XIV.
Guy Maynard faced the President of the Court, who said to him: "Maynard, your story is absurd. That you spent a year on an unknown planet sounds impossible. But—there is one bit of evidence which, if you can explain, will be discarded. Early medical records claim that you have a MacMillan burn beneath your right arm. It is further stated that if this scar is not removed, it will turn into cancer. No record can be found of its removal—yet it is gone. To clear yourself, name the surgeon that removed the dangerous scar."
Maynard blinked. He'd forgotten the scar entirely. It had been a minute speck that had never given him a bit of trouble.
"The record states that you got that scar at age twenty-two. You were a junior aide at the time, and you received the burn in a fight with the Martians during the Martio-Terran Incident."
He'd gotten it before he went to Ertene!
"Can you recall the name of the doctor?"
Guy shook his head.
"I can not believe that you would visit a disreputable doctor for such treatment when the Base doctor is available—and the expense is no answer. Having received the wound in service, its treatment is a responsibility of the government. Yet we have searched the records of all reputable doctors and find no mention."
Guy shook his head again.
"Maynard, I am beginning to assume that there is truth in your drunken story. Your developments—your inventions—were so startling and so brilliant. Memorized details of a civilization's best efforts. The barrier-screen. Used, no doubt, to keep Ertene hidden as it passes from start to finish through the universe. A brilliant bit of adaptation, Maynard."
"That's a little harsh, Mantley," said Kane.
"Are you in this with him?" asked Mantley sharply. "If I were you, Kane, I'd look to my own past and see if there are any loose ends. We may decide that you know about this, too."
"You're being overharsh to a man that should have the entire world at his feet."
"Maynard, will you swear upon your honor that no such planet exists?" demanded Mantley.
Maynard remained silent, convicting himself.
"Ha! Then it was not drunkenness entirely. Look, Maynard. Your high position as sector marshal will not help you in the face of this. The entire situation will be overlooked if you do your duty and lead us to Ertene now."
Maynard made a soundless "No".
"You are a valuable man," insisted Mantley. "Copies though the originals may have been, your work at adaptation is nothing short of genius. To take an alien concept and reduce it to practice is no small feat, Guy. Do not fling your future into the drink. Lead us to Ertene, and we will consider your job well done."
"They saved my life," said Guy. "They gave me knowledge. I strived and worked enthusiastically in an effort to convince Ertene that Terra and Sol would ever be friendly, and offered her a place near Sol. I assured Ertene of our undying alliance and protection. They preferred eternal loneliness to joining a militant system such as ours. Since they felt that entering Sol's system would bring about the death of Ertinian integrity, they offered me life in exchange for silence."
"A fine bargain," sneered Mantley.
"I swore to keep their secret. I shall."
"Your honor is rooted in dishonor—"
"That I deny. I had no other alternative. I could bring their secrets to you only by swearing silence. If I had not sworn silence, I would have been executed. Alive, but silent, I brought to Terra the science by which she will gain mastery over the Solar System. Dead, I would have been able to do nothing, and Terra would not have the benefit of the things I brought. Give me that credit, at least!"
"You should have sworn silence," said Mantley coldly. "And then taken us to them."
"You would prefer an officer whose word means nothing?"
"False oaths. The only oath that is worth the breath of life is your oath to the Patrol."
"I see. Dishonesty extends in only one direction? Be rotten to the core—for the Terran Space Patrol! Even a Martian spy has more honor than that!"
"Enough. We find you guilty of treasonable acts, Maynard. You will be removed from command, relieved of any connection with the Terran Space Patrol, and your citizenship in the Terran and Colonial Alliance destroyed. We'll see how popular you are, Maynard. No matter how big a man may get, he still is less than the world itself. We'll find out whether you can find friends who trust you when you've been dishonorably discharged from the Patrol.
"There is this fact. To remove the Act of Treason from your record, you must remove the charge. By leading us to Ertene you will remove any cause for action, and by doing so you will regain your position. Understand?"
Maynard's lips curled in a sneer. He said nothing because there was nothing to say. The President of the Court approached him and harshly ripped the insignia from his uniform.
"Thus I remove the sacred shields of honor from a man of dishonor. He has defiled them."
The insignia were dropped into a small box, which was then burned so that no trace of the original shapes remained. During the firing of the insignia, Guy stood woodenly. His former friends looked past him, through him, ignoring him. They arose and filed out of the room, leaving Guy standing alone.
Completely alone.
He stood on the edge of the great spaceport and watched the activity. It was hard to realize that he was no longer a part of it; he knew that he could return as soon as he grew tired of going hungry, of finding no work, of being without a single friend. But before he did that—well, he was not reduced to starvation yet. Perhaps something would turn up.
He heard a footstep beside him, and found it was Kane.
"Sorry," he said to the publisher.
"So am I, Guy. But I believe with you. You should have been permitted your little secret. Would they have preferred another Mephisto? A planet such as you describe ruined and sterilized because of pride? No—and believing that I know the mettle of the people on that mysterious planet, I know that they'd die before they'd permit invasion. Right?"
"Absolutely. That's why I did nothing. They were human, Kane, as you and I are human. A dead specimen is no good in a zoo."
"I know. What are you going to do?"
"I don't know."
"Don't take it too hard. I'm still the big publisher. I'll see that your case reaches the public in the proper light. You'll be a victim of Patrol politics, thrown out because of personal pettiness over practical action."
"That may help."
"They'll never stand for it."
"You should know."
"I do. Now look, Guy. Will you take the Loki and head for Pluto? Get lost there on Pluto; hire out as a workman. When the time is ripe, you'll know and can come back. I'm not going to see my friend broken because of their high-handed methods."
"That's offering a lot."
"Not at all. I can pick the Loki up there. Right at the present time you'd get nowhere if you stay on Terra; your face is known to every man, woman, and child on the planet."
"But—"
"Go to Pluto, Guy. Out there they will not demand ten years of references before you apply for a job."
Guy faced Kane once more. "Was I right?" he asked.
"As far as I am concerned, you were. And as far as I have the ability to make people believe—and I've made quite a pile doing just that—they'll believe, too. We'll campaign you right back into the service. But meantime you must play this my way. Disappear, Guy, because when you return, we can claim another M-12 for you, and tell the world that your dismissal was all a part of a grand plot. Understand?"
Guy nodded. Kane's argument was very sound. Remaining in the light would destroy any chances of squashing the charge later.
"I'll do it!"
Kane handed Maynard the key to the Loki's shelter. "Keep an eye on the newsprint," he said. "You'll know when to return!"
High in the Solar System; up near the orbit of Jupiter, Guy became lonely. Killing time, he'd started at a 1-G drive, and in spite of the terrific velocities that can be achieved at a single G, it took a long time to make the run to Pluto at 1-G. He'd watched and listened daily to the Press Broadcasts and gratified to know that Kane's campaign was off to a successful start.
Other headline stories bothered him. The Patrol had started a search for the hidden planet. It worried Guy. Supposing that they did manage to find it? The recurring worry caused cold sweat and shakes, and it was only by main force that Guy willed himself into a semblance of nervous stability.
Again and again he analyzed his actions. He viewed them as Guy Maynard. He tried to see them from the standpoint of the Patrol. He tried to visualize the thoughts of the people, and knew that they were being swayed by both Kane's publicity and the Patrol's adverse reports. Would they ever know the real truth? How could they ever really realize the facts when the facts were cloaked in suave words and shaded tones?
The Mephistan was right. True democracy would occur only when the thought-beam instruments became universal and fancy words no longer prevailed. But all evidence of the mental instruments was destroyed on Mephisto; Guy had seen to that. He'd been afraid that their use would disclose his secret.
It would have uncovered his secret, without a doubt.
And yet he was responsible for destroying an instrument that would have been the salvation of mankind. Wars and strife and graft and lies were the rewards of power; and power went to the man who was wealthy and dishonest enough to buy it. An honest man did not have a real chance to gain power; others bought it easily, and by trying their tactics and buying their power, they themselves became dishonest.
He felt like cursing Ertene, and then remembered that without the nomad world, he would have been dead.
And yet, what had he gained from life?
It was a hard thing to balance and justify. He'd had his day of success and power. Regardless of what they said about him, he had made his good mark on history. He realized the life was a continuous succession of rises and falls, and by all the rules he had been heading for the fall. But to have fallen so far—was that really fair?
How should he have treated Laura Greggor? And what of Joan? Could he have changed that, really?
Mephisto? Well, he'd found the tenth planet for them because he wanted power himself. He'd fought the tenth planet, and had given Terra another planet to colonize, and in carrying on the long incident of the tenth planet, had succeeded in losing something that could not be calculated in the mean terms of money.
He wondered whether he was any better than the rest. Had he been satisfied to remain as he was, Mephisto would have been discovered by someone else, and that would have lessened his chances of getting involved in this present situation. But no. He had to strike high and hard, so that he could fling the insignia of the Patrol Marshal in Laura Greggor's face with an "I told you so!"
Laura Greggor didn't deserve it.
And then what had he done? He'd pinned them on himself.
Guy smiled glumly. "Superstition," he snorted. And yet it had happened. The first time he'd pinned his own lapel ornaments on, trouble had claimed him for its own. "Superstition!" he growled. Perhaps superstition was just the human-equation coming to the fore. Those unexplainable factors of human behavior. In walking under a ladder, one might get hit by falling tools; in breaking a mirror one might cut himself; one was fortunate to find a four-leaved clover because they were rare, one so fortunate might repeat. In having disaster fall upon an officer that had no friend to pin his insignia on—it meant that he had no true friends. At least, no friends among the opposite sex.
And Maynard knew that a man of that character, whose friends did not include one member of the opposite sex, was possessed of a warp in his get-together and quite capable of speeding blindly into some form of disaster. A man should be balanced in all things—even to the sex of his friends.
Guy felt a tiny pang of jealousy. Who, he wondered, had been the lucky man to pin the caduceus on Joan's uniform?
Guy turned to the news-recorder and read the pages with aloof interest. A great verbal fight was beginning between Kane's outfit and another. Guy shook his head. It was all wrong. Kane shouldn't be fighting the Patrol. They'd break him—and then what good could he do. For even a publication company such as Kane's to attempt to sway the people against the wishes of the Patrol was foolish. And Kane's interests covered everything possible in the realm of the Fourth Estate. Books, broadcast, newsprint, commercial advertising, everything.
A trace of humor passed through Guy. It was a trace of that same humor that had been essential in saving every human being since the beginning of time.
Guy listened to the glowing claims of an advertiser on the newscast and laughed to think what the thought-beam would do to his script—"—and these cigarettes, ladies and gentlemen, are made of no worse a grade of floor-sweepings than any other brand!"
He laughed, and it did him good.
But this rise in feeling was short-lived. The next newscast took him right down to the bottom again.
It was a long editorial, written by one of the High Command, denouncing Kane and his publications, and officially suspending all operations of the Kane Publishing Co. for publicly and aggressively resisting the Patrol's attempt to add still an eleventh planet to the Solar System.
It made no matter that Ertene was passing through. They did not know that Ertene was dirigible and could be swung into an orbit. In fact they thought not. But they were determined to visit Ertene. And Guy Maynard knew that their intent was to ravage the nomad of her treasures and every bit of her science.
So Kane was no longer a factor. He had fallen in the battle to save a friend—himself, Guy Maynard.
Guy felt that he was an unfortunate fellow. Everything that he loved and wanted to befriend was going to hell—or had gone there already. Even Ertene—
No! Perhaps he could still do something about that!
Not openly. But he could pass as Ertinian, he knew, provided that he shaved twice daily and managed to hide his razor well.
It would take years of careful planning and working to get himself to a dominant position on Ertene—one that would be without question. He'd done it on Terra—using Ertinian science, and no doubt he could do the same thing on Ertene using Terran science.
He had time. Ertene was still far, far out beyond the orbit of Mephisto and the speed gave him years to prepare, unless an unhappy accident cut his time. He made an oath, then. There were two things to take with him. The vortex projector and the thought-beam. One, Terra had. The other, neither knew existed. A threat on the part of Ertene to blast Sol itself with vortices might hold Terra away, and the thought-beam would solidify Ertene against invaders.
If his action in coming to Ertene to protect them were really known, he didn't think they'd act harshly in his direction. Ertene was one place where the thought-beam would save him at the proper time.
Maynard strode to the tiny pilot's chamber and charted the course of the Loki.
When he established the barrier, he did not know that a hundred beam-detectors throughout the system went wandering foolishly; their center-of-urge gone completely. But he suspected, and he searched the Loki with a sensitive detector rigged out of the communications set parts and located twelve separate spotter-generators.
If he were to land on Ertene safely, he'd want no detectors on him. And if the barrier failed for the barest instant on his course, Terra would be on the trail in minutes.
Once inside the great barrier that covered Ertene, he would be safe—except that he wanted no Ertinian to detect him either.
So he combed the Loki free of all emission and then continued to coast toward Pluto, concealed behind the barrier.
Ertene was on the far side of Sol.
Evasion of the Patrol was going to be a problem. Though he was not undetectable, they knew where he was and how fast he was going and in what direction. Their course-predictors could extrapolate very well indeed, and could predict the position of a barrier-hidden ship since no drive would work behind the barrier. It was a matter of straight-line projection unless the celestial masses caused some deflection, but this could also be calculated.
Since his creation of the barrier would be taken as an admission of flight, he was willing to wager his life that a Terran ship would soon take the pursuit. Armed with the course-prediction, the ship would match the Loki's velocity and position to a precision within a few days.
He could not hope to drive the Loki under the barrier. Yet he was beyond the negative-detector range that he had devised on the Orionad to predict the positions of sub-ships. His problem, then, was to stay outside of that range, and at the same time change his course.
Once the barrier was removed, he would be detected by his drive. He shook his head. Well, there were certain ideas he could give a try. And, luckily, there was no premium put on time.
He would make use of the minor errors in all detectors. He could make use of the "angles of confusion" which give areas instead of pinpricks at great distances for the position of a target. And he could hope to win through.
Kane's little ship was not a Patrol ship, unluckily, though the publisher had installed just about every attachment that he could get his hands on. Guy's assumption that he would find acceleration garb in the locker was correct, and he strapped the binding, holding suit on tightly and waited while the oxygen-content of the Loki increased.
Then Guy cut the barrier and pointed the top of the Loki north; at ninety degrees from his line of flight and drove it for thirty minutes at a bone-tingling 10-Gs. Then he set the barrier again and coasted.
He'd been loafing along the road to Pluto at 1-G. He was about halfway there, and it had taken him slightly less than ten days, twenty-four hours each, to achieve his present initial velocity, Plutowards, of just a trace over five thousand miles per second. His action at driving the ship northward had changed his course only slightly. It had given him one hundred and ten miles per second velocity northward. His course, then, differed from the original course by the angle whose tangent is equal to one hundred ten divided by five thousand, or roughly one over fifty.
In decimals, this becomes point zero two. It is one degree, eight minutes, and forty-four plus seconds.
Not much, but enough to throw Guy quite a bit out of place by the time he continued to coast toward Pluto. Minute angles add up when they are projected for half the distance from Sol to Pluto, a matter of one billion, eight hundred fifty million miles. That plus the fact that he should start decelerating at 1-G to make Pluto and his calculated course constants come out even.
Then there came a long period of nothing to do.
But Guy found things to do. He went to work on the detector. He increased its gain, and in doing so sacrificed much of its selectivity and directivity. Targets at one million miles, formerly at extreme range, would no longer be pinpoints in the celestial sphere, but shapeless masses but one third the distance out from the center of the detector sphere. The angles of confusion would be greater, too, and the noise level went up to almost prohibitive quantities. Flecks of noise-projected light filled the globe with a constantly swirling, continually changing pattern that reminded Guy of the Brownian Movement viewed in three dimensions.
Calibration of the souped-up detector range was based on estimation since no accurate measure of distances was available to him. Guy pessimistically estimated the range at three million miles and hoped it good enough.
At least, no ships were within that range.
And since the barrier, when first established, had broken the far-flung contact maintained by the driver-detectors on Terra, Guy was safe until they could send out ships to intercept him.
He cursed the cardex files in all Patrol ships, and wondered whether he could change the Loki sufficiently to make it appear different to the sorting machines and the characteristic detectors. The detector impulses were based on the size, the characteristic radiation of the drivers, the mass, and the metal of the hull. Those four characteristics were individual and while some duplications occurred, sufficient evidence remained to pin the cardex-information down to a particular ship. Especially when this particular ship was being sought and others of the same characteristic would be catalogued as to course, and position.
He had the barrier, but he could not drive through it. He could hide, but when hiding could not run. He could run, but when running could not hide.
But he was the equal of the Patrol's best watchdogs. A bit of hare and hounds might come out with the hare a winner. At worst, Guy had nothing to lose.