by C. L. Moore
“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 hooked 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 eye. 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 do21; 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 you 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 negotiable on him. Go on, serch 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 had 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’lihhan 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 the 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 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 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 uncons
cious 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 a 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 euphoric.
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 away 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 ca we do this, Jaime Morgan?”
“You’ve got some idea,” Morgan said impassively. “Go on.”
Valley shrugged. “An idea only. Perhaps it will work. Are you afraid of the wild Harvesters, Morgan?”
“Sure I am,” Morgan said. “Be a fool not to be.”
“No, no, I mean, could you handle a herd of them? Guide such a herd, perhaps?”
Morgan squinted at him, letting his finger slip off the trigger a little. “You crazy?” he demanded.
“I had heard it can be done. Perhaps some frontiersman more expert than yourself—”
“It can be done, all right,” Morgan interrupted. “But why should it? Where would it get you?”
“To the ship, with my cargo, if we’re lucky,” Valley said. “I would like you to stampede such a herd straight through Ancibel Settlement. What would happen then?”
“Blue ruin,” Morgan said. “Half the population wiped out and every building in their way trampled flat. That what you want?”
Shining Valley shrugged.
“That doesn’t concern me. What I want is to draw the Jetborne and the settlers away from the building where the sehft has been stored. I want enough confusion in Ancibel to clear the spacefield. I think what you describe would do the job nicely, don’t you?”
“Yes,” Morgan said dubiously. “Maybe it would.”
“So you will?”
“There must be easier ways,” Morgan said.
“How? Fire the town? It won’t burn. Only the church and a few of the older stores are made of wood. Of course some other way might be devised, in time, but I have no time to waste. I thought of the Harvesters because one of my men reports a herd of them grazing down a valley only a few miles from here.”
“The town must be protected automatically somehow,” Morgan objected. “Harvesters are dangerous. There must be—”
“I believe some sort of devices have been set up. Seismographic pickups catch the vibrations of their approach and cut in automatic noisemaking devices. Harvesters I believe are very sensitive to sound? Very well. They won’t react to these, because the noisemakers won�
��t operate. My men will see to that, if you can take care of guiding the herd.”
“It’s too dangerous,” Mogan said.
“Nobody earns forty thousand credits easily, my friend. Will you do it, or must I search for a man with less timidity for the job?”
“There isn’t a man on Loki any less scared of Harvesters than I am,” Morgan said practically. “I’m thinking of afterward. Do you know the only way a herd of stampeding Harvesters can be guided? Somebody’s got to ride the lead bull. All right, I could do it. But I’d be pretty conspicuous up there, wouldn’t I? And a lot of the settlers are bound to get hurt.”
“Do you owe them anything, my friend?”
“Not a thing. I hate the sight of ’em. I’d like to throw the lot of ’em clear off Loki planet, and you and your crowd right after. Every man, woman and child in Ancibel Settlement can die for all I care, the way I feel now. But I’m not going to run my neck in a noose killing ’em. I’ll be up there in plain sight, and there’s bound to be survivors. If I earn that forty thousand credits, Valley, I want to live to enjoy it. I don’t want a crowd of vigilantes stringing me up to a tree the minute I drop off the Harvester bull. So that’s out.”
“Perhaps,” Valley sighed. “Perhaps. A pity, isn’t it? I have the forty thousand right here.”
He groped inside the sleeve of his fawn-colored robe and laid a packet of credit notes on the table. It was thick and crisp, smelling of the mint.
“This is yours,” he said. “For the taking. If you earn it. Isn’t it worth a little risk, Jaime Morgan?”
“Maybe,” Morgan said. He gazed hungrily at the money. He thought of his ship lying portbound beyond Ancibel, fuelless and immobile—like himself. What did he owe the settlers, anyhow? Had they spared him, when they had the chance? Like most men who travel the lonely worlds, Morgan had great respect for life. He killed only by necessity, and only as much as he had to.
Still—with this much money he could get clear away. Loki was a big world, after all. He moved his fingertip caressingly on the trigger of the hidden gun.
Suddenly he grinned and his right arm moved with startling speed. The table jerked, the shining tree of spray bowed sidewise between Valley and him. When it righted again the muzzle of Morgan’s gun rested on the table edge and its unwinking eye was fixed steady upon the Venusian. Valley met that round black stare, going a little cross-eyed through the bubbles. He lifted a flat, waiting gaze to Morgan.
