Frog wakened in the Corporation hospital. Three faces hovered
over him. One belonged to a Blake medic with whom he had dealt
before. Smythe wasn’t bad for a Corporation flunky. Another
was a small white face with vulpine features and hungry eyes. He
did not know the man. The third was Moira. Pretty little Moira. He
tried to smile.
There were no officials around. He was surprised when his
sluggish mind noted their absence.
He came up cussing like a stuttering Arab. He got his tongue
under control, snarled, “Get the hell out of here, Smythe. I
been getting away with it fifty years. Blake ain’t going to
break me with no phony medical bill.”
“On the house, Frog.”
“On the house, my ruddy red rectum. Blake don’t give
away no fourth-hand condom.” He glanced at Moira, prim and
blondly angelic, trying not to squirm worriedly on a hard chair. He
misinterpreted her concern as embarrassment. He flashed her a weak
grin. “We argue about it later.”
He glared at Foxface. The man had perched on a low dresser, one
foot on the floor. “Who the hell you be, guy?”
“August Plainfield. Stimpson-Hrabosky News. Pool man
assigned to cover you here.”
“Uhn?” He got a bad odor from the newshawk.
Vulture-reek, maybe. His breed wallowed in it wherever there was
human carrion.
He looked at Moira again. She looked anxious, frightened, and
tired. Just the worry? Or the holonet people giving her hell?
He was no fan but he had watched enough HV to know the netmen
pursued their stories ruthlessly, with a singleminded
inhumanity.
He had half feared he would stir them up with his stunt, but had
not foreseen that they would go after Moira. He had rehearsed a few
choice lines for them. But Moira . . . She was
a baby. She could not handle the pressure.
What did a child’s comfort matter to a vulture like
Plainfield? His kind saw everyone and everything as fodder for the
camera-cannon they used to down the prey they fed their monster
audience.
“Moira, you go outside a minute. I got a word to say to
this critter.” Pain was not making him feel reasonable. He
was sure that Smythe, who had gone next door to check his metabolic
monitors, was in a dither. The Doc was all right, but he took
things too serious.
Hell, let him stew.
Moira crawled off her chair and left without a word. In her
public reticence, and other ways, she was aping him. It was her way
of showing affection. Frog found it disconcerting. Like so many men
who maintain a tight rein on emotion, Frog longed for its
expression in others. It provided him an excuse for opening a
little himself. And it terrified him. He might get trapped into
exposing an Achilles’ heel of self.
He used some of his choice words on the newsman.
Then a few more, bloody-minded, colorful, and threatening.
Plainfield endured them like a mountain weathering another of
countless storms fated to lash its slopes.
“What did you find out there?” he asked when Frog
ran down.
“Huh? Find? Nothing. More Shadowline. More Brightside. And
if I did find something, I wouldn’t tell no creepo like
you.”
“Thought so. You rambled a lot while you were under. About
the yellow, the orange. Dreaming, Doctor Smythe thinks. I’ve
got a notion you weren’t. Dreams don’t leave men
radiation sick. Yellow has meant radioactivity for a thousand
years.”
Frog’s face wrinkled in a frown so deep that for a moment
he resembled a dark-eyed prune. “I don’t remember so
good. Oxygen starvation do things to your brain. Check my
log.” He smirked. Plainfield was not going to get near his
rig till Blake’s people checked it out. They might not bring
it in for years.
“I did. I didn’t find anything. In fact, I found so
much nothing that it made me curious. Made me wonder why a man
would tell his computer to forget a place that left him half dead
of radiation poisoning. Made me wonder why a man would take the
trouble to register a formal claim on the shade at the end of the
Shadowline when he thinks he’s dying. When he’s never
filed a claim before. And it made me wonder why he revised his will
the minute the claim was notarized.”
“I want to be buried out there,” Frog improvised.
“Somebody’s going to do it again someday. I want him to
bury my ashes on the only claim I ever had.”
“Your diction and syntax are improving.” Plainfield
smiled a smile that made him appear more wolf than fox. “You
may be telling the truth. Corporation people who think they know
‘that crazy dwarf’ figure it something like that. Or think
you’re rigging a scheme to get them to throw money down a rathole in some cockamamie revenge. I
don’t suffer their preconceptions. I don’t know you. I
just know people. I think you found something.”
“Just a place to be buried,” Frog insisted
nervously. This interrogation was not his idea of an interview.
Plainfield’s smile broadened. “You might get there
quicker than you want. El Dorados, dreams that come true, they have
a way of devouring their dreamers.”
“What the hell kind of newsman are you, anyway?”
Frog was so nervous his customary act was slipping.
“Call me a dream shaper. I make fantasies come true.
Mostly my own, but sometimes other people’s, too. Those
sometimes turn out to be nightmares.”
Frog stopped being nervous and started being scared. He looked
around for a weapon.
He was in over his head. Bluster was useless, and his condition
denied him his customary alternative, attack.
Frustration kindled anger. Hadn’t his flesh always
betrayed his spirit? Hadn’t he always been just a little too
short, too small, or too weak? Why wasn’t somebody from Blake
doing the questioning?
“Why’d you do it, anyway? I mean, make the run.
Reasons after the fact could be supplied, I suppose, but I want to
know what makes a man try something impossible in the first place.
I’ve studied everything known about Brightside and the
Shadowline. There’s no way you could have known that
you’d find anything out there.”
What does make a man throw himself into something for which
there is neither a reasonable nor rational justification? Frog had
done a lot of thinking during his ran. Not once, even remotely, had
he been able to make his motives add up. Most of the time he had
told himself that he was doing it for Moira, but there had been
times whan he had suspected that he was doing it for Frog, to salve
a scarred ego by showing humanity it was wrong about his being a
clown. Yet that had not taken into account the probability of
failure, which would have done nothing but underscore his
foolishness.
Why, then? A badfinger for Blake? Because he had had some crazy,
deep-down conviction that he would find something? No. Not one of
those reasons was good enough in itself.
All that time alone and still he had not figured himself
out.
Thr man who hides from himself hides best of all.
“What did you find?”
Frog strove to focus on Plainfield. And realized that his
earlier assessments were incorrect. The man was neither vulture,
fox, nor wolf. He was a snake. Cold-blooded, emotionless, deadly.
Predatory, and unacquainted with mercy. Nor was he owned. This news
business was cover. He was a dagger in his own hand.
Plainfield moved toward him. A slap hypo appeared in his palm.
Frog struggled weakly. The hypo hit his arm. Wrong again, he thought. He’s worse than a snake.
He’s a human.
“What did you find?”
Frog knew he would not make it this time. This man, this thing
that called itself August Plainfield and pretended to be a newsman,
was going to strip him of his victory, then kill him. Even God in
heaven could not stop him from talking once the drug took hold, and
then what value would he have alive?
Frog talked. And talked. And, as he knew he must, he died. But
before he did, and while he was still sufficiently in possession of
his senses to understand, another man entered the dark door before
him.
Smythe burst into the room, alerted by his monitors. Moira
trailed him as if attached by a short chain. The doctor charged
Plainfield, opening his mouth to shout.
A small, silent palm weapon ruined Smythe’s heart before
any sound left his lips. Moira, as if on a puppeteer’s
strings, jerked back out of the room. Plainfield cursed but did not
pursue her.
A sadness overwhelmed Frog, both for himself and for Smythe.
On Blackworld, as on all but a few worlds, the dead never saw
resurrection. Even the Blakes remained dead when they died.
Resurrection was too expensive, too difficult, and too complex in
social implication. And why bother? Human numbers made life a cheap
commodity.
Plainfield finished with Frog, then disappeared. The murders
went on record as unsolved. Corporation police hunted the newsman,
but no trace turned up.
They wanted him for theft. They wanted him for destruction of
municipal and Corporate property. They wanted him for suborning
municipal and Corporate employees. They wanted him for a list of
crimes. But most of all they wanted him because of Frog and
Smythe.
Blake had a long, long memory.
Stimpson-Hrabosky News denied ever having heard of Plainfield.
How, then, Blake’s cops demanded, had the man reached
Blackworld in a Stimpson-Hrabosky charter? How, if he was an
unknown, had he managed to get himself elected pool man?
Stimpson-Hrabosky responded with almost contemptuous
silence.
Their reticence was itself informative. Plainfield obviously
carried a lot of weight outside.
In the furor of pursuit the killer’s motives became
obscured. Only a handful of men knew about Frog’s claim and
will, and they were the men Plainfield had bribed. They were on
trial and no one was listening to them. They were sent into exile,
which meant that they were given outsuits and put out of the city
locks to survive as best they could.
Blake reasserted its contention that it never left a debt
outstanding, though it might take a generation to repay.
Frog’s original will left Moira more than anyone had
anticipated. It set up a trust that assured her a place in
Edgeward’s life.
And life went on.
Frog wakened in the Corporation hospital. Three faces hovered
over him. One belonged to a Blake medic with whom he had dealt
before. Smythe wasn’t bad for a Corporation flunky. Another
was a small white face with vulpine features and hungry eyes. He
did not know the man. The third was Moira. Pretty little Moira. He
tried to smile.
There were no officials around. He was surprised when his
sluggish mind noted their absence.
He came up cussing like a stuttering Arab. He got his tongue
under control, snarled, “Get the hell out of here, Smythe. I
been getting away with it fifty years. Blake ain’t going to
break me with no phony medical bill.”
“On the house, Frog.”
“On the house, my ruddy red rectum. Blake don’t give
away no fourth-hand condom.” He glanced at Moira, prim and
blondly angelic, trying not to squirm worriedly on a hard chair. He
misinterpreted her concern as embarrassment. He flashed her a weak
grin. “We argue about it later.”
He glared at Foxface. The man had perched on a low dresser, one
foot on the floor. “Who the hell you be, guy?”
“August Plainfield. Stimpson-Hrabosky News. Pool man
assigned to cover you here.”
“Uhn?” He got a bad odor from the newshawk.
Vulture-reek, maybe. His breed wallowed in it wherever there was
human carrion.
He looked at Moira again. She looked anxious, frightened, and
tired. Just the worry? Or the holonet people giving her hell?
He was no fan but he had watched enough HV to know the netmen
pursued their stories ruthlessly, with a singleminded
inhumanity.
He had half feared he would stir them up with his stunt, but had
not foreseen that they would go after Moira. He had rehearsed a few
choice lines for them. But Moira . . . She was
a baby. She could not handle the pressure.
What did a child’s comfort matter to a vulture like
Plainfield? His kind saw everyone and everything as fodder for the
camera-cannon they used to down the prey they fed their monster
audience.
“Moira, you go outside a minute. I got a word to say to
this critter.” Pain was not making him feel reasonable. He
was sure that Smythe, who had gone next door to check his metabolic
monitors, was in a dither. The Doc was all right, but he took
things too serious.
Hell, let him stew.
Moira crawled off her chair and left without a word. In her
public reticence, and other ways, she was aping him. It was her way
of showing affection. Frog found it disconcerting. Like so many men
who maintain a tight rein on emotion, Frog longed for its
expression in others. It provided him an excuse for opening a
little himself. And it terrified him. He might get trapped into
exposing an Achilles’ heel of self.
He used some of his choice words on the newsman.
Then a few more, bloody-minded, colorful, and threatening.
Plainfield endured them like a mountain weathering another of
countless storms fated to lash its slopes.
“What did you find out there?” he asked when Frog
ran down.
“Huh? Find? Nothing. More Shadowline. More Brightside. And
if I did find something, I wouldn’t tell no creepo like
you.”
“Thought so. You rambled a lot while you were under. About
the yellow, the orange. Dreaming, Doctor Smythe thinks. I’ve
got a notion you weren’t. Dreams don’t leave men
radiation sick. Yellow has meant radioactivity for a thousand
years.”
Frog’s face wrinkled in a frown so deep that for a moment
he resembled a dark-eyed prune. “I don’t remember so
good. Oxygen starvation do things to your brain. Check my
log.” He smirked. Plainfield was not going to get near his
rig till Blake’s people checked it out. They might not bring
it in for years.
“I did. I didn’t find anything. In fact, I found so
much nothing that it made me curious. Made me wonder why a man
would tell his computer to forget a place that left him half dead
of radiation poisoning. Made me wonder why a man would take the
trouble to register a formal claim on the shade at the end of the
Shadowline when he thinks he’s dying. When he’s never
filed a claim before. And it made me wonder why he revised his will
the minute the claim was notarized.”
“I want to be buried out there,” Frog improvised.
“Somebody’s going to do it again someday. I want him to
bury my ashes on the only claim I ever had.”
“Your diction and syntax are improving.” Plainfield
smiled a smile that made him appear more wolf than fox. “You
may be telling the truth. Corporation people who think they know
‘that crazy dwarf’ figure it something like that. Or think
you’re rigging a scheme to get them to throw money down a rathole in some cockamamie revenge. I
don’t suffer their preconceptions. I don’t know you. I
just know people. I think you found something.”
“Just a place to be buried,” Frog insisted
nervously. This interrogation was not his idea of an interview.
Plainfield’s smile broadened. “You might get there
quicker than you want. El Dorados, dreams that come true, they have
a way of devouring their dreamers.”
“What the hell kind of newsman are you, anyway?”
Frog was so nervous his customary act was slipping.
“Call me a dream shaper. I make fantasies come true.
Mostly my own, but sometimes other people’s, too. Those
sometimes turn out to be nightmares.”
Frog stopped being nervous and started being scared. He looked
around for a weapon.
He was in over his head. Bluster was useless, and his condition
denied him his customary alternative, attack.
Frustration kindled anger. Hadn’t his flesh always
betrayed his spirit? Hadn’t he always been just a little too
short, too small, or too weak? Why wasn’t somebody from Blake
doing the questioning?
“Why’d you do it, anyway? I mean, make the run.
Reasons after the fact could be supplied, I suppose, but I want to
know what makes a man try something impossible in the first place.
I’ve studied everything known about Brightside and the
Shadowline. There’s no way you could have known that
you’d find anything out there.”
What does make a man throw himself into something for which
there is neither a reasonable nor rational justification? Frog had
done a lot of thinking during his ran. Not once, even remotely, had
he been able to make his motives add up. Most of the time he had
told himself that he was doing it for Moira, but there had been
times whan he had suspected that he was doing it for Frog, to salve
a scarred ego by showing humanity it was wrong about his being a
clown. Yet that had not taken into account the probability of
failure, which would have done nothing but underscore his
foolishness.
Why, then? A badfinger for Blake? Because he had had some crazy,
deep-down conviction that he would find something? No. Not one of
those reasons was good enough in itself.
All that time alone and still he had not figured himself
out.
Thr man who hides from himself hides best of all.
“What did you find?”
Frog strove to focus on Plainfield. And realized that his
earlier assessments were incorrect. The man was neither vulture,
fox, nor wolf. He was a snake. Cold-blooded, emotionless, deadly.
Predatory, and unacquainted with mercy. Nor was he owned. This news
business was cover. He was a dagger in his own hand.
Plainfield moved toward him. A slap hypo appeared in his palm.
Frog struggled weakly. The hypo hit his arm. Wrong again, he thought. He’s worse than a snake.
He’s a human.
“What did you find?”
Frog knew he would not make it this time. This man, this thing
that called itself August Plainfield and pretended to be a newsman,
was going to strip him of his victory, then kill him. Even God in
heaven could not stop him from talking once the drug took hold, and
then what value would he have alive?
Frog talked. And talked. And, as he knew he must, he died. But
before he did, and while he was still sufficiently in possession of
his senses to understand, another man entered the dark door before
him.
Smythe burst into the room, alerted by his monitors. Moira
trailed him as if attached by a short chain. The doctor charged
Plainfield, opening his mouth to shout.
A small, silent palm weapon ruined Smythe’s heart before
any sound left his lips. Moira, as if on a puppeteer’s
strings, jerked back out of the room. Plainfield cursed but did not
pursue her.
A sadness overwhelmed Frog, both for himself and for Smythe.
On Blackworld, as on all but a few worlds, the dead never saw
resurrection. Even the Blakes remained dead when they died.
Resurrection was too expensive, too difficult, and too complex in
social implication. And why bother? Human numbers made life a cheap
commodity.
Plainfield finished with Frog, then disappeared. The murders
went on record as unsolved. Corporation police hunted the newsman,
but no trace turned up.
They wanted him for theft. They wanted him for destruction of
municipal and Corporate property. They wanted him for suborning
municipal and Corporate employees. They wanted him for a list of
crimes. But most of all they wanted him because of Frog and
Smythe.
Blake had a long, long memory.
Stimpson-Hrabosky News denied ever having heard of Plainfield.
How, then, Blake’s cops demanded, had the man reached
Blackworld in a Stimpson-Hrabosky charter? How, if he was an
unknown, had he managed to get himself elected pool man?
Stimpson-Hrabosky responded with almost contemptuous
silence.
Their reticence was itself informative. Plainfield obviously
carried a lot of weight outside.
In the furor of pursuit the killer’s motives became
obscured. Only a handful of men knew about Frog’s claim and
will, and they were the men Plainfield had bribed. They were on
trial and no one was listening to them. They were sent into exile,
which meant that they were given outsuits and put out of the city
locks to survive as best they could.
Blake reasserted its contention that it never left a debt
outstanding, though it might take a generation to repay.
Frog’s original will left Moira more than anyone had
anticipated. It set up a trust that assured her a place in
Edgeward’s life.
And life went on.