Now at least that part of the job was done, and his dark eyes were fixed tensely out the window, as he observed the last-minute actions about the cruiser, preparatory to its departure. So far, those for whom he watched had not arrived.
"What's the point?" muttered Age. "They've already given the stuff up to us. What difference does it make to Earth-City government whether we use it or trade it to the Amnhohen?"
"None," said Jarl. "But it's a chance for them to twist our arms and hold us up for better terms. You've got to get that straight, Age. They'll hit us any time they get the chance. In this case, they're going back to the old business about Mark."
"What do they want us to do?" snapped Age. "Stop everything else and spend the next ten thousand years trying to find his body?"
Outside, as Brot watched, the main entrance to the cruiser was closed and sealed, leaving only the ladder to the open fore lock available for last-minute cargo and personnel. The colony spacemen on guard at the lock Had now moved out to a safe distance and were checking last-minute items and crew aboard from the perimeter. The new grass of spring was dark about the underside of the checkerboard hull.
"Not really," said Jarl. "It's just a means of advancing a claim. Remember, the agreement Mark started to make with them was never actually signed."
"We're acting as though it was," said Lily. "So are they."
"That's right," said Jarl, with a slight cutting edge to his voice. "But I explained all that five months ago. They never will sign as long as they can go on a de facto basis and use the fact there's no official agreement to make capital out of points like this about trading Navy equipment to aliens. Would you?"
"I suppose not," said Lily thoughtfully.
"I still say, ignore it—or refuse them, flat," said Age harshly. "What can they do about it, anyway?"
"Delay current trading sessions," said Jarl. "And they can afford to do that. We can't—I mean we here at Abruzzi Fourteen. We need that heavy machinery now. They're pinching us."
"No one ever promised them Mark," said Paul, from the end of the table.
Jarl looked down along the table at the young outposter with a hint of exasperation.
"Mark promised them Mark," Jarl said. "I thought I'd got that through all your heads. It was Mark who sent them the original agreement. Their counteroffer was on its way here —and it was a counteroffer that agreed, provided Mark would surrender himself personally to Earth justice to answer charges arising out of his actions. Then Mark took off from here—"
"Mark and Ulla," interposed Paul quietly.
"Mark and Ulla, then. What difference does Ulla make?" said Jarl. "The point is, Mark left here to give himself up to Earth. He even left a letter here for us, saying that's what he intended to do, that he anticipated Earth asking for him. Consequently, Earth claims this constituted agreement to their counterproposal, since Mark was the negotiating authority. And we can't deny he was the negotiating authority, because it's to our advantage to hold Earth to Mark's original version of the agreement. In fact, we can't deny it if we want to carry on trade and recruitment of special personnel from Earth without interruption. The only fly in the ointment is the fact Mark made some kind of shift error and got lost among the stars, before he could get to Earth."
"I suppose they really don't believe that," said Lily.
"They believe it all right," said Age. "Even if they don't, what's the difference? The ship's been lost six months. Wherever in space it is, Mark and Ulla would be dead from atmosphere exhaustion. They won't come back to bother Earth. And that's all Earth wants."
"In the large sense," said Jarl, "not the small. And it's the small I've been trying to get into your heads..."
Brot stiffened suddenly, squinting out the window at the recolonization cruiser. What he had been watching for had arrived. A ground car was racing up to it. Now it had halted for checking by the guarding spacemen. A young but bearded man wearing colonist clothes and a girl with the collar of her nurse's jacket turned up so that it hid her face were showing papers. Barely glancing at them, the spacemen waved them both to the fore air-lock ladder. As Brot watched, they ran for it—and made it. A moment later the lock closed and the first rumble of the cruiser's warming engines sounded.
Brot sat back in his chair, letting out the sigh of relief he had been holding, a sigh that had been waiting six months now for utterance. It was one thing to trust a woman to keep her man from throwing his life away. It was something else again to hope she could persuade him to scrap everything he had believed in while those who loved him set up an entire new life for him. Six months was a long time for a natural leader to sit it out in the mountains while his followers took over.
But the girl had done it. She had the one thing the boy lacked—an appreciation of the fact that in the end no one makes it to where he's headed entirely alone. For the second time in his life (the first had been when he had stood with Mark as a baby in his arms amid the ruins of the Ten Roos station) Brot felt a fleeting twinge of loss for the wife he had never had. But Brot was too much of a man of the immediate present to waste any emotion on might-have-beens. He turned his attention back to the meeting, to see Lily, Paul, and Maura Vols all with their eyes covertly and questioningly upon him.
He gave them a curt nod of assurance, unseen by Age or Jarl. Jarl was still talking. The other three relaxed, turning their own attention back to what the big man was saying.
'The other Colonies are voting in their own officers as fast as they can." Jarl's words seemed to float and hang in the still air of the room. "But we here at Abruzzi Fourteen are two years ahead of them, mainly because of the work I've done. And because we're ahead, we've been able to cream off the best of the available Navy ships and supplies at Navy Base for our own colony. Now, Earth can afford to take its time. The other Colonies can take their time. But we, Abruzzi Fourteen, can't afford to take our time, because we want to keep the natural lead we've got over the other hundred and forty-three Independent Colonies. We're the ones who put us out ahead in the first place—"
"Were we?" Paul interrupted softly. "I thought it was Mark."
Jarl looked at him.
"As Mark himself said at the outposter meeting the day he left," answered Jarl, "he couldn't have done it without us. "Oh, don't jump to the notion I'm trying to run down Mark's part in all this. If he needed us, we needed him, too. But we've got to operate without his help now, and the way to do that is to start off recognizing that it's us—all of us around this table"—his gaze swung about over them all—"who're the actual, present leaders for the Colonies, and that the Colonies lead the human race. In short, we're important people, and that means we've got a duty to our colonists—to all the colonists in general and the race as a whole—to guard that importance and take it into account in making decisions."
"You think I don't?" Age growled. "There's nobody but me to manage those factories— and there aren't any other factories, out here at least. They think I drive them too hard, those people I've got working for me. But I can afford to burn them up. I can't afford to burn me up."
He looked around at all the others except Jarl.
"The rest of you may not agree you're important," he said. "But I do. And that's because I am—maybe the most important."
"Not exactly," said Lily quickly. "Your factories won't be doing anything if I don't interpret the alien psychologies for all of us. Earth always had factory management, but it never had alien relations experts, and that's where the key to success lies."
"And with the trained people to handle the ships to make it all work, don't forget," said Maura. "Don't push, Age. We're all important people here. We all know it, and we're all interested in seeing our United Independent Colonies develop to everybody's best advantage—"
She looked at Jarl.
"Aren't I right, Jarl?"
"Why, yes," he said. "Self-interest—enlightened self-interest, of course—is always the best motive.
That's why, with all respect to Mark"—he glanced down the table at Paul— "we're better off to have lost him. This is a new era, now, in the Colonies, and his ways belonged to the old. While we—"
Down in the landing area the recolonization cruiser finally took off with a mounting thunder of engines that momentarily drowned out all possibility of talk in the Residence library. Slowly, the sound faded, and Brot, who had turned to look out the window once more, brought his face and attention back at the library. He laughed at them all.
"There it goes," he said loudly in the new stillness, "leaving the rest of you sitting here like small frogs in a puddle, trying to blow yourselves up big in the universe. Well, you're necessary to the machinery, I guess. So if you weren't already so hell-bent to create yourselves lords of the human race, some of the real people would have to invent you to do the job. But I goddam well don't have to like the fact—or you. And I don't."
His eyes met Jarl's at the opposite end of the long table.
"And you don't like me," Brot went on. "But you aren't going to do anything about me. You'll still need the outposters here for another ten years or so—even if you like to pretend you don't—and long before then I'll be gone."
He pointed out the window and up in the direction the cruiser had lifted.
"Out there," he said. "That's where the real future is, with the people who've just left. They've gone and left your kind sitting behind here, talking about it. And it's out there with them that I'm going to end up, still in the front of the wave, with my grandchild on the one good knee I've got left, and the bad taste of Earth, and all of you, too, five hundred light-years behind me."
"What're you talking about, Brot?" said Age sourly. "Everybody knows you never had any children. Even Mark was adopted, and he's dead. You can move on any time you want to, and no tears shed. But don't talk about grandchildren to me. You'll never have anything you can even pretend to call a grandchild—any more than I ever had."
Age turned back to Jarl, opening his mouth to take up the discussion the cruiser's lift-off had interrupted.
"The hell I won't!" growled Brot softly, still smiling grimly up at the skies into which the cruiser, bearing Mark and Ulla under new identities, had now flung itself out of sight, into free space and the free years to come.
-End-
Gordon R. Dickson, The Outposter
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