None But Man by Gordon R. Dickson

Author:Gordon R. Dickson [Dickson, Gordon R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction, Sci-Fi
Publisher: Pyramid Books
Published: 1971-03-25T00:00:00+00:00

15

“Just how safe are we?” asked Cully bluntly, once he and Will were alone and afoot at the Spaceport of the capital city on the Crown World of the Moldaug. They had left Doak behind, keeping the shuttle boat of the captured Moldaug ship on ready for instant take-off, and were now crossing the small-boat parking area toward the Spaceport taxi line-up.

“Not safe at all, really,” admitted Will.

“I thought so,” said Cully.

It had been entirely too easy so far. The captured ship turned out to have maps of the Crown World by which they could locate the capital city and its Spaceport. The three of them had entered the planetary atmosphere quite openly in the shuttle boat; and in reply to a routine challenge by the Moldaug equivalent of a spaceport traffic controller, Will had answered quite truthfully that they were three soft faces, last from Heder T’ai, friends of—and he had named the surviving Chief Officer of the courier ship they had captured—who were coming in to see the capital city during All-Respectable Time.

At a spaceport on one of the Old Worlds or one of the Frontier Worlds, under the present tense human-alien conditions, this would hardly have been enough to satisfy the landing authorities. But, as Will had explained, the concept of absolute responsibility which invested the Moldaug Leaders—as long as they remained leaders of the race—was matched by a concept of absolute trust on the part of the Moldaug who were led. The very fact that three soft faces were here, in the very heart of the Moldaug territory, was enough to prove that they had a right to be here. Just within the border line of the Moldaug frontier, the shuttle boat would probably have been melted on sight.

But there was a difference. The Moldaug on the Frontier were under orders to keep soft faces out. The Moldaug at the capital-city Spaceport were not.

Cully and Will were now almost to the edge of the parking area. Now they could see the line of automated alien taxis clearly—looking eerily like a column of old-fashioned, horsedrawn coaches out of the human past, but lacking both horses and wheels and floating a few inches above the ground on repulsor units.

“We’ll grab one of those,” said Cully thoughtfully. “It ought to be programmed to take us automatically to any destination we can name. About being safe—even if this is a time of carnival and general license, it’ll be for a special kind of Moldaug carnival and license, isn’t that it?”

“That’s it,” agreed Will. “To the Moldaug themselves, it’s a time of complete relaxation of the rules. But, really, this only means relaxation from the conscious rules. The unconscious commandments of their culture and society still operate on them. If we violate one of those unconscious commandments, if we step across the line somewhere, we may find ourselves in trouble. And if we get into trouble, we may be held until the Time of All-Respectable ends. Then we will, indeed, be in very deep trouble.

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