He had witnessed the worst catastrophe ever to befall his people and their city, and the memory of it would be etched into his brain until he died. The glider that should not have been there, the white one, rose with insolence to confront the king, and something spat from it like lightning in a clear sky. One second later the king—he who had been aerial majesty, wisdom, and doom incarnate—was a blistered, tumbling hulk shorn of a wing, falling like a wounded god toward the pit of a volcano straight below.
And Belfeor, the upstart stranger, the intruder from the south without reverence for the gods, had made himself legal lord of Carrig.
The pay was the highest in history, because you were paid in life. But because the rewards were so high, the conditions were stringent. In other branches of government service you could earn on a four-for-one basis, or six-for-one, or even seven-for-one. Only in the Corps Galactia was pay on a ten-for-one scale. Straightforwardly, for every year you spent in the Corps, you would be
guaranteed
ten healthy, youthful years of extra life.
If you survived to claim your due.
And if you had a use to put them to.
And, above all, if you and the Corps got along. Tie minimum service contract was ten years, and if you quit—or were thrown out—before those ten years were up, you had lost your chance for good. Nobody got a second try at any career that paid off in longevity treatment.
Maddalena Santos thought of this fact, sitting alone in the anteroom of the commandant’s suite, and was suddenly afraid. She was twenty-five years old. She had just begun to realize what life could mean—what a
lifetime
could mean. And she feared that she had thoughtlessly found out how to throw her chance of it away.
It was never cold under the dome on this airless world—airless like all Corps bases, so that hyperphotonic ships could come out of subspace almost on its surface—but Maddalena felt herself shivering. There were so few things that a call to the commandant’s office could mean, and they were practically all bad. Especially since a ship had just docked after a long tour on frontier patrol and was scheduled to head from here to Earth, presumably for a change of crew and a refit. That was the way failed corpsmen went out: back to Earth, or wherever they hailed from originally. Not many of them were from Earth nowadays.
And there was part of her trouble.
She closed her hands convulsively on the arms of the big chair she sat in and her lips moved silently. They formed
words which might have been, “I didn’t mean to behave like that!”
Maybe not … But people too often did things they didn’t mean.
Looking back, she saw that coming fresh from Earth’s most famous university, proud as all space of her diplomas and degrees, she must have appeared arrogant and cocky to those more experienced corpsmen she found herself working with. She just didn’t react to them as genuine corpsmen; that was it. It was too far a cry from the glamorous ideal to the hardbitten, weary, unromantic reality. Subconsciously she found herself looking on her companions as ignorant colonials, while she was a sophisticated product of Earth itself.
Obviously, the Earthside way to do things was the best way. Maddalena knew the Earthside way. This made her superior. It said here!
It took almost a year for her to realize how much she was disliked. With some people it was nearer hate than dislike. And six months beyond that—up till now—to figure out why. She had just got there. She was just learning to feel ashamed of herself, learning to writhe at the memory of her own voice raised as it had been a hundred times in complaint, complaint, complaint!
“There’s never any fun around here! You can’t think about the work clear around the clock! I never needed to feel bored on Earth—there was always something to do, something new and exciting!”
Or if it wasn’t over the monotony, it was about the food, or the standardized accommodation, or the smell of the ventilator current, or the incompetent way she thought someone else was handling what was none of her business.
A multipanel was set into each of the walls of the anteroom. She reached for the controls of the nearest and switched to the mirror adjustment. Her face felt hot, And sure enough, when she looked at her reflection, she was blushing with embarrassment at her own past stupidity. It wasn’t long since blushing in itself would have horrified her. Currently it seemed like a pretty good sign. Like a fever indicating that her body’s defenses were fighting for her.
Another point occurred to her as she studied herself. Maybe she’d cared too much about this face and body of hers. Out here on a Corps base, two parsecs from a civilized planet, a body was a vehicle for getting a mind from place to place. The mind was what counted. It was man’s only weapon of last resort against the universe. What she wanted, what she needed to do was to start regarding the good looks that had come with her body as a bonus, not as the important part.
Of course … they were a substantial bonus. She tilted her head a trifle to one side. The blush had gone, leaving her skin as usual: flawless, lightly tanned, with a hint of olive beneath. Her eyes were large and dark and the long lashes were natural. Her glossy black hair was cropped short (she’d complained about that toot), because hair more than one inch long might get trapped in the sealing-ring of a space helmet when suiting up for an emergency; but that merely emphasized how beautifully shaped her oval head was. A student of preatomic art she had known in college had compared it to a form by Brancusi. Her shoulders sloped a little; her waist was small, and her legs were inches longer than they should have been in proportion to her trunk, giving her a look of tall fragility.
She was tired as hell of that fragile look, she realized abruptly. She was probably conditioned by it herself—the exquisite product of Earth, too fine to rub shoulders with these gross colonials!
And thanks to that idiotic subconscious assumption, the chances were good that she had thrown away a century of much-coveted extra life.
A voice spoke out of the wall close at hand. “Probationer Santos to the commandant’s office now, please!”
Automatically she got to her feet. She was thinking:
Probationer!
That had rankled too. She had expected to be confirmed as most people were in lieutenant’s rank after a year; when she was not she had gone around complaining and saying it wasn’t because she couldn’t cope with her work, it was because people didn’t like her. Not believing what she said. Speaking from malice.
But it was then, of course, that someone finally lost his temper and told her how right she was, and she realized
with horror and dismay that being liked
was
part of her job and moreover the part she couldn’t manage. That was the beginning of her real education.
More than likely, this was the end now.
She walked through the autodoor of the commandant’s office as smartly as she could, but when she announced herself she heard her voice shaking a little. Commandant Brzeska took no notice, but neutrally told her to sit down. She obeyed, thinking:
He isn’t alone—I wonder if that’s a good sign or a bad one.
She knew the man who was sitting beside the commandant, but only by sight. He was a tired-faced man with prematurely gray hair which had presumably turned color while he was on patrol out of reach of longevity treatments. It was his ship which had docked here yesterday. Her first hopeful reaction turned sour as she remembered the likely corollary of this.
And yet—would Brzeska tell her she was through in the presence of a stranger?
There was a silence while the patrolman looked her up and down. His gaze was uncomfortably penetrating, as though he could judge her personality from outward appearances. At length he turned to the commandant and raised one eyebrow inquiringly; Brzeska nodded and spoke.
“Santos, this is Patrol Major Langenschmidt.”
Maddalena forced a smile of acknowledgment and waited for him to continue. He seemed to have difficulty choosing words; it was perhaps as much as half a minute before he plunged ahead.
“Well, Santos! I’m going to say what I have to say in front of Major Langenschmidt because it’s only fair that he should hear it I don’t imagine I have to tell you now that you’re by far the most cordially detested person who has ever been stationed here, under my command or anybody else’s.
Do
you realize that?”
With all the spirit she could muster, Maddalena said, “I’ve known for some time. I’ve been doing my best to rectify it.”
“Glad to hear you say so,” Brzeska countered caustically. “So far I haven’t noticed much success. In fact—look at this.”
He picked up a report form from the desk before him and held it out to her. She took it numbly, and read:
“In view of her congenital inability to cooperate with more experienced corpsmen, and her indomitable conceit, Probationer Santos appears wholly unsuitable as career material.”
She went on staring at the words long after they had blurred unreadably.
“All right, give it back,” Brzeska said, took the form, and crumpled it in his hand. Tossing it into the disposer where it vanished with a puff of heat, he leaned back.
“That was the report I planned to send to Earth on the major’s ship, and you along with it. You realize the implications?”
Do you have to torture me?
But Maddalena’s mouth was too dry to utter the words aloud; she could merely nod.
“Hrmph! But in fact you’ve had a reprieve. According to your documents, which I’ve studied pretty frequently—as often as I found myself wondering why you were selected for Corps service in the first place, and you can imagine how often
that
must be!—you have a good aptitude for languages, right? And in college your chief leisure activity was face-to-face dramatics: acting, as it used to be called?”
Maddalena nodded again.
“Half your trouble, it seems to me,” Brzeska sighed, “is due to dramatizing yourself above your real place in the scheme of things. Well, thanks to our current shortage of spare operatives a chance has arisen for you to see whether these talents of yours really entitle you to the status you seem to think is yours by right.” He turned to Langenschmidt. “Tell her about it, Gus.”
The major hesitated. “You presumably know the Patrol’s main job in this sector,” he suggested.
Do you think I’m completely ignorant?
The words rose angrily to Maddalena’s lips, but she bit them back with an effort. She said, “You’re mainly mapping the planets where the refugees from Zarathustra wound up, and planting and collecting agents on the worlds which are still isolated from contact with the rest of the Galactic community.”
“Correct. Well, we’ve heard nothing from one of our most valuable on-planet agents for very nearly two years
now. According to rumors relayed by our other agents there, he’s dead, nobody knows quite how. In general this would be nothing worse than a damned nuisance—it’s a backward world in most respects, and things don’t change greatly from generation to generation. However, something very odd indeed is happening in one of the cities that used to be included in the dead agent’s beat. There may have been some crucial technological breakthrough, leading to a cultural upheaval, or maybe there’s been a revolution, or some conqueror has seized power. We can’t tell. All we hear is at third-hand or worse, muddled by word-of-mouth transmission and exaggerated into nonsense. It’ll take us a year or two to build up a good cover for a new permanent agent covering the same beat, and a year or two might be a dangerously long time. I put it to the commandant here and he agrees with me.”
“So, Santos,” Brzeska rumbled, “you being the only operative I can cheerfully spare, I’m offering you a choice. I appreciate it has offended your sensitive soul to be forced into the company of us rough backwoodsmen here, so it’ll be quite in character for you to refuse the assignment—after all, on the world we’re talking about, people are not just uncouth but unwashed, not just unsophisticated but uncivilized.”
Under the lash of the commandant’s sarcasm Maddalena felt herself trembling. It took all her willpower to bear in mind that she deserved to be talked to like this after the way she had behaved since her arrival.
“Naturally,” Brzeska continued, “if you do refuse, I’ll rewrite my report in the same terms as before and this time I won’t throw it away. I’ll send it, and you, to Earth. And you will be out one century’s pay.”
“Permanently,” Maddalena said. She hadn’t intended to speak.
“Permanently,” Brzeska confirmed.
While the commandant was speaking, Langenschmidt had been looking worried. Now he said in a doubtful tone, “Pavel, you’ve used some pretty strong terms about Probationer Santos. I know you well enough to realize you must have good reasons. But if this is the way things stand, maybe it wasn’t a good idea in the first place. An—uh—an
inadequate agent would be worse than no agent at all in a spot like this.”
Maddalena took a deep breath. “Major,” she said, “when I came here a year and a half ago I was a conceited little fool. I thought that because I was Earthborn I knew all about everything. I realize that now—fully. I’ll take any chance at all to make up for my own stupidity. I can’t do more than my best, but I don’t think the people who passed me for Corps service can be completely wrong. If there’s anything useful in me I’m determined to find it, and right now I’ll take the hardest job I can get—in space, on a planet, anywhere.”
“You do realize,” Langenschmidt murmured, not looking at her but down at his own big-knuckled hands, “that you stand a good chance of being out not merely your century of extra life, but what remains of your natural span as well? Things are pretty rough on the Zarathustra Refugee Planets.”
“If I turn down the assignment, I’m going to have to go through the rest of my
natural span
feeling miserably ashamed of myself, arent I? So that’s not likely to deter me.”
Brzeska gave a stifled snort. “Santos, you’re overdramatizing yourself again,” he sighed. “There was a legend they used to have, I believe, back in the days when people acted face-to-face as professional entertainers, which always concerned some young unknown player becoming famous when the most important player was taken ill and he or she had to step into the main role. You’re not being chosen for some glamorous part, understood? You’re a stopgap. Your job is to go to a certain place and find out what’s happening,
nothing else.
The fewer people who’ve heard of your existence when you leave that planet, the better we’ll be pleased. You’re not going to be famous and there won’t be any glamour. Is that clear?”
“I understand,” Maddalena said stiffly.