The COMPLEAT Collected SFF Works 1911-1987

by C. L. Moore

  "I don't like the odds," Morgan said. "You could pay me better and still—"

  "It's my price. You won't get any better offer. I'll pay you ten thousand for forty gallons." The surf-sounds of Venusian seas beat in his throat briefly. He added, "Skalla," and made a rolling, interlacing gesture with his fingers, so Morgan knew that would be the top figure. When a Venusian said skalla, poker-bluff wouldn't work.

  Still, with ten thousand—There were gambling joints in Ancibel Key now. Like most men who gamble with life and know the odds well enough to win, Morgan erroneously thought he could call the odds on other games of chance. Besides, the brandy was beginning to burn enticingly in his stomach, calling irresistibly for more of the same brand. And he couldn't buy any, not with the few coin-nest cubes in his pocket.

  He reached over and took the notes from the Venusian's boneless fingers, riffling the edges to count. There were ten. He took a key out of his pocket and dropped it on the bar.

  "A locker key?" Valley inquired. "Very wise of you."

  "The other two are lockered," Morgan said. "It's a deal."

  "Not yet," Valley said gently, his round, flat eyes on Morgan's. "We want you to work with us. We can offer you a very good bargain on that, my friend."

  Morgan got off the bar stool with a quick, smooth motion, struck impatiently at the curtain behind him. "Let me out of here," he said. "I'm no friend of yours, Valley."

  "You will be," Valley murmured, gesturing. The curtain slid up with a hiss and rustle, and the noises of the bar flowed back around them.

  It was noisier than it had been before. The ranch hands were stumbling up from their table, staggering a little, blinking at an angry middle-aged homesteader in the doorway.

  "I'd fire you all!" he was shouting as the curtain rose. "If I could, I'd do it! Outside, you loafers! Get out, before I break your necks!" His furious glare flashed around the room. "We'll clean you out yet," he roared at the bartender, who shrugged impassively. "We don't want your kind here!"

  One of the ranch hands stopped quickly to drain a shot-glass on the table before he joined the rest. The homesteader crossed the floor with quick, angry strides, snatched the glass from the man's hand, pivoted and hurled it against the glass of the skylight that illumined the curtain-cubicled bar. A shower of tinkling fragments rained down upon the emptied table. The man turned and stalked noisily out, driving his reluctant help before him.

  Morgan laughed shortly.

  "Compared to me," he said, "he likes you."

  "Come back when you're ready," Shining Valley said with a round, impassive look. "You'll come, Jaime Morgan. You're ready—"

  Morgan spat on the floor, turned his back on Valley, and stamped out of the bar.

  He needed another drink.

  -

  Painfully Morgan opened his eyes, wincing at the impact of light. For a perceptible interval he had no idea who he was, or where. Then a familiar face leaned over him and for a moment he was ten years old again, looking into the face of the ten-year-old Rufus Dodd. Rufe had been playing soldier. He was dressed up incongruously in a tight brown uniform with the Solar Ring emblem at his collar, and gold leaves on his shoulders. But outside, in the thin violet air of the Martian morning the dead sea-bottoms must be stretching, purple-shadowed under the level rays of sunrise, and in a few minutes now their mothers would be calling them both away to breakfast.

  Dust-motes danced in the beam of light that struck between curtains in his eyes. He turned his head far enough to see that he lay in an unfamiliar little shack with dust thick on everything. The metal uprights of a bunk rose left and right before him. Plastic curtains discolored at the folds shut him partially in.

  Bitter fumes were in his head and dead, unpleasant air was in his lungs. He squinted painfully against his headache and saw a small black scuttling object move across the wall—man's ancient supercargo, the cockroach. He shut his eyes and grimaced. He knew now who he was.

  "Hello, Rufe," he said thickly.

  "Get up, Jaime," the familiar, crisp voice snapped. "You're under arrest."

  Morgan sighed heavily. He rubbed his palms down the sides of his face; the harsh scratch of stubble rasped his nerves. He hated the cockroach and the discolored curtains and this whole filthy, stinking town the settlers had built upon his world, his clean, wild, lonely Loki.

  "What for, Rufe?" he asked. The motion of face-rubbing had brought his wrists into view and there was a fresh knife-scratch along the edge of his forearm. He looked at it thoughtfully.

  "It might be for a lot of things," Dodd said. He stepped back a pace and locked his thumbs into his uniform belt. His face looked many times ten years old now. Time must have acted as filter between them in that first moment of waking, a filter that screened out the firm, harsh set of Rufe's jaw and the lines incised lengthwise from nose to chin, and the cool, disciplined narrowing of the eyes. Rufe had never spared himself. It wasn't likely that he'd spare others.

  "It might be for drunkenness, assault and battery, or conduct unbecoming a human being," he told Morgan, his voice crisp. "It might be for trying to wreck a gambling joint when you lost your last credit there. But it isn't. What I'm arresting you for is selling sehft to a contraband runner called Shining Valley. You're a fool, Jaime."

  "Sure I'm a fool," Morgan wriggled his toes in muddy socks. "Only I didn't do it, Rufe."

  "Too late for lies now. You always did talk too much when you're drunk. You shoot off your mouth before a dozen settlers, Jaime, and then you hole up here like a sitting duck. Jaime, I've got orders to arrest any violators of the new sehft-law. I can't help myself. I don't make the laws."

  "I do," Morgan said. "I make my own. You're trespassing, Rufe. Loki's my world."

  "Sure, I know. You and a few others opened it up. But it belongs to the Trade Control now, and you've got to abide by their rules. Get up, Jaime. Put your shoes on. You're under arrest."

  Morgan rose on one elbow. "What'll they do to me?"

  "Deport you, probably."

  "Oh no!" Morgan said. "Not me." He raised a wild and savage gaze to his old friend. "Loki's mine."

  Dodd shrugged. "You should have thought of that sooner, Jaime. You've got to ride with the times."

  "Nobody's going to put me off Loki," Morgan said stubbornly. "Nobody!"

  "Be sensible, Jaime. There's always plenty of room—out there." He looked up; so did Morgan. "Out there" was always up, no matter how far toward the Galaxy's rim you stood. "One of the big outfits would finance you if you needed grubstaking—"

  "And they'd tie me hand and foot, too," Morgan said. "When I open up a new world I do it my way, not the way of Inter-Power or Sun-Atomic. When I take a walk down Paradise Street, I go under my own power."

  -

  They were both silent for an instant, thinking of that trackless path among the stars, that road exactly as wide and exactly as narrow as a ship's bow, pointing wherever a ship's bow points and always bordered by the stars. The course on the charts is mapped by decimals and degrees, but all courses run along Paradise Street.

  The explorers and the drifters and the spacehands are misfits mostly, and, therefore, men of imagination. The contrast between the rigid functionalism inside a spaceship and the immeasurable glories outside is too great not to have a name. So whenever you stand in a ship's control room and look out into the bottomless dark where the blinding planets turn and the stars swim motionless in space, you are taking a walk down Paradise Street.

  "There'll always be jackpot planets left, Jaime," Dodd said, making his voice persuasive."

  -

  "I won't go," Morgan told him.

  "What are your plans, Jaime?" Dodd asked ironically. "Have you looked in your pockets?"

  Morgan paused halfway through a gesture to search his rumpled clothing, his inquiring gaze on Dodd. "I didn't—" he began.

  "Oh yes you did. Everything. Even your guns are gone now. Those gambling joints don't let a man get away as long as there's anything negoti
able on him. Go on, search your pockets if you don't believe me. You're broke, Jaime."

  "Not the whole ten thousand credits!" Morgan said with anguish, beginning frantically to turn his jacket inside out.

  "Ten thousand credits?" Dodd echoed. "Is that all Valley gave you? For forty gallons of the drug?"

  "Drug?" Morgan said abstractedly, still searching. "What drug? I sold him sehft."

  "Sehft's a drug. Didn't you know?"

  Morgan lifted a blank gaze.

  "It's been kept quiet, of course," Dodd went on. "But I thought you knew. A narcotic can be synthesized from the natural raw sehft. Not from the synthetic stuff. It hasn't got the proteins."

  Morgan looked up in bewilderment that slowly gave way to a dawning fury. "Then the stuff's worth ... why, it'll be priceless!" he said. "If the sehft-rats are exterminated, what I sold Valley's worth a hundred times the penny-ante price he paid me!"

  "That's what you get when you play around with city boys, Jaime," Dodd told him unsympathetically.

  Morgan stared straight ahead of him at the discolored curtains and the moted sun. A vast and boiling rage was beginning to bubble up inside him. All down the line, Shining Valley had outwitted him, then. And Dodd stepped in to take over where the Venusian left off. And Warburg sat back smugly to watch while the Trade Control put a roof over Loki and Loki's rightful dwellers. He thought for one weak and flashing moment, with a sort of bitter envy, of young Dain safe on Chocolate Hill under his Martian Circle, and of Wild Bill dead before Loki's downfall, and of Sheml'li-hhan with no more problems to deal with. They'd been the lucky ones, after all.

  But Morgan was no defeatist at heart. He'd think of something. Jaime Morgan would last forever, and Loki was still his world and nobody else's. He choked the fury down and turned to face Dodd.

  "I can take care of myself," he said. "Kick my boot over this way, Rufe."

  -

  The major scuffled with one foot in the dust. Morgan swung his feet over the bunk's edge and stooped, grunting, to snap the clasps of his boots.

  "You're wasting your time, Rufe," he said, looking up under his brows. "Why don't you get on out there and round up a few of the local hoods, if you feel so law-abiding? They're the real criminals, not me."

  Dodd's face tightened. "I obey orders."

  "From what I hear, the settlers are going to take things into their own hands one of these fine days," he said. "Oh well, forget it." He stretched for the farthest buckles, grunting. Then he slanted a grin up at the watching major.

  "What do you hear from the cockeyed giant, Rufe?"

  Dodd's stern mouth relaxed slightly. The smile was reluctant, but it came. Encouraged, Morgan made his voice warm and went on, still struggling laboriously with the boot.

  "I can't reach the last snaps, Rufe," he said. "Remember that crease from a spear I got out on Llap, when we stood off the Redfeet together for three days? Makes it hard for me to bend this far. Guess you don't outgrow these things once you start getting old. Damned if you're not starting to show gray yourself, Rufe."

  "Maybe you aren't," Dodd said. "But your hands are shaky, Jaime."

  "If you'd had a night like mine," Morgan grinned, "you'd be resonating ultrasonics. I'll get over it. I—" He grunted piteously, stretching in vain for the last clasp.

  "I'll get it," Dodd said, and stooped.

  "Thanks," Morgan said, watching his moment. When Dodd's jaw was within range Morgan narrowed his eyes, braced himself in the bunk, and let the heavy boot fly forward and upward with all his lean weight behind it.

  The kick caught Dodd on the side of the jaw and lifted him a good six inches before he shot backward and struck the dusty floor, his head making a hollow thump on the rubberized plastic.

  Morgan followed his foot without a second's delay. Dodd had no more than hit the dust before Morgan's knees thudded upon the floor on each side of him and Morgan's hands slapped down hard upon his throat.

  It wasn't necessary. Dodd lay motionless.

  "Sorry, Rufe," Morgan grinned. "Hope I didn't—" His hands explored the unconscious skull before him. "Nope, you're all right. Now I'll just borrow your gun, Rufe, and we'll see about a little unfinished business here in town. Deport me, eh? Let me give you a little good advice, Rufe. Never underestimate an old friend."

  He got up, grinning tightly, slipping the stolen gun in his belt.

  The hangover thudded inside his head, but he showed no outward sign of it. Moving cautiously, light and easy, he slid out of town, through the new orchards toward the woods about a mile away. Wild woods, circling down upon Ancibel Settlement in ranks unbroken for countless miles upon miles far over the curve of Loki planet.

  There was fresh-water brook coming down out of the foothills in the edge of the woods. Morgan stripped and bathed in the icy water until his head cleared and he began to feel better. Afterward he went back toward Ancibel, the gun heavy in his shirt, looking for a man named Shining Valley.

  -

  "I was waiting for you," Shining Valley said dreamily, blinking up through a rising mist of bubbles that flowed in a slow fountain from the pewter mug in his hand. He leaned his elbows on the table, moving the mug from side to side and swaying his head to and fro with it in a smooth, reptilian motion. The spray of rising bubbles bent like an airy tree in the wind. "I was waiting," he said again, only this time he sang it. All Venusians sing among themselves, but not to outsiders unless they are euphoriac.

  Morgan's nostrils stung with the sharp, almost painfully clear aroma of the high-C pouilla Valley was inhaling. He knew better than to rely on the hope that the man was drunk.

  Valley made a gesture in the air, and again out of the ceiling a descending swoop and rustle sounded and a curtain closed the two of them in, this time a circle of it around the table toward the rear of the Feather Road.

  Valley's opaque stare was candid and curiously limpid through the rising spray. "Now you will work with us," he sang.

  "Now I'll take the rest of my credits," Morgan corrected him.

  Valley's fingers caressed the pewter mug with a faintly unpleasant tangling motion.

  "I paid you ten thousand. Skalla."

  "That was a first installment. I want the rest."

  "I told you—"

  Morgan inhaled, wrinkling his nose. "You told me a fish story. The stuff I sold you will be priceless as soon as Trade Control clears out the sehft-rats. There isn't any planet with an H.K spectra matter cloud. You'll process the sehft for narcotics and ask your own price. Get it, too. I want mine. Will you pay up now, or shall I blow your head off?"

  Valley made the familiar sea-wave sound in his throat meditatively. Suddenly he bent his head and nuzzled his face into the spray of pin-point bubbles.

  "Give me the ten thousand back," he said, "and I'll return your sehft. Things have been happening. Forty gallons isn't worth running a risk for, and forty's all I have."

  "You're lying," Morgan told him flatly.

  Shining Valley smiled through the spray. "No. I had more, yesterday. Much more. I've been collecting it for weeks now, from everyone I could buy from. But last night Major Dodd confiscated the lot. Now I have nothing but the forty gallons you sold me. You want it back?"

  Morgan struck fiercely at the empty air in front of him, as if he brushed away invisible gnats. He hated this quicksand shifting underfoot. What was true? What was false? What devious double-dealing lay behind the Venusian's dreamy smile? He wasn't used to this kind of byplay. There was always one way to end it, of course. He slid his hand inside his shirt and closed it on Dodd's gun.

  "I'll make you an offer, though," Shining Valley said.

  Morgan tightened a little in every muscle. Here it came, he thought. They'd been maneuvering him toward some untenable spot he could yet only dimly glimpse. In a moment or two, perhaps he'd know.

  "Go on," he said.

  "You're in a bad position, Jaime Morgan," the man from Venus said softly. "Very bad indeed. You drunkenly squandered your money a
way and now you can't leave Ancibel Key. No one will sell you a liter of fuel until you pay up your old debts. I know how frontiersmen work, always one trip behind themselves, operating on credit, using this year's cargo to pay last year's bills. Without the price of the sehft you can't re-establish your credit. Am I right?"

  -

  Morgan bent forward, resting his chin on his hand, his elbow on the table. In this position his shirt front was covered, and he slipped Dodd's gun out and laid it on his knee, muzzle facing Shining Valley's middle under the table.

  "Go on," was all he said.

  "You'll be deported from Loki planet as soon as the Jetborne catch up with you," Valley went on in the same dreamy singsong. "You want to stay. But you can't stay unless you co-operate with me."

  "I can work out my own problems," Morgan said. "Pay me what you owe and forget about me."

  "That deal is finished. I have said skalla and it can't be reopened. If you offered me a ton of sehft now, I wouldn't give you a link for it. You have only one thing for sale I'll buy from you, Morgan—your co-operation. I'll pay you forty thousand credits if you'll do a little job for us."

  Morgan moved the gun muzzle forward on his knee a little, felt the trigger with a sensitive forefinger.

  "What's the job?" he asked.

  "Ah." Shining Valley smiled mistily through the spray. "That you must tell me. I can only give you my problem and hope you have the answer—because you know Loki planet so well." He made a disagreeably fingery gesture toward the far end of town. "Out there stand the big ships, pointing into space," he said. "One of them is ours. We are very well organized here at Ancibel Key. Much money is behind us. But Major Dodd has grounded all the ships in port. Also, he has confiscated our treasure. What we wish to do is regain the sehft he stole from us, load it aboard our ship and send it off. How can we do this, Jaime Morgan?"