"I wonder if you'd mind answering a few questions."
Salardi wiped at his beard, thinking it over, looked at Dane, then said, "Go ahead. I'll tell you when I've heard enough of them."
"How long have you lived with the gypsies?"
"Four years."
"You're an archaeologist?"
"No."
"But I understood you came here with—"
"I'm a roboticist by profession, an archaeologist by avocation. I came with the expedition to oversee their limited-response robots."
"And you remained behind."
Salardi said nothing.
"Why do you stay here, among those of another species, without any of the comforts of modern life?"
"I like them; that's it. As simple as that. I think they've gotten a lousy deal from the fedgov right down the line. I'd rather live among them than among my own kind. My own kind shame me."
"How have they gotten a lousy deal?" St, Cyr asked.
Salardi folded his arms across his barrel chest and said, "The fedgov always says that planets are colonized without war. I found, when I was with the diggers here, that there had been a war, a damn short and violent war, when the Darmanians were dispossessed. They were primitive, but with a high degree of artistic achievement and the most carefully structured social system I've ever seen. We knocked them down, killed more than half of them, and let another quarter die out from Earth-borne diseases. That's long in the past now, but it still haunts me. What we did here was inexcusable. Do you know that these people did not know anything of war before we came? There were perhaps half a billion of them across the globe, and they never once took arms against each other. The fedgov's war of annexation was grotesque. In two months, only two hundred thousand natives remained. And then the disease… And now that it's clear that violence against other intelligent creatures is beyond them, the fedgov lets them go, lets them wander in quasi-poverty on a planet made over for the rich. That is how they've gotten a lousy deal."
The man spoke with the fiery eloquence of a fanatic on the subject. St, Cyr used his present lack of emotional balance to ask him: "Then you aren't running from criminal prosecution in the Inner Galaxy, as everyone says?"
Salardi dropped his arms and balled his fists at his side. His face colored suddenly. "I've heard enough questions," he said. He turned and entered his tent, pulled the flap shut and tied it down from within.
* * *
Dane brooded on the ride down from the gypsy camp, drove too fast for the condition of the road. St. Cyr ignored him, trusting to Fate and the boy's own desire to live to get them safely home again.
When they had been driving for an hour, Dane suddenly spoke: "What about the fits the boy threw when he was sick — snapping at people and growling like an animal?"
"It's a common symptom of the disease, according to Climicon. It sounds like a relative of an epileptic fit."
"I knew that thing on your chest would keep you blind to the truth. It's trying to apply logic where logic wasn't meant to be."
"But the logic is working," St. Cyr observed.
"Who in hell do you suspect, St. Cyr? Who is a better potential killer than the du-aga-klava? Who would have reasons?"
"Several people," St. Cyr said. "And I'm adding Salardi to the list."
"Why him?"
"Because he's a fanatic about the treatment accorded the natives by the fedgov. Understandable, of course, and all of it as deplorable as he thinks it is. But a fanatic might very well decide that the best way to strike back in behalf of the non-violent Darmanians is to start killing the wealthy people who have inherited this world."
"He's had four years to start. Why begin now?"
"Perhaps it took four years to build up a keen edge of madness."
Dane said nothing more.
Eventually they left the gray trees behind and passed through the lower foothills where the pines grew. The sunlight was welcome, the sky cheerfully cloudless.
St. Cyr's mood was considerably better than it had been that morning. He had even begun to enjoy the scenery again — until they came within sight of the five-level white mansion. Then he realized that, though he had ruled out the possibility of a werewolf to his own satisfaction, he had yet to explain the discovery of wolf hairs on two of the three corpses.
EIGHT: Encounter with a Wolf
Chief Inspector Rainy, whom St. Cyr called that same day, confirmed Salardi's means of arrival on Darma and the reasons he claimed for remaining there. Yes, they had checked with Inner Galaxy police. No, they had not turned up anything of interest Salardi was printed, as were all citizens, but he had no warrants outstanding against him. Similar calls to fedgov agencies produced the same results. No, the Darmanian police had not discounted the rumors altogether. It was still possible that Salardi was on the run from an industrial police force. The largest companies maintained their own protection systems — sometimes their own armies — and, when they employed a million or more people, often had their own sets of laws. Salardi could have been employed by a gargantuan industry, could have broken their plant laws somehow, and could be on the run from a private police force. That was next to impossible to check out, considering the hundreds of industrial worlds and the thousands of companies with their own laws and police. Besides, it was out of Rainy's jurisdiction. St. Cyr promised to call in a couple of days and hung up.
Two more days passed in which he did not achieve anything — except a better understanding of Tina Alderban, whom he found himself spending too much time with. She seemed, with every moment that he was around her, increasingly beautiful, stirring needs in him that he had ignored for quite a long while. At night, when nightmares came, she was not in them — but when he woke, it somehow seemed to him that she was nevertheless connected to them in some fashion. He knew that the stalker in his dream was not Tina, but some connection…
On the evening of the second day after he and Dane had returned from the gypsy camp, he was in Tina's studio looking over a new piece of work that she had almost finished. As they stood side-by-side before the canvas, he thought that he detected an attitude of longing in her that mirrored or at least resembled his own. He turned away from the painting — which she had evidenced disgust with — and took her in his arms, pulled her against him, kissed her. When she responded, her tongue moving between his lips, he let his hands slip slowly down her back until they cupped the full roundness of her buttocks. They stood that way for a long while, going no further, requiring nothing more than that. For St. Cyr it was a revelation, for he reacted to the girl in far more than a physcial way. He wanted to protect her, to hold her against him and share everything that was to come in the future. He was startled by the ferocity of his commitment (Avoid emotional ties.) and then, subsequently, hurt when she stepped away from him and adjusted her blouse, which had slipped out of her shorts.
She said, "You still think I can care for someone, form a normal human relationship?"
"More than ever."
She looked weary. "Then it isn't you. I thought it might be you, but we can't ever be that close."
His mouth was dry when he said, "What? Why not?"
"You're — cold," she said. "Like all the rest of us in this house. You hold back; you don't give yourself. To care, I've got to have someone who can go more than halfway, who can teach me."
"I can," he insisted.
"No. You're too logical, too reserved. It's that bio-computer, I suppose, that makes you that way."
"I can take it off."
"Are you any different when you do?"
"Of course."
"Perhaps you are, subtly," she said, "But I think that the basic coldness remains."
"I'm as emotional as any other man, outside of my cyberdetective role." It had been a long time since anyone had made him feel defensive.
"When you aren't wearing that shell?"
"Yes," he said.
"How often do you wear it?"
"Only when I'm working."
"How often are you on a case?"
"Oh — on the average, three weeks a month or so."
"And you never wear it between assignments?"
"Hardly ever."
"Hardly ever? What does that mean? Sometimes you wear it when you aren't working?"
He remembered the way the customs men had looked at him, their certainty that he depended on the bio-computer shell for his very existence. He did not want to see the same expression on her face. Yet he could not tell her anything but the truth. "Sometimes — I leave it on a day or two past the conclusion of a case."
She turned away from him and looked back at her new painting. "That shell you wear makes you as hollow as the rest of us, as flat and selfish as someone who has been hypno-keyed."
After that, there had been no opportunity to get her in his arms again. He had left her studio shaken, and had experienced the worst nightmare in many years toward the dawn of the next morning.
Rising early because of the nightmare, he bathed and dressed and went into the gardens to inspect the site of Dorothea's murder. He had been there before, as had the police, but he planned this time to make concentric circles around the spot, constantly widening his search pattern until he either found something they had overlooked before or had been from one end of the gardens to the other without luck. Besides, it was something to do while he waited for the killer to make his next move.
The place where the girl's body had been found was still marked by the chemicals the police had used to force the earth to give up secrets — before they discovered it had none to give up. The grass was dead, though tiny green shoots from new seeds had begun to peek out of the ugly stain. St. Cyr moved quickly around the site, covering the ground that he had been over once before, then slowed his pace as he came upon untrodden flowerbeds and walkways where neither he nor the police had done much work.
It was tedious work, but at least it kept his mind occupied while the sun climbed into the sky and began to eat away the empty hours.
Just when he was beginning to miss the breakfast he had not taken time to eat, his legs weary from more than two hours of continuous pacing, the killer made his next move. Something stung St. Cyr in the center of his back, sent warmth through the upper half of his body.
He fell forward to avoid a second shot, if there happened to be one; he hit the earth hard, the shock against the bio-computer shell carried swiftly against his ribs. Unfortunately, the shell was far tougher than he was and did not cushion any of the blow. He scrambled forward toward a line of hedges behind which he could have a little bit of shelter. As he was scrambling through the hedgerow, scratching his face and hands on the brambles, a second dart pricked his right buttock.
On the other side of the hedge, he plucked the long, slim needles from his back and looked at them closely. They were thicker in the middle than on either end and had only a single point, with an almost microscopic hole in the very tip. The charge was held in the middle, in the rounded bulge no wider than a quarter of an inch and about one inch long.
Charge of what, though? Narcotics? If that were the case, then he was in a damn bad way. Strangely, he had not passed out immediately, as he should have. But if he had just been narco-darted, he only had a few precious seconds to do something to save himself.
Had Leon, Dorothea and Betty been snapped full of narcotics before the killer made his move against them? No, that would have showed up in an autopsy.
Perhaps he had not just been sedated, but poisoned. Perhaps in a moment he would go into violent convulsions.
He rolled onto his stomach and wriggled a dozen feet along the hedgerow, spread some of the tightly-packed branches and surveyed the trees and flowers and shrubs across the way. He could not see anyone lurking there. He thought he would have heard them if they had tried to circle him, but he looked behind anyway. The gardens there were also serene.
St. Cyr was still not sleepy.
That worried him.
What the hell was going on?
Your perceptions seem to be deteriorating, the bio-computer said.
"I feel all right."
He should not have spoken so loudly. He did not even need to vocalize communications with the bio-computer pack. Besides, his voice carried remarkably well in the heavily-grown gardens, echoing down the sheltered flagstone walkways.
It is currently only a subtle deterioration.
Poison, he thought.
He got to his knees and stood without much trouble, though for a second or two it seemed to him that the ground had rippled, risen towards him in an effort to keep him from getting away. That was imagination, of course. Looking quickly around, he tried to gauge the nearest exit from the artificial jungle. If he could make the open lawn around the mansion, someone might see him and come to him before it was too late.
Behind him, a pathway led toward the perimeter of the garden, arched over with green leaves and red blossoms that smelled like oranges. He started for that and was halfway to the walk entrance when he saw the leaves snake quickly forward, growing at a fantastic rate. In two seconds the exit had been sealed off by vegetation.
"What the hell—"
He turned right, starred for another walkway, watched the same thing happen, except that this time it was the grass that grew swiftly to cover the entrance. The blades widened as they grew, toughened, twined rapidly in and out of the side-poles of the rose arbor which framed the entrance to the walk, forming an impassable barrier.
St. Cyr turned and faced the other way.
The hedge behind which he had hidden only a few minutes ago had begun to join in with the harmony of growth — no, the cacophony. It sprouted new branches. Actually, they looked more like vines, highly flexible vines covered with wicked inch-long thorns. A dozen of these ropy tentacles had almost reached him. As he watched, they rose from the ground like snakes responding to the music of a flute, stood higher and higher still until they towered over him.
At the last instant he realized what they intended. They would fall and embrace him, squeeze him firmly in a crosshatch of thorns. He screamed, fell, rolled to the left barely fast enough to avoid them as they dropped where he had been.
The vines thrashed agitatedly.
He could hear things growing all around him, bursting forth like gardens he had seen filmed with stop-action photography.
He got up and ran.
He passed through the entrance to another walkway before he noticed it, and he was elated that, unconsciously, he had fooled the garden. He was on his way out of it.
Hallucinations.
He paid no attention to the bio-computer now. He was in no mood to listen to anything except the incredible roar of growing things, which he fancied was as loud as the continuous explosion at the base of a major waterfalls.
Be calm. Hallucination.
On both sides the trees shot up, growing so fast that they would soon punch out the sky.
"Sky" is basically an abstract term. You are hallucinating.
He had gone a hundred feet down the flagstone path when, immediately before him in the leaping, dancing chaos of the garden, a silver and black wolf appeared. It was larger than he was, and it was bearing down on him.
He tried to side-step; could not.
Silver claws slashed down across his shoulder, dug deep, ripped loose, carried away a spray of blood.
He stumbled and fell.
The wolf swept by him, turned to attack again.
This is no hallucination, St. Cyr thought. Not this part about the wolf. The wolf is real.
Affirmed.
He didn't need to have it affirmed. He felt as if he had lost his arm, though he could look at it and see that it was still there, gushing blood but still attached.
The wolf swooped in at him, moving so quickly and gracefully that it seemed almost to have wings.
He twisted.
The claws caught his shirt, ripped it, passed by.
"Help!"
The word sounded al
ien, as if someone else had spoken it. He looked around, saw he was alone, realized it was himself that had called out. "Help! Help!"
He had no way of knowing how loud it was. His voice might have been a whisper. His altered perceptions, however, told him it sounded like an amplified scream. Indeed, each time he shouted he could see the sound waves spiraling outward from his mouth, some of them catching on the trees and shattering there, others spearing right through the growth and carrying on, seeking ears. The shattered sounds lay on the grass like broken bottles, gleaming green and yellow.
The wolf came back, got its claws into him again, into the same shoulder as before, tore, twisted, snarled loudly as its grip broke and blood spattered.
He remembered that Dorothea had one arm torn off and was missing several toes.
Suddenly, above the sound of the growing plants and above the hissing, growling fury of the wolf, something boomed with the impact of a ton of rock dropped on a sheet of tin.
He felt the sound of it smash down on all sides, covering up the broken-bottle sounds of his own voice.
The glittering fragments of this sound were bright red, like blood, broken sound… on all sides of him…
He looked up from the glass blood that was really sound, and he saw that the wolf was gone. He looked behind, but he did not see it in that direction either. Of course, as rapidly as the grass was growing, and considering all the violence with which the thorned vines had attacked St. Cyr, the garden might very well have swallowed the beast.
When he turned front again he saw Hirschel running toward him, carrying what appeared to be a rifle. So it was Hirschel, after all. It was that simple. Somehow, Hirschel had obtained a trained wolf that he was using to do his dirty work — straight out of The Hound of the Baskervilles. Any self-respecting detective should have been familiar with the ruse. Of course, in that story there had been no shattered sound lying around like broken glass, and there had not been trees growing right up through the top of the sky… He had a lot more to contend with here than Holmes ever had.
Hirschel stopped and bent over him.
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