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  “Is that really so bad? Would you of Sol Three not like similar protection for your own world? There are, after all, many races among the stars that neither of us have yet met. One of these may well be ruled by such a warlord. Are you safer alone, or as a member of a Civilization composed of a million suns?”

  Sar-Say continued at length in that vein, stressing the benefits of joining the Broan Sovereignty. After several minutes of this, Mark had to admit that he was being damned persuasive. He made the Sovereignty seem more a collection of equals than an oligarchy run by and for the benefit of the Broa. Mark knew otherwise, but wondered how many members of the general public did. Would they hear Sar-Say’s siren song and see the truth, or would they be taken in by a string of smooth lies? Considering some of the political arguments he had observed, he wasn’t sure.

  One thing was certain. The pseudo-simian had learned his human psychology lessons well.

  Eventually, Sar-Say ran out of benefits to extol and turned to the negatives: first the carrot, then the stick.

  “You face a choice in the near future,” Sar-Say said in a deeper, and somehow more threatening, tone. “It is not the choice you have been debating these past few days. You believe it possible to maintain your independence, and are arguing over the best way to do so. This argument misses the point. Since it is inevitable that we will find you, the choice is whether to submit willingly, or be overcome by force.

  “Your leaders tell you that we Broa do not allow other species to compete for the leadership of Civilization. This is true. Letting each species go its own way leads to warfare and endangers everyone. If you choose to join us, the transition to Civilization will go quite smoothly. If, however, you resist, we will bring you under control by force.

  “Let me describe to you what that entails. When you are inevitably discovered and refuse our offers of membership in Civilization, we will assemble a war fleet and send them through stargates on single-ended jumps into your Solar System. One moment, you will be secure in your isolation, knowing that you are safe from the terrible Broa. The next, you will find yourself surrounded by thousands of warcraft more powerful than you can possibly imagine.

  ”What happens next depends on the strength of your resistance. If you prove no stronger than most species, you will lose a few cities to bombardment from space. If, however, you put up a strong fight, your world will be destroyed.”

  He paused and let that point sink in. When he continued, it was in the same confident tone with which he had begun.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, I urge you not to close your minds to joining us voluntarily. It is literally the only choice you have if you are to survive. We are coming. Your fate rests in your hands alone.” He paused and consulted the antique timepiece he wore on one arm just above a six-fingered hand.

  “I see that I have been speaking for about as long as an audience will tolerate. I therefore will conclude my remarks.

  “Thank you for listening to me.”

  #

  At first his remarks were met with a sullen silence. Then isolated shouts and jeers broke out. These soon turned into a crescendo. People rose to their feet and shouted at the stage. Some actually shook their fists. Others, however, sat in their seats and looked pensive, as though they were trying to process a wholly new thought. Alan Fernandez beamed as he strode to the lectern to help the pseudo-simian down. From backstage, four large men appeared. They were Sar-Say’s ‘bodyguards,’ here to escort him back to his cell.

  The guards waited patiently while Sar-Say spoke privately with Fernandez. Then they surrounded him and escorted him from the stage.

  Alan Fernandez returned to the microphone and announced a twenty minute recess, following which they would begin the reports of the working groups.

  Twenty minutes later, about half the crowd was back in their seats, awaiting the resumption of the program. These were the members of the various institutes who were doing the actual work. Members of Parliament and the Coordinator’s representatives had largely departed.

  The twenty minute time limit came and went without anyone reappearing on stage. Five minutes went by, and then ten, and still the conference did not reconvene. Mark looked at Lisa questioningly, and she shrugged her shoulders. Out of the corner of his eye, he caught sight of a familiar figure striding down the aisle from the back of the auditorium.

  Dieter Pavel made his way to where they were sitting and spoke in a stage whisper. “Lisa, you are wanted upstairs. Mark can come too if he wants.”

  “Upstairs?” she asked. “What’s wrong?”

  “Not here,” Pavel replied, jerking his thumb toward the wide door leading from the auditorium. “Out in the foyer.”

  The three of them walked up the long slope to the door, and turned right toward the lift. When they were alone in a brightly lit corridor, Lisa asked, “What is going on?”

  “Sar-Say has been kidnapped!”

  #

  Chapter Nineteen

  “Upstairs” proved to be the office of the Harvard Convention Center manager. When Dieter Pavel ushered Lisa and Mark inside, they found all three Directors clustered around a visibly shaken security guard. The guard wore the epaulets of a Lieutenant and had a white bandage running diagonally across his left temple.

  There was one other in the office, Tony Hulsey, leader of the Coordinator’s faction in parliament. The Guard Lieutenant wasn’t the only one visibly shaken. Alan Fernandez’s complexion was the color of dirty snow.

  Dexter Hamlin glanced up as Mark and Lisa entered. His dark eyes were focused on Lisa. “Good, you’re here. We are in need of your insights.”

  “What happened?” she asked.

  “Four guards were escorting Sar-Say back to his cell when they were jumped by an unknown number of assailants. They were all simultaneously stunned by illegal tasers. The jolts knocked them out for a few seconds, and when they came to, Sar-Say was gone. Lieutenant Forster got a pretty good knock on the head and one of his men has a broken arm.”

  “Any idea who these assailants were?

  “None. We only know they were damned well organized.”

  “How could they have known the route in advance?” Mark asked on impulse.

  The Lieutenant looked at him and said, “My fault. We went straight up the pedestrian mall by the most direct route. We wanted to get Sar-Say back under lock and key as quickly as possible.”

  “Surely we must have some suspicions as to their identity,” Lisa said.

  Hamlin turned back to her. “They could have been from any number of factions. There are the Religionists, who think Sar-Say is one of Satan’s minions; the Earth Firsters, who wish we had never invented electricity, let alone space travel; the Radical Conservatives, who think we’re going to spend too much tax money regardless of what we decide. Hell, it might just be a local gang who think they can make a healthy credit by holding him for ransom. Personally, I wouldn’t put it past members of Terra Nostra.”

  “Why them?” Mark asked. “True, Vasloff is in favor of pulling back from the stars, but kidnapping Sar-Say won’t advance his cause any.”

  “It may be someone else,” Lisa said, her face frozen in a pensive frown.

  “Who?”

  “It could be Sar-Say himself.”

  “Go ahead,” Hamlin said.

  “I’m just speculating, you understand,” she replied, hesitantly.

  “Speculate away. That is why we asked you here.”

  “I spent a lot of time living with Sar-Say,” she replied. “He is quite intelligent, possibly more intelligent than we are. I doubt he would give up on the idea of escape just because his first attempt didn’t work.”

  “Are you suggesting that this was a jail break?” Alan Fernandez demanded, his voice turning into a squeak as he completed the sentence.

  “Precisely,” Lisa replied.

  “To what purpose?”

  “Why, to get off this planet and back to the Sovereignty, of course.”

  The direct
or of the Broa Institute shook his head. “That’s crazy. No human would betray Earth that way.”

  “Are you sure? He can offer those who help him riches beyond imagining.”

  There followed a long silence, after which Dexter Hamlin mused, “That puts a different slant on things.”

  “How so?” Hulsey asked.

  “Think of it,” Mark’s boss continued. “Sar-Say may have been kidnapped by someone who means him harm; in which case, we will probably be pulling his body out of the bay this afternoon. Then again, perhaps he was kidnapped for money.

  “In the first case, his death will be a major loss to our research, but it also guarantees the Broa will not learn of our existence from him. In the second case, we pay the ransom, get him back, and hunt down the perpetrators. The result is that he returns to our custody with no lasting harm done. But what if Lisa is right? What if this is a jailbreak organized by Sar-Say himself?”

  “Then Earth is in grave danger.”

  “What are we to do about it?” Jean-Pierre Landrieu asked. Like Fernandez, he looked sick to his stomach.

  “The police have already been notified. We had best get the army involved, as well,” Hamlin replied. “There is a division of Peace Enforcers at Fort Monmouth. They can be here this evening.”

  “No need for that,” Fernandez objected.

  “I disagree. We are going to have to shut down the entire Boston Metro Area. That means we will need troops to throw a cordon around the entire city. Nothing in or out until we find Sar-Say, dead or alive.”

  “The kidnappers have probably already left the city.”

  Director Hamlin nodded. “I would have, were I them. However, we can’t overlook the possibility they are hiding locally. They must know we would set up mandatory traffic checkpoints as soon as we learned of the kidnapping. In fact, the police are doing that right now. It isn’t like they can slap a blonde wig on him for a disguise.”

  “What if he has escaped Boston?”

  “The traffic monitors can give us the registration of every vehicle that has left the city since the kidnapping and where they are now. We will have to track them down and cross-reference their drivers and passengers to everyone who has had contact with Sar-Say since he has been here at the Institute.

  “People with contact?” Hulsey asked.

  “Think about it. If this is a jailbreak, then Sar-Say had to arrange it with someone. We get a list of those who have come in contact with him and see if any of them have the resources to arrange his escape. Then, of course, there are the starships.”

  “What about them?”

  “We need to secure them… right now! If Sar-Say has escaped, he needs a starship to complete his getaway. Again, he can offer any and all accomplices anything they want. But to reap their reward, they have to get him home first. Who is to say there isn’t a starship captain out there just waiting for the shuttle that is bringing him to orbit?”

  “That means that we will have to shut down the shuttles,” Hulsey said.

  “Not just them. All launches ground-to-orbit. For all we know, he is heading for one of the electromagnetic launchers and planning on leaving Earth marked as a cylinder of oxygen or something.”

  “Surely he couldn’t have arranged all of that while he has been here. We record his every movement and utterance for exhaustive study,” Alan Ferguson said.

  “It doesn’t make much sense to escape otherwise,” Hamlin replied. “Why trade his small comfortable prison for the larger, much more dangerous one known as Planet Earth?”

  “Then in addition to grounding everything headed for orbit, we should move the starships to where he can’t get at them,” Tony Hulsey replied. Unlike the academics, he seemed completely at ease dealing with a crisis of this magnitude. “How many are there in the Solar System at the moment?”

  “There can’t be more than a couple of dozen.”

  “All right. We get guards aboard each and every ship, and then we dispatch them out to the vicinity of Jupiter. Somewhere that a ground-to-orbit shuttle can’t reach, anyway.”

  “High station?” Mark suggested.

  Hulsey nodded. “That should be far enough. Very few ships from Earth can reach that orbit without refueling at Equatorial Station first. We’ll have to monitor that, too; although there shouldn’t be any comings or goings. Not with our blockade in effect.”

  “These are needlessly drastic measures,” Alan Fernandez said sourly.

  “Perhaps so,” Mark’s boss replied. “But if Sar-say gets aboard a starship and somehow gains control, our fate will be sealed. With the safety of humanity in the balance, drastic measures are called for.”

  #

  Sar-Say had not left the Boston Metro Area. In fact, he was in the basement of an older home in Cambridge, not four blocks from the university.

  “All right,” Gus Heinz said, sitting on the sofa facing the small alien. “I’ve held up my end of the bargain. Now where is my money?”

  “You will receive what I promised and more as soon as I reach my home,” Sar-Say said. As he did so, he dipped his tongue into a glass of cold water, formed a tube, and sucked up the refreshing liquid. His adventures over the past few hours had left him parched.

  “Your note didn’t say anything about that,” Heinz replied menacingly. “It said that you would give me one billion credits if I helped you escape. I’ve helped you. Now, where is my money?”

  “Surely you didn’t expect me to have it on my person?” Sar-Say asked, spreading his arms wide in a human gesture. Unlike at his speech earlier in the day, he was now clothed normally… that is, in his fur alone. His gesture made it clear that he lacked pockets in which to sequester a billion credits.

  “I expected you to be able to get it,” Heinz said.

  “How? Do you suppose they were paying me for my services?”

  “Why not?” asked the interstellar importer/exporter. “You give them information about alien technology and they pay you what the information is worth.”

  At that moment, Sar-Say began to worry about the success of his plan. This human was not very intelligent. Or rather, his intelligence was focused in his business and making money. He seemed to have few other interests in life, save the Boston Beans flyball team.

  “I am sorry, Gus, but I was their prisoner. They paid me nothing for the valuable information I provided, even though I spoke honestly and at length.”

  “So you lied in the note?”

  Sar-Say noted the human’s voice had dropped an octave, making his manner seem more menacing. As an alien, Sar-Say was actually more aware of the significance of these unconscious changes in voice and face than were their owners. His years of captivity had taught him the skill of reading human expressions.

  “Not at all,” Sar-Say replied. “I pledge to you the sum of one billion credits or their equivalent as soon as we reach any Broan world.”

  Heinz stood angrily, his fists two white-knuckled balls at his sides. “Then I’ve taken this risk for nothing. So have the people I hired to break you out.”

  “That is not true. Please, sit down and let me tell you my plan to get home and to pay you. In fact, I will make you my prime human contact when I am made administrator of this world, which will make you far richer than a mere billion credits.”

  At the mention of additional riches, Sar-Say noted the muscles in Heinz’s face relax and his breathing begin a return to normal.

  #

  After he had gotten the big, rotund human quieted down, Sar-Say recounted the plan he had worked out over the long months of captivity.

  The easiest thing to do would have been for Heinz to hire a starship to return to Klys’kra’t, the coordinates of which Sar-Say had memorized. Presumably there was a ship’s captain and crew amenable to promises of future reward.

  Nor would such promises be empty ones. When Sar-Say was awarded the mastership of Earth, he would have near infinite resources with which to reward those who helped him. If Gus Heinz desired the Gov
ernor-Generalship of Australia, then that would be his reward. If he also wished to house himself in a mansion, supplied with a steady stream of nubile females, Sar-Say would arrange that too. In truth, once he assumed his rightful place as Master of Earth, there was no limit on his ability to reward supporters, and good reasons for others to see that cooperation paid in cold, hard credits.

  All of this was for the future. Today’s problem was that promises of future wealth would not hire a starship. It seemed to him that Heinz was particularly ill suited for the task. As an interstellar merchant, Heinz dealt with shipping agents and other intermediaries, never directly with starship captains or crews.

  Sar-Say proposed that Gus take out as large a loan as he could manage, even mortgaging his business if need be. Having obtained funding that he had no intention of repaying, Heinz would contract with a starship captain to transport machine tools and luxury foodstuffs to whatever colony the captain was scheduled to visit on his next voyage.

  The cargo would consist of several vacuum-proof shipping containers, one of which Heinz would modify to smuggle Sar-Say aboard the starship. This container would require both breathing equipment and a cooling system that would operate for several days with little possibility of failure.

  Heinz would book passage aboard the starship, along with a number of accomplices. Once the starship was in superlight, Heinz would make an excuse to visit the cargo hold, release Sar-Say, and break out the weaponry they would smuggle in the other cases. Once they were armed, taking control of the ship should not be difficult.

  Commercial starships were highly automated, which meant that they could extend their foodstuffs for the year-long voyage by disposing of the other passengers and crew.

  Sar-Say did not bother to mention this last point to Heinz.

  When he finished his explanation, Heinz scratched the stubble on his face and said, “It’s going to take a lot more than I can arrange with a bank to swing this deal.”