Authors: Space Pioneers
Miles stared at the big man blankly, while a
cold ball of horror gathered in his chest, dropped to his stomach and stuck
there.
A murderer!
A rare animal,
these days—almost extinct.
The little farmer had been inclined to take
the threat of the hand-blast only half seriously. Now he suddenly developed an
intense respect for it, in inverse proportion to the respect he lost for its
holder. And for the first time in his life he knew fear of another human being.
It was an atavistic, somehow unclean, feeling, and it made him a little sick.
To keep the ball rolling while he considered
his situation, he said, "Where'd all this murdering and embezzling take
place?"
"Jason One—and in the opposite order.
First, I embezzled from my firm. My partner
discovered the loss and we had a disagreement. I disposed of the body, but you
know how it is.
One thing after another.
Eventually
questions were asked and although I lied magnificently I was booked on
suspicion."
He
tossed the can of Garol to Miles and the farmer turned, pressed it into the
opener. Near his fingertips lay the inviting bulk of the short-wave cook-all
and it occurred to him that with luck he might be able to brain the big man
with it. The can opened with a hiss. Miles shoved it into the cook-all, wrapped
his fingers around the grill to get a firm hold. He put his weight on his toes
and bunched his arm muscles—
"That's
fine!" The hand-blast bored cruelly into his back and twisted. "Now
get back against the wall, little man, and think up something better to
try!"
For
one reckless moment Miles toyed with the idea of swinging around abruptly,
wrestling for the weapon. Jord sensed this, however. He stepped back quickly to
the center of the room and barked a single word, "Don't"—underlining
it with the
chat!
of
the hand-blast. The charge whined past
Miles' head and out of the window, raising small thunder and a sudden white
plume near the base of the sun-mill. The farmer heard Jord's sarcastic laugh:
"You might as well find out right now
that I'm an excellent shot, and that I'm not a careless man or a fool. Mind
that, and well get along."
Miles snapped on the cook-all, his face
impassive. "I'll mind it." He moved to the wall, and sat down
cross-legged. "I don't have to stand, do I?"
"No."
Miles
forced himself to consider his position logically, screening out certain
impulses that he recognized as neurotic in origin. Such reactions were
dangerous, could very well result in his death. The attempt with the cooker,
for example, had been quite foolish.
This
train of thought gave him a minor inspiration. He turned it over in his mind,
thinking moodily that every little bit helps.
The old bar-rag stench of
jongar
filled the room, bringing its picture of the vines that crowded the
cottage walls, lacing over the windows with a persistence that no amount of
blasting could inhibit. Burn the vines, sear their roots—and
jongar
would regenerate from a cinder.
in
Max Miles versus the vines had been a primary
issue soon after his arrival from
Earth,
and he had
tackled them with indignation. But, after ten or a dozen futile sessions with a
hand-blast, he had shrugged his shoulders and saved his pellets. Whereupon
jongar
had, during a single night, regained and consolidated, twisting and
matting so that from afar the cottage looked like a blue haystack; and there
jongar
stopped its growth, took a million bites of Mercury-steel with a million
mouths and sat back to digest, perhaps also shrugging its shoulders.
Miles cleared his throat. "Got something
to tell you—" he said.
Jord looked at him without much interest and
Miles deliberately wet his lips uneasily, refusing to meet the big man's gaze.
"Those
vines—" Miles pointed at the tendrils of
jongar
dangling outside the window— "their odor is toxic." He
cleared his throat again, looking Jord squarely between the eyes. "You—
you have to get injections every week or you die. It's a horrible death. If
you stay here much longer, you'll—I—it'll be too late—" he trailed his
voice off into a hopeful silence.
Jord's irises were twin chips of polar ice as
he studied Miles' face. Then, slowly, amused contempt dulled the hard glitter.
He shook his head.
"You're lying," he said.
"And very badly.
I forgot to tell you that I'm also an
excellent judge of men."
Miles
shrugged philosophically . . . and mentally patted his back on a fair job of
acting. When he told his next lie, minus the fidgets, Jord would probably
believe it. His ego would want him to believe, and so he would. This gave the
farmer a slight edge, a toehold. Men like Jord, who prided themselves on their
caution, sometimes looked so hard for subtleties that they overlooked the
Letter on the Mantle. Miles had no idea yet what his next lie was going to be,
but he knew that it would be a dilly.
After a moment, he said:
"What about the body?"
Jord frowned. "What
about it?"
"No body—you say you
disposed of it. No corpus delicti."
"Corpus delic—oh, Earth law. I'm afraid
that doesn't throw much weight out here. If you've ever read western stories,
you know what I mean. Men were men and all that, and the law was a—Holt, I
believe the blaster was called? Here on the pioneer worlds, just as on the
western frontier, we're beyond contemporary law. Will be for some years, I
imagine—though never a fraction as lawless." Jord got up and crossed to
adjust the cook-all, moving crab-wise to keep an eye on Miles. "It'll
catch up to us in time," he went on, "but until then we won't have
legalities to confound justice . . . Funny, isn't it?"
"What?"
"My
concern for the blind lady Justice."
Miles answered inanely, his intelligence
nowhere near the conversation. "I hardly imagine that you're looking
forward to your just punishment."
Jord laughed shortly. "Oh, Lord, you're
right there! I plan to escape it! Obvious as hell that I killed Harry, you
know. In an Earth court I might have wheedled and bribed my way out of it.
Here—" he shrugged. "So I skipped my bail and got off-world."
Miles
stood up and shouldered out from the
wall,
and the
hand-blast snapped up to level on his midriff. He pointed at the supplies on
the table. "Do you mind if I put some of that stuff away?" he
growled. "That steak is soaking up these smells like a sponge."
Jord
moved away from the cooker to a neutral corner and nodded. Miles slid open the
deep-freeze and stacked in the perishables, slanting his attention at the big
man. His covert glances didn't pass unnoticed.
"Don't try to throw
anything at me," he was warned, "or this place will smell even worse.
These hand-blasts really cook a man, you know!"
Hand-blast?
Miles thought grimly.
Brother, you haven't met Grandpa!
And then he frowned, his hands pausing in their work. He'd almost
forgotten about Grandpa. On Goran
Three
— or Two or
One, for that matter—people didn't forget about Grandpa and live to tell about
it. He glanced casually at his wrist-meter.
An hour, a little
over.
He ground his teeth almost audibly. This was getting nastier by
the minute.
He'd have to get Jord out of here before
Grandpa's arrival or take the big man underground; and he didn't favor the
latter very much. First, because he didn't want to be cooped up with the killer
for seven hours; second—and more important— if Jord got out of the lowlands he
might possibly manage to escape from
Three
.
Another killing, maybe two.
A stolen visa.
A quick interstellar jaunt through hyperspace and Henry Jord would vanish into
the crowds of Earth or Mars. And this, Miles thought with naive logic, should
not be allowed to happen.
As
if reading his mind, Jord said, "You'd like to stop me, wouldn't
you?" He nodded, not waiting for an answer. "I've been tempted to
stop
myself
several times since this thing began. At such
times I forget that I am the criminal—the impulse to remove such a
danger-potential to our society is almost overwhelming . . ." he rapped
his knuckles lightly on the table top, then seemed to remember what he had been
about to say. "But luckily, speaking as an individual rather than as a component
of that society, my aberration has included a revival of the self-preservation
'instinct.' Otherwise I'm sure I would have offered myself for
elimination."
Miles closed
the
deep-freeze
and hipped himself onto it.
Keep him talking about himself,
he thought with controlled calm,
and look for an opening—because, brother,
you're between the devil and the Saturnian Sea! Exactly Imlf an hour left to
do something—but what?
He said aloud, "Jason
One's
a good week's spacing from here. Why come to Goran?"
"Oh, it wasn't intentional. I had some
vague idea of heading for Sol—lose myself in a crowd, you know." Jord
pulled a roll of cigarettes from a pocket and scratched one alight on the
table. He flipped the roll to Miles. "But I never was much of an astrogator.
Piled on the drive till I blew a tube.
Barely managed to get into the life-shell before the whole business
went
kaput.
I set the spectro for an Earth-type planet."
He shifted and made a face.
"Beastly little things, those shells.
Stuffy—no ports,
you know—completely automatic. No place for a claustrophobe. So here I am—and
you never did answer my first question. What the devil stinks so?"
"Plants, mister.
Jongar,
linla,
kanl,
herck—"
"And slithy toves. I
wish I had a breath of fresh air!"
Miles grinned crookedly.
"You get used to it after a while."
Jord
fell back a step, his grin taking on that peculiar stiffness heavily, like
bright blue lava. He snapped off the cook-all and raised an eyebrow at the
little farmer. "I won't be here that long—thanks to your
stratocoupe."
"Now, wait a minute," Miles
growled. He took the cigarette out of his mouth and glared at the big man.
Jord
fell back a step, his grin taking on that peculiar stiffness again. "You
can address your complaints to this hand-blast."
Miles
shook his head angrily. "You'll have a real party flying Mary. It took me
a month to get on to her bag of tricks!"
"I'll
manage.
Strength of desperation and all that.
Suppose
we eat?"
Followed closely by Jord, Miles made several
trips to Mary to bring in the remaining supplies.
Jord poked
among the cans and containers, selecting the most expensive and exotic items.
Miles, in turn, busied himself at the
cook-all under the careful guidance of his guest who, it seemed, liked his
food just so.
And without poison.
They ate silently,
Miles evolving and discarding schemes, Jord very carefully on guard against
them.
Later, Jord switched on the telaudio and
fiddled with the dials. To the farmer's surprise the old set picked up a
bleared image from Leyville on Goran Two. A symphony orchestra, one of the many
extrovert organizations springing from this lonely outer space existence, was
struggling fiercely with
Verklärte
Nacht.
It probably wasn't half bad at the point of origin, but forty million
miles of space gave it a hell of a kicking around.
Jord grunted, "Plenty
verklärte—"
and turned the dial methodically until he located a newscast. There was
the usual stuff: local news, polo scores, spaceship arrivals and departures,
births and deaths.
Nothing about fugitive killers.