Talents, Incorporated by Murray Leinster (books you have to read txt) 📖

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[80] 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[81] 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:[82]

"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.[83]

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[84] 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.[85]

"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.

[86]

Part Three

Chapter 7

The Mekinese ship was a cruiser, and it broke out of overdrive within the Tralee solar system just two days, four hours, and some odd minutes after Gwenlyn predicted its coming. Presumably, it had made the customary earlier breakout to correct its course and measure the distance remaining to be run. In overdrive there was not as yet a way to know accurately one's actual speed, and at astronomical distances small errors piled up. Correction of line was important, too, because a course that was even a second off arc could mount up to hundreds of thousands of miles. But even with that usual previous breakout, the Mekinese cruiser did not turn up conveniently close to its destination. It needed a long solar-system drive to make its planetfall.

Bors's long-range radar picked it up before it was near enough to notify its arrival to the planet—if it intended to notify at all. Most likely its program was simply and frighteningly to appear overhead and arrogantly demand the services of the landing-grid to lower it to the ground.

Bors's radar detected the cruiser and instantly cut itself off. The cry of "Co-o-ntact!" went through the ship and all inner doors closed, sealing the ship into sections. Bors was already at the board in the control room. He did not accept the predictions of Talents, Incorporated as absolute truth. It bothered him that such irrational means of securing information should be so accurate. So he compromised in his own mind to[87] the point where, when Talents, Incorporated gave specific information, it was possible; no more. Then, having admitted so much, he acted on the mere possibility, and pretended to be surprised when it turned out to be a fact.

That was the case now. A ship had appeared in this solar system at the time the ship-arrival Talent on the Sylva predicted. Bors scowled, and swung the Isis in line between Tralee and the new arrival. He turned, then, and drove steadily out toward it. The other ship's screens would show a large blip which was the planet, and in direct line a very much smaller blip which was the Isis. The small blip might not be noticed because it was in line with the larger. If it were noticed, it would be confusing, because such things should