“No,” he said. “It’s good of you, kid, but I’m going ahead with my project. We won’t need you, though, so feel free to take off.”
Fear edged her tone, for the first time since he had met her: “I do not want to die of the sickness.”
“You won’t. I’ll get clean away, with no suspicion of the fact-“
“Impossible! Every spaceship on this planet is watched!”
“-or else I’ll be recaptured. Or, more likely, killed. I’d prefer being killed, I think. But either way, Luang, you’ve done your share and there’s no reason for you to take further risks. I’ll speak to Tembesi. You can get a car out of here tomorrow morning.”
“And leave you?”
“Uh-“
“No,” she said.
They stood unspeaking a while. The Tree soughed and thrummed.
Finally she asked, “Must you act tomorrow already, Dominic?”
“Soon,” he replied. “I’d better not give Warouw much time. He’s almost as intelligent as I am.”
“But tomorrow?” she insisted.
“Well-no. No, I suppose it could wait another day or two. Why?”
“Then wait. Tell Tembesi you have to work out the details of your scheme. But not with him. Let’s be alone up here. This wretched planet can spare an extra few hours till it is free-without any idea how to use freedom-can it not?”
“I reckon so.”
Flandry dared not be too eager about it, or he might never get up courage for the final hazard. But he couldn’t help agreeing with the girl. One more short day and night? Why not? Wasn’t a man entitled to a few hours entirely his own, out of the niggardly total granted him?
XIV
Among other measures, Nias Warouw had had a confidential alarm sent all dispensers, to watch for a fugitive of such and such a description and listen (with judicious pumping of the clientele) for any rumors about him. Despite a considerable reward offered, the chief was in no hopes of netting his bird with anything so elementary.
When the personal call arrived for him, he had trouble believing it. “Are you certain?”
“Yes, tuan, quite,” answered the young man in the telecom screen. He had identified himself by radio-scanned fingerprints and secret number as well as by name; in the past, hijacker gangs seeking pills for the black market had sometimes used false dispensers. This was absolutely Siak, stationed in Ranau. “He is right in this community. Being as isolated as we are, the average person here knows him only as a visitor from across the sea. So he walks about freely.”
“How did he happen to come, do you know?” asked Warouw, elaborately casual.
“Yes, tuan, I have been told. He befriended a youth of our clan in Gunung Utara. The boy released some prisoners of yours; then, with the help of certain local people, they contrived Flandry’s escape from Biocontrol Central.”
Warouw suppressed a wince at being thus reminded of two successive contretemps. He went on the offensive with a snap: “How do you know all this, dispenser?”
Siak wet his lips before answering nervously, “It seems Flandry hypnotized the boy with gaudy daydreams of seeing Mother Terra. Through the boy, then, Flandry’s criminal friends met several other youths of Ranau-restless and reckless-and organized them into a sort of band for the purpose of liberating Flandry and getting him off this planet. Of course, it would be immensely helpful to have me as part of their conspiracy. The first boy, who is a kinsman of mine, sounded me out. I realized something was amiss and responded as he hoped to his hints, in order to draw him out. As soon as I appeared to be of one mind with them, they produced Flandry from the woods and established him in a house here. They claim he is an overseas trader scouting for new markets… Tuan, we must hurry. They have something afoot already. I do not know what. Neither do most of the conspirators. Flandry says that no man can reveal, by accident or treachery, what he has not been told. I only know they do have some means, some device, which they expect to prepare within a very short time. Hurry!”
Warouw controlled a shudder. He had never heard of any interstellar equivalent of radio. But Terra might have her military secrets. Was that Flandry’s trump card? He forced himself to speak softly: “I shall.”
“But tuan, you must arrive unobserved. Flandry is alert to the chance of being betrayed. With the help of his rebel friends, he must have established a dozen boltholes. If something goes wrong, they will blast down the vault, take a large stock of antitoxin, and escape through the wilderness to complete their apparatus elsewhere. In that case, I am supposed to cooperate with them and pretend to you that I was overpowered. But it would make no difference if I resisted, would it, tuan?”
“I suppose not.” Warouw stared out a window, unheeding of the bright gardens. “Judging from your account, a few well-armed men could take him. Can you invite him to your house at a given time, where we will be in ambush?”
“I can do better than that, tuan. I can lead your men to his own house, to await his return. He has been working constantly at the Tree of the Gnarly Boughs, which has a little electronic shop. But in his guise as a trader, he has been asked to dine at noon with my uncle Tembesi. So he will come back to his guest house shortly before, to bathe and change clothes.”
“Hm. The problem is to get my people in secretly.” Warouw considered the planetary map which filled one wall of his office. “Suppose I land a car in the woods this very day, far enough out from your settlement not to be seen. My men and I will march in afoot, reaching your dispensary at night. Can you then smuggle us by byways to his house?”
“I… I think so, tuan, if there are only a few of you. Certain paths, directly from limb to limb rather than along the trunk, are poorly lighted and little frequented after dark. The cabin he uses is high up on the Tree Where the Ketjils Nest, isolated from any others… But tuan, if there can merely be three or four men with you… it seems dangerous.”
“Bah! Not when each man has a blaster. I do not want a pitched battle with your local rebels, though; the more quietly this affair is handled, the better. So I will leave most of my crew with the aircar. When we have Flandry secured, I will call the pilot to come get us. The rest of the conspiracy can await my leisure. I doubt if anyone but the Terran himself represents any real danger.”
“Oh, no, tuan!” exclaimed Siak. “I was hoping you would understand that, and spare the boys. They are only hot-headed, there is no real harm in them-“
“We shall see about that, when all the facts become known,” said Warouw bleakly. “You may expect reward and promotion, dispenser… Unless you bungle something so he escapes again, in which case there will be no sparing of you.”
Siak gulped. Sweat glistened on his forehead.
“I wish to all the gods there were time to think out a decent plan,” said Warouw. He smiled in wryness. “But as it is, I have not even time to complain about the shortness of time.” Leaning forward, like a cat at a mousehole: “Now; there are certain details I must know, the layout of your community and-“
XV
As they neared the heights, the sun-low above gleaming crowns-struck through an opening in those leaves which surrounded her and turned Luang’s body to molten gold. Flandry stopped.
“What is it?” she asked.
“Just admiring, my sweet.” He drew a lungful of dawn air and savored the sad trilling of a ketjil. There may not be another chance.
“Enough,” grumbled Kemul. “On your way, Terran.”
“Be still!” The girl stamped her foot.
Kemul dropped a hand to his blaster and glared out of red eyes. “You have had plenty of time with her, Terran,” he said. “Any more stalling now, and Kemul will know for a fact you are afraid.”
“Oh, I am,” said Flandry, lightly but quite honestly. His pulse hammered; he saw the great branch, the leaves that flickered around it, the score of men who stood close by, with an unnatural sharpness. “Scared spitless.”
Luang snarled at the mugger: “You do not have to go up
there and face blaster fire!”
Seeing the ugly face, as if she had struck it and broken something within, Flandry knew a moment’s pain for Kemul. He said in haste: “That’s my own orders, darling. I thought you knew.
Since you insisted on waiting this close to the scene of action, I told him to stand by and protect you in case things got nasty. I won’t hear otherwise, either.”
She bridled. “Look here, I have always taken care of myself and-“
He stopped her words with a kiss. After a moment’s rigidity, she melted against him.
Letting her go, he swung on his heel, grabbed a rung, and went up the bole as fast as he could. Her eyes pursued him until the leaves curtained her off. Then he climbed alone, among murmurous mysterious grottos.
Not quite alone, he told his fears. Tembesi, Siak, young Djuanda, and their comrades came behind. They were lifetime hunters, today on a tiger hunt. But their number and their archaic chemical rifles were of small account against blaster flames.
Well, a man could only die once.
Unfortunately.
The taste of Luang lingered on his mouth. Flandry mounted a final ladder to the platform, which swayed in morning wind. Before him was the cabin. It looked like one arbor of purple flowers. He stepped to the doorway, twitched the drape aside, and entered.
Because the truncheons whacking from either side were not unexpected, he dodged them. His movement threw him to the floor. He rolled over, sat up, and looked into the nozzles of energy guns.
“Be still,” hissed Warouw, “or I will boil your eyes with a low beam.”
A disgruntled club wielder peered out a vine-screened window. “Nobody else,” he said.
“You!” Another Guard kicked Flandry in the ribs. “Was there not a woman with you?”
“No-no-” The Terran picked himself up, very carefully, keeping hands folded atop his head. His gray eyes darted around the hut. Siak had given him a report on the situation, after leaving Warouw here to wait, but Flandry required precise detail.
Two surly Guards posted at the door, sticks still in hand and blasters bolstered. Two more, one in each corner, out of jump range, their own guns drawn and converging on him. Warouw close to the center of the room, and to Flandry: a small, deft, compact man with a smile flickering on his lips, wearing only the green kilt and medallion, a blaster in his clutch. The brand of Biocontrol smoldered on his brow like yellow fire.
It was now necessary to hold all their attention for a few seconds. Tembesi’s men could climb over the supporting branches rather than up the ladder, and so attain this platform unobserved from the front of the cabin. But it had a rear window too.
“No,” said Flandry, “there isn’t anyone with me. Not just now. I left her at-Never mind. How in the name of all devils and tax collectors did you locate me so fast? Who tipped you?”
“I think I shall ask the questions,” said Warouw. His free hand reached into a pocket and drew forth the flat case of a short-range radiocom. “The girl does not matter, though. If she arrives in the next several minutes, before the car does, we can pick her up too. Otherwise she can wait. Which will not be for long, Captain. A carful of well-armed men is out in the jungle. When they arrive, I will leave them in charge of the local airstrip-and dispensary, in case your noble young morons retain any ideas about raiding it. Then she can give herself up, or wait for a search party to flush her out of hiding, or run into the jungle and die. That last would be a cruel waste of so much beauty, but I do not care immensely.”
He was about to thumb the radiocom switch and put the instrument to his lips. Flandry said with great clearness and expression-rather proud of rendering it so well in Pulaoic-“Pillicock sat on Pillicock-hill: Halloo, halloo, loo loo!”
“What?” Warouw exclaimed.
“Take heed o’ the foul fiend,” cried Flandry: “obey thy parents; keep thy word justly; swear not; commit not with man’s sworn spouse; set not thy sweet heart on proud array. Tom’s acold.”
He twirled once around, laughing, and saw that he had all their eyes. A Guard made signs against evil. Another whispered, “He is going amok, tuan!”
The Terran flapped his arms. “This is the foul fiend Flibbertigibbet,” he crowed: “he begins at curfew, and walks till the first cock; he gives the web and the pin, squints the eye, and makes the hare-lip; mildews the white wheat, and hurts the poor creature of earth.” He burst into song:
“Swithold footed thrice the old;
He met the nightmare and her nine-fold-“
“Be still!” Warouw stuck the radiocom back in his pocket, advanced, and thrust expertfmgers at Flandry’s solar plexus.
Flandry didn’t remain in the path of that blow.
He tumbled on his back, just in front of the chief. His feet came up, hard, into the groin. As Warouw lurched forward on top of him, driven by the kick as much as the pain, Flandry got the man’s gun wrist between two arms and broke the blaster loose. No chance to use it-the effort sent it across the floor, out of reach.
He clutched Warouw against him, shouted, and wondered icily if the Guards would incinerate their own boss to get him.
The four sprang toward the grappling pair.
A rifle cracked at the rear window. A Guard fell backward, brains splashed from his skull. Tembesi fired again. One of the other Guards managed to shoot. Flame engulfed Tembesi. The whole rear wall went up in smoke and thunder. But even as the ecologist died, the room was exposed to outside view. Guns barked from a dozen surrounding boughs.
Flandry saw the last Guard crash to the boards. Fire sheeted up in the flimsy roof. He relaxed his hold on Warouw, preparatory to hustling the man out of the burning hut.
Warouw yanked his left arm free. His fist struck the angle of Flandry’s jaw.
For a moment, the Terran sagged among whirling ringing darknesses. Warouw scrambled clear of him, snatched up his blaster, and bounded to the doorway.
As he emerged, a voice from the leaves cried, “Halt where you are!” Warouw showed his teeth and fired full power into that foliage. The Tree man screamed and fell dead off his branch.
Warouw yanked the radiocom from his pocket. A gun spoke. The instrument shattered in his hand. He looked at his bleeding palm, wiped it, fired a thunderbolt in return, and sped for the ladder. Bullets smote the planks near his feet. The hunters hoped for a disabling shot. But they dared not risk killing him. The whole object had been to lure him here and take him alive.
As he reeled from the cabin, Flandry saw Warouw go over the platform edge. The Terran hefted the blaster he himself had picked up, drew a long breath, and forced clarity back into his head. Someone has to get him, he thought in an odd unemotional fashion, and as I’m the only one on my side who knows much about the care and ceding of spitguns, I seem elected.
He swarmed down the ladder. “Back!” he called, as supple bodies slipped along the branches on either side of him. “Follow me at a distance. Kill him if he kills me, but hold your fire otherwise.”
He set his weapon to full-power needle beam, gaining extreme range at the cost of narrowing his radius of destruction to a centimeter or so. If Warouw wasn’t quite as handy with pencil shots, there, might be a chance to cripple him without suffering much harm from his own diffuse fire. Or there might not.
Down the holy Tree!
Flandry burst into view of the bough where Luang waited. Warouw confronted her and Kemul. Their hands were in the air; he had taken them by surprise. Warouw backed toward the next set of rungs. “Just keep your places and do not follow me,” he panted.
Flandry broke through the leaf cover overhead. Warouw saw him, whipped around and raised gun.
“Get him, Kemul!” shouted Luang.
The giant shoved her behind him and pounced. Warouw glimpsed the motion, turned back, saw the mugger’s gun not quite out of its holster, and fired. Red flame enveloped Kemul. He roared, once, and fell burning from the limb.
Having thus been given an extra few seconds, Flandry leaped
off the bole rungs onto the bough. Warouw’s muzzle whirled back to meet him. Flandry’s blazed first. Warouw shrieked, lost his gun, and gaped at the hole drilled through his hand.
Flandry whistled. The riflemen of Ranau came and seized Nias Warouw.
XVI
Dusk once more. Flandry emerged from the house of Tembesi. Weariness lay heavy upon him.
Phosphor globes were kindling up and down the Tree Where the Ketjils Nest, and its sister Trees. Through the cool blue air, he could hear mothers call their children home. Men hailed each other, from branch to branch, until the voices of men and leaves and wind became one. The first stars quivered mistily in the east.
Flandry wanted silence for a while. He walked the length of the bough, and of lesser ones forking from it, until he stood on a narrow bifurcation. Leaves still closed his view on either hand, but he could look straight down to the ground, where night rose like a tide, and straight up to the stars.
He stood a time, not thinking of much. When a light footfall shivered the limb beneath him, it was something long expected.
“Hullo, Luang,” he said tonelessly.
She came to stand beside him, another slim shadow. “Well,” she said, “Kemul is buried now.”
“I wish I could have helped you,” said Flandry, “but-“
She sighed. “It was better this way. He always swore he would be content ‘to end in a Swamp Town canal. If he must lie under a blossoming bush, I do not think he would want anyone but me there to wish him good rest.”
“I wonder why he came to my help.”
“I told him to.”
“And why did you do that?”
“I don’t know. We all do things without thinking, now and then. The thinking comes afterward. I will not let it hurt me.” She took his arm. Her hands were tense and unsteady. “Never mind Kemul. Since you have stopped working on him, I take it you have succeeded with Warouw?”
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