The Second Science Fiction MEGAPACK®. Robert Silverberg

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СКАЧАТЬ at the coat of arms carved into the surface of the diamond. A thousand years ago, his ancestors had carved themselves a tiny empire out of middle Europe—a few hundred acres, no more. Enough to keep one family in luxury while the serfs had a bare existence. They had conquered by the sword and ruled by the sword. They had taken all and given nothing.

      But had they? The Barons of Tarnhorst had not really lived much better than their serfs had lived. More clothes and more food, perhaps, and a few baubles—diamonds and fine silks and warm furs. But no Baron Tarnhorst had ever allowed his serfs to starve, for that would not be economically sound. And each Baron had been the dispenser of Justice; he had been Law in his land. Without him, there would have been anarchy among the ignorant peasants, since they were certainly not fit to govern themselves a thousand years ago.

      Were they any better fit today? Tarnhorst wondered. For a full millennium, men had been trying, by mass education and by mass information, to bring the peasants up to the level of the nobles. Had that plan succeeded? Or had the intelligent ones simply been forced to conform to the actions of the masses? Had the nobles made peasants of themselves instead?

      Edway Tarnhorst didn’t honestly know. All he knew was that he saw a new spark of human life, a spark of intelligence, a spark of ability, out in the Belt. He didn’t dare tell anyone—he hardly dared admit it to himself—but he thought those people were better somehow than the common clods of Earth. Those people didn’t think that just because a man could slop color all over an otherwise innocent sheet of canvas, making outré and garish patterns, that that made him an artist. They didn’t think that just because a man could write nonsense and use erratic typography, that that made him a poet. They had other beliefs, too, that Edway Tarnhorst saw only dimly, but he saw them well enough to know that they were better beliefs than the obviously stupid belief that every human being had as much right to respect and dignity as every other, that a man had a right to be respected, that he deserved it. Out there, they thought that a man had a right only to what he earned.

      But Edway Tarnhorst was as much a product of his own society as Sam Fergus. He could only behave as he had been taught. Only on occasion—on very special occasion—could his native intelligence override the “common sense” that he had been taught. Only when an emergency arose. But when one did, Edway Tarnhorst, in spite of his environmental upbringing, was equal to the occasion.

      Actually, his own mind was never really clear on the subject. He did the best he could with the confusion he had to work with.

      “Now we’ve got to be careful, Sam,” he said. “Very careful. We don’t want a war with the Belt Cities.”

      Sam Fergus snorted. “They wouldn’t dare. We got ’em outnumbered a thousand to one.”

      “Not if they drop a rock on us,” Tarnhorst said quietly.

      “They wouldn’t dare,” Fergus repeated.

      But both of them could see what would happen to any city on Earth if one of the Belt ships decided to shift the orbit of a good-sized asteroid so that it would strike Earth. A few hundred thousand tons of rock coming in at ten miles per second would be far more devastating than an expensive H-bomb.

      “They wouldn’t dare,” Fergus said again.

      “Nevertheless,” Tarnhorst said, “in dealings of this kind we are walking very close to the thin edge. We have to watch ourselves.”

      CHAPTER VI

      Commodore Sir Harry Morgan was herded into a prison cell, given a shove across the smallish room, and allowed to hear the door slam behind him. By the time he regained his balance and turned to face the barred door again, it was locked. The bully-boys who had shoved him in turned away and walked down the corridor. Harry sat down on the floor and relaxed, leaning against the stone wall. There was no furniture of any kind in the cell, not even sanitary plumbing.

      “What do I do for a drink of water?” he asked aloud of no one in particular.

      “You wait till they bring you your drink,” said a whispery voice a few feet from his head. Morgan realized that someone in the cell next to his was talking. “You get a quart a day—a halfa pint four times a day. Save your voice. Your throat gets awful dry if you talk much.”

      “Yeah, it would,” Morgan agreed in the same whisper. “What about sanitation?”

      “That’s your worry,” said the voice. “Fella comes by every Wednesday and Saturday with a honey bucket. You clean out your own cell.”

      “I thought this place smelled of something other than attar of roses,” Morgan observed. “My nose tells me this is Thursday.”

      There was a hoarse, humorless chuckle from the man in the next cell. “’At’s right. The smell of the disinfectant is strongest now. Saturday mornin’ it’ll be different. You catch on fast, buddy.”

      “Oh, I’m a whiz,” Morgan agreed. “But I thought the Welfare World took care of its poor, misled criminals better than this.”

      Again the chuckle. “You shoulda robbed a bank or killed somebody. Then theyda given you a nice rehabilitation sentence. Regular prison. Room of your own. Something real nice. Like a hotel. But this’s different.”

      “Yeah,” Morgan agreed. This was a political prison. This was the place where they put you when they didn’t care what happened to you after the door was locked because there would be no going out.

      Morgan knew where he was. It was a big, fortresslike building on top of one of the highest hills at the northern end of Manhattan Island—an old building that had once been a museum and was built like a medieval castle.

      “What happens if you die in here?” he asked conversationally.

      “Every Wednesday and Saturday,” the voice repeated.

      “Um,” said Harry Morgan.

      “’Cept once in a while,” the voice whispered. “Like a couple days ago. When was it? Yeah. Monday that’d be. Guy they had in here for a week or so. Don’t remember how long. Lose tracka time here. Yeah. Sure lose tracka time here.”

      There was a long pause, and Morgan, controlling the tenseness in his voice, said: “What about the guy Monday?”

      “Oh. Him. Yeah, well, they took him out Monday.”

      Morgan waited again, got nothing further, and asked: “Dead?”

      “’Course he was dead. They was tryin’ to get somethin’ out of him. Somethin’ about a cable. He jumped one of the guards, and they blackjacked him. Hit ’im too hard, I guess. Guard sure got hell for that, too. Me, I’m lucky. They don’t ask me no questions.”

      “What are you in for?” Morgan asked.

      “Don’t know. They never told me. I don’t ask for fear they’ll remember. They might start askin’ questions.”

      Morgan considered. This could be a plant, but he didn’t think so. The voice was too authentic, and there would be no purpose in his information. That meant that Jack Latrobe really was dead. They had killed him. An ice cold hardness surged along his nerves.

      * * * *

      The door at the far end of the corridor clanged, and a brace of heavy footsteps clomped along the floor. СКАЧАТЬ