4
CULLY LAUGHED. The irony of the situation tickled him. But there was no bitter edge to his humor—any more than there had been bitterness at his betrayal by Alia. Cully had never expected his fellow men and women to be saints. Rather, the contrary. Which was possibly why, the thought had occurred to him once or twice, so many of them seemed to be well-disposed toward him. Certainly, nothing else explained his lifelong luck in that regard.
“So that’s it,” said Cully. “And here I was thinking it was pure admiration and charity that had made you take me in.”
“I’m not asking for myself!” said Will sharply. “It’s Doak. You see how he is. Sooner or later he’ll kill someone here—or get himself killed.”
“Well, that can happen,” said Cully, “and you’re a good man, in my book, for wanting to look out after your partner. But from what I’ve seen of places like this, it’s not a good enough reason to get him escape priority. My guess is, he’ll have to wait his turn.”
“There won’t be any turns,” said Will. His usually calm face had tightened. “The chance to escape that’s coming up is going to be the first and only at Number One.”
Cully was suddenly alert.
“The first and only?” he said. “You mean no one’s tried an escape before this?”
“That’s right.” Will nodded. “New Zealand’s fifteen hundred miles away, and that’s our closest land. The only way anyone can get out of here is by taking over one of the Space-and-Atmosphere ships that fly in to bring us new prisoners or supplies, and then fly out again. The SA ships always come down in the water a good hundred yards away from Number One, and then ferry over to the station what they’re bringing in. That means there’s always at least a hundred yards of open water between any escapees and the means of escape. And, aside from the guards, the water around Number One’s alive with sharks. You’ll see why, the first time you get your turn up on deck.”
“I see,” said Cully slowly. “It’s a matter of needing a boat, then, to get from the station here to the SA ship?”
“Yes,” said Will. “And there’s no such thing as a boat to be found on Number One. The SA ships bring their own when they come, and take it away when they leave.”
“Then how’s an escape being figured?” Cully asked.
“The Board of Governors started building a boat four months ago,” Will said. “Not many here know that, but I found it out. A small boat, made in fifty or sixty small parts that can be hidden separately, then fitted together when the time comes. It’ll be six months more before it’s done, and even after that, they’ll have to wait for a chance to smuggle the pieces up on deck. So that when an SA ship comes, the prisoners can stage a riot long enough for the boat to be put together and gotten into the water. The boat’s to hold five men—it needs to hold at least five to be sure to take over the SA ship from whatever guards are left on her. But five’s the limit. Any boat larger than that would be too hard to build secretly and put together in a hurry on deck when the time comes.”
He stopped. Cully nodded thoughtfully.
“I see,” said Cully.
“Yes,” said Will. “Five men are going to get a chance to escape. Only five—out of nearly three thousand prisoners. You see what chance Doak and I have of being two of them?”
“Now it’s both of you who want to go,” said Cully humorously. “You’ll have that boat filled in a minute. What makes you think I wouldn’t want a place aboard her myself, if it comes to that?”
Will brushed the question aside impatiently.
“Don’t joke with me—you know you’re going!” he said, leaning urgently toward Cully. “Listen, you’ll take Doak because you’ll need me. And I won’t go without him. I told you—I spent forty years, on and off, with the Moldaug. I can speak their language. But, more than that, I understand them. I understand the different way they think. With my help you can make terms with the Moldaug; and once you make terms with them, you can do anything you want to the Old Worlds!”
“Such as?” Cully’s attention suddenly sharpened.
“I don’t know—whatever your objectives are!” said Will. “Taking over their government, or whatever—I don’t care! The point is, I can help you get it without bloodshed. I tell you I know the Moldaug. I came out with the first Casimir III Settlement as a cultural anthropologist, to study the adaptation of the settlers to Frontier conditions. But then I ran into the Moldaug and they fascinated me. I switched to studying them. I got to know them. I learned their tongue. I rode back to their worlds in their scouting ships, and began to study their myths and legends. Don’t you understand? Those myths and legends are just the clues we humans need to understand the whole business of how the Moldaug think and react—”
“Hold on a minute,” Cully interrupted gently. Will stopped. For a moment he sat, still leaning tensely forward. Then his body sagged.
“No,” he said in a dull voice, “you don’t believe me either, do you? You don’t realize what a difference there is between the Moldaug and humans—”
“Easy now,” said Cully. “I’m not turning a deaf ear to all this you’re saying. It’s just you’re going a little fast for me. Let’s go back a minute. Remember—I asked you why you didn’t think I’d grab a place for myself on that boat if I could get it?”
Will stared at him, at first blankly and then with growing astonishment.
“I don’t understand,” he said at last.
“You’ve got that a bit twisted,” said Cully. “I’m the one who doesn’t understand. What makes you think I’m so sure of a place in that boat that I can fix it for you and Doak to come along with me? I just landed in this place. There’s three thousand men, according to you, that were here before me.”
“But—” Will still stared at him incredulously. “The whole business is for you, isn’t it? I mean, who else but you could’ve figured out a way of taking over the Old Worlds in a coup d’état with the few spaceships and men we’ve got out on the Frontier? If anybody’s going to get a chance to get out of here and back to the Pleiades, it has to be you!”
“I’d be happy to think so,” said Cully. “But there’s one little thing you seem misinformed about. I’ve never made any plans for the Frontier to take over the Old Worlds in a coup d’état. I’d have had to lose what little sense I’ve got to dream a dream like that.”
Will stared at him for a long second.
“You don’t trust me, that’s it,” said Will at last. “That must be it. Cully, everybody in Number One knows about the plot! We’ve all been questioned about it by the Police before we were brought here.”
“Oh?” said Cully. He nodded then, slowly and thoughtfully. “So that’s it. That’s how the fantasy started. It’s this Old Worlds paranoia.”
“Fantasy?” Will echoed the word in a strangely stifled voice. He sat for a second. “Fantasy?”
“Well, now, you’re from the Frontier yourself,” said Cully. “Tell me—can you see any way such a notion could be anything more than fantasy?”
Will sat looking at him—for what seemed a long time. He did not answer or move. Then a deep breath escaped from him slowly, and he seemed to shrink in size.
“Fantasy . . .” he said again in the same stilled voice. “I knew it . . .” His voice thickened a little. “And the Board of Governors and everyone in Number One from the Frontier, all this time, just holding on for the day when it’d come true, and we’d be rescued by the Frontier’s takeover here on Earth. That’s why the Board started to build their boat—to get word back to the Frontier Congress how we were all being held here. Of course, we had to know—all of us—that it’s impossible. But we all tried to believe in it just the same . . .”
“Well, the World Police believe in it, it seems,” said Cully, “and they’ve got powerful ways of making themselves convincing.” He sat back, looking at the older man slumped opposite him. In spite of the casualness of his voice, a new idea was beginning to build swiftly in the back of Cully’s mind. He chose his next words carefully.
“Cheer up,” he said. “It’s a mad universe, all over the place. Here’s the Old Worlds convinced that the Frontier can take them over, without a shred of reason for believing it. And there’s the Moldaug out on the Frontier, laying claim to our worlds in the Pleiades without a shred of reason either.”
“What—” Will’s voice was dull. He roused himself slightly. “Oh, the Moldaug reason for claiming the Pleiades will be real enough.”
“Real enough?” Cully watched him closely. “The Moldaug sit for fifty years and watch us settle down on those planets, and then suddenly claim that we had no right landing on them in the first place? Why, it’s the very fact there’s no reason and sense behind that action of theirs that started this whole chain of events, with the Old Worlds dreaming the nightmare of a coup d’état that got us all arrested and sent here in the first place.”
“I know—I know—” said Will straightening up. “But the very fact we don’t see any reason for the Moldaug to do this is an example of why the Tri-Worlds Council is making such a mess of dealing with their Ambassador Ruhn and his Brother Ambassadors. That’s why I came to Earth, to explain that to the Council; but when I tried to tell Braight, he turned me over to the World Police—”
“Braight? Amos Braight?” demanded Cully.
“Yes, that’s the man,” said Will. “I knew him slightly back when he was Kalestin’s Governor. So I managed to get an appointment to see him; but when I told him, he didn’t believe me. You see, our human culture operates on a polarity between the concepts of ‘right’ and ‘wrong.’ But ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ are unimportant, flexible, only relative terms to the Moldaug. They operate instead on a polarity between the concepts of Respectability and not-Respectability. I know it’s not an easy idea to grasp, but Braight wouldn’t even try to listen. He accused me of being part of the plot—the ‘fantasy’ you called it—and you’re right, of course . . .”
He trailed off.
“Then, just what is the Moldaug reason for claiming the Pleiades?” Cully asked quietly.
“The specific reason? That I don’t know,” said Will. “My field’s anthropology, not politics. But I know the reason’s got to be there in Moldaug terms—a perfectly sensible reason, if you think like they do. It only needs someone who thinks in the proper terms and knows the Moldaug, to dig it out.”
“Is that so?” said Cully thoughtfully. He changed the subject abruptly. “What about Doak? How does Doak come into all this?”
“Doak?” Will hesitated. For the first time his eyes shifted a little away from Cully’s. “Oh, Doak was brought to Number One a little after I got here. He’d come to Earth about a year before, to . . . look for someone. Finally he was picked up by the World Police. He’d given them a harder time than I had—or anyone else they’d sent here. He can’t bend at all, you see. Once he’d told them the truth and they wouldn’t listen, he just stopped talking altogether. When he came here he was in bad shape—worse than you were, much worse. Well, I know a little about medicine. I helped him get well . . . and we’ve been partners since.”
“Yes,” said Cully. His mind was in high gear now, fitting fact to fact and supposition to supposition with lightlike speed. He had almost forgotten Will’s presence, when the older man spoke to him.
“What?” asked Cully, looking back across the mattresses.
“I said”—Will’s eyes were penetratingly upon him—“I wouldn’t have thought there was anything in what I’ve told you to make a man smile.”
“Smile?” Cully became suddenly conscious of his own facial expression.
“If you can call it that,” said Will. “That’s a pretty wolfish expression, whether it’s a smile or not. Braight was a friend of yours when you were a boy on Kalestin, wasn’t he?”
“He took me in,” said Cully, feeling the smile vanish. “He took me into his home, into the Governor’s mansion on Kalestin, after my parents were killed by brush outlaws. He’d known my father back on Earth. I lived with him and his daughter for six years before I struck out back into the brush to go trapping on my own. That was two years before he gave up the Governorship, when his party called him back to run for office here on Earth.”
For a moment, the memory of Amos and Alia as he had known them on Kalestin threatened to draw Cully’s thoughts from the situation at hand. Harshly, he shoved memory aside and came back to the present.
“You say the prisoner Board of Governors all believe in this scheme, the Frontier making an attempt to take over the Old Worlds?” he asked Will.
“Yes,” answered Will, looking at him in some wonder. “I told you—we’ve all believed it here.”
Cully got to his feet, stepping out from under the staircase. Will rose and followed.
“Then we’d better get busy about seeing them,” said Cully—he smiled again at the older man—“if you and Doak want your places in that boat, after all.”
“If Doak and I—” A startled look showed in Will’s eyes. “But how can we get into it now—?” He broke off suddenly. “I thought you told me just a minute ago that the plot was a fantasy—a fantasy dreamed up by the paranoiacs here on the Old Worlds.”
“It was,” answered Cully lightly, “until just about thirty seconds ago. Are you going to show me where I can find these Governors you talked about—or not?”
“If you want.” Still gazing at Cully wonderingly, Will walked around him and began to mount the stairs above their cubbyhole. “I’ll take you to them. But you said ‘was’?”
“Was, as I say,” agreed Cully, stepping up level with the older man. “But as of the last thirty seconds it strikes me there just might be a very good chance of making it become real.”
Will stared at him.
“I don’t understand?” the older man said.
“Why, it seems that uncovering the reason behind that Moldaug claim to the Pleiades may be the key to everything,” said Cully cheerfully. “And with your help, once we get out of here, we just might be able to pull off that coup d’état after all—with benefits to all concerned.”