The Paradox Men

by Charles L. Harness

  He replaced the cube in his waist-pouch and waited.

  Nothing happened.

  For a long moment Alar stood motionless. Perspiration began to gather in his armpits and his throat grew dry.

  Either the Society had given him an outdated voice key, or there was an additional, unaccounted-for variable.

  And it was then that he noticed two things. The first was an ominous quiet in hall and guardroom. The second was that the gentle snores from the bed had ceased. The next moment stretched endlessly toward its breaking point.

  His incorrect signal had evidently activated some unseen alarm. Even as his mind raced in frantic fury he visualized briefly the hard alert faces of half a thousand Imperial Police, who would be wheeling patrol jets about, then hurtling toward the area.

  A faint hesitant scrape of sandals came from the hall. He instantly understood that the guards were puzzled, uncertain as to whether their entry would endanger their master.

  He knew that soon one of them would call out.

  In a bound he was at the bedroom door that opened to the guard annex and slammed it noisily behind electronic bolts. He listened momentarily to the angry voices on the other side.

  “Bring a beam-cutter!” came a cry.

  The door would be down in short order.

  Simultaneously a heavy blow struck him in the left shoulder and the bedroom sparkled with sudden light. He whirled, crouching, and appraised coolly the man in bed who had shot him.

  Shey’s voice was a strange mixture of sleepiness, alarm and indignation. “A Thief!” he cried, tossing the gun away as he realized that lead-throwers were no good against a Thief’s body-screen. “And I have no blade here.” He licked pudgy lips. “Remember,” he giggled nervously, “your Thief code forbids injuring an unarmed man. My purse is on the perfume table.”

  Both men listened to the blend of distant police sirens and the muffled curses and grunts coming from beyond the bedroom door.

  “You will open the jewel room,” said Alar flatly.

  Shey’s eyes widened.

  “My jewels!” he gasped. “You shall not have them!”

  Three sirens sounded very close. As Alar listened one of them choked off suddenly. I.P.’s would be swarming out of a patrol jet and setting up semiportable Kades in the street, capable of volatilizing him, armor or no armor.

  The bedroom door was beginning to vibrate in resonance with the beam-cutter.

  Alar strode almost casually to the bed and stood over Shey’s heavy face, which was upturned in trembling pallor. In a startling snakelike movement the Thief seized his host’s left eyelid between thumb and forefinger.

  Shey chuckled horridly, then raised his head painfully and reluctantly. He found himself sitting on the edge of his bed, then standing beside it. And when he attempted to grasp the slender throat of his tormentor, a knife seemed to stab into his eyeball.

  Sweat was pouring down his face when, a moment later, he stood before his beloved treasure room.

  All the sirens had ceased wailing. A hundred or more jets must be waiting for him outside.

  And Shey knew it too.

  A cunning grin stole over the psychologist’s mouth.

  “Don’t hurt me any more,” he giggled. “I’ll open the jewel room.”

  He put his lips to the rosette and whispered a few words. The door rolled noiselessly into the wall.

  He staggered back and rubbed his eye gingerly as the Thief leaped into the treasure alcove.

  With methodical speed Alar tore open the teakwood drawers and scooped their glittering contents into his pouch. A less experienced Thief would not have known where or when to stop but Alar, even in the act of reaching for a beautiful choker worth forty men, jerked back his hand and drew his pouchthong tight in a single motion.

  He was at the portal in a bound, just in time to see the bedroom door crash inward beneath a dazzling mass of rapiers. Even as his own blade whipped from its scabbard and disarmed the foremost guard, he knew that the odds were too great, that he must be wounded and perhaps killed before he could leap from the mile-high window. This was so because, before he could leap, he must tie his coiled shock-cord to some immovable object. But to what? Shey’s bed was no antique. It had no bedposts. Suddenly he knew the answer.

  By a miraculous coordination of concentration and skill he had remained unscathed during his retreat to the open window. The guards, unaccustomed to such mass attacks on a single opponent, were thrusting ad lib instead of simultaneously and he was able to parry each thrust as it came. But now, probably by accident, two guards lashed at him from either side. He attempted an intricate level-blade parry for both thrusts, but the angle of approach of the two rapiers was too wide.

  However, even as his blade was losing contact with that of the guard on his right, his left hand was drawing a noose of shock cord from the coil case on his chest, and as the blade seared into his side, he was throwing, left handed, a lasso towards the wet, balding face of Shey, who was crouching on the other side of the bed.

  And then the Thief, without waiting to see whether the noose had seized Shey’s neck, flung himself backward. The sword in his side did not pull free. Instead it was wrenched from the startled guard’s hand. With the sword imbedded in his side, Alar plunged out of the window into space.

  Somewhere in the first thirty meters, while he counted off the quarter seconds, he felt his side. The wound was not bad. The blade had sliced the flesh, was held now by his clothing. He tore the sword from his side.

  The line would gradually grow taut at the fourth second, assuming that the noose had tightened about Shey’s neck and that all the guards would be grasping at it with their bare hands for the better part of a minute before one of them should have the presence of mind to sever it with his sword. And by that time Alar would have cut it himself.

  He suddenly realized that the whirling, crashing fifth second had come and gone, and that he was now plummeting in free fall.

  The noose had not caught.

  He noted almost curiously that he was beyond panic and fear. He had often wondered how death would come, and how he would meet it. He would not live to tell his companion Thieves that his reaction to imminent death was simply a highly intensified observation, that he could see individual grains of quartz, feldspar, and mica in the granite blocks of the wall of the great building as it hurtled up and past. And that everything that had happened to him in his second life flashed before him in almost painful clarity. Everything, that is, except the key to his identity.

  For Alar did not know who he was.

  As the mill of death ground away he relived the moment when the two professors had found him, a young man of about thirty. They had found him wandering adaze along a bank of the upper Ohio River.

  He relived their searching tests of those far-off days. They were sure at the time that he was a spy planted by the Imperial Police, and for all he knew he might have been. His amnesia had been complete. Nothing of his past life had seeped through to suggest to him—or to his two new friends—what he might have been.

  He remembered their astonishment at his voracity for knowledge, recalled in detail the first and last university class he had attended and how he had fallen into a polite doze after the instructor’s fourth inaccuracy.

  He remembered vividly how the professors, after they had finally become convinced that his amnesia was unfeigned, had bought false indicia of his educational history. With the papers, he became, overnight, a Doctor of Astrophysics on sabbatical leave from the University of Kharkov and a substitute lecturer at the Imperial University, where the two professors taught.

  Then came the long walks at night, his arrest and beating by Imperial Police, his growing awareness of the wretchedness about him.

  Finally, he saw the foul-smelling battered van clatter through the streets in the early morning with its wailing burden of aged slaves.

  “Where were they being taken?” he had asked the professors later. “When a slave is too o
ld to work he is sold,” was all he could get from them.

  But he had finally discovered the secret. The charnel-house. The cost had been two bullets in his shoulder from the guard.

  Of all nights that he could remember that was the most revelatory. The two professors and a third man, a stranger with a black bag, were waiting for him when he crept blindly into his room in the early morning. He recalled vaguely the painful probings in his shoulder, the white bandages and finally the momentary nausea that followed the flow of something tingling from his scalp to his toes—Thief armor.

  By day he had lectured on astrophysics. By night he had learned the gentle arts of climbing a smooth wall with his fingernails—of running a hundred yards in eight seconds— of disarming three lunging Imperials. In his five years as a member of the Society of Thieves he had looted the wealth of Croesus, and the Society had freed tens of thousands of slaves with it.

  Thus had Alar become a Thief, thus was he now fulfilling an unpleasant maxim of the Society of Thieves—No Thief dies a natural death.

  Suddenly he felt a blasting blow on his back that tore his black vest off, and he realized that the shock cord, now tight as a steel wire, had jerked him back against the building.

  His lungs filled to the bursting point in the first breath he had drawn during the fall.

  He would live.

  His descent was gradually being broken. The noose must have caught on Shey, after all. He smiled at the struggle that must now be going on far above him—six burly men holding a thread-like cord with their bare hands to keep their source of revenue alive. But within a matter of seconds one of them would think to cut the cord.

  He looked below. He had not fallen as far as he had thought. It was now evident that he had counted the quarter seconds too rapidly. Why did time linger so in the presence of death?

  Now the dimly-lit street was rushing up to meet him. Tiny lights scurried around below, probably I.P. armored cars with short-range semiportable Kades as well as shell-throwers. He was certain that half a dozen infrared beams were bathing this side of the building, and knew that it was just a question of time before he was spotted. He doubted that the I.P.’s could score a direct shell hit on his body, but the shock cord was highly vulnerable. A flying metal fragment could easily sever it.

  The lights below were now forbiddingly large. Alar lifted his hand to the cord case, ready to engage the decelerator. About one hundred feet above the ground he jammed home the gear lever and almost blacked out under the abrupt deceleration. And then he was stumbling dizzily to his feet, cutting the cord and starting up a street barely alight with the fast-coming dawn.

  Which way to run? Would police cars with Kades guns be waiting for him when he turned the corner? Were all the streets blocked?

  The next few seconds would have to be played very accurately.

  A shaft of light stabbed at him from the left, followed by the stamp of running feet. He whirled in alarm to see a glittering sedan chair carried on the shoulders of eight stalwart slaves, whose sweating faces reflected the growing redness in the east. A woman’s slurred voice floated to him, and then the chair was past.

  Despite his growing peril he almost laughed. Now that nuclear-powered jet cars were available to all, the carousing nobility could distinguish themselves from the carousing bourgeois only by a return to the sedan chair of the Middle Ages. The padding feet died away.

  Then, the shock of what she had said hit him. “The corner to your left, Thief.”

  The Society must have sent her. But he really had no choice. He swallowed hard and ran around the corner—and stopped.

  Three Kades guns immediately swiveled in three I.P. cars to cover him. He threw up his hands and walked slowly towards the car on the left.

  “Don’t shoot!” he cried. “I surrender!”

  He gulped with relief as Dr. Haven dismounted from the impostor car, rapier drawn, and pretended to advance cautiously to meet him. A pair of handcuffs was gripped in one hand.

  “The reward goes three ways!” called an I.P. from the middle car.

  Dr. Haven did not turn, but held up a hand in acknowledgment.

  “Easy, boy,” he whispered to Alar. “Thank the gods you came this way. Lost a bit of blood? Surgeon in the car. Can you make it to your lecture?”

  “I think so, but in case I pass out, the jewels are in my pouch.”

  “Beautiful. That gives us four hundred freemen.” He seized Alar by the belt roughly. “Come on, you scum! You’ve got a lot of questions to answer before you die!”

  A few minutes later the Thief car lost its escorts, changed its insignia and sped toward the University.

  2

  The Lady and the Tarsier

  THE WOMAN SAT before the mirror, quietly brushing her black hair. Under the glow of the vanity lamp, the long strands were lustrous and fine, shimmering with blue highlights. The thick richness of her hair was a striking frame for her face, accentuating the whiteness of her skin, the cheeks and lips that were barely pink. It was a face as calm and cold as the hair was vibrant and warm. But the eyes were different. They were large and black and brought the face alive to harmonize with the hair. They, too, sparkled in the glow of the lamp. She could not dull those eyes as she could her face. She could only mask them, partially, by keeping her dark lashes low. She was keeping her eyes that way now, for the benefit of the man who stood behind her.

  “You might be interested to learn of the latest offer,” Haze-Gaunt said. He seemed to be toying idly with the emerald tassels on the vanity lamp, but she knew his every sense was strained to catch her faintest reaction. “Shey offered me two billion for you yesterday.”

  A few years ago she might have shuddered. But now … she continued to brush her black hair with long even strokes, and her quiet black eyes sought out his face in the vanity mirror.

  The face of the Chancellor of America Imperial was like no other face on earth. The skull was smooth-shaven, but the incipient hairline revealed a broad high forehead beneath which were sunk hard intelligent eyes. The pupils were dark, immense. The aquiline nose showed a slight irregularity, as though it had once been broken and reset.

  The man’s cheeks were broad, but the flesh was tight-fitting, lean and scarless except for one barely visible cicatrix across the jutting chin. She knew his dueling philosophy. Enemies should be disposed of cleanly and without unnecessary risk, by specialists in the art. He was courageous but not naïve.

  The mouth, she decided, might have been described in another man as firm; on him, however, it seemed vaguely petulant. It betrayed the man who had everything—and nothing.

  But perhaps the most remarkable thing about him was the tiny, huge-eyed ape-thing that crouched in eternal fright on the man’s shoulder, and which seemed to understand everything that was said. The warlock and his familiar, thought Keiris. What grotesque affinity had joined them?

  Unsmiling, Haze-Gaunt asked, “You aren’t interested?” He lifted his hand in an unconscious gesture and stroked his shrinking little pet.

  He never smiled. Only a few times had she known him to frown. An iron discipline defended his face from what he seemed to regard as puerile emotional vanities. And yet he could never hide his feelings from her.

  “Naturally, Bern, I’m interested. Have you entered a binding agreement for my disposal?”

  If he was rebuffed, he gave no sign of it beyond an imperceptible hardening of his jaw muscles. But she knew he would have liked to rip the jeweled tassel from its enchased foundation and hurl it across the room.

  She continued to brush her hair in unperturbed silence, her expressionless eyes looking calmly at his mirrored ones.

  He said, “I understand that you called to a man on the street early this morning when the chair slaves were bringing you in.”

  “Did I? I don’t remember. Perhaps I was drunk.”

  “Some day,” he murmured, “I really shall sell you to Shey. He loves to experiment. I wonder what he would do to you?”
/>   “If you want to sell me, then sell me.”

  His mouth barely curled. “Not yet. You are, after all, my wife.” He said it unfeelingly, but there was that faint trace of a sneer at the corner of his lips.

  “Am I?” She felt her face grow warm and saw in the mirror the deepening shade of pink on her cheeks surging toward her ears. “I thought I was your slave.”

  Haze-Gaunt’s eyes flickered in the mirror. He had noticed the flush of color on her skin, and she secretly raged that he did. These were his moments of satisfaction against her husband—her true husband.

  “It’s the same thing, isn’t it?” he said. The faint sneer had subtly altered into a faint smirk.

  She was right: he had scored and found his pleasure. She tried to twist the direction of the conversation. “Why bother to mention Shey’s offer? I know I afford you far too much pleasure to exchange for a bit more wealth. More money won’t satisfy your hatred.”

  The curl in his lips faded away, leaving only the sharp line of his mouth. His eyes locked with hers in the mirror.

  “There is no one I need hate now,” he replied.

  What he said was true, she knew, but it was an evasive truth. He did not need to hate her husband, for he had destroyed her husband. He did not need to hate, but he still did. His bitter hatred and envy of the achievements of the man she loved was as strong as ever. It would never be quenched. That was why she was enslaved. She had been the beloved of the man he hated—she was a means for revenge against the dead.

  “That has always been true,” she said, holding his gaze steadily with her own.

  “There is no one,” he repeated slowly, “I need hate now.” He bore down on the final word just enough for her to catch the stress. “You cannot escape the fact that I have you.”

  She deliberately made no reply. Instead she lazily shifted the brush from one hand to the other, attempting to make the movement an insolent gesture. She told herself, “You think I cannot escape, that I remain with you because I must. How little you know, Haze-Gaunt!”