Impact, Irving E. Cox [latest ebook reader .TXT] 📗

[Page 6]

Over the cabin ’phone, Ann’s voice was crisp with anger. “Mr. Lord, I must see you at once.”

“Of course, Ann.” Lord tried not to sound uncordial. It was all part of a trade agent’s job, to listen to the recommendations and complaints of the teacher. But an interview with Ann Howard was always so arduous, so stiff with unrelieved righteousness. “I should be free until—”

“Can you come down to the schoolroom, Mr. Lord?”

“If it’s necessary. But I told you yesterday, there’s nothing we can do to make them take the lessons.”

“I understand your point of view, Mr. Lord.” Her words were barely civil, brittle shafts of ice. “However, this concerns Don; he’s gone.”

“Gone? Where?”

“Jumped ship.”

“Are you sure, Ann? How long ago?”

“I rather imagined you’d be interested,” she answered with smug satisfaction. “Naturally you’ll want to see his note. I’ll be waiting for you.”

The ’phone clicked decisively as she broke the connection. Impotent fury lashed Lord’s mind—anger at Don Howard, because the engineer was one of his key men; and, childishly, anger at Don’s sister because she was the one who had broken the news. If it had come from almost anyone else it would, somehow, have seemed less disastrous. Don’s was the fourth desertion in less than a week, and the loss of trained personnel was becoming serious aboard the Ceres. But what did Ann Howard expect Lord to do about it? This was [Page 8] a trading ship; he had no military authority over his crew.

As Lord stood up, his desk chair collapsed with a quiet hiss against the cabin wall, and, on greased tubes, the desk dropped out of sight beneath the bunk bed, giving Lord the luxury of an uncluttered floor space eight feet square. He had the only private quarters on the ship—the usual distinction reserved for a trade agent in command.

From a narrow wardrobe, curved to fit the projectile walls of the ship, Lord took a lightweight jacket, marked with the tooled shoulder insignia of command. He smiled a little as he put it on. He was Martin Lord, trade agent and heir to the fabulous industrial-trading empire of Hamilton Lord, Inc.; yet he was afraid to face Ann Howard without the visible trappings of authority.

He descended the spiral stairway to the midship airlock, a lead-walled chamber directly above the long power tubes of the Ceres. The lock door hung open, making an improvised landing porch fifty feet above the charred ground. Lord paused for a moment at the head of the runged landing ladder. Below him, in the clearing where the ship had come down, he saw the rows of plastic prefabs which his crew had thrown up—laboratories, sleeping quarters, a kitchen, and Ann Howard’s schoolroom.

Beyond the clearing was the edge of the magnificent forest which covered so much of this planet. Far away, in the foothills of a distant mountain range, Lord saw the houses of a village, gleaming in the scarlet blaze of the setting sun. A world at peace, uncrowded, unscarred by the feverish excavation and building of man. A world at the zenith of its native culture, about to be jerked awake by the rude din of civilization. Lord felt a twinge of the same guilt that had tormented his mind since the Ceres had first landed, and with an effort he drove it from his mind.

He descended the ladder and crossed the clearing, still blackened from the landing blast; he pushed open the sliding door of the schoolroom. It was large and pleasantly yellow-walled, crowded with projectors, view-booths, stereo-miniatures, and picture books—all the visual aids which Ann Howard would have used to teach the natives the cultural philosophy of the Galactic Federation. But the rows of seats were empty, and the gleaming machines still stood in their cases. For no one had come to Ann’s school, in spite of her extravagant offers of trade goods.

Ann sat waiting, ramrod straight, in front of a green-tinged projectoscope. She made no compromise with the heat, which had driven the men to strip to their fatigue shorts. Ann wore the full, formal uniform. A less strong-willed woman might have appeared wilted after a day’s work. Ann’s face was expressionless, a block of cold ivory. [Page 9] Only a faint mist of perspiration on her upper lip betrayed her acute discomfort.

“You came promptly, Mr. Lord.” There was a faint gleam of triumph in her eyes. “That was good of you.”

She unfolded her brother’s note and gave it to Lord. It was a clear, straight-forward statement of fact. Don Howard said he was deserting the mission, relinquishing his Federation citizenship. “I’m staying on this world; these people have something priceless, Ann. All my life I’ve been looking for it, dreaming of it. You wouldn’t understand how I feel, but nothing else—nothing else—matters, Ann. Go home. Leave these people alone. Don’t try to make them over.”

The last lines rang in sympathy with Lord’s own feelings, and he knew that was absurd. Changes would have to be made when the trade city was built. That was Lord’s business. Expansion and progress: the lifeblood of the Federation.

“What do you want me to do?” he demanded.

“Go after Don and bring him back.”

“And if he refuses—”

“I won’t leave him here.”

“I have no authority to force him against his will, Ann.”

“I’m sure you can get help from this—” her lip curled “—this native girl of yours. What’s her name?”

“Niaga.”

“Oh, yes; Niaga. Quaint, isn’t it?” She smiled flatly.

He felt an almost irresistible urge to smash his fist into her jaw. Straight-laced, hopelessly blind to every standard but her own—what right did Ann have to pass judgment on Niaga? It was a rhetorical question. Ann Howard represented the Federation no less than Lord did himself. By law, the teachers rode every trading ship; in the final analysis, their certification could make or break any new planetary franchise.

“Niaga has been very helpful, Ann; cooperative and—”

“Oh, I’m sure she has, Mr. Lord.”

“I could threaten to cut off Don’s bonus pay, I suppose, but it wouldn’t do much good; money has no meaning to these people and, if Don intends to stay here, it won’t mean much to him, either.”

“How you do it, Mr. Lord, is not my concern. But if Don doesn’t go home with us—” She favored him with another icy smile. “I’m afraid I’ll have to make an adverse report when you apply for the franchise.”

“You can’t, Ann!” Lord was more surprised than angry. “Only in the case of a primitive and belligerent culture—”

“I’ve seen no evidence of technology here.” She paused. “And not the slightest indication that these people have any conception of moral values.”

“Not by our standards, no; but we’ve never abandoned a planet for that reason alone.”

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“I know what you’re thinking, Mr. Lord. Men like you—the traders and the businessmen and the builders—you’ve never understood a teacher’s responsibility. You make the big noise in the Federation; but we hold it together for you. I’m not particularly disturbed by the superficials I’ve seen here. The indecent dress of these people, their indolent villages, their congenital irresponsibility—all that disgusts me, but it has not affected my analysis. There’s something else here—something far more terrible and more dangerous for us. I can’t put it in words. It’s horrible and it’s deadly; it’s the reason why our men have deserted. They’ve had attractive women on other worlds—in the trade cities, anything money could buy—but they never jumped ship before.”

“A certain percentage always will, Ann.” Lord hoped he sounded reassuring, but he felt anything but reassured himself. Not because of what she said. These naive, altogether delightful people were harmless. But could the charming simplicity of their lives survive the impact of civilization? It was this world that was in danger, not by any stretch of the imagination the Federation.

As the thought occurred to him, he shrank from it with a kind of inner terror. It was heresy. The Federation represented the closest approximation of perfection mortal man would ever know: a brotherhood of countless species, a union of a thousand planets, created by the ingenuity and the energy of man. The Pax Humana; how could it be a threat to any people anywhere?

“That would be my recommendation.” Suddenly Ann’s self-assurance collapsed. She reached for his hand; her fingers were cold and trembling. “But, if you bring Don back, I—I won’t report against a franchise.”

“You’re offering to make a deal? You know the penalty—”

“Collusion between a trade agent and the teacher assigned to his ship—yes, I know the law, Mr. Lord.”

“You’re willing to violate it for Don? Why? Your brother’s a big boy now; he’s old enough to look after himself.”

Ann Howard turned away from him and her voice dropped to a whisper. “He isn’t my brother, Mr. Lord. We had to sign on that way because your company prohibits a man and wife sailing in the same crew.”

In that moment she stripped her soul bare to him. Poor, plain, conscientious Ann Howard! Fighting to hold her man; fighting the unknown odds of an alien world, the stealthy seduction of an amoral people. Lord understood Ann, then, for the first time; he saw the shadow of madness that crept across her mind; and he pitied her.

“I’ll do what I can,” he promised.

As he left the schoolroom she collapsed in a straight-backed chair—thin and unattractive, [Page 11] like Ann herself—and her shoulders shook with silent, bitter grief.

Martin Lord took the familiar path to Niaga’s village. The setting sun still spread its dying fire across the evening sky, but he walked slowly through the deep, quiet shadows of the forest. He came to the stream where he had met Niaga; he paused to dip his sweat-smeared face into the cool water cascading over a five foot fall.

A pleasant flood of memory crowded his mind. When he had first met Niaga, almost a week before, she had been lying on the sandy bank of the stream, idly plaiting a garland of red and blue flowers. Niaga! A copper-skinned goddess, stark naked and unashamed in the bright spot light of sun filtered through the trees. Languorous, laughing lips; long, black hair loosely caught in a net of filmy material that hung across her shoulder.

The feeling of guilt and shame had stabbed at Lord’s mind. He had come, unasked, into an Eden. He didn’t belong here. His presence meant pillage, a rifling of a sacred dream. The landing had been a mistake.

Oddly enough, the Ceres had landed here entirely by chance, the result of a boyish fling at adventure.

Martin Lord was making a routine tour of representative trade cities before assuming his vice-presidency in the central office of Hamilton Lord, Inc. It had been a family custom for centuries, ever since the first domed ports had been built on Mars and Venus.

Lord was twenty-six and, like all the family, tall, slim, yellow-haired. As the Lords had for generations, Martin had attended the Chicago University of Commerce for four years, and the Princeton Graduate School in Interstellar Engineering four more—essential preparations for the successful Federation trader. In Chicago Martin had absorbed the basic philosophy of the Federation: the union of planets and diverse peoples, created by trade, was an economy eternally prosperous and eternally growing, because the number of undiscovered and unexploited planets was infinite. The steady expansion of the trade cities kept demand always one jump ahead of supply; every merchant was assured that this year’s profits would always be larger than last. It was the financial millennium, from which depression and recession had been forever eliminated. At Princeton Lord had learned the practical physics necessary for building, servicing and piloting the standard interstellar merchant ships.

Martin Lord’s tour of the trade cities completed his education. It was his first actual contact with reality. The economy of progress, which had seemed so clear-cut in the Chicago lecture halls, was translated into a brawling, vice-ridden, frontier city. In the older trade cities, the [Page 12] culture of man had come to dominate the occupied worlds. No trace of what alien peoples had been or had believed survived, except as museum oddities.

This, Lord admitted to himself, was conquest, by whatever innocuous name it passed. But was it for good or evil? In the first shock of reality, Martin Lord had doubted himself and the destiny of the Federation. But only for a moment. What he saw was good—he had been taught to believe that—because the Federation was perfection.

But the doubt, like a cancer, fed and grew in the darkness of Lord’s soul.

On the home trip a mechanical defect of the calibration of the time-power carried the Ceres off its course, light years beyond the segment of the Galaxy occupied by the Federation.

“We’ve burned out a relay,” Don Howard reported.

“Have we replacements?” Lord asked.

“It’s no problem to fix. But repairs would be easier if we could set the ship down somewhere.”

Lord glanced at the unknown sun and three satellite planets