[Jan Darzek 02] - Watchers of the Dark

by Lloyd Biggle, Jr.

  “Sure. Where will we go?”

  “Schluppy, you have a remarkable gift for placing your finger on the precise nub of the problem. Let’s give it one more try.”

  They joined another surge of newcomers, but Darzek felt certain, now, that they were wasting their time. They were not going to be met—by anyone.

  Chapter 5

  Darzek nudged Miss Schlupe, and they turned away from the transmitter gates and followed a trickle of passengers toward the only other exit. Beyond the flat arch of a wide doorway were the moving conveyors that connected the passenger levels of the transfer station.

  “Where are we going?” Miss Schlupe asked.

  “To the dining room. It’s the one place where we’ll have a reasonable excuse for waiting, and we can do it sitting down.”

  “Good idea. What are we waiting for?”

  “I don’t know. If Biag-n does show up, he’ll certainly look for us there. In the meantime, we can be thinking about what we’re going to do if he doesn’t come at all.”

  They rode the conveyor, and on the upper level they passed through a small lobby flanked with more transmitters and entered the enormous, transparent-domed dining room.

  The light rose mistily from the floor, and they unconsciously tiptoed as they crossed to an empty table. Darzek set down his suitcase and dropped onto a hassock with a sigh of relief. Even in the light gravity of the transfer station his arsenal quickly became uncomfortably heavy. Sitting sidewise—for the cylindrical table provided no place for his feet—he turned to face Miss Schlupe.

  “I wish I’d brought a camera,” she said. “I could have taken enough monster magazine snapshots to make me independently wealthy.”

  “You couldn’t sell them. There are limits to the credulity of even a monster magazine editor.”

  As he spoke a huge ball bounced past, landed on a chair at an unoccupied table, and deflated noisily into an untidy heap. Darzek blinked and rubbed his eyes.

  Miss Schlupe snickered. “That looked like fun.” Then she glanced behind her and blanched. Seated at the next table was something that resembled a large sausage, with arms and legs. It was eating, with reverberating gusto, something that looked like small sausages.

  There were almost humans everywhere, creatures whom some distorting mirror trick of evolution had left with blurred features or gruesomely unbalanced proportions. There were also incomprehensibly hideous monsters with disconcertingly human features.

  “Do we look just as odd to them?” Miss Schlupe asked.

  “I doubt it. If they’ve been participating in scenes like this all their lives, I don’t see how anything could look odd to them. Shall we order?”

  “How can anyone eat, with all these smells?”

  “If we sit here very long without ordering, we’ll start being conspicuous again.”

  “All right. I just hope we don’t get sausages. I’d feel guilty eating them, with one sitting next to me.”

  Darzek opened a service panel and carefully touched out his order on the rows of numbered and colored slides, mumbling the formula that Smith had taught to them: All food well cooked (neither raw, half raw, nor burned); meat moderately aged (neither fresh nor spoiled) and of the third type (which was vaguely similar to beef—Smith had discouraged him from trying anything else); vegetables of the first type; all food prepared in chewable form, in pieces no larger than human mouth-size; a small portion of each (they seemed huge, to Darzek) with service of the second type. The dishes would be shallow rectangular bowls, and there would be a small ladle, modified on one side to facilitate pouring liquids into mouths of various shapes, and a set of automated tongs for the solid food. Darzek had been unable to find a drink that appealed to him, so he ordered water. That, too, would be served in a shallow bowl.

  Darzek turned to Miss Schlupe, who was mumbling over her own service panel. “Ready?”

  “I suppose.”

  They offered their solvency credentials for the table’s scrutiny, placing the palms of their right hands over the unblinking crystalline eyes of the service panels. It accepted the two orders with a purr and a click.

  “Marvelous invention, the solvency credential,” Darzek murmured.

  It was an invisible tattoo, an artificial fingerprint that served as legal signature and all-purpose identification card. It was the key that enabled them to use their monetary reserves, or solvency, which had been registered with the spaceship’s passenger service for automatic transfer to the Primores Credit Central on arrival. It also ensured that private transmitters would not admit unauthorized persons, but in that respect Darzek was not fully prepared to trust it.

  “I’m afraid I did something wrong,” Miss Schlupe said.

  “Even if you did everything right, you’re due for a surprise. Smith said that foods will vary drastically from place to place. Each world will have its own type three meat, for example, no two of them alike.”

  “Oh, dear. I’m afraid I didn’t order type three.” She sighed. “I’d just like to have a waitress walk in and take my order for a hamburger. I suppose when they have all of these monsters to feed, and each kind needing a different food, prepared and served in a different way, they can’t possibly worry about satisfying individual tastes.”

  “True. It must be quite a problem just to provide something that every life form can eat.”

  “Anyway, it’s a lovely dining room.”

  Darzek nodded. “Many of the customers have little or no sense of taste anyway. The atmosphere in which they eat is more important to them than the food.”

  The table clicked; the service panels opened. Darzek’s food was approximately what he expected; Miss Schlupe had made several small errors. Her meat dish looked like a segment of dinosaur bone, stuffed with what was obviously large insects and covered with a rubbery-looking sauce. Her vegetable dish was grass in an advanced stage of decomposition. She hurriedly slid the dishes into the disposal slot

  “Try again,” Darzek suggested.

  “No, thank you. You eat. I’ll watch the stars.”

  Darzek chewed ruminatively, indulging in an occasional sidelong glance at the nearby tables. On his right, a human-sized insect was imbibing some unmentionable liquid from a tall, narrow-necked container into which it had unreeled a proboscis. At the next table a feather-flecked snake was crunching something that looked like tree bark.

  “How’s the food?” Miss Schlupe asked.

  “The meat is tough and the vegetables are cooked to a pulp, but it’s edible.”

  She turned her attention to the sky, where a multitude of dazzlingly bright stars wheeled in a breathtaking panorama. The view was magnificent, but Darzek could not enjoy it with her. He was more worried than he cared to admit. At any moment she would be asking what he intended to do next, and he did not know.

  There had been too much secrecy and too much haste, and no provision for unexpected contingencies. The missed contact wouldn’t matter if they’d been properly prepared to find their way about on a strange world. They hadn’t been. They had no idea of where the illusive textile merchant planned to take them, or how to get in touch with the mysterious Council of Supreme. They could not even retrace their steps and try again. Smith would have left his headquarters, and none of his subordinates knew that they existed.

  “What are we going to do?” Miss Schlupe asked.

  Darzek shook his head.

  “We’re in trouble,” she said flatly.

  “We’ll muddle through somehow. The important thing is not to panic. We haven’t been here much more than an hour, and we don’t know whether punctuality means anything in this society. Maybe our errant Biag-n is busy elsewhere. We’ll wait awhile longer, and then—what’s the matter?”

  Miss Schlupe gasped. Darzek followed her upward, transfixed gaze and saw a
body floating across the transparent dome, just outside the station. It differed in two important respects from the other life forms they’d seen: in its small, rotund shape, and in the fact that it was quite spectacularly dead. The sudden thrust into vacuum had caused certain of its internal organs to explode through its mouth. It turned slowly, head over heels, entrails trailing gracefully, and with a myriad of frozen droplets of purplish blood fanned out in its wake.

  The room’s cacophony of weird sounds suddenly subsided to horrified silence. Those with vision stared hypnotically upward; the sightless stirred uneasily. Miss Schlupe, who possessed an iron stomach, was struggling valiantly not to be sick.

  “Wait here!” Darzek snapped, and leaped to his feet. He glanced once more at the orbiting corpse as he left the dining room; it had reached the apex of the dome, still performing in slow motion its ghastly acrobatics.

  He cursed himself for an inexcusable blunder. He had learned long since that one could not control events while sitting around waiting for them to happen; and yet he had wasted time in leisurely dining and gawking like an innocent tourist while his contact was being brutally and horribly murdered.

  He rode the descending conveyor down to the Arrival Level and thoughtfully looked about him. “He was here to meet us,” he muttered. “If he was conscientious—and a person who takes his job seriously enough to give his life for it is likely to be conscientious—he was here early. He was waiting on this level. Then what?”

  Beyond the conveyors a corridor curved out of sight. Darzek followed it, forcing himself to walk normally. Instantly he scented danger. The passageway was curving, curving, curving to the point where it would intersect the inevitable orbit of Biag-n’s death flight. Doors were spaced irregularly along either side: here, there, and there again; then, unexpectedly, two facing each other like the jaws of a trap. Darzek placed his hand on the automatic in his shoulder holster as he passed them, and tried to remember if these strange collapsing doors could be opened silently. He kept looking back even after the doors had vanished around the curve. As often as not sudden death was compounded of minutiae such as that; which was perhaps something that Biag-n had not known or had forgotten.

  Then Darzek was at the end of the passageway, standing between two more facing doors and thinking it unaccountably strange that he could walk halfway around this bustling transportation exchange without meeting either body or—to whatever extent the expression was applicable—soul. He turned to the doorway on the right, pressed the release and held it, and let the door drop slowly.

  His apprehension had been correct; it made no noise.

  Beyond it was an office, with a few workers bent over cylindrical desks. A row of elliptical windows looked out into space. Darzek stepped back and silently rippled the door closed.

  He turned to the opposite doorway, opened it, and stepped inside.

  The room had some kind of maintenance function, but Darzek dismissed the complex of strange machines with a glance. On the floor lay a small circular container, dented as if from a blow. Nearby was a broad stain that looked black in the tinted light, and a trail of black droplets that led to the transparent double doors of an air lock.

  Darzek picked up the container and opened it. The neat compartments were filled with circles of fabric, each with an identifying mark.

  He gave the room a final, searching look and turned away. He retreated cautiously, watching the doorways, and relaxed only when he reached the conveyors. Grimly he rode back to the upper level.

  Miss Schlupe was waiting expectantly; several nearby tables were empty. The corpse was no longer visible.

  “What’s been happening?” Darzek asked.

  “Three giraffe’s uncles came charging in just after you left. They took one look at the thing and charged out again. Several diners lost their appetites and left hurriedly. Otherwise, nothing.”

  “They’ll probably intercept it before it makes another orbit.”

  “After all that talk about remaining inconspicuous, you picked a fine moment to dash out.”

  “It couldn’t be helped.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Our textile merchant’s sample case.”

  Her eyes widened, and she clapped a hand to her mouth. “Then—” She gestured at the dome. “Then that was—”

  “Biag-n. Of course. Didn’t you recognize him?”

  “I suppose I was too shocked to really see him. What’s in the sample case?”

  “Samples. I didn’t dare take time for more than a quick look.”

  “What did you find out?”

  “That he was dead when he was pushed into space.

  Stabbed, maybe, except that there was an unusual amount of blood for a stab wound. His kind may bleed easily.”

  “We’re in trouble.”

  Darzek nodded. “The Dark has been infiltrating even more successfully than Smith realized. A few guesses: The Dark knew we were coming. It knew Biag-n was going to meet us. It didn’t know who we are, or where we were coming from.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “If it had known, we’d have been met—by agents of the Dark.”

  She shuddered.

  “It isn’t too difficult to reconstruct what happened,” Darzek said slowly. “Biag-n was waiting for us on the Arrival Level. A friend, an associate, perhaps a stranger pretending to be an associate, came to him and said, ‘I have important last minute instructions. Let’s go where we can talk.’ He led Biag-n to an empty room. There was a struggle—the sample case had been stepped on—and then a murder. The murderer didn’t want to leave the body where it was, and the clerks in the next room could have seen it at once if he’d pushed it out into space. So he sent it slowly upward to orbit the station, and he had time to transmit elsewhere or lose himself in the crowds before it became visible up here.”

  Miss Schlupe shuddered again.

  “Put it down that our textile merchant was, in his small way, a considerable hero. I’m betting that they used persuasion, threats, bribery, maybe even torture to make him betray us. He wouldn’t have any of it, so he died. That’s worth remembering. It isn’t just a job that we’re working on. It’s a cause, and some of these creatures are loyal enough to die for it.”

  “One of them was loyal enough,” Miss Schlupe said. “He’s dead. Who else can we trust?”

  “No one on this transfer station,” Darzek said. “So let’s leave it.”

  Back on the Arrival Level, Darzek studied the transmitter gates for a moment and chose the longest line. “The heaviest traffic should be going to the capital city of the capital world,” he said. “And that’s where we want to go. At least, I think it is.”

  “We could ask someone.”

  “Who—the assassin? Take the sample case, will you? I’d like to have one hand free.”

  “No one seems to be paying anything,” she observed.

  “Not for my solvency credential,” Darzek said dryly. “For my automatic.”

  The line moved steadily. Several times Darzek looked about him suspiciously, but none of the fantastic arrays of eyes in his immediate vicinity seemed to be focused on him.

  They approached the transmitters. Miss Schlupe called over her shoulder, “Stay close behind me. If we don’t come out in the same place, all I’ll be able to do is sit down on my suitcase and look lost.”

  She stepped through.

  Darzek followed on her heels, and they emerged a stride apart in the staggering drag of full gravity. They were in an enormous dome, but they saw little of it because it enclosed another dome almost as large.

  Around the base of the inner dome were the transmitter receivers out of which the arriving passengers emerged. Opposite, around the base of the outer dome, were three-sided alcoves lined with transmitters. They drifted uncer
tainly, moving at right angles to the flow of traffic; the other passengers walked directly to the nearest alcove, touched out destinations on do-it-yourself transmitter controls, and disappeared.

  “Are we being followed?” Darzek asked.

  “No,” Miss Schlupe said.

  “Let’s go back. We’re as likely to figure out this setup where we came in as any other place, and we’re being highly conspicuous.”

  They retraced their steps and stood with the traffic flowing around them, studying an alcove. “Obviously this is the main transmitting exchange,” Darzek said. “Each of these alcoves should be equipped to handle all the likely destinations for anyone arriving here.”

  “Did you notice the floor?” Miss Schlupe asked.

  Darzek nodded. “Three banks of transmitters, and a different floor pattern in front of each: wavy lines, straight lines, and checkerboard. Meaning—”

  “Different cities?”

  “All the likely destinations,” Darzek said meditatively. “One pattern would be for other planets of this solar system, or the moons and transfer stations. That would be the one with the fewest transmitters. Another would be for other destinations on this world. The third—”

  “Destinations in this city?”

  Darzek nodded. “And since the greatest volume of traffic will be local traffic, that pattern should have the most transmitters. So we’ll use one of those.”

  “And we’ll end up on a street corner. Or in a Turkish bath.”

  “Good idea. One of these characters with tentacles could be the masseur I’ve always wanted to find.”

  They had moved slowly toward the alcove; again they stopped to scrutinize it, letting the traffic flow around them. Miss Schlupe said nervously, “Are you about to be brilliant? If so, hurry it up. We’re conspicuous again.”