Well, if the material came from the ambient, and the force came from a slight deplacement of two coincident worlds, why were messengers to Supply needed? Oh, they had to go to Supply to make adjustments in the pattern, the student said.
“May not the pattern also be of this world?” Pilgrim had asked him. “May not the pattern be in our own ambient? Why should we have to draw it from another ambient?”
“No, no, only half of the pattern can be here. The other half must come from elsewhere. It is the slight deplacement of two coincident worlds that generates incredible force in the line of creativity and shaping also. Half the pattern has to come from another world.”
“What if it all came from here?”
“Then it would be altogether ordinary. It would be too ordinary for such creative results. Anyone could do it then, and you wouldn’t become rich and powerful.”
That was a bright young student, but most of the time Pilgrim could not remember quite what it was that he said.
The material certainly was not delivered here by any visible sort of vehicle or conveyor. Nor was it, apparently, rematerialized here as it might be at the end of a conventional teleportation sequence. If it was teleportation, then where was the receiver for it? There was no such energy provided or consumed as a receiver would have to have; at least such energy was not instrumented. The material and supplies all appeared as the result of “One Smooth Operation.” Who can add to this what he does not know?
The commodity arrival floor appeared to be electric, a field force nexus. It appeared to be magnetic, a secondary fugaro vortex. It appeared to be gravitational and to have aspects of drag-world gravity. But the best instrumentation denied that it was any of these things.
Nevertheless, there was that startling, shimmering effect enwrapping the area at all times. Nobody could deny that. Bi-location kickback sometimes produces such a shimmering effect. There are other situations that produce this effect also.
The other great worldwide wholesalers, Jones and Cloud, Chung and Ching, Ivanova and McCresh, Izzersted and Panenero—each firm had its own “One Smooth Operation” for the reception of world supplies. But none of them had the same “One Smooth Operation” that Dusmano’s Commercial Enterprises used. Pilgrim thought about these things.
Then blind lightning struck.
4
In calm agenda of the day
Why should such mere dispatch be chilling?
A jeweled glance, five pints to pay,
A kid that took a lot of killing.
Commercial Messenger Weekly
Dusmano was struck down on the edge of the commodity arrival area. He received a body shock such as no man could survive unchanged. He was picked up again; then, like a stringy glob of wet clay, he was manhandled, he was secured, he was throttled almost beyond the point of death. He was shaking with the force of the onslaught; do dead men shake like that? Nobody jumped Pilgrim in his own place, not ever. Nobody struck him with such instant and silent power.
Dusmano was quite strong and active, a vital man. He was agile. He had imagination, he had spirit, he had heart. He had the old male courage, and he also had a few of the alien juices. He knew the repertoires of all the great personal-combat disciplines.
Pilgrim Dusmano was about as good an amateur scrapper as was to be found anywhere. But he was in the hands of a really remarkable man who had slipped up on him (and nobody slipped up on Dusmano ever), and who was handling him as if he were a child. Such men were not common. This man was certainly not an amateur, and just as certainly he had to be a known man. Pilgrim could have counted on the fingers of one hand all the men on that world who could have handled him so. Count this man on the fingers of one hand though and you’ll get all your fingers broken.
“He is killing me with his hands,” Pilgrim realized to himself in balanced panic. All Pilgrim’s reactions and compensations were working well. That the man was killing him proved that he was not dead yet. That he was in panic proved that he had resources left. He drew what strength he could from his channeled panic and found that it was not enough.
“He is killing me with his hands,” Pilgrim thought in a detached and lively-eyed despair, “and there is not yet anything that I see to prevent it. I cannot call out, for my throat is closed. I cannot twist. I cannot break away. He can snap my neck and kill me in an instant. He can shut off the rest of my breath and kill me in two instants. He can do these things; why hasn’t he done them? Are the instants always as long as these when one is dying? I don’t remember them that way.”
Yes, there was something puzzling here. The final instants were too long.
“I’m not ready to die,” Pilgrim protested to himself. “I cannot even gather my wits for a jump. Oh, oh, he’s one of those! It will be a ritual killing. All to the bad, or all to the good, depending on how I can twist it. It will give me a little time to ready my mind for a world-jump. The jumpers have a saying that an unprepared death may cost one the advantage of two or even three lives. And the jumpers also have a saying about being on the wrong end of a ritual killing.”
Pilgrim Dusmano prepared himself rapidly for his death and for his world-jump. He would salvage what he could. His assailant meanwhile had in hand what was probably the ritual knife, slender and sharp. The assailant had opened a vessel in the side of Pilgrim’s throat, and the blood was flowing out. But it wasn’t being wasted. It is hard to concentrate on an advantageous world-jump when a man is opening your throat with a ritual knife.
The assailant had a tankard. It was an old period piece with a flip lid. If it was ritual it was out of a hearty barroom ritual. The strong man was filling the tankard with Pilgrim’s blood. And Pilgrim saw, with an inattentive flick of the eye (for his mind was occupied with the correct philosophy of world-jumping), that it was a five-pint tankard. That’s a lot of blood to take out of a man at one time.
Pilgrim’s hands were free most of this time. It was a measure of the attacker’s strength that he didn’t seem to worry much about the hands. But pounding on the trunk of that strong man was about like pounding on a petrified oak bole. Pilgrim could notice, from a slanted view of the man’s large, lank, slab-sided face, that the man was very intense about something.
“Why should he be intense and passion-taken?” Pilgrim questioned himself in his dizzied and fading consciousness. “I’m the one whose life is in the balance. Still, if he is intense, then he is vulnerable somewhere. There’s a saying that a chthonic demiurge will find work for idle hands. That mine be not idle!”
There was once a drowning man caught underwater who busied himself gorging on prime fish eggs. He liked them, and he might never have another chance of eating any of them, and he might as well have some advantage out of his predicament. Pilgrim busied his hands about the strong man’s garments and trunk. Especially he busied one hand about a thing in the man’s inner breast pocket. Pilgrim knew what it was as soon as his fingers touched it, but he had seldom come on so large or fat a one. Pilgrim removed the thing from the man’s pocket and slipped it into one of his own, and that blood-drawing man was too intense even to notice it. “I’d fire that man if he were working for me,” Pilgrim’s flickering mind mumbled. “I don’t care how strong he is. He shouldn’t let himself be so easily distracted.”
Pilgrim woke up (it couldn’t have been much later; it had been only a short ritual sleep or death) on the flickering apron of the commodity arrival area. Sticky, red, syrupy blood stuff had stained the shimmering floor and set up a rejecting sputtering. Pilgrim put thumb and finger to the side of his throat and was almost able to stop the scarlet flow which had already declined greatly from its spate. The assailant was gone from the area, and so were at least five pints of Pilgrim’s blood. Something had happened to Pilgrim, something a little bit more than his weakness. There had been a change in his eyes. It was as if they were really opened for the first time. Much brighter, but much more fractured; light poured in by them now. Waking with new eyes was almost the same th
ing as waking in a new world.
Pilgrim rose to his feet. Then he fell down in a dizzy faint. He repeated this several times. Then he got himself up and tolerably solid on his feet, and he walked. He cleaned himself a little in one of the ornamental fountains that were on the edge of the commodity arrival floor. Then he went into the board meeting room.
“We have almost finished the bill of particulars, Mr. Dusmano,” Spurgeon said. None of the men paid much attention to the appearance of Pilgrim.
“All right,” Pilgrim said. He sat down and examined the wallet he had taken from the inner breast pocket of the unkilling, intense assailant. The men there may have thought their employer Dusmano had gone on some blood-for-health-and-happiness kick, if they thought about his appearance at all. The sparkling Dusmano, who was working very hard at becoming a worldwide fad, was himself a faddist of unlimited range.
First of all, there was a quantity of large-bill cash in the wallet. “My blood for drachmas,” Pilgrim quipped to himself.
Then Pilgrim’s fingers and eyes stumbled onto sudden knowledge while prowling through the fat wallet of the vanished assailant. Such information should never be carried on a man. “If he worked for me, I’d fire him,” Pilgrim said once more. But this particular man, who behaved as though he could whip any man in the world—who may have been able to do so—had likely felt himself safe in carrying anything he wanted to carry.
Pilgrim, as soon as he had waked into dizziness on the apron of the commodity area, had remembered the public identity of the assailant. He had remembered it even though he had had no more than a very angled and blurred look at the big, slab-sided, intense face. Yes, that man, Mr. Holiness-through-Strength himself, really could whip any man in the world. Now Pilgrim learned, from a notebook in the wallet, the private or code or cognominal identity of this man.
He was one of the henchmen of that enemy Evenhand, and his code name was Mut or courage. And then, there in the middle of the doodles of the private man or the masked-man Mut, were written the code identities of all the henchmen of Evenhand:
Blut, who was blood or family.
Brut, who was the brood or spawn.
Flut, who was the flood, or the breaking-out, or the overflowing.
Glut, who was the blaze or flame.
Gut, who was the property.
Hut, who was the harbor or the shelter, who was also the hat (and who was dead).
Mut, who was the courage (but not, apparently, the carefulness).
Wut, who was the rage or mania.
Was Evenhand’s own code name given there? Oh, certainly. It was Rut, which is the rod or the scepter or the authority. What? How big a boss was Evenhand, anyhow? Was he the ruler himself?
Pilgrim remembered with real pleasure the man he had killed that morning, Hut, who was the shelter or the harbor or the hat. There had been eight of these assistants to Evenhand (Rut). Well, why should such a devious octopus have eight legs coming out of his central devil’s head? And to what man of the most secret and the most high office are there appended eight secret and strong assistants? Pilgrim guessed it. He was sure of it. And then he read it boldly written down on another page. Now he knew who his enemy Evenhand really was. He was the holder of the office like none other in the country.
“I hadn’t any idea that Evenhand was so innocent a man as that.” Pilgrim rattled this new thought around in his mind. “I had no idea that he was so good a man as that, that he was so absolutely spotless a man. But he has been certified so or he would not occupy such office. Well, I hold no brief for innocence or goodness or spotlessness. They have no more than clinical interest for me. To think that I was once secretly considered and weighed and investigated for that same office. Well, they have it written down somewhere, in an obscure but interesting corner of the national archives, that I am not innocent, that I am not good, that I am not spotless. It’s good to have official, even if secret, confirmation of one’s own opinion of oneself. But I could have made a good thing out of that job.
“But now I must find and join the concert of those who would bring down and destroy Evenhand. It is time to bring the movement out into the open and put it into effect. There has to be such an opposition movement. Really, the only reason for having men in that office is that they may be destroyed in that office. It is the ritualistic and satisfying scratching of a national itch, of a world itch. It will be the huge raping, the great gang-shagging. It will be a corporate pleasure almost without equal. It’s so rich a satiation to topple giants, especially good giants.”
Spurgeon and his fellow workers weren’t quite finished with the bill of particulars to be sent to Supply. So Pilgrim still mused and schemed.
And halfway across town, Evenhand, a tall and slim man of mid middle age, had been nibbling at the agenda of both sets of his affairs: the open set, and the official and secret set. A man came in through a hidden door behind Evenhand, came in soundless and saturnine, and stood bulky and powerful behind Evenhand. Evenhand felt the power of the silent man, but he was not alarmed. It had to be one of eight men (seven live now, and one dead), for only one of those eight could possibly come through that hidden door.
“Who is it?” Evenhand asked, raising his head. “And what is it?”
“It’s Mut,” the powerful and bulky man said. “And about Dusmano, he bleeds red.”
“Oh? Then he’s probably human. So few real aliens are.”
“Likely he is human. It’s not certain, though. I don’t believe he comes from any outer world, only from an aspect world. Here’s a sample of him. Do you want me to get other samples from the creature? I could easily rip out lung tissue or brain tissue. Or the heart. It would be good to know whether it is two chambered or four chambered or six chambered. Or I could bring you the reins or the liver of the man.”
“I don’t want him killed, Mut. Not yet.”
“Killed? No. I’d rip out the software so quickly as to leave him still writhing and alive. And then he would die within a few seconds in one of those unprovable effects of my cause. He would be dead, but could we call him killed?”
“You like that sort of stuff, don’t you, Mut?”
“Certainly. You have to have someone attached to you who likes it. You yourself are spotless by definition. All that means is that your spots are externalized and localized. So they are. They are externalized in eight of us (seven alive and one dead now). And mostly these spots are externalized in me.”
“We’ll not kill him yet, Mut,” Evenhand said. “I’m really sorry he’s human. It’s so hard to accept that a human can be so evil a person, so attractively evil a person. And our own job is to preside over an interplay of forces, and he’s such a force. We interfere only a little. And we wait and watch.”
“Yes. And then we are destroyed while we wait and watch too long.”
“True, Mut, all too true.”
“You want the blood, Evenhand? It has a good strong tang to it.”
“No. I don’t drink blood.”
“I do sometimes,” Mut said. And he drank off five pints of it in one big draft.
“It is finished, Mr. Dusmano,” Spurgeon said back in the board meeting room. “It’s really quite a routine paper. We draw up one like it every week, don’t we?”
“I believe so, yes,” Pilgrim said.
“Then why do we always forget that it’s routine?” Spurgeon asked. “Why do we forget that it’s a usual thing? Why do we always soup ourselves up into thinking it’s a crisis event, instead of seeing that it’s dull and almost automatic?”
“I believe it’s because nothing with a dull and automatic feel can be transmitted by the channels I must employ. There has to be a sense of urgency, or the message cannot go at all, and the messenger cannot. And when repeated urgency becomes routine, then memory failure must be intruded into it.”
Pilgrim took the list, the bill of particulars, the requests to Supply for some slight modifications and additions to the flow of materials. He went out with the li
st to find the Pyms.
He found them looking uneasy. They were sitting on four long stone benches; beside them was a large material-grinder-and-shredder machine.
“Wherever did those things come from?” Pilgrim asked the Pyms and the world at large. “I didn’t know we had any benches of that sort in stock. And that grinder-shredder is a model I don’t recognize at all. Brrr, it’s about the right size to be a people-grinder!”
“But the workmen brought these things here just a few moments after you left us, Mr. Dusmano,” Aubrey Pym told him. “They said you had just then told them to bring these things here. They said you had them set up here about once a week. Isn’t it all right?”
“Oh, yes, it’s quite all right. I almost remember what they are for now. It’s all coming to me with a rush, the ritual thing that I’m supposed to do. Is that really the only way we have of getting messages across the gap? It isn’t good to know the ritual or to remember it between times. If I always remembered it, it would become stale. Here is the message, Aubrey. Hold it tight.”
“Yes, yes. Nothing will get it away from me.”
“Well, is everybody properly disposed for the journey?” Pilgrim asked.
“Yes, I am,” said Aubrey Pym.
“Yes. We will all go together to happiness in a new town at double pay,” the wife said.
“Yes,” said the older child.
“No,” said the younger child. “Hey, there’s something wrong with your eyes.” There was mockery in that child, and a bit of hate.
“Happiness and trust are essential,” Pilgrim told the Pyms. “But do not let go of your apprehension. All of you lie down on your stone couches now. Did not the workmen bring a very large stone knife also?”
Not To Mention Camels Page 5
