Entities: The Selected Novels of Eric Frank Russell (38 page)

“I do,” said Charles, with no hesitation. “You are an unblushing liar.”

“I resent having to admit it.” He gave the other a reassuring clap on the shoulder. “See, you
know
what I am. Therefore you must have intuitive awareness. Definitely, you’re a paranormal and ought to express yourself by taking up ballet dancing.”

“Eh?” Charles gloomed down at his ample front. It stuck out like a Christmas parcel carried under his vest. “That’s what I call throwing it back at me.”

He went silent as three men in uniform came round the corner ahead and stopped in their path.

The trio were dressed as forest rangers, the only organized body—apart from special squads of police—officially permitted to bear arms on Venus. They grouped close together like friends having a last chat before going home, but their attention was on the pair coming toward them. Their open minds revealed that all three were pyrotics looking for a man named Raven.

The leader kept tab of the oncomers out of the corners of his eyes, waited until they drew level, wheeled swiftly on one heel and snapped with sudden authority, “Your name David Raven?”

Stopping and lifting a surprised eyebrow, Raven said, “However did you guess?”

“Don’t be funny,” advised the questioner, scowling.

Raven turned to Charles. His tones were pained. “He tells me not to be funny. Do you think I am funny?”

“Yes,” responded Charles, with prompt disloyalty. “You’ve been that way since you fell on your head at age three.” His bland but stupid looking eyes shifted to the ranger. “Why do you want this person named . . . er—?”

“Raven,” prompted Raven, being helpful.

“Oh, yes, Raven. Why do you want him?”

“There’s money on his head. Don’t you ever use your spectroscreen!”

“Occasionally,” Charles admitted. “Most times it bores me to tears, so I let it stay dead.”

The ranger sneered to his companions. “Now you know why some people stay poor. Opportunity knocks at every door but some refuse to listen.” Taking no notice of Raven, he continued with Charles who was looking suitably crushed. “They’ve put it on the spectroscreen that he’s wanted badly and at once.”

“For what?”

“For imperiling the lives of crew and passengers of the
Fantôme.
For opening an airlock contrary to regulations, interfering with navigation, refusing to obey the lawful orders of a ship’s officer, landing in a forbidden area, evading medical examination on arrival, evading customs search on arrival, refusing to pass through the antibacterial sterilization chambers and—” He paused for breath, asked one of the others, “Was there anything else?”

“Spitting in the main cabin,” suggested that worthy who had long been tempted by that crime merely because a large-lettered notice warned him that he must not. “I never spit,” asserted Raven, giving him the cold eye.

“Shut up, you!” ordered the first one, making it clear that he was taking no back chat from anybody. He switched to Charles, preferring that person’s respectful dumbness.

“If you happen to come across this David Raven, or hear anything about him, ring Westwood 1717 and tell us where he is. He’s dangerous!” He slipped a sly wink at the others as he emphasized the last word, then promised, “We’ll see that you get your fair share of the reward.”

“Thanks.” Charles was humbly grateful. He said to Raven, “Come on. We're late already. Keep a look-out and remember he resembles you.”

They walked off, conscious that the three were watching them go. The trio’s surreptitious comments reached them in the form of mental impulses loud and clear. “Took us for rangers, anyway.”

“Let’s hope some ranger captain does too, if we happen to meet one.”

“We're wasting our time just because a guy on the spectroscreen mentioned money. We could spend a few hours at better than this. There’s a
tambar
joint two blocks down, so what say—”

“Why don’t they distribute his picture?”

“A telepath would help, like I said. All we’d need do is wait for him to point. Then we’d make the smoke and flames. After that we could wear down our fingers counting the dough.”

“Now you mention it, I think there’s something queer about that reward. They didn’t bid anything like as high for Squinty Mason when he busted those banks and shot a dozen people.”

“Perhaps Wollencott wants him for personal reasons.”

“Look, fellows, there’s a
tambar
joint—”

“All right, we’ll go there for half an hour. If anyone catches us there we’ve got a good excuse. We heard a rumor that Raven was meeting someone in the dump.” The mental stream started to fade very slowly. “If Wollencott wants him—”

They continued talking about Wollencott until they dimmed beyond hearing. They thought up twenty ways in which Wollencott might have been offended by the fugitive, forty ways in which the latter might be brought to book, a hundred ways in which Wollencott would make an example of the culprit.

It was Wollencott, Wollencott, Wollencott all the time. Not one mentioned Thorstern or so much as gave that name a passing thought.

Which was quite a tribute to the brains of the owner of that name.

A great black basalt castle was the home of Emmanuel Thorstern. It dated back to the earliest days of settlement when smooth, high walls six feet thick were sure protection against antagonistic jungle beasts of considerable tonnage. Here the little group of first-comers from Earth had clung stubbornly to their alien plot until more shiploads built them up in numbers and strength of arms. Afterward they’d sallied forth, taken more land and held it.

Seven other similar castles elsewhere on the planet had served the same function for a time, then had been abandoned when their need had passed. These others now stood empty and crumbling like dark monuments to this world’s darkest days.

But Thorstern had stepped in and restored this one, strengthening its neglected walls, adding battlemented towers and turrets, spending lavishly as though his calculated obscurity in matters of power had to be counterbalanced by blatancy in another direction. The result was a sable and sinister architectural monstrosity that loomed through the thickening fog like the haunt of some feudal maniac who held a countryside in thrall.

Toying thoughtfully with the lobe of an ear, Raven stood amid swirls of fog and examined this edifice. Only the base was clearly visible in the curling, thickening vapor, the rest becoming shadowy with the growing darkness and merging into the higher haze. Yet his gaze lifted and shifted from point to point as if somehow he could see in full details those features hidden from normal sight.

“Quite a fortress,” he remarked. “What does he call it?—the Imperial Palace or Magnolia Cottage or what?”

“Originally it was known as Base Four,” Charles replied. “Thorstern renamed it Blackstone. Locally it’s referred to as the castle.” He stared upward in the same manner as the other, apparently having the same ability to see the unseeable. “Well, what now? Do we go after him in our own way or do we wait for him to come out?”

“We’ll go in, I don’t feel like hanging around all through the night until some unpredictable time tomorrow.”

“Neither do I.” He pointed at a high angle. “Do we exert ourselves and go over the top? Or shall we take it easy and walk in?”

“We'll enter like gentlemen, in decent and civilized manner,” Raven decided. “To wit: through the front gate.” He had another look at their objective. “You do the talking while I hold your arm and let my tongue hang out. Then we'll
both 
look simple.”

“Thank you very much,” said Charles, in no way offended. Strutting officiously up to the gate, he thumbed a bell button, waited with Raven by his side.

Four blasphemous minds located nearby immediately radiated four different but equally potent oaths. They were pawn minds, all of them. Not a mutant in the bunch.

It was to be expected. As an individual without talent other than that provided by above-average brains, Thorstern would make full use of those blessed with paranormal aptitudes but not yearn for their company. So it was likely that the majority of those around him—that is to say, within the castle—would be mere pawns chosen for various merits of loyalty, dependability, subservience to the boss.

In these respects the lord of the black castle ran as true to type as the lowliest of his servitors. All ordinary human beings, clever or stupid, were leery of paranormals, liked them better the farther away they got. It was a natural psychological reaction based on the concealed inferiority complex of Homo Today in the presence of what uncomfortably resembled Homo Tomorrow. The Terran forces controlled by Carson and Heraty could have exploited such instinctive antagonisms to the great discomfort of the opposition—but that would have meant further accentuating human divisions in the name of human unity.

In addition, to stir up masses of pawns against a powerful minority of mutants would be to incite type-riots which—like the racial upsets of long, long ago— could get hopelessly out of hand and spread farther than desired. Terra had some mutants of her own!

So it was a blue-jowled and commonplace kind of pawn who opened a door in the thickness of the wall, came out and peered through the heavy bars of the gate. He was squat, thick-shouldered, irritable, but sufficiently disciplined to try to conceal his ire.

“Wanting someone?”

“Thorstern,” said Charles airily.

“It’s
Mister
Thorstern to you,” reproved the other. “You got an appointment?”

“No.”

“He won’t see anyone without an appointment. He’s a busy man.”

“We are not anyone,” put in Raven. “We are someone.”

“Makes no difference. He’s a busy man.”

Charles said, “Being so busy he will wish to see us with the minimum of delay.”

The guard frowned. He was around I.Q. 70 and steered mostly by his liver. He did not want to use the phone and consult a higher-up lest the reward be a bawling out. More than anything else he yearned for a reasonable excuse to give these callers the easy brushoff. That interrupted game of jimbo-jimbo had reached its most enthralling stage now that he had won first sniff at the green bottle.

“Well?” insisted Charles, fatly bellicose. “You going to keep us here come Monday week?”

The other registered the baffled distaste of a slow mind being pushed faster than it wants to move. The plausible excuse he was seeking seemed strangely elusive. He glowered at the pair as though they had shoved him where he didn’t wish to go.

Maybe he
had
better do something about this. The manifold ramifications of Thorstern’s business brought all sorts of people to the gate at all times, though seldom as darkness fell. Some were admitted, some were not, and now and again it happened that dopes and crackpots were allowed in while important looking persons were kept out. Anyway, it was his duty only to hold the fort, not to sit in judgment on every caller.

Licking his lips, he asked hoarsely, “What are your names?”

“They don’t matter,” said Charles.

“Well, what is your business?”

“That
does
matter.”

“Cripes, I can’t tell them just that!”

“Try it and see,” Charles advised.

Hesitating, the guard stared from one to the other, absorbed mental comfort from each without knowing it, went back into the wall. Those in the tiny room beyond greeted him with a chorus of remarks that caused not a whisper outside the door but did spike through the basalt in neural waves and came clearly to the pair waiting outside the gate.

“Oh, Lord, how much longer are you going to be? You’re holding up the game.” “What’s eating someone, coming along at this hour? It’ll be blacker than the inside of a cat pretty soon.”

“Who is it, Jesmond? Somebody important?”

“They won’t say.” informed the guard, with glumness. Taking the phone off the wall, he waited for its visiscreen to clear and show who was responding at the other end.

At the end of a minute his neck was beet-red and his tone apologetic.

Racking the phone, he threw the three scowling, impatient faces at the table a pained glance, went into the rapidly gathering gloom. The impulse that had driven him to report with no information was now gone, but he sensed its absence no more than he had sensed its presence. “See here, you two, the—”

He stopped, gaped outward through the gate. Those couple of minutes had hastened the night. Visibility was now down to a mere four or five yards. Within that small radius there was nobody in view, nobody at all.

“Hey!” he called into the wall of fog. No reply. Again, much louder. “Hey!” Nothing but a dismal drip of water from black walls and a dim, subdued mixture of sounds from the city a couple of miles away.

“Darn!” Giving it up, he returned to the door. A thought struck him just as he reached it, he came back, tried the gate, shaking it, examining its bolts and the main lock. It was securely fastened. He glanced at the top. A quadruple row of spikes three inches from the overhead rock made it completely impassable. “Darn their hides!” he said, inexplicably uneasy, and went indoors.

The green bottle was the chief object of his attention. It did not occur to him that a great gate’s strongest point is also its weakest—the lock. Neither did it strike him that the most complicated lock can be turned from either side providing one has a key—or a satisfactory non-material substitute!

Darkness became complete as the last dim fadings of light were swept away much as if a gigantic shutter had been drawn across the concealed Venusian sky. A long, narrow courtyard stood behind the gate. Within this area visibility was down to an arm’s length. As usual upon Venus, the fall of night caused the fog to be pervaded by a hundred exotic odors drawn from trees and jungles, with a crushed marigolds perfume predominant.

The two invaders halted their progress through the courtyard. Immediately to their right a large bolt-studded door was set in the wall. Though well hidden in the all-enveloping cloud, they
knew
the door was there without having perceived it visually. They moved closer and inspected it.