2 
2
As a section of the wall opened, Joktar felt the warning twinge of a vibrator. The captives would leave, all right, or twist in agony. He got to his feet, stooped to shake Haggy. The barman moaned, opened bleared eyes which became terror-stricken as he grew aware of his surroundings. Lurching free of Joktar’s hold, he staggered to the door. The dealer followed, to be caught up in the web of a tangle-field. He could still walk, in fact he had to, since he was being drawn down a brightly lighted corridor, but otherwise he could not raise a finger.
The E-men had all the props. But then, why shouldn’t they? The Galactic Council was solidly behind this emigration policy which worked two ways. First it got rid of the drifters and those outside the law on the civilized worlds, and second, it helped to open new planets. Thus both problems were settled to the satisfaction of all but the victims, who had no political power anyway.
Haggy had passed through another door ahead; now it was Joktar’s turn. The barman was in the process of stripping off his gaudy clothing under the supervision of a bored medic.
“All right, you there,” the same man spoke to Joktar, “strip.”
Joktar regarded him mutinously. They had relaxed the tangle-field, but if he tried to jump the medic, they would slap it on again and they could tighten those lines of invisible energy to choke the breath out of a man’s lungs. No use fighting when there wasn’t the smallest chance to win. He dropped his jacket, unwound his belt sash. No chance to palm anything since they must have a spy-spot on him. But, as his shirt followed his jacket, the dealer’s hand went to the disc hanging on a chain about his throat.
“Hand that over, you!” the medic was alert.
For the first time since the momentary panic upon his awakening in the pens, Joktar’s control came close to snapping. He stood breathing a little raggedly. The medic clasped one hand into a fist and Joktar staggered, bit his lip against an answering cry. That vicious squeeze of the tangle was a warning. He tossed the disc to the medic, who allowed it to fall to the floor and kicked it away spinning.
So he was processed after Haggy, run through the examination machines, his brain busy with escape plans as impossible as they were fleeting. Then, wearing a coverall of coarse red stuff, vividly visible, he was steered into a cell with five others, all strangers.
They were fed from mess kits slid through a wall panel. And there was little talk among them. These were all young, Joktar noted, but of the drifter class, spineless hangers-on such as could be picked up by the hundred in the streets. He squatted back on a bench, the mess tin on his knee.
“Hey!” one of his cellmates sidled down the bench. “You worked for Kern, didn’t you?” There was a malicious twist to his half-grin. The gap between his sort and a man who was employed in one of the big spots was an ocean wide.
“Me, I usta run for Lafty ’fore he got wiped off the books,” he added in a spurt of half-defiance. “Saw you in the SunSpot layin’ ’em out. Think Kern’ll unpocket for you now?” His grin grew wider.
Joktar shrugged, chewing methodically at the tasteless mess on his plate.
“Kern got wiped proper,” one of the others raised his head to sputter through a full mouth. “Saw four—five of his men being run through here.”
That could be true. Though how such a coup could have been managed with runners and spotters planted to prevent just such a catastrophe Joktar did not understand. This report dimmed his one small hope of rescue. Kern himself might be in the pens now. Who was behind it, Norwold?
“Anybody heard where they’re fixing to send us?” The thin voice shook a little.
“Ship in port bound for Avar,” volunteered the ex-runner.
“Yeah? What’s Avar, anybody know?” another of the captives asked.
“Field work,” someone answered, but he didn’t sound too convincing and Joktar was sure that was a guess. Perhaps because field work could be preferred over labor in a mine.
The ex-runner gave a laugh which was close to a snarl. “Don’t matter much, burnout—you goes where you is sent. No pickin’ or choosin’. You ain’t no colonist. When you lands here your luck is out anyway.”
That was only too true. Someone sighed and Joktar finished the last of his food.
“They freezes you, don’t they?” the quavering voice asked.
“Sure thing,” the ex-runner responded with a ghoulish relish. “No room in an E-ship to have you sittin’ round eatin’ your fat head off. Stick some needles full of goop in a fella, make him stiff as a board, and bed him down in a hold. He’ll keep ’til you get planetside again.”
“Only I heard as some don’t make it to wake up again.”
The ex-runner leaned forward on the bench. “Sure, a man’s luck may be run out all the way. They gets enough of ’em through to make a trip pay. Maybe them machines they had us in and out of tell ’em which can make the big jump and live.”
“Hey!” One of the others started away from the wall. “I hear someone comin’! Maybe they’ll run us out now.”
Joktar was on his feet, his mess tin held as if that could serve him in place of his lost force blade. The ex-runner laughed.
“Fixin’ for a rumble, kid? You ain’t got a chance. Every guard in here carries a tangle. Me, I’d take what they dish out peaceable. No use askin’ to be worked over just to prove how big and brave you are.”
He was right, but Joktar resented that rightness. His own helplessness was a frightening thing. He had believed he was tough and independent. But he began to realize now that there had always been Kern and the SunSpot between him and the full rawness of the streets. Now he was really alone and he needed time to adjust. He put the tin plate on the bench, seated himself beside it. And the ex-runner, reading his face with the shrewdness of his kind, stopped grinning.
A guard stood in an open panel, surveying them with contempt. His glance fastened on Joktar and he beckoned. The hope which had died a few moments earlier revived. Kern, buying him out? Joktar shoved past the ex-runner, only too willing to obey that summons. The familiar strangle of the tangle fell about him and his spark of hope flickered.
Two more guards closed in at the end of the corridor and one of them spoke to the man escorting the captive.
“Gentlehomo Ericksen wants you at the front office. We’re to hold this one until later.”
“Why the change?”
“Spaceport police want to ask him some questions.”
Spaceport police? Joktar was bewildered. Was this some move of Kern’s? The boss had his contacts in the port control, all vips did. But, as the first guard left, the tangle caught with a painful grip about his middle.
“Get going, you!”
The pace they set was close to a run and Joktar sweated, his first uneasiness growing close to fear. These guards had a furtive air, as if they were acting beyond their orders. Yet their attitude toward him did not suggest they were in Kern’s pay.
His puzzlement grew as he was hustled into a small room to front a man in the uniform of the port police as well as a young man wearing a tunic Joktar had not seen before. The regular space patrol went in dark blue, this man’s garb was silver-gray and sported a badge bearing a glittering constellation, instead of the comet and circle of stars. Joktar blinked. Somewhere—perhaps in that portion of his brain which had been blocked so long ago—a small prick of warning flashed, then spread. He knew that this stranger spelled a deadly danger out of all proportion to their present meeting.
Then he glimpsed what the strange officer was holding and sucked in his breath. The disc he had been forced to abandon in the examination room swung from its chain gripped between the other’s forefinger and thumb. Above it the man’s face was stark with anger. Yet Joktar was sure he had never seen the other before.
“Well, Gentlehomo,” the policeman spoke first, “this one of the scum who jumped you and your friend?”
“If he isn’t, he knows them! This proves it, doesn’t it? How else would a burnout from the streets get a scout’s ident? You—” he added two descriptive expressions which flattened Joktar’s lips against his teeth in a tight snarl. Then the dealer rocked under a blow across his face.
“Well? Speak up! Where did you get this ident?” In its way, the policeman’s reasonable tone was as deadly as the open brutality of the officer’s attack.
“I’ve always had it.” Joktar was startled into the direct truth and knew that they would never believe him.
One of the guards who had brought him there spoke hurriedly:
“Look here, we’ll have to make this quick. They’ve ordered him up to the front office. There’s a buy-out waiting.”
The officer in the gray tunic stiffened. “Who’d unpocket for this dirt?” he demanded. “Talk you, and straight on orbit! Who burned down Kender last week? And where did you get his ident, you swine?” He swung the disc as a flail and the metal ripped Joktar’s already bruised cheek.
When he shook his head, as much to combat dizziness as to deny the charge, they really went to work. He was helpless in the tangle and they battered him until at last, he lay on the floor, trying to hold to the ragged edge of consciousness, still bewildered. There was a bustle at the door.
“. . . ordered to get him to the front office. He’s been cleared.”
Cutting across that came a hot protest from the officer. “He’s not going to get away so easy. He’s one of the gang who mugged Kender, and he’s going to pay for it.”
Again the reasonable policeman: “If we hold him legally, we’ll have to have more proof than just that ident-disc. He could have bought that from some stumble-bum for the price of a drink. And how do you know he didn’t?”
“Wouldn’t he have said so? This story about its being his—these things don’t just float around in free-fall, you know. One is given to a man when he swears in, and he doesn’t lose it easy. Kender was dead when they ripped his off. Why this little scum could trade on that ident anywhere, saying he was on detached duty, and live high!”
“But you’ll still have a time proving murder on him.”
“I tell you he isn’t just going to walk out of here!”
There was an amused chuckle from the policeman. “No, you’ve seen to that. The boys’ll have to carry him.”
“Yeah,” the guard sounded morose. “We take him upstairs looking this way and there’ll be a beef blowing us higher than the first Moon base.”
“Look here,” a new voice said. “How about this, we’re loading ’em in the Griffin right this minute. Slip him in with the rest of that bunch and who’ll care afterwards? Just a mistake on somebody’s part. They can’t reach out and grab him out of space, and the front office won’t speak up if there’s likely to be a stink. He can’t do anyone any harm where the Griffin’s going.”
“And where’s that?” demanded the space officer.
“Fenris.”
The name meant nothing to Joktar but he detected an appeased note in the other’s answer.
“Fenris!” The officer laughed. “That should do for him all right. Can you get him out on that ship?”
“If we hurry him through. And what if he doesn’t get all the shots? Who’s going to care if he doesn’t wake up on the other side?”
The last thing Joktar heard was the judicial reply of the policeman: “Seems like you boys have it all figured out. No, I guess no one is going to worry. This whole thing’s off record, remember. And you’ll have to cook up a tale to satisfy your front office. Me, I’m not going to be dragged into any hassle with them.”
They gathered their victim up from the floor and that pushed him over the border of unconsciousness. When he half-aroused again he had been dumped on a flat surface with force enough to set his body aching.
“. . . stupid fools. Bring in this one late . . .” voices ebbed and flowed over him.
“What happened? He looks to me like an accident case.”
“You aren’t paid to ask questions. Probably a fight in one of the pens and this one started it. They hauled him out to keep the peace. We get enough of those.”
Hands were stripping off his coverall. There was a sharp stab of pain, then another. A persistent buzzing, then black and cold—a cold so intense he shriveled, as a man shriveled under a force blade slash.
Joktar did not know or feel when he was rolled from the table into that waiting box with an unhealthy resemblance to a coffin, when the lid of that was made fast in impatient haste with skimped attention to various dials and indicators. A placard was slapped on the top, and the box became one of many in a truck waiting to roll.
Then came the spaceport where the transport waited under the crane projecting from the E-ship’s hatch. The jaws of the crane bit into one box after another and they swung up, over into the maw of the cargo hold, each to be pegged down in a niche from which the cargo would eventually be discharged alive or dead as chance willed it. This would be months later in planet time and half the galaxy away in space. The last box was wedged in, the hatch sealed.
Not too long afterwards, the ship trembled to the push of jets, arose on her tail flames, moved out on course.
In the E-station front office, a man waited with a packet of credit notes. He grew impatient, demanded action, at last made a closed com-call to a number which surprised, irritated, and faintly alarmed the man in whose office he waited.
Another man, also equipped with credits, heard a rumor in the waiting room, confirmed it in two surreptitious and hurried interviews, and left the E-station. He debated the necessity of the return of the credits to their proper owner. And, because he was not foolhardy, he went back to the streets, found a hideout and admitted to the man there that certain plans had gone wrong. The man named Kern was disappointed enough to take several steps in the direction of retrieving his own prestige by a few sharp lessons. But once those orders were given, he forgot the whole affair for a while.
A third man in a small, discreet office received a com-call. As a result five men in widely separated points on Terra found themselves embarking on new assignments and three took off by jet for N’Yok.
Two E-guards were questioned, shipped out for Melwambe Port after being warned that if they talked they were going to be given the same processing they had given others. This was done within the month in spite of their protestations. The service could not stand another scandal, not now when there was an alarming new stirring behind scenes. Both E-guards eventually reached a planet named Blore and within the year one died from pal-pest and the other was killed by his fellows for informing on a gang break.
Another man, in the gray uniform of the scouts, went to a jeweler’s shop in N’Yok the same hour the Griffin lifted. He had an ident-disc forced open. But when he read the name inside he went white under his space brown, remembering certain old stories. He was tempted to drop the disc into the nearest rubbish disposal when he left, but he finally decided to see it destroyed in his ship’s atom-break. On his way back to the port, his pocket was picked. When he discovered his loss he was frightened, thoroughly frightened, for the first time in years.
A councilor, making a wide-flung inspection of frontier planet conditions, was scheduled to visit the second planet of the star, Zeta Lupi, in the Wolf Constellation. The name of that world was Loki and its closest neighbor was Fenris. There were hints of trouble on Fenris.
In an outlaw camp on Fenris, a man challenged the mob boss for a blast out. The man was named Samms and had once been an emigrant, now an escapee from the alibite mines. At present he nursed a long-range plan and the call for a blast out was the second move in it. Because the day was an unusually cold one and his opponent had been running a trap line, Samms was a fraction of a second faster and became the leader of the Kortoski mob that night.
(Report from Hudd and Rusto, N’Yok to B. Morle, redirected to Kronfeld, Director, Colonization Project 308)
Subject was questioned by space scout, disc taken from him, later opened by jeweler. Ident was for Marson, O-S-S-D 451. Scout took disc away from him. Thought subject was responsible for fatal mugging of his partner, Kender, which occurred on streets three weeks ago. Must stress difficulty dealing with E-station. Believe records there purposefully suppressed. Kern also tried to buy-out subject.
(Closed com between Kronfeld and Morle):
Kronfeld: Put men on this space scout. I don’t altogether buy this friend-being-mugged story. Might just be something else. The boys in gray are getting upset all along the line. I want a full report on this scout. Will deal with the E people myself. Forget Kern, he’s out of the picture now.
(Interdepartmental com)
E-S 59641—7/20
From: E-Service Station, N’Yok Port, Irson, Agent in charge
To: Kronfeld, Director, Colonization Project 308
Subject:
Report concerning emigrant, male, age about eighteen, race, Terran, picked up in raid on SunSpot, fourth day of March. This man shipped out on E-ship Griffin, destination planet Fenris for service in alibite mines. Correctly attested “unlawfully employed, unnecessary to the well-being of Terra.” Micro of record attached.
(Closed com, Kronfeld to Morle)
K: Are you sure this is the man? Record from E-people way off on age alone.
M: They omitted some facts turned up in his physical, too. This record was edited. Certainly wrong on age, I have witnesses who can prove that. But if you are right there would be such a difference. They’re working hard to cover up the irregularity in his ship out. But he was the one sent to Fenris all right. What can you do about that?
K: Nothing until he arrives. I’ll alert our agent there. Trouble is that is a critical point just at present. He would land in a place such as that! With luck we may be able to bid him in at the auction. Fenris! It looks as if someone would like to get rid of him just as badly as we want to pull him into the fold. Blast those damn scouts. This was badly muddled straight from the beginning. I hope Thorn and Cullan can roast their tails straight up their spines! Send me everything you can dig up as fast as the boys feed it to you.
(Excerpt from Galactic Guide)
Fenris: Third planet in the system of star Zeta Lupi, Constellation Wolf. With the two other planets in this system, Hel and Loki, it shares a climate and terrain hardly endurable for native Terran stock.
Principle export: alibite and some furs. Traces of earlier native race, now extinct, exist in form of stone work and mounds. Subject to severe storms and nine months of freezing winter weather per solar year. One port: Siwaki. Two towns: Siwaki, Sandi, center of mining territory. Posted by survey as unsuitable for tourist travel. An “A” certificate required from anyone engaging passage to Siwaki.
At another camp, on the other side of a small mountain range, a spaceman who had been cashiered from the service and only recently had been bought out of a labor gang, listened carefully to the man who had put up the credits for his release. Then he talked himself, describing an event in his own past in detail. His benefactor was thus enabled to fit another piece into a very wide and broken puzzle, rounding out a pattern to please the man in the discreet office on Terra.
But the Griffin rode on, snapped into hyper-space, carrying in her cargo the missing element which would influence movements from Terra, to Fenris, to Loki. And an ex-star-and-comet dealer from the streets began the first step towards realizing a bizarre future.