Gordon R. Dickson (5 page)

Of
course, it was a known fact that the Unstabs resented Stabs.

There
were no signs marking a boundary. But the minute Kil crossed into Unstab
territory, he was made aware of the fact by a number of little things. For one,
as he had noticed from his hotel window earlier, patches of dim light and even
of actual shadow could suddenly be seen ahead on the heretofore brightly lit
street, down which the moving roadway was carrying him. For another, the fixed
sidewalks bordering the roadway and extending over to the front of the
buildings along the street, began to be peopled by occasional lounging figures,
not groups stopping and chatting as they might have elsewhere in the city, but
solitary individuals leaning against store fronts and watching those who passed
with an air of wariness or calculation. The shops themselves had a dingy air;
as if, without being actually unclean, which was almost
an impossibility
in modern times, they had somehow managed to reflect the strange dustiness and
disorder within the minds of those who occupied them. Few people seemed to be
about; and yet the public buildings murmured with life behind dark or shielded
fronts. Signs in muted colors identified the entertainment spots. And it was
into one of these, a
bar, that
Kil left the safety of
the moving roadway to enter.

To
his surprise, and in contrast to the glowing sign out front, the door that
opened to his Key revealed a place seemingly dead and all but deserted. As he
stood just inside the entrance, blinking in the sudden and unaccustomed gloom,
it became slowly apparent that this first impression was a mistake, fostered by
darkness and silence. The place was thinly but evenly populated.

It was also larger than he had thought. To
his left a short
semi-circle of bar bellied out from the wall. To his right, a closely huddled
pack of booths and tables faded off into the obscurity of a further wall that,
for some reason, was broken up into little niches and crannies housing single
booths in deep shadow. A scattering of dim forms sat here and there at the
tables and there was a slim, irregular line of patrons around the bar.

With
all this, it took only a short moment for Kil to understand what had caused
him, instinctively, to check his entrance a few feet inside the front door. He
had stepped not only into darkness, but also into that same silence, noted earlier,
the peculiar pregnancy of which is in itself a warning. And now, in the whole
place, there was not a whisper, not a rustle, not a clink.

They
sat or stood, he saw now with clearing eyes, all staring at him. There was a
tribal unanimity in their motionless-ness, an ancient tribal hostility toward
the stranger. They waited, it seemed, for him to make the first move; and he,
half-hypnotized by the impact of their numerous eyes, stood fixed and
incapable.

Abruptly
the silence was shattered by a wild, drunken whoop. A tall, blond boy of less
than twenty, with a mop of unruly hair, staggered clear of the bar and stood
facing Kil, half the length of the room between them.

"Well, big S!" he shouted.
"Big S!
B . . . ig, dir . . . ty S!"

Kil did not move. The silence in the rest of
the bar continued unbroken. The boy stood weaving, silent now, but not turning
back to his drink. Abruptly, the paralysis holding Kil snapped. He turned himself
slowly toward the other drinkers watching him from the bar. He went down along
it to an open space opposite the bartender and leaned across the bar to face
him.

The bartender said nothing.

"I'd like," said Kil, "to talk
to a man known as the Ace King."

"A
juby rig," said the man to Kil's right, suddenly. "I'll pipe."

The bartender looked at the man and then back
to Kil. His eyes were unfriendly.

"A stick," he said. His voice was
harsh and heavy, coming from a harsh and heavy face.

"If
he is," said the man on Kil's right, "who do you think you're coving
with the gabby low?" He turned to Kil, a tall, cadaverous man with a dark
Latin-looking face and something sardonic and distant in Iris eyes. "Who
sent you, Chief?"

"Cole Marsk."

"Never
heard of him."

"He's
a private detective. I wanted him to do some work for me," said Kil.
"He said he couldn't, but to see a man called the Ace King."

The tall man turned to the
bartender.

"Spin the dosker,
Joel," he said.

The
bartender reached down below the bar and did something with his hands. He
watched intently for a moment,
then
raised his head.

"Marsk's on," he said. "He's
piped before."

"I'll
pipe on then." The tall man turned once more to Kil. "Stay here until
I come back for you. Sit at one of the tables there and keep your mouth
shut."

He shoved his drink away
and started toward the door.

"Hey,
don't forget
my per
," yelled the bartender after
him. "If it's a juby rig I want my five."

The tall man laughed
derisively.

"You'll
get five in a fist," he threw back over his shoulder without pausing.
"Give him a drink and don't poison him. I'm piping this."

He
went out the door. The bartender turned a bitter face back toward Kil.

"Well,
what'U it be,
Chief?"
He spat the words out. Kil held on to his own
temper with an effort.

"Nothing,"
he answered. He turned and strode across the room to a table in the shadows. He
sat down. Away, at die far end of the bar, the mop-headed boy pivoted
unsteadily to face him.

"Big,
dirty,
S!"

"Clab
it!"
shouted the bartender, turning on the youth.
Muttering, the boy twisted back to his
drink; and the rest of the customers, as if all actuated by a single circuit,
turned likewise, ignoring Kil.

Kil
sat and waited. Occasionally new people came in to the bar and others went out.
The clientele changed faces without changing either numbers or types. Kil
could have been invisible for all the attention paid him. He sat in stillness,
feeling the waiting drain the tension from him, leaving him almost empty. For the
moment, the hot coal of his purpose smothered and dimmed under the smoky pall
of a dull and heavy apathy. He sat in a timeless vacuum, waiting for the tall
man to return. Then, finally, after an interminable time, he came gradually
back to conscious awareness, pricked by a faint whisper that was just reaching
his ear.

"Chief
...
oh, Chief . . ."

Kil
slowly raised his head and started to twist about to the table behind and to
his left, which sat in one of the little wall niches in deepest shadow.

"No,
Chief!" hissed the whisper, urgently. "Don't turn around. Keep
looking the way you are. And don't move your lips when you answer."

Kil
complied. He let his head droop as if tired; and with his face half-hidden,
whispered back through still lips.

"Who're
you?"

"Dekko,
Chief."

"Dekko?"

"Dekko.
I called you at the Stick gate yesterday. You remember. "You were
climbing into a cab and I asked if you wanted a runny."

Slowly there swam back into focus in Kil's
mind the picture of a narrow face, pointed-chinned and with straight black
hair, which had grimaced at him through the window of the cab.

"You're that little man," said Kil.
"Well? What do you want?"

"Work
for you, Chief. You need a runny. I'm a good one." Kil considered the
answer for a second. "What's a runny?" he whispered.

"A runner, Chief.
I can run you anywhere. You got
a
problem. I can help. I got
a
talent;
and I know all the wires."

"I don't," hissed Kil,
exasperatedly, "understand half of what you're saying."

"That's
it. You see, Chief?" The answering whisper was triumphant. "You don't
know anything about anything. You're a lost juby in riggertown. If you hadn't
been piped to Crown One, they'd be all over you in this place by now. How you
going to get done what you got to get done without a runny to slip the wires
for you? You'd get shook out every time you turned around until there wasn't
nothing
to shake out no more and then some Crim would come
along and close you up.

"I don't think so," replied Kil.
"I'm just down here to talk to this Ace King man. After that I'll be
getting out."

"That's what you think, Chief. I watched
you go into the Sticks and I read you coming out. You got a problem and it goes
under the line where the wires are. I know. I tell you—"

The whisper stopped abruptly, as if the
speaker had choked it off in his throat.

"What do you know—" Kil was
beginning, when out of the comer of his eye, he saw the tall, cadaverous man
reentering the bar. He watched the other stride toward him until he stood over
Kil at the table.

"All
right,
Chief
," said the tall man. "Come on
with me. Ace'll see you and I'm taking you to him."

Slowly,
Kil rose to his feet. The tall man turned and led the way out of the bar. As he
stepped away from the tables, Kil turned a little sideways and threw one quick
glance back over his shoulder.

The
table in the niche behind him was empty. Several tables down, a fat and drunken
old man dozed above his half-finished drink. Otherwise the space surrounding
where he had sat was deserted. There was no sign of the little man called Dekko
anywhere in the place.

CHAPTER FOUR

The
tall man led Kil through several streets and
finally down a dark alley to a building's side entrance. Within, there were
several doors to be opened by the tall man's Key, and several short hallways to
pass before they stepped at last into a long room stripped bare to the basic
metal and plastic of its wall, ceiling and floors. The room was empty of
furniture except for a desk at its far end, behind which a small man sat
staring fixedly at them as they came in, and a chair before it. Behind the
little man at the desk, another, younger man, in white tunic and kilt edged in
gold, leaned against the opaqued window that filled that end of the room, looking
pallid and almost macabre against its blackness. "Here he is, Ace,"
said the tall man.

"Thank
you, Birb. Ono, go stand by the door,
will
you?"
As the man lounging against the window moved forward and around the desk, the
man known as the Ace King kept his eyes fixed on Kil. "So this is the
man," he said, in a dry, hard voice that had a nearly feminine waspishness
to it. "Well, come here and sit down, you."

Kil strode forward. The room was longer than
it seemed. The bare walls and bright, unrelieved lighting gave it a hot,
unnaturally clear and sharp appearance, like
an
hallucination seen in deep fever. As he reached the chair and sat down, Kil saw
that the Ace was not sitting behind his desk, after all, but standing; and that
he was much smaller than he had at first appeared. He was a square, dry-skinned
man in his early fifties, swaddled almost, in long trousers of thick, purple
cloth clipped into black boots and a black, turtle-necked long sleeved tunic.
His lined face was leathery, his eyes small and hard.

"What's your name?" said the Ace.

Kil told him. The Ace stood looking at him.

"Well?"
snapped the little man, at last, "Well? What did you want to see me
about?"

Kil remembered Marsk's advice and took a firm
grip on his temper with both hands.

"I
want to find my wife," he answered. "She's disappeared. A private
detective named Marsk said you might be able to help me."

"Oh,
he did? Well, I've never even heard of him." The Ace frowned down at his
desk and made a minute adjustment in the papers laid out in militarily precise
order there. "However, since you're here, I might as well listen. What
happened? I suppose you had some little lover's spat."

Kil
felt himself go hot, and his eyes burned. With an effort, he held his voice
down, though the words came out before he could stop them.

"Don't
let the situation go to your head," he said. "I'll tell you what
you're going to need to know."

There
were a couple of audible breaths from the back of the room and Ace jerked his
head up. The expression on his face as he stared at Kil did not change; but he
went momentarily and horribly pale. After a short moment, his color came back.

"Go ahead," he
said in a neutral voice.

Kil
told him. In the retelling of it, he regained his calmness; and by the time he
was finished he was once more in control of himself. As for Ace, he seemed
almost friendly, as if the small passage-at-words had never been.

"Interesting,"
he said, when Kil had finished.
"A strange story."

Kil looked sharply at him, to see if there
was any further sarcasm in this, but the man's face was clear.
"Well?" demanded Kil. "Well-what?" "Can you find
her?"

"Well,
now," said the Ace. "That depends." He came around the desk and
perched on a corner of it, looking down into Kil's face. "You come here to
ask a service, you know," he said, softly. "You come here to see me
because none of your Class A, or Class B, or Class C friends can help
you."

"Friends?"
echoed Kil. "I want to hire somebody. Can you do it?
How
much?"

The Ace stood up again and went back behind
the desk. He sat down and it became immediately apparent that the chair to his
desk had been abnormally cushioned, because he was nearly as tall seated as he
had been standing.

"How much?
Yes, how much?" he said. "That's right, you wouldn't want
favors. But I feel generous, you know. There's actually several ways you could
pay for my assistance."

"Check?
Cash?
It doesn't matter."

"No, no, you don't understand.
Nothing like that.
I said several ways, several different
kinds of payments." "Such as?" demanded Kil.

The Ace put his fingertips on the desk and
leaned forward.

"Perhaps
you know something that might be useful to me. It's an axiom of mine that
valuable information is like diamonds, often stumbled upon unexpectedly. And
since the price for what you want is high . . ." He let his voice trail
off.

"How
high?"

"Quite high.
I might even say—by your standards—very high.
There's
people
to be paid all over the world. You see, what we do is pass the
word; and everybody in our areas the world over keeps his eyes open. So the
price for the one who first discovers your wife has to be enough to make it
worth the trouble of his looking. Then the local Ace in the area where she's
discovered will want a slightly greater amount and naturally, you pay me the
most of all."

"How
much?"
said Kil.

"But
I'm just talking about money! Suppose you were able to pay some other way,
entirely say, by providing me with information. Let's look on the optimistic
side first." He held up two fingers of his right hand. "If you can
help me with either one of two questions, we'll find your wife for nothing.
I'll
pay for it."

Kil stared at him for a
long moment.

"All right," he
said at last. "Ask ahead.
".

"That's
nice," said the Ace, leaning back. "That's very agreeable.
Now, for question number one.
There is a man in whom we're
all very interested. Is he a man? I think so. Yes,
I
think we can take that much for granted. Perhaps, talking to your
letter-Class friends you've heard of him.
Perhaps even met
him.
The Commissioner?"

' The last words were said in almost an idle
tone, so lightly and so casually that Kil, staring at the short Unstab, had
trouble for a moment believing that he had heard correctly.
"Who?"
he asked.

"The Commissioner," repeated the
Ace, blandly. "I don't know anyone by that title."

"Now,"
said the Ace, "I can hardly believe that. He's one of your own
people."

"What do you
mean,
one of
my
people?" snapped Kil.

"What people have you? The Class A's, of
course."

"I don't know what you're talking
about," said Kil.

"All
right," the Ace sighed. "I'll be plain about it. You Class A's need
the Police to stay where you are—on top of the world. You can't control the
Police very well with a new head going in every six months, so you have a
secret head man who goes by the title of Commissioner—an unofficial head. I
want to know who he is."

"You're crazy!" said Kil,
incredulously.

"You won't tell me?"

"I don't know; there is no such
man."

"All
right," the Ace's voice had hardened. "It seems you don't want this
wife of yours back as much as you say you do. But I'll give you another chance.
What do you know about Sub-E?"

"Sub-E?"

The
Ace sat and stared at him for a long, long moment without speaking.

"You
know," he said at last. "You might just be telling the truth- You
might just be the complete fool you seem to be, after all."

"Now,
look!" Kil started up in his chair and felt hard hands slam him down
again. He twisted his head to look behind him and saw the tall, cadaverous man,
Birb, standing over him.

"You
look," said The Ace, and Kil turned his eyes back to look at him.
"You come in here and demand to see me, with your insufferable Class
A
nose in the air. You say
you're
going to tell me all I'll need to know—as if you were the one to be
giving orders around here.
As if I was dirt under your feet
because you're Class A and I'm Class One.
Never mind the fact that I've
got more intelligence than you ever dreamed of having! Never mind that I could
buy you and sell you a thousand times over and never even notice the cost!
Never mind—" The man's eyes were showing their whites all the way around
the pupil and a little moisture flew from his working lips into Kil's face
"—that I'm a busy man and your lousy little wife means nothing to me. You
came in to see me. So let's talk business. Let's talk money, since you obviously
haven't got anything else. How much will it cost to find your wife? How much
will it cost in money? Two hundred thousand, that's what it'll cost!"

Kil blinked at the rigid
little man, stunned.

"Two hundred thousand?" he managed,
finally.

"Two hundred—
hundred
thousand!
That's the price! That's the regular price!
If you'd gone to any other Ace but me, they'd have asked you if you had that
much money before they bothered to talk to you. But I wanted to be kind. I
tried to be decent. I know memnonic engineers aren't rich; and I tried to think
of some way you could pay otherwise."

"Listen!"
said Kil; but the words pouring from the Ace's mouth overwhelmed and flooded
over his interruption.

"But
no matter what I did, no matter what I tried, you continued to insult me, to
try to take advantage of me! You planned this. You thought you could walk all
over me because you're Class A and I'm Class One! You thought maybe you could
bully me, scare me into working for you for nothing. Well, you've come to the
wrong man for that! I've got position and authority. I've got power and I know
it. If you'd been halfway decent I'd have found some way to help you. Two
hundred thousand is twenty years' income to you, but it's nothing to me. I
might even have paid part of it out of my own pocket just to be kind, to help
you. But no matter how I tried, how I leaned over backwards to help you, you
just trampled on me some more. Well, now you can go to hell! You can go to
hell! You and your slut of a wife who's probably off with some other man right
this very min—"

It was a wide desk, but Kil went over it in
one jump. His hands closed around the Ace's throat, the desk chair flopped over
backwards and they crashed to the floor together, the little man underneath and
squalling like a cat. Through a dark blur of rage, Kil was conscious of blows
landing on him from behind, of hard hands pulling him away from his enemy; but
he held on grimly, until something broke in splintering pain against the back
of his head and a black mist closed around him.

When
it cleared a second later, there was water dripping from his face and he was
being held upright between Birb and Ono. The Ace was facing him, his
turtle-necked tunic torn and his face congested above it.

"Take
him out," he said, breathing hard and speaking softly. "Take him out.
Teach him to hit
mel
"

The two men dragged Kil away.

They
went back out the route by which Kil had entered, and emerged into the alley.
The sudden dimness, after the bright lights of the office and the corridors,
was startling. At the far end of the alley the sunbeam-illuminated street was a
distant rectangle of white light with black patches of shadow that were
doorways pacing off the distance down the side of the building toward it.

"Hold him, Ono,"
said Birb.

There
was a subtle shifting of hands and Kil found himself held in a full nelson by
Ono, while the cadaverous man moved around to face him.

"All right, Stab," said Birb.

It
was like the tail end of a bucking log in the rapids of a mountain stream
catching him in the stomach. Kil doubled
over,
gasped
for air and began to struggle. Other blows came switfly and heavily.
Body, head, neck, face, groin.
There was a drumming in his
ears and a haze of pain rose to blind him.

"Drop
him." It was the voice of Birb again; and, although he had not been
conscious of falling, Kil felt the hardness of the alley pavement rough against
his cheek.

"Boots, Ono, and I'll—"

Suddenly,
from nowhere, the universe rocked to a soundless flash of light and one of the
two men above Kil screamed like a wounded horse. There was a scrambling sound
in the alley and a series of long, hoarse gasps. Kil felt arms pulling him to
his feet. Blindly he
groped,
his eyes still seared and
sightless from the flash. Hands took his arm and pulled 'him, staggering,
along.

"Can
you run, Chief?" asked a voice. "Come on, hang onto me. We got to go
fast."

It was the voice of Dekko.

CHAPTER FIVE

The
apartment was just like any apartment in the
class of buildings which could be registered in with three weeks or more time
to go on your Key; by which piece of evidence, coupled with the fact that by
manners and language he was obviously Unstab, Kil came early to the conclusion
that Dekko was Class One; by title, at least, the equal of the little man known
as the Ace King. The apartment itself consisted of a sleeping room and lounge
with lavatory off to one side and a small dining area, furnished with delivery
slots, leading from the building's automatic kitchen. There was the usual furniture
in the form of tables, beds, chairs,
a
vision box in
each room and a large, wall-sized one-way window in the lounge. The first two
days, when it was all Kil could do to drag his aching body on occasional trips
between the bed and the lavatory, Kil had spent most of his waking hours lying
on one of the beds and watching the bedroom screen. He occupied himself with
news broadcasts, mainly, except for the occasions when the discomfort of his
battered frame became too insistent a drag on his attention. Then he would
switch over to one of the pain-relieving hypnotic patterns and give himself ten
minutes of conditioning. The patterns were not too successful. He was a bad hypnotic
subject and had known it since grade school. But at the same time he had a
slight block against chemical palliatives, hating to surrender any level of his
awareness to a drug; and he had turned down Dekko's offer of barbiturates.