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Talents, Incorporated

<h2>Chapter 6</h2> The Isis approached Tralee from the night side, and at a time when the planet's spaceport faced the sun. Tralee was not a base for Mekinese war-craft. To the contrary, it was strictly a conquered world. It was desirable for Mekinese ships to be able to appear as if magically and without warning in its skies. There would be no far-ranging radars on the planet except at its solitary spaceport. Mekinese ships could come out of overdrive, time a solar-system-drive approach to arrive at Tralee's atmosphere in darkness, and be hovering menacingly overhead when dawn broke. Such an appearance had strong psychological effects upon the population. Bors used the same device with modifications. His ship plunged out of the sunrise and across half a continent, descending as it flew. When it reached the planet's capital city, there had been less than a minute between the first notification by radar and its naked-eye visibility. When it came into sight at the spaceport it was less than four thousand feet high and it went sweeping for the landing-grid at something over mach one. Its emergency-rockets roared. It decelerated smoothly and crossed the upper rim of the great, lacy metal structure with less than a hundred feet to spare. In fractions of an additional minute it was precisely aground some fifty yards from the spaceport office. Steam and smoke rose furiously from where its rocket-flames had played. Lock-doors opened. Briskly moving landing-parties trotted across the ground toward the grid-control building. There were two ships already in the spaceport. One was a Mekinese guard-ship of approximately the armament of the Isis. Weapons trained swiftly upon it. Missiles roared across the half-mile of distance. They detonated, chemical explosives only. The Mekinese guard-ship flew apart. What remained was not truly identifiable as a former ship. It was fragments. Bors asked curtly, "Grid office?" The landing-party was inside. A small tumult came out of a speaker. A voice said: "All secure in the grid office, sir." "Hook in to planetary broadcast, declare a first-priority emergency, and run your tape," commanded Bors. He said over the ship's speakers, "Everything going well so far. Prize crew, take the cargo-ship. Keep the crew aboard. Then report." Ten men poured out of the grounded light cruiser's starboard port and trotted on the double toward the other ship aground. The weapons on Bors's ship did not bear upon it. The sun shone. Clouds drifted tranquilly across the sky. Masses of smoke from the demolition-missiles that had smashed the guard-ship rose, curled and very slowly dissipated. Ten men entered the bulbous cargo-ship. Up to now the entire affair had consumed not more than five minutes, from the appearance of a blip on a spaceport radar screen, to the beginning of a full-volume broadcast. Bors turned on the receiver and listened to the harsh voice—especially chosen from among the crew—which now came out of every operating broadcast receiver on the planet. "Notice to the people of Tralee! There is aground on Tralee a ship with no home planet nor any loyalty except to its hatred of Mekin. We were part of the fleet of Kandar until that fleet was destroyed. Now we fight Mekin alone! We are pirates. We are outcasts. But we still have arms to defend ourselves with! We demand...." A voice said curtly in Bors's ear, "Cargo-ship secured, sir." "Take off on rockets and maneuver as ordered," said Bors. "Then rendezvous as arranged." He returned his attention to the broadcast. It was a deliberately savage, painstakingly desperate, carefully terrifying message to the people of Tralee. It demanded supplies and arms on threat of destroying the city around it. A single one of its combat-missiles, as a matter of fact, could have done a good job of destruction on this metropolis. The broadcast would be a shattering experience to men who had reconciled themselves to subjugation by the rulers of Mekin. The planet Tralee was now governed for the benefit of Mekin by the kind of men who would do such work. They knew that they could stay in office only so long as Mekin upheld them. To hear their protectors denounced if only by a single voice.... There was a monstrous roaring outside. The cargo-ship took off for the skies. It was a thousand feet high before the weapons on the Isis stirred. It seemed to those below that the pirate crew was taken unawares by the cargo-ship's escape. That was part of Bors's plan. A weapon of the grounded Isis roared. A missile hurtled after the fugitive, and missed. It went on past its apparent target and did not even detonate at nearest proximity, as it should have done. It vanished, and the cargo-ship continued to rise in seemingly panicky fashion. It slanted from its headlong lift, and curved away and darted for emptiness at its maximum acceleration. A second missile from the fighting-ship missed. The cargo-ship dwindled, and dwindled, and now the Isis appeared to take deliberate measurements of the distance and acceleration of its target. It might be assumed that its radars needed to be readjusted from the long-range-finding required in space, to the shorter-range measurements called for now. Something plunged after the fleeing cargo-boat, by now merely a pin-point in the blue. The rising object moved so swiftly that it was invisible. Then it detonated, and the fumes of the explosion blotted out the fugitive. When they cleared, the sky was empty. There had now been a lapse of less than ten minutes from the first sighting of the Isis screaming toward the spaceport. The guard-ship had been destroyed and the cargo-ship which seemed to flee had apparently been destroyed. When someone had leisure to think, it would appear that the cargo-boat's crew had overcome the armed party which entered it and then taken the foolish course of flight. Bors waited, listening absently. A voice: "All clear on board the prize, sir. The cargo seems to be mostly foodstuffs, sir. Proceeding to rendezvous as ordered. Off." Bors nodded automatically and resumed listening to the broadcast. Matters were going well. Everything had gone through with the precision of clockwork, which meant simply that Bors had planned in detail something that had never been anticipated and so had not been counter-planned. Before anyone on Tralee realized that anything had happened, everything had happened—the Isis aground, the guard-ship demolished, the grid taken over, and a fleeing cargo-ship apparently destroyed in the upper atmosphere. And a harsh voice now rasped out of loudspeakers everywhere, uttering threats, cursing Mekin—few could believe their ears—and rousing hopes which Bors knew regretfully were bound to be disappointed. The rasping broadcast cut off in the middle of a syllable. Somebody had come to believe that he really heard what he thought he heard. Now there would be reaction. At the sunrise-line on Tralee only a handful of people were awake. They were dumbfounded. Where people breakfasted, the intentionally savage voice made food seem unimportant. Where it was midday, waves of violent emotion swept over the land. "Call the defense forces," Bors commanded the grid office, by transmitter. "They'll be Mekinese—Mekinese-officered, anyhow. We don't want them to get ideas of attacking us, so identify us as the pirate ship Isis and order all police and garrison troops to stay exactly where they are. Say we've got all our fusion-bombs armed to go off in case of an artillery-fire hit." This was the most valid of all possible threats against the most probable form of attack. Fusion-bombs could be used against enemies in space, or for the annihilation of a population, but they could not be used in police operations against a subject people. To coerce people one must avoid destroying them. So while a ship the size of the Isis could—and did—carry enough confined hellfire in its missile warheads to destroy an area hundreds of miles across, the occupation troops of Mekin could not use such weapons. They needed blast-rifles for minor threats and artillery for selective destruction. In any case no sane man would try to destroy the Isis aground after an announcement that its bombs were armed, and that they were fused to explode. "Now repeat the demand for stores," ordered Bors. "We might as well stock up. Speed is essential. We can't use stores they've time to booby-trap or poison. Give them twenty minutes to start the stuff arriving. Demand fuel, extra rocket-fuel especially. Remind them about our bombs." He waited. Speakers beside him could inform him of any action anywhere outside or inside the ship. The landing-party in the spaceport building reported as it went through the spaceport records, picking up such information concerning Mekinese commercial regulations, identification-calls and anticipated ship-movements as might prove useful elsewhere. The rasping voice began to broadcast again. It went on for fifteen seconds and cut off. "Tell the government broadcasting system that if they stop relaying our broadcast," said Bors, "we'll heave a bomb into the police barracks and the supply-depots." He heard the threat issued and very soon thereafter an agitated voice announced to the people of Tralee that a pirate ship was in possession of the planet's spaceport and that it insisted upon broadcasting to the planet's people. It was considered unwise to refuse. Therefore the broadcast would continue, but of course citizens could turn off their sets. There came a roar of anger and the harsh-voiced broadcaster returned to the air. His taped broadcast had run out. Now he bellowed such subversive profanity directed at the officials of Tralee-under-Mekin that Bors smiled sourly. It was not good for Mekinese prestige to have a subject people know that one ship could defy the empire, even for minutes. It was still less desirable to have the members of the puppet government described as dogs of particularly described breeds, of particularly described characteristics, and particular lack of legitimacy. Bors had chosen for his broadcast a man of vivid imagination and large vocabulary. He did not want the Isis to appear under discipline, lest it seem to act under orders. He wanted to create the impression of men turned pirates because everything they lived for had been destroyed, and who now were running amok among the planets Mekin had subjugated. The broadcast was not incitement to revolt, because Bors's ship was posing as the only survivor of a planet's fleet. But it conveyed such contempt and derision and hatred of all things Mekinese that for months to come men would whisper jokes based on what an Isis crewman had said on Tralee's air. The respect the planet's officials craved would drop below its former low level. Time passed. Bors, of course, could not send a landing-party anywhere, lest it be sniped. He had actually accomplished the purpose for which he'd landed, the getting of a shipload of food out to space, the announcement of the destruction of Kandar's fleet and the spreading of contempt and derision for Mekin in Tralee. Now he had to keep anyone from suspecting the importance of the cargo-ship. The demand for stores was a cover-up for things already done. But that cover-up had to be completed. Vehicles appeared at the edge of the landing-grid. Figures advanced individually, waving white flags. Bors sent men out with small arms to get their messages. These were the supplies he'd demanded. Food. Rocket-fuel. More food. The vehicles trundled into the open and stopped. Men from the Isis waved away the drivers and took over the trucks. They brought most of them to the ship's side. A petty-officer came into the control room and saluted. "Sir," he said briskly. "One of the drivers told me his load of grub had time-bombs in it. The secret police use time-bombs and booby-traps here, sir, to keep the people terrified. He says the bombs will go off after we're out in space, sir." "What did you do?" asked Bors. "I pretended the truck stalled and I couldn't start it. Two other drivers tipped off our men. We left those trucks and some others out on the field, so the drivers wouldn't be suspected of alerting us." "Good work," said Bors. "Better put detectors on all parcels from all trucks before bringing them aboard." "Booby-traps can be made very tricky indeed, but when they are used by secret police...." Bors allowed himself to rage for a moment only, at the idea of that kind of terrorism practiced by a government on its supposed citizens. It would be intended to enforce the totalitarian idea that what is not commanded for the ordinary citizen to do is forbidden to him. But secret-police booby-traps and time-bombs would be standardized. He hadn't allowed time for complex, detection-proof devices to be made. Detectors would pick out any ordinary trickery. The harsh-voiced broadcaster continued to harangue the population of Tralee, of which the least of his words was high treason. They enjoyed the broadcast very much. Presently Bors began to fidget. The Isis had been aground for thirty-five minutes. He had sat in the control room that whole time, supervising a smoothly-running operation. He had had to supervise it. Nobody else could have planned and carried it out. But it was not heroic. He had the line officer's inherent scorn for administrative officers, who are necessary but not glamorous or admired. He was stuck with just that kind of duty now. But he fretted. The local officials were given time to get over their panic. They ought to be planning some counter-measure by this time. He called the spaceport office. "There should be a map of the city somewhere about," he said crisply. "Send it along special. Bring a communicator call-book. If you find any news-reports, new or old, we want them." "Yes, sir," said a brisk voice. "The broadcast's right, sir?" "It is," said Bors. "You're mining the grid set-up. We'll blow it before we leave. There's no point in letting Mekin set down transports loaded with troops to punish innocent people because they heard the Mekinese accurately described. Make 'em land on rockets and there won't be so many landing." "Yes, sir. Will do, sir." A click. Bors heard heavy materials being loaded aboard. Each object was being examined by a detector. The loading process stopped. Bors pressed a button. "What happened?" he demanded. "Looks like a booby-trapped box, sir," said a voice. "Among the supplies, sir." "Take it off a hundred yards and riddle it," ordered Bors. "This may settle a problem for us." "Yes, sir." Bors fidgeted again. A messenger from the grid-control building arrived. He had a map of the capital city of Tralee. There was an explosion. A violent one. Bors looked out a port and saw where the suspected parcel had been set up as a target a hundred yards from the ship. It had been riddled with blast-rifle bolts, and had exploded. It might not have destroyed the Isis if it had exploded in space, but it would not have done it any good. Bors pushed the button for the loading-port compartment. "Throw out all the stuff loaded so far," he commanded. "Some of it may be booby-trapped like that last one. We won't take a chance. Heave it all out again." "Yes, sir." Bors gave other orders. The harsh-voiced broadcast stopped. Bors's own voice went out on the air, steely-hard. "Captain Bors, pirate ship Isis speaking," he said coldly. "We demanded supplies. They were sent us—government-supplied. We have found one booby-trap included. In retaliation for this attempted assassination, we are going to lob chemical-explosive missiles into the principal government buildings of this city. We give three minutes' leeway for clerks and other persons to get clear of those buildings. The three minutes start now!" The sun shone tranquilly on the planet Tralee. White clouds floated with infinite leisureliness across the blue sky. There was no motion of any sort within the wide, open area of the landing-grid. Over a large part of this world's surface all activity had stopped while men listened to a broadcast. "Fifteen seconds gone," said Bors icily. He wrote out an order and passed it for execution. "Thirty seconds gone." From twenty giant buildings in the city, a black tide of running figures began to pour. When they reached the street, they went on running. They wanted to get as far as possible from the buildings Bors had said would be destroyed. "Forty-five seconds gone," said Bors implacably. A voice spoke from the grid-control building, where men were now placing explosives with precisely calculated effects. The voice came on microwaves to the ship. "Sir," said the voice, "landing-grid reporting. Space-yacht Sylva reports breakout from overdrive and asks coordinates for landing. Purpose of visit, pleasure-travel." Bors swore, then smiled to himself. Gwenlyn had threatened to do something drastic! "Say landing's forbidden," he commanded an instant later. "Advise immediate departure." He pressed a button and said evenly: "One minute gone! In two minutes more we send our bombs and take off." Streets outside the government buildings were filled from building-wall to building-wall by clerks drafted to staff the incredible, arbitrary government set up on its tributary worlds by Mekin. Bors scribbled a list of buildings to be ranged on. The map from the spaceport office would help. He marked the Ministry of Police, which would contain the records essential to the operation of the planet-wide police system. Anything that happened to those records would be so much good fortune for Tralee, and so much bad for the master race and its quislings. He marked the Ministry of the Interior, which would house the machinery for requisitions of tribute to Mekin. The Ministry of Public Order would be the headquarters of the secret and the political police. It ran the forced-labor camps. It filed all anonymous accusations. It kept records on all persons suspected of the crime of patriotism. If anything happened to those records, it would be all to the good. "Two minutes gone," said Bors. The voice from the spaceport control building said briskly: "Demolition charges placed, sir. Ready to evacuate and fire. Sir, the space-yacht Sylva sends a message to the captain of the pirate ship. It says they'll wait." Bors said, "Damn! All right." Then into the broadcast-microphone, "Two-and-a-half minutes. There will be no further count-down. In thirty seconds we fire missiles into government buildings, in retaliation for an attempt to assassinate us with time-bombs. The next sound you hear will be our missiles arriving." He cut back to the grid-control building. "Fire all charges and report to the ship." Almost instantly curt, crisp reports sounded nearby. The landing-party came smartly back to the airlock, while explosions continued in the building they'd left. "Launcher-tubes train on targets," Bors commanded. He pressed another button. "Rocket-room, make ready for lift." Back to the launcher-tube communicator. "Fire missiles one, two, three, four, five, six." There were boomings, which rose to bellowings as devastation tore away from the Isis's launching-tubes. Bors said irritably to the rocket-room: "Take her up!" And then the ship lifted on her rockets—they were not solely for emergency use, as on cargo-ships—and rushed toward the sky. As the ship mounted on its column of writhing smoke, other smoky columns spouted up. Six of them. But they were limited. They went up two thousand feet and then tended to mushroom. Bits of debris went higher and spread more widely, and for a time there were fragments of buildings and their contents flying wildly about. But the ship went straight upward. The city and the open country beyond it shrank swiftly. The spouted smokes of explosions in the city were left behind. Mountains appeared at one horizon and a sea at another. Then the vast expanse of the planet suddenly acquired a curved edge, and the ship again went up and up—while the sky turned dark and some stars appeared in futile competition with the sun—and the surface of Tralee became visibly the near side of an enormous globe. Then the planet became plainly what it was, a great ball floating in space, one-half of it brilliant in the sunshine and one part of it bathed in night. Bors put on the solar-system drive and changed course. A voice came through: "Calling pirate ship ... calling pirate ship.... Space yacht Sylva calling pirate ship...." Bors growled into a microphone, "What the devil are you doing in this place. What's happened?" Gwenlyn's voice, bland and amused. "Nothing happened. But we've got some news for you. Make rendezvous at the fourth planet?" Bors swore again. That was where he was to meet the cargo-ship captured and sent aloft, supposedly destroyed on Tralee. But he drove on out, around and away from Tralee. He was reasonably satisfied with his landing on Tralee. With some luck, the news of the landing of a lone survivor of the Kandarian fleet might reach Mekin before it was aware of what had happened to its occupation force. With a little more luck, the attention of Mekin would be devoted more to a ship which dared to turn pirate than to Kandar itself. With unlimited favorable fortune, Mekin might actually send ships to hunt the Isis instead of asking questions on Kandar. But Bors made a mental note. The more time that passed before Mekin knew what had happened, the better. So a ship or two or three might be detached from the fleet and sent back to hang off Kandar. If a single ship came inquiringly, it might be sniped and the news of Kandar suppressed for a while longer. And it was conceivable that Mekin might come to worry more about other matters than the success or failure of a routine expansion of its empire. The fourth planet loomed up on schedule. Bors was irritated, as often before, by the relatively slow solar-system drive. Overdrive was sometimes not fast enough—but solar-system drive was infuriatingly slow. Yet one couldn't use overdrive in a solar system. Approaching a planet on overdrive would be like trying to garage a ground-car at sixty miles an hour. One couldn't stop where one wanted to. He wondered vaguely if Logan, the math Talent, could handle such a problem, and dismissed the idea. One could break a circuit with an accuracy of microseconds, but that wouldn't be close enough for overdrive. It wouldn't be practical. Then the ice-sheet of Tralee's nearest neighbor planet spread out in the vision-port's range of view. Bors called for the cargo-ship. It answered almost immediately. It was standard practice, of course, that the site of a meeting planned at a given planet would be wherever its poles pointed nearest to galactic north. The cargo-ship had just arrived. It barely responded before the Sylva began to call again. The three ships, then, joined their orbits and went swinging about the glacier-world beneath them while they conferred. The report from the cargo-ship was unexpectedly satisfactory. It had been almost completely loaded, and its cargo was largely foodstuffs intended for Mekin. Kandar's fleet-in-hiding was already subsisting on emergency rations. This cargo of assorted frozen foods would be welcome. Bors gave orders for it to head for Glamis immediately, in overdrive. Communication had been three-way, and Gwenlyn said quickly; "Just a moment! Did you pick up any news-reports on Tralee?" "Hm. Yes. I'd better send them—" "You'd better?" echoed Gwenlyn, scolding. "My father stayed with the fleet to try to explain what Talents, Incorporated can do! He kept most of the Talents with him, for demonstrations! The Department for Predicting Dirty Tricks is there! Don't you remember what that Department works on? Of course you've got to send those news-reports!" Bors ordered a space-boat to come from the cargo-ship for the reports. "Would you like to come to dinner on the yacht?" asked Gwenlyn. "You're all living on emergency rations. Nobody asked us to divide our supplies with the fleet. I can give you a nice meal." "Better not," said Bors curtly, and mumbled thanks. He ordered the cargo-ship to send as much of its stores as the space-boat could conveniently carry. "Then how about some cigars?" asked Gwenlyn. She seemed at once amused and approving, because Bors would not indulge himself in a really satisfying meal while his crew lived on far from appetizing emergency foodstuffs. "No," said Bors. "No cigars either. You said you had some news for me. What is it?" "I brought along our ship-arrival Talent," said Gwenlyn blandly. "He can only tell when a ship will arrive at the solar system where he is, so he had to come here to precognize." Bors felt again that stubborn incredulity which Talents, Incorporated would always rouse in a mind like his. "There'll be a ship arriving here in two days, four hours, sixteen minutes from now," said Gwenlyn matter-of-factly. "He thinks it's a fighting ship, though he can't be sure. It could be a cruiser or something like that doing mail duty, coming to deliver orders and receive reports. You can't run an empire without a regular news system, and Mekin wouldn't depend on commercial ships for government business." "Good!" said Bors. "Thanks!" There was a pause. "What will you do now?" "Try to raise the devil somewhere else," said Bors. "Try to pick up another food-ship, probably. Maybe I ought to let this ship alone, to carry news of the pirate ship Isis back to Mekin, but— No. They use booby-traps as police devices!" It was not reasonable, but Bors could not think of missing a Mekinese warship. The idea of a government using booby-traps to enforce its orders somehow put it beyond forgiveness, and with the government all those who served it willingly. "You'll go to Garen then?" asked Gwenlyn. Bors felt a sharp sting of annoyance. He had carefully kept secret the choice of Garen Three as the next planet to be invaded by the pseudo-pirate ship. It was upsetting to find that Gwenlyn knew about it. Blast Talents, Incorporated! "The dowsing Talent," said Gwenlyn, "says there's a battleship aground there. There've been some riots. The people of Garen don't like Mekin, either. Strange? The battleship is to overawe them." "How do you know that?" demanded Bors. "The Department for Predicting Dirty Tricks was reading old news-reports," she told him. "We're leaving now. 'Bye." "Goodbye," said Bors, and sighed, not knowing whether he felt regret or relief. The space-yacht Sylva flicked out of sight. It had gone into overdrive. Bors realized that he hadn't noticed which way it pointed. He should have taken note. But he shook his head. He gave the cargo-ship detailed orders, receiving its space-boat and what food it had been able to bring. He sent it off to meet his fleet at Glamis. He stayed in orbit around the fourth planet to wait for a Mekinese fighting-ship. He began, too, to make long-range plans. <hr /> Part Three <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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