The Godmakers (4 page)

"But . . ." Orne fell silent as the hunter came up to them, passed their vehicle with only a casual side-glance.

"What's that leather case on his back?" Stetson asked.

"Spyglass."

"Lesson number two," Stetson said. "Telescopes originate as astronomical devices. Spyglasses are developed as an adjunct of a long-range weapon. I would guess those fowling pieces have an effective range of about one hundred meters. Ergo: you may take it as proved that they have artillery."

Orne nodded. He still felt dazed with the rapidity of developments, unable as yet to accept complete sensations of relief.

"Now, let's consider that village up ahead," Stetson said. "Notice the flag.

Almost inevitably flags originate as banners to follow into battle. Not always. However, you may take this as a good piece of circumstantial evidence in view of the other things."

"I see."

"There's the docility of the civilian populace," Stetson said. "It's axiomatic that this goes hand in glove with a powerful military and/or religious aristocracy which suppresses technological change. Hamal's Leader Council is nothing but an aristocracy, well versed in the use of religion as a tool of statecraft and in the use of spies, another inevitable development occurring with armies and warfare."

"They're aristocrats, all right," Orne agreed.

"Rule one in our book," Stetson said, "says that whenever you have a situation of haves and have-nots, then you have positions to be defended. That always means armies, whether you call them troops or police or guards. I'll bet my bottom credit those gaming fields of the green and yellow balls are disguised drill grounds."

Orne swallowed. "I should've thought of that."

"You did," Stetson said. "Unconsciously. You saw all of the wrongness here unconsciously. It bothered hell out of you. That's why you pushed the panic button."

"I guess you're right."

"Another lesson," Stetson said. "The most important point on the aggression index: peaceful people, really peaceful types, don't even discuss peace.

They have developed a dynamic of nonviolence in which the ordinary concept of peace doesn't even occur. They don't even think about it. The only way you develop more than a casual interest in peace as we conceive of it is through the recurrent and violent contrast of war."

"Of course." Orne took a deep breath, stared at the village on the high ground ahead of them. "But what about the lack of forts? I mean, no cavalry animals and . . ."

"We can take it for granted that they have artillery," Stetson said.

"Hmmmmm." He rubbed his chin. "Well, that's probably enough. Well undoubtedly discover a pattern here which rules mobile cavalry out of the equation prohibiting stone forts."

"I guess so."

"What happened here was something like this," Stetson said. "First-Contact, that schlammler, may he rot in a military prison, jumped to a wrong conclusion about Hamal. He tipped our hand. The Hamalites got together, declared a truce, hid or disguised every sign of warfare they knew anything about, put out the word to the citizenry, then concentrated on milking us for everything they could get. Have they sent a deputation to Marak, yet?"

"Yes."

"Well have to pick them up, too."

"It figures," Orne said. He began to feel the full emotional cleansing of relief, but with odd overtones of disquiet trailing along behind. His own career was out of the soup, but he thought of the consequences for Hamal in what was about to happen. A full O-force! Military occupation did nasty things to the occupiers and the occupied.

"I think you'll make a pretty good I-A operative," Stetson said.

Orne snapped out of his reverie. "I'll make a . . . Huh?"

"I'm drafting you," Stetson said.

Orne stared at him. "Can you do that?"

"There are still a few wise heads in our government," Stetson said. "You may take it for granted that we have this power in the I-A." He scowled. "And we find too damned many of our operatives this way -- one step short of disaster."

Orne swallowed. "This is . . ." He fell silent as the farmer pushed his creaking cart past the I-A vehicle.

The men in the go-buggy stared at the peculiar swaying motion of the farmer's back, the solid way his feet came down on the dusty roadbed, the smooth way the high-led vegetable cart rolled along.

"I'm a left-handed froolap!" Orne muttered. He pointed at the retreating back. "There's your cavalry animal. That damn wagon's nothing but a chariot!"

Stetson slapped his right fist into his open left palm. "Damn! Right in front of our eyes all the time!" He smiled grimly. "There are going to be some surprised and angry people hereabouts when our O-force arrives tomorrow."

Orne nodded silently, wishing there were some other way to prevent disastrous military excursions into space. And he thought: What Hamal needs is a new kind of religion, one that shows them how to balance their own lives happily on their world and to balance their world in the universe.

But with Amel controlling the course of every religion, that was out of the question. There was no such religious balancing system -- not on Chargon . .

. not even on Marak.

And certainly not on Hamal.

Every sapient creature needs a religion of some kind.

-- NOAH ARKWRIGHT the basic scriptures of Amel

Umbo Stetson paced the landing control bridge of his scout cruiser. His footsteps grated on a floor that was the rear wall of the bridge during flight. Now, the ship rested on it's tail fins -- all four hundred glistening red and black meters of it. The open ports of the bridge looked out on the jungle roof of the planet Gienah in some one hundred and fifty meters below.

A butter-yellow sun hung above the horizon perhaps an hour from setting.

Gienah was a nasty situation and he didn't like using an untested operative in such a place. It concerned him that this particular operative had been drafted into the I-A by a sector chief named Umbo Stetson.

I draft him and I send him out to get killed, Stetson thought. He glanced across the bridge at Lewis Orne, now a junior I-A field operative with a maiden diploma. Trained . . . and intelligent, but inexperienced.

"We ought to scrape this planet clean of every living thing on it," Stetson muttered. "Clean as an egg!" He paused in his round of the bridge, glared out the open starboard port into the fire-blackened circle the cruiser had burned from a jungle clearing.

The I-A sector chief pulled his head back in the port, stood in his customary slouch. It was a stance not improved by the sacklike patched blue fatigues he wore. Although on this operation he rated the flag of a division admiral, his fatigues carried no insignia. There was a generally unkempt, straggling look about him.

Orne stood at an opposite port, studying the jungle horizon. Something glittered out there too far away to identify; probably the city. Now and then he glanced at the bridge control console, at the chronometer above it, at the big translite map of their position which had been tilted from the upper bulkhead. He felt vaguely uneasy, intensely aware of his heavy-planet muscles overacting on Gienah with its gravity only seven-eighths Terran Standard. The surgical scars on his neck where the micro-communications equipment had been inserted into his flesh itched maddeningly. He scratched.

"Ha!" Stetson barked. "Politicians!" A thin black insect with shell-like wings flew in Orne's port, settled in his closely cropped red hair. Orne pulled the insect gently from his hair, released it. Again, it tried to land in his hair. He dodged. The insect flew across the bridge and out the port beside Stetson.

The starchy newness of Orne's blue I-A fatigues failed to conceal his no-fat appearance. It gave Orne a look of military spit and polish, but something about his blocky, off-center features suggested the clown.

"I'm getting tired of waiting," Orne said.

"You're tired! Ha!"

"You hear anything new from Hamal?" Orne asked.

"Forget Hamal! Concentrate on Gienah!"

"I was just curious, trying to pass the time." A breeze rippled the tops of the green ocean below them. Here and there, red and purple flowers jutted from the verdure, bending and nodding like an attentive audience. The rich odor of rotting and growing vegetation came in the open ports.

"Just look at that blasted jungle!" Stetson said. "Them and their stupid orders!"

Orne listened quietly to the sounds of anger from his chief. Gienah obviously was a very special, very dangerous problem. Orne's thoughts, though, kept going back to Hamal. The O-force had taken over on that planet and things were in their expected mess. No way had ever been found to keep occupying troops from betraying an overbearing attitude and engaging in certain oppressive activities -- such as picking off all the prettiest and most willing women. When the O-force finally lifted from Hamal, the people of that planet might be peaceful, but they'd bear scars which five hundred generations might not erase.

A call bell tinkled on the bridge console above Orne. The red light at the speaker grid began blinking. Stetson shot an angry glance at the offending equipment. "Yeah, Hal?"

"Okay, Stet. Orders just came through. We use Plan C. ComGo says you may now brief the fieldman on the classified information, then jet the aitch out of here."

"Did you ask them about using another fieldman?"

Orne looked up attentively. Secrecy piled upon secrecy and now this?

"Negative. It's crash priority. ComGo expects to blast the planet anyway."

Stetson glared at the speaker grid. "Those fat-headed, lard-bottomed, pig-brained, schlemmel-hearted POLITICIANS!" He took two deep breaths. "Okay.

Tell them we'll comply."

"Confirmation's on the way. You want me to come up and help in the briefing?"

"No. I . . . Dammit! Ask them again if I can take this one!"

"Stet, they said we have to use Orne because of the records on the Delphinus."

Stetson sighed, then: "Will they give us more time to brief him?"

"Crash priority, Stet. We're wasting time."

"If it isn't one . . ."

"Stet!"

"What now?"

"I just got a confirmed contact."

Stetson brought himself upright, poised on the balls of his feet. "Where?"

Orne glanced out the port, returned his attention to Stetson. The electric feeling of urgency and reluctance in the bridge made his stomach chum.

"Contact . . . about ten klicks out," the speaker rasped.

"How many?"

"A mob. You want I should count them?"

"No. What're they doing?"

"Making a beeline for us. You'd better move it."

"Right. Keep us posted.

"Wilco."

Stetson looked across at his untried junior fieldman. "Orne, if you decide you want out of this assignment, you just say the word. I'll back you to the limit"

"Why should I want out of my first assignment?"

"Listen, and find out." Stetson crossed to a tilt-locker beside the big translite map, hauled out a white coverall uniform with gold insignia, tossed it to Orne. "Get into these while I brief you."

"But this is an R&R uni --"

"Get that damn uniform on your ugly frame!"

"Yes, sir, Admiral Stetson, sir. Right away, sir. But I thought I was through with old Rediscovery & Reeducation when you drafted me into the I-A."

He began changing from the I-A blue into the R&R white. Almost as an afterthought, he said: ". . . sir."

A wolfish grin cracked Stetson's big features. "You know, Orne, one of the reasons I drafted you was your proper attitude of subservience toward authority."

Orne sealed the long seam of the coverall uniform. "Oh, yes, sir . . . sir."

"All right, knock it off and pay attention." Stetson gestured at the translite map with its green superimposed grid. "Here we are." He put a finger on the map. "Here's that city we flew over on our way down." The finger moved. "You'll head for the city as soon as we drop you. The city's big enough that if you hold a course roughly northeast you can't miss it.

We're . . ."

Again the call bell rang, the light flashed.

"What is it this time, Hal?" Stetson barked.

"They've changed to Plan H, Stet. New orders cut."

"Five days?"

"That's all they can give us."

"Holy . . ."

"ComGo says we can't keep the information out of High Commissioner Bullone's hands any longer than that."

"It's five days then," Stetson sighed. Orne moved closer to the map, asked:

"Is it the usual R&R foul-up?"

Stetson grimaced. "Worse, thanks to Bullone and company. We're just one jump ahead of another catastrophe, but they still pump the Rah & Rah into the boys back at dear old Uni-Galacta."

"It's either go out and rediscover the lost planets or let them rediscover us," Orne said. "I prefer the former."

"Yeah, and we're going to rediscover one too many someday, but this Gienah is a different breed of fish. It's not, repeat not, a rediscovery."

Orne felt his muscles stiffen. "Alien?"

"A-L-I-E-N," Stetson spelled it out. "A species and a culture we've never before contacted. That language you were force-fed on the way out here, that's an alien language. It's not complete, but all we have off the minis.

And we didn't give you the basic data, what little we have, on the natives, because we've been hoping to scrub this place and nobody the wiser."

"Holy mazoo! Why?"

"Twenty-six days ago an I-A sector searcher came on this planet, made a routine mini-sneaker survey. When he combed in his net of sneakers to check their data, lo and behold he had a little stranger."

"One of theirs?"

"No, one of ours. It was a mini off the Delphinus Rediscovery. The Delphinus has been unreported for eighteen standard months. Cause of disappearance unknown."

"You think it cracked up here."

"We don't know. If it did crash on Gienah, we haven't been able to spot it.

And we've looked, son. Believe me, we've looked. And now we've something else on our minds. It's the one little item that makes me want to blot Gienah and run home with my tail between my legs. We've a . . ."