John Brunner (12 page)

XIII

T
he
real irony
of
the whole thing,
Kynance
reflected as she tried to
stifle her boundless impatience, was the way the situation kept turning on
little pivots of time, a few days or even a few hours in size, separated by
enormous gulfs of months or years when they did nothing except sit around and
wish for the future to catch up with them, because they dared not do anything.

If,
for example, the four men had been a couple of days later in reaching the main
station aboard their clumsy raft, her inspired plan would have been impossible
to implement for at least another year, and
then
they would have had to wait the compulsory year following until the
harvesting ship made its regular trip.

So
now, too, they had to wait, hating every minute's limping progress, for an
arbitrary deadline—whereupon they would have to cram into a few narrow hours
the fruit of months upon months of scheming, plotting, thinking, arguing,
examining and re-examining.

And
it might all come to nothing in the end—some petty snare might still catch a
foot and bring the enterprise to
a
foolish halt.

They
were assembled in the observation dome, where she had rigged a remote for the
calendar clock in the supervisor's quarters. The hands were ticking now
towards the red line she had carefully inscribed across the face first thing today.
One by one they had fallen silent; the chattering that had signaled the release
of old tension, now that the day of their revenge was here, hadn't lasted, and
now they sat and sweated, or paced up and down, or went to the head from nervousness
rather than need.

"Can't
we?"
Dickery
suggested, and didn't have to specify what, but he closed his hand on the can
of paint beside him on his bench-seat.

"No!"
Horst rasped. "
Kynance
has explained over and
over —this has got to be done so watertight that nobody, not even
a
dozen
Zygra
Companies, could spring a leak in
it!"

"I
don't know how much longer I can bear to wait," Victor complained. But he
had been saying the same thing daily for half a year, and they ignored it as a
formality.

At
first,
Kynance
remembered, she had scarcely expected
to survive to this moment. The strain of knowing that yet one more year must
leak away had almost climaxed in murder—it had caused at least three fights
between Evan and
Coberley
, and one between Evan and
Horst. But that kind of thing had stopped; the pressure behind it had seeped
away as one by one they'd begun to accept the consequences of their joint
action.

She
had first begun to let herself believe in success the day she'd come upon
Coberley
—of all the men,
Coberley
!—standing
by himself at the edge of the huge steel deck of the station, staring at the
white sunlight on the pools of water pitting the nearest mudflats, at the
matted vegetation, at the drab olive-dun shapes of some unripe pelts drifting
ahead of
a
tireless monitor.

He'd
stood several moments longer without realizing he was being watched; then,
noticing her, he'd turned and given
a
scowl.
He'd said, "Damned bastards in the
Zygra
Company
—trying to pretend this isn't a fit world for human beings!"

After
that, it had become possible to regard her companions as colleagues, and the
tone of their discussions together had altered from desperate—a search for
escape—to proud. Even Victor, whose bitterness was too deeply ingrained in his
personality by years of privation ever to be eliminated completely had done
his best to spare the others the effects of it, and had taken to stealing away
on his own to sweat out his indefinable fear.

What a bunch of misfits!
Kynance
thought, and then added with a burst of
near-affection:
Yet
there's something special about anyone, neurotic or normal, who'll accept the
responsibility of looking after a whole damned planet!

And
the finest integrated automatic system in the galaxy made no difference one way
or the other to that basic truth.

"
Kynance
!"
Horst said harshly, and she started. While
she had been wrapped in thought, the clock had reached the red line.

She took a deep breath, and began to recite
the necessary legal formulas. They seemed to take half of eternity, but they
could not be skipped; "it is necessary not only that justice be done, but
that it be seen to be done."

Finally
she ran out of words and
breath
at the same time. She
could only give a nod to her companions, and they shot away like so many rising
starships to tackle the jobs she had assigned them.

With
paint, with circuit-tracers, with meters and gauges and sheets of paper on
which computer programs had been fair-copied after a dozen revisions, they set
out to conquer
Zygra
.

The boom of the starship at the edge of
atmosphere reached them just as the job was finished.
Dickery
,
paint on face and hands, was the last to join them in the observation dome,
and they grinned at him and slapped each other on the back before turning to
watch the ship make its landing.

The impact of
Dickery
's
work
was all that could have been hoped for. The moment the drive died, and the viewports
of the ship were opened to local air, a head appeared from what must have been
the bridge compartment. It turned to survey the station, and was confronted
with Dick-
ery's
handiwork: letters three feet high
running along the side of the observation dome.

They
said
zygra
main spaceport.

Another
head appeared. There was some shouting. A third head peered out—by the glitter
on the shoulders below, it belonged to the captain. And then Shuster appeared.

"All right then,"
Kynance
said with uncharacteristic grimness. "I think
it's time to go and welcome them, don't you?* She looked at Horst. He said
suddenly, "
Kynance
, have I ever told you I think
you're the most extraordinary person I've ever met?"

"Just
as well," Victor said. "The galaxy would fall apart if there were
many more like her."

Kynance
flushed, gathered up the folder of documents
she had prepared against this moment, and led the way onto the deck. In the
shadow of the newly arrived starship, they formed a semicircle and waved
cheerfully to the astonished crewmen peering out of the bridge.

Another couple of minutes, and the
nearst
passenger lock shot open to disgorge Shuster and
several others, including the second mate who had tried to remonstrate when
Kynance
had shown up to join the ship at Nefertiti. They
were armed with
laseguns
, and she had to force
herself not to step back in sheer panic.

But
she had rehearsed this moment mentally so many times that the necessary words
sprang to her lips without conscious decision. She found herself saying, "Which
of you is the senior representative of the company operating this vessel? You
have not signified acceptance of the scale of harbor dues in force at this
spaceport, and you are required to agree to the terms and furnish proof of
ability to meet them before discharging or loading cargo."

Shuster
had gone as white as a comet's tail. He had recognized all of them as
ex-supervisors of this private treasure-planet, and the shock of being
confronted by four men and a woman he'd given up for dead was too much for him.

He
pulled the rags of his self-possession together and started to bluster.

"What
is all this nonsense? Put these pirates under arrest!"

So
it had penetrated his thick skull already—the central fact that he couldn't
just order them burned down where they stood.
Kynance
acknowledged that that was a very fast deduction.

She said aloud, "Are you the senior
company official, then?"

"You
know damned well I am!" Shuster roared. "And I want to know the
meaning of this—this
slogan
you've scrawled on my
company's main station!" He shot out an arm at the huge white letters
across the observation dome.

"Not yours,"
Kynance
said delicately.

The
second mate lowered his gun and gestured for his companions to do the same.
With worried glances at Shuster they complied.

"What nonsense are you spouting?"
Shuster raged. "I—" "Is there somebody up there with a
recorder?"
Kynance
called to the men leaning out
of the bridge, ignoring Shuster's fury.

"Ah—"
A hasty whispered conference, and then a defiant cry to assure them there was,
and everything was being recorded in full, "So that you damned pirates
and claim-jumpers will get what's coming to you!"

Kynance
drew herself up to her full height, such as
it was, and heard behind her a mutter of encouragement: "Give it to '
em
, girl!" She thought it was
Coberley's
voice.

"If
there is any piracy going on around here, it looks as though it's on your side,
landing a party of"—she counted rapidly—"nine armed men at this
spaceport!"

"Spaceport!"
shouted Shuster. "This is the
Zygra
Company's
main station!"

"Correction,"
Kynance
informed him. "This is
Zygra
Main Spaceport, under the control and direction of
the
Zygra
Port Operations Company—keep that recorder
pointed at me!" she added in a sudden bellow the force of which amazed
her. "I want the whole story down for any legal investigation that may be
needed to substantiate what I'm about to tell you!"

The snout of the recorder
wavered, but remained trained.

"My
name is
Kynance
Foy. I was engaged to act as
supervisor of this planet on behalf of the
Zygra
Company, to conform
with
the legal requirement that a
celestial body to which a claim of absolute sovereignty is laid must be
occupied by at least one living person. My contract forbade me to signal or in
any way communicate with
a
person
not an employee of the company.

"Within two days of the commencement of
my tenure I was approached by four ex-incumbents of the post I now held, who
had been inveigled into infringing their contracts—"

"It's a slanderous lie!" screamed
Shuster.
Kynance
disregarded him.

"—and
who consequently were no longer employees of the company. By waving to them,
later by speaking to them, I invalidated my own contract and thereupon
automatically ceased to be an employee of the
Zygra
Company.

"Since
that moment, the planet
Zygra
has reverted to the
status of an
unclaimed
celestial body.
It
is well established that to maintain its claim of sovereignty
a
company must maintain representation on its behalf."

"Oh, God," said the second mate in
a barely audible voice.

"But
you can't claim
Zygra
—" Shuster began, and
stopped dead.

"I
can,"
Kynance
answered demurely, and wondered
when he would start to squirm.

"But—but
just a second!" Grasping at a straw, Shuster stumbled over his own tongue.
"That doesn't apply to property deposited upon a celestial body—"

"You
mean this thing here, the new
Zygra
Main Port?"
Kynance
permitted herself a faint smile. "Executive
Shuster, are you familiar with the law of salvage?"

"Salvage?"
Shuster echoed. "What does that have to do with—?" Suddenly
he stopped, seeming to choke as the relevance of it sank in.