Orkap smiled again. "I am aware of Mayhem's identity," he said, "but I'm
not going to do anything about it."
The pilots waited. The sun glared down balefully. "You see," Orkap told
them, "we cannot be altogether sure that the rest of you are here simply
to earn your twenty credits a flight. Mayhem has unwittingly become our
insurance. Find Mayhem! Find the spy among you! A hundred credits bonus
to the man who does!"
* * * * *
Pandit looked at Sria, who whistled. The girl said: "If they think we
can finish the job without sleep, picking up cargo and flying it to the
spaceport and returning for more, then a hundred credits is probably
more than any of us will earn. They'll all be looking like hawks for
this Mayhem."
"And," Pandit agreed, "if there's a native spy among them, he'd be
afraid to show himself for fear they'll think he's Mayhem. Very clever
of the Denebians."
"... to work at once," Orkap was saying. He wore a blaster on his hip,
the only weapon among them. They all trudged behind him through the
burning, faceless sands. Soon they reached a depression from which the
sand had been cleared, baring the white bedrock of the Empty Places. In
the rock a square opening had been cut, shielded on each side from the
shifting sands by an up-curving lip. A ramp led down into darkness.
"You will find your cargo down there. Also enough trundle-sleds to go
around," Orkap explained. "The cargo is crated. The crates must remain
intact. Is that understood?"
It was understood.
Their sudden mutual suspicion a pall worse than the heat, the Ophiuchans
descended the ramp. They needed the money or they wouldn't be here. The
money meant more to them than anything: this was no time to be
far-sighted. Yet one of them was a spy for the Galactic League--Johnny
Mayhem.
One of them, but which?
Pandit made a quick estimate of the number of crates. They were stacked
neatly against one wall, each about four feet by four by four. And from
the size of them, a single crate would fill the cargo bay of each of the
jets. Pandit made a rough estimate. Two dozen crates, perhaps. In the
dim light it was hard to tell. Two dozen crates, six jets, twelve
Ophiuchans. Four trips for each jet. A half hour to load, ten minutes to
unload, an hour and a half by jet to the spacefield. Three hours and
forty minutes, round trip. Say, four hours. Four times four, sixteen.
Sixteen hours of steady work for eighty credits. No time for mystery or
suspicion. Barely time for mistrust....
"You, there!" a voice called. "What are you doing?"
It was one of the other Ophiuchans, quite the biggest of the lot. Pandit
had seen him outside and remembered his name. He was Raj Shiva, a tall,
muscular, swarthy Ophiuchan, with small, alert, suspicious eyes and a
livid scar alongside his jaw.
"Nothing," Pandit said. "Nothing."
"No? The others are loading already. I'll be watching you."
For a hundred credits, Pandit thought furiously, but said nothing. Sria
touched his shoulder. "I have one of the trundle-sleds," she said.
"Let's get about it."
"Right," said Pandit.
Raj Shiva watched them a few moments longer, then drifted away with his
own partner. It took Pandit and Sria, sweating copiously in the
tremendous heat, a few minutes less than half an hour to load one of the
crates aboard their jet. Three of the other ships were already airborne,
whining away toward the spacefield.
Pandit looked at the crate. There were no markings on it anywhere. The
wood looked new, but that meant absolutely nothing. In the dry heat of
the Empty Places, wood would last a century, a millennium. They could
not tell how old it was.
* * * * *
"Ready?" Sria Krishna called from the controls.
Pandit had secured the crate in the cargo bay. "Ready," he responded.
Moments later acceleration thrust them back in the twin pilot seats.
Sria leveled the jet at twenty thousand and they sped at eight hundred
miles an hour toward the city and the spacefield just beyond it.
"Do you wonder about it?" Sria asked after a while.
"About what?"
"The cargo."
"We aren't supposed to."
"I know." Sria laughed. "I'm a woman, you see."
Pandit grinned at her. "Curiosity," he said. "A woman's trait on any
world."
Sria got up from the pilot chair but Pandit placed his hand on her
shoulder and gently shoved her down again. "They have a televid unit
aboard," he said, "remember?"
Sria nodded. The jet sped on.
They landed at the spacefield. They were the fourth jet down and one of
the other three had taken off on the return leg of the flight. A
Denebian Pandit had never seen before was supervising the loin-cloth
garbed laborers loading the crates aboard a Denebian spaceship. With
Sria he delivered their crate on the trundle-sled, returned with the
sled to their jet, and took off.
* * * * *
Just short of four hours from the time they started they returned to the
Empty Places. They had gained a little time and were the second team
down. From the jet ahead of them, Raj Shiva led a puny, middle-aged
co-pilot.
Orkap stood in the underground storage room. Looking at his wrist chrono
he said to the four Ophiuchans who came down the ramp: "You made fine
time." Raj Shiva's puny companion said something, but Raj Shiva grabbed
his arm and they began to load a second crate. Pandit and Sria loaded
theirs in silence.
They made their second round trip in four hours exactly. It was
completely dark when they returned to the Empty Places. Sria was worried
they would overshoot the cargo point, but Pandit brought the little jet
down within a few hundred yards of its takeoff point.
They could see nothing when they shut off the jet's running lights,
except for the glow which came from the underground room. They reached
it and went down the ramp. Pandit judged that half the crates were gone
now. He took a quick tour of the dimly-lit room while Sria got the
trundle-sled into position against one of the crates.
"Nobody here," Pandit said in a whisper. "The Denebian must be sleeping
in the sand-sled."
"Yes," Sria said a little breathlessly.
"I was thinking--"
"What?" Sria said. "Don't stop."
"If we wanted to examine one of the boxes, it would be suicide to open
the one we take. But we could open one of them down here, see what it
is, take another for ourselves--"
"You would do this?" Sria asked him. "Why?"
Pandit shrugged. "I have eyes," he said. "Our gurus did not broadcast
the death-wish to outworlders until the Denebians came. Then they
started. Have the Denebians sold them on the idea?"
"I don't know," Sria said.
"Well, let's assume they have. Why? Why would they do such a thing,
Sria?"
* * * * *
"Let me get this straight, Pandit. First, you think the gurus actually
are making the outworlders kill themselves?"
"Of course," Pandit said. "It's mental suggestion, on a scale only our
gurus are capable of. But don't you see, Sria, they wouldn't do it on
their own. The gurus are dirty, careless about their bodies--but
terribly arrogant. Left alone, they wouldn't think the outworlders
important enough to be concerned over one way or another. They certainly
wouldn't kill them."
"Go on," Sria urged.
"All right. The gurus have great knowledge of the mystical, but
externally they're naive. Let's suppose someone came along--the
Denebians in this case--and found something they wanted very badly on
Ophiuchus. These crates here, Sria. What would they do? They'd go to the
gurus and convince them--it wouldn't be difficult--that any intercourse
with outworlders would be harmful to Ophiuchus, that the outworlders
want to colonize and exploit our world, that sort of thing. While the
gurus are stewing it over, the Denebians could have prepared this
shipment here--whatever it is--for departure. But the gurus, too well
convinced by them, could have acted sooner than they expected, making it
all but impossible for the small handful of outworlders, the Denebians
among them, to go abroad without fear of taking their own lives. Perhaps
a few, like Orkap and that other Denebian, are not at all suicide-prone.
Perhaps a few can withstand it. As for the rest, it's indoors and away
from the mental influence of the gurus, or off Ophiuchus entirely. Which
would leave the Denebians with a problem they hadn't thought of." His
words made sense.
"Yes!" cried Sria excitedly. "Now that they have their valuable cargo
ready to go, how can they get it off Ophiuchus without help?"
"We," said Pandit softly, "are that help."