The World Swappers Read online

  “We’re facing a desperate situation. We have to take risks. Why, for instance, have you not recommended anyone as a recruit yet?”

  “Mainly because the only people I’ve made any serious impression on have been boys and girls in their early teens. Ymiran conditioning is hellishly successful; by the time the children reach adult status at eighteen, they’re solid from the neck up.”

  “I’ve never worked on Ymir,” said Counce thoughtfully. “But I have worked on more than twenty different worlds. I think you’re still partly a victim of your own early conditioning yourself, despite what we did to counteract it. There are ten million people on the planet. In five years it ought to be possible to find more than one person with sufficient hereditary empathy to free him or her from his background. You were a white-haired boy at one time, remember? When the elders selected you to join the staff of their embassy on Earth, you were regarded as totally uncorruptible. You fell inside the year. Agreed, you were exposed to the truth at first hand. But though you’re working with diluted information, you’ve had a much longer time and many more people to work on. I want a potential recruit, Jaroslav–and I want him now.”

  Jaroslav’s eyes searched his visitor’s face. “You have bad news, Saïd,” he suggested.

  “I have.” Counce put his glass down and got to his feet. “The Others have been to Regis. They were there before we arrived–possibly only scouting the planet, possibly with the intention of planting a colony. We don’t know for sure. But we’ve got to hurry.”

  He put his thumb on a certain star in the pattern on the wall-map. “That’s Regis, Jaroslav. And here”–he made a pair of compasses with his forefinger and thumb, and swung the finger through a third of a circle–“is Ymir. Ymir is the sort of world the Others hunt for. Oxygen-high, frigid, almost lifeless, it’s virtually perfect for them. The worst danger we can conceive of is that they should chance across it.

  “We thought they had been concentrating their efforts in a direction at right angles to Ymir. But if they’ve come as close as Regis once, they may come again. They may come at any time.”

  He turned round and faced Jaroslav again. “Well?” he said.

  “Working here on Ymir is like trying to plod through knee-deep mud. A dozen times I’ve had my eye on potential recruits, only to find–almost from one week to the next–that their defense against the received pattern of thinking here on Ymir is faulty, and they’ve succumbed. From being a trusted friend I turn overnight into an emissary of the devil. You say you want a potential recruit now. The only one I can honestly recommend is a girl, aged seventeen or so. And she probably isn’t mature enough to be of use.”

  “She’ll have to do,” said Counce grimly. “Who is she?”

  “Her name in Enni Zatok. Her father is in the power station; he’s a charge hand or overseer, I believe. He’s an infernal bigot, and probably in another ten years he’ll qualify for an elder’s post through sheer block-headedness. But the girl came to me of her own accord, and she’s kept on coming for a year. I think she has real possibilities.”

  “She’ll do as a start. I want you to get her to Earth as fast as you can–by orthodox shipping routes. That’s essential. When she gets there, I’m going to arrange that Bassett should hear about her, get hold of her, and pick her mind clean of information about Ymir.” He gave a brief summary of the events that had led up to his decision.

  Jaroslav whistled. “It sounds like a thin chance. How thin?”

  Counce spread his hands and shook his head. “It’s the best we’ve got, and it’ll have to be tried. Can you do it?”

  “Give me a moment to think it out,” Jaroslav requested, and sat back in his chair and closed his eyes.

  Counce waited impatiently. After a minute, Jaroslav got hastily to his feet and crossed the room to consult a pile of papers. He riffled through them, and then, holding his fingers in the pile to mark the place, said over his shoulder, “Will eight days from now be soon enough?”

  “To get this girl off Ymir? No, not nearly.”

  “To get her to Earth is what I mean. She could leave on the Amsterdam–Captain Leeuwenhoek was the man who brought me back from Earth, my first and best friend among the spacecrews. He isn’t scheduled to touch Earth this trip, but it wouldn’t lose him anything to scrap his schedule for once.”

  “Good,” said Counce succinctly. “Anything else?”

  “Lord, yes! For one thing, although I’ve managed to convince Enni pretty thoroughly of the fact that Earth-born people aren’t invariably cruel and wicked, I doubt if she would voluntarily sever her ties with Ymir. After all, she still suffers the standard Ymiran family conditioning; deep down in her mind her father, bloody though he may be, is still a sort of god-figure. I’ll have to think up a pretty strong threat to make her give in.”

  “Any ideas?”

  “She’s been here on her own several times–I could make out that the elders have discovered the fact and will beat her into confessing that I seduced her. They would, too, if they had the chance. I saw one of the local misfits being whipped naked through the streets the other day. He’d missed three consecutive confession-meetings. I had to run out of sight, or I’d have tried to grab the whip or something. This is a hell of a place, Saïd.”

  “Of course it is! This planet simply isn’t fit for human beings to live on. That’s the fundamental postulate behind all our present plans.” He mused for a moment. “Could you get her aboard the Amsterdam and off-world before anyone discovered she was missing?”

  “Certainly. Enni herself could arrange that. She manages to alibi herself for two or three hours at a time twice a week or so, anyway, and by the time her parents got tired of sitting grimly by the door waiting to whip her for staying out late, she could be clear of the planet. You’ve no idea how much they’d love to whip her. The hope of doing so will keep them from worrying where she’s gone for at least an extra three or four hours.”

  Counce gave Jaroslav a long, steady look. “Jaroslav, you seem to be letting this place get you down. You’d better clear your mind a little. After all, no matter how repulsive the Ymirans’ behavior is, you’re an Ymiran yourself. You’re a human being and so are they. Once you stop recognizing that fact, consciously and continuously, you’re a failure. We’ve had failures occasionally. We had to stop them. I’m not threatening you–just reminding you.”

  Jaroslav gave a weary smile. “Don’t worry, Saïd. That’s my own kith and kin I’m insulting; I think I have a better right to know what’s wrong with them than an off-worlder, no matter how highly developed his empathy. What we need here, Saïd, is some method of exposing the youngsters firsthand to a different environment. Enni will be lucky; you’ll take her on if she survives the experience with Bassett–”

  “We will. We couldn’t forgive ourselves if we didn’t.”

  Jaroslav nodded. “In the end, anyway, she’ll get her facts straight. She’ll be a decent, functioning human being. But she’ll only be one.”

  “Organize it, then! Damn it, that’s what you’re here for. Arrange wholesale stowing away aboard the spacecraft that call here. Kidnap a whole street gang or something–you can cover yourself. Pinch a hundred boys and girls from their beds with your transfax, drug them, and let them wake up on Shiva or Zeus or K’ung-fu-tse. Wouldn’t the spacemen play?”

  “Not very likely. We need agents working in the spacecrews too, you know.”

  “Spacecrews are the least of our worries. They see all the different worlds, and can enjoy themselves equally anywhere. They’re tolerant. They’re spacemen first and men second, and that’s close enough to what we want. We couldn’t waste the effort.”

  “But couldn’t we recruit people like Leeuwenhoek, for instance?”

  “We could. Try it yourself when he’s here; if he seems likely, ask him to quit his ship and send him to Regis. I’ll tell Wu to expect him.”

  Counce swigged the last of his wine. “Well, good-bye, Jaroslav. I’m sorry I can’t st
ay longer. But I’ll have to make sure that a certain Ymiran teen-age girl, who arrives on Earth in eight days’ time, falls into the right hands – and that’s going to mean having every third person on the docks on our side during the crucial hour or two. You think you have problems? Try mine sometime!”

  They exchanged understanding and mutually forgiving grins, and then Counce was gone.

  CHAPTER VIII

  Her parents might not have noticed the piece of paper in the bare, chilly room. They seldom came in here. Enni was charged with cleaning it and making her own bed, and she, like most other young people on Ymir, had very few personal belongings. Occasionally, she knew, her father looked in late at night to see that she was properly in bed and asleep.

  But she knew every inch of the floor, the walls and the ceiling, so that when she came in and set her schoolbooks down, the out-of-place whiteness was the first thing that caught her eye.

  She picked it up. She had seen enough of Jaroslav Dubin’s handwriting to recognize that this sample was genuine. With harsh fear clutching at her throat, she read:

  Enni, you and I are in terrible danger. Come and see me this evening. Jaroslav.

  Terror, the fear of discovery and its certain consequences, had walked day and night with Enni for many months. She didn’t stop to wonder how the note had got where it was, whether it might in fact be a forgery designed to provoke her into giving away a damaging fact. Thankful that she had not yet taken off her out-door clothes, she turned and went straight back into the street.

  She had not spoken to her mother, who was in the kitchen; her father would be working late tonight at the power station. With luck, she could get to Jaroslav’s and back before her absence was noticed. With luck. She was too scared to think beyond that point.

  Usually Jaroslav greeted her at the door of his home and showed her into the small anteroom where she could change into her treasured dress from Earth before joining him in the lounge. Tonight he brought her straight through to the main room. There was a stranger there.

  Sweating in her heavy clothes, Enni stood shifting from foot to foot, aching to know what the danger was that Jaroslav had written about, while the strange man – tall and bearded – looked her over thoughtfully. The pause grew unbearable.

  “Enni,” said Jaroslav at last, “this is Captain Leeuwenhoek of the space trader Amsterdam. He’s a very close friend of mine, and he may be able to save us from appalling danger.”

  Leeuwenhoek nodded and gave a mechanical smile.

  “The situation’s this,” said Jaroslav. “The elders have found out that you’ve been coming here on your own. They’re planning to arrest you at home tonight and beat you until you confess that I have seduced you.”

  On Ymir, no one used words as frank as “seduce”; Enni felt a vast blush heat her skin, making the already great warmth intolerable. She said, “But that wouldn’t be true!”

  Jaroslav just looked at her, and she rushed on, “But you can’t mean that the elders would lie like that!”

  The spaceman, sitting at Jaroslav’s side, coughed and spoke for the first time. “With due respect, miss, your elders have a reputation for being the finest liars in the galaxy. Ask anyone who has to do business with them. They’re so self-righteous they end up by convincing themselves they’re telling the truth.”

  “But it wouldn’t be a lie, so far as they’re concerned,” Jaroslav said quietly. “People like that are only prepared to believe the worst of their fellow men, because they’re only capable of the worst themselves. They suspect, and in their hearts they’re sure, that I’ve done evil to you. They would beat you until you lied to save yourself more pain. Then they would have the chance they have so long sought to destroy me.”

  Leeuwenhoek chipped in, “You see, young woman, Jaroslav here is a friend of us spacemen. We’d make damned sure your elders did nothing to him groundlessly. But we couldn’t say a word if he’d really – uh – taken advantage of you. According to Ymiran law they’d have a case against him, all right, and we would have to admit it. We’re honest. Have to be. The elders know it.”

  Enni made vague waving gestures, and they interpreted the motion correctly and fell silent to let her think. After a pause, she said, tears trembling in her eyes, “But Jaroslav, what can we do?”

  “There’s only one thing to be done,” said Jaroslav brutally. “Get you out of the elders’ reach.”

  “How? There’s nowhere I could go without people asking questions, and the news would get back –”

  “Nowhere on Ymir,” said Jaroslav. “But you’ve often said you wanted to see other worlds, Enni. Here’s your chance. The Amsterdam is due to lift in two hours. You’ll have to be aboard.”

  Enni’s eyes grew suddenly round and wide with horror. “I couldn’t” she whispered. “I just couldn’t.”

  “You’ll have to,” said Jaroslav. “Either you go, or you wait until the elders send a custodian around to fetch you. They’ll whip the skin off your back to start with. If you still don’t tell them what they want to hear, they’ll put salt on the cuts. After that, they’ll hang you head first over a barrel of ice water and duck you until you’re blue. You’ve seen heretics on trial – you know what would happen.”

  She knew. She had taken the fifteen-year-old’s classes in citzenship. She had seen the solemn men and women in black attending to heretics and backsliders, while the children were urged to sing louder and drown the victims’ cries. There was fear enough to drive a thousand to flight.

  Urging her the same way were a host of memories of what she had learned from Jaroslav; her own longing to walk under a warm and grateful sun set in a clear blue sky, to move unencumbered by the Ymiran garments which now were like an oven on her body. If she had been alone with Jaroslav, she would have felt sufficiently unself-conscious to take some of them off; Ymiran conditioning, though, still hung so heavily on her that she could not think of removing even her outermost parka in the presence of a total stranger.

  And Ymir was with her in other ways too. There was more than the fear; there were the threats and the promises. In the back of her mind a small voice was whispering that maybe a beating from the elders was compensation for her guilt in lying to her parents, in visiting the proscribed Jaroslav. Maybe this was her just due, which would have to be borne in silence and even joy so that she could be cleansed and receive a second chance.

  The stern, righteous men leaped up behind her closed eyelids, to glare at her accusingly. They had sought her out and discovered her wickedness–

  But Leeuwenhoek had said these just, upright persons were reputed the finest liars in the galaxy. She opened her eyes again and gave the spaceman a puzzled look. He seemed, he sounded like, a decent man. It was hard to believe that he would lie.

  The indecision made Enni’s mind whirl; the heat was overpowering. A spasm of giddiness blurred her vision. She put her hand to her face and then tried to seize a support to stop herself from falling .

  She did not become completely unconscious until she had measured her length on the floor. It was for this reason that she was able to hear Jaroslav say in a satisfied tone, “Good. She’s fainted.”

  But she had no time to be properly astonished at this remark before blackness swamped her mind.

  “Are you all right now?”

  It was a woman’s voice, deep and anxious. Enni listened to it with puzzlement because it was not quite right. The words were oddly accented, but nonetheless in a familiar way.

  Of course. Leeuwenhoek, and some of the other spacemen she had met at Jaroslav’s, spoke with such an accent, distinct from the Ymiran one. She turned her head from contemplating the plain white ceiling, and saw a brown-haired woman at the side of the bed.

  “Are you Mrs. Leeuwenhoek?” she asked.

  “No, I’m the ship’s doctor,” the woman answered with a smile. She wore white coveralls and there were shiny metal instruments showing from her pockets. “You must be recovered now; that’s the first question you
’ve asked.”

  Enni pondered. She was in a bed softer than her own, and the air was so warm she had nothing over her except a single coverlet. She felt amazingly free and unrestrained. Inspection told her that this was due to having no clothes on.

  The coverlet came all the way to her shoulders, and the doctor was a woman; nonetheless, Enni felt herself going scarlet.

  “Do you know where you are?” the doctor asked gently.

  Enni nodded. She knew. Somewhere in the immediate past was the strangest, most confused memory of her young life. Black, menacing figures had started up at her from every corner; she had tried wildly to run from them, to strike at them and beat them down. Some of them had held whips. The heat had been feverish and intolerable, and she had not been able to eat or drink for fear the food or water might be poisoned. But out of the confusion certain things had become clear to her. That she was aboard a ship; that the ship was taking her away from the horrors lurking in wait on Ymir; and her thinking was as clear as spring water.

  “What really happened?” she whispered.

  “First of all you fainted in Jaroslav Dubin’s house. When Captain Leeuwenhoek brought you aboard, you were still unconscious; then it turned out that you’d picked up a fever. You’ve been in a coma for four days and nights. But that’s all over now.”

  The doctor slapped the edge of the bed reassuringly and got to her feet. “You’ll feel a bit weak for the moment, but we’ll feed you up and make you better than new.”

  She hesitated, looking down at the pale-faced girl in the bed. “Enni, how do you feel about – about what’s happened to you?”

  “About coming away from Ymir, do you mean?” Enni asked with composure. “I don’t quite know. I feel I ought to be terribly scared, only I’m not.”

  “That’s because we gave you some tranquilizer shots while you were ill. They’ll wear off.”