In Case of Fire

  Produced by Greg Weeks, Bruce Albrecht, Stephen Blundelland the Online Distributed Proofreading Team athttps://www.pgdp.net

  IN CASE OF FIRE

  _There are times when a broken tool is better than a sound one, or a twisted personality more useful than a whole one. For instance, a whole beer bottle isn't half the weapon that half a beer bottle is ..._

  By RANDALL GARRETT

  Illustrated by Martinez

  In his office apartment, on the top floor of the Terran Embassy Buildingin Occeq City, Bertrand Malloy leafed casually through the dossiers ofthe four new men who had been assigned to him. They were typical of thekind of men who were sent to him, he thought. Which meant, as usual,that they were atypical. Every man in the Diplomatic Corps who developeda twitch or a quirk was shipped to Saarkkad IV to work under BertrandMalloy, Permanent Terran Ambassador to His Utter Munificence, the Occeqof Saarkkad.

  Take this first one, for instance. Malloy ran his finger down thecolumns of complex symbolism that showed the complete psychologicalanalysis of the man. Psychopathic paranoia. The man wasn't technicallyinsane; he could be as lucid as the next man most of the time. But hewas morbidly suspicious that every man's hand was turned against him. Hetrusted no one, and was perpetually on his guard against imaginary plotsand persecutions.

  Number two suffered from some sort of emotional block that left himcontinually on the horns of one dilemma or another. He waspsychologically incapable of making a decision if he were faced with twoor more possible alternatives of any major importance.

  Number three ...

  Malloy sighed and pushed the dossiers away from him. No two men werealike, and yet there sometimes seemed to be an eternal sameness aboutall men. He considered himself an individual, for instance, but wasn'tthe basic similarity there, after all?

  He was--how old? He glanced at the Earth calendar dial that wasautomatically correlated with the Saarkkadic calendar just above it.Fifty-nine next week. Fifty-nine years old. And what did he have to showfor it besides flabby muscles, sagging skin, a wrinkled face, and grayhair?

  Well, he had an excellent record in the Corps, if nothing else. One ofthe top men in his field. And he had his memories of Diane, dead theseten years, but still beautiful and alive in his recollections. And--hegrinned softly to himself--he had Saarkkad.

  He glanced up at the ceiling, and mentally allowed his gaze to penetrateit to the blue sky beyond it.

  Out there was the terrible emptiness of interstellar space--a great,yawning, infinite chasm capable of swallowing men, ships, planets, suns,and whole galaxies without filling its insatiable void.

  Malloy closed his eyes. Somewhere out there, a war was raging. He didn'teven like to think of that, but it was necessary to keep it in mind.Somewhere out there, the ships of Earth were ranged against the ships ofthe alien Karna in the most important war that Mankind had yet fought.

  And, Malloy knew, his own position was not unimportant in that war. Hewas not in the battle line, nor even in the major production line, butit was necessary to keep the drug supply lines flowing from Saarkkad,and that meant keeping on good terms with the Saarkkadic government.

  The Saarkkada themselves were humanoid in physical form--if one allowedthe term to cover a wide range of differences--but their minds justdidn't function along the same lines.

  For nine years, Bertrand Malloy had been Ambassador to Saarkkad, and fornine years, no Saarkkada had ever seen him. To have shown himself to oneof them would have meant instant loss of prestige.

  To their way of thinking, an important official was aloof. The greaterhis importance, the greater must be his isolation. The Occeq of Saarkkadhimself was never seen except by a handful of picked nobles, who,themselves, were never seen except by their underlings. It was a long,roundabout way of doing business, but it was the only way Saarkkad woulddo any business at all. To violate the rigid social setup of Saarkkadwould mean the instant closing off of the supply of biochemical productsthat the Saarkkadic laboratories produced from native plants andanimals--products that were vitally necessary to Earth's war, and whichcould be duplicated nowhere else in the known universe.

  It was Bertrand Malloy's job to keep the production output high and tokeep the materiel flowing towards Earth and her allies and outposts.

  The job would have been a snap cinch in the right circumstances; theSaarkkada weren't difficult to get along with. A staff of top-grade mencould have handled them without half trying.

  But Malloy didn't have top-grade men. They couldn't be spared from workthat required their total capacity. It's inefficient to waste a man on ajob that he can do without half trying where there are more importantjobs that will tax his full output.

  So Malloy was stuck with the culls. Not the worst ones, of course; therewere places in the galaxy that were less important than Saarkkad to thewar effort. Malloy knew that, no matter what was wrong with a man, aslong as he had the mental ability to dress himself and get himself towork, useful work could be found for him.

  Physical handicaps weren't at all difficult to deal with. A blind mancan work very well in the total darkness of an infrared-film darkroom.Partial or total losses of limbs can be compensated for in one way oranother.

  The mental disabilities were harder to deal with, but not totallyimpossible. On a world without liquor, a dipsomaniac could be channeledeasily enough; and he'd better not try fermenting his own on Saarkkadunless he brought his own yeast--which was impossible, in view of thesterilization regulations.

  But Malloy didn't like to stop at merely thwarting mental quirks; heliked to find places where they were _useful_.

  * * * * *

  The phone chimed. Malloy flipped it on with a practiced hand.

  "Malloy here."

  "Mr. Malloy?" said a careful voice. "A special communication for you hasbeen teletyped in from Earth. Shall I bring it in?"

  "Bring it in, Miss Drayson."

  Miss Drayson was a case in point. She was uncommunicative. She liked togather in information, but she found it difficult to give it up once itwas in her possession.

  Malloy had made her his private secretary. Nothing--but _nothing_--gotout of Malloy's office without his direct order. It had taken Malloy along time to get it into Miss Drayson's head that it was perfectly allright--even desirable--for her to keep secrets from everyone exceptMalloy.

  She came in through the door, a rather handsome woman in her middlethirties, clutching a sheaf of papers in her right hand as thoughsomeone might at any instant snatch it from her before she could turn itover to Malloy.

  She laid them carefully on the desk. "If anything else comes in, I'lllet you know immediately, sir," she said. "Will there be anything else?"

  Malloy let her stand there while he picked up the communique. She wantedto know what his reaction was going to be; it didn't matter because noone would ever find out from her what he had done unless she was orderedto tell someone.

  He read the first paragraph, and his eyes widened involuntarily.

  "Armistice," he said in a low whisper. "There's a chance that the warmay be over."

  "Yes, sir," said Miss Drayson in a hushed voice.

  Malloy read the whole thing through, fighting to keep his emotions incheck. Miss Drayson stood there calmly, her face a mask; her emotionswere a secret.

  Finally, Malloy looked up. "I'll let you know as soon as I reach adecision, Miss Drayson. I think I hardly need say that no news of thisis to leave this office."

  "Of course not, sir."

  Malloy watched her go out the door without actually seeing her. The warwas over--at least for a while. He looked down at the papers again.

  The Karna, slowly being beaten back on every front, were suing forpeace. They wanted an armistice co
nference--immediately.

  Earth was willing. Interstellar war is too costly to allow it tocontinue any longer than necessary, and this one had been going on formore than thirteen years now. Peace was necessary. But not peace at anyprice.

  The trouble was that the Karna had a reputation for losing wars andwinning at the peace table. They were clever, persuasive talkers. Theycould twist a disadvantage to an advantage, and make their own strengthslook like weaknesses. If they won the armistice, they'd be able toretrench and rearm, and the war would break out again within a fewyears.

  Now--at this point in time--they could be beaten. They could be forcedto allow supervision of the production potential, forced to disarm,rendered impotent. But if the armistice went to their own advantage ...

  Already, they had taken the offensive in the matter of the peace talks.They had sent a full delegation to Saarkkad V, the next planet out fromthe Saarkkad sun, a chilly world inhabited only by