"It came piece by piece, much of it from Epsilon Eridani itself," he
smiled. "There is, after all, no ban on humans owning such material.
But to play safe, we spread the purchases over several years, and made
them in the names of many people."
"But you--"
"I took a degree in psychiatry once. I can handle this."
He could. He put me through the mill in the next few
nights--intelligence tests, psychometry, encephalography, narcosis,
psycho-probing, everything his machines and his skill could cover. He
did not find out anything we hadn't meant to be found out. The Service
had ways of guarding its agents with counter-blocks. But he got a very
thorough picture of Conrad Haugen.
In the end he said, still calmly, "This is amazing. You have an
IQ well over the borderline of genius, an astonishing variety of
assorted knowledge about the Empire and about technical subjects, and
an implacable hatred of Eridanian rule--based on personal pique and
containing self-seeking elements, but no less firm for that. You're out
for yourself, but you'll stand by your comrades and your cause. We'd
never hoped for more recruits of your caliber."
"When do I start?" I asked impatiently.
"Easy, easy," he smiled. "There's time. We've waited fifty years; we
can wait a while longer." He riffled through the dossier. "Actually,
the difficulty is where to assign you. A man who knows astrogation, the
use of weapons and machines, and the Empire, who is physically strong
as a bull, can lead men, and has a dozen other accomplishments, really
seems wasted on any single job. I'm not sure, but I think you'll do
best as a roving agent, operating between Main Base and the planets
where we have cells, and helping with the work at the base when you're
there."
* * * * *
My heart fairly leaped into my throat. This was more than _I_ had dared
hope for!
"I think," said Nat Hawkins, "you'd better just drop out of sight now.
Go to Hood Island and stay there till the spaceship comes next time.
You can spend the interval profitably, resting and getting a little
fattened up; you look half starved. And Barbara can tell you about the
Legion." His leather face smiled itself into a mesh of fine wrinkles.
"I think you deserve that, Conrad. And so does Barbara."
Mentally, I shrugged. My stay in New Chicago had pretty well convinced
me that all Earthling females were sluts. And what of it?
The following night, Hawkins and I rowed out to Hood Island. It lay
about a mile offshore, a wooded, rocky piece of land on which a
moon-whitened surf boomed and rattled. The place had belonged to the
Hood family since the first settlements here, but Barbara was the last
of them.
Hawkins' voice came softly to me above the crash of surf, the surge
of waves and windy roar of trees as we neared the dock. "She has more
reason than most to hate the Eridanians. The Hoods used to be great
people around here. They were just about ruined when the redskins first
came a-conquering, space bombardment wiped out their holdings, but they
made a new start. Then her grandfather and all his brothers were killed
in the revolt. Ten years ago, her father was caught while trying to
hijack a jetload of guns, and her mother didn't live long after that.
Then her brother was drafted into a road crew and reported killed in an
accident. Since then she hasn't lived for much except the Legion."
"I don't blame her," I said. My voice was a little tight, for indeed I
didn't. But somebody has to suffer; civilization has a heavy price. I
couldn't help adding, "But the Empire's lately begun paying pensions to
cases like that."
"I know. She draws hers, too, and uses it for the Legion."
_That, of course, was the reason for the pensions._
The boat bumped against the dock. Hawkins threw the painter up to
the man who suddenly emerged from the shadow. I saw the cold silver
moonlight gleam off the rifle in his hand. "You know me, Eb," said
Hawkins. "This here's Con Haugen. I slipped you the word about him."
"Glad to know you, Con." Eb's horny palm clasped mine. I liked his
looks, as I did those of most of the higher-up Legionnaires. They were
altogether different from the low-caste barbarians who were all the
rebels I'd seen before. They had a great load of ignorance to drag with
them.
We went up a garden path to a rambling stone house. Inside, it was long
and low and filled with the memoirs of more gracious days, art and fine
furniture, books lining the walls, a fire crackling ruddily in the
living room.
"Barbara Hood--Conrad Haugen."
* * * * *
Almost, I gaped at her. I had expected some gaunt, dowdy fanatic, a
little mad perhaps. But she was--well, she was tall and supple and clad
in a long dark-blue evening gown that shimmered against her white skin.
She was not conventionally pretty, her face was too strong for all of
its fine lines, but she had huge blue eyes and a wide soft mouth and a
stubborn chin. The light glowed gold on the hair that tumbled to her
shoulders.
I blurted something out and she smiled, with a curious little twist
that somehow caught in me, and said merely, "Hello, Conrad."
"Glad to be here," I mumbled.
"The spaceship should arrive in a month or so," she went on. "I'll
teach you as much as I can in that time. And you'd better get your own
special knowledge onto a record wire, just in case. I understand you've
been in the Vegan System, for instance, which nobody else in the Legion
knows very much about."
Her tone was cool and business-like, but with an underlying warmth. It
was like the sea wind which blew over the islands, and as reviving. I
recovered myself and helped mix some drinks. The rest of the evening
passed very pleasantly.
Later a servant showed me to my room, a big one overlooking the water.
I lay for a while listening to the waves, thinking drowsily how
rebellion, when its motives were honest, drew in the best natives of
any world, and presently I fell asleep.
The month passed all too quickly and agreeably. I learned things which
Intelligence had spent the last three years trying to find out, and
dared not attempt to transmit the information. That was maddening,
though I knew there was time. But otherwise--
I puttered about the place. There were only three servants, old family
retainers who had also joined the anarchs. They had little modern
machinery, and of course Earthlings weren't allowed robots, so there
was need for an extra man or two. I cut wood and repaired the roof and
painted the boathouse, spaded the garden and cleared out brush and set
up a new picket fence. It was good to use my hands and muscles again.
And then Barbara was around to help with most of what I did. In jeans
and jersey, the sun ablaze on her hair, laughing at my clumsy jokes or
frowning over some tough bit of work, she was another being than the
cool, lovely woman who talked books and music and history with me in
the evenings, or the crisp bitter anarch who spat facts and figures at
me like an angry machine. And yet they were all her. I remembered Ydis,
who was dead, and the old pain stirred again. But Barbara was alive.
She was more alive to me than most of Valgolia.
I make no apologies for my feelings. I had been away from anything
resembling home for some two years now. But I was careful to remain
merely friendly with Barbara.
* * * * *
She didn't know a great deal about the rebel movement--no one agent
on Earth did--but her knowledge was still considerable. There was a
fortified base somewhere out in space, built up over a period of four
years with the help of certain unnamed elements or planets outside the
Empire. I suspected several rival states of that!
Weapons of all kinds were manufactured there in quantities sufficient
to arm the million or so rebels of the "regular" force, the twenty
million or so in the Solar System and elsewhere who held secret drills
and conducted terrorist activities, and the many millions more who were
expected to rise spontaneously when the rebel fleet struck.
There was close coordination and a central command at Main Base for the
undergrounds of all dissatisfied planets--a new and formidable feature
which had not been present in the earlier uprisings. There were rumors
of a new and terrible weapon being developed.
In any case, the plan was to assault Epsilon Eridani itself
simultaneously with the uprisings in the colonies, so that the Imperial
fleet would be recalled to defend the mother world. The anarchs hoped
to blast Valgolia to ruin in a few swift blows, and expected that the
Empire's jealous neighbors would sweep in to complete the wreckage.
This gentle girl spoke of the smashing of worlds, the blasting of
helpless humans, and the destruction of a culture as if it were a
matter of insect extermination.
"Have you ever thought," I asked casually once, "that the Juranians
and the Slighs and our other hypothetical allies may not respect the
integrity of Sol any more than the Eridanians do?"
"We can handle them," she answered confidently. "Oh, it won't be easy,
that time of transition. But we'll be free."
"And what then?" I went on. "I don't want to be defeatist, Barbara, but
you know as well as I do that the Eridanians didn't conquer all mankind
at a single swoop. When they invented the interstellar engine and
arrived here, man was tearing the Solar System apart in a war between
super-nations that was rapidly reducing him to barbarism. The redskins
traded for a while, sold arms, some of their adventurers took sides in
the conflict, the government stepped in to protect Eridanian citizens
and investments--the side which the Eridanians helped won the war,
then found its allies were running things and tried to revolt against
the protectorate--and without really meaning to, the strangers were
conquering and ruling Earth.
"But the different factions of man still hate each other's guts. There
are still capitalists and communists, blacks, whites and Browns,
Hindus and Moslems, Germans and Frenchmen, city people and country
people--a million petty divisions. There'll be civil war as soon as the
Eridanians are gone."
"Some, perhaps," she agreed. "But I think it can be handled. If we have
to have civil wars, well, let's get them over with and live as free
men."
Personally, I could see nothing in the sort of military dictatorship
that would inevitably arise which was preferable to an alien, firm, but
just rule that insured stability and a reasonable degree of individual
liberty.
But I didn't say that aloud.
* * * * *
Another time we talked of the de-industrialization of Earth. Barbara
was, of course, venomous about it. "We were rich once," she said.
"All Earth was. We have one of the richest planets in the Galaxy. But
because their own world is poor, the redskins have to take the natural
resources of their conquests. Earth is a granary and a lumberyard for
Valgolia, and the iron of Mars and the petrolite of Venus go back to
their industry. What few factories they allow us, they take their fat
percentage of the product."
"Certainly they've made us economically dependent," I said, "and
their standard of living is undoubtedly higher than ours. But ours
has, on the whole, gone up since the conquest. We eat better, we're
healthier, we aren't burdened with the cost of past and present and
future wars. Our natural resources aren't being squandered. The forests
and watersheds and farmlands we ruined are coming back under Eridanian
supervision."