Sergeant Mori Luk made an ideal soldier of the ranks. He came from the huge agricultural planets of the Pleiades where only army life could break the bond to the soil and the unavailing life of drudgery; and he was typical of that background. Unimaginative enough to face danger without fear, he was strong and agile enough to face it successfully. He accepted orders instantly, drove the men under him unbendingly and adored his general unswervingly.
And yet with that, he was of a sunny nature. If he killed a man in the line of duty without a scrap of hesitation, it was also without a scrap of animosity.
That Sergeant Luk should signal at the door before entering was further a sign of tact, for he would have been perfectly within his rights to enter without signaling.
The two within looked up from their evening meal and one reached out with his foot to cut off the cracked voice which rattled out of the battered pocket-transmitter with bright liveliness.
“More books?” asked Lathan Devers.
The sergeant held out the tightly-wound cylinder of film and scratched his neck. “It belongs to Engineer Orre, but he’ll have to have it back. He’s going to send it to his kids, you know, like what you might call a souvenir, you know.”
Ducem Barr turned the cylinder in his hands with interest. “And where did the engineer get it? He hasn’t a transmitter also, has he?”
The sergeant shook his head emphatically. He pointed to the knocked-about remnant at the foot of the bed. “That’s the only one in the place. This fellow, Orre, now, he got that book from one of these pig-pen worlds out here we captured. They had it in a big building by itself and he had to kill a few of the natives that tried to stop him from taking it.”
He looked at it appraisingly. “It makes a good souvenir – for kids.”
He paused, then said stealthily, “There’s big news floating about, by the way. It’s only scuttlebutt, but even so, it’s too good to keep. The general did it again.” And he nodded slowly, gravely.
“That so?” said Devers. “And what did he do?”
“Finished the Enclosure, that’s all.” The sergeant chuckled with a fatherly pride. “Isn’t he the corker, though? Didn’t he work it fine? One of the fellows who’s strong on fancy talk, says it went as smooth and even as the music of the spheres, whatever they are.”
“The big offensive starts now?” asked Barr, mildly.
“Hope so,” was the boisterous response. “I want to get back on my ship now that my arm is in one piece again. I’m tired of sitting on my scupper out here.”
“So am I,” muttered Devers, suddenly and savagely. There was a bit of underlip caught in his teeth, and he worried it.
The sergeant looked at him doubtfully, and said, “I’d better go now. The captain’s round is due and I’d just as soon he didn’t catch me in here.”
He paused at the door. “By the way, sir,” he said with sudden, awkward shyness to the trader, “I heard from my wife. She says that little freezer you gave me to send her works fine. It doesn’t cost her anything, and she just about keeps a month’s supply of food froze up complete. I appreciate it.”
“It’s all right. Forget it.”
The great door moved noiselessly shut behind the grinning sergeant.
Ducem Barr got out of his chair. “Well, he gives us a fair return for the freezer. Let’s take a look at this new book. Ahh, the title is gone.”
He unrolled a yard or so of the film and looked through at the light. Then he murmured, “Well, skewer me through the scupper, as the sergeant says. This is ‘The Garden of Summa,’ Devers.”
“That so?” said the trader, without interest. He shoved aside what was left of his dinner. “Sit down, Barr. Listening to this old-time literature isn’t doing me any good. You heard what the sergeant said?”
“Yes, I did. What of it?”
“The offensive will start. And we sit here!”
“Where do you want to sit?”
“You know what I mean. There’s no use just waiting.”
“Isn’t there?” Barr was carefully removing the old film from the transmitter and installing the new. “You told me a good deal of Foundation history in the last month, and it seems that the great leaders of past crises did precious little more than sit – and wait.”
“Ah, Barr, but they knew where they were going.”
“Did they? I suppose they said they did when it was over, and for all I know maybe they did. But there’s no proof that things would not have worked out as well or better if they had not known where they were going. The deeper economic and sociological forces aren’t directed by individual men.”
Devers sneered. “No way of telling that things wouldn’t have worked out worse, either. You’re arguing tail-end backwards.” His eyes were brooding. “You know, suppose I blasted him?”
“Whom? Riose?”
“Yes.”
Barr sighed. His aging eyes were troubled with a reflection of the long past. “Assassination isn’t the way out, Devers. I once tried it, under provocation, when I was twenty – but it solved nothing. I removed a villain from Siwenna, but not the Imperial yoke; and it was the Imperial yoke and not the villain that mattered.”
“But Riose is not just a villain, doc. He’s the whole blamed army. It would fall apart without him. They hang on him like babies. The sergeant out there slobbers every time he mentions him.”
“Even so. There are other armies and other leaders. You must go deeper. There is this Brodrig, for instance – no one more than he has the ear of the Emperor. He could demand hundreds of ships where Riose must struggle with ten. I know him by reputation.”
“That so? What about him?” The trader’s eyes lost in frustration what they gained in sharp interest.
“You want a pocket outline? He’s a low-born rascal who has by unfailing flattery tickled the whims of the Emperor. He’s well-hated by the court aristocracy, vermin themselves, because he can lay claim to neither family nor humility. He is the Emperor’s adviser in all things, and the Emperor’s too in the worst things. He is faithless by choice but loyal by necessity. There is not a man in the Empire as subtle in villainy or as crude in his pleasures. And they say there is no way to the Emperor’s favor but through him; and no way to his, but through infamy.”
“Wow!” Devers pulled thoughtfully at his neatly trimmed beard. “And he’s the old boy the Emperor sent out here to keep an eye on Riose. Do you know I have an idea?”
“I do now.”
“Suppose this Brodrig takes a dislike to our young Army’s Delight?”
“He probably has already. He’s not noted for a capacity for liking.”
“Suppose it gets really bad. The Emperor might hear about it, and Riose might be in trouble.”
“Uh-huh. Quite likely. But how do you propose to get that to happen?”
“I don’t know. I suppose he could be bribed?”
The patrician laughed gently. “Yes, in a way, but not in the manner you bribed the sergeant – not with a pocket freezer. And even if you reach his scale, it wouldn’t be worth it. There’s probably no one so easily bribed, but he lacks even the fundamental honesty of honorable corruption. He doesn’t stay bribed; not for any sum. Think of something else.”
Devers swung a leg over his knee and his toe nodded quickly and restlessly. “It’s the first hint, though–“
He stopped; the door signal was flashing once again, and the sergeant was on the threshold once more. He was excited, and his broad face was red and unsmiling.
“Sir,” he began, in an agitated attempt at deference, “I am very thankful for the freezer, and you have always spoken to me very fine, although I am only the son of a farmer and you are great lords.”
His Pleiades accent had grown thick, almost too much so for easy comprehension; and with excitement, his lumpish peasant derivation wiped out completely the soldierly bearing so long and so painfully cultivated.
Barr said softly, “What is it, sergeant?”
“Lord Brodrig is coming to see you. Tomorrow! I know, because the captain told me to have my men ready for dress review tomorrow for … for him. I thought – I might warn you.”
Barr said, “Thank you, sergeant, we appreciate that. But it’s all right, man; no need for–“
But the look on Sergeant Luk’s face was now unmistakably one of fear. He spoke in a rough whisper, “You don’t hear the stories the men tell about him. He has sold himself to the space fiend. No, don’t laugh. There are most terrible tales told about him. They say he has men with blast-guns who follow him everywhere, and when he wants pleasure, he just tells them to blast down anyone they meet. And they do – and he laughs. They say even the Emperor is in terror of him, and that he forces the Emperor to raise taxes and won’t let him listen to the complaints of the people.
“And he hates the general, that’s what they say. They say he would like to kill the general, because the general is so great and wise. But he can’t because our general is a match for anyone and he knows Lord Brodrig is a bad ‘un.”
The sergeant blinked; smiled in a sudden incongruous shyness at his own outburst; and backed toward the door. He nodded his head, jerkily. “You mind my words. Watch him.”
He ducked out.
And Devers looked up, hard-eyed. “This breaks things our way, doesn’t it, doc?”
“It depends,” said Barr, dryly, “on Brodrig, doesn’t it?”
But Devers was thinking, not listening.
He was thinking hard.
Lord Brodrig ducked his head as he stepped into the cramped living quarters of the trading ship, and his two armed guards followed quickly, with bared guns and the professionally hard scowls of the hired bravos.
The Privy Secretary had little of the look of the lost soul about him just then. If the space fiend had bought him, he had left no visible mark of possession. Rather might Brodrig have been considered a breath of court-fashion come to enliven the hard, bare ugliness of an army base.
The stiff, tight lines of his sheened and immaculate costume gave him the illusion of height, from the very top of which his cold, emotionless eyes stared down the declivity of a long nose at the trader. The mother-of-pearl ruches at his wrists fluttered filmily as he brought his ivory stick to the ground before him and leaned upon it daintily.
“No,” he said, with a little gesture, “you remain here. Forget your toys; I am not interested in them.”
He drew forth a chair, dusted it carefully with the iridescent square of fabric attached to the top of his white stick, and seated himself. Devers glanced towards the mate to the chair, but Brodrig said lazily, “You will stand in the presence of a Peer of the Realm.”
He smiled.
Devers shrugged. “If you’re not interested in my stock in trade, what am I here for?”
The Privy Secretary waited coldly, and Devers added a slow, “Sir.”
“For privacy,” said the secretary. “Now is it likely that I would come two hundred parsecs through space to inspect trinkets? It’s you I want to see.” He extracted a small pink tablet from an engraved box and placed it delicately between his teeth. He sucked it slowly and appreciatively.
“For instance,” he said, “who are you? Are you really a citizen of this barbarian world that is creating all this fury of military frenzy?”
Devers nodded gravely.
“And you were really captured by him after the beginning of this squabble he calls a war. I am referring to our young general.”
Devers nodded again.
“So! Very well, my worthy Outlander. I see your fluency of speech is at a minimum. I shall smooth the way for you. It seems that our general here is fighting an apparently meaningless war with frightful transports of energy – and this over a forsaken fleabite of a world at the end of nowhere, which to a logical man would not seem worth a single blast of a single gun. Yet the general is not illogical. On the contrary, I would say he was extremely intelligent. Do you follow me?”
“Can’t say I do, sir.”
The secretary inspected his fingernails and said, “Listen further, then. The general would not waste his men and ships on a sterile feat of glory. I know he talks of glory and of Imperial honor, but it is quite obvious that the affectation of being one of the insufferable old demigods of the Heroic Age won’t wash. There is something more than glory hereand he does take queer, unnecessary care of you. Now if you were my prisoner and told me as little of use as you have our general, I would slit open your abdomen and strangle you with your own intestines.”
Devers remained wooden. His eyes moved slightly, first to one of the secretary’s bully-boys, and then to the other. They were ready; eagerly ready.
The secretary smiled. “Well, now, you’re a silent devil. According to the general, even a Psychic Probe made no impression, and that was a mistake on his part, by the way, for it convinced me that our young military whizz-bang was lying.” He seemed in high humor.
“My honest tradesman,” he said, “I have a Psychic Probe of my own, one that ought to suit you peculiarly well. You see this–“
And between thumb and forefinger, held negligently, were intricately designed, pink-and-yellow rectangles which were most definitely obvious in identity.
Devers said so. “It looks like cash,” he said.
“Cash it is – and the best cash of the Empire, for it is backed by my estates, which are more extensive than the Emperor’s own. A hundred thousand credits. All here! Between two fingers! Yours!”
“For what, sir? I am a good trader, but all trades go in both directions.”
“For what? For the truth! What is the general after? Why is he fighting this war?”
Lathan Devers sighed, and smoothed his beard thoughtfully.
“What he’s after?” His eyes were following the motions of the secretary’s hands as he counted the money slowly, bill by bill. “In a word, the Empire.”
“Hmp. How ordinary! It always comes to that in the end. But how? What is the road that leads from the Galaxy’s edge to the peak of Empire so broadly and invitingly?”
“The Foundation,” said Devers, bitterly, “has secrets. They have books, old books – so old that the language they are in is only known to a few of the top men. But the secrets are shrouded in ritual and religion, and none may use them. I tried and now I am here – and there is a death sentence waiting for me, there.”
“I see. And these old secrets? Come, for one hundred thousand I deserve the intimate details.”