And if that were true, could it have been Fishhook instead of Finn which had struck the lethal blow at Stone?
He recoiled at the thought, but it clung inside his brain—for the situation was revealing itself as more than just a simple struggle between Finn and Stone.
It might be best, he cold himself, to disclaim immediately any connection whatsoever with the star machine. Perhaps he should have made the disclaimer back there at the shed when Rand first had mentioned it. But if he told the truth, if he told Rand now that he had not known of the star machine until just hours ago, he conceivably might lose a bargaining point of uncertain value. And even if he told him, Rand more than likely would refuse to believe him, for lie, after all, had helped Riley nurse the truck which had carried it almost all the way from Mexico.
“It took you plenty long,” said Blaine, “to catch up with me. Are you, maybe, losing your grip? Or were you just amused?”
Rand frowned. “We almost lost you, Shep. We had you pegged in that town where they were about to hang you.”
“You were even there that night?”
“Well, not personally,” said Rand, “but I had some men there.”
“And you were about to let me hang.”
“Well, I tell you honestly, we were of divided mind. But you took die decision right out of our bands.”
“But if not . . .”
“I think most likely we would have let you hang. There was the possibility, of course, that if we grabbed you off you could have led us to the star machine. But we were fairly confident, at that point, we could spot it for ourselves.”
He crashed his glass down on the table. “Of all the crazy things!” he yelled. “Hauling a machine like that in the rattletrap you used. What ever—”
“Simple,” said Blaine, answering for Stone. “And you know the answer just as well as I do. No one would be that crazy. If you had stolen something very valuable, you’d get it as far away and as fast as possible—”
“Anybody would,” said Rand.
He saw Blaine grinning at him and grinned back.
“Shep,” he said, “come dean with me. We were good friends once. Maybe, for all I know, we’re still the best of friends.”
“What do you want to know?”
“You took that machine some place just now.”
Blaine nodded.
“And you can get it back again.”
“No,” Blaine told him. “I’m pretty sure I can’t. I was . . . well, just sort of playing a joke on someone.”
“On me, perhaps?”
“Not you. On Lambert Finn.”
“You don’t like Finn, do you.”
“I’ve never met the man.”
Rand picked up the bottle and filled the glasses once again. He drank half of the liquor in his glass and then stood up.
“I have to leave,” he said, looking at his watch. “One of Charline’s parties. Wouldn’t miss it for the world. You’re sure that you won’t come. Charline would be glad to have you.”
“No, thanks. I’ll stay right here. Give Freddy my regards.”
“Freddy,” said Rand, “isn’t with us any more.”
Blaine got up and walked with Rand over to the transo. Rand opened the door. The inside of it looked something like a freight elevator.
“Too bad,” said Rand, “we can’t use these out in space. It would free a lot of manpower.”
“I suppose,” Blaine said, “that you are working on it.”
“Oh, certainly,” Rand told him. “It’s just a matter of refining the controls.”
He held out his hand. “So long, Shep. I’ll be seeing you.”
“Good-by, Kirby,” said Blaine. “Not if I can help it.”
Rand grinned and stepped into the machine and closed the door. There was no flashing light—nothing to show the machine had operated.
And yet by now, Blaine knew, Kirby Rand was back in Fishhook.
He turned from the transo and started back for the chair beside the fire.
The door from the store up front swung open and Grant came into the room. He had a striped robe folded on his arm.
“We got just the thing,” he announced. “I had forgotten that I had it.”
He lifted the robe off his arm and shook it out.
“Isn’t it a beauty?” he demanded.
It was all of that. It was a fur of some sort and there was something about the fur itself that made it glitter in the firelight, as if someone had dusted it with tiny diamond fragments. It was a golden yellow with black stripes that ran diagonally and it had the look of silk rather than of fur.
“It’s been around for years,” said Grant. “There was this man camping on the river and he came in and ordered it. Fishhook had a bit of trouble locating one immediately, but they finally delivered. As you know, sir. they always do.”
“Yes, I know,” said Blaine.
“Then the man never did show up. But the fur was so beautiful I could never send it back. I kept it on inventory, pretending that some day I’d have a chance to sell it. I never will, of course. Ir costs too much money for a one-horse town like this.”
“What is it?”
“The warmest, lightest, softest fur in the universe. Campers carry it. Better than a sleeping bag.”
“I couldn’t use it,” protested Blaine. “Just an ordinary blanket—”
“But you must,” Grant told him. “As a favor to me, sir. My accommodations are so poor, I feel deeply shamed. But if I knew you were sleeping in a luxury item—”
Blaine laughed and held out his hand.
“All right,” lie said. “And thanks.” Grant gave him the robe and Blaine weighed it in his hand, not quite believing it could be so light.
“I’ve still got a little work,” the factor told him. “If you don’t mind, I’ll go back and finish it. You can bed down anywhere.”
“Go ahead,” said Blaine. “I’ll finish up my drink and then turn in. Would you have one with me?”
“Later on,” the factor said. “I always have a snort before I go to bed.”
“I’ll leave the bottle for you.”
“Good night, sir,” the factor said, “See you in the morning.”
Blaine went back to the chair and sat down in it, with the robe lying in his lap. He stroked it with his hand and it was so soft and warm that it gave the illusion of being still alive.
He picked up the glass and worked leisurely on the liquor and puzzled over Rand.
The man was probably the most dangerous man on earth, despite what Stone had said of Finn—the most dangerous personally, a silky, bulldog danger, a bloodhound of a man who carried out the policies of Fishhook. No enemy of Fishhook was ever safe from Rand.
And yet he had not insisted that Blaine go back with him. He had been almost casual in his invitation, as if it had been no more than a minor social matter, and he had displayed no resentment nor no apparent disappointment upon Blaine’s refusal. Nor had he made a move toward force, although that, Blaine told himself, was more than likely due to his lack of knowledge with what he might be dealing. Along the trail, apparently, he had happened on enough to put him on his guard, to know that the man he followed had some secret abilities entirely new to Fishhook.
So he’d move slowly and cautiously, and he’d cover up with a nonchalance that fooled no one at all. For Rand, Blaine knew, was a man who would not give up.
He had something up his sleeve, Blaine knew—something so well hidden that no corner of it showed.
There was a trap all set and baited, Blaine knew. There was no doubt of it.
He sat quietly in his chair and finished off the liquor in his glass.
Perhaps it was foolish of him to remain here in die Post. Perhaps it would be better if he just got up and left. And yet that might be the very riling Rand would have figured him to do. Perhaps the trap was outside the door and not in the Post at all. It could be very likely that this room was the one safe place in all the world for him to spen
d the night.
He needed shelter, but he did not need the sleep. Perhaps the thing to Jo was stay here, but not to go to sleep. He could lie on the floor, with the robe wrapped tight about him and pretend to sleep, but keeping watch on Grant. For if there were a trap in this room, Grant was the one to spring it.
He put his glass back on the table beside the one that Rand had used, still a quarter full of liquor. He moved the bottle over to make a set piece out of the bottle and the glasses, the three of them together. He bundled the robe underneath his arm and walked over to the fire. He picked up the poker and pushed the burning logs together to revive their dying flame.
He’d bed down here, he decided, just before the fire, so that the light of it would be back of him, out into the room.
He spread the robe carefully on the floor, took off his jacket and folded it for a pillow. He kicked off his shoes and lay down on the robe. It was soft and yielding, almost like a mattress despite its lack of thickness. He pulled it over him and it fell together smoothly, like a sleeping bag. There was a comfort in it that he had not felt since those days when he had been a boy and had snuggled down into his bed, underneath the blankets, in his room on the coldest winter nights.
He lay there, staring out into the darkness of the storeroom beyond the living quarters. He could see the faint outlines of barrels and bales and boxes. And lying there in the silence, unbroken except by the occasional crackle of the fire behind him, he became aware of the faint scent which perfumed the room—the indescribable odor of things alien to the Earth. Not an offensive scent, nor exotic, not in any way startling at all, but a smell such as was not upon the Earth, the compounded smell of spice and fabric, of wood and food, of all the many other things which were gathered from the stars. And only a small stock of it here, he knew, only the staples considered necessary for one of the smaller Posts. But a Post with the entire resources of the massive Fishhook warehouses available within a moment’s notice, thanks to the transo standing in its corner.
And this was only a small part of that traffic with the stars—this was only the part that you could put your hands upon, the one small part of it that one could buy or own.
There was also that greater unseen, almost unrealized part of the Fishhook operation—the securing and collecting—and the hoarding, as well—of ideas and of knowledge snared from the depths of space. In the universities of Fishhook scholars from all parts of the world sifted through this knowledge and sought to correlate and study it, and in some cases to apply it, and in the years to come it would be this knowledge and these ideas which would shape the course and the eventual destiny of all humanity.
But there was more to it than that. There was, first of all, the revealed knowledge and ideas, and secondly, the secret files of learning and the facts kept under lock and key or at the very best reviewed by most confidential boards and panels.
For Fishhook could not, in the name of humanity as well as its own self-interest, release everything it found.
There were certain new approaches, philosophies, ideas, call them what you might, which, while valid in their own particular social structure, were not human in any sense whatever, nor by any stretch of imagination adaptable to the human race and the human sense of value. And there were those others which, while applicable, must be studied closely for possible side-effects on human thinking and the human viewpoint before they could be introduced, no matter how obliquely, into the human cultural pattern. And there still were others, wholly applicable, which could not be released for perhaps another hundred years—ideas so far ahead, so revolutionary that they must wait for the human race to catch up with them.
And in this must have lain something of what Stone had been thinking when he had started his crusade to break the monopoly of Fishhook, to bring to the paranormal people of the world outside of Fishhook some measure of the heritage which was rightly theirs by the very virtue of their abilities.
In that Blaine could find agreement with him, for it was not right, he told himself, that all the results of PK should be forever funneled through the tight controls of a monopoly that in the course of a century of existence had somehow lost the fervor of its belief and its strength of human purpose in a welter of commercialism such as no human being, nor any age, had ever known before.
By every rule of decency, parakinetics belonged to Man himself, not to a band of men, not to a corporation, not even to its discovers nor the inheritors of its discoverers—for the discovery of it, or the realization of it, no matter by what term one might choose to call it, could not in any case be the work of one man or one group of men alone. It was something that must Jay within the public domain. It was a truly natural phenomenon—more peculiarly a natural resource than wind or wood or water.
Blaine lay quietly, thinking, with the alien scent within his nostrils and his mind, with the snapping of the fire behind him, with the warmth and comfort of the robe around him, and he was at peace with the silence and the snugness. Except, he told himself, he had no right to be at peace.
There was Godfrey Stone, dead with his head smashed in; there was Anita Andrews and her band of witches who had come flying to the rescue on simple faith alone; there was Lambert Finn, all set to preach tomorrow, not dreaming that his lecture prop, his horrible example, was now beyond his touch; and there was Harriet Quimby—and where was Harriet this night?
Back at the Plainsman motel, perhaps, although when he thought about it, it seemed quite unlikely. Or in jail, hauled there by the over-zealous police of Belmont, held there, as they would tell her, for her own protection. Or, perhaps, many miles from here, her car roaring through the night, bound upon some mission or maybe simply fleeing. Although Harriet was a woman, he reminded himself, it would nor be easy to stampede into flight.
And there was as well another factor, perhaps the overriding factor, of Fishhook, the huge monolithic structure that dominated everything on Earth.
Behind him the logs, burning to the point of collapse, fell apart in a fiery crash. He turned to look at them—
Or tried to turn.
But he could not turn.
There was something wrong.
Somehow or other, the robe had become wrapped too tightly.
He pushed his hands out from his side to pull it loose, but he could: not push his hands and it would not loosen.
Rather, it tightened. He could feel it tighten.
Terrified, he tried to thrust his body upward trying to sit up.
He could not do it. It was impossible.
The robe held him in a gentle, but unyielding grasp.
He was as effectively trussed as if he’d been tied with rope. The robe, without his knowing it, had become a strait jacket that held him close and snug.
He lay quietly on his back and while a chill went through his body, sweat poured down his forehead and ran into his eyes.
For there had been a trap.
He had been afraid of one.
He had been on guard against it.
And yet, of his own free will and unsuspecting, he had wrapped the trap about him.
XXV
Rand had said “I’ll be seeing you” when he had shaken hands and stepped into the transo. He had sounded cheerful and very confident. And he’d had a right to sound that way, Blaine thought ruefully, for he’d had it all planned out. He had known exactly what would happen and he’d planned it letter perfect—the one way to apprehend a man you happened to be just a little scared of, not knowing exactly what to expect from him.
Blaine lay on the floor, stretched out, held stretched-out and motionless by the encircling robe—except, of course, it was not a robe. It was, more than likely, one of those weird discoveries which Fishhook, for purposes of its own, had found expedient to keep under very careful cover. Foreseeing, no doubt, that certain unique uses might be found for it.
Blaine searched his memory and there was nothing there—nothing that even hinted of a thing like this, some parasitic life, perhaps, which fo
r time on end could lie quiet and easy, making like a robe, but which came to deadly life once it was exposed to something warm and living.
It had him now and within a little while it might start feeding on him, or whatever else it might plan to do with him. There was no use, he knew, to struggle, for at every movement of his body the thing would only close the tighter.
He searched his mind again for a clue to this thing and all at once he found a place—he could see a place—a murky, tumbled planet with tangled forestation and weird residents that flapped and crawled and shambled. It was a place of horror, seen only mistily through the fogs of memory, but the most startling thing about it was that he was fairly certain, even as he dredged it up, he had no such memory. He had never been there and he’d never talked to one who had, although it might have been something he’d picked up from dimensino—from some idle hour of many years before, buried deep within his mind and unsuspected until this very moment.
The picture grew the brighter and the clearer, as if somewhere in his brain someone might be screwing at a lens to get a better picture, and now he could see in remarkable and mind-chilling detail the sort of life that lived within the welter of chaotic jungle. It was horrendous and obscene and it crawled and crept and there was about it a studied cold ferociousness, the cruelty of the uncaring and unknowing, driven only by a primal hunger and a primal hate.
Blaine lay frozen by the pitlike horror of the place, for it was almost as if he actually were there, as if a part of him lay on this floor before the fireplace while the other half was standing, in all reality, within the loathesome jungle.
He seemed to hear a noise, or this other half of him seemed to hear a noise, and this other half of him looked upward into what might have been a tree, although it was too gnarled, too thorned and too obnoxious to be any proper tree, and looking up, he saw the robe, hanging from a branch, with the shattered diamond dust sparkling in its fur, about to drop upon him.
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