Asgard's Conquerors. Brian Stableford

that,” he said, contemptuously. “But I’ll bet you your half of our ship that Dr. Ayub Khan feels a lot more strongly about what’s in those tanks than he does about keeping Kramin and his bully boys sweet.”

      The phone trilled again, and I picked it up.

      “Yes?” I said.

      “Very well, Mr. Martin,” said Ayub Khan, who was obviously no good at recognizing voices. “The cargo-vessel transporting Mistral has been directed to turn back. It will dock in approximately four hours. You may board it and depart.”

      I blinked. I looked at Finn, and said: “You were right. They’re bringing her back.”

      “We win!” His exultation failed to cover up his surprise. He hadn’t been at all certain that it would work. But even as I watched him, I saw the mood of self-congratulation build inside him. He was beginning to think that he was a very clever fellow indeed—if he had ever really doubted it.

      “Thank you, Dr. Khan,” I said into the phone, rather leadenly. “That’s most kind of you. We’ll be happy to wait.”

      It was a lie, of course—I was anything but happy.

      But I couldn’t for the life of me see what else we could do.

      CHAPTER FIVE

      The best-laid plans of mice and men, so the poet assures us, gang aft agley. The worst-laid plans can hardly be expected to fare much better. You will understand, therefore, that the four-hour wait that stretched ahead of Finn and myself while we waited for our getaway ship to be brought back to dock was not a comfortable prospect.

      “You don’t suppose they’re going to let us get away with this, do you?” I asked of Finn.

      “Got a better idea?” he spat back at me. He still had his sterile suit on, but he’d unfastened the helmet so he could talk. I hadn’t bothered to put mine on.

      I didn’t have a better idea. In fact, I didn’t have any ideas at all. But I had completely lost confidence in Finn’s ideas. He seemed to me to have an overripe imagination, which obviously had a tendency to run away with him. Not for the first time I cursed my luck in running into him. Of all the people I had known in my life who might conceivably be found on a microworld orbiting Uranus, he was probably the only one who could have compounded my problems to this degree. Everybody else would have had sufficient sanity and kindness to leave me alone.

      “Why exactly are you calling yourself Jack Martin these days?” I asked him.

      He favored me with a sour expression.

      “Because I’m a Star Force deserter,” he told me. “Among other things.”

      It didn’t come as a tremendous surprise.

      “What other things?”

      “Nothing serious. Theft.” He paused, then went on: “Was drafted when I got back after my stay on Asgard. If I’d stayed out there, I’d have been okay, but I couldn’t stick the place. Creepy humanoids, cold, dark caves—like hell frozen over. Came back, pulled a couple of software frauds, set up the fake identity. Wasn’t too difficult. But you can’t move about on Earth or Mars these days without leaving a trail like an electronic skunk. Australia got too hot. Had to go back to the belt; had to get out of there, too. Been here for a year. Ayub Khan’s on to me, but hasn’t turned me in. Not because of his innate generosity, you understand. I’m not even particularly useful to him, in spite of my special skills—but it would be inconvenient to get a replacement. Isn’t just the law, either. Got other people looking for me. When you’re being hunted from both sides...I’d give a lot to get back to Asgard, even if it is hell frozen over. Or a colony world, maybe. Never been to a colony. You?”

      “You’re quite the little Napoleon of crime, aren’t you?” I said. “I always knew you’d go to the bad, even in the old days. Mickey must be turning in his grave.”

      “I’m not the only one here who’s wanted for desertion, am I?”

      “You’re the only one who’s guilty.”

      “Sure. You’re a real war hero, Rousseau. You really did your bit for dear old Mother Earth, piddling around in absolute zero out on the galactic rim. Is it true that your bosses there were peddling android super-soldiers to the Salamandrans?”

      These were low blows, but I could see his point of view. The Tetrax had sold war-materials to the Salamandrans, including technics they’d developed as a result of our researches on Asgard. Maybe somewhere along the line, one of my discoveries had contributed a little. I wondered, though, whether the Tetrax had been selling stuff to our side too. It would be logical. The fact that humans aren’t supposed to be biotech-minded probably made Tetrax systems all the more attractive as items of purchase.

      “Okay,” I said to Finn, “I guess neither of us is Robin Hood. But it looks like we’re outlaws from here on in—unless we change our minds and surrender.”

      “Ho, ho,” he said, humorlessly.

      “I’m serious,” I told him. “You could zap me with the mud gun and claim to be a hero. Tell them I blackmailed you into it because I knew your real name. Or I could zap you with the mud gun and tell them I only just found out what a ruthless desperado you are.”

      He wasn’t amused. “What did you find on Asgard?” he asked, changing the subject back to something less worrying.

      I decided that talking was preferable to silence, given the mood we were in. “I found out that the levels go a long way down,” I said, without much enthusiasm. “There are thousands of them. There could be more surface area down there than on the homeworlds and colonies of all the galactic humanoids put together. If they were all populated, there’d be an awful lot of people inside that world.”

      “Know what I think it is?” he asked.

      “Probably,” I told him. “I’ve heard just about every theory there is. Hot favorite, by a wide margin, is that it’s an interstellar Noah’s Ark fleeing from some cosmic disaster that took place unimaginable eons ago in the black galaxy.”

      I could tell by his face that I’d guessed it in one. Desperately, he cast around for some other notion, so that he could pretend I was wrong.

      “It could be a zoo,” he said. “Or it could be that they’re refugees from our own galaxy, from the time before any of the present-day humanoids went into space. They say it couldn’t possibly be coincidence that all the civilizations in the galactic arm should be approximately the same age, and all the humanoid races look so very similar. The guys on Goodfellow think we all have common ancestors—that all our worlds may have been terraformed in the distant past by some kind of parent species.”

      “I’ve heard people argue along those lines,” I admitted.

      “So what do you think, genius?” he demanded, with a hint of a sneer in his voice.

      “I don’t know,” I told him, truthfully. “But I do think we might find the answers to more questions than we ever dared to ask if anyone does get to the center of Asgard. I saw enough down there to convince me that there are people in the deeper layers who make the Tetrax look primitive. The Tetrax suspect it too. They worry about it—they really like being the neighborhood superstars. They love to call the rest of us barbarians, and I don’t imagine they’d like to be shoved into that category themselves. They’re very keen to find out what Asgard really is, but I’m not so sure they’ll like the answers.”

      “Like the rest of us to do their spade-work for them, don’t they? God, I hated working for them—although I have to admit that they taught me a thing or two about security systems. If it hadn’t been for the damned war, I’d really have been in a position to make it big back here. Learned some neat tricks on Asgard. They might be monkey-faced bastards, but they’re prepared to share what they know when it suits them. Or did they only open up Asgard to the rest of us so saps like you and me could take their risks for them?”

      “That’s