The Imperial general’s eyes were dark. “Is that really so? You waste your lies, man. I’ve been on the planet, Terminus. I know your Foundation. I’ve looked it in the face.”
“And you ask me? Me, when I haven’t kept foot on it for two months at a piece in ten years. You are wasting your time. But go ahead with your war, if it’s fables you’re after.”
And Barr spoke for the first time, mildly, “You are so confident then that the Foundation will win?”
The trader turned. He flushed faintly and an old scar on one temple showed whitely, “Hm-m-m, the silent partner. How’d you squeeze that out of what I said, doc?”
Riose nodded very slightly at Barr, and the Siwennian continued in a low voice, “Because the notion would bother you if you thought your world might lose this war, and suffer the bitter reapings of defeat, I know. My world once did, and still does.”
Lathan Devers fumbled his beard, looked from one of his opponents to the other, then laughed shortly. “Does he always talk like that, boss? Listen,” he grew serious, “what’s defeat? I’ve seen wars and I’ve seen defeats. What if the winner does take over? Who’s bothered? Me? Guys like me?” He shook his head in derision.
“Get this,” the trader spoke forcefully and earnestly, “there are five or six fat slobs who usually run an average planet. They get the rabbit punch, but I’m not losing peace of mind over them. See. The people? The ordinary run of guys? Sure, some get killed, and the rest pay extra taxes for a while. But it settles itself out; it runs itself down. And then it’s the old situation again with a different five or six.”
Ducem Barr’s nostrils flared, and the tendons of his old right hand jerked; but he said nothing.
Lathan Devers’ eyes were on him. They missed nothing. He said, “Look. I spend my life in space for my five-and-dime gadgets and my beer-and-pretzel kickback from the Combines. There’s fat fellows back there,” his thumb jerked over his shoulder and back, “that sit home and collect my year’s income every minute – out of skimmings from me and more like me. Suppose you run the Foundation. You’ll still need us. You’ll need us more than ever the Combines do – because you’d not know your way around, and we could bring in the hard cash. We’d make a better deal with the Empire. Yes, we would; and I’m a man of business. If it adds up to a plus mark, I’m for it.”
And he stared at the two with sardonic belligerence.
The silence remained unbroken for minutes, and then a cylinder rattled into its slot. The general flipped it open, glanced at the neat printing and in-circuited the visuals with a sweep.
“Prepare plan indicating position of each ship in action. Await orders on full-armed defensive.”
He reached for his cape. As he fastened it about his shoulders, he whispered in a stiff-lipped monotone to Barr, “I’m leaving this man to you. I’ll expect results. This is war and I can be cruel to failures. Remember!” He left, with a salute to both.
Lathan Devers looked after him, “Well, something’s hit him where it hurts. What goes on?”
“A battle, obviously,” said Barr, gruffly. “The forces of the Foundation are coming out for their first battle. You’d better come along.”
There were armed soldiers in the room. Their bearing was respectful and their faces were hard. Devers followed the proud old Siwennian patriarch out of the room.
The room to which they were led was smaller, barer. It contained two beds, a visi-screen, and shower and sanitary facilities. The soldiers marched out, and the thick door boomed hollowly shut.
“Hmp?” Devers stared disapprovingly about. “This looks permanent.”
“It is,” said Barr, shortly. The old Siwennian turned his back.
The trader said irritably, “What’s your game, doc?”
“I have no game. You’re in my charge, that’s all.”
The trader rose and advanced. His bulk towered over the unmoving patrician. “Yes? But you’re in this cell with me and when you were marched here the guns were pointed just as hard at you as at me. Listen, you were all boiled up about my notions on the subject of war and peace.”
He waited fruitlessly, “All fight, let me ask you something. You said your country was licked once. By whom? Comet people from the outer nebulae?”
Barr looked up. “By the Empire.”
“That so? Then what are you doing here?”
Barr maintained an eloquent silence.
The trader thrust out a lower lip and nodded his head slowly. He slipped off the flat-linked bracelet that hugged his fight wrist and held it out. “What do you think of that?” He wore the mate to it on his left.
The Siwennian took the ornament. He responded slowly to the trader’s gesture and put it on. The odd tingling at the wrist passed away quickly.
Devers’ voice changed at once. “Right, doc, you’ve got the action now. Just speak casually. If this room is wired, they won’t get a thing. That’s a Field Distorter you’ve got there; genuine Mallow design. Sells for twenty-five credits on any world from here to the outer rim. You get it free. Hold your lips still when you talk and take it easy. You’ve got to get the trick of it.”
Ducem Barr was suddenly weary. The trader’s boring eyes were luminous and urging. He felt unequal to their demands.
Barr said, “What do you want?” The words slurred from between unmoving lips.
“I’ve told you. You make mouth noises like what we call a patriot. Yet your own world has been mashed up by the Empire, and here you are playing ball with the Empire’s fair-haired general. Doesn’t make sense, does it?”
Barr said, “I have done my part. A conquering Imperial viceroy is dead because of me.”
“That so? Recently?”
“Forty years ago.”
“Forty … years … ago!” The words seemed to have meaning to the trader. He frowned, “That’s a long time to live on memories. Does that young squirt in the general’s uniform know about it?”
Barr nodded.
Devers’ eyes were dark with thought. “You want the Empire to win?”
And the old Siwennian patrician broke out in sudden deep anger, “May the Empire and all its works perish in universal catastrophe. All Siwenna prays that daily. I had brothers once, a sister, a father. But I have children now, grandchildren. The general knows where to find them.”
Devers waited.
Barr continued in a whisper, “But that would not stop me if the results in view warranted the risk. They would know how to die.”
The trader said gently, “You killed a viceroy once, huh? You know, I recognize a few things. We once had a mayor, Hober Mallow his name was. He visited Siwenna; that’s your world, isn’t it? He met a man named Barr.”
Ducem Barr stared hard, suspiciously. “What do you know of this?”
“What every trader on the Foundation knows. You might be a smart old fellow put in here to get on my right side. Sure, they’d point guns at you, and you’d hate the Empire and be all-out for its smashing. Then I’d fall all over you and pour out my heart to you, and wouldn’t the general be pleased. There’s not much chance of that, doc.
“But just the same I’d like to have you prove that you’re the son of Onum Barr of Siwenna – the sixth and youngest who escaped the massacre.”
Ducem Barr’s hand shook as he opened the flat metal box in a wall recess. The metal object he withdrew clanked softly as he thrust it into the trader’s hands. “Look at that,” he said.
Devers stared. He held the swollen central link of the chain close to his eyes and swore softly. “That’s Mallow’s monogram, or I’m a space-struck rookie, and the design is fifty years old if it’s a day.”
He looked up and smiled.
“Shake, doc. A man-sized nuclear shield is all the proof I need,” and he held out his large hand.
The tiny ships had appeared out of the vacant depths and darted into the midst of the Armada. Without a shot or a burst of energy, they weaved through the ship-swollen area, then blasted on and out, while the Imperial wagons turned after them like lumbering beasts. There were two noiseless flares that pinpointed space as two of the tiny gnats shriveled in atomic disintegration, and the rest were gone.
The great ships searched, then returned to their original task, and world by world, the great web of the Enclosure continued.
Brodrig’s uniform was stately; carefully tailored and as carefully worn. His walk through the gardens of the obscure planet Wanda, now temporary Imperial headquarters, was leisurely; his expression was somber.
Bel Riose walked with him, his field uniform open at the collar, and doleful in its monotonous gray-black.
Riose indicated the smooth black bench under the fragrant tree-fern whose large spatulate leaves lifted flatly against the white sun. “See that, sir. It is a relic of the Imperium. The ornamented benches, built for lovers, linger on, fresh and useful, while the factories and the palaces collapse into unremembered ruin.”
He seated himself, while Cleon II’s Privy Secretary stood erect before him and clipped the leaves above neatly with precise swings of his ivory staff.
Riose crossed his legs and offered a cigarette to the other. He fingered one himself as he spoke, “It is what one would expect from the enlightened wisdom of His Imperial Majesty to send so competent an observer as yourself. It relieves any anxiety I might have felt that the press of more important and more immediate business might perhaps force into the shadows a small campaign on the Periphery.”
“The eyes of the Emperor are everywhere,” said Brodrig, mechanically. “We do not underestimate the importance of the campaign; yet still it would seem that too great an emphasis is being placed upon its difficulty. Surely their little ships are no such barrier that we must move through the intricate preliminary maneuver of an Enclosure.”
Riose flushed, but he maintained his equilibrium. “I can not risk the lives of my men, who are few enough, or the destruction of my ships which are irreplaceable, by a too-rash attack. The establishment of an Enclosure will quarter my casualties in the ultimate attack, howsoever difficult it be. The military reasons for that I took the liberty to explain yesterday.”
“Well, well, I am not a military man. In this case, you assure me that what seems patently and obviously right is, in reality, wrong. We will allow that. Yet your caution shoots far beyond that. In your second communication, you requested reinforcements. And these, against an enemy poor, small, and barbarous, with whom you have had not one’ skirmish at the time. To desire more forces under the circumstances would savor almost of incapacity or worse, had not your earlier career given sufficient proof of your boldness and imagination.”
“I thank you,” said the general, coldly, “but I would remind you that there is a difference between boldness and blindness. There is a place for a decisive gamble when you know your enemy and can calculate the risks at least roughly; but to move at all against an unknown enemy is boldness in itself. You might as well ask why the same man sprints safely across an obstacle course in the day, and falls over the furniture in his room at night.”
Brodrig swept away the other’s words with a neat flirt of the fingers. “Dramatic, but not satisfactory. You have been to this barbarian world yourself. You have in addition this enemy prisoner you coddle, this trader. Between yourself and the prisoner you are not in a night fog.”
“No? I pray you to remember that a world which has developed in isolation for two centuries can not be interpreted to the point of intelligent attack by a month’s visit. I am a soldier, not a cleft-chinned, barrel-chested hero of a subetheric trimensional thriller. Nor can a single prisoner, and one who is an obscure member of an economic group which has no close connection with the enemy world introduce me to all the inner secrets of enemy strategy.”
“You have questioned him?”
“I have.”
“Well?”
“It has been useful, but not vitally so. His ship is tiny, of no account. He sells little toys which are amusing if nothing else. I have a few of the cleverest which I intend sending to the Emperor as curiosities. Naturally, there is a good deal about the ship and its workings which I do not understand, but then I am not a tech-man.”
“But you have among you those who are,” pointed out Brodrig.
“I, too, am aware of that,” replied the general in faintly caustic tones. “But the fools have far to go before they could meet my needs. I have already sent for clever men who can understand the workings of the odd nuclear field-circuits the ship contains. I have received no answer.”
“Men of that type can not be spared, general. Surely, there must be one man of your vast province who understands nucleics.”
“Were there such a one, I would have him heal the limping, invalid motors that power two of my small fleet of ships. Two ships of my meager ten that can not fight a major battle for lack of sufficient power supply. One fifth of my force condemned to the carrion activity of consolidating positions behind the lines.”
The secretary’s fingers fluttered impatiently. “Your position is not unique in that respect, general. The Emperor has similar troubles.”
The general threw away his shredded, never-lit cigarette, lit another, and shrugged. “Well, it is beside the immediate point, this lack of first-class tech-men. Except that I might have made more progress with my prisoner were my Psychic Probe in proper order.”
The secretary’s eyebrows lifted. “You have a Probe?”
“An old one. A superannuated one which fails me the one time I needed it. I set it up during the prisoner’s sleep, and received nothing. So much for the Probe. I have tried it on my own men and the reaction is quite proper, but again there is not one among my staff of tech-men who can tell me why it fails upon the prisoner. Ducem Barr, who is a theoretician of parts, though no mechanic, says the psychic structure of the prisoner may be unaffected by the Probe since from childhood he has been subjected to alien environments and neural stimuli. I don’t know. But he may yet be useful. I save him in that hope.”
Brodrig leaned on his staff. A shall see if a specialist is available in the capital. In the meanwhile, what of this other man you just mentioned, this Siwennian? You keep too many enemies in your good graces.”
“He knows the enemy. He, too, I keep for future reference and the help he may afford me.”
“But he is a Siwennian and the son of a proscribed rebel.”
“He is old and powerless, and his family acts as hostage.”
“I see. Yet I think that I should speak to this trader, myself.”
“Certainly.”
“Alone,” the secretary added coldly, making his point.
“Certainly,” repeated Riose, blandly. “As a loyal subject of the Emperor, I accept his personal representative as my superior. However, since the trader is at the permanent base, you will have to leave the front areas at an interesting moment.”
“Yes? Interesting in what way?”
“Interesting in that the Enclosure is complete today. Interesting in that within the week, the Twentieth Fleet of the Border advances inward towards the core of resistance.” Riose smiled and turned away.
In a vague way, Brodrig felt punctured.