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Conquest Over Time

"You see," Horton said as they drove into the town, "not a soul on the streets. This is not only a bad day, this is one for the books. To-morrow, you see, there is an eclipse. And to these people there is nothing more frightening than an eclipse. During the entire week preceding one they won't do a darn thing. No business, no weddings, no anything. The height of it will be reached about tomorrow noon. Their moon—which is a tiny little thing not much bigger than our first space station—is called Felda. It is very important in their astrology. And for all practical purposes the eclipse is already in force. I knew you were riding in down the base so I checked it out. It not only applies to you, other things cinch it." He pulled a coarse sheet of paper from his pocket and read from it in a wishful voice: "With Huck, planet of necessity, transiting the 12th house of endings and things hidden, squaring Bonken, planet of gain, in the ninth house of travellers and distant places, it is unquestionable that the visit of these—uh—persons bodes ill for Mert. If further proof is needed, one need only examine the position of Diomed, which is conjunct Huck, and closely square to Lyndal, in the third house of commerce, etc, etc. You see what I mean? On top of this yet an eclipse. Trav, you haven't got a prayer. If only you hadn't been so close. Two days from now would have been great. Once the eclipse ends—" "Well, listen," Travis said desperately, "couldn't we just see the guy?" "Take my advice. Don't. He has expressed alarm at the thought that you might come near him. Also his guards are armed with blunderbusses. They may be a riot to look at, but those boys can shoot, believe me. Give you a contract? Trav, he wouldn't give you a broom to sweep out his cellar." At that moment they drew up before an enormous marble building vaguely reminiscent of a Theban palace. It turned out to be the local hotel. Horton stopped on the threshold and handed them two of the tiny Langkits, the little black memory banks in which the language of Mert had been transcribed for their use by the Mapping Command. Travis slipped his automatically into position behind his ear, but he felt no need to know the language. This one was going to be tough. He glanced at Dahlinger. The kid was wearing a stunned expression, too dulled even to notice the pantalooned customer—first Merts they'd seen—eyeing them fearfully from behind pillars as they passed. Smell that gold, Travis remembered wistfully. Then, smell those generators. Oh, he thought sinkingly, smell those generators. They went silently on up to the room. Travis stopped at the door as a thought struck him. "Listen," he said cautiously, taking Horton by the arm, "haven't you thought of this? Why don't we just take off and start all over, orbit around for a couple of days, pick a good hour, and then come back down. That way we'll be starting all—" But Horton was gazing at him reproachfully. "They have a word for that, Trav," he said ominously, "they call it vetching. Worst crime a man can commit. Attempt to evade his stars. Equivalent almost to falsifying a horoscope. No siree, boy, for that they burn you very slowly. The first horoscope stands. All your subsequent actions, according to them, date from the original. You'll just be bearing out the first diagnosis. You'll be a vetcher." "Um," Travis said. "If they feel that way, why the heck do they even let us stay?" "Shows you the way the system works. This is a bad day for everything. Coming as well as going. They'd never think of asking you to start a trip on a day like this. No matter who you are." Travis collapsed into an old, vaguely Chippendale chair. His position was not that of a man sitting, it was that of a man dropped from a great height. "Well," Horton said. "So it goes. And listen, Trav, there was nothing I could do." "Sure, Hort." "I just want you to know I'm sorry. I know they've been kickin' you around lately, and don't think I don't feel I owe you something. After all, if you hadn't—" "Easy," Travis said, glancing at Dahlinger. But the kid's ears perked. "Well," Horton murmured, "just so's you know. Anyways I still got faith in you. And Unico will be in the same boat. If they get here tonight. So think about it. Let me see the old Pat Travis. Your luck has to change sometime." He clenched a fist, then left. Travis sat for a long while in the chair. Dahlinger muttered something very bitter about luck. Travis thought of telling him that it was not luck that had put them so close to Mert, but a very grim and expensive liaison with a ferociously ugly Mapping Command secretary at Aldebaran. She had told him that there was a ship in this area. But this news was not for Dahlinger's ears. And neither did he think it wise to explain to Dahlinger the thing he had done for Horton some years ago. Young Dolly was not yet ripe. Travis sighed and looked around for a bed. To his amusement he noted a four poster in the adjoining room. He went in and lay down. Gradually the dullness began to wear off. There was a resiliency in Travis unequalled, some said, by spring steel. He began to ponder ways and means. There was always a way. There had to be a way. Somewhere in the customs of this planet there was a key—but he did not have the time. Unico would be in tonight, others would be down before the week was out. And the one to land in two days, on the good day, would get the contract. He twisted on the bed. Luck, luck, the hell with luck. If you were born with sense you were lucky and if a meteor fell on you, you were unlucky, but most of the rest of it was even from there on out. So if the legend was to continue.... He became gradually aware of the clock in the ceiling. In the ceiling? He stared at it. The symbols and the time meant nothing, but the clock was embedded flat in the ceiling above the bed, facing directly down. He pondered that for a moment. Then he exploded with laughter. By jing, of course. They would have to know what time the baby was conceived. So all over Mert, in thousands of homes, there were clocks in the bedrooms, clocks in the ceilings, and wives peering anxiously upward murmured sweetly in their husbands' ears: 4:17, darling, 4:17 and a half.... The roar of his mirth brought Dolly floundering in from the other room. Travis sprang from the bed. "Listen, son," he bellowed, "luck be damned! You get back to the ship. Get Mapping Command to let you look at its files, find out everything you can about Mert. There's a key somewhere, boy, there's an out in there someplace, if we look hard enough. Luck! Hah! Work, boy, work, there's a key!" He shooed Dahlinger out of the room. The young man left dazedly, but he had caught some of Travis' enthusiasm. Travis turned back to the bed feeling unreasonably optimistic. No way out, eh? Well by jingo, old Pat Travis would ride again, he could feel it in his bones. A few moments later he had another feeling in his bones. This one was much less delightful. He was pacing past a heavy drapery when something very hard and moving very fast struck him on the head. <hr style="width: 45%;" /> The first thing Travis saw when he awoke was, unmistakably, the behind of a young woman. His head was lying flat on the floor and the girl was sitting next to him, her back toward him very close to his face. He stared at it for a long while without thinking. The pain in his head was enormous, and he was not used to pain, not any kind of pain. The whiskey men drank nowadays left no hangovers, and for a normal headache there were instantaneously acting pills, so Travis on the floor was unused to pain. And though he was by nature a courageous man it took him a while to be able to think at all, much less clearly. Eventually he realized that he was lying on a very hard floor. His arms and legs were tightly bound. He investigated the floor. It was brick. It was wet. The dark ceiling dripped water in the flickering light from some source beyond the girl. The brick, the dripping water, the girl, all combined to make it completely unbelievable. If it wasn't for the pain he would have rolled over and gone to sleep. But the pain. Yes the pain. He closed his eyes and lay still, hurting. When he opened his eyes again he was better. By jing, this was ridiculous. Not a full day yet on Mert and in addition to his other troubles, now this. He did not feel alarmed, only downright angry. This business of the flickering light and being tied hand and foot was too impossible to be dangerous. He grunted feebly at the back of the girl. "Ho," he said. "Now what in the sweet name of Billy H. Culpepper is this?" The girl turned and looked down at him. She swiveled around on her hips and a rag-bound foot kicked him unconcernedly in the side. For the first time he saw the other two men behind her. There were two of them. The look of them was ridiculous. The girl said something. It was a moment before he realized she was speaking in Mert, which he had to translate out of the Langkit behind his ear. "The scourge awakes," one of the men said. "A joy. It was my thought that in the conjunction was done perhaps murder." "Poot. One overworries. And if death comes to this one, observe, will the money be paid? Of a surety. But this is bizarre." "Truly bizarre," the girl nodded. Then to make her point, "also curious, unique, unusual. My thought: from what land he comes?" "The cloth is rare," one of the men said, "observe with tight eyes the object on his wrist. A many-symboled engine—" "My engine," the girl said positively. She reached down for his watch. Travis jerked back. "Lay off there," he bawled in English, "you hipless—" The girl recoiled. He could not see her face but her tone was puzzled. "What language is this? He speaks with liquid." The larger of the two men arose and came over to him. "Speak again scourge. But first empty the mouth." Travis glared at the man's feet, which were wrapped in dirty cloth and smelt like the breezes blowing softly over fresh manure. "Speak again? Speak again? Untie my hands, you maggoty slob, and I'll speak your bloody—" he went on at great length, but the man ignored him. "Truly, he speaks as with a full mouth. But this is not Bilken talk." "Nor is he, of clarity and also profundity, a hill man," the girl observed. "Poot. Pootpoot," the young man stuttered, "the light! He is of Them!" It took the other two a moment to understand what he meant, but Travis caught on immediately. May the Saints preserve us, he thought, they figured I was from Mert. He chuckled happily to himself. A natural mistake. Only one Earthman on this whole blinking planet, puts up at a good hotel, best in town, these boys put the snatch on me thinking I'm a visiting VIP, loaded, have no idea I'm just poor common trash like the rest of us Earthmen. Haw! His face split in a wide grin. He gathered his words from the Langkit and began to speak in Mert. "Exactly, friends. With clarity one sees that you have been misled. I am not of Mert. I am from a far world, come here to deal with your Senate in peace. Untie me, then, and let us erase this sad but eraseable mistake with a good handshake all around, and a speedy farewell." It did not have the effect he desired. The girl stepped back from him, a dark frown on her face, and the large man above him spoke mournfully. "Where now is the ransom?" "And the risk," the girl said. "Was not there great risk?" "Unhappily," the tall man observed. "One risks. One should be repaid. It is in the nature of things that one is repaid." "Well now, boys," Travis put in from the floor, "you see it yourselves. I'm flat as a—" he paused. Apparently the Merts had no word for pancake. "My pockets are—windy. No money is held therein." "Still," the tall man mused absently, "this must have friends. On the great ships lie things of value. Doubt?" "Not," the girl said firmly. "But I see over the hills coming a problem." "How does it appear?" "In the shape of disposal. See thee. Such as will come from the great ships, of value though it be, can it not be clarifiably identified by such pootian authorities as presently seek our intestines?" "Ha!" the tall man snorted in anger. "So. Truth shapes itself." "Will we not, then," continued the girl, "risk sunlight on our intestines in pursuing this affair?" "We will," the young man spoke up emphatically. "We will of inevitability. Navel. Our risk is unpaid. So passes the cloud." "But in freedom for this," the girl warily indicated Travis, "lies risk in great measure. Which way lie his ribs? Can we with profit slice his binds? He is of Them. What coils in his head? What strikes?" They were all silent. Travis, having caught but not deciphered most of the conversation, glanced quickly from face to face. The girl had backed out into the light and he could see her now clearly, and his mouth fell open. She was thickly coated with dirt but she was absolutely beautiful. The features were perfect, lovely, the mouth was promising and full. Under the ragged skirt and the torn sooty blouse roamed surfaces of imaginable perfection. He had difficulty getting back to the question at hand. All the while he was thinking other voices inside him were whispering. "By jing, by jing, she's absolutely...." The two men were completely unlike. One was huge, from this angle he was enormous. He had what looked like a dirty scarf on his head, madonna-like, which would have been ridiculous except for the mountainous shoulders below it and the glittering knife stuck in his wide leather belt. The shaft of the knife flickered wickedly in the light. It was the only clean thing about him. The other man was young, probably still in his teens. Curly-haired and blond and much cleaner than the other two, with a softness in his face the others lacked. But in his belt he carried what appeared to be—what was, a well-oiled and yawning barreled blunderbuss. So they sat for a long moment of silence. He had time to observe that what they were sitting in was in all likelihood a sewer. It ran off into darkness but there was a dim light in the distance and other voices far away, and he gathered that this was not all of the—gang—that had abducted him. But it was beginning to penetrate, now, as he began to understand their words, that they were unhappy about letting him go. He was about to argue the point when the big man stepped suddenly forward and knelt beside him. He shut out the light, Travis could not see. The last thing he heard was the big man grunting as he threw the blow, like a rooting pig. <hr style="width: 45%;" /> <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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