Tikil was really three cities loosely bound
together, two properly recognized on the maps of Korwar’s
northern continent, the third a sore—rather than a
scar—of war, still unhealed. To the north and west Tikil was
an exotic bloom on a planet that had harbored wealth almost from
the year of its first settlement. To the east, fronting on the
spaceport, was the part of Tikil in which lay the warehouses,
shops, and establishments of the thousands of businesses necessary
for the smooth running of a pleasure city, this exotic bloom where
three-quarters of the elite of a galactic sector gathered to
indulge their whims and play.
To the south was the Dipple, a collection of utilitarian, stark,
unattractive housing. To live there was a badge of inferiority. A
man from the Dipple had three choices for a cloudy future. He could
try to exist without sub-citizenship and a work permit, haunting
the Casual Labor Center to compete with too many of his fellows for
the very limited crumbs of employment; he could somehow raise the
stiff entrance fee and buy his way into the strictly illegal but
flourishing and perilous Thieves’ Guild; or he could sign on
as contract labor and be shipped off world in deep freeze with no
beforehand knowledge of his destination or work.
The War of the Two Sectors had been fought to a stalemate five
years ago. Afterwards, the two leading powers had shared out the
spoils—“spheres of influence.” Several major and
once richer planets had to be written off entirely, since worlds
reduced to cinders on which no human being dared land were not
attractive property. But a fringe of frontier worlds had passed
into the grasp of one or the other of the major powers—the
Confederation or the Council. As a result, the citizens of several
small nations suddenly found themselves homeless.
At the outbreak of the war ten years earlier, there had been
forced evacuations from such frontier worlds; pioneers had been
removed from their lands so that military outposts and masked solar
batteries could be placed in their stead. In this fashion, the
Dipple had been set up on Korwar, far back from the fighting line.
During the first fervor of patriotism the Dipple dwellers met with
good will. But later, when their home worlds were ruined or traded
away across the conference tables, there was resentment, and on
some planets there were organized moves to get rid of these
rootless inhabitants.
Now, before dawn in Tikil, men from the Dipple leaned their
bowed shoulders against the outer wall of the Casual Labor Center
or squatted on their heels before the door that marked the meeting
place between the haves and the have nots.
Troy Horan watched the pale gold in the morning sky deepen. Too
late to mark stars now. He tried to remember the sky over
Norden—and had again one of those sharp picture flashes of
recollection.
A silver bowl arching above a waving plain of grass, grass that
was pale green, mauve, and silver all at once, changing as the wind
rippled it. He knew the warmth of a sun always half veiled in
rainbow haze, felt the play of muscles as the animal he perched
upon as a small boy, rather than bestrode, broke into a rocking
canter. That was one of his last memories of Norden. They had been
out “riding track,” cutting a wide circle about the
grazing herd of tupan to check that none of the animals had drifted
toward the quicksands near the river.
It had been that same morning that the Council ships had cut out
of the sky, burning portions of the plain to charred earth and slag
with their tailbursts. Within three days Troy and his people had
left Norden for Korwar—three Horans, a small clan among all
the others. But not three for long. His father—big body,
laughing voice, quiet steady eyes, a pair of hands that did
everything well, a man who was able to establish a strange bond of
sympathy with any animal—had put on a trooper’s tunic
and vanished into the maw of a transport. Lang Horan had not
returned.
After that the Big Cough had hit the Dipple, leaving only Troy
Horan, a lanky adolescent who inherited skills and desires for
which there was no need on Korwar. He also possessed a stubborn,
almost fierce independence, which had so far kept him either from
signing on as contract labor or from the temptation offered by the
Guild. Troy Horan was a loner; he did not take orders well. And
since his mother’s death, he had no close attachments in the
Dipple. There were few left there now who had come from Norden. The
men had volunteered as troopers, and, for some reason, their
families had been particularly susceptible to the Cough.
The door that was their gate to the day’s future slid
back. Men stood away from the wall, got up. Mechanically Troy made
a brushing gesture down the length of his thin torso, though
nothing would restore a vestige of trimness to his clothing.
Spacer’s breeches, fifth-hand, clean enough but with their
sky blue now a neutral, dusty gray; spacer’s boots, a little
wide for his narrow feet, the magnetic insets clicking as he
walked; an upper tunic that was hardly more than a sleeveless
jerkin, all in contrast to the single piece of his old life that he
wore pulled tight about his flat middle. That wide belt of a Norden
rider was well oiled, every one of its silver studs polished and
free of tarnish. Those studs formed a design that was Troy’s
only heritage. If he ever rode the grass plains again, with tupan
galloping ahead—well, those tupan might bear that same
pattern on their cream-white hides. Lang Horan had been Range
Master and Brand Owner.
Because he was young, tough, and stubborn, Troy was well to the
fore of the line at the mechanical assignor. He watched with alert
jealousy as three men ahead ran toward the stamper, assured of
work—the mark on their wrists giving them the freedom of the
city, if only for a day. Then he was facing that featureless,
impersonal mike himself.
“Horan, class two, Norden, lawful work—” The
same old formula he uttered there day after day. He stood, his feet
a little apart, balancing as if the machine were an opponent ready
for battle. Under his breath he counted five quickly, and a tiny
hope was born. Since he had not been rejected at once, the assignor
did have some request that might be matched by his meager
qualifications.
The five he had counted doubled into ten before the assignor
asked a question: “Knowledge of animals?”
“That
of a Norden herd rider—” Troy stretched the truth to a
very thin band, but his small hope was growing fast.
The assignor meditated. Troy, through his excitement, felt the
impatience of the men behind him. Yet the length of time the
machine was taking was so promising—
“Employed.” Troy gave a small gasp of relief.
“Time of employment—indefinite. Employer—Kossi
Kyger, first level, Sixth Square. Report there at once.”
The plates in his boot soles beat a ratatat as he hurried to
the stamper, thrust his hand into the slot, and felt that instant
of heat that set the work mark on his tanned wrist.
“First level, Sixth Square,” he repeated aloud, not
because it was so necessary to impress his memory, but for the pure
pleasure of being able to claim a work address.
Sixth Square lay on the outer fringe of the business district,
which meant that Kyger was engaged in one of the upper-bracket
luxury trades. Rather surprising that such a merchant would have
need for a C.L.C. hireling. The maintenance force and highly
trained salesmen of those shops were usually of the full-citizen
class. And why animals? Horan swung on one of the fast-moving roll
walks, his temporarily tattooed wrist held in plain sight across
his wide belt to prevent questions from any patroller.
Because it was early, the roll walks were not crowded, and few
private flitters held the air lanes overhead. Most of the shutters
were still in place across the display fronts of the shops. It
would be midday before the tourists from the pleasure hotels and
the shoppers from the villas would move into town. On Korwar,
shopping was a fashionable form of amusement, and the treasures of
half the galaxy were pouring into Tikil, the result of stepped-up
production after the war.
Troy changed to another roll walk. The farther westward he went,
the more conspicuous he became. Not that clothing was standardized
here, but the material, no matter how fantastically cut and pieced
together, was always rich. And the elaborate hair arrangements of
the men who shared the roller with Troy, their jeweled wristbands,
neck chains, and citizens’ belt knives, took on a uniformity
in which his own close-cropped yellow hair, his weaponless belt,
his too-thin, fine-boned face were very noticeable. Twice a
patroller stirred at a check point and then relaxed again at the
sight of the stamp on the boy’s bony wrist.
Sixth Square was one of the areas of carefully tended vegetation
intended by the city planners to break the structure pattern of the
district. Troy jumped from the roller and went to the map on a side
pillar.
“Kyger,” he said into the mike.
“Kyger’s,” the finder announced. “Gentle
Homos, Gentle Fems—visit Kyger’s, where the living
treasures of a thousand worlds are paraded before you! See and hear
the Lumian talking fish, the dofuld, the priceless Phaxian
change-coat—the only one of its kind known to be in captivity
alive. Follow the light, Gentle Homo, Gentle Fem, to
Kyger’s—merchant dealer in extraordinary
pets!”
A small spark, which had glowed into life on the wall below the
map, loosed itself and now danced through the air ahead, blinking
with a gem flash. A pet shop! The inquiry about animal knowledge
was now explained. But Troy lost some of his zest. The thin story
he had told the assignor was now thinner, to the point of being
full of holes. He was ten years out of Norden, ten years away from
any contact with animals at all. Yet Troy clung to one hope. The
assignor had sent him, and the machine was supposed to be always
right in its selection.
He looked about him. The massed foliage of the center square was
a riot of luxuriant vegetation, which combined plants and shrubs
from half-a-dozen worlds into a pattern of growing—red-green,
yellow-green, blue-green, silver—And he began to long with
every fiber of his semistarved body that he would be the one Kyger
wanted, even for just one day.
His spark guide danced up and down, as if to center his
attention on the doorway before which it had paused, and then
snuffed out. Troy faced Kyger’s display and drew a deep
breath of wonder, for he seemed to be staring at four different
landscapes, each occupying one-quarter of the space. And each
landscape was skillfully contrived so that a section of an
outlandish planet had been transported in miniature. In each, small
creatures moved about the business of living and dying. It was all
art tri-dee, of course, but the workmanship was superb and would
completely enthrall any prospective customer.
Reluctantly Troy approached the door itself, a barrier where
plexaglass had been impressed with a startling and vivid pattern of
weird and colorful insects, none of which he recognized. There was
no sign that the establishment was open for business, and he had no
guide to lead him behind the mass of buildings to a rear entrance.
Troy hesitated uncertainly before the closed door until, among the
imprisoned creatures of the center panel, a portion of face with
reasonable human features appeared. Round dark eyes set in yellow
skin regarded him with no trace of interest or emotion.
Troy held up his wrist so that the employment mark might be
fully visible to those eyes. Unblinkingly they centered upon it.
Then the stretch of yellow cheek, the broad nose, vanished. The
creatures in the panel seemed to flutter as that barrier arose. And
a flow of warm air, redolent with many strange smells, engulfed
Troy. As if drawn by an invisible cord, he entered
Kyger’s.
He was given no time to look about the outer reception lounge
with its wall cabinets of more miniature other-world scenes, for
the owner of the eyes was awaiting him impatiently. Used as he was
to oddities, human, humanoid, and nonhuman, Troy still found the
small man strange enough to study covertly. He could have walked
under Horan’s out-stretched arm but his small, wiry body was
well proportioned and not that of a dwarf. What hair he had was
black and grew in small tufted knobs tight to the rounded bowl of
the skull. In addition, there was a rough brush of the same black
on his upper lip and two tufts or knots on his chin, one just below
the center of his lower lip and the other on the point of the jaw
beneath.
His clothing was the conventional one-piece suit of an employed
sub-citizen, with the striking addition of a pair of boots clinging
tightly to his thin legs and extending knee-high, fashioned of
reptile skin as soft as glove leather, giving off tiny prismatic
sparks with every movement of their wearer. About a slight potbelly
he had a belt of the same hide, and the knife that swung from it
was not only longer but also wider than those usually worn in
Tikil.
“Come—” His voice was guttural. A crook of
finger pointed the way, and Troy followed him through two more
showrooms into a passage from which opened a number of screened
doors. Now the effluvium of animal—a great many
animals—was strong, and sounds from each of the screened
doors they passed testified to the stock Kyger kept on hand.
Troy’s guide continued to the end of the hall, set his small
hand into the larger impression of a palm lock, and then stood
aside for Horan to enter.
If the yellow man was an oddity, the man who sat waiting for
Troy to cross his office was almost as great a surprise. Horan had
seen many of the merchants of Tikil, and all of them had been
glittering objects indeed. Their jewels, their ultrafashionable
dress, their eye-catching coiffures had all been designed as
advertisements to attract general attention.
But Kyger, if this was Kyger, was no such starburst. His
muscular body was covered with a hora-silk half tunic and kilt, but
the color was a dark and sober blue, and he wore no jewels at all.
On his right wrist was the broad service bracelet of a veteran
spacer with at least two constellations starring its sweep, while
his skull was completely shaven as if to accommodate the helmet of
a scout-ship man. The bareness of that deeply tanned stretch of
skin made the red, puckered scar down along his right ear the more
noticeable. Troy wondered fleetingly why he chose to keep that
disfiguring brand; plastic surgery could have erased it
completely.
The other regarded Troy for a long moment, his stare both as
aloof and as searching as that the yellow man had used through the
door panel.
“The assignor reported you as Norden,” he remarked,
but gave the planet name a slight accent new to Troy. “I
would rather have thought Midgard—”
Troy met him eye to eye. This man had a spacer’s knowledge
of racial types and other worlds right enough.
“I was born on Norden—”
The other might not have heard him. “Midgard—or even
Terra—”
Troy flushed. “Norden,” he repeated firmly. Lang
Horan’s father had been from Midgard, right enough. Before
that—well, who traced any planet-pioneering family back
through generations and star systems to the first hop?
“Norden. And you think that you know something about
animals.” Those gray eyes, cold as space between far-flung
suns, dropped from Troy’s face to the belt with its lovingly
polished silver studs. “Range Master, eh?”
Troy refused to be drawn. He shrugged, not knowing why the other
was trying to bait him. Everyone knew that Norden had been handed
over to the Confederation, that none of her former inhabitants
could hope to return to her plains.
“All right. If the assignor sent you, you’re the
best it could find.” Kyger arose from the enveloping embrace
of his eazi-rest. The yellow man slipped to his side. “Zul
will give you your orders. We are expecting a shipment in on the
Chasgar. You’ll go to the dock with Zul and do just as he
tells you—no more, certainly no less. Understand?”
There was a flick of razor-sharp whip in that. Troy nodded.
Zul was certainly not a talkative companion. He merely beckoned
Troy out through another door into a courtyard. This, too, was
sided with pens and cages, but Troy was given no time to inspect
their inhabitants. Zul waved him to a waiting flitter. As Troy took
his place in the foreseat, the small man reached for the controls
and they lifted with practiced ease to the air lanes. Zul circled,
then headed them toward the west and the spaceport.
There was more traffic aloft now, personal flitters, heavier
vans, and small flyers such as their own. Zul slipped through the
lanes with a maximum of speed and a minimum of effort, bringing
them down without a jar on the landing strip behind the receiver
station. Again a jerk of thumb served to bring Troy, trailing his
guide, into one of the many entrances of the clearance section. His
small companion was well known here, for he bypassed two barriers
without explanation, their guardians waving him on.
“Kyger’s.” Zul spoke at last, putting a claim
disk down before the man in charge of the third grill.
“Right section, third block—”
Now they were in a corridor with a wall on one side, a series of
bins, room size, on the other, each well filled with shipping
crates, bales, and containers. There were men hauling these in and
out, which testified that the contents of the packages in this
particular section were too precious to be left to the mechanical
transportation of the port robots.
Zul located the proper bin room and dropped his disk into the
release frame at the door. The protecting mesh rolled up, and a
light flashed on above two crates and a large, well-padded travel
cage. All three packages were bulky, and Zul, fists on hips, eyed
them closely before he said over his shoulder, “Get a
truck.”
Troy went back up the corridor to claim one of the motored
platforms. He was wriggling that out of a line of its fellows when
he caught a half glimpse of a face, a familiar face. As he jumped
on the platform, dug his boot toe into the activating button, and
headed the vehicle down the line, he wondered just what would
happen if he shouted out that a newly accepted member of the
Thieves’ Guild was working here, in the very center of the
supposedly best-protected treasure-transshipping center on Korwar.
Every man who entered this building had been scanned by the
psychocheck at the door, and everyone not on legitimate business
would have been unmasked by that latest weapon in the armory of the
patrollers. Yet Troy was certain he had seen Julnuk Varms shifting
a crate, and he knew for a fact that Varms had crossed the line
into the apprenticeship ranks of the Guild.
The platform rolled to a stop before Zul, and they went to work
shifting their cargo to its surface. Each piece was heavy enough to
require the combined efforts of the mismatched workers, and Troy
wiped his hand across his face as the second settled into place. He
eyed the curtains covering the sides of the cage, wondering just
what kind of exotic creature cowered within.
Cowered? That was the wrong word. The inmate of that cage was
curious, interested, alertly eager—not in any way cowed.
Inmate? Inmates—two of them—
Troy stood very still, staring at the closely curtained
transport cage. How did he know that?
Interest—now increasing—Something touched him, not
physically, but as if a very soft, inquiring paw had been drawn
lightly along his arm to test the quality of his skin, the strength
of his muscles, the toughness of the bone beneath that covering.
Just so did he feel that something had very lightly touched what
was his inner self in exploration. Touched—and flashed
instantly away—so that the sensation was cut off almost the
same moment that he was aware of it. Troy helped Zul boost the cage
onto the platform. There was no feeling of movement from
within—nothing at all. Had there ever been?
Tikil was really three cities loosely bound
together, two properly recognized on the maps of Korwar’s
northern continent, the third a sore—rather than a
scar—of war, still unhealed. To the north and west Tikil was
an exotic bloom on a planet that had harbored wealth almost from
the year of its first settlement. To the east, fronting on the
spaceport, was the part of Tikil in which lay the warehouses,
shops, and establishments of the thousands of businesses necessary
for the smooth running of a pleasure city, this exotic bloom where
three-quarters of the elite of a galactic sector gathered to
indulge their whims and play.
To the south was the Dipple, a collection of utilitarian, stark,
unattractive housing. To live there was a badge of inferiority. A
man from the Dipple had three choices for a cloudy future. He could
try to exist without sub-citizenship and a work permit, haunting
the Casual Labor Center to compete with too many of his fellows for
the very limited crumbs of employment; he could somehow raise the
stiff entrance fee and buy his way into the strictly illegal but
flourishing and perilous Thieves’ Guild; or he could sign on
as contract labor and be shipped off world in deep freeze with no
beforehand knowledge of his destination or work.
The War of the Two Sectors had been fought to a stalemate five
years ago. Afterwards, the two leading powers had shared out the
spoils—“spheres of influence.” Several major and
once richer planets had to be written off entirely, since worlds
reduced to cinders on which no human being dared land were not
attractive property. But a fringe of frontier worlds had passed
into the grasp of one or the other of the major powers—the
Confederation or the Council. As a result, the citizens of several
small nations suddenly found themselves homeless.
At the outbreak of the war ten years earlier, there had been
forced evacuations from such frontier worlds; pioneers had been
removed from their lands so that military outposts and masked solar
batteries could be placed in their stead. In this fashion, the
Dipple had been set up on Korwar, far back from the fighting line.
During the first fervor of patriotism the Dipple dwellers met with
good will. But later, when their home worlds were ruined or traded
away across the conference tables, there was resentment, and on
some planets there were organized moves to get rid of these
rootless inhabitants.
Now, before dawn in Tikil, men from the Dipple leaned their
bowed shoulders against the outer wall of the Casual Labor Center
or squatted on their heels before the door that marked the meeting
place between the haves and the have nots.
Troy Horan watched the pale gold in the morning sky deepen. Too
late to mark stars now. He tried to remember the sky over
Norden—and had again one of those sharp picture flashes of
recollection.
A silver bowl arching above a waving plain of grass, grass that
was pale green, mauve, and silver all at once, changing as the wind
rippled it. He knew the warmth of a sun always half veiled in
rainbow haze, felt the play of muscles as the animal he perched
upon as a small boy, rather than bestrode, broke into a rocking
canter. That was one of his last memories of Norden. They had been
out “riding track,” cutting a wide circle about the
grazing herd of tupan to check that none of the animals had drifted
toward the quicksands near the river.
It had been that same morning that the Council ships had cut out
of the sky, burning portions of the plain to charred earth and slag
with their tailbursts. Within three days Troy and his people had
left Norden for Korwar—three Horans, a small clan among all
the others. But not three for long. His father—big body,
laughing voice, quiet steady eyes, a pair of hands that did
everything well, a man who was able to establish a strange bond of
sympathy with any animal—had put on a trooper’s tunic
and vanished into the maw of a transport. Lang Horan had not
returned.
After that the Big Cough had hit the Dipple, leaving only Troy
Horan, a lanky adolescent who inherited skills and desires for
which there was no need on Korwar. He also possessed a stubborn,
almost fierce independence, which had so far kept him either from
signing on as contract labor or from the temptation offered by the
Guild. Troy Horan was a loner; he did not take orders well. And
since his mother’s death, he had no close attachments in the
Dipple. There were few left there now who had come from Norden. The
men had volunteered as troopers, and, for some reason, their
families had been particularly susceptible to the Cough.
The door that was their gate to the day’s future slid
back. Men stood away from the wall, got up. Mechanically Troy made
a brushing gesture down the length of his thin torso, though
nothing would restore a vestige of trimness to his clothing.
Spacer’s breeches, fifth-hand, clean enough but with their
sky blue now a neutral, dusty gray; spacer’s boots, a little
wide for his narrow feet, the magnetic insets clicking as he
walked; an upper tunic that was hardly more than a sleeveless
jerkin, all in contrast to the single piece of his old life that he
wore pulled tight about his flat middle. That wide belt of a Norden
rider was well oiled, every one of its silver studs polished and
free of tarnish. Those studs formed a design that was Troy’s
only heritage. If he ever rode the grass plains again, with tupan
galloping ahead—well, those tupan might bear that same
pattern on their cream-white hides. Lang Horan had been Range
Master and Brand Owner.
Because he was young, tough, and stubborn, Troy was well to the
fore of the line at the mechanical assignor. He watched with alert
jealousy as three men ahead ran toward the stamper, assured of
work—the mark on their wrists giving them the freedom of the
city, if only for a day. Then he was facing that featureless,
impersonal mike himself.
“Horan, class two, Norden, lawful work—” The
same old formula he uttered there day after day. He stood, his feet
a little apart, balancing as if the machine were an opponent ready
for battle. Under his breath he counted five quickly, and a tiny
hope was born. Since he had not been rejected at once, the assignor
did have some request that might be matched by his meager
qualifications.
The five he had counted doubled into ten before the assignor
asked a question: “Knowledge of animals?”
“That
of a Norden herd rider—” Troy stretched the truth to a
very thin band, but his small hope was growing fast.
The assignor meditated. Troy, through his excitement, felt the
impatience of the men behind him. Yet the length of time the
machine was taking was so promising—
“Employed.” Troy gave a small gasp of relief.
“Time of employment—indefinite. Employer—Kossi
Kyger, first level, Sixth Square. Report there at once.”
The plates in his boot soles beat a ratatat as he hurried to
the stamper, thrust his hand into the slot, and felt that instant
of heat that set the work mark on his tanned wrist.
“First level, Sixth Square,” he repeated aloud, not
because it was so necessary to impress his memory, but for the pure
pleasure of being able to claim a work address.
Sixth Square lay on the outer fringe of the business district,
which meant that Kyger was engaged in one of the upper-bracket
luxury trades. Rather surprising that such a merchant would have
need for a C.L.C. hireling. The maintenance force and highly
trained salesmen of those shops were usually of the full-citizen
class. And why animals? Horan swung on one of the fast-moving roll
walks, his temporarily tattooed wrist held in plain sight across
his wide belt to prevent questions from any patroller.
Because it was early, the roll walks were not crowded, and few
private flitters held the air lanes overhead. Most of the shutters
were still in place across the display fronts of the shops. It
would be midday before the tourists from the pleasure hotels and
the shoppers from the villas would move into town. On Korwar,
shopping was a fashionable form of amusement, and the treasures of
half the galaxy were pouring into Tikil, the result of stepped-up
production after the war.
Troy changed to another roll walk. The farther westward he went,
the more conspicuous he became. Not that clothing was standardized
here, but the material, no matter how fantastically cut and pieced
together, was always rich. And the elaborate hair arrangements of
the men who shared the roller with Troy, their jeweled wristbands,
neck chains, and citizens’ belt knives, took on a uniformity
in which his own close-cropped yellow hair, his weaponless belt,
his too-thin, fine-boned face were very noticeable. Twice a
patroller stirred at a check point and then relaxed again at the
sight of the stamp on the boy’s bony wrist.
Sixth Square was one of the areas of carefully tended vegetation
intended by the city planners to break the structure pattern of the
district. Troy jumped from the roller and went to the map on a side
pillar.
“Kyger,” he said into the mike.
“Kyger’s,” the finder announced. “Gentle
Homos, Gentle Fems—visit Kyger’s, where the living
treasures of a thousand worlds are paraded before you! See and hear
the Lumian talking fish, the dofuld, the priceless Phaxian
change-coat—the only one of its kind known to be in captivity
alive. Follow the light, Gentle Homo, Gentle Fem, to
Kyger’s—merchant dealer in extraordinary
pets!”
A small spark, which had glowed into life on the wall below the
map, loosed itself and now danced through the air ahead, blinking
with a gem flash. A pet shop! The inquiry about animal knowledge
was now explained. But Troy lost some of his zest. The thin story
he had told the assignor was now thinner, to the point of being
full of holes. He was ten years out of Norden, ten years away from
any contact with animals at all. Yet Troy clung to one hope. The
assignor had sent him, and the machine was supposed to be always
right in its selection.
He looked about him. The massed foliage of the center square was
a riot of luxuriant vegetation, which combined plants and shrubs
from half-a-dozen worlds into a pattern of growing—red-green,
yellow-green, blue-green, silver—And he began to long with
every fiber of his semistarved body that he would be the one Kyger
wanted, even for just one day.
His spark guide danced up and down, as if to center his
attention on the doorway before which it had paused, and then
snuffed out. Troy faced Kyger’s display and drew a deep
breath of wonder, for he seemed to be staring at four different
landscapes, each occupying one-quarter of the space. And each
landscape was skillfully contrived so that a section of an
outlandish planet had been transported in miniature. In each, small
creatures moved about the business of living and dying. It was all
art tri-dee, of course, but the workmanship was superb and would
completely enthrall any prospective customer.
Reluctantly Troy approached the door itself, a barrier where
plexaglass had been impressed with a startling and vivid pattern of
weird and colorful insects, none of which he recognized. There was
no sign that the establishment was open for business, and he had no
guide to lead him behind the mass of buildings to a rear entrance.
Troy hesitated uncertainly before the closed door until, among the
imprisoned creatures of the center panel, a portion of face with
reasonable human features appeared. Round dark eyes set in yellow
skin regarded him with no trace of interest or emotion.
Troy held up his wrist so that the employment mark might be
fully visible to those eyes. Unblinkingly they centered upon it.
Then the stretch of yellow cheek, the broad nose, vanished. The
creatures in the panel seemed to flutter as that barrier arose. And
a flow of warm air, redolent with many strange smells, engulfed
Troy. As if drawn by an invisible cord, he entered
Kyger’s.
He was given no time to look about the outer reception lounge
with its wall cabinets of more miniature other-world scenes, for
the owner of the eyes was awaiting him impatiently. Used as he was
to oddities, human, humanoid, and nonhuman, Troy still found the
small man strange enough to study covertly. He could have walked
under Horan’s out-stretched arm but his small, wiry body was
well proportioned and not that of a dwarf. What hair he had was
black and grew in small tufted knobs tight to the rounded bowl of
the skull. In addition, there was a rough brush of the same black
on his upper lip and two tufts or knots on his chin, one just below
the center of his lower lip and the other on the point of the jaw
beneath.
His clothing was the conventional one-piece suit of an employed
sub-citizen, with the striking addition of a pair of boots clinging
tightly to his thin legs and extending knee-high, fashioned of
reptile skin as soft as glove leather, giving off tiny prismatic
sparks with every movement of their wearer. About a slight potbelly
he had a belt of the same hide, and the knife that swung from it
was not only longer but also wider than those usually worn in
Tikil.
“Come—” His voice was guttural. A crook of
finger pointed the way, and Troy followed him through two more
showrooms into a passage from which opened a number of screened
doors. Now the effluvium of animal—a great many
animals—was strong, and sounds from each of the screened
doors they passed testified to the stock Kyger kept on hand.
Troy’s guide continued to the end of the hall, set his small
hand into the larger impression of a palm lock, and then stood
aside for Horan to enter.
If the yellow man was an oddity, the man who sat waiting for
Troy to cross his office was almost as great a surprise. Horan had
seen many of the merchants of Tikil, and all of them had been
glittering objects indeed. Their jewels, their ultrafashionable
dress, their eye-catching coiffures had all been designed as
advertisements to attract general attention.
But Kyger, if this was Kyger, was no such starburst. His
muscular body was covered with a hora-silk half tunic and kilt, but
the color was a dark and sober blue, and he wore no jewels at all.
On his right wrist was the broad service bracelet of a veteran
spacer with at least two constellations starring its sweep, while
his skull was completely shaven as if to accommodate the helmet of
a scout-ship man. The bareness of that deeply tanned stretch of
skin made the red, puckered scar down along his right ear the more
noticeable. Troy wondered fleetingly why he chose to keep that
disfiguring brand; plastic surgery could have erased it
completely.
The other regarded Troy for a long moment, his stare both as
aloof and as searching as that the yellow man had used through the
door panel.
“The assignor reported you as Norden,” he remarked,
but gave the planet name a slight accent new to Troy. “I
would rather have thought Midgard—”
Troy met him eye to eye. This man had a spacer’s knowledge
of racial types and other worlds right enough.
“I was born on Norden—”
The other might not have heard him. “Midgard—or even
Terra—”
Troy flushed. “Norden,” he repeated firmly. Lang
Horan’s father had been from Midgard, right enough. Before
that—well, who traced any planet-pioneering family back
through generations and star systems to the first hop?
“Norden. And you think that you know something about
animals.” Those gray eyes, cold as space between far-flung
suns, dropped from Troy’s face to the belt with its lovingly
polished silver studs. “Range Master, eh?”
Troy refused to be drawn. He shrugged, not knowing why the other
was trying to bait him. Everyone knew that Norden had been handed
over to the Confederation, that none of her former inhabitants
could hope to return to her plains.
“All right. If the assignor sent you, you’re the
best it could find.” Kyger arose from the enveloping embrace
of his eazi-rest. The yellow man slipped to his side. “Zul
will give you your orders. We are expecting a shipment in on the
Chasgar. You’ll go to the dock with Zul and do just as he
tells you—no more, certainly no less. Understand?”
There was a flick of razor-sharp whip in that. Troy nodded.
Zul was certainly not a talkative companion. He merely beckoned
Troy out through another door into a courtyard. This, too, was
sided with pens and cages, but Troy was given no time to inspect
their inhabitants. Zul waved him to a waiting flitter. As Troy took
his place in the foreseat, the small man reached for the controls
and they lifted with practiced ease to the air lanes. Zul circled,
then headed them toward the west and the spaceport.
There was more traffic aloft now, personal flitters, heavier
vans, and small flyers such as their own. Zul slipped through the
lanes with a maximum of speed and a minimum of effort, bringing
them down without a jar on the landing strip behind the receiver
station. Again a jerk of thumb served to bring Troy, trailing his
guide, into one of the many entrances of the clearance section. His
small companion was well known here, for he bypassed two barriers
without explanation, their guardians waving him on.
“Kyger’s.” Zul spoke at last, putting a claim
disk down before the man in charge of the third grill.
“Right section, third block—”
Now they were in a corridor with a wall on one side, a series of
bins, room size, on the other, each well filled with shipping
crates, bales, and containers. There were men hauling these in and
out, which testified that the contents of the packages in this
particular section were too precious to be left to the mechanical
transportation of the port robots.
Zul located the proper bin room and dropped his disk into the
release frame at the door. The protecting mesh rolled up, and a
light flashed on above two crates and a large, well-padded travel
cage. All three packages were bulky, and Zul, fists on hips, eyed
them closely before he said over his shoulder, “Get a
truck.”
Troy went back up the corridor to claim one of the motored
platforms. He was wriggling that out of a line of its fellows when
he caught a half glimpse of a face, a familiar face. As he jumped
on the platform, dug his boot toe into the activating button, and
headed the vehicle down the line, he wondered just what would
happen if he shouted out that a newly accepted member of the
Thieves’ Guild was working here, in the very center of the
supposedly best-protected treasure-transshipping center on Korwar.
Every man who entered this building had been scanned by the
psychocheck at the door, and everyone not on legitimate business
would have been unmasked by that latest weapon in the armory of the
patrollers. Yet Troy was certain he had seen Julnuk Varms shifting
a crate, and he knew for a fact that Varms had crossed the line
into the apprenticeship ranks of the Guild.
The platform rolled to a stop before Zul, and they went to work
shifting their cargo to its surface. Each piece was heavy enough to
require the combined efforts of the mismatched workers, and Troy
wiped his hand across his face as the second settled into place. He
eyed the curtains covering the sides of the cage, wondering just
what kind of exotic creature cowered within.
Cowered? That was the wrong word. The inmate of that cage was
curious, interested, alertly eager—not in any way cowed.
Inmate? Inmates—two of them—
Troy stood very still, staring at the closely curtained
transport cage. How did he know that?
Interest—now increasing—Something touched him, not
physically, but as if a very soft, inquiring paw had been drawn
lightly along his arm to test the quality of his skin, the strength
of his muscles, the toughness of the bone beneath that covering.
Just so did he feel that something had very lightly touched what
was his inner self in exploration. Touched—and flashed
instantly away—so that the sensation was cut off almost the
same moment that he was aware of it. Troy helped Zul boost the cage
onto the platform. There was no feeling of movement from
within—nothing at all. Had there ever been?