“All right,” agreed the cop. He blinked as he tried to rationalize his mind. Thoughts gyrated bafflingly in his cranium. “Not for you to reason why. Do your duty and ask no questions. Let higher-ups take the responsibility. This guy’s got all the authority in the world— and he knows what he’s doing.” There was something not quite right about those thoughts. They seemed to condense inward instead of expanding outward, as thoughts ought to do. But they were powerful enough, sensible enough, and he wasn’t able to give birth to any contrary ideas. “All right,” he repeated.
Studying the passers-by, Harold picked a man of his own height and build. Of all the apparel streaming past, this fellow’s looked made to fit him to a nicety. He nudged the cop.
“That’s the man.”
The officer strode majestically forward, stopped the victim, said, “Police! I’m taking you in for interrogation.”
“Me?” The man was dumfounded. “I’ve done nothing!”
“Then what’ve you got to worry about?”
“Nothing,” hastily assured the other. He scowled with annoyance. “I guess I’ll have to go. But it’s a waste of time and a nuisance.”
“So you think the Empire’s business is a nuisance?” inquired Harold, joining the cop.
The victim favored him with a look of intense dislike, and complained, “Go on, try making a case against me. Having it stick will be something else!”
“We’ll see!”
Cutting down a side street, the trio hit a broad avenue at its farther end. No cars here; it was solely for pedestrians. The road was divided into six moving strips, three traveling in each direction, slowest on the outsides, fastest in the middle. Small groups of people, some chatting volubly, some plunged in boredom, glided swiftly along the road and shrank in the distance. A steady rumbling sound came from beneath the rubbery surface of the road.
The three skipped onto an outer slow strip, thence to the medium fast strip, finally to the Central rapid strip. The road bore them ten blocks before they left it. Harold could see it rolling on for at least ten blocks more.
The cop’s apartment proved to be a modernistic, three-roomed bachelor flat on the second floor of a tall, graystone building. Here, the captive started to renew his protests, looked at Harold, found his opinions changing even as he formed them. He waxed co-operative, though in a manner more stupefied than willing. Emptying the contents of his pockets on a table, he exchanged clothes.
Now dressed in formal, less outlandish manner, Harold said to the police officer, “Take off your jacket and make yourself at home. No need to be formal on this job. We may be here some time yet. Get us a drink while I tell this fellow what’s afoot.” He waited until the cop had vanished into an adjoining room, then his eyes flamed at the vaguely disgruntled victim. “Sleep!” he commanded, “sleep!”
The man stirred in futile opposition, closed his eyes, let his head hang forward. His whole body slumped wearily in its chair. Raking rapidly through the personal possessions on the table, Harold found the fellow’s identity card. Although he’d never seen such a document before, he wasted no time examining it, neither did he keep it. With quick dexterity, he dug the cop’s wallet out of his discarded jacket, extracted the police identity card, substituted the other, replaced the wallet. The police card he put in his own pocket. Way back on the home planet it was an ancient adage that double moves are more confusing that single ones.
He was barely in time. The cop returned with a bottle of pink, oily liquid, sat down, looked dully at the sleeper, said, “Huh?” and transferred his lackluster stare to Harold. Then he blinked several times, each time more slowly than before, as if striving to keep his eyes open against an irresistible urge to keep them shut. He failed. Imitating his captive, he hung his head—and began to snore.
“Sleep,” murmured Harold, “sleep on toward the dawn. Then you may awake. But not before!”
Leaning forward, he lifted a small, highly polished instrument from its leather case beneath the policeman’s armpit. A weapon of some sort. Pointing it toward the window, he pressed the stud set in its butt. There was a sharp, hard crack, but no recoil. A perfect disk of glassite vanished from the center of the window. Cold air came in through the gap, bringing with it a smell like that of roasted resin. Giving the weapon a grim look, he shoved it back into its holster, dusted his fingers distastefully.
“So,” he murmured, “discipline may be enforced by death. Verily, I’m back in the dark ages!”
Ignoring the sleepers, he made swift search of the room. The more he knew about the Empire’s ordinary, everyday citizens the better it’d be for him. Knowledge—the right knowledge—was a powerful arm in its own right. His people understood the value of intangibles.
Finished, he was about to leave when a tiny bell whirred somewhere within the wall. He traced the sound as emanating from behind a panel, debated the matter before investigating further. Potential danger lurked here; but nothing ventured, nothing gained. He slid the panel aside, found himself facing a tiny loudspeaker, a microphone, a lens, and a small, circular screen.
The screen was alive and vivid with color, and a stern, heavily jowled face posed in sharp focus within its frame. The caller raked the room with one quick, comprehending glance, switched his attention to Harold.
“So the missing Guarda is indisposed,” he growled. “He slumbers before a bottle. He awaits three charges: absent from duty, improperly dressed, and drunk! We’ll deal with this at once.” He thinned his lips. “What is your name and the number of your identity card, citizen?”
“Find out,” suggested Harold. He slammed the panel before the tiny scanner could make a permanent record of his features—if he had not done so already.
That was an unfortunate episode: it cut down his self-donated hours of grace to a few minutes. They’d be on their way already, and he’d have to move out fast.
He was out of the apartment and the building in a trice. A passing car stopped of its own accord and took him downtown. Its driver was blissfully unaware of the helplessness of his own helpfulness.
Here, the city seemed brighter than ever mostly because the deeper darkness of the sky enhanced the multitude of lights. A few stars still shone, and a string of colored balls drifted high against the backdrop where some unidentifiable vessel drove into space.
He merged with the crowds still thronging the sidewalks. There was safety in numbers. It’s hard to pick one guy out of the mob, especially when he’s dressed like the mob, behaves like the mob. For some time he moved around with the human swarm though his movements were not as aimless. He was listening to thoughts, seeking either of two thought-forms, one no more than slightly helpful, the other important. He found the former, not the latter.
A fat man wandered past him and broadcast the pleasurable notion of food shared in large company. He turned and followed the fat man, tracking him along three streets and another moving avenue. The fat man entered a huge restaurant with Harold at his heels. They took an unoccupied table together.
Plenty of active thoughts here. In fact the trouble was that there were far too many. They made a constant roar right across the telepathic band; it was difficult to separate one from another, still more difficult to determine who was emanating which. Nevertheless, he persisted in his effort to sort out individual broadcasts, taking his food slowly to justify remaining there as long as possible. Long after the fat man had left he was still seated there, listening, listening. There were many thoughts he found interesting, some revealing, some making near approach to the notions he sought, but none quite on the mark, not one.
In the end, he gave it up, took his check from the waiter. It was readily apparent what the waiter had on his mind, namely, this crazy stuff called money. Roka had told him a lot about money, even showing him samples of the junk. He remembered that Roka had been dumfounded by his ignorance concerning a common medium of exchange. With amusing superiority, the worthy lieutenant had assumed that Harold’s people had yet to d
iscover what they’d long since forgotten.
There had been some of this money—he didn’t know just how much—in the pockets of this suit, but he’d left it all with the suit’s hapless donor. There wasn’t any point in snatching someone else’s tokens. Besides, having managed without it all his life he wasn’t going to become a slave to it now.
He paid the waiter with nothing, putting it into the fellow’s hand with the lordly air of one dispensing a sizable sum. The waiter gratefully accepted nothing, put nothing into his pocket, initialed the check, bowed obsequiously. Then he rubbed his forehead, looked vague and confused, but said nothing. Harold went out.
It was on the sidewalk Harold made the contact he was seeking, though not in the manner he’d expected. He was looking for a mutinous thinker who might lead him to the underworld of mutinous thinkers. Instead, he found a friend.
The fellow was twenty yards away and walking toward him with a peculiarly loose-jointed gait. He was humanoid in all respects but one—his skin was reptilian. It was a smooth but scaly skin of silvery gray in which shone an underlying sheen of metallic blue. The pupils of his eyes were a very light gray, alert, intelligent.
Those eyes looked straight into Harold’s as they came abreast, a flood of amity poured invisibly from them as he smiled and said in an undertone, “Come with me.” He walked straight on, without a pause. He didn’t look back to see whether Harold followed.
Harold didn’t wait to consider the matter. This was a time for quick decision. Swiveling on one heel he trailed along behind the speaker. And as he trod warily after the other, his mind was active with thoughts, and his thinking was done within a mental shell through which nothing could probe.
Evidently the scaly man was an outsider, a product of some other world. His queer skin was proof of that. There were other factors, too. He hadn’t read Harold’s mind—Harold was positive of that— yet in some strange, inexplicable way he’d recognized a kinship between them and had acknowledged it without hesitation. Moreover, he was strolling along with his mind wide open, but Harold was totally unable to analyze his thoughts. Those thoughts, in all probability, were straightforward and logical enough, but they oscillated in and out of the extreme edge of the neural band. Picking them up was like trying to get frequency modulation on a receiver designed for amplitude modulation. Those thought-forms might be normal, but their wave-forms were weird.
Still not looking back, the subject of his speculations turned into an apartment building took a levitator to the tenth floor. Here he unlocked a door, gazed around for the first time, smiled again at his follower, motioned him inside.
Harold went in. The other closed the door after him. There were two similar entities in the apartment. One sat on the edge of a table idly swinging his legs; the other lounged on a settee and was absorbed in a magazine.
“Oh, Melor, there’s a—” began the one on the settee. He glanced up, saw the visitor, grinned in friendly fashion. Then his expression changed to one of surprise, and he said, “By the everlasting light, it’s you! Where did you find him, Melor?”
This one’s mind was fully as baffling and Harold found himself unable to get anything out of it. The same applied to the being perched upon the table: his thoughts wavered in and out of the borderline of detection.
“I found him on the street,” replied the one called Melor, “and I invited him along. He has a most attractive smell.” He sat down, invited Harold to do likewise. Looking at the one on the settee, he went on, “What did you mean by, ‘Oh, it’s you’? D’you know him?”
“No.” The other switched on a teleset at his side. “They broadcast a call for him a few minutes ago. He’s wanted—badly.” He moved a second switch. “Here’s the recording. Watch!”
The set’s big screen lit up. A sour-faced man in flamboyant uniform appeared on the screen, spoke with official ponderousness.
“All citizens are warned to keep watch for and, if possible, apprehend an escaped specimen recently brought from the Frontier. Name: Harold Harold-Myra. Description—” He went on at great length, giving everything in minute detail, then finished, “His attire is noticeably unconventional and he has not yet been provided with an identity card. Citizens should bear in mind that he may possess attributes not familiar to Empire races and that he is wanted alive. In case of necessity, call Police Emergency on Stud Four. Here is his likeness.”
The screen went blank, lit up again, showed Harold’s features in full color. He recognized part of his former prison in the background. Those midget scanners had done their job!
“Tush!” scoffed the being on the settee. He switched off, turned to Harold. “Well, you’re in good hands. That’s something. We wouldn’t give anyone in authority a magni-belt to hold up his pants. My name’s Tor. The one industriously doing nothing on the table is Vern. The one who brought you here is Melor. Our other names don’t matter much. As maybe you’ve guessed, we aren’t of this lousy, over-organized world. We’re from Linga, a planet which is a devil of a long way off, too far away for my liking. The more I think of it, the farther it seems.”
“It’s no farther than my own world,” said Harold. He leaned forward. “Look, can you read my mind?”
“Not a possibility of it,” Tor answered. “You’re like the local breed in that respect—you think pulsatingly and much too far down for us. Can you read ours?”
“I can’t. You wobble in and out of my limit.” He frowned. “What beats me is what made Melor pick me out if he can’t read my thoughts.”
“I smelled you,” Melor put in.
“Huh?”
“That’s not strictly correct, but it’s the best way I can explain it. Most of the Empire’s peoples have some peculiar faculty they call a sense of smell. We don’t possess it. They talk about bad odors and sweet ones, which is gibberish to us. But we can sense affinities and oppositions, we can sort of ‘smell’ friends and enemies, instantly, infallibly. Don’t ask me how we do it, for how can I tell you?”
“I see the difficulty,” agreed Harold.
“On our world,” Melor continued, “most life forms have this sense which seems peculiar to Linga. We’ve no tame animals and no wild ones—they’re tame if you like them, wild if you don’t. None would be driven by curiosity to make close approach to a hunter, none would flee timidly from someone anxious to pet them. Instinctively they know which is friend and which is enemy. They know it as certainly as you know black from white or night from day.”
Tor put in, “Which is an additional reason why we’re not very popular. Skin trouble’s the basic one, d’you understand? So among an appalling mixture of hostile smells we welcome an occasional friendly one—as yours is.”
“Do the Dranes smell friendly?”
Tor pulled a face. “They stink!” he said with much emphasis. Gazing ruminatively at the blank television screen, he went on, “Well, the powers-that-be are after your earthly body, and I’m afraid we can’t offer you much encouragement though we’re willing to give you all the help we can. Something like twenty specimens have escaped in the last ten or twelve years. All of them broke loose by suddenly displaying long-concealed and quite unexpected powers which caught their captors by surprise. But none stayed free. One by one they were roped in, some sooner than others. You can’t use your strength without revealing what you’ve got, and once the authorities know what you’ve got they take steps to cope with it. Sooner or later the fugitive makes a try for his home planet—-and finds the trappers waiting.”
‘They’re going to have a long, long wait,” Harold told him, “for I’m not contemplating a return to my home world. Leastways, not yet. What’s the use of coming all the way here just to go all the way back again?”
“We took it that you hadn’t much choice about the coming,” said Tor.
“Nor had I. Circumstances made it necessary for me to come. Circumstances make it necessary for me to stay awhile.”
The three were mildly surprised by this phlegmatic attitud
e.
“I’m more of a nuisance here,” Harold pointed out. “This is the Empire’s key planet. Whoever bosses this world bosses the Empire. It may be one man, it may be a small clique, but on this planet is the mind or minds which make the Empire tick. I’d like to retime that tick.”
“You’ve some hopes!” opined Tor gloomily. “The Big Noise is Burkinshaw Three, the Lord of Terror. You’ve got to have forty-two permits, signed and countersigned, plus an armed escort, to get within sight of him. He’s exclusive!”
“That’s tough, but the situation is tougher.” He relaxed in his chair and thought awhile. “There’s a Lord of Terror on every planet, isn’t there? It’s a cockeyed title for the bosses of imperial freedom!”
“Terror means greatness, superior wisdom, intellect of godlike quality,” explained Tor.
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