Endre Vadász took the lid off the kettle, inhaled a sumptuous odor, gave the contents a stir, and re-covered them. “Almost done, this,” he said. “I had better make the salad. Have you the materials ready?”
Lisa Heim blushed. “I … I’m afraid I’m not so good at slicing cucumbers and stuff,” she said.
“Poof to that.” Vadász scooped the disorderly pile of greens into a bowl. “For a cadet, you do very well … Find me the seasonings, will you? One must needs be an engineer to operate this damned machine shop you call a kitchen … As I was saying, small one, when I so rudely interrupted myself, we shall yet win you to your cook and bottle washer (j.g.) rating. Charge, a boar’s head erased with an apple gules in its mouth, field barry of six vert and or. That’s for cabbage and clotted cream.”
Lisa giggled and hopped onto the table, where she swung her legs and watched Vadász with embarrassing warmth. He had only tried to be good company to his host’s daughter while her father was away. He gave the herbs and spices more attention than was really necessary.
“My mother taught me a Spanish saying,” he remarked, “that it takes four men to make a salad: a spendthrift for the oil, a philosopher for the seasonings, a miser for the vinegar, and a madman for the tossing.”
Lisa giggled again. “You’re cute.”
“Er—here we go.” Vadász got to work, singing.
“Is that a real old song too?” Lisa asked when he paused for breath. He nodded. “I just love your songs,” she said.
“Now outside his gate there sat a human wreckiung,” Vadász continued hastily.
Lisa grabbed a skillet and spoon to beat out time as, she joined him in the chorus.
“Hi-ro-de-rungl Hi-ro-de-rung!” chimed in a bull basso. Gunnar Heim stormed through the door.
(“Daddy!” “Gunnar!”).
“Glory, hallelujah, hi-ro-de-rung!” He snatched Lisa off the table, tossed her nearly to the ceiling, caught her, and began to whirl her around the floor. Vadász went merrily on. Helm took the chorus while he stamped out a measure with the girl, who squealed.
“Oh, Daddy!” Lisa collapsed in a laughing fit.
“Welcome home,” Vadász said. “You timed yourself well.”
“What’s going on here, anyway?” Heim inquired. “Where are the servants? Why put a camp stove in a perfectly good kitchen?”
“Because machines are competent enough cooks but will never be chefs,” Vadász said. “I promised your daughter a goulash, not one of those lyophilized glue-stews but a genuine handmade Gulyás and sneeze-with-joy in the spices.”
“Oh. Fine. Only I’d better get me—”
“Nothing. A Hungarian never sets the table with less than twice as much. You may, if you wish, contribute some red wine. So, once more, welcome home, and it is good to see you in this humor.”
“With reason.” Heim rubbed his great hands and smiled like a happy tiger. “Yes, indeedy.”
“What have you done, Daddy?” Lisa asked.
“’Fraid I can’t tell you, jente min. Not for a while.” He saw the first symptoms of mutiny, chucked her under the chin, and said, “It’s for your own protection.”
She stamped her foot. “I’m not a child, you know!”
“Come, now; come, now,” interrupted Vadász. “Let us not spoil the mood. Lisa, will you set a third place? We are eating in the high style, Gunnar, in your sunroom.”
“Sure,” she sighed. “If I can have the general intercom on, vid and audio both. Can I, please, Daddy?”
Heim chuckled, stepped out to the central control panel, and unlocked the switch that made it possible to activate any pickup in the apartment from any other room. Vadász’s voice drifted after him:
and on to the end.
When Heim came back, he remarked in an undertone, because she’d be watching and listening, “Lisa doesn’t want to miss a second of you, eh?”
The finely molded face turned doleful. “Gunnar, I didn’t mean—”
“Oh, for crying in the beer!” Heim slapped Vadász on the back. “You can’t imagine how much I’d rather have her in orbit around you than some of that adolescent trash. Everything seems to be turning sunward for me.”
The Magyar brightened. “I trust,” he said, “this means you have found a particularly foul way to goosh our friends of Alerion.”
“Shh!” Heim jerked a thumb at the intercom screen. “Let’s see, what wine should I dial for your main course?”
“Hey, ha, this is quite a list. Are you running a hotel?”
“No, to be honest, my wife tried to educate me in wines but never got far. I like the stuff but haven’t much of a palate. So except when there’s company, I stay with beer and whisky.”
Lisa appeared in the screen. She laughed and sang,
Vadász put thumb to nose and waggled his fingers. She stuck out her tongue. They both grinned, neither so broadly as Heim.
And supper was a meal with more cheer, more sense of being home, than any he could remember since Connie died. Afterward he could not recall what was said—banter, mostly—it had not been real talk but a kind of embracement.
Lisa put the dishes in the service cubicle and retired demurely to bed; she even kissed her father. Heim and Vadász went downramp to the study. He closed the door, took Scotch from a cabinet, ice and soda from a coldbox, poured, and raised his own glass.
Vadász’s clinked against it. “And a voice valedictory … “ the minstrel toasted. “Who is for Victory? Who is for Liberty? Who goes home?”
“I’ll drink to that,” said Heim, and did, deeply. “Where’s it from?”
“One G. K. Chesterton, a couple of centuries ago. You have not heard of him? Ah, well, they no longer care for such unsophisticated things on Earth. Only in the colonies are men so naive as to think victories are possible.”
“Maybe we can make ’em change their minds here, too.” Heim sat down and reached for a pipe.
“Well,” Vadász said, in a cool tone but with a kind of shiver through his slim form, “now we come to business. What has happened, these last several days while I fretted about idle?”
“I’ll begin from the beginning,” Heim said. He felt no compunction about revealing what Twyman had admitted, since this Listener could be trusted. His acquaintance with Vadász, though brief, had been somewhat intense.
The Magyar wasn’t surprised anyway. “I knew they had no intention to get New Europe back when none would hear me.”
“I found a buck who would,” Heim said, and went on with his account. As he finished, Vadász’s jaw fell with a nearly audible clank.
“A privateer, Gunnar? Are you serious?”
“Absodamnlutely. So’s Coquelin, and several more we talked with.” Heim’s mirth had dissolved. He drew hard on his pipe, streamed the smoke out through dilated nostrils, and said:
“Here’s the situation. One commerce raider in the Phoenix can make trouble out of all proportion to its capabilities. Besides disrupting schedules and plans, it ties up any number of warships, which either have to go hunt for it or else run convoy. As a result, the Aleriona force confronting ours in the Marches will be reduced below parity. So if then Earth gets tough, both in space and at the negotiations table—we shouldn’t have to get very tough, you see, nothing so drastic that the peacemongers can scream too . loud—one big naval push, while that raider is out there gobbling Aleriona ships—We can make them disgorge New Europe. Also give us some concessions for a change.”
“It may be. It may be.” Vadasz remained sober. “But how can you get a fighting craft?”
“Buy one and refit it. As for weapons, I’m going to dispatch a couple of trusty men soon, in a company speedster, to Staurn-you know the place?”
“I know of it. Ah-ha!” Vadasz snapped his fingers. His eyes began to glitter.
“Yep. That’s where our ship will finish refitting. Then off for the Auroran System.”
“But … will you not make yourself a pirate in the view of the law?”
“That’s something which Coquelin is still working on. He says he thinks there may be a way to make everything legal and, at the same time, ram a spike right up the exhaust of Twyman and his giveaway gang. But it’s a complicated problem. If the ship does have to fly the Jolly Roger, then Coquelin feels reasonably sure France has the right to try the crew, convict them, and pardon them. Of course, the boys might then have to stay in French territory, or leave Earth altogether for a colony—but they’ll be millionaires, and New Europe would certainly give them a glorious reception.”
Heim blew a smoke ring. “I haven’t time to worry about that,” he continued. “I’ll simply have to bull ahead and take my chances on getting arrested. Because you’ll understand how Coquelin and his allies in the French government—or in any government, because not every nation on Earth has gone hollowbelly—well, under the Constitution, no country can make warlike preparations. If we did get help from some official, that’d end every possibility of legalizing the operation. We’d better not even recruit our men from a single country, or from France at all.
“So it depends on me. I’ve got to find the ship, buy her, outfit her, supply her, sign on crew, and get her off into space—all inside of two months, because that’s when the formal talks between Parliament and the Aleriona delegation are scheduled to begin.” He made a rueful face. “I’m going to forget what sleep’s like.”
“The crew—” Vadász frowned. “A pretty problem, that. How many?”
“About a hundred, I’d say. Far more than needful, but the only way we can finance this venture is to take prizes, which means we’ll need prize crews. Also … there may be casualties.”
“I see. Wanted, a hundred skilled, reliable spacemen, Navy experience preferred, for the wildest gamble since Argilus went courting of Witch Helena. Where do you find them? … Hm, hm, I may know a place or two to look.”
“I do myself. We can’t recruit openly for a raider, you realize. If our true purpose isn’t kept secret to the last millisecond, we’ll be in the calaboose so fast that Einstein’s ghost will return to haunt us. But I think, in the course of what look like ordinary psych tests, I think we can probe attitudes and find out who can be trusted with the truth. Those are the ones we’ll hire.”
“First catch your rabbit,” Vadász said. “I mean find a psychologist who can be trusted!”
“Uh-huh. I’ll get Wingate, my father-in-law, to co-opt one. He’s a shrewd old rascal with tentacles everywhere, and if you think you and I are staticked about Alerion, you should listen to him for a while.” Heim squinted at the model of Star Fox, shining across the room. “I don’t believe ordinary crewmen will be too hard to find. When the Navy appropriation was cut, three years ago, a good many fellows found themselves thumb-twiddling on planet duty and resigned in disgust. We can locate those who came to Earth. But we may have trouble about a captain and a chief engineer. People with such qualifications don’t drift free.”
“Captain? What do you mean, Gunnar? You’ll be captain.”
“No.” Heim’s head wove heavily back and forth. A good deal of his bounce left him. “I’m afraid not. I want to—God, how I want to!—but, well, I’ve got to be sensible. Spaceships aren’t cheap. Neither are supplies, and especially not weapons. My estimates tell me I’ll have to liquidate all my available assets and probably hock everything else, to get that warship. Without me to tend the store, under those conditions, Heimdal might well fail. Lord knows there are enough competitors who’ll do everything they can to make it fail. And Heimdal, well, that’s something Connie and I built—her father staked us, but she worked the office end herself while I bossed the shop, those first few tough years. Heimdal’s the only thing I’ve got to leave my daughter.”
“I see.” Vadász spoke with compassion. “Also, she has no mother. You should not risk she lose her father too.”
Heim nodded.
“You will forgive me, though, if I go?” Vadász said.
“Oh, ja, ja, Endre, I’d be a swine to hold you back. You’ll even have officer rank: chief steward, which means mainly that you oversee the cooking. And you’ll bring me back some songs, won’t you?”
Vadász could not speak. He looked at his friend, chained to possessions and power, and there ran through his head:
But the rhythm got into his blood, and he realized what Heim had done and what it meant, leaped to his feet, and capered around the study shouting his victorious music aloud till the walls echoed,