Tomorrow's Crimes Page 24

  The Colonel said, “About your brother’s notebook. You brought it with you?”

  “Yes.”

  “And can you decipher the code?”

  “I don’t know; I never tried.”

  “But you will try, won’t you?”

  “No. You can copy that page out of the notebook if you want; maybe your crypto people can solve it. But all I want is to get off Anarchaos. I’m going back to Earth.”

  The Colonel leaned forward, the better to look at me. “Are you sure you haven’t decoded the message? You might think you have some personal right to your brother’s discovery, and of course you’d be worth a percentage, but you’d be hardly in the position—”

  “I don’t care about the discovery. It got Gar killed; I don’t want any part of it.”

  The Colonel studied me, frowning, firelight reflecting in his eyes. “You aren’t interested in money.” he said.

  I looked at him, and something about his expression, something about his eyes, put me in mind of Phail, when Phail was trying to judge me and couldn’t because our values were so different. I said, “I’m interested in going back to Earth. I’ve been changed by everything here; I want to see what kind of life I can make for myself on Earth.”

  “Of course,” said the Colonel softly. “We’ll talk about it in the morning.” He sat back again, and looked into the fire.

  We didn’t do any more talking.

  XXXVI

  Jenna came to the room half an hour after I’d gone to bed, as I had known she would, but she never mentioned the notebook until much later, after we had been together a couple of hours. I don’t know if that was the result of planning or impulse, though I would say her excitement was genuine. False excitement would have chosen objects other than my scars and left wrist.

  When at last she brought the talk around to the business of the night, she began obliquely, murmuring, “I wish you were rich. I wish you were the richest man I knew.”

  I moved my shoulder, beneath her head, to a more comfortable position, and said, “Why?”

  “Because I am a very expensive girl, and I wish you could afford me. I wish we could just pack up, you and I, and go off together, travel from world to world, see everything, do everything.”

  “You couldn’t be a poor man’s wife?”

  She laughed throatily. “Can you see me back on Earth, in one of those three room project apartments, riding down once a week to market floor for my shopping, setting my own hair, spending my evenings in front of the entertainment wall? Can you really visualize me there?”

  “No,” I said. “I can’t.”

  She raised up a little and looked at me, smiling. “Can’t you ever be rich?” she asked. “Don’t you suppose some day you might be beautifully wealthy?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “I don’t know any way to make a lot of money.”

  “What about Car’s notebook?”

  “You think I should make a deal with the corporation?”

  She smiled and shrugged, saying, “I’m not working for the corporation now, Rolf. For all I know someone else might offer you more than the Colonel. Haven’t you thought about it yourself?”

  “No.”

  “The Colonel thinks you have.”

  I said, “What did you do to Gar?”

  “What?” Surprise and confusion made her sit up and look around the room as though she’d lost something. “Do to Gar? I didn’t do anything. What kind of question is that?”

  “In his notebook—”

  In sudden agitation she leaped up from the bed. crying, “I don’t want to hear about it!”

  “You don’t want to hear what he said about you?”

  “You know I don’t!” She prowled about the room, nude and beautiful, like a caged animal. “Do you think I like myself?”

  “I hadn’t thought about it.”

  “Listen,” she said, her eyes blazing. “Listen to me, I don’t know if you’re a fool or what you are, but watch the Colonel. He’ll never let you get away with that notebook, he won’t let you go until you tell him what the code says.”

  “I don’t know what it says.”

  “You won’t get him to believe that. He’s convinced you’ve already decoded it.”

  “I haven’t.”

  She came back and sat on the edge of the bed again, saying urgently, “I never meant to hurt Gar. I wasn’t used to his kind of sincerity; I didn’t know when it stopped being a game.”

  “All right.” I said. “I can see how it would happen.”

  “I’ll tell you this because you’re his brother, to make up for it. The Colonel sent me here tonight.”

  “I know.”

  “You know?” She sat back, frowning at me. “Then why didn’t you kick me out?”

  “I wanted you. It’s been a long while for me. Besides, you wanted to be sent here. Does the Colonel think he can hold me prisoner?”

  “He won’t let you go until he knows where the strike location is.” She leaned forward, intent and sincere, saying, “Don’t you see? If he can find it, claim it for himself, he can make his own arrangements with the corporation, make up for what he did that sent him here.”

  I lay back on the pillow and closed my eyes. It wasn’t over yet. What was it I’d been told, long ago, before ever coming here? “It was the colony that killed your brother.” And in a way that was right. It was the colony that made these situations possible, that created the power vacuum into which these hungry and immoral Colonel Whistlers and General Ingors moved. The spreading responsibility washed back and back, endlessly. It was the colony that killed my brother.

  But even that wasn’t the end of it. This colony was an abortion, a monstrous growth; without outside assistance it couldn’t survive a year. So that if it was the colony that had made the murder of Gar possible, it was the Union Commission, in its rum, which made the colony possible. Without the UC there would be no imports or exports, no monetary exchange, nothing. The colony would die.

  I opened my eyes and looked at Jenna. I said, “I cannot kill them anymore one at a time.”

  “Kill? You mean the Colonel?”

  I saw that she hoped I meant to kill the Colonel, that her telling me the truth had been at least partly in the hope that my response would be the Colonel’s death. I said, “You know, of course, where he sleeps.”

  “Rolf—”

  “And in his absence,” I said, “you have his authority, have you not?”

  Doubtfully, she nodded.

  I said. “Gel dressed.”

  “Rolf? What are you going to do?”

  I got up from the bed and took from under the pile of my clothing on the chair the yellow notebook. I held it up and said, “You were right, I do know what the code means. It’s a code Gar and I made up together when we were children.”

  A sudden smile lit her face like sunlight. “Rolf!”

  “I was going to go on my own,” I said, “but I see that’s no good. I’ll give you a half share, if you’ll help me.”

  Already I could see the calculation behind her eyes, though she masked it very well. I knew she would stay with me until we were safely clear of Anarchaos. that she would make no attempt to double-cross me while we were still in this lawless hellhole. What she said was, “Of course I’ll help you. For the money, naturally for the money; I told you I’m a very expensive girl. But not for the money alone. For (Jar, too. And for you.”

  “All right. Do you have the authority to order a plane for us?”

  “If the Colonel isn’t around to countermand it.”

  “He won’t be. And there are some other things I want, too. Have them put on the plane.”

  “Of course.”

  She said of course, but then she questioned me, wanting to know why I needed such things. I told her I would explain later, and said, ‘The plane is for you and the Colonel. Everyone else is to continue to wait here for the Sledge ship.”

  “All right. Shall I carry the notebook?
”

  “I think not,” I said.

  We kissed in the corridor outside the room, with a great show of passion. Then she hurried away to make the arrangements, and I went off to strangle Colonel Whistler in his bed.

  XXXVII

  Everything went smoothly. Bundled up in heavy furs, I could have been Colonel Whistler or anyone. Jenna and I took a corporation auto out to the airfield, where at her orders the plane was already warming up. It was a small plane, with only ourselves and the pilot aboard. I dispatched the pilot after we took off, but kept Jenna for her usefulness. She knew how to fly the plane, and she could dear the w ay if any questions arose at any of our stops.

  The entire circuit took three standard days, and questions did arise. After the first day there was an increasing urgency in the requests for information about Colonel Whistler, who seemed to have disappeared. (I had buried him in the snow not far from the Ice building at Cannemuss.) Jenna had the authority of the Colonel in her own person when he was unavailable, and she did excellent work keeping the corporation employees from growing too suspicious too soon.

  We did the circuit almost entirely without rest, going first to Chax and then to Ulik, on to Prudence, to Moro-Geth, and at last to Ni. I told Jenna, when we arrived at Ni, to wait at the company airfield till I returned, as she had done at each of our other stops, and this time she said, “Shouldn’t t go on to the spaceport and start arranging for our tickets?”

  “You can call them from here, can’t you?”

  “Yes, there’s a ground line, but why not go straight there?”

  “Because it would be better to fly in. Phone and order two round-trip passages, for Colonel Whistler and his secretary of Ice, to be billed to the Wolmak Corporation.”

  She smiled. “That’s lovely, Rolf. We’ll let them pay our fare.”

  “We’ve got to, I don’t have any money. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

  We kissed, and I picked up the last of the five suitcases, and carried it into the city.

  When I arrived at Ni spaceport they told me there wouldn’t be another ship leaving for two standard days, but there were dormitory facilities if I cared to wait on UC territory. I said I did, and got out the rest of my luggage and money, which had been checked here ever since I’d first arrived. I then went to the UC commander and said to him:

  “I’m afraid I have a rather—delicate problem. While I was here, there was a woman. . .”

  He smiled, showing that he was a man of sophistication, and said, “It does happen.”

  “The only problem is, she might come out here looking for me, and to tell you the truth she frightens me.”

  “You want us to keep her out, is that it? Well, unauthorized local citizens are kept out anyway, so there’s really no problem.”

  “Well, but she isn’t exactly a local citizen. She’s an off-worlder, works for one of the syndicates.”

  “Ahh,” he said, nodding his head. “I see. So she could come in.”

  “If she could be told there was no one here by my name, no one”—I held up my left wrist—“suiting my description, I would be very grateful.”

  “I’m sure it can be arranged,” he said, and was very hearty and jolly and man to man with me.

  So I had no trouble from Jenna. I waited the two days, a ship arrived, and I boarded it, the only passenger leaving the planet. I’d been somewhat afraid Jenna would decide to book passage by herself after all, but she had chosen not to. What she was doing instead I couldn’t guess, except that she had surely given up waiting for me by now. If she hadn’t been found out by Wolmak employees already, she was more than likely busy trying to rearrange the facts of the last few days so as not to get in trouble with the corporation. I thought it likely she would succeed, she having the kind of drive necessary for success. As to the suitcases, I hardly thought it likely she would be mentioning them to anyone, since their effects might ultimately reflect back upon her. Besides, she didn’t know—and I doubted she could guess—what I had done with them.

  The suitcases were my answer to the problem of Gar’s death, my final answer. I had tried avoiding the problem, with death or antizone. I had tried giving it a limited response, avenging Gar upon the persons of Phail and the other involved panics from Sledge. But I now saw that it would end only when I had accepted my responsibility to the fullest and completed the vengeance I’d come out here to start.

  It was the colony that had killed my brother. That was true, finally. After the specifics of inter-corporation intrigue and lost strikes, there was still the fact that Anarchaos had produced the climate in which Gar’s life could end as it had done. Phail and Gar, working for the same corporations on other planets, would never have met one another across a loaded gun.

  If the colony was responsible for Gar’s death, it followed that I must somehow kill the colony. I had tried to believe for a while that it was best to leave the place to its own slow self-destruction, as in the empty shacks around the perimeters of the major cities, but the rough health of Cannemuss had proved it would be a long while before that slow suicide completed itself. I had tried to believe with Rohstock, who wrote in Voyages To Seven Planets that “All arc guilty on Anarchaos, and the guilty are invariably punished—by life on Anarchaos,” but it is true that man is infinitely adaptable, and if a man knows no life other than the life of Hell, eventually Hell becomes normality and ceases to be Hell. I had tried to evade the issue by telling myself the task was too big for one man, but even as I’d thought it I’d known that the magnitude of a duty is never an excuse for shirking the attempt to perform it.

  When I had seen in Colonel Whistler’s eyes the look I remembered from Phail, I had known at last there was no choice. Anarchaos was a cancer, and to merely snip off a few of the sick cells was to do nothing. The entire cancer had to be rooted out and destroyed.

  Thus the suitcases.

  It was my job to kill the colony, and what was it now that kept the colony alive? The Union Commission, bound this way and that by rules and regulations so that it could supply Anarchaos the necessities of its life without supplying the discipline and order it so urgently needed. Some underling members of the UC might be disgusted by the arrangement, might want to do something more forceful, but those at the top were too ensnarled in red tape and the balance of power, aided and abetted by those off-world corporations who were fattening themselves on this rich carrion world.

  Well, I had just seen to it that the red tape would disappear. Tourists might be slaughtered, missionaries and merchants might be obliterated, engineers and prospectors and all honest workmen might be slashed and hacked, and the UC, wrapped in its own regulations, would stand to one side and do nothing. But now something was going to happen, and the UC would have to move.

  According to the timers and my watch, it would happen in two standard days, eighteen hours and twenty-one minutes after my spacecraft lifted off Anarchaos. At that moment in time, the five suitcases would explode, each with enough force to demolish a city block, enough to topple one of those towers.

  Four of the suitcases were hidden in the four UC Embassies in Chax, Ulik, Prudence and Moro-Geth. The fifth was hidden in the spaceport at Ni.

  In less than three days, the entire personnel of the UC mission to Anarchaos would be wiped out. Records gone as well, and the heart of the monetary system. And all the equipment in the spaceport.

  I wasn’t sure in which direction the UC would cut the red tape, whether they would merely pull out entirely and leave Anarchaos to rot in its own juices, or rather move in emphatically, take over full-time governing of the planet, and replace its absurd anarchy with some protectorate government of its own. In either case, this colony at Anarchaos was dead. We were even.

  Alone in the blank passenger compartment of the spaceship, I sat a while in thought, and slowly boredom crept over me, the boredom of travel by shuttle, until at last I took Gar’s notebook from my pocket. Neither then nor later did I look at any of the sections in code.
Instead, I opened it to the remembered spot and began to read:

  ROLF

  I am going to have a second chance . . .

  THE END.