“You have indeed made a find.” Wass gave that simple statement enough emphasis to assure Hume he had won. His one-in-a-thousand idea had been absorbed, was now being examined, amplified, broken down into details he could never have hoped to manage for himself, by the most cunning criminal brain in at least five solar systems.
“Is there any hope of survivors?” Wass attacked the problem straight on.
“No evidence even of there being any passengers when the L-B planeted. Those are automatic and released a certain number of seconds after an accident alarm. For what it’s worth the hatch of this one was open. It could have brought in survivors. But I was on Jumala for three months with a full Guild crew and we found no sign of any castaways.”
“So you propose—?”
“On the basis of my report, Jumala has been put up for a safari choice. The L-B could well be innocently discovered by a client. Everyone knows the story with the case dragging through the Ten Sector-Terran Courts now. Gentlefem Brodie and her son might not have been news ten years ago. Now, with a third of the Kogan-Bors-Wazalitz control going to them, any find linked with the Largo Drift would gain full galactic coverage.”
“You have a choice of survivor? The Gentlefem?”
Hume shook his head. “The boy. He was bright, according to the stories since, and he would have the survival manual from the ship to study. He could have grown up in the wilds of an unopened planet. To use a woman is too tricky.”
“You are entirely right. But we shall require an extremely clever imposter.”
“I think not.” Hume’s cool glance met Wass’. “We only need a youth of the proper general physical description and the use of a conditioner.”
Wass’ expression did not change; there was no sign that Hume’s hint had struck home. But when he replied there was a slight change in the monotone of his voice.
“You seem to know a great deal.”
“I am a man who listens,” Hume replied, “and I do not always discount rumor as mere fantasy.”
“That is true. As one of the Guild, you would be interested in the root of fact beneath the plant of fiction,” Wass acknowledged. “You appear to have done some planning on your own.”
“I have waited and watched for just such an opportunity as this,” Hume answered.
“Ah, yes. The Kogan-Bors-Wazalitz combine incurred your displeasure. I see you are also a man who does not forget easily. And that, too, I understand. It is a foible of my own, Out-Hunter. I neither forget nor forgive my enemies, though I may seem to do so and time separates them from their past deeds for a space.”
Hume accepted that warning—both must keep any bargain. Wass was silent for a moment, as if to leave time for the thought to root itself, then he spoke again.
“A youth with the proper physical qualifications. Have you any such in mind?”
“I think so.” Hume was short.
“He will need certain memories; those take time to tape.”
“Those dealing with Jumala I can supply.”
“Yes. You will have to provide a tape beginning with his arrival on that world. For such family material as is necessary I shall have ready. An interesting project, even apart from its value to us. This is one to intrigue experts.”
Expert psycho-techs—Wass had them. Men who had slipped over the border of the law, had entered Wass’ organization and prospered there. There were some techs crooked enough to enjoy such a project for its own sake, indulging in forbidden experimentation. For a moment, but only for a moment, something in Hume jibbed at the intent of carrying through his plan. Then he shrugged that tinge aside.
“How soon do you wish to move?”
“How long will preparation take?” Hume asked in return, for the second time battling a taste of concern.
“Three months, maybe four. There’s research to be done and tapes to be made.”
“It will be six months probably before the Guild sets up a safari for Jumala.”
Wass smiled. “That need not worry us. When the time comes for a safari, there shall also be clients, impeccable clients, asking for it to be planned.”
There would be, too, Hume knew. Wass’ influence reached into places where the Veep himself was totally unknown. Yes, he could count on an excellent, well-above-suspicion set of clients to discover Rynch Brodie when the time came.
“I can deliver the boy tonight, or early tomorrow morning. Where?”
“You are sure of your selection?”
“He fulfills the requirements, the right age, general appearance. A boy who will not be missed, who has no kin, no ties, and who will drop out of sight without any questions to be asked.”
“Very well. Get him at once. Deliver him here.”
Wass swept one hand across the table surface. On the red of the stone there glowed for seconds an address. Hume noted it, nodded. It was one in the center of the port town, one which could be visited at an odd hour without exciting any curiosity. He rose.
“He will be there.”
“Tomorrow, at your convenience,” Wass added, “you will come to tin’s place.” Again the palm moved and a second address showed on the table.
“There you will begin your tape for our use. It may take several sessions.”
“I’m ready. I still have the long report to make to the Guild, so the material is still available on my note tapes.”
“Excellent. Out-Hunter Hume, I salute a new colleague.” At last Wass’ right hand came up from the table. “May we both have luck equal to our industry.”
“Luck to equal our desires,” Hume corrected him.
“A very telling phrase, Out-Hunter. Luck to equal our desires. Yes, let us both deserve that.”
2
The Starfall was a long way down scale from the pleasure houses of the upper town. Here strange vices were also merchandise, but not such exotics as Wass provided. This was strictly for crewmen of the star freighters who could be speedily and expertly separated from a voyage’s pay in an evening. The tantalizing scents of Wass’ terraces were reduced here to simply smells, the majority of which were not fragrant.
There had already been two fatal duels that evening. A tubeman from a rim ship had challenged a space miner to settle a difference with those vicious whips made from the tail casings of Flangoid flying lizards, an encounter which left both men in ribbons, one dead, one dying. And a scarred, ex-space marine had blaster-flamed one of the Star-and-Comet dealers into charred human ash.
The young man who had been ordered to help clear away the second loser retired to the stinking alley outside to lose the meal which was part of his meager day’s pay. Now he crawled back inside, his face greenish, one hand pressed to his middle section.
He was thin, the fine bones of his face tight under the pallid skin, his ribs showing even through the sleazy fabric of the threadbare tunic with its house seal. When he leaned his head back against the grime-encrusted wall, raising his face to the light, his hair had the glint of bright chestnut, a gold which was also red. And for his swamper’s labor he was almost fastidiously clean. “You—Lansor!”
He shivered as if an icy wind had found him and opened his eyes. They seemed disproportionately large in his skin-and-bone face and were of an odd shade, neither green nor blue, but somewhere between.
“Get going, you! Ain’t paying out good credits for you to sit there like you was buying on your own!” The Salarkian who loomed above him spoke accentless, idiomatic Basic Space which came strangely from between his yellow lips. A furred hand thrust the handle of a mop-up stick at the young man, a taloned thumb jerked the direction in which to use that evil-smelling object. Vye Lansor levered himself up the wall, took the mop, setting his teeth grimly.
Someone had spilled a mug of Kardo and the deep purple liquid was already patterning the con-stone floor past any hope of cleaning. But he set to work slapping the fringe of the noisome mop back and forth to sop up what he could. The smell of the Kardo uniting with the general effluvia of the ro
om and its inhabitants heightened his queasiness. Working blindly in a half-stupor, he was not aware of the man sitting alone in the booth until his mop spattered the ankle of one of the drinking girls. She struck him sharply across the face with a sputtering curse in the tongue of Altar-Ishtar.
The blow sent him back against the open lattice of the booth. As he tried to steady himself another hand reached up, fingers tightened about his wrist. He flinched, tried to jerk away from that hold, only to discover that he was the other’s prisoner.
And looking down at his captor in apprehension, he was aware even then of the different quality of this man. The patron wore the tunic of a crewman, lighter patches where the ship’s badges should have been to show that he was not engaged. But, though his tunic was shabby, dirty, his magnetic boots scuffed and badly worn, he was not like the others now enjoying the pleasures of the Starfall.
“This one—he makes trouble?” The vast bulk of the Vorm-man who was the Starfall’s private law moved through the crowd with serene confidence in his own strength, which no one there, unless blind, deaf, and out-of-the-senses drunk, could dispute. His scaled, six-fingered claw hand reached out for Lansor and the boy cringed.
“No trouble!” There was the click of authority in the voice of the man in the booth. His face, moments earlier taut and sharp with intelligence, was suddenly slack, his tone slurred as he answered: “Looks like an old shipmate. No trouble, just want a drink with an old shipmate.”
But the grip which had pulled Vye forward swung him around and down on the other bench in the booth, was anything but slack. The Vorm-man glanced from the patron of the Starfall to its least important employee and then grinned, thrusting his fanged jaws close to Lansor’s.
“If the master wants to drink, you dirt-rat, you drink!”
Vye nodded vigorously, and then put his hand to his mouth, afraid his stomach was about to betray him again. Apprehensive, he watched the Vorm-man turn away. Only when that broad, green-gray back was lost in the smoky far reaches of the room did he expel his breath again.
“Here—” The grip was gone from his wrist, but fingers now put a mug into his hand. “Drink!”
He tried to protest, knew it was hopeless, and used both hands to get the mug to his lips, mouthing the stinging liquid in dull despair. Only, instead of bringing nausea with it, the stuff settled his stomach, cleared his head with an afterglow with which he managed to relax from the tense state of endurance which filled his hours in the Starfall.
Half of the mug’s contents inside him and he dared to raise his eyes to the man opposite him. Yes, this was no common crewman, nor was he drunk as he had pretended for the Vorm-man. Now he watched the milling crowd with a kind of detachment, though Vye was sure he was aware of every move he himself made.
Vye finished the liquid. For the first time since he had come into this place two months earlier, he felt like a real person again. And he had wits enough to guess that the potion he had just swallowed contained some drug. Only now he did not care at all. Anything which could wipe out in moments all the shame, fear, and sick despair the Starfall had planted in him was worth swallowing. Why the other had drugged him was a mystery, but he was content to wait for enlightenment.
Lansor’s companion once more applied that compelling pressure to the younger man’s bony forearm. Linked by that hold, they left the Starfall, came into the cooler, far more pleasant atmosphere of the street. They were a block away before Vye’s guide halted, though he did not release his prisoner.
“Forty names of Dugor!” he spat.
Lansor waited, breathing in the air of early morning. The confidence of the drug still held. At the moment he was certain nothing could be as bad as the life behind him; he was willing to face what this strange patron of the Starfall had in mind.
The other slapped his hand down on an air-car call button, stood waiting until one of the city flitters landed on beam before them.
From the seat of the air-car Vye noted they were heading into the respectability of the upper city, away from the stews ringing the launch port. He tried to guess their destination or purpose, not that either mattered much. Then the car descended on a landing stage.
The stranger waved Lansor through a doorway, down a short corridor into a room of private quarters. Vye sat down gingerly on the foam seat extending from the wall as he neared. He stared about. Dimly he could just remember rooms which had this degree of comfort, but so dimly now he could not be sure they did not exist only in his vivid imagination. For Vye’s imagination had buoyed him first through the drab existence in a State Child’s Créche, then through a state-found job which he had lost because he could not adapt to the mechanical life of a computer tender, and had been an anchor and an escape when he had sunk through the depths of the port to the last refuge in the Starfall.
Now he pressed both his hands into the soft stuff of the seat and gaped at a small tri-dee on the wall facing him, a miniature scene of life on some other planet wherein a creature enveloped in short black-and-white striped fur crept belly flat, to stalk long-legged, short-winged birds making blood-red splotches against yellow reed banks under a pale violet sky. He feasted on its color, on the sense of freedom and off-world wonders which it raised in him.
“Who are you?”
The stranger’s abrupt question brought him back, not only to the room but to his own precarious position. He moistened his lips, no longer quite so aglow with confidence.
“Vye—Vye Lansor.” Then he added his other identification, “S. C. C. 425061.”
“State child, eh?” The other had pushed a button for a refresher cup, then was sipping its contents slowly. He did not ring for a second to offer Vye. “Parents?”
Lansor shook his head. “I was brought in after the Five-Hour Fever epidemic. They didn’t try to keep records, there were too many of us.”
The man was watching him levelly over the rim of that cup. There was something cold in that study, something which curbed Vye’s pleasant feeling of only moments earlier. Now the other set down his drink, crossed the room. Cupping his hand under Lansor’s chin, he brought up his head in a way which stirred a sullen resentment in the younger man, yet something told him resistance would only bring trouble.
“I’d say Terran stock—not more than second generation.” He was talking to himself more than to Vye. He loosed his hold on the boy’s chin, but he still stood there surveying him from head to foot. Lansor wanted to squirm, but he fought that impulse, and managed to meet the other’s gaze when it reached his face again.
“No—not the usual port-drift. I was right all the way.”
Now he looked at Vye again as if the younger man did have a brain, emotions, some call on his interest as a personality. “Want a job?”
Lansor pressed his hand deeper into the foam seat. “What—what kind?” He was angry and ashamed at that small betraying break in his voice.
“You have scruples?” The stranger appeared to think that amusing. Vye reddened, but he was also more than a little surprised that the man in the worn space uniform had read hesitancy right. Someone out of the Starfall should not be too particular about employment, and he could not tell why he was.
“Nothing illegal, I assure you.” The man crossed to set his refresher cup in the empty slot. “I am an Out-Hunter.”
Lansor blinked. This had all taken on some of the fantastic aura of a dream. The other was eyeing him impatiently, as if he had expected some reaction.
“You may inspect my credentials if you wish.”
“I believe you,” Vye found his voice.
“I happen to need a gearman.”
But this wasn’t happening! Of course, it couldn’t happen to him, Vye Lansor, state child, swamper in the Starfall. Things such as this did not happen, except in a thaline dream, and he wasn’t a smoke eater! It was the kind of dream a man didn’t want to wake from, not if he was port-drift.
“Would you be willing to sign on?”
Vye tried to clutch
reality to himself, to remain level-headed. A gearman for an Out-Hunter! Why five men out of six would pay a large premium for a chance at such rating. The chill of doubt cut through the first hazy rosiness. A swamper from a portside dive simply did not become a gearman for a Guild Hunter.
Again it was as if the stranger read his thoughts. “Look here,” he spoke abruptly. “I had a bad time myself, years ago. You resemble someone to whom I owe a debt. I can’t repay him, but I can make the scales a little more even this way.”
“Make the scales even.” Vye’s fading hope brightened. Then the Out-Hunter was a follower of the Fata Rite. That would explain everything. If you could not repay a good deed to the one you owed, you must balance the Eternal Scales in another fashion. He relaxed again, a great many of his unasked questions so answered.
“You will accept?”
Vye nodded eagerly. “Yes, Out-Hunter.” He still could not believe that this was happening.
The other pressed the refresher button, and this time he handed Lansor the brimming cup. “Drink on the bargain.” His words had the ring of command.
Lansor drank, gulping down the contents of the cup, and suddenly was aware of being tired. He leaned back against the wall, his eyes closed.
Ras Hume took the cup from the lax fingers of the young man. So far, very good. Chance appeared to be playing on his side of the board. It had been chance which had steered him into the Starfall just three nights ago when he had been in quest of his imposter. And Vye Lansor was better than he dared hope to find. The boy had the right coloring, he had been batted around enough to fall for the initial story, he was malleable now. And after Wass’ techs worked on him he would be Rynch Brodie—heir to one-third of Kogan-Bors-Wazalitz!
“Come!” He touched Vye on the shoulder. The boy opened his eyes, but his gaze did not focus as he got slowly to his feet. Hume glanced at his planet-time watch. It was still very early; the chance he must run in getting Lansor out of this building was small if they went at once. Guiding the younger man with a light hold above the elbow, he walked him out back to the flitter landing stage. The air-car was waiting. Hume’s sense of being a gambler facing a run of good luck grew as he shepherded the boy into the flitter, punched a cover destination and took off.