Blood's a Rover

  Blood’s a Rover

  Chad Oliver

  First published in Astounding Science Fiction, May 1952

  This copy derived from the above source.

  It’s a very hard thing indeed for a man to define what he means by “good”—and hard, sometimes, to see good in the misery, disorganization and squalor that results

  * * *

  Clay lies still, but blood’s a rover;

  Breath’s a ware that will not keep.

  Up, lad: when the journey’s over

  There’ll be time enough to sleep.

  —A. E. Housman

  I.

  Night sifted through the city like flakes of soft black snow drifting down from the stars. It whispered along the tree-lined canyons between the clean shafts of white buildings and pressed darkly against windows filled with warm light. Conan Lang watched the illumination in his office increase subtly in adjusting to the growing darkness outside and then looked again at the directive he held in his hand.

  It still read the same way.

  “Another day, another world,” he said aloud. And then, paraphrasing: “The worlds are too much with us—”

  Conan Lang fired up his pipe and puffed carefully on it to get it going properly. Then he concentrated on blowing neat cloudy smoke rings that wobbled across the room and impaled themselves on the nose of the three-dimensional portrait of the President. It wasn’t that he had anything against President Austin, he assured himself. It was simply that Austin represented that nebulous being, Authority, and at the moment it happened that Authority was singularly unwelcome in the office of Conan Lang.

  He looked back at the directive. The wording was friendly and informal-enough, but the meaning was clear:

  Headquarters, Gal. Administration.

  Office of Admiral Nelson White,

  Commander, Process Planning Division.

  15 April, 2701. Confidential.

  One Agent Conan Lang

  Applied Process Corps

  G.A. Department Seven

  Conan: We got another directive from the Buzzard yesterday. Seems that the powers that be have decided that a change in Sirius Ten is in order—a shift from Four to Five. You’re it. Make a prelim check and report to me at your convenience. Cheer up—maybe you’ll get another bag of medals out of it.

  Nelson.

  Conan Lang left the directive on his desk and got to his feet. He walked over to the window and looked out at the lights sprinkled over the city. There weren’t many. Most people were long ago home in the country, sitting around the living room, playing with the kids. He puffed slowly on his pipe.

  Another bag of medals. Nelson wasn’t kidding anybody—wasn’t even trying to, really. He knew how Conan felt because he felt the same way. They all did, sooner or later. It was fascinating at first, even fun, this tampering with the lives of other people. But the novelty wore off in a hurry—shriveled like flesh in acid under a million eyes of hate, a million talks with your soul at three in the morning, a million shattered lives. Sure, it was necessary. You could always tell yourself that; that was the charm, the magic word that was supposed to make everything fine and dandy. Necessary—but for you, not for them. Or perhaps for them too, in the long run.

  Conan Lang returned to his desk and flipped on the intercom. “I want out,” he said. “The Administration Library, Division of Extraterrestrial Anthropology. I’d like to speak to Bailey if he’s there.”

  He had to wait thirty seconds.

  “Bailey here,” the intercom said.

  “This is Lang. What’ve you got on Sirius Ten?”

  “Just like that, huh? Hang on a second.”

  There was a short silence. Conan Lang smoked his pipe slowly and smiled as he visualized Bailey punching enough buttons to control a space fleet.

  “Let’s see,” Bailey’s voice came through the speaker. “We’ve got a good bit. There’s McAllister’s ‘Kinship Systems of Sirius Ten’; Jenkins’—that’s B. J. Jenkins, the one who worked with Holden—‘Sirius Ten Social Organization’; Bartheim’s ‘Economic Life of Sirius Ten’; Robert Patterson’s ‘Basic Personality Types of the Sirius Group’; ‘Preliminary and Supplementary Ethnological Surveys of the Galactic Advance Fleet’—the works.”

  Conan Lang sighed. “O.K.,” he said. “Shoot them out to my place, will you?”

  “Check—be there before you are. One thing more, Cone.”

  “Yes?”

  “Been reading a splendid eight-volume historical novel of the Twentieth Century. Hot stuff, I’ll tell you. You want me to send it along in case you run out of reading material?”

  “Very funny. See you around.”

  “So long.”

  Conan Lang switched off the intercom and destroyed the directive. He lapped out his pipe in the waster and left the office, locking the door behind him. The empty hallway was sterile and impersonal. It seemed dead at night, somehow, and it was difficult to believe that living, breathing human beings walked through it all day long. It was like a tunnel to nowhere. He had the odd feeling that there was nothing around it at all, just space and less than space—no building, no air, no city. Just a white antiseptic tunnel to nowhere.

  He shook off the feeling and caught the lift to the roof. The cool night air was crisp and clean and there was a whisper of a breeze out of the north. A half moon hung in the night, framed by stars. He looked up at it and wondered how Johnny was getting along up there, and whether perhaps Johnny was even then looking down on Earth.

  Conan Lang climbed into his bullet and set the controls. The little ship rose vertically on her copter blades for two thousand feet, hovered a moment over the silent city, and then flashed off on her jets into the west.

  Conan Lang sat back in his cushioned seat, looking at the stars, trying not to think, letting the ship carry him home.

  Conan Lang relaxed in his armchair, his eyes closed, an icy bourbon and soda in his hand. The books he had requested—neat, white, uniform microfilm blowups from the Administration Library—were stacked neatly on the floor by his side, waiting. Waiting, he thought, sipping his drink. They were always waiting. No matter how much a man knew, there was always more—waiting.

  The room closed in around him. He could feel it—warm, friendly, personal. It was a good room. It was a room filled with life, his life and Kit’s. It was almost as if he could see the room better with his eyes closed, for then he saw the past as well as the present. There was the silver and black tapestry on the wall, given to him by old Maharani so long ago, on a world so far away that the very light given off by its sun when he was there had yet to reach the Earth as the twinkle of a star in the night sky. There were his books, there were Kit’s paintings, there was the smudge—the current one—on the carpet where Rob had tracked dirt into the house before supper.

  He opened his eyes and looked at his wife.

  “I must be getting old, Kit,” he said. “Right at the moment, it all looks pretty pointless.”

  Kit raised her eyebrows and said nothing.

  “We tear around over the galaxy like a bunch of kids playing Spacemen and Pirates,” he said, downing his drink. “Push here, pull there, shove here, reverse there. It’s like some kind of half-wit game where one side doesn’t even know it’s playing, or on which side of the field. Sometimes—”

  “Want another drink?” Kit asked softly.

  “Yes. Kit—”

  “I know,” she said, touching his shoulder with her hand. “Go ahead and talk; you’ll feel better. We go through this every time there’s a new one, remember? I know you don’t really mean things the way you say them, and I know why you say them that way anyhow.” She kissed him lightly on the forehead and her lips were cool and patient. “ I understand.”

&n
bsp; Conan Lang watched her leave the room with his empty glass. “Yes,” he whispered to himself. “Yes, I guess you do.”

  It was necessary, of course. Terribly, urgently necessary. But it got to you sometimes. All those people out there, living their lives, laughing and crying, raising children. It hurt you to think about them. And it wasn’t necessary for them, not for him, not for Kit. Or was it? You couldn’t tell; there was always a chance. But if only they could just forget it all, just live, there was so much to enjoy—

  Kit handed him a fresh bourbon and soda, icy and with just a trace of lemon in it the way he liked it, and then curled up again on the couch, smiling at him.

  “I’m sorry, angel,” he said. “You must get pretty sick of hearing the same sad song over and over again.”

  “Not when you sing it, Cone.”

  “It’s just that sometimes I chuck my mind out the nearest window and wonder why—“

  There was a thump and a bang from the rear of the house. Conan Lang tasted his drink. That meant Rob was home. He listened, waiting. There was the hollow crack—that was the bat going into the corner. There was the heavy thud—that was the fielder’s glove.

  “That’s why,” Kit said.

  Conan Lang nodded and picked up the first book off the floor.

  * * *

  Three days later, Conan Lang went up the white steps, presented his credentials, and walked into the Buzzard’s Cage. The place made him nervous. Irritated with himself, he paused deliberately and lit his pipe before going on. The Cage seemed cold, inhuman. And the Buzzard—

  He shouldn’t feel that way, he told himself, again offering his identification before entering the lift to the Nest. Intellectually, he understood cybernetics; there was nothing supernatural about it. The Cage was just a machine, for all its powers, even if the Buzzard did sometimes seem more—or perhaps less—than a man. Still, the place gave him the creeps. A vast thinking machine, filling a huge building, a brain beside which his own was as nothing. Of course, men had built it. Men made guns, too, but the knowledge was scant comfort when you looked into a metallic muzzle and someone pulled the trigger.

  “Lang,” he said to himself, “you’re headed for the giggle ward.”

  He smiled then, knowing it wasn’t so. Imagination was a prime requisite for his job, and he just had more than his share. It got in the way sometimes, but it was a part of him and that was that.

  Conan Lang waded through a battery of attendants and security personnel and finally reached the Nest. He opened the door and stepped into the small, dark room. There, behind the desk where he always was, perched the Buzzard.

  “Hello, Dr. Gottleib,” said Conan Lang.

  The man behind the desk eyed him silently. His name was Fritz Gottleib, but he had been tagged the Buzzard long ago. No one used the name to his face, and it was impossible to tell whether or not the name amused him. He spoke but seldom, and his appearance, even after you got used to it, was startling. Fritz Gottleib was squat and completely bald. He always dressed in black and his heavy eyebrows were like horizontal splashes of ink against the whiteness of his face. The Buzzard analogy, thought Conan Lang, was more than understandable; it was inevitable. The man sat high in his tower, in his Nest of controls, brooding over a machine that perhaps he alone fully understood. Alone. He always seemed alone, no matter how many people surrounded him. His was a life apart, a life whose vital force pulsed in the shifting lights of the tubes of a great machine.

  “Dr. Lang,” he acknowledged, unmoving, his voice sibilant, almost a hiss.

  Conan Lang puffed on his pipe and dropped into the chair across from Gottleib. He had dealt with the Buzzard before and most of the shock had worn off. You could get used to anything, he supposed. Man was a very adaptable animal.

  “The smoke doesn’t bother you, I hope?”

  Gottleib did not comment. He simply stared at him, his dark eyes unblinking. Like looking at a piece of meat, thought Conan Lang.

  “Well,” he said, trying again, “I guess you know what I’m here for.”

  “You waste words,” Fritz Gottleib hissed.

  “I hadn’t realized they were in short supply,” Lang replied, smiling. The Buzzard was irritating, but he could see the justice in the man’s remark. It was curious the number of useless things that were said all the time—useless, at any rate, from a purely communicative point of view. It would have been sheerly incredible for Gottleib—who after all had been checking his results in the computer—not to have known the nature of his mission.

  “O.K.,” said Lang, “what’s the verdict?”

  Fritz Gottleib fingered a square card in his surprisingly long-fingered hands, seeming to hover over it like a bird of prey.

  “It checks out,” he said sibilantly, his voice low and hard to hear. “Your plan will achieve the desired transfer in Sirius Ten, and the transfer integrates positively with the Plan.”

  “Anything else? Anything I should know?”

  “We should all know many more things than we do, Dr. Lang.”

  “Um-m-m. But that was all the machine said with respect to my proposed plan of operations?”

  “That was all.”

  Conan Lang sat back, watching Gottleib. A strange man. But he commanded respect.

  “I’d like to get hold of that baby sometime,” he said easily. “I’ve got a question or two of my own.”

  “Sometimes it is best not to know the answers to one’s questions, Dr. Lang.”

  “No. But I’d like to have a shot at it all the same. Don’t tell the security boys I said that; they’d string me up by the toes.”

  “Perhaps one day, Dr. Lang. When you are old like me.”

  Conan Lang stood up, cupping his pipe in his hand. “I guess that’s all,” he said.

  “Yes,” said Fritz Gottleib.

  “See you around.”

  No answer. Cold shadows seemed to fill the room.

  Conan Lang turned and left the way he had come. Behind him, drilling into his back, he could feel the eyes of Fritz Gottleib following him, cold and deep like the frozen waters of an arctic sea.

  The ship stood on Earth but she was not of Earth. She was poised, a mighty lance of silver, a creature of the deeps. She waited, impatient, while Conan Lang slowly walked across the vast duralloy tarmac of Space One, Admiral White at his side. The sun was bright in a clean blue sky. It touched the ship with lambent flame and warmed Conan Lang’s shoulders under his uniform. A slight puff of breeze rustled across the spaceport, pushing along a stray scrap of white paper ahead of it.

  “Here we go again,” said Conan Lang.

  “That’s what you get for being good,” the admiral said with a smile. “You get good enough and you’ll get my job—which ought to be a grim enough prospect even for you. If you’re smart, you’ll botch this job six ways from Sunday and then we’ll have to give you a rest.”

  “Yeah—play a little joke, strictly for laughs, and give ’em an atom bomb or two to stick on the ends of their hatchets. Or take ’em back to the caves. There are plenty of delicious possibilities.”

  The two men walked on, toward the silver ship.

  “Everything’s set, I suppose?” asked Conan Lang.

  “Yep. Your staff is already on board and the stuff is loaded.”

  “Any further instructions?”

  “No—you know your business or you wouldn’t be going. Just try to make it as quick as you can, Cone. They’re getting warm over on Research on that integration-acceleration principle for correlating data—it’s going to be big and I’ll want you around when it breaks.”

  Conan Lang grinned. “What happens if I just up and disappear one day, Nels? Does the galaxy moan and lie down and quit?”

  “Search me,” said Admiral Nelson White. “But don’t take any more risks than you absolutely have to. Don’t get the idea that you’re indispensable, either. It’s just that it’s tiresome to break in new men.”

  “I’ll try to stay alive if you’re
positive that’s what you want.”

  They approached the ship. Kit and Rob were waiting. The admiral touched his cap and moved on, leaving Conan Lang alone with his family. Kit was lovely—she always was, Conan Lang thought. He couldn’t imagine a life without her.

  “Bye, darlin’,” he whispered, taking her in his arms: “One of these days I’m coming back and I’m never going to leave you again.”

  “This is till then,” Kit said softly and kissed him for keeps.

  Much later, Conan Lang released her and shook hands with his son.

  “So long, old-timer,” he said.

  “Hurry back, Dad,” Rob said, trying not to cry.

  Conan Lang turned and joined Admiral White at the star cruiser. He did not look back.

  “Good luck, Cone,” the admiral said, patting him on the back. “I’ll keep the medals warm and a light in the cabin window.”

  “O.K., Nels,” said Conan Lang.

  He swung aboard the great ship and stepped into the lift. There was a muted hum of machinery as the car whispered up through the pneumatic tube, up into the hollowness of the ship. Already it seemed to Conan Lang that he had left Earth far behind him. The endless-loneliness of the star trails rode up with him in the humming lift.

  The ship rested, quiescent, on Earth. Ahead of her, calling to her, the stars flamed coldly in an infinite sea of night.

  II.

  Conan Lang walked down the long white corridor to the afterhold, his footsteps muffled and almost inaudible in the murmur of the atomics. It would be a long white corridor, he thought to himself. Wherever man went, there went the long white corridors—offices, hospitals, command posts. It was almost as if he had spent half a lifetime walking through long white corridors, and now here was yet another one—cold and antiseptic, hanging in space eight light-years from Earth.

  “Halt.”