by Matt
"You wanted to know where Signor Marrotta is at lunch?" the young man asked.
"I want you to take me there. When I get to him"—Shane produced the wad of notes again—"you get this."
"I can't be gone that long." The pale, pointed-chinned face was damp with perspiration, the voice was highly nervous.
"Suit yourself." Shane put the notes away. "I suppose you know you and that other man in the office are going to be in deep trouble with your boss when he comes back and I tell him how you kept me from finding him."
"You're one of the two people in pilgrim robes who were in the other day?"
"That's right."
"All right."
Marrotta, it turned out, was lunching by himself in a small neighborhood restaurant, at a table for one by a wall. Shane identified him through the glass window fronting the restaurant.
"I've got to go," said the clerk. "Let's have the money." Shane shook his head.
"Not yet," he answered. "First you go in and tell him I'm out here."
"That wasn't the deal! You just wanted to get to him. He'll go through the roof if he sees me away from the office here."
"Tell him I made you bring me. As for the rest—I haven't got to him yet. Not until you bring him out here. If you want your money, get moving."
The clerk scowled at him, hesitated, but went in. Through the window Shane saw him speak to Marrotta. The trucking firm owner put his fork down, wiped his lips on a napkin and followed the younger man out.
Shane had kept his hood pinched shut from the moment he had left the hotel. Through the narrow parting in the two edges of cloth now, he could see Marrotta's face. No enmity was visible there this time. No particular friendship, either. Merely the readiness of a man in business to do that business with another member of the general public.
"You ready, then?" asked Marrotta in Italian.
"Yes," said Shane. "As soon as you can get me on my way, I need to be headed toward Rome. When I get there, I'll have to buy another staff, or a piece of wood approximately like this—"
He shook his own staff.
"Also a white bedsheet, black paint, brushes and nails. I'll also need something to make the flag stand upright, like a flagpole. Can you see to it that the driver knows where I can buy those things without making anyone curious?"
Marrotta nodded. He jerked his head to his left.
"Come on back to the office," he said. "It's Johann's shift. He's waiting back there for you."
Half an hour later, after being dropped off by a truck in a different neighborhood and picking up a car to which Johann had the keys but which was simply parked on the street—a five- or six-year-old, Simca four-door sedan, a block and a half from where the truck had dropped them—Shane and his chauffeur were on their way to Rome.
Johann was a practiced driver with good reflexes. Shane looked at him with a curiosity that he had not felt before toward any member of the Resistance. What did a man like this think? What made him involve himself in a risk to life like this? Had the Aalaag done something to someone close to him? Any answer was possible. For the first time Shane felt a need to know such things about these people. A small, quiet, dark man in his thirties or thereabouts, completely Milanese in appearance in spite of his first name, which was all Shane was ever to know about him, Johann drove with concentration and made it plain he was not interested in conversation. Since this suited Shane's original plans, if not his present curiosity, equally well, they made the drive to Rome almost without words, in a little over six hours.
They stopped at last before an apartment building. Johann took a small, zippered canvas bag from the rear seat of the Simca and led Shane up three flights of dark, narrow stairs in an atmosphere heavy with the odors of past meals. The Resistance man unlocked a door and let them both into a small, single-room apartment with two tiny beds, a two-burner electric stove, one ceiling light and one lamp. It was dark enough in the room, in spite of its being only late afternoon of a sunny day, so that Johann lit the ceiling light. The room looked even less appetizing in the illumination of the one weak bulb.
"But it's safe," said Shane. "Against anyone but the Aalaag, anyway."
To his surprise, Johann crossed himself.
"Are the aliens going to be looking for us, too?" he asked.
"No," said Shane. He was conscious of an irrational urge to apologize. He went to a change of subject. "Look, Signor Marrotta told you about the things I need to buy and where to buy them without attracting attention?"
Johann nodded.
"Well, I was going to get you to take me around so I could buy them myself; but, late as it is, some shops could be closed before I got around to everything. You can probably do it quicker alone. You think you can get it all bought before the stores lock up for the day?"
"Yes," said Johann.
Shane handed him a generous supply of banknotes. "I'll wait here. You'd probably better bring back some food and drink."
"I was going to anyway," said Johann. He left.
His going seemed to bring a grayness and a chill to the room. Its cause had been only the removal of one other human body, but for some reason Shane was suddenly and acutely aware of being alone. The sensation was like a sense of betrayal in him. He was conscious of exhaustion. He flopped on his back on one of the narrow beds, feeling the thin hardness of its mattress under his spine and staring up at the wavy, cracked, and dingy white surface of the plastered ceiling.
His decision to slip away to Rome like this and have the Pilgrim make an appearance there had been so that there would be a break in the direct correlation between the cities to which he had been sent, and the Pilgrim's appearances. Eventually, as Peter had suggested, others could take it on themselves to play at such appearances, with his permission or without it. Then all direct association with his travels and such sightings would become blurred beyond tracing. But until then he must protect himself.
The actual appearance, in this case, should be fairly safe and easy. The difficult part was that he had decided he needed permanent possession of tools like those he now carried—and these could only be taken from some arms locker with which he apparently could never have had contact. Also, by preference, it should be a much larger locker than that in one of Laa Ehon's Government Units, so that the stolen tools were less likely to be missed. In a word, he needed to make a raid on an Aalaag installation with a heavy complement of officers— such as the Aalaag Headquarters here in Rome.
And the danger in doing so lay in the fact that, if caught within its walls, he would be able to produce no good reason for being there. To be caught would mean his being returned to Lyt Ahn, for certain questioning and eventual disposal. His only hope of getting away with it would be to let himself in by the same sort of private Aalaag door by which he had slipped out of the Milan HQ to provide an excuse that would save Maria's life, then hope those within who saw him there would take him for a human servant with some legitimate reason for being there.
He could not make specific plans because he had no idea of what he might run into, in the way of the Headquarters' physical layout or in human or Aalaag curiosity about him, once he was inside. His mind skirted the edge of imaginings in which he was stopped, questioned, and found out. .. and fled from these into sleep.
When he woke, suddenly, and for no apparent reason, it ·was completely dark in the room. He looked at his wristwatch and saw that an inner alarm had roused him close to the proper time. It was almost midnight. On the bed beside him, a small hump under a blanket showed where Johann slumbered.
The Aalaag were largely indifferent to the day and night of the planet they were on. They operated on a roughly twenty-four-hour day, and a large establishment like the local Headquarters would of necessity have a fair number of human servants on duty at all hours. Shane dressed in the sort of casual slacks and shirt he normally wore while on duty at the House of Weapons, and which was the usual human dress in most Aalaag working places that did not call for special un
iforms. Over the slacks and shirt, he put his pilgrim cloak, took his staff and went out.
The Roman night was cool. He felt the chill almost immediately through the robe and his thin clothes underneath. He shrugged his shoulders to signal the robe's Aalaag-technology heating system to compensate for the temperature. The streets were empty except for long lines of cars crowded against the curbs on either side, locked tight, dark and empty. The Simca would be among them, but Johann would have the keys. Unthinkingly, Shane had planned to do as he normally did and catch a taxi. But it did not look as if this was a neighborhood where he would find taxis cruising the streets.
He could go back upstairs, wake Johann and get the keys from him or even make the little man part of the expedition. But he did not want to do either. Alone, he was not only safer, but this part of his trip would remain a secret.
With a feeling of urgency and uneasiness, he turned and began to walk rapidly down the street, looking for some intersection that would show lights in the distance, some sign of activity that would signal a greater likelihood of his finding a cab.
By these means he finally managed to find a hotel with cabs waiting before it, and take one of these to within a few blocks of the Headquarters. He waited until the vehicle was out of sight before turning to walk the last few blocks.
When he reached the Headquarters building, he found, as he had expected, that it was very much like every other Aalaag Headquarters he had seen; with the exception of the House of Weapons, which in its alien way was actually more of a palace than a Headquarters. In this case, even the private door he had counted on was in almost the same location as it had been at the Headquarters in Milan. It sat, at the bottom of a flight of a dozen steps down from street level, some fifty feet farther along the street from the Headquarters' main entrance; which, according to custom, at this hour of the night had no Interior Guards standing on duty outside it.
There were consequently no eyes watching as he stripped off his pilgrim robe and tucked it, with his staff, in a patch of deep shadow at the foot of a wall—where hopefully, they would remain safely hidden until he came back for them. Shivering in the sudden chill of the night air once the robe was off, he went down the stairs and Lyt Ahn's key opened the door for him immediately and noiselessly.
Interior warmth flowed comfortingly around him. The door had let him directly into the first basement level where the arms locker should be; something he had hoped for but had not dared to count on. He went along the softly lighted corridor the door had let him into, touching each door he passed with Lyt Ahn's key.
Most did not open, proving themselves to be ordinary doors with no alien locks to them. A few opened, but showed themselves to be storerooms with contents in which he was not interested. He came at last to a door which he was just about to touch with his key when it dissolved before him of its own accord.
A door such as this should only do that if an Aalaag was going in and out repeatedly and did not want to bother with unlocking it each time.
Every nerve in his body tensed. His stomach seemed to curl and shrink within him. Silently and slowly, he leaned forward until he could peer around the edge of the door.
He looked into the arms locker, fully lit, but he saw no living being, human or Aalaag, in it—though there were areas into which he could not see from where he stood.
Some Aalaag might have come, gone back out and would not be returning for a while. Otherwise leaving the door unlocked was a breach of security. An unimportant one, it was true; but except under extraordinary conditions, the Aalaag did not commit breaches of security. There was only the unlikely but possible chance that an Aalaag, after entering it, had been momentarily called away for some unexpected reason and, leaving, had in effect left the portal ajar in the expectation of being back within a few seconds—or minutes at most.
Shane stared and listened. He saw no movement and heard nothing. If one of the Aalaag had opened it and left temporarily, now was the ideal time for him to steal the tools he had come to take. It was simply an unparalleled stroke of luck that needed to be taken advantage of right away, if at all. Moreover—the thought chilled him—if he did not go in now, but waited to play safe and enter after the Aalaag, whoever he was, had returned and gone again, there was no telling how long the alien might be planning to spend in the locker. If he was intending to contemplate one of the weapons of his ancestors, he might be in there literally for hours. Meanwhile, every second Shane spent inside this building increased the danger of his being observed, questioned and found out. But if he went in now and got out again before the Aalaag's return, there would not even be the use of Lyt Ann's key on the door for alien technology to trace.
In the end, Shane hardly knew what triggered his decision, but suddenly he was inside, moving almost at a run but as silently as he could toward the back of the locker, where the tools were kept.
He had visited the tools section of three lockers now, and they were all laid out the same. He knew where to look. It was hardly a moment before he was able to find an invisibility device, a levitating tool, and one of the cutting tools he had seen the woman from Maintenance use to cut the wall at the House of Weapons.
He stowed the devices in his pockets and paused for a second longer to run his eye over the neat ranks of other tools, wishing he knew what more of them did and which might be useful to him if only he knew all those capabilities.
"Halt!" said an Aalaag voice behind him. "Turn about, beast! What are you doing here?"
Shane turned. Just inside the entrance, looking down the aisle between the equipment-banked walls, was a male Aalaag in off-duty uniform. He stared, without words, at the massive body that blocked his only way out of the locker, in this moment he had been afraid of....
"Speak, beast!" said the Aalaag. "What's your name?"
Shane's wits began to work sluggishly again.
"'Tarnished sir," he mumbled in Aalaag so clumsy it would be barely understandable. "My name Hyman-beast."
He had deliberately chosen a name with two consonants the Aalaag vocal apparatus could not pronounce, and to which consequently the aliens were all but ear-blind. He had the momentary satisfaction of seeing the Aalaag opposite him start to echo the name and give up before he had started.
"What're you doing here? Who sent you here?"
"Not speak Aalaag good..." mumbled Shane. He reached into his pocket and brought out the wall-cutting device. "Orders. Put this back. Door open."
"Who sent you to take it back? What beast is your superior? Haven't you ever been told that no beast is to enter an arms locker except under special orders or supervision?"
"Pardon, 'tarnished sir. This stupid beast not understand."
"What beast sent you here? Or did an officer send you?"
"Not understand."
"What sort of cattle are they sending us nowadays?" said the officer. "Beast, listen—you are not to put that tool back. You understand?"
"Understand, 'tarnished sir."
"Take it and go yourself to the office of the Officer of the Day. Do you at least know where that is?"
"Know, 'tarnished sir."
"Go there and wait for me. Tell the Officer of the Day I sent you and I'll be along before his duty period ends to explain why you're there. You understand? You tell Officer of the Day that Chagon Een send you to wait. Chagon Een come soon. Understand?"
"This beast wait Officer Day. Chagon Een come soon."
"Good. Now go. Touch nothing on your way out."
"Beast go, 'tarnished sir."
Shane walked down the aisle, slipped past the Aalaag, who did not deign to move and give him extra room to pass, and went out through the door. Once out, he turned to peer back from the relatively dim light of the corridor into the brightly illuminated locker, and saw the alien had moved to one of the racks of weapons and taken down something that vaguely resembled an ancient mace, handling it carefully and holding it at last in both hands before him, becoming motionless in contemplation of
it.
Shane turned and went with all quiet speed back down the corridor. Seconds later he was out of the building and putting on his robe once more. In less than an hour he was back at the hotel, where Johann seemed not to have moved in his sleep.
20
The planned appearance of the Pilgrim at the Castel Sant'Angelo in Rome had been considered by Shane primarily as an excuse for his raid on the arms locker of the Aalaag Headquarters in that city. It should be a simple matter. There would be no Aalaag riding sentry around the historic—but to the Aalaag—useless structure. It had been spared destruction officially because the Aalaag had classed it as a harmless part of the custom pattern of the beasts. Privately, Shane had thought that in such restraint he scented the fact that the Aalaag, with their worship of their own past, had at least a trickle of understanding for important relics of the human past....
