Not that anything he learned would help him much. He was thoroughly trapped, and in a while he might be thoroughly destroyed. But action, any action, even this verbal shadowboxing, was one way to avoid thinking about such impolite details.

  “Professionally speaking,” he said, “I’m interested to know how you trapped me.”

  “Ah.” Warouw gestured with his own cigarillo, not at all loath to expound his cleverness. “Well, when you made your…eh…departure in Kompong Timur, it might have been the hysterical act of a fool who had simply blundered onto us. If so, you were not to be worried about. But I dared not assume it. Your whole manner indicated otherwise—not to mention the documents, official and personal, which I later studied on your ship. Accordingly, my working hypothesis was that you had some plan for surviving beyond the period in which your first antitoxin dose would be effective. Was there already an underground organization of extraplanetary agents, whom you would seek out? I admit the search for such a group took most of my time for numerous days.”

  Warouw grimaced. “I pray your sympathy for my plight,” he said. “The Guards have faced no serious task for generations. No one resists Biocontrol! The Guards, the entire organization, are escorts and watchdogs at best, idiots at worst. Ignoring the proletariat as they do, they have no experience of the criminal subtleties developed by the proletariat. With such incompetents must I chase a crafty up-to-date professional like yourself.”

  Flandry nodded. He’d gotten the same impression. Modern police and intelligence methodology—even military science—didn’t exist on Unan Besar. Poor, damned Nias Warouw, a born detective forced to re-invent the whole art of detection!

  But he had done a disquietingly good job of it.

  “My first break came when a district boss named Sumu—ah, you remember?” Warouw grinned. “My congratulations, Captain. He was unwilling to admit how you had taken him, but afraid not to report that he had unwittingly entertained a man of your description. I forced the whole tale from him. Delicious! But then I began to think over the datum it presented. It took me days more; I am not used to such problems. In the end, however, I decided that you would not have carried out so risky an exploit except for money, which you doubtless needed to buy illegal antitoxin. (Oh, yes, I know there is some. I have been trying to tighten up controls on production and distribution. But the inefficiency of centuries must be overcome.) Well, if you had to operate in such fashion, you were not in touch with a secret organization. Probably no such organization existed! However, you must have made some contacts in Swamp Town.”

  Warouw blew smoke rings, cocked his head at the trill of a songbird, and resumed: “I called for the original reports on the case. It was established that in fleeing us you had broken into the establishment of a certain courtesan. She had told the Guards that she fled in terror and knew nothing else. There had been no reason to doubt her. Nor was there now, a priori, but I had no other lead. I ordered her brought in for questioning. My squad was told she had left several days before, destination unknown. I ordered that a watch be kept on her antitoxin record. When she appeared at Gunung Utara, I was informed. I flew there within the hour.

  “The local dispenser remembered her vividly, and had a recollection of a tall man with her. She had told him where she was staying, so we checked the inn. Yes, she had been careless enough to tell the truth. The innkeeper described her companions, one of whom was almost certainly you. We arrested her and the other man in their rooms and settled back to await you.”

  Flandry sighed. He might have known it. How often had he told cubs in the Service never to underestimate an opponent?

  “You almost escaped us again, Captain,” said Warouw. “A dazzling exhibition, though not one that I recommend you repeat. Even if, somehow, you broke loose once more, all aircars here are locked. The only other way to depart is on foot, with 400 kilometers of dense rain forest to the nearest village. You would never get there before your antitoxin wore off.”

  Flandry finished his cigarillo and crushed it with regret. “Your only reason for isolating this place that much,” he said, “is that you make the pills here.”

  Warouw nodded. “This is Biocontrol Central. If you think you can steal a few capsules for your jungle trip, I suppose you can try. Pending distribution, they are kept in an underground vault protected by identification doors, automatic guns, and—as the initial barrier—a hundred trusted Guards.”

  “I don’t plan to try,” said Flandry.

  Warouw stretched; muscles flowed under his hairless brown skin. “There is no harm in showing you some of the other sections, though,” he said. “If you are interested.”

  I’m interested in anything which will postpone the next round of unfriendliness, acknowledged Flandry. Aloud: “Of course. I might even talk you into dropping your isolationist policy.”

  Warouw’s smile turned bleak. “On the contrary, Captain,” he said, “I hope to prove to you that there is no chance of its being dropped, and that anyone who tries to force the issue is choosing a needlessly lingering form of suicide. Come, please.”

  -11-

  Two Guards padded silently behind, but they were no more heeded than Warouw’s blaster. The chief took Flandry’s arm with a delicate, almost feminine gesture and led him down a hall and a curving ramp to the garden. Here it was cool and full of green odors. Immense purple blooms drooped overhead, scarlet and yellow flowerbeds lined the gravel walks like a formal fire, water plashed high out of carved basins and went rilling under playfully shaped bridges, ketjils were little gold songsparks darting in and out of willow groves. Flandry paid more attention to the building. He was being led across from one wing to the center. It reared huge, the changing styles of centuries discernible in its various parts. Warouw’s goal was obviously the oldest section: a sheer black mountain of fused stone, Guards at the doors and robot guns on the battlements.

  An attendant in an anteroom bowed low and issued four suits. They were coveralls, masked and hooded, of a transparent flexiplast which fitted comfortably enough, though Warouw must leave off his robe. Gloves, boots, and snouted respirators completed the ensemble.

  “Germs in there?” asked Flandry.

  “Germs on us.” For a moment, the nightmare of a dozen generations looked out of Warouw’s eyes. He made a sign against evil. “We dare not risk contaminating the vats.”

  “Of course,” suggested Flandry, “you could produce a big enough reserve supply of antitoxin to carry you through any such emergency.”

  Warouw’s worldliness returned. “Now, Captain,” he laughed, “would that be practical politics?”

  “No,” admitted Flandry. “It could easily lead to Biocontrol having to work for a living.”

  “You never gave the impression of possessing any such peasantish ideal.”

  “Fate forbid! My chromosomes always intended me for a butterfly, useful primarily as an inspiration to others. However, you must admit a distinction between butterflies and leeches.”

  Since Flandry had used the name of equivalent native insects, Warouw scowled. “Please, Captain!”

  The Terran swept eyes across one horrified attendant and two indignant Guards. “Ah, yes,” he said, “Little Eva and the Sunshine Twins. Sorry, I forgot about them. Far be it from me to do away with anyone’s intellectual maidenhead.”

  Warouw put his hands to a scanner. The inner door opened for his party and they entered a sterilizing chamber. Beyond its UV and ultrasonics, another door led them into a sort of lobby. A few earnest young shavepates hurried here and there with technical apparatus. They gave the sense of a task forever plagued by clumsy equipment and clumsier organization. Which was to be expected, of course. Biocontrol was not about to modernize its plant. And, like all hierarchies not pruned by incessant competition, Biocontrol had proliferated its departments, regulations, chains of command, protocols, office rivalries, and every other fungus Flandry knew so well on Terra.

  A creaky old slideramp bore Warouw’s group up several floors. Two purely ornamental Guards lounged on blast rifles outside a gilded door of vast proportions. Several men cooled their heels in the room beyond, waiting for admission to the main office. Warouw brushed past them, through a small auxiliary sterilizing chamber and so into the sanctum.

  Solu Bandang himself sat among many cushions. He had removed his flexisuit but not donned a robe again. His belly sagged majestically over his kilt. He looked up, heavy-lidded, and whined, “Now what is the meaning of this? What do you mean? I gave no appointment to—Oh. You.”

  “Greeting, Tuan,” said Warouw casually. “I had not expected to find you on duty.”

  “Yes, it is my turn, my turn again. Even the highest office, ah, in the…the world, this world…does not excuse a man from a tour of— Necessary to keep one’s finger on the pulse, Captain Flandry,” said Bandang. “Very essential. Oh, yes, indeed.”

  The desk didn’t look much used. Flandry supposed that the constant presence of some member of the governing board was a survival of earlier days when Biocontrol’s stranglehold wasn’t quite so firm.

  “I trust, ah, you have been made to…see the error of your ways, Captain?” Bandang reached for a piece of candied ginger. “Your attitude has, I hope, become—realistic?”

  “I am still arguing with our guest, Tuan,” said Warouw.

  “Oh, come now!” said Bandang. “Come now! Really, Colleague, this is deplorable, ah, dilatoriness on your part. Explain to the Captain, Warouw, that we have methods to persuade recalcitrants. Yes, methods. If necessary, apply those methods. But don’t come in here disturbing me! He’s not in my department. Not my department at all.”

  “In that case, Tuan,” said Warouw, his exasperation hardly curbed, “I beg you to let me proceed with my work in my own fashion. I should like to show the Captain one of our vats. I think it might prove convincing. But of course, we need your presence to get into that section.”

  “What? What? See here, Warouw, I am a busy man. Busy, do you hear? I have, er, obligations. It is not my duty to—”

  “Perhaps,” snapped Warouw, “the Tuan feels he can take care of the situation single-handed, when the outworlders arrive?”

  “What?” Bandang sat up straight, so fast that his jowls quivered. The color drained from them. “What’s that? Do you mean there are outworlders? Other, that is, than the Betelgeuseans—uncontrolled outworlders, is that, ah, is that—”

  “That is what I have to find out, Tuan. I beg you for your kind assistance.”

  “Oh. Oh, yes. Yes, at once. Immediately!” Bandang rolled to his feet and fumbled at his hung-up flexisuit. The two Guards hastened to assist him in donning it.

  Warouw checked an electronic bulletin board. “I see Genseng is on watch at Vat Four,” he said. “We’ll go there. You must meet Colleague Genseng, Flandry.”

  The Terran made no answer. He was considering what he had seen. Bandang was a fat fool, but without too many illusions. His horror at the idea of out-planet visitors proved he knew very well what Flandry had already deduced:

  God, what an overripe plum! If only the pills could come from somewhere else, this Biocontrol boobocracy and its comic opera Guards wouldn’t last a week.

  If any adventurers do learn the truth, they’ll swarm here from a score of planets. Unan Besar is rich. I don’t know how much of that wealth is locked in Biocontrol vaults, but it must be plenty. Enough to make the fortune of an experienced fighting man (like me) who’d serve as a revolutionary officer for a share in the loot.

  Unless the revolution happens too fast to import filibusters. I suspect that would be the actual case. The people of Unan Besar would rip their overlords apart bare-handed. And, of course, the real money to be made here is not from plundering, but from selling cheap antitoxin without restrictions…Which is less my line of work than a spot of piracy would be. But I’d still like to get that juicy commission from Mitsuko Laboratories.

  The lightness faded in him, less because he remembered his immediate problems than because of certain other recollections. The man who screamed and died in a cage where the stone gods danced. Swamp Town, and humans turned wolf to survive. Hungry men chipping a mountainside by hand, women and children in rice paddies. Djuanda, with nothing left him but pride, leaping off the wall. Luang’s eyes, seen across the room where she sat bound. The Guard who struck her with a club.

  Flandry had no patience with crusaders, but there are limits to any man’s endurance.

  “Come, then,” puffed Bandang. “Yes, Captain, you really must see our production facilities. A, ah, an achievement. A most glorious achievement, as I am sure you will agree, of our, ah, pioneering ancestors. May their, their work…ever remain sacred and undefiled, their blood remain, er, pure.”

  Behind the plump back, Warouw winked at Flandry.

  Passing through the office sterilizer, and the waiting technicians who bowed to Bandang, the conducted tour took a slideway down corridors where faded murals depicted the heroic founders of Biocontrol in action. At the slideway’s end, a glassed-in catwalk ran above a series of chambers.

  They were immense. Up here near the ceilings, Flandry saw technicians down on the floor scuttle like bugs. Each room centered on a gleaming alloy vat, ten meters high and thirty in diameter. With the pipes that ran from it like stiff tentacles, with the pumps and stirrers and testers and control units and meters clustered around, it could have been some heathen god squatting amidst attendant demons. And on more than one face, among the men who went up and down the catwalks, Flandry thought he recognized adoration.

  Warouw said in a detached tone: “As you may know, the process of antitoxin manufacture is biological. A yeast-like native organism was mutated to produce, during fermentation, that inhibitor which prevents the bacterial formation of acetylcholine. The bacteria themselves are destroyed within a few days by normal human antibodies. So, if you left this planet, you would need one final pill to flush out the infection. Thereafter you would be free of it. But as long as you are on Unan Besar—each breath you take, each bite you eat or drop you drink, maintains an equilibrium concentration of germs in your system.

  “Unfortunately, these omnipresent germs kill the yeast itself. So it is critically important to keep this place sterile. Even a slight contamination would spread like fire in dry grass. The room where it occurred would have to be sealed off, everything dismantled and individually sterilized. It would take a year to get back in operation. And we would be lucky to have only one vat idled.”

  “A molecular synthesizing plant could turn out a year’s biological production in a day, and sneer at germs,” said Flandry.

  “No doubt. No doubt, Captain,” said Bandang. “You are very clever in the Empire. But cleverness isn’t all, you know. Not by any means. There are other virtues. Ah…Warouw, I think you should not have called the circumstance of, um, easy contamination…unfortunate. On the contrary, I would call it most fortunate. A, ah, a divine dispensation, bringing about and protecting the, er, social order most suitable for this world.”

  “A social order which recognizes that worthiness is heritable, and allows every blood line to find its natural status under the benevolent guardianship of a truly scientific organization whose primary mission has always been to preserve the genetic and cultural heritage of Unan Besar from degradation and exploitation by basically inferior outsiders,” droned Flandry.

  Bandang looked surprised. “Why, Captain, have you come to so good an understanding already?”

  “Here is Vat Four,” said Warouw.

  In each chamber, a stairway, also glassed in, led down from the catwalk. Flandry was taken along this one. It ended at a platform several meters above the floor, where a semi-circular board flashed with lights and quivered with dials. Flandry realized the instruments must report on every aspect of the vat’s functioning. Underneath them was a bank of master controls for emergency use. At the far left projected a long double-pole switch, painted dead black. A light at its end glowed like a red eye.

  The man who stood motionless before the board would have been impressive in his white robe. Seen kilted through a flexisuit, he was much too thin. Every rib and vertebra could be counted. When he turned around, his face was a skull in sagging skin. But the eyes lived; and, in an eerie way, the glowing golden brand.

  “You dare—” he whispered. Recognizing Bandang: “Oh. Your pardon, Tuan.” His scorn was hardly veiled. “I thought it must be some fool of a novice who dared interrupt a duty officer.”

  Bandang stepped back. “Ah…really, Genseng,” he huffed. “You go too far. Indeed you do. I, ah, I demand respect. Yes.”

  The eyes smoldered at them. “I am duty officer here until my relief arrives.” The murmur of pumps came more loudly through the glass cage than Genseng’s voice. “You know the Law.”

  “Yes. Yes, indeed. Of course. But—”

  “The duty officer is supreme at his station, Tuan. My decisions may not be questioned. I could kill you for a whim, and the Law would uphold me. Holy is the Law.”

  “Indeed. Indeed.” Bandang wiped his countenance. “I too…after all. I too have my watches to stand—”

  “In an office,” sneered Genseng.

  Warouw trod cockily to the fore. “Do you remember our guest, Colleague?” he asked.

  “Yes.” Genseng brooded at Flandry. “The one who came from the stars and leaped out the window. When does he go in the cage?”

  “Perhaps never,” said Warouw. “I think he might be induced to cooperate with us.”

  “He is unclean,” mumbled Genseng. The hairless skull turned back toward the dance of instruments, as if beauty dwelt there alone.

  “I thought you might wish to demonstrate the controls to him.”

  “S-s-s-so.” Genseng’s eyes filmed over. He stood a long while, moving his lips without sound. At last: “Yes, I see.”

  Suddenly his gaze flamed at the Terran. “Look out there,” the parchment voice ordered. “Watch those men serving the vat. If any of them makes an error—if any of a hundred possible errors are made, or a thousand possible misfunctions of equipment occur—the batch now brewing will spoil and a million people will die. Could you bear such a burden?”