expect me to believe that Terra would send a petty criminal to interview a business man about a purely fanciful war?”

“There is a war and you’re running it with the aid of stooges here and on Mars.”

“What proof have you?”

“No proof is required,” said Raven, flatly.

“Why not?”

“Because you know it to be true even though you don’t choose to admit it. Proof would be needed only to convince a third party. There is no third party present. This is wholly between yourself and us two.”

“As one whose business and financial interests are large and widespread,” informed Thorstern, becoming ponderous, “inevitably I have been the target of all sorts of rumors and insults. I have become hardened to them. They split no atoms with me whatsoever. They represent the price a man must pay for his considerable measure of success. The jealous and the spiteful are always with us, always will be, and I regard them as beneath contempt. But I must admit that this bald and completely unsupported assertion of surreptitious warmongering is by far the most outrageous that has offended my ears to date.”

“It is neither fantastic nor unsupported,” Raven contradicted. “Unfortunately, it is a grim fact. It doesn’t offend you, either. In fact, you take secret pride in it. You are inwardly gratified that someone has proved shrewd enough to recognize you as the big boss. You are tickled to bits because for once your well-publicized dummy Wollencott has failed to grab the limelight.”

“Wollencott?” echoed Thorstern, quite unmoved. “I am now beginning to see things a little more clearly. I presume that Wollencott—a melodramatic rabble-rouser if ever there was one—has stamped on somebody’s corns. So you’ve stupidly followed a false trail he has laid and it brought you straight to me.”

Charles stirred in his seat and growled at the screen, “I am not in the habit of smelling along false trails.”

“No?” Thorstern studied him a second time, saw nothing but an obese individual with plump, amiable face and lackluster eyes. “So
you
claim the honor of identifying me as the prime motive force behind a non-existent war?”

“If it can be called an honor.”

“Then, sir, you are not only a crackpot but a dangerous one!” He made a disparaging gesture. “I have no time for crackpots. It would be best to get you off my hands and let the police deal with you.” His face was severe as he finished, coldly, “Like a good citizen, I have the utmost confidence in our police.”

Giving him a contemptuous sniff, Charles retorted, “You are referring, of course, to the large number who happen to be in your pay. I know of them. They are feared on this planet and with good reason.” His lazy face sharpened suddenly so that for the briefest moment he looked neither fat nor futile. “But we don’t fear them!”

“You may find cause to change that opinion.” Thorstern switched his attention back to Raven. “I deny all your nonsensical accusations and that is that! If Terra thinks there is need to reassert her authority over Venus let her do so in proper manner. Without a doubt Wollencott is the cause of Terra’s trouble. How she’s going to cope with him is her problem and not mine.”

“We aren’t fooled by false fronts or human-shaped red herrings, see? If we snatch Wollencott you will laugh most heartily, replace him with the next stooge on your private list and use the snatching for purposes of propaganda.”

“Will I?”

“You won’t lift a finger to save Wollencott. On the contrary, you’ll assign to him the useful role of Venusian nationalism’s first martyr. Terra has something better to do than provide a petty god with one or two saints.”

“The said deity being me?” inquired Thorstern, grinning.

“Of course.” Raven went on, “Our logical move is to get at the man who pulls the strings of the puppets. That is why we’ve come direct to you. Our only alternative is to accept that you are not amenable to reason and bring you to heel by more drastic methods.”

“That is a threat.” Thorstern revealed strong, white teeth. “It comes strangely from one so completely at my mercy. To your other delusions must now be added the weird notion that you are independent of your environment and impervious to circumstances. Stone walls do not a prison make. Hah!”

“Enjoy yourself,” Raven advised. “It’s later than you think.”

“I am now beginning to doubt your inherent criminality,” Thorstern continued, ignoring that remark. “I think you are a case for a psychiatrist. You are motivated by a powerful obsession that I, Emmanuel Thorstern, a prosperous Venusian trader, am a kind of Goliath to whom you must play the part of David.” He glanced down at a desk not visible in the screen, finished with much acidity, “Yes, I see that your name actually is David. Possibly you are conditioned by it.”

“No more so than you are by Thor or Emmanuel.”

It produced the first noteworthy reaction in the other’s features. Momentarily forsaking his determined composure, Thorstern scowled. Even then he managed to lend the grimace a majestic quality.

He chewed at his bottom up and rasped, “I have broken men for less than that! I have smashed them!” His clenched fist struck the desk. “I have made them as if they had never been!”

“Well! I see you
do
know the significance of your names.”

“I am not uneducated.” He lifted a bushy eyebrow. “But I am only a trader— not a fanatic. It is you who are obsessed, not me. I seek power, true, but only in material things. Your insults are dangerous—not to me, but to yourself.”

“Your threats are of no consequence. The point is that you may smash certain men but you will never smash Terra. Call off this war while yet there is time.” “Or—?”

“Or Terra will decide that she’s had more than enough and will strike in her own way. Like to know how?”

“I am listening.”

“She will remove the opposition’s key men one by one, starting with you!” Thorstern wasn’t fazed. Neither was he annoyed. Sweeping back his thick mop of white hair, he consulted papers below the level of the screen, spoke judicially.

“My conscience being clear, I have no reason to apprehend summary removal. Furthermore, we are all Terrans in law, subject to the Terran system of jurisdiction which lays down that a citizen is deemed innocent until conclusive evidence of guilt is forthcoming. Such evidence will be impossible to produce, especially in the absence of certain witnesses, including yourselves.”

“A counter-threat,” Raven commented.

“Construe it as you please. You do not seem to appreciate your own position.”

“We know it. We are trapped—you hope!”

“You are in a room with solid walls and devoid of windows. The only door is multiple-locked by remote control and cannot be unlocked except from here. It is an anteroom reserved for interviews with paranormals of unknown power and unknown purposes. We get them here from time to time.”

So it seems.

“I am not so foolish as to rely exclusively on one iron gate which could be passed as somehow you passed it. You can learn a belated lesson from this: whoever fights me does so in time and place of my own choosing.”

“Rather elaborate precautions for the home of an honest trader, aren’t they?” Raven asked, pointedly.

“I have elaborate interests to protect. The means I have detailed are not all, by a long shot. You have reached only the second line of defense. ” He bent nearer the screen, added with triumphant emphasis, “Even in this room from which I am speaking you would find me invulnerable!”

Smiling to himself, Raven said, “It would be nice to put that to the test.”

“You will not be given the chance. Get it into your slow thinking minds that ordinary men are not without ability, Some of us—myself especially—know how best to deal with mutants. We think two jumps ahead of them every time.”

“You’re two behind but you don’t know it.”

Disregarding that, Thorstern continued, “If you are proud of your teleportatory powers I suggest you try them on the door bolts. Or if you happen to be hypnos, see whether you can fascinate me through a scanner. Or if you are telepaths, try to detect my thoughts. You cannot read my mind, can you? You don’t know where I am, in which direction or how far away. I may be within ten yards of you, my thought-stream grounded by a silver-mesh screen. Or I may be speaking to you from the other side of the planet.”

“Sounds as if you’re scared of someone.”

“I fear nobody,” said Thorstern, and was speaking truth. He was Thorstern’s body without Thorstern’s conscience. “But I do recognize the existence of supernormal powers denied to me. Hence I use prudence. On Venus and Mars one can do little else. Our number of mutants is high. It is a factor Terra should take into account before starting something she might not be able to stop.”

“Terra has mutants of her own,” Raven told him. “More than you suppose. You folk tend to overlook that item, being so bemused by what you’ve got yourselves. Who lugged the lot of you to new planets in the first place? The Terran space fleet which was and still is manned by Terrans who’ve spent fifteen to twenty years zooming through the dark and absorbing hard radiations. There has been the same natural results. Many children of space-dogs aren’t quite like other people’s children.”

“I’ll take you up on that.” Thorstern showed the gratification of one about to make an unanswerable point. “If, as you pretend, there is a war being waged, why doesn’t Terra use her own mutants to retaliate in kind?”

“Who said Venus was using mutants for her attacks?” asked Raven.

Thorstern spent one-tenth of a second chiding himself for the obvious blunder, covered up by asking in mock surprise, “Isn’t that what is happening?”

“No.”

“What then?”

“Something infinitely worse. They’re using a new kind of ray to sterilize our womenfolk.”

“That’s a blatant lie!” Thorstern’s voice was loud and ireful, his face flushed.

“Of course it is.” Raven displayed no shame. “And you
know
it. You’ve just said so.
How
do you know it?”

“Nobody would play so lousy a trick.” Secretly irked by this second mistake, Thorstern decided that he would make no more. “I have grown tired of this conversation. It is neither entertaining nor informative. I am going to deal with you as I would with any other menacing crazies who break into my home.”

“If you can.”

“It will be easy. Every skewboy has the same kind of lungs as everyone else. He falls asleep as swiftly and as deeply even though he may be a nocturnal. Despite his powers he is as helpless in his slumbers as any newborn babe. He is no longer what he fancies himself to be, that is, the biological superior of ordinary, talentless people. Asleep, he is no better than a lump of meat. Any village idiot can handle him.”

“Meaning you intend to gas us into insensibility?”

“Precisely,” agreed Thorstern, pleased with his powers over the powerful. “There are vapor-conduits running into your room for that very purpose. It is part of the defense system. We use our imagination and think ahead of you, see?” Plucking pensively at a bottom lip, he added byway of afterthought, “I like to do things in the simplest way, smoothly, with minimum of trouble.”

“But you refuse to do anything about stopping this war?”

“Don’t be silly. I really cannot admit that there is a war, much less that I have any part of it. Your mythical conflict fails to interest me. I am treating you as a pair of unsavory characters who have broken into my home. I am going to ensure that the police take you away peacefully, like removing unwanted luggage.”

He leaned forward, reaching for something near the edge of the screen.

Already slumped low in his chair, Charles suddenly slid down farther, quietly, undramatically. His plump face was pale, his eyes closing as though for the last time. His legs sprawled at awkward angles.

Raven stood up, removing his attention from the onlooker in the screen. Bending over Charles, he heaved him into sitting position, slid a hand under his vest, gently rubbed him over the heart.

“Quite a diverting little by-play,” remarked Thorstern. his lips pursed in sarcasm. He was still reaching toward the screen but with his hand momentarily arrested. “The fat boy plays sick. You massage his chest, looking serious. In a moment or two you will tell me he’s having an attack of coronary thrombosis or something like that. He will die unless something is done quickly. I am then supposed to go into a sympathetic panic, withhold the gas, withdraw the bolts and send somebody running to you with a
tambar
bottle.”

His back still turned to the other, Raven said nothing. He remained over Charles, holding him in the chair, rubbing near to the heart.

“Well, it won’t work!” Thorstern practically spat out the words. “It is too infantile a trick to deceive a half-wit. In fact, I consider it an insult to my intelligence. Moreover, if that fat boy’s stroke did happen to be genuine I would be quite content to sit here and watch him die. Who am I to try to thwart the workings of destiny?”