"Thanks to Jarl, here."
"Thanks to you for saying so," said Jarl.
The hard voice of Brot broke in.
"But why should they hit us, Mark?"
"Because there's no point in their trading for those pieces of artwork we offered them if they can just take them," said Mark. "And also, because they don't like being bluffed any more than we do. One of the reasons I crowded them into talking business with us as soon as possible was because we were working against a time limit. The minute we showed up there, the way we did, they must have sent at least one ship to Navy Base to find out what the Navy knew about us. They were bound to come up with the information that the Navy had leased us the scout ships, and that'd be proof enough we didn't have any space-going fleet of our own. Their next move is obvious—hit us and settle the matter, as well as maybe wind up with a valuable haul."
"And you're telling us you deliberately provoked the Meda V'Dan into something like this?" Race demanded.
"That's right, Race." Mark looked across the curve of the table at the other man. "Because I wanted a chance to burn them; and teach them the lesson that it's a bad idea to raid Garnera Six Abruzzi Fourteen station. When they come, we're going to be ready for them. I took only two ships to visit them, deliberately, and we'll have two ships standing in the field. The other two we'll crew and lay off, armed and waiting just below the horizon. We'll set up an orbit watch, to give us a warning of their coming, and we'll evacuate the station itself. Also we'll set up gun posts in the woods around the station—anywhere there's cover—and that'll include use of the four fixed plasma rifles that are now on the two ships we'll leave in the field for them to see. We'll take them off and dummy up some kind of imitation rifles to mount in their place."
He looked over at Orval Belothen.
"You can raise us some kind of crew out of the village factories to do that for us, can't you, Orval?"
The round-faced outposter nodded. "There's a good new colonist in the furniture factory named Age Hammerschold," Orval said. "He can probably cut you wood imitation plasma rifles that'd fool anyone at fifty feet with a little paint. That is, if there's time enough, and I can get him to work steadily. He's a little unadapted yet. Mutters to himself and sits around a lot."
"All right," said Mark. "Then let's get down to details on the rest of it."
They spent the next five hours talking over plans. It was not until after dinner that Mark could find time to get together with Brot and Spal. They met in the small building at the station built by Mark to hold the station weapons and a small tool shop for their repair and maintenance.
"What did you learn about the Meda V'Dan we could use—if anything?" Mark asked the ex-Marine bluntly.
Spal shook his round head.
"Not much," he said. "In fact, not really anything. You know they didn't take us where we could see anything military."
"I told you beforehand," said Mark, "they wouldn't do anything like that. I asked you to use your eyes, anyway, and see if you couldn't figure out anything from what you did see."
"I know," said Spal. "I tried. But there's not much you can tell from what they showed us. In fact, nothing, really."
Mark looked at him for a moment.
"Spal," he said, "I brought you to this station and gave you this job, which is a lot better job than you'd have got if you'd just gone through general assignment to some other colony. I did that because I thought you could be useful here. If you're not going to be useful, you can move out to one of the section villages tomorrow. Now, I'm not asking you what you saw. I'm asking you to tell me what the things you saw might mean, as far as the ability of the Meda V'Dan to fight goes. Stop for a minute, now, and think. Then see if you can't come up with something to justify the job I've given you."
Spal hesitated.
"There's ... nothing," he said, his voice tight. "That's the truth. There just isn't anything to tell you. Oh, that town of theirs isn't built to be any kind of a defence point, but what can I tell about what they might have hidden away there in the way of armament?"
"Just a minute," said Mark. "What's this about the Meda V'Dan city not being built as a defence point? What do you mean?"
Spal shrugged.
"Well, it's plain enough to see," he said. "Those buildings of theirs, and most of the stuff in them, aren't heavy and thick enough to stand up to more than a few seconds of heat from even the small fixed plasma rifles on our scout ships. You noticed how flimsy everything was built? And they don't have any protection from the terrain, like being down in a cup-valley or something so they'd have hills around to give them a high horizon; they're deliberately built out in the flat open, with the ground even slagged around them. Even if they've got real weapon power tucked away out of sight there, it doesn't make sense laying themselves out in the open like that, and building with such light metal they'd lose a lot of their city even if they drove off or killed an attack force."
"Hell," put in Brot, "maybe they're so sure they can knock off an enemy before he even gets close that they don't have to worry about getting damaged. Maybe they've got some kind of weapon tucked away we've never dreamed of."
"When I was in the Marines, our intelligence people didn't think so," said Spal. "And anyway, they've not only built as if they didn't worry about being hurt. It's almost as if they deliberately hunted up the most open, defenceless place to build in."
"Maybe there's something close by they need," grunted the crippled station commander.
"No," said Mark, "I was looking for signs of civilization on the planet as we went in, and I didn't see any, except for that one city. There's nothing around it, either, not even what you might expect in the way of farmland. Did you see anything else, Spal?"
"No," said Spal.
"Maybe, all this time, they've just had an outpost there," Brot muttered.
"Pretty big for just an outpost," said Spal.
"I think so, too," said Mark, thoughtfully. "That city was big enough to hold at least a million Meda V'Dan. Twenty-five square miles of ten-story buildings is. a lot of buildings."
"If they live there," said Brot, "they've got to have some way of feeding themselves."
"They're omnivores like us," said Mark. "You know when they raid, along with tools, equipment, and weapons, they usually take any stored grain or harvested agricultural products. Assuming they get part of the nutriments they want from outside, mainly the carbohydrate part, they could grow their protein indoors under laboratory conditions. In fact, with all the evidence of technology they've got kicking around, that might be the easiest method for them. We know they can eat our food in a pinch—as long as it isn't seasoned in any way—but no human I ever heard of knows what their food looks like. It could be almost completely synthetic."
"Why?" asked Brot bluntly. "Why synthesize when growing's simpler?"
"I don't know," said Mark. "But if they do, the reason for their doing it could tell us a lot about them. Particularly if we could find out why they build the kind of city they do, and tie the two reasons together."
The three of them talked a while longer, and Mark tried to stimulate Spal to additional useful deductions about what he had seen, but without results. They split up, and Mark went to see Lily in the underground records room.
He found her working alone there, recording a report on what she had seen on the Meda V'Dan visit. She smiled up at him and switched off the machine as he came in and took a chair facing her.
"You're pleased," she said.
"I think you've got a little more imagination and initiative than Spal," he answered. He told her what Spal had been able to come up with in the way of observations upon the Meda V'Dan.
"How about you?" he wound up. "What were you able to deduce about the philosophy and character of the Meda V'Dan?"
"I'm sorry," she said, and she looked sorry as she said it. "I'd like to tell you I came up with something vital and unknown about them, but I didn't. Oh,
I'll get together with my assistants and we'll go over this report I'm doing and see if we don't find something useful psychologically or sociologically from what I saw and remember. But all I can really tell you about the Meda V'Dan after seeing them is that, one, they scare me silly, and, two, I don't see how you could be so sure you could bluff them the way you did."
"They bluff, too," Mark said.
"I suppose they do." She stared at him, her small face serious. "But I certainly didn't get the feeling they were bluffing. I got the feeling they believe everything they say about themselves."
"Such as?"
"Well, that business of their being an old race when our race was young," she said. "The business of being older than any other race in the universe and that they were going to go on living even after we were dead."
He looked at her sharply.
"You didn't tell me you could understand
Meda V'Dan speech," he said.
"If you'd asked me on the ship coming out here, I'd have told you," she said. "I didn't think of it then as something that might be helpful to get you to choose me. I didn't think of it at all until you put me to work to find out about the Meda V'Dan. Then I was a little afraid to tell you because, to tell the truth"— she hesitated—"I don't really understand the language all that well. It's just that I picked up a sort of working knowledge of it, along with a lot of other languages I was learning so I could read and appreciate the philosophy of the people who spoke them. And it got to be something of a hobby with me."
"I see. All right," he said. "But the point is you believed the Meda V'Dan about this business of their race living forever? Because of some secret they had, wasn't it?" She nodded. "Why? What made you believe them? That's the sort of thing any race might like to think about itself?"
"I don't know..." She frowned. "It's just that it seemed to fit in. I suppose it was just a subconscious reaction of mine to how it seemed to match with everything else there. The idea of their having a secret and living forever seemed to tie up, somehow, with the way they were, and the way they lived. It was only a feeling, but I had it."
He was watching her closely.
"Well, hang on to it," he said. "Think about it some more and see if something in the way of concrete evidence doesn't come to mind. One of the things I learned from Wilkes
Danielson—he was my tutor, back at the Earth-City—was that the hunches of a trained observer are likely to be a lot closer to the truth than anyone untrained would guess. An experienced observer picks up ail sorts of little signals from an observed situation without being consciously aware of them as specifics, Wilkes said. And from what I've seen, he's probably right."
Mark got to his feet.
"Can't you stay awhile?" she asked.
"Too much to do," he said. "We've got a week's work to get done in a couple of days, and I need to be on top of everything that is done."
He went out.
He had not exaggerated the work needed and the time needed to do it, and as it turned out it was accomplished with only about fifteen minutes to spare.
He was sitting slumped in the chair at his desk in the unlighted Residence office two and a half days later, dawn greying the sky above black clumps of Earth-imported pines beyond the tall Residence window, when Ulla Showell came to find him. At the sound of footsteps, he looked up, numb with fatigue through all his body, but his mind clear with that abnormal, last-ditch clarity that comes shortly before the point of physical collapse. He saw her standing just beyond the desk, the white dress around her slim young body seeming to float by itself in the dim, dark room.
"They told me you'd headed for bed," she said. "So I looked for you in your room first. When you weren't there, I guessed I'd find you stopped somewhere along the way."
"I said I was going to bed to shut them up," he answered. He pointed a finger toward a chair alongside the desk, facing him. "Sit down."
He reached wearily for the light button on the desk.
"Leave the light off," she said. "It's peaceful here in the dark."
He nodded, drew back his hand, and let it drop off the desk edge onto his knee.
"Why don't you go to bed?" she asked.
"I'm still awake," he said. "And there's still things to be done."
"There'll always be things to be done," she said.
"Yes."
He was too tired to ask her why she had come looking for him. He simply waited. But that was a mistake. As they sat there in the gloom, her physical presence only a few feet from him began to reach him even through his exhaustion. There was something about this girl, the very fact of her existence, that seemed to invite him to question everything he had committed himself to do ever since he could remember. Why? His mind, usually so unsparing facing questions, seemed to duck and dodge aside from this one. It was not just that—face it, he told himself—he was strongly attracted to her as a girl, a woman, or rather would be if he let himself be. It was something more than that. Something about her challenged him to prove that there was no mistake somewhere in his planning.
He jerked his thoughts angrily away from that subject. There was no sense in sitting here, letting himself be silently hypnotized by her presence. To force her to break that silence he spoke up himself, brusquely.
"Well?" he said. "What brings you here?"
"I told Dad I wanted to make a visit to Abruzzi Station to see Jarl," she answered. "I even said I might be thinking of marrying Jarl."
"Marry him!" Mark was jolted out of his exhaustion and introspection alike by the idea. It was like a cold hand clutching at his stomach, and his thoughts whirled.
"Why not? It could be done, couldn't it?" she said. "As acting station commander you can marry colonists, can't you?"
"I wouldn't," he said.
"You wouldn't? Why not?"
He had his spinning thoughts under control now.
"I also have to approve such marriages," he said. "I wouldn't approve this one. I need Jarl."
"What if I were willing to pay?" she said. He peered at her in the gloom, wishing he could make out the expression on her face. "Credit, old Navy ships, equipment—anything."
"We're past the point of needing anything like that," Mark said. "We're at the point now where what we need most is to make our own way as a colony with what we've already got.
For that, we need Jarl."
"You wouldn't be losing Jarl. You'd be gaining me."
"I don't want you—I mean I don't want you here as one of the colonists," Mark said harshly. "For one thing, you'd never fit in."
"We'll see about that," she said. "I've got Navy permission to visit as long as I like. See if you still feel I won't fit in in a month or two from now."
Inexplicably, he felt as if she were driving him against a wall.
"For another thing," he said recklessly, "you don't want Jarl." The words came tumbling out angrily, surprising him. Somehow she seemed able to provoke him into speaking out about his most private beliefs. "You've talked yourself into wanting him just to soothe your conscience. Most of you Earth-City aristocrats don't even have a conscience, but you do, and you think you can settle it after seeing the colonists on the ship on the way out here, and places like this station, and Navy Base the way you must know it is, by doing something for Jarl Rakkal, as if he were some special victim of the situation. But he's not. There's no more tragedy about his being lotteried than about any other colonist. The best thing you can do is stop playing games, go back to Earth, and just forget about the Colonies. Put it all out of your mind the way all your friends back there do."
He stopped talking. The effort behind his words had pulled him upright in his chair. The day was breaking fast, and now he could make out not only the expression on her face but the dark shadows under her eyes. Only, seeing her expression was no help. He found it unreadable.
She did not answer him for a moment. When she did, her voice was quiet, almost remote.
"You don't understa
nd me at all," she said.
"I don't understand you—" the accusation struck him as ridiculous.
"No. And you should," she said, in the same quiet voice.
"I should? Why?"
"Because we're a lot alike," she said. "You were an orphan, with your parents killed before you could remember them. So was I— practically. My mother died when I was born and my father was always off Earth on Navy business or away from home. We both grew up by ourselves."
"And that," he said, "makes us alike?"
"Yes," she said, "because neither of us would ever give in. I never gave up trying to make the universe come out the way I thought it ought to be. And neither have you."
He stared at her in the growing pale light of dawn, feeling once more that strange power of hers that seemed to back him against a wall.
"Of course I don't want to marry Jarl," she said. "You're right about him. But my father thinks I'm visiting here to see if I do, and you can't send me away. So I'm staying because I won't give up wanting to make things come out right. Maybe what I need to find out about how to do that is right here, in what you're doing with your colonists and your outposters. So you might as well get used to having me around."
He found his voice, at that.
"Damn it!" he said. "Do you think this is some kind of game I'm running here? Do you think the Meda V'Dan are just going to be going through the motions when they hit this station any minute now?"
He took hold of the desk edge with both hands and hauled himself to his feet.
"In fact, you ought to have been out of here a long time ago, and over in the trenches behind the trees, away from the Residence, like everyone else. Come on, I'll take you over right now."
He led her out the door. She joined him in the ground car outside without a word.
"You're an idiot," he continued harshly, as he put the car in motion and swung it toward the dark, distant clump of trees. "Even if you want to set the universe right, you've got to face the fact that the universe is people. And to change people—for good or bad—costs. You'd better count that cost before you go charging out to fix things."
"As you have?" she said.