Authors: Keith Laumer
Sam glared into Leatherwell’s eyes. “That right?” he grated.
Leatherwell bobbed his head, his chins compressed into bulging folds.
“However,” Retief went on, “I wasn’t at all sure you’d still
be agreeable, since he’s made your company a binding offer of 2645-P in return
for clear title to 95739-A.”
Mancziewicz looked across at Retief with narrowed eyes. He
released Leatherwell, who slumped into his chair. Magnan darted around his desk
to minister to the magnate. Behind them Retief closed one eye in a broad wink
at Mancziewicz.
“ . . . still, if Mr. Leatherwell will
agree, in addition to guaranteeing your title to 95739-A, to purchase your
output at four credits a ton, FOB his collection station—”
Mancziewicz looked at Leatherwell. Leatherwell hesitated,
then nodded. “Agreed,” he croaked.
“ . . . and to open his commissary and
postal facilities to all prospectors operating in the
Belt . . .”
Leatherwell
swallowed, eyes bulging, glanced at Mancziewicz’s
face . . . He nodded. “Agreed.”
“ . . . then I think I’d sign an
agreement releasing him from his offer.”
Mancziewicz looked at Magnan.
“You’re the Terrestrial Consul-General,” he said. “Is that
the straight goods?”
Magnan nodded. “If Mr. Leatherwell agrees—”
“He’s already agreed,” Retief said. “My pocket recorder, you
know.”
“Put it in writing,” Mancziewicz said.
Magnan
called in Miss Gumble. The others waited silently while Magnan dictated. He
signed the paper with a flourish, passed it across to Mancziewicz. He read it,
re-read it, then picked up the pen and signed. Magnan impressed the consular
seal on the paper.
“Now the grant,” Retief said. Magnan signed the paper, added
a seal. Mancziewicz tucked the papers away in an inner pocket. He rose.
“Well, gents, I guess maybe I had you figured wrong,” he
said. He looked at Retief. “Uh . . . got time for a drink?”
“I shouldn’t drink on duty,” Retief said. He rose. “So I’ll
take the rest of the day off.”
“I don’t get it,” Sam said, signaling for refills. “What was
the routine with the injunction—and impounding
Gertie
? You could have
got hurt.”
“I don’t think so,” Retief said. “If you’d meant business
with that Browning, you’d have flipped the safety off. As for the
injunction—orders are orders.”
“I’ve been thinking,” Sam said. “That gold deposit; it was a
plant, too, wasn’t it?”
“I’m just a bureaucrat, Sam. What would I know about gold?”
“A
double-salting job,” Sam said. “I was supposed to spot the phoney hardware—and
then fall for the gold plant. When Leatherwell put his proposition to me, I’d
grab it. The gold was worth plenty, I’d figure, and I couldn’t afford a legal
tangle with General Minerals. The lousy skunk. And you must have spotted it and
put it up to him—”
The
bartender leaned across to Retief. “Wanted on the phone.”
In the booth, Magnan’s agitated face stared at Retief.
“Retief, Mr. Leatherwell’s in a towering rage! The
deposit
on
2645-P; it was merely a surface film, barely a few inches thick! The entire
deposit wouldn’t fill an ore-boat . . .” A horrified expression
dawned on Magnan’s face. “Retief,” he gasped, “what did you do with the
impounded ore-carrier?”
“Well, let me see . . .” Retief said.
“According to the Space Navigation Code, a body in orbit within twenty miles of
any inhabited airless body constitutes a navigational hazard. Accordingly, I
had it towed away.”
“And the cargo?”
“Well, accelerating all that mass was an expensive business,
so to save the tax-payer’s credits, I had it dumped.”
“Where?” Magnan croaked.
“On some unimportant asteroid—as specified by Regulations.”
He smiled blandly at Magnan. Magnan looked back numbly.
“But you said—”
“All I said was that there was what looked like a valuable
deposit on 2645-P. It turned out to be a bogus gold mine that somebody had
rigged up in a hurry. Curious, eh?”
“But you told me—”
“And you told Mr. Leatherwell. Indiscreet of you, Mr. Consul.
That was a privileged communication; classified information, official use
only.”
“You led me to believe there was collapsed-crystal—”
“I said Sam had mentioned it. He told me his asteroid was
made of the stuff.”
Magnan
swallowed hard, twice. “By the way,” he said dully. “You were right about the
check. Half an hour ago Mr. Leatherwell tried to stop payment. He was too
late . . .”
“All in all, it’s been a big day for Leatherwell,” Retief
said. “Anything else?”
“I
hope not,” Magnan said. “I sincerely hope not . . .” He leaned
close to the screen. “You’ll consider the entire affair
as . . . confidential? There’s no point in unduly
complicating relationships—”
“Have no fear, Mr. Consul,” Retief said cheerfully. “You
won’t find me identifying with anything as specific as triple-salting an
asteroid.”
Back at the table, Sam called for another bottle of rock
juice.
“That Drift’s a pretty good game,” Retief said. “But let me
show you one I learned out on Yill . . .”
“Rising
above crass materialism, the native piety of Corps diplomats, coupled with a
solemn appreciation of universal spiritual values, has enriched Corps annals
with no more inspiring example of the reconciliation of alien ideologies than
that of Ambassador Straphanger’s virtuoso performance among the Hoog. Ever
humbly aware of the Great Notebook in the hand of the Big Inspector—whose
E.R.’s are written on the parchment of Eternity—Straphanger penetrated the
veils of ecclesiastical mystery to base a rapprochement on the firm ground of
the realistic doctrine of the Universal Popularity of Sin . . .”
—Vol. II, Reel I, 480 AE (AD 2941)
The
Hoogan chamberlain was tall, black-clad, high-shouldered, with an immense
dome-shaped head sloping into massive shoulders, eyes like freshly shelled
oysters in a leathery face and over-long, dangling arms. He turned to face the
party of Terrestrial diplomats who stood clutching suitcases, dwarfed under the
lofty vaulted ceiling of the vast, dark hall. Shafts of eerily colored light
filtered through stained-glass loopholes high in the walls to shed a faint glow
on the uneven stone floor, the drab-colored murals and hangings depicting the
specialties of the seven Hoogan Hells, the mouths of dark corridors radiating
from the circular chamber with helmeted and kilted Hoogan pikemen spaced
between them, immobile as the gargoyles that peered from high niches.
“His Arrokanze the Bope has kraziously blaced at your
disposal these cosy quarters,” the chamberlain said in a deep, hollow voice.
“You may now zelect rooms on the floors above and array yourselves in the
karments provided—”
“Look here, Mr. Oh-Doomy-Gloom,”
Ambassador
Straphanger
cut in. “I’ve been thinking it over, and I’ve decided that my staff and I will
just nip back over to our ship for the night—”
“His Arrokanze will pe eggpecting you at the fête in the
Bapal Kardens in one hour’s time,” the Hoogan bored on. “His Arrokanze tislikes
intenzely to be kept waitink.”
“Oh,
we’re all keenly aware of the honor His Arrogance has paid us in offering
accommodations here in the Papal Palace, but—”
“One hour,” Oh-Doomy-Gloom repeated, his voice echoing across
the hall. He turned away, the symbolic chain attached to his neck clanking as
he moved. He paused, turned back.
“By the way, you are instrugted to iknore any small
ah . . . indrusions. If you zee
anything . . . unusual, zummon a guard at once.”
“Intrusions?” Straphanger repeated querulously. “What kind of
intrusions?”
“The balace,” Oh-Doomy-Gloom said, “is haunted.”
Four twisting turns of a stone staircase above the reception
hall, Second Secretary Magnan tip-toed at Retief’s side along an echoing
corridor past black, iron-bound doors and mouldy tapestries dimly visible in the
light of a flambeau set in a bracket at the far end of the passage.
“Quaint
beliefs these bucolics entertain,” Magnan said in a tone of forced heartiness.
“Haunted indeed! How silly! Ha!”
“Why are you whispering?” Retief inquired.
“Just out of respect for the Pope, of course.” Magnan came to
an abrupt halt, clutched Retief’s sleeve. “Wha-what’s that?” he pointed. Along
the corridor, something small and dark slipped from the shadow of a pilaster to
the shelter of a doorway.
“Probably just our imagination,” Retief suggested.
“But it had big red eyes,” Magnan protested.
“They’re as easy to imagine as any other kind.”
“I just remembered: I left my shower cap in my hold baggage.
Let’s go back.”
Retief moved off. “It’s just a few doors farther. Six,
seven . . . here we are.” He inserted the key
Oh-Doomy-Gloom’s aide had provided; the heavy door swung open with a creak that
descended the scale to a low groan. Magnan hurried forward, paused to stare at
the nearest wall hanging, showing a group of Hoogans suspended head-down from
spikes above leaping flames, while goblins of various shapes prodded them with
long barb-tipped spears.
“Curious how similar religious art is from one world to
another,” he commented. Inside the room, he stared around in dismay at the damp
stone walls, the two spartan cots, the carved devils in the corner.
“What perfectly ghastly quarters!” He dropped his suitcase,
went over to prod the nearest bunk. “Why, my spine will never endure this
mattress! I’ll be a physical wreck after the first night! And the draft—I’m
sure to catch a chill. And . . . and . . .”
He broke off, raised a shaky finger to point at the darkest corner of the
narrow chamber, where a tall, bug-eyed demon carved from pale blue stone winked
garnet eyes.
“Retief! Something moved over there—it was just like the
devils in the pictures! All fuzzy red bristles and eyes that glow in the
dark . . . !”
Retief opened his suitcase. “If you see another one, throw a
shoe at it. Right now, we’d better be getting into costume; compared with an
aroused Ambassador, a few devils are just friendly pets.”
Half an hour later, having sponged off at the stone sink,
Magnan’s eyes were still rolling nervously as he adjusted the folds of his
Hoogan ceremonial sarong before the tarnished, rippled mirror.
“I suppose it
is
just nerves,” he said. “It’s all the
fault of that Oh-Doomy-Gloom fellow and his quaint native superstitions! I
confess his remarks quite unnerved me for a moment.”
Across the room, Third Secretary Retief was loading
match-head sized charges into the magazine of an inconspicuous hand-gun.
“Probably just his way of warning us about the mice,” he
said.
Magnan turned, caught a glimpse of the gun. “Here, Retief!
What’s that?”
“Just a quaint native cure for spooks—if they get too noisy.”
He tucked the gun out of sight under the Hoogan sarong. “Just think of it as a
sort of good luck charm, Mr. Magnan.”
“A knife up the sleeve is an old diplomatic tradition,”
Magnan said doubtfully. “But a power pistol under the
sarong . . .”
“I’ll have it along in case something jumps out of the
stonework and yells boo!” Retief said reassuringly.
Magnan sniffed, admiring himself in the dark glass.
“I
was rather relieved when the Ambassador insisted on native dress for the staff
instead of ceremonial nudity for tonight’s affair.” He turned to study the hang
of the uneven hem-line that exposed his bare shins. “One of his finer moments,
I fancied. He
does
cut an impressive figure, once his jowls get that
purplish tinge. Not even Oh-Doomy-Gloom dared stand up to him. Though I do wish
he’d gone just the
one step further and
demanded the right to wear trousers—
” he broke off, his eyes on the
black drapes covering the high, narrow window. The heavy cloth twitched.
“Retief!” he gasped. “There it is again!”
“Shhh,” Retief watched as the curtain moved again. A tiny
red-glowing head appeared at its edge, a foot above the floor; a wire-thin leg
emerged, another; a body like a ball of reddish fluff came into view, its
red-bead eyes on two inch stalks tilting alertly to scan the chamber. Its gaze
fixed on Retief; it moved clear of the curtain, paused, then started toward him
on skittery legs—
With a yell, Magnan dived for the door, flung it wide.
“Guards! Help! Goblins! Spooks!” His voice receded along the
hall, mingling with the clank of accouterments, the slap of wide Hoogan feet.
The intruder hesitated at the outcry, dithered for a moment,
then emitted a cry like a goosed fairy, fumbling with two of its limbs at
something attached to its back. Beyond the door, Magnan’s voice supplied a
shrill counterpoint to the rumble of Hoogan questions.