Captive of the Centaurianess by Poul Anderson

 
     
     
     
    Poul Anderson - Captive of the Centaurianess
     
    The hero is the child of his times, in that his milieu gives him his motives and means. Yet he seizes the world as he finds it and reshapes it as he will; and he remains eternally an enigma to his contemporaries and to the future.
    Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the famous but ever strange story of the three whose discoveries and achievements, late in the twenty-third century, set entire races of beings upon wholly new courses.
    The driving idealism and military genius of Dyann Korlas; the wisdom, mighty, profound, and benign, of Urushkidan; above all, perhaps, the inspired leadership of Tallantyre—these molded history, but we will never truly understand them. The persons who embodied them are still further beyond us. The essential selves of the glorious three will always be mysterious.
    — Vallabhai Rasmussen,
     
    Origins of the Galactic Era
     
     
    I
     
    Floodlit, the tender loomed against nigh t, above the swarm of humanity, like a great golden bullet. Ray Tallantyre quickened his steps. By George and dragon both, he'd made it! The flight from San Francisco to Quito, the nail-gnawing wait for an airbus, the ride to the spaceport, the walk through a terminal building that seemed to stretch on forever—all were outlived and there she was, there the darling stood, ready to carry him up to the Jovian Queen and safety.
    He kissed his fingers at the craft and shoved rudely through the crowd. He'd already missed the first trip up to the liner, and the thought of standing around till the third was beyond endurance.
    "Hey, you."
    As the voice fell on his ears, a hand did on his arm. Ray could have sworn he felt his heart slam against his teeth and his spine fall out of his trousers. Somehow he turned around. A large man was comparing his thin features with a photograph held in the unoccupied paw. "Yes, it's you, all right," this person said. "Come along, Tallantyre."
    "¡Me llama Garcia!" the fugitive gibbered. "No hablo inglés."
    "I said come along," the detective answered. "We figured you'd try to leave Earth. This way."
    Sometimes desperation breeds inspiration. Ray's own free hand crammed the fellow's hat down over his eyes. Wrenching loose, he bolted for the gangramp. En route, he upset a corpulent lady. A volley of Latin imprecations pursued him. Shoving aside another passenger, he sped up the incline—and bounced off the wall which was a Jovian officer.
    "Your ticket and passport, please," said that man. He was a tall, muscular blond, crisply white-uniformed, who regarded the new arrival with the thinly veiled contempt of a true Confed for the lesser breeds of life.
    Ray shoved the documents at him, meanwhile staring backward. The detective had gotten entangled with the lady, who was beating him around the head with her purse and volubly cursing him. Agonizingly deliberate, the Jovian scanned the engineer's papers, checked them against a list, and waved him on.
    The detective won free, followed, and struck the same immovable barrier. "Your ticket and passport, please," said the ship's representative.
    "That man's under arrest," panted the detective. "Let me by."
    "Your ticket and passport, please."
    "I tell you I'm an officer of the law and I have a warrant for that man. Let me by!"
    "Proper authorization may be obtained at the security center," said the immovable barrier. The detective tried to rush, encountered a bit of expert judo, and tumbled back into a line of passengers who also grew indignant with him. Every able-bodied Jovian was a military reservist.
    "Proper authority may be obtained at the security center," the gatekeeper repeated. To the next person: "Your ticket and passport, please."
    In the airlock chamber, Ray Tallantyre dashed the sweat off his brow and permitted himself a laugh, by the time his pursuer had gone through all the red tape, he himself would be on the space liner. Before one of his own country's secret police,