Gedner’s smile showed strong white teeth. “What would life be without coincidences?”
“But this one is rather too good to be true,” insisted the girl on a false note of gaiety. “Everybody knew you’d buried yourself somewhere in the wilds. But imagine me stumbling onto your grave!”
Paul Gedner’s grin tightened. “Not so surprising, Leila darling. You’re royally paid to go around the System digging things up, aren’t you?”
Captain Manoly of the Zodiac broke in, his voice betraying his irritation. “I believe Miss Frey’s luggage has all been landed.”
“Fine,” said Gedner, glancing toward where Mark Paige was already wrestling with an assortment of trunks and cases far too expensive and extensive to be appropriate on the little mining moon. “You must have thought this was another society assignment, Leila . . . You’re in a hurry to lift, Captain?”
“That’s right,” snapped the spaceman. “I’ve got a schedule to keep up.” But neither his schedule, nor the unhappy fact that he was seeing none of the impressive sum which Leila Frey’s syndicate had paid to persuade the managers of the line to allow a troublesome unscheduled stop, could have warranted his obvious nervousness. He had already cast more than one apprehensive glance into the twilight beyond the little group of humans. Now Leila caught the movement of his helmet and followed the look.
She could not suppress a gasp. Scarcely a dozen yards away crouched a huge white shape, somewhat like a man, more like a gorilla, a strange albino gorilla with a fell of hair like a muskox, covering all its face save the expressionless crimson eyes. Its great three-fingered hands rested on the ground as it cowered and stared.
Leila recovered her composure. “Is this one of your renowned killer Woollies?” she asked coolly of Gedner.
“Not him. Big Bill’s my right hand man.” Gedner beckoned and the creature rose and padded toward him. “Carry the lady’s luggage, Bill.
Paige relinquished his task with alacrity. The great Woolly embraced the entire load with ease, and moved toward the lighted buildings. Leila’s eyes followed him, and, accustomed as she was to the sight of Woollies, a faint shudder shook her. The news which had brought her to Phoebe was responsible for that shudder; two days before, the message from the lonely moon had shaken the whole Saturnian system—“A Woolly has killed a man!”
NOW on all the moons of Saturn, the human colonists paled in terror before their familiar and trusted slaves; families trembled behind locked doors, streets were deserted, industry at a standstill. On the Earth and Mars exchanges, the stocks of Saturn Colonial dropped sickeningly and continued to drop. The whole thriving economy of the Subsystem, based on Woolly slave labor—far cheaper than human workers, cheaper even than robots—rocked on its foundations.
It was impossible, unbelievable—but frightened millions believed. All experience and all psychological tests pointed to the complete, robot-like reliability of the Woollies. The great race which had ruled Saturn’s moons before the Age of Man had, before its unexplained extinction, bred its slave-creatures with superb skill, for vast strength, for adaptability to the diverse environments of the satellites—and for a perfect susceptibility to telepathic control.
But, if a Woolly had killed a man—The Company had declared at once its intention of sending an investigating commission to Phoebe; it did not request the interference of the Colonial Government, and that, from the Company was equivalent to a stem KEEP OUT in the face of the police and everyone else. But before the corporation heads had recovered sufficiently to issue their statement, the All-Planet News Syndicate had Leila Frey aboard the Zodiac, traveling toward Phoebe at sixty miles a second.
Gedner took the girl’s arm in one heavily-gloved hand and led her away from the ship at a leisurely pace. Captain Manoly had already vanished thankfully into the airlock of his vessel.
As if coming out of a trance, Leila made a sudden effort to shake her arm from Gedner’s grip. Failing, she walked on beside him in stiff silence. It was the man who spoke, when they had almost reached the largest of the lighted structures.
“So now your employers send you out after scoops,” he remarked thoughtfully.
“I just happened to be in the Subsystem, looking for general interest stuff on the colonies,” put in Leila quickly, almost defensively. Gedner went on as if she had not spoken, and with like disregard for the fact that every word was ringing also in the helmet phones of the two other men plodding on behind.
“You’ve been doing well since you got rid of me. But I always knew you had what it takes to get ahead, darling; you’ve never been anything but a grasping, selfish, irresponsible little monster.”
Leila wrenched herself away from him, as they paused at the airlock door of the Company headquarters. “I assure you I haven’t changed in the least,” she told him icily. “And neither have you. You’re still one huge hypertrophied ego. Nothing matters to you except being the boss—Say!” She began to laugh, staccato. “Why, Paul, you’ve found the one ideal place for yourself here, out of the whole System. A planet little enough to make you feel as big as you want to, where you’re almost alone with a crew of subhuman things that don’t know anything but obedience . . .”
Her own words called back the jarring memory of what had brought her here, and she stopped on an indrawn breath. Gedner had stared at her in silence—she knew that of old as a sign that she had come near the quick of his pride—and abruptly she was aware of the ghostly mass of Big Bill, looming erect behind his master.
Out on the landing strip blue lightning ripped through the noonday dusk. The ground vibrated as the Zodiac began to glide forward; the rocky landscape stood out in harsh light and shadow, and the glare of atomic flame silhouetted the misshapen figures of the two other men, who had come up and were waiting.
Gedner operated the airlock mechanism, and they passed through; the throbbing vibration underfoot rose to a higher pitch and died suddenly as the space ship left the surface of the moon. In three days, Earth time, it would return to pick Leila up on the return trip to Titan.
After the three men and the girl entered the giant Woolly. The thin translucent lids descended again over his eyes as he rolled into the brightly-lit room.
The room, Leila observed, was large and slovenly, arranged for both business and relaxation, a scarred desk and file-cabinet keeping company with a table, armchairs and a tired-looking couch. Walls and ceilings were naked insulation; the iron floor was unswept of dust and cigarette butts, and patched with rust. But it was a relief for her to feel her great iron-soled shoes, like those of a medieval Russian peasant, assert their magnetic grip. Without further ado, the girl unfastened the bulky ballast belt about her slender waist, wriggled out of the shoulder harness, and let what on Earth would have been a thousand pounds of lead slide to the floor.
Gedner lounged against the table; he had raised the faceplate of his helmet, and his features had the pallor which comes with a long stay on the outer planets. He remarked lightly, “The Company would raise hell if they knew you were here.”
“That’s not my worry,” retorted Leila. “I’m on assignment from A.P.”
“Maybe you’d like to interview Sam Chandler. He’s right outside.”
The girl recoiled from Gedner’s easy smile. “No!” she said sharply, and then added, “Later . . . perhaps.”
“The All-Planet people want the details, don’t they?”
“For God’s sake, Paul!” exploded Mark Paige. But his mouth twitched beneath his hopelessly straggly little mustache as Gedner’s gaze met his.
“Shut up,” said Gedner evenly. “Miss Frey and I are old friends. We understand each other.”
LEILA said nothing, but her red lips were compressed to a thin line as she fumbled with the air-tight zippers of her suit. As she wriggled with difficulty out of the heavy garment, Gedner’s hard black eyes dwelt with pleasure on the white silk blouse and shorts she had donned in the stuffy cabin aboard the rocket, on the soft curves of her breasts a
nd her slender legs . . . And in the corner crouched Big Bill, a great white-furred faceless thing with dull red eyes fixed unwinkingly on the girl.
Leila sat down in one of the worn armchairs, but she failed to relax from the tension, the nameless apprehension that had begun to grip her when she first set foot on this little twilight moon. Her gaze flicked from Gedner to Paige, who had picked up her discarded vacuum suit and was arranging it meticulously on the hangers beside the outer door, and from him to the third man, who, without even removing his helmet, had bent over the desk and seemed to be absorbed in the disordered papers atop it. The humming undertone of the air pump, which had started automatically on the opening of the inner airlock door, stopped suddenly as the room pressure reached normal, and left a heavy silence . . .
She looked back to Gedner, leaning lazily against the battered table, one thumb hooked into the belt that sagged awkwardly over his ballast belt to support a holstered flame pistol. He smiled at her again, and she had a panicky feeling of being alone with him in this bare room millions of miles from civilization.
But what he said was not at all alarming. “Care for something to eat?”
“I had dinner on the rocket,” said Leila.
“Cup of tea, then?” said Gedner. Leila nodded, grateful for a distraction. Paige had already moved toward what was evidently the kitchen door, methodically removing his gloves as he went. Presently he came back with a tray and a single steaming cup.
Gedner slid off the edge of the table and turned to Paige. “We’d better flame that strip before it cools off entirely,” he said matter-of-factly, and, to Leila, with a gesture at the still-helmeted figure bending over the desk, “Doc Chaikoski here can entertain you while we’re busy.”
The one indicated looked up quickly, and, though his face was obscured by the reflection of light in his helmet, his very posture, even in the grotesque space suit, spoke of taut hatred as he glanced toward Gedner. The latter took no notice, but turned away to join Paige, who had silently opened a chest in the far end of the room and was dragging out two heavy portable electron torches.
The two men snapped their faceplates shut and went out through the airlock. Leila sat quite still for a little while, glancing nervously from the crouching, silent Woolly against the wall to the equally silent man. At last she exclaimed in exasperation, “Won’t you take that thing off your head? Two gargoyles in a room this size are too many!”
The other spoke for the first time. “It won’t help much,” he said in a toneless voice, but he removed the helmet, set it carelessly on the desk-top, and, turning, began to unzip his vacuum suit. The girl saw a pale, thin, youthful face, shockingly marred by a huge, angry scar which cut diagonally across the cheek, ruined the bridge of the nose, and disappeared under an unkempt shock of dun-colored hair. A terrific blow, perhaps from a hot fragment of metal, must have left that mark.
“My name isn’t Doc,” There was increasing bitterness in his voice. “It’s Leo. It’s just that it amuses him to call me that, because I happen to be a petrologist.”
“Oh,” said Leila. She watched him cross the room and toss his space suit onto a hanger, return and sprawl limply in the chair behind the desk. Then she remembered that she was a reporter with the biggest story of her life to get. “Perhaps you can tell me something of what I need to know,” she suggested.
Leo Chaikoski stared fixedly at the tangle of papers. “What do you mean?”
“Well . . .” she hesitated. “Something about the general setup here, to begin with.”
“Setup? It’s simple enough. Paul Gedner gives the orders to the Woollies and to the rest of us—officially, he’s only the Woolly boss, but—well, you seem to know him.”
“Yes,” said Leila.
“I have a degree from North American Geological, so whenever the Woollies have worked out a jade site, I go out and kick over a couple of rocks to uncover a new one. It’s not a job—the surface supply will outlast the market. Paige keeps the accounts and production records and makes out requisitions once in a while and spends the rest of his time with a book and a bottle. Chandler—was—our maintenance man for the mechanical equipment. And the Woollies dig the jade and load it when the rocket comes, and Saturn Colonial pays our salaries.”
But Leila seized on the mention of the dead man. She said, “I’m here to get the facts on Chandler’s death, you know.”
HIS HEAD snapped up; the girl fancied she saw alarm flash into his eyes. Then he looked down again. “You’d better ask the others. They were both there when it happened; I wasn’t.”
“But you must know how it happened.”
“Chandler was out at the diggings, inspecting a drill, when one of the Woollies on the job attacked him. There wasn’t any provocation, nor any warning. Paul killed the Woolly with that gun he carries, but Chandler was done for.”
There was a guarded look in the scarred face, and Leila was not satisfied. She remembered her training in interviewing—the you-approach.
“What do you think made that Woolly run amok?” she demanded pointblank.
Leo rose to his feet with a jerk, as if the abrupt question had carried a physical impact. He said in a savage voice, “I don’t think, I—” He bit off the last word and fell silent, the great scar growing more apparent as his face paled. His eyes strayed fearfully toward the outer door; then he looked back at the girl and advancing toward her, lowered his voice. “Listen, I’ll tell you. But you mustn’t let him see that you know . . . Paul killed Chandler.”
Leila sat open-mouthed. But there was no need for her to say anything; the words came now from Leo Chaikoski in a jerky torrent.
“You’ve seen how it is. He controls the Woollies, like he dominates everything else around him. The rest of us know the technique, too—but we can’t do anything with them. He’s strong. He made the Woolly kill Chandler—and he could kill Paige or me the same way—or you. Yes, he could kill you, too, if he wanted to. He has us all in his hands.” The young man’s voice had sunk lower and lower, and a thread of mortal terror ran through it.
“That’s why he can murder us and never be caught.” Leo’s scarred face twisted with impotent rage. “I’d kill him . . . but he always has the gun . . . and the Woollies. If I had a gun, I could do it . . .” He grasped pleadingly at the girl’s limp hand on the arm of her chair. “Do you happen to have a gun?”
“No,” said Leila curtly. Her blue eyes stared into space, past Leo and his fear; her mind raced, envisaging the widening ripples of consequence that were even now spreading through the whole System from the death of a mechanic. If that death had been murder—had the killer acted without considering those consequences?
Leo’s abject terror gave the weight of truth to his accusation—a weird indictment, but no, more preposterous than the simple fact that a Woolly had killed a man. But there was still something missing, the fundamental—
“Why?” said Leila suddenly, almost to herself. “I don’t doubt that Paul’s capable of murder. But it would have to be for profit.”
“The motive?” Leo hesitated, then, “Oh, that’s simple. He sabotaged the radio. Chandler was going to fix it . . . he wasn’t afraid. So Paul made the Woolly kill him.”
Now Leila too glanced apprehensively at the door. She exclaimed, “But this makes less and less sense. Why should Paul Gedner want the radio out of commission?”
Leo was silent, avoiding her penetrating gaze; at last he said sullenly, “Chandler wanted to send a message.”
Leila’s hands tightened on the arms of her chair. “What message?” she persisted fiercly.
“Why shouldn’t I tell you what he’s doing?” Leo wondered dully. “He’s going to kill me, anyway, because I know, and then he’ll kill you too—” His words were choked off in a gasp; he sprang back, crashing bruisingly into the desk, and cowered against it. Into a deathly silence came the grating of the inner airlock door. It opened, and Gedner came in, followed by Paige burdened with the two glazing torches. Gedner
’s eyes traveled from the girl to Leo and back again, and his grin flashed as he lifted off his helmet.
“Having a nice chat?” he inquired softly.
NOBODY answered; in the intolerable silence, Gedner crossed to the desk, picked up a package of cigarettes and inhaled one into life as he began removing his vacuum suit. Leo Chaikoski sidled away from him, slumped into a chair in the corner, and sat staring into space.
“I hope you’ve found time to admire Big Bill,” said Gedner lightly, gesturing at the giant creature, which had not moved or shifted its red gaze from Leila for a moment. “Quite a man, isn’t he? You always liked the big, husky type, didn’t you, darling?”
“Wouldn’t it be better,” said Leila in a carefully governed voice, “to leave that beast outside? After—what happened, I mean.”
“Big Bill’s all right. All the Woollies are all right; you just have to know how to get along with them.”
The girl shuddered inwardly; it no longer occurred to her to doubt what Leo had told her. Another silence fell; it was broken by Paige, who, having hung up his outer garments, had stood for a time, glancing about uncertainly, and at last looked elaborately at his watch, moved toward the inner door, and announced, “I’m going to bed.”
“Go easy on the nightcap,” advised Gedner. He looped his pistol belt carefully over the back of a chair, with the gun hanging on the outside, then sat down on the edge of the desk and drew contentedly on his cigarette. “Our bedtimes are various,” he told Leila. “No proper night or day here, and damn little system. The Company doesn’t worry as long as we get out the jade.”
“The Company’s worried now,” said Leila, uncomfortably, feeling Gedner’s probing gaze upon her. “They’re sending a commission to investigate Phoebe.”
“A commission!” mocked Gedner. There was silence again for a space, and an infinitesimal change crept into his hard, smiling face; Leila strove in vain to read it. Only at the last moment did she become aware of the pale shadow looming beside her.
Complete Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Page 16
