The second shift of the working day was just beginning, and already it was clear to Birdie Kelly that it was going to be a bad one. The new supervisor might still be half a world away on Starside, but already the boss was brooding over the man's impending arrival.
"How can someone who has never even visited this system be competent to control travel between Opal and Quake?" Max Perry stared at Birdie with pale, unhappy eyes. Birdie looked back, saw the starved jut of Perry's jaw, and thought how much good it would do if the other man could just eat a square meal and relax for a day or two.
"Quake traffic is our job," Perry went on. "We've been doing it for six years. How much does this Rebka, a total stranger, know about that? Not a thing. Do they think at Circle headquarters that there's nothing to it, and any idiot can understand Quake? We know the importance of forbidding access to Quake. Especially now, with Summertide almost here. But do they know it?"
Birdie listened to Max Perry's stream of complaints and nodded sympathetically. One thing was sure: Perry was a good man and a conscientious boss, but he had his obsessions. And Captain Hans Rebka, whoever he might be, was sure going to make Birdie's own life more difficult.
Birdie sighed and leaned back in his wicker chair. Perry's office stood on the top floor of Opal's highest Quakeside building, a four-story experimental structure that had been built to Perry's own specifications. Birdie Kelly still felt uncomfortable inside it. The foundation extended down through layers of mud and a tangle of dead and living roots, right on past the lower basement of the Sling to the brackish waters of Opal's ocean. It was buoyed by a hollow chamber just below the surface, and the hydrostatic lift from there carried most of the load.
Even such a low building did not feel safe to Birdie. The Slings were delicate; without firm foundations, most buildings on Opal were held to one or two stories. For the past six months this Sling had been tethered in one spot, but as Summertide approached that would be too dangerous. Perry had ordered that in eight more days the Sling should be released to move at the mercy of the tides—but was that soon enough?
The communicator sounded. Max Perry ignored it. He was leaning back in his reclining chair, staring up at the ceiling. Birdie rubbed at his threadbare white jacket, leaned forward, and read the crude display.
He sniffed. It was not a message likely to put Max Perry in a better mood.
"Captain Rebka is closer than we thought, sir," he said. "In fact, he left Starside hours ago. His aircar should be ready to land in a few minutes."
"Thanks, Birdie." Perry did not move. "Ask the Slingline to keep us posted."
"I'll do that, Commander." Kelly knew he had been dismissed, but he ignored it. "Before Captain Rebka gets here you should take a look at these, sir. As soon as you can."
Kelly laid a folder on the plaited-reed tabletop that lay between them, sat back, and waited. Max Perry could not be rushed in his current mood.
The ceiling of the room was transparent, looking directly up into Opal's normally cloudy skies. The location had been carefully chosen. It was close to the center of Quakeside, in a region where atmospheric circulation patterns increased the chance of clear patches. At the moment there was a brief predusk break in the overcast, and Quake was visible. With its surface only twelve thousand kilometers from the closest point of Opal, the parched sphere filled more than thirty-five degrees of the sky like a great, mottled fruit, purple-gray and overripe, poised ready to fall. From that distance it appeared peaceful, but already the dusky limb of the planet showed the softening of edges that spoke of rising dust storms.
Summertide was just thirty-six days away, less than two standard weeks. In ten days' time Perry would order the evacuation from Quake's surface, then monitor that evacuation personally. In every exodus for the past six years he had been the last man or woman to leave Quake, and the first to return after Summertide.
It was a compulsion with Perry. And regardless of what Rebka might want, Birdie Kelly knew that Max Perry would try to keep it that way.
Already night was advancing on the surface of Opal. Its dark shadow would soon create the brief false-night of Mandel eclipse on Quake. But Perry and Kelly would not be able to see that. The break in the overcast was closing, eaten away by swirls of rapidly moving cloud. There was a final flash of silver from far above, light reflected from the glittering knot of Midway Station and the lower part of the Umbilical; then Quake faded rapidly from view. Minutes later the roof above their heads showed the starred patterns of the first raindrops.
Perry sighed, leaned forward, and picked up the folders. Kelly knew that the other man had registered his earlier words without really hearing them. But Perry knew that if his right-hand man said he ought to look at the folder at once, there was a good reason for it.
The green covering held three long message summaries, each one a request for a visit to the surface of Quake. There was nothing very unusual in that. Birdie had been ready to give routine approval pending examination of travel plans—until he saw the source of the requests. Then he knew that Perry had to see them and would want to study them in detail.
The communicator buzzed again as Perry began to concentrate on the contents of the folder. Birdie Kelly took one look at the new message and quietly left the room. Rebka was arriving, but Perry did not need to be on the airstrip to welcome him. Birdie could do that. Perry had quite enough to worry about with the visit requests. Every one had come from outside the Dobelle system—outside, in fact, the worlds of the Phemus Circle. One was from the Fourth Alliance, one from a remote region of the Zardalu Communion, so far away that Birdie Kelly had never heard of it; and one, oddest of all, had been sent by the Cecropia Federation. That was unprecedented. So far as Birdie knew, no Cecropian had ever come within light-years of Dobelle.
Stranger yet, every visitor wanted to be on the surface of Quake at Summertide.
When Birdie Kelly returned he did something that he reserved for emergencies. He knocked on the door before he came in. The action guaranteed Perry's instant attention.
Kelly was holding yet another folder, and he was not alone. Behind him stood a thin, poorly dressed man who stared about with bright dark-brown eyes and was apparently more interested in the room's meager and tattered furnishings than in Perry himself.
His first words seemed to bear out that idea. "Commander Perry, I am pleased to meet you. I am Hans Rebka. I know that Opal is not a rich planet. But your position here would surely justify something better than this."
Perry put down the folder and followed the other man's inquisitive eyes as they surveyed the room. It was a sleeping chamber as well as an office. It held no more than a bed, three chairs, a table, and a desk, all battered and well used.
Perry shurgged. "I have simple needs. This is more than enough."
The newcomer smiled. "I agree. All men and women would not."
Regardless of whatever other feelings his smile might hide, part of Rebka's approval was quite genuine. In the first ten seconds with Max Perry he was able to dispose of one idea that had come to him after reading the other's history. Even the poorest planet could provide great luxury for one person, and some men and women would stay on a planet because they had found wealth and high living there, with no way to export it. But whatever Perry's secret, that could not be it. He lived as simply as Rebka himself.
Power, then?
Hardly. Perry controlled access to Quake, and little else. Permits for offworld visitors went through him, but anyone with real clout could appeal to a higher authority in the Dobelle system council.
So what was the driving force? There had to be one; there always was. But what was it?
During the official introductions and the exchange of meaningless courtesies on behalf of the government of Opal and the General Coordinators' office for the Phemus Circle, Rebka turned his attention to Perry himself.
He did it with real interest. He would rather be exploring Paradox, but despite his contempt for the new assignment he could not turn off his curiosity. The contrast between Perry's early history and his present position was just too striking. By the time Perry was twenty years old he had been a section coordinator in one of the roughest environments the Circle could offer. He had been subtle in handling problems, and yet he had been tough. The final assignment for one year to Opal was almost a formality, the last tempering of the metal before Perry was judged ready for work in the Coordinators' office.
He had come. And he had stuck. In one dead end job for all those years, unwilling to leave, lacking all his old drive. Why?
The man himself gave no clue as to the source of the problem. He was pale-faced and intense, but Rebka could see as much pallor and intensity just by looking in the mirror. They had both spent their early years on planets where survival was an achievement and thriving was impossible. The prominent goiter in Perry's neck spoke of a world where iodine was in short supply, and the thin, slightly crooked legs suggested an early case of rickets. Scaldworld's tolerance of plant life was grudging. At the same time Perry appeared in excellent health—something that Rebka could and would check in due course. But physical well-being only made it clearer that there must be mental problems. They would be harder to examine.
The inspection was not one-sided. While the formal exchanges of government greetings were taking place, Rebka knew that Perry was making his own assessment.
Did he hope that the new supervisor would be a man burned out from previous service or excesses, or perhaps some lazy pensioner? The Circle government had its share of people looking for sinecures, idlers willing to let Perry and others like him run the operation any way they wanted to, provided that the boss was not asked to do any work.
Apparently Perry wanted to find out whom he was dealing with and would waste no time in doing so, for as soon as the final courtesies had been exchanged he asked Kelly to leave and gestured Rebka to one of the chairs. "I assume that you will take up your duties here very soon, Captain?"
"More than soon, Commander. My duties on Opal and Quake have begun. I was told that they commenced at the moment the ship touched down on Starside Port."
"Good." Perry held out the green folder plus the fourth and latest document that Kelly had handed to him. "I was in the middle of reviewing these. I would appreciate it if you would take a look and give me your opinion."
In other words, let me see how smart you are. Rebka took the documents and skimmed them in silence for a minute or two. He was not sure what the test was, but he did not want to fail it. "These all appear to be in the correct official format," he said at last.
"You see nothing unusual in them at all?"
"Well, perhaps in the diversity of the applicants. Do you often have visit requests from outside the Dobelle system?"
"Very seldom." Perry was nodding in grudging respect. "Now we get four requests, Captain, in one day. All want to visit Opal and Quake. Individuals from the three major groups, plus a member of an Alliance council. Do you know how many visitors a year we usually get to Dobelle? Maybe fifty—and they all come from our people, worlds in the Phemus Circle. And nobody ever wants to go to Quake."
Max Perry picked up the folder again. Apparently Rebka had met some initial acceptance criterion, because Perry's manner had lost a little of its stiffness. "Look at this one. It's from a Cecropian, for God's sake. No one on Dobelle has ever seen a live Cecropian. I haven't seen one myself. No one here knows how to communicate with one."
"Don't worry about that." Rebka focused again on the sheets in front of him. "She'll have her own interpreter. But you're right. If you get only fifty a year, four in a day is way outside statistical limits." And you haven't said it to me, he thought, but as far as you're concerned it's five in a day, isn't it? These requests arrived at the same time I did. So as far as you are concerned, I'm just another outsider. "So what do they all want, Commander? I didn't read their reasons."
"Different things. This one"—Perry poked at the page with an emaciated finger "—just came in. Did you ever hear of a man called Julius Graves? He represents the Fourth Alliance Ethical Council, and according to this he wants to come to Opal to investigate a case of multiple murder, somehow involving twins from Shasta."
"Rich world, Shasta. A long way from Dobelle, in more ways than one."
"But if he wants to, according to the way I read the regulations, he can overrule anything that we say locally."
"Overrule us, or anyone else on Dobelle." Rebka took the document from Perry. "I never heard of Julius Graves, but the ethical councils carry the weight of all the groups. He'll be a hard man to argue with."
"And he doesn't say why he's coming here!"
"He doesn't have to." Rebka looked again at the application. "In his case, this request is a formality. If he wants to come, no one can stop him. What about the others, though? Why do they want to go to Quake?"
"Atvar H'sial—that's the Cecropian—says her specialty is the evolution of organisms under extreme environmental stress. Quake certainly qualifies. She says she wants to go there and see how the native life-forms adapt during Summertide."
"She's traveling alone?"
"No. With someone or something called J'merlia. A Lo'tfian."
"Okay, that'll be her interpreter. The Lo'tfians are another life-form from the Cecropia Federation. Who else?"
"Another female, Darya Lang from the Fourth Alliance."
"Human?"
"I assume so. She claims to be interested in seeing Builder artifacts."
"I thought there was only one in the Dobelle system."
"There is. The Umbilical. Darya Lang wants to take a look at it."
"She doesn't have to go down to Quake to do that."
"She says she wants to see how the Umbilical is tethered at the Quake end. She has a point there. No one has ever understood how the Builders arranged for its retraction to space at Summertide. Her story is plausible. Believe it if you want to."
Perry's tone of voice made it clear that he did not. It occurred to Rebka that they had at least one thing in common—their cynicism.
"And then there's Louis Nenda," Perry went on. "From the Zardalu Communion. When did you last hear from them?"
"When they had their last skirmish with the Alliance. What's he say he wants?"
"He doesn't bother to tell us in detail, but it's something about being interested in studying new physical forces. He wants to investigate the land tides on Quake during Summertide. And then there's a footnote, talking about the theory of the stability of biospheres, as it applies to Quake and Opal. Oh, and Nenda has a Hymenopt along with him, as a pet. That's another first. The only Hymenopts anyone has ever seen on Opal are stuffed ones in the Species Museum. Add them all up, Captain, and what do you get?"
Rebka did not answer that. Unless all the records on Perry were false, there was a subtle, flexible intelligence hiding behind those pale, mournful eyes. Rebka did not believe for a moment that Perry was asking advice because he thought he needed it. He was feeling out Rebka himself, probing the other man's intuition and sense of balance.
"When do they request arrival?"
"According to this, Darya Lang cleared the last Bose Node three days ago. That means she's on final subluminal approach to Starside Port. Landing request could come anytime. The rest of them are maybe a few days away."
"What do you recommend we do?"
"I'll tell you what I recommend we don't do." For the first time, emotion appeared on Max Perry's thin face. "We can let them visit Opal—though that's going to be no joke this Summertide—but we don't, under any circumstances, let them set foot on Quake."
Which means, Rebka thought, that my instinct back on Starside was spot on. If I'm going to find out what keeps Max Perry on Dobelle, I'll probably have to do exactly that: visit Quake, at Summertide. Well, what the hell. It can't be any more dangerous than the descent into Paradox. But let's test things here a little bit more before we jump too far.
"I'm not convinced of what you say," he replied, and watched apprehension flicker in Perry's pale eyes. "People are coming a long way to see Quake. They'll be willing to pay Dobelle a lot for the privilege, and this system needs all the credit it can get. Before we deny access, I want to talk at least to Darya Lang. And I think I may need to see the surface of Quake close to Summertide for myself—soon."
Quake close to Summertide. At those words another expression appeared on Max Perry's face. Sorrow. Guilt. Even longing? It could be any of them. Rebka wished he knew the other man better. Perry's countenance surely revealed the answers to a hundred questions—to someone who knew how to read it.