The Truth About Cushgar - James H. Schmitz, ebook, Temp
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The Truth about Cushgar
There was, for a time, a good deal of puzzled and uneasy speculation about the methods that had
been employed by the Confederacy of Vega in the taming of Cushgar. The disturbing part of it was that
nothing really seemed to have happened!
First, the rumor was simply that the Confederacy was preparing to move into Cushgar—and then,
suddenly, that it
had
moved in. This aroused surprised but pleased interest in a number of areas
bordering the Confederacy. The Thousand Nations and a half-dozen similar organizations quietly flexed
their military muscles, and prepared to land in the middle of the Confederacy's back as soon as it became
fairly engaged in its ambitious new project. For Cushgar and the Confederacy seemed about as evenly
matched as any two powers could possibly be.
But there was no engagement, then. There was not even anything resembling an official surrender.
Star system by system, mighty Cushgar was accepting the governors installed by the Confederacy.
Meekly, it coughed up what was left of the captive peoples and the loot it had pirated for the past seven
centuries. And, very simply and quietly then, under the eyes of a dumfounded galaxy, it settled down and
began mending its manners.
Then the rumors began. The wildest of them appeared to have originated in Cushgar itself, among
its grim but superstitious inhabitants.
The Thousand Nations and the other rival combines gradually relaxed their various preparations and
settled back disappointedly. This certainly wasn't the time to jump! The Confederacy had sneaked
something over again; it was all done with by now.
But
what
had they done to Cushgar—and how?
* * *
In the Confederacy's Council of Co-ordinators on Vega's planet of Jeltad, the Third Co-ordinator,
Chief of the Department of Galactic Zones, was being freely raked over the coals by his eminent
colleagues.
They, too, wanted to know about Cushgar; and he wasn't telling.
"Of course, we're not actually accusing you of anything," the Fifth
Co-ordinator—Strategics—pointed out. "But you didn't expect to advance the Council's plans by sixty
years or thereabouts without arousing a certain amount of curiosity, did you?"
"No, I didn't expect to do that," the Third Co-ordinator admitted.
"Come clean, Train!" said the First. Train was the name by which the Third Co-ordinator was
known in this circle. "How did you do it?" Usually they were allies in these little arguments, but the First's
curiosity was also rampant.
"Can't tell you!" the Third Co-ordinator said flatly. "I made a report to the College, and they'll dish
out to your various departments whatever they ought to get."
He was within his rights in guarding his own department's secrets, and they knew it. As for the
College—that was the College of the Pleiades, a metaphysically inclined body which was linked into the
affairs of Confederacy government in a manner the College itself presumably could have defined exactly.
Nobody else could. However, they were the final arbiters in a case of this kind.
The Council meeting broke up a little later. The Third Co-ordinator left with Bropha, a handsome
youngish man who had been listening in, in a liaison capacity for the College.
"Let's go off and have a drink somewhere," Bropha suggested. "I'm curious myself."
The Co-ordinator growled softly. His gray hair was rumpled, and he looked exhausted.
"All right," he said. "I'll tell
you
—"
Bropha's title was President of the College of the Pleiades. That was a good deal less important
 than it sounded, since he was only the executive scientist in charge of the College's mundane affairs.
However, he was also the Third Co-ordinator's close personal friend and had been cleared for secrets of
state of any kind whatsoever.
They went off and had their drink.
"You can't blame them too much," Bropha said soothingly. "After all, the conquest of Cushgar has
been regarded pretty generally as the Confederacy's principal and most dangerous undertaking in the
century immediately ahead. When the Department of Galactic Zones pulls it off suddenly—apparently
without preparation or losses—"
"It wasn't without losses," the Co-ordinator said glumly.
"Wasn't it?" said Bropha.
"It cost me," said the Co-ordinator, "the best Zone Agent I ever had—or ever hope to have.
Remember Zamm?"
Bropha's handsome face darkened.
Yes, he remembered Zamm! There were even times when he wished he didn't remember her quite
so vividly.
But two years would have been much too short an interval in any case to forget the name of the
person who had saved his life—
* * *
At the time, the discovery that His Excellency the Illustrious Bropha was lost in space had sent a
well-concealed ripple of dismay throughout the government of the Confederacy. For Bropha was
destined in the Confederacy's plans to become a political figure of the highest possible importance.
Even the Third Co-ordinator's habitual placidity vanished when the information first reached him.
But he realized promptly that while a man lost in deep space was almost always lost for good, there were
any number of mitigating factors involved in this particular case. The last report on Bropha had been
received from his personal yacht, captained by his half brother Greemshard; and that ship was equipped
with devices which would have tripped automatic alarms in monitor-stations thousands of light-years
apart if it had been suddenly destroyed or incapacitated by any unforeseen accident or space attack.
Since no such alarm was received, the yacht was still functioning undisturbed somewhere, though
somebody on board her was keeping her whereabouts a secret.
It all pointed, pretty definitely, at Greemshard!
For its own reasons, the Department of Galactic Zones had assembled a dossier on Bropha's half
brother which was hardly less detailed than the information it had available concerning the illustrious
scientist himself. It was no secret to its researchers that Greemshard was an ambitious, hard-driving man,
who for years had chafed under the fact that the goal of his ambitions was always being reached first and
without apparent effort by Bropha. The study of his personality had been quietly extended then to a point
where it could be predicted with reasonable accuracy what he would do in any given set of
circumstances; and with the department's psychologists busily dissecting the circumstances which
surrounded the disappearance of Bropha, it soon became apparent what Greemshard had done and
what he intended to do next.
A prompt check by local Zone Agents indicated that none of the powers who would be interested
in getting Bropha into their hands had done so as yet, and insured, furthermore, that they could not do so
now without leading the Confederacy's searchers directly to him. Which left, as the most important
remaining difficulty, the fact that the number of places where the vanished yacht could be kept
unobtrusively concealed was enormously large.
The number was a limited one, nevertheless—unless the ship was simply drifting about space
somewhere, which was a risk no navigator of Greemshard's experience would be willing to take. And
through the facilities of its home offices and laboratories and its roving army of Agents, the Third
Department was equipped, as perhaps no other human organization ever had been, to produce an exact
chart of all those possible points of concealment and then to check them off in the shortest possible time.
 So the Co-ordinator was not in the least surprised when, on the eighth day of the search instigated
by the department, a message from Zone Agent Zamman Tarradang-Pok was transferred to him, stating
that Bropha had been found, alive and in reasonably good condition, and would be back in his home on
Jeltad in another two weeks.
"In a way, though, it's too bad it had to be that space-pixy Zamm who found him!" one of the
Co-ordinator's aides remarked.
And to that, after a moment's reflection, the Chief of Galactic Zones agreed.
* * *
The moon where Bropha's yacht lay concealed was one of three approximately Earth-sized,
ice-encrusted satellites swinging about the sullen glow of a fiery giant-planet.
The robot-ship of Zone Agent Zamman Tarradang-Pok, working along its allotted section of the
general search-pattern, flashed in at the moon on a tangent to its orbit, quartered its surface in two
sweeping turns and vanished again toward the nearer of the two other satellites.
All in all, that operation was completed in a matter of seconds; but before the ship left, Zone Agent
Zamm had disembarked from it in a thirty-foot space-duty skiff—crammed to its skin just now with the
kind of equipment required to pull off a miniature invasion-in-force. Whatever sort of camouflaged power
station was down there had been shut off the instant it detected her ship's approach. While that didn't
necessarily reveal a bad conscience, the momentary pattern of radiations Zamm's instruments had picked
up suggested an exact duplicate of the type of engines which powered Bropha's yacht.
So it probably was the yacht, Zamm decided—and it would be hidden just below the moon's frozen
surface. She had pin-pointed the spot; and on the opposite side of the big satellite the skiff came
streaking down into a thin, icy atmosphere.
"You can start hoping that ship was one of those I've been waiting for," Greemshard was remarking
meanwhile. "Or else just somebody who isn't interested in us."
He stood in the center of the yacht's control room, staring at Bropha with intense dislike and a touch
of fear. A suspicion had begun to grow on Greemshard that with all his cleverness and planning he might
have worked himself at last into an impossible situation. None of the dozens of coded messages he had
sent out during the past few days had been answered or perhaps even received. It was a little uncanny.
"Whatever happens," he concluded, "they're not getting you back alive!"
Bropha, flattened by gravity shackles to one wall of the room, saw no reason to reply. For the
greater part of the past week, he had been floating mentally in some far-off place, from where he
detachedly controlled the ceaseless complaints of various abused nerve-endings of his body. His half
brother's voice hardly registered. He had begun to review instead, for perhaps the thousandth futile time,
the possibilities of the trap into which he had let Greemshard maneuver him. The chances were he would
have to pay the usual penalty of stupidity, but it was unlikely that either Greemshard or his confederates
would get any benefit out of that.
Bropha was quite familiar—though Greemshard was not—with the peculiar efficiency of the
organization headed by his friend, the Third Co-ordinator.
"Do not move, Captain Greemshard!"
That was all that tinkling, brittle voice really said. But it was a moment or so before Bropha grasped
the meaning of the words.
He had, he realized, been literally shocked into full consciousness by something that might have
been the thin cry of a mindless death as it rose before its victim—a sound that ripped the clogging
pain-veils from his thoughts and triggered off an explosion of sheer animal fright. Bropha's brain was a
curiously sensitive tool in many ways; it chose to ignore the explicit substance of Zamm's curt warning
and, instead, to read in it things like an insatiable hunger, and that ultimate threat. And also, oddly enough,
a wailing, bleak despair.
Later on, he would admit readily that in his wracked condition he might have put a good deal more
into the voice than was actually there. He would point out, however, that Greemshard, who was not an
 imaginative man and recklessly brave, seemed to be similarly affected. His half brother, he saw, stood
facing him some twenty feet away, with his back to the door that led from the control room into the main
body of the yacht; and the expression on his face was one Bropha could never remember afterwards
without a feeling of discomfort. There was an assortment of weapons about Greemshard's person and on
a desk to one side and within easy reach of him; but for that moment at least he did not move.
Then Bropha's startled gaze shifted beyond Greemshard.
The passage door had disappeared, and a pale-green fire was trickling swiftly from about its frame.
He saw Zone Agent Zamm next, standing just beyond the door with a gun in her hand, and several squat,
glittering shapes looming up behind her. The shock of almost superstitious fear that had roused him left
Bropha in that instant, because he knew at once who and what Zamm was.
At about the same moment, Greemshard made his bid—desperately and with the flashing speed of
a big, strong animal in perfect condition.
He flung himself sideways to reach the floor behind the desk, one hand plucking at a gun in his belt;
but he was still in mid-leap when some soundless force spun him about and hurled him across the room,
almost to Bropha's feet. What was left of Greemshard lay twitching there violently for a few seconds
more, and was still. A faint smell of ozone began to spread through the room.
Bropha looked down at the headless body and winced. As children and half-grown boys, he and
Greemshard had been the best of friends; and later, he had understood his half brother better than
Greemshard ever knew. For a moment at least, the events of the last few days seemed much less
important than those years that were past.
Then he looked back at the figure behind the coldly flaming door frame across the room and
stammered: "Thank you, Zone Agent!"
His first glance at Zamm had showed him that she was a Daya-Bal; and up to that moment he
would have thought that no branch of humanity was emotionally less suited than they to perform the
duties of an Agent of Galactic Zones. But under the circumstances, the person who had effected an entry
into that room, in the spectacularly quiet and apparently instantaneous fashion which alone could have
saved his life, was not likely to be anything else.
* * *
Like a trio of goblin hounds, three different pieces of robotic equipment came variously gliding and
floating through the glowing door frame on Zamm's heels, and began to busy themselves gently about a
now rather shock-dazed Bropha. His rescuer, he found himself thinking presently, seemed really more
bizarre in these surroundings than her mechanical assistants!
Zamm was not in armor but in a fitted spacesuit, so her racial characteristics were unmistakable. By
ordinary human standards, the rather small Daya-Bal body was excessively thin and narrow; but Zamm's
white face with its pale eyes and thin, straight nose matched it perfectly, and every motion showed the
swift, unconscious grace which accounted for some of the fascination her people exerted on their more
normally constructed cousins. Bropha, who had spent over a year among the Daya-Bal planets in the
Betelgeuse region, and during that time had also come under the spell of what was perhaps the youngest
true branch of
Genus Homo
, addressed Zamm, by and by, in her own language.
He noted her smile of quick pleasure and the flash of interest in her eyes, and listened carefully to
her reply, which began as an apology for causing irreparable damage to his ship in the process of
boarding it. Such responses all seemed disarmingly normal; and he felt unable to recapture the sensations
which had awakened him so suddenly when he heard her challenge to Greemshard.
Greemshard's death, too—however he might feel about it personally—was, after all, simply the fate
of a criminal who had been misguided enough to resist certain arrest. As it happened, Bropha never did
learn the exact circumstances under which the four members of Greemshard's little gang, who were acting
as the yacht's crew, had departed this life just before Zamm appeared at the control room; but it could be
assumed that the situation there had been a somewhat similar one.
His explanations, however, completely failed to satisfy him—because he knew the Daya-Bals.
 * * *
He spent most of the two weeks required for the return trip to Jeltad in a bed under robotic
treatment.
The physical damage his misadventure had cost him wasn't too serious, but it had to be repaired
promptly; and such first-aid patchwork usually involved keeping a human brain anaesthetized to the point
of complete unconsciousness. But Bropha's level of mind-training permitted him to by-pass that particular
effect, and to remain as aware of his surroundings as he chose to be; and he remained much more aware
of them than Zamman Tarradang-Pok or her robots appeared to realize.
To the average bedridden traveler, that endless drive on a silent ship through the unreal-seeming
voids of the overspeed might have seemed monotonous to the point of dreary boredom. Bropha—alert,
wondering and reflecting—soon gained a different impression of it. Little enough was actually happening;
but even the slightest events here seemed weighted to him with some abnormal dark significance of their
own. It was almost, he thought, as if he were catching an occasional whispered line or two of some grim
drama—the actors of which moved constantly all about him but were very careful to stay out of his sight!
One day, finally, his watching was briefly rewarded; though what he observed left him, if anything,
more puzzled than before. But afterwards, he found that a faint echo of the chill Zamm's voice first
aroused in him had returned. In his mind, it now accompanied the slight shape which came occasionally
through the shadowed passage before his cabin and, much more rarely, paused there quietly to look in on
him.
Simultaneously, he discovered that a sense of something depressing and frightening had crept into
his concept of this stupendously powered ship of Zamm's, with its electronic mentality through which
sensations and reflexes flashed in a ceaseless billionfold shift of balances, over circuits and with meanings
to which nothing remotely like a parallel existed in any human brain. Its racing drive through apparent
nothingness, at speeds which no longer could be related mentally to actual motion, was like the
expression of some fixed, nightmarish purpose which Bropha's presence had not changed in any way.
For the moment, he was merely being carried along in the fringe of the nightmare—soon he would be
expelled from it.
And then that somehow terrible unit, the woman of a race which mankind had long regarded as if
they were creatures of some galactic Elfland—beings a little wiser, gentler, a little farther from the brute
than their human brothers—and her train of attendant robots, of which there seemed to be a
multi-shaped, grotesque insect-swarm about the ship, and finally the titanic, man-made monster that
carried them all, would go rushing off again on their ceaseless, frightening search.
For what?
Without being able to give himself a really good reason for it even now, Bropha was, in brief,
profoundly disturbed.
But one day he came walking up into the control room, completely healed again, though still a little
uncertain in his stride and more than a little dissatisfied in his thoughts. Vega was now some twenty-five
light-years away in space; but in the foreshortening magic of the ship's vision tank, its dazzling, blue-white
brilliance floated like a three-inch fire-jewel before them. A few hours later, great Jeltad itself swam
suddenly below with its wind-swept blues and greens and snowy poles—to the eyes of the two watchers
on the ship much more like the historical Earth-home of both their races than the functional, tunneled
hornet-hive that Terra was nowadays.
So Bropha came home. Being Bropha, his return was celebrated as a planetary event that night,
centered about a flamboyant festival at his fine house overlooking the tall, gray towers of Government
Center. Being also the Bropha who could not leave any human problem unsettled, once it came to his
attention, he tried to make sure that the festival would be attended both by his rescuer and by her
boss—his old friend, the Third Co-ordinator of the Vegan Confederacy.
However, only one of them appeared.
* * *
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