The Centauri Device Part 14

agonal conveyors. Smoke and vapors vented from the overtaxed condensers of the power plant roiled between the rusting hoppers, drifted across the soaked ashy earth at the height of a man's waist to hang reeking over the terraces of the opencast mines.

Reactor-glare beat its way up and down the spectrum, now white and electric, now somnolent and purple-a constant unhealthy flicker of partially contained plasma struggling against the abused lines of force that restrained it, filling the wind with an awful, modulating, voracious roar like junk-tides on an abandoned planet at the very gutter-edge of Time. The denizens of this city, white-eyes and thin demented bones, watched the light racing and arcing across their grim skyline, and huddled close. Why should they be any less desperate for comfort than their customers? That leaky old engine menaced them, but they depended on it.

"I was on Centauri VII, Captain. I know what I saw when Grishkin burst through into the final bunker. I had been operating the cutter not a minute before he began to scrabble his way through, barehanded. Yusef Karem saw it too, but later, and his report was garbled; Fleet agents were already close behind him- by then, they had cooked my sergeant's brains and knew we were there."

Ben Barka had a bolthole in the ganger's shed of an ,, ore furnace: a dusty room with faded yellow duty rosters pinned to the walls and a collection of the shaky, scuffed furniture that always seems to find its way into such places-two or three hard chairs, some adjustable metal shelving, and a half-made folding bed.

From small grimy windows the top-gas extractors and blast pipes of the smelter were visible, crawling over its outer sh.e.l.l like vast slow worms. Its charging platforms and skip-inclines hung askew, creaking on their broken welds in the wind. Shunting lines ran 130.

The Centaur? Device *

round its base, detouring heaps of machine-tool rejects once destined for the fire. Nothing here had been built to last; its very bulk seemed to lend it an impermanent air.

"What I saw is probably the most powerful propaganda tool the Galaxy has ever known. Conceive of a sort of psychical radio of great range and selectivity, which, by broadcasting images direct to the cortex, win bypa.s.s the interpretive moment and eliminate the possibility of evasion-"

Ben Barka was pacing the shabby room nervously, slapping his cane against the open palm of his left hand and frequently consulting his watch. He seemed to be expecting someone else. "No more willful ignorance, Captain! The responsibility will be enormous!"

Truck ma.s.saged Ms foot, stretched. He felt rested and energetic, but wary.

Down hi the port he'd rather admired the desert fervor of ben Barka's eyes; this was less romantic.

"That's a disgusting little fantasy," he said. "I don't know anything about 'interpretive moments.' Whatever you saw in the bunker, the General seems convinced that it's a bomb. I suspect you're both as mad as Grishkin. Hethinks it's G.o.d.**

Ben Barka nibbed some grime from a window pane, examined the end of his finger edgily.

"Did you ever stop to think, Captain, that there may now remain no useful definition of the terms 'sane' and 'insane1? It's war. Anything else is an impersonation, a dream."

"Then stop it. You wouldn't have anything to eat round here, would you? Fm famished."

"Give us the Device and it will stop. I can promise you that"

"Oh sure. It's not a case of giving. IVe never even seen the b.l.o.o.d.y thing-and if it was, I wouldn't. I don't see you as much of an alternative to General Gaw. If only you'd slaughter each other instead of the

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rest of us. Why don't you hold your war on Earth? fll sell tickets and applaud."

The colonel looked nonplused.

"Now, if yours are the 'safer hands' Angina had in mind, you've been wasting your time. Can I go now?"

At this, the door of the hut sc.r.a.ped open abruptly and an Earth-European in the uniform of the UASR(N) Political Corps bustled over the threshold. His skin was'gray, his hands were covered with small seedy scabs, and the cuffs of his shut were frayed. Five centuries earlier, there would have been permanent ink stains on his fingers too, and secret meetings in his attic every second Wednesday.

He had obviously been eavesdropping. He glared aggressively at Truck, put his thumb in his mouth and ripped savagely at the nail, then said without looking at ben Barka, "I'll take over now."

Ben Barka s.h.i.+pped his stick and clasped his hands behind his back. He nodded coldly. Long, rolling dunes came back into his eyes, under a white moon.

Trains full of overfed colonial infantrymen steamed out of the marshaling yards of Alexandria into the jaws of his ambush.

"I'd prefer you to sit in that chair," said the PCO. His nose was running.

When it became evident that Truck didn't intend to resist, he wiped it on his sleeve and grinned triumphantly.

"By dint of ceaseless energy and intelligence,** he began, hi a vigoriously offensive voice, "the watchful peoples of the United Arab Republics have uncovered a projected violation of their sovereignty involving an an ti humanitarian weapon built by the decadents of Centauri VII in an attempt to halt their engulfment by the equally corrupt expansionist forces of the so-called Israeli World Government.*"

He sniffed loudly. "Well, we all know what happened there," he said parenthetically.

"While we of the UASR would abhor and strongly protest the use of any such device as antibeneficial to 132.

the interest of freedom-loving nationals of all the planets, there seems a possibility that in the hands of a properly-const.i.tuted Socialist democracy it would signal the overture of a new era of Socialist co-operation: the instant peaceful conversion of the Galaxy to true Marxist-Leninism, the end of die cla.s.s struggle, the-*'

He stared hard at Truck.

"Well?"

"Do we have to have this rucking down hi here?** Truck appealed. But ben Bark a, listening to the onion-skins peeling off the Saharan rock in a far-off cold dawn, only lifted one eyebrow. What did he have to do with Europe, his eyes were asking, in this or any other century-?

"You'll address me. The colonel isn't responsible for interrogation. Look here, Captain, we've started out on the wrong foot here, m tell you what welldo. We'll cut the philosophy-fair enough, it isn't your line, I can understand that-and get down to bra.s.s tacks. O.K.?"

Truck shrugged stonily.

"Well then, about this propaganda machine: we know you can control it. It's in your genes." He grinned ingratiatingly and repeated, "Your genes," He narrowed his eyes, as if that might enable him to spot the actual deformity, there in the bone. "Captain," he said, "I'm empowered to offer you the rank of Hero of the UASR." His eyes bulged at the thought of it "Also-wait for it!-immediate honorary professors.h.i.+p in Political Philosophy at Cairo University. New Cairo, that is, of course. What do you think of that?"

It was everything he'd ever wanted, you could see that.

"I think you're a clown.**

"Captain, Captain. You're a s.p.a.cer. You owe the Zionists nothing. Plenty of the hinterland people are committed to a Socialist Galaxy**-it had been fas.h.i.+onable, a couple of years before the New Music-"even

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your wife, Captain. She was once a member of the Party-"

"Ob, s.h.i.+t." Truck got to his feet, stormed across the room to confront ben Barka. 'Tm sick of this little idiot," he said. "Can I go now?"

"Sit down!" yelped the PCO. He danced around in the doorway, fumbling for something in his belt, his nose running horribly.

"No. Look, ben Barka, you don't really have anything in common with this wretched little commissar and his rubbish? You don't really agree with that stuff?" - The colonel blinked once, slowly. Beyond his initial nod, he hadn't once acknowledged the existence of the PCO. Now he brooded on the man's crumpled uniform and great raw ears. He smiled faintly. "Yes, I think I do." After a while, "Yes, I do.'* In his eyes, the remnants of an old dream, dissolving wadies, camels, and fellaheen fading into insubstantiality.

"Then you and Alice Gaw make a fine pair. G.o.d help you both.'*

The PCO had succeeded in hauling out an enormous Chambers gun and was waving it about. "I*m arresting you," he shouted, "in the name of the Peoples of the Galaxy." Sick and hollow, Truck limped out. "You'll co-operate. The exigencies of the cla.s.s struggle demand it!" In the doorway, fumes from the chancy old reactor catching at his throat, Truck stared back over the greasy, bobbing head of his monkey captor. Ben Barka was sitting on the camp bed. Nothing but an old dream. Sand dunes and an old, sold-out dream.

Outside, filled with disgust, he tried to kick the PCO's face in. But the has.h.i.+sh in, who'd been hanging about in the gloom in antic.i.p.ation of just such a contingency, grinned and threw him down a flight of steps. They were careful not to hurt him much, and he guessed their orders were to treat him decently unless the other 134 side looked like getting hold of him. It was West Central and Nodes all over again.

They put him in the Cowper stove of the furnace. Someone had long ago ripped out the checkerwork, disconnected the blast pipes, and hacked out a crude door about a foot above ground level. What remained was a domed steel sh.e.l.l, all its ducts but one plugged and welded, and that one too high to reach. From it issued a sluggish trickle of warm air lighted by some peculiar inner quality caused by its pa.s.sage over the reactor fire, so that his breath took on the palest yellow tinge as he mooched about sucking his split lip. He was too galled to care.

If Grishkin's lunatic violation of his innards in the Cathedral of Intestinal Revelation had robbed him of his sense of proportion-what Pater had called Ms "fine vulgar iconoclasm"-ben Barka's scruffy little retreat among the rubbish was doing a lot to restore it He knew a wrecking yard when he saw one, and he remembered the PCO from innumerable hinterland corners: snotty-nosed, one foot in the gutter, leaving small toothmarks on the bone.It was a pusher's Galaxy all right.

After a bit, he reviewed his situation. His a.s.sault on the PCO, however satisfying, had been by nature an exploration; next time, he expected to get the Chambers pistol. He retrieved the knuckleduster from his boot, paced round a few more times-hobbling and cursing-to work the stiffness out of his bruised right arch, then squatted down to wait in a position that would put him behind the door next time it opened.

It stayed shut for nearly three hours.

He worried because he needed darkness, and the dawn must be near. He dozed off, he woke up with a guilty start His stomach grumbled, his legs developed pins and needles. He recalled the holograms of Howell, and conceived a sudden retrospective l.u.s.t for sallow Heloise, uncrowned queen of the Aesthetic Asteroid.

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Grinning into the luteous gloom, be clenched a fist and rubbed the cold steel knuckles against his cheek...

The sides of the Cowper stove boomed faintly as someone outside kicked at the door. He shot to his feet, sweating. He was only partly upright when the door slammed back-grabbed at it for support, found it swinging further toward him as a result, and was shoved painfully into the wall So much for ambush.

Sodding and blinding, he extricated himself and rolled out of the closing gap into the yellow arena- White light pinned him crouching to the scaly floor like a child caught in the awful act.

"You watch it, s.p.a.cer," said a soft voice. "What you doing in there?"

He sat on his right hand to hide the knuckleduster, blinked.

"Hey," he whined placatingly, "that hurts. I was having-" Flapped his left hand in front of his eyes. The light went out.

"Fetch him here," ordered the PCO, who'd sensibly sent a couple of commandos through ahead of him. They grinned at one another, pistols dangling negligently from their hard thick fingers. One of them shrugged and advanced.

"You just leave me alone!" pleaded John Truck, cowering away as the brown hand touched his shoulder, so that its owner had to stretch and grab at the last minute. Balance undermined, he swayed. "Right, you sod!" shouted Truck, brought the knuckles round in a dirty gray arc and hit him in the mouth.

Something broke, the Arab's fingers went lax, Truck had hold of the gun before it hit the floor.

"Now," he said, trembling with relief and fury. He wound his left hand into the has.h.i.+s.h.i.+n's belt and held the flaccid body up as a s.h.i.+eld. Red unsteady light dispelled the gloom as the PCO and the remaining Arab let go simultaneously with their pistols. Lunchtime smells in the Cowper stove.

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"No, no," said the PCO.

"Oh yes," whispered Truck, shuffling inexorably forward behind the smoldering corpse, "oh yes."

All three of them were on fire when he left the chamber, expressions of horror on their rigid features. What else should he have done? He watched them dispa.s.sionately for a moment or two, then, weighed down by more guns than he'd ever owned in his life, ran off into the jungle of railway tracks and junkheaps. Rusty gear trains rolled about under his feet as he went, like the fossil bones of preposterous little animals.

Energy fronts resonated silent and dating from the cliff-faces of the rolling mills; from the convection currents dancing like translucent veils above the mounds of the city came a wicked, sucking roar; hot-air refraction s.h.i.+fted the positions of the known stars, cold winds howled toward the stricken center of it all across the Weak loading platforms. It looked like a dream of arson. It looked like HeU-He didn't quite know what to do. Dwarfed and stumbling, a gun in each hand and a spare one stuck down the side of his boot, he took to the lanes of shadow beneath the great corroded walls, drawn toward that essential solipsistic djinn thras.h.i.+ng the confines of its magnetic bottle.

lanthine light fired the lines and pylons of the high voltage system; it limned the Kaldo converters and the vast corrugated sheds of the borax refinery; it spilled like hot gla.s.s over Truck's bald, vulnerable skull as he turned to scan the waste behind him, and discovered twenty cruel black figures leaping through the rubbish-a complete fellaheen death-commando, threading the lunatic peep-show nicker in a cla.s.sic search-and-destroy maneuver.

Ben Barka had decided to cut his losses.

Truck got down on the floor and crawled further into the shadows, shaking. He could see them, but he 137.

didn't think they could see him. He rubbed his face into the rust, he bit the inside of his cheek so hard it bled. They'd have found their dead by now, smoking in the Cowper stove. "Oh Jesus," he sobbed. He hadn't got a chance.

He fled down a blind narrow walkway, falling repeatedly into troughs and sumps of lukewarm sticky water-at the end of the alley, fetched up against a blank wall of flaking steel-opened his split lip and dropped one of his guns.

Panicked.

"Oh my Christ, my Christ," staring back, mouth open, b.l.o.o.d.y-chinned, no way out He scrabbled about, discovering rivets.

There was a door.

He wiped his lips with the back of his hand. Spreading his cloak to hide the flare, he fired half a Chambers magazine into the rusty lock; reeled back from the heat with his forehead blistering; stab-kicked the door and dived through it panting and laughing like a madman, reeking of scorch and smoke and death.

He had broken into a gutted pumping station, where a score of small-bore pipelines converged to supply raw organic material to one great conduit fifteen feet in diameter. Most of the transfer valve gear had been ripped out, but a faint odor of partly-processed polymers stiU haunted the sour air. A shattered inspection window gave access to the conduit; as soon as he had relaxed enough to be able to turn his back on the rapidly cooling door-fairly sure that for a moment the pursuit had gone off hi some other direction-he poked his head through it and had a look.

The main stretched away right and left in a slight but perceptible curve, lighted by dim orange bulbs strung from a frayed cable hi the ceiling-adopted by the denizens of Junk City as a trunkline for furtive journeys, a rat's highway smeared with cryptic brown 138.

graffiti and littered with rubbish. He rested his elbows on the windowsill and wondered if it would get him anywhere. Small drafts fluted through splits in the inner cladding, drying the sweat on his temples.

He was clambering in, and stuff the consequences, when someone came tap-tapping out of the dim Fallopian reaches, footsteps quick and purposeful.

He ducked back into the pumping station until the noise got very close, then shoved his pistols through the window and hissed, "Move, and 111 blow you to belli"

A short, ironical laugh, then a female voice said, "Go on and shoot"

"What?"

"You'd be doing me a favor, Captain.**

He peered through the window.

It was Angina Seng, all coppery hair and long body. She stood regarding him with a pinched, censorious expression. Once again, he had the feeling that she was fighting a doomed action to prevent her soul evacuating her skull and boiling off into s.p.a.ce. The lines around her mouth were deep and sad.

"I can't seem to get rid of you, can I?" she said. "Are you going to get itover with, or can I go?"

He was amazed to realize that she honestly didn't care. He hauled himself through the window and frowned aggressively. "I've got a bone to pick with you," he told her, remembering that he had.

"I've no time, Captain. You'd better shoot, if that's what you feel, because I'm not waiting around any longer. Whatever you feel necessary.**

And she turned on her heel and trudged off, arms folded, head down, breasting some personal hinterland wind.

"Look here-" He watched her receding shoulders for a minute, glanced at his guns. He felt a bit of a fool. He hurried after her like some mad philosopher chasing the Noumenon forever down a gradient of misunderstanding. "Why do you always treat me like a The Centaur! Device 139.