Crag crossed to the bar and took a stool. The big lantern-jawed bartender moved down the bar opposite him without speaking. Crag ordered his drink and got it, having momentary trouble finding a bill small enough for a small bar like this one to be able to cash. He remembered he was trying to spend money, not to save it, and told the bartender to have a drink with him.
The bartender thanked him and poured a second drink. He reached behind him and flicked the switch of a radio. “May be a newscast on,” he said.
There was, but it was a political discussion; the announcer was discussing probabilities and possibilities in the coming elections—just as though he meant what he was saying, as though he didn’t know that there weren’t any possibilities or probabilities, that the results of elections had already by now been decided in closed conferences between the leaders of the two big parties and that the casting and counting of votes was only a formality.
Crag said a four-letter word and the lantern-jawed bartender nodded. “Yeah, it’s hogwash,” he said. “I was hoping there’d be something on the new planet, but that would have been at the start of the ’cast. Well, I heard the report on it a couple hours ago; guess there hasn’t anything much happened since then.” He reached back to turn off the radio and then stayed his hand.
The newscaster was saying: “From Earth. The great Judge Olliver is reported missing in space. Olliver’s private spaceship, a J-14 class ship, cleared from Mars City two weeks ago, presumably to return to Earth. Olliver was accompanied by his wife and his personal pilot. The ship has not been reported as landing on Earth or elsewhere, and since it carried supplies for three people for a period not to exceed ten days, it can only be presumed that…”
“Hell,” he said, “that’s one guy in politics who might have been straight. Say, what’s your idea on this new planet business?”
“I haven’t any,” Crag said. “What’s yours?”
“Damn if I know. Why should I, when even the science boys ain’t got an idea what’s going on. Oh, they got theories; they always got theories. But none of them makes any sense. The one thing they can’t admit is that something goes on they can’t understand. ’Nother drink?”
Crag said, “Thanks, no. I’m leaving now.”
He got down off the stool and started for the door. There was a click and Crag recognized the sound and its source and reacted instantaneously; he saved his life by dropping so fast that the shot missed him. The click had been the lock of the door he’d been walking toward and it had been electrically activated from behind the bar.
The place was a deadfall, as some small quiet bars were, especially ones near the outskirts of a big city, as this one was. In such a place, a solitary customer didn’t leave alive if he was foolish enough to be well dressed and to flash a roll of big denomination bills, as Crag had. He saw now, even as he fell, that the two customers who’d been seated at the table when he’d entered were no longer there; they’d happened to leave quietly while he’d been listening to the newscast or to the bartender.
The second drink the bartender had just asked him if he’d wanted would, no doubt, have been a poisoned one. Since he’d turned it down and started for the door, the bartender had fallen back upon his second line of offense; he’d activated the lock of the outer door by remote control and had picked up and used a weapon he’d had ready behind the bar.
The weapon, Crag could see now, from the floor, was an antique sawed-off shotgun, still—if you didn’t mind noise, and this bar like most was doubtless soundproofed—as dangerous a weapon as existed for close or medium range shooting. It was being lowered now, the bartender was trying to line it up on Crag again before he pulled the second trigger.
But Crag was rolling fast toward the bar and close enough to it now so the gun couldn’t aim at him, unless the bartender climbed up on the bar. And running footsteps behind the bar told Crag that the bartender was coming around the end of the bar—and which end he was coming around. Crag sat up, facing that way, his metal left hand gripped in his good right one, and his right arm cocked to throw.
It scored a bull’s-eye in the bartender’s face as he came around the end and before he could even begin to aim the shotgun.
That was the end of the fight; it had lasted less than three seconds, and the bartender was dead.
Crag got back his hand and dusted himself off. He went back of the bar to the cash register and found a little more than a hundred dollars. But in the bartender’s pocket he found proof that the man had made a good haul, and recently. There were eight thousand-dollar bills. Crag grimaced, and then laughed at himself for doing so. He was getting ahead of the game instead of behind; his total expenditures out of the half million, even counting the damage to his suite for which he’d not yet paid, would be less than the eight thousand he’d just found.
Rather than risk being seen leaving the place, he left by a back door into an alley.
Back at the hotel a clerk, not the manager, was on duty at the desk. But he told Crag that the damage in his suite was repaired and presented him a bill. The bill was only slightly higher than Crag had guessed it would be; he paid it, and another thousand in advance.
“Thank you, Mr. Ah,” the clerk said. “If there is anything—?”
There wasn’t anything else he wanted, Crag assured him.
In his suite, he wandered around for a while and then turned on the radio in the salon; it was a few minutes before the hour and there would be a newscast on the hour. He suffered through a commercial and then sat down as the newscaster started talking.
“First the latest reports on the new planet forming in the asteroid belt—or in what was the asteroid belt.
“The planet is forming with incredible rapidity. It is estimated that nine tenths of all the former asteroids are now a part of it. It is currently approximately the size and mass of Mars, and will be slightly larger when the remaining free asteroids have crashed into it—as, within another four to six hours all of them will have done. Those behind it in its orbit are accelerating speed so they will crash into it; those ahead of it in its orbit are decelerating and it will overtake them.
“The planet is revolving, but the period of revolution, even if it has as yet stabilized, cannot be determined until the clouds of dust thrown up by the crashing of the arriving asteroids have settled sufficiently to make the surface visible. The fact that this dust stays suspended in clouds is proof that the new planet, incredible as this may seem, already has an atmosphere. Because of the thickness of the dust an accurate spectroscopic examination cannot be made as yet, but the atmosphere definitely contains oxygen and will probably be breathable.
“Observations, spectroscopic and otherwise, are now being made from spaceships only a few hundred thousand miles away. Landings and exploration will be made as soon as the solar council deems them to be safe.
“No decision has been made yet on a name for the new planet. Majority opinion favors giving the honor of naming it to Bellini, the astronomer who, through the big scope on Luna, first observed the perturbation of the orbit of the asteroid Ceres. His report focused attention upon the asteroid belt and led to the discovery of what was happening there.”
The newscast switched to politics and Crag shut it off.
He wondered if there might be a picture of the new planet on video; surely they’d be scanning it from the ships out there observing from so relatively close. He opened the double doors behind which was the big video screen, flicked the switch and backed away from it while it warmed up.
The set hummed and brilliant colors flashed on the screen; then the hum turned into music—if one could call it that—and the colors became a larger-than-life closeup of a beautiful young man with blond ringlets of hair, plucked eyebrows and full sensuous lips that were crooning:
Jet up! Jet down! On a slow ship to Venus!
Honey-wunny-bunny…
Calmly and soberly, without anger, Crag walked to the screen and kicked it in.
He went to t
he bar and poured himself a short nightcap, found himself yawning before he finished drinking it, and went to bed as soon as he’d finished it.
And dreamed, but in the morning did not remember any of the things he had dreamed. Which was just as well, for being Crag he would have been disgusted with himself for having dreamed them.
The next day he spent walking, refamiliarizing himself with the downtown business section of Mars City. He went to the two banks at which he’d left part of his money before leaving Mars with Olliver a couple of weeks before. He’d left it there because he hadn’t trusted Olliver. But he didn’t trust the banks either and decided now that he’d rather have his money in cash. True, there was a chance of his being killed and robbed, as he had almost been last night, but if he was killed it might as well be for a large sum as a relatively small one; whatever was left wasn’t going to do him any good.
But he found that he had failed to realize how bulky half a million would be. Even with most of it in ten-thousand-dollar bills, the largest denomination available except for banking transactions, it made a stack of bills an inch thick. Even divided among several pockets he found it awkward to carry. So that evening he hid most of it in his suite, a hundred thousand dollars in each of four caches. He used ingenuity and imagination in finding those caches in places where it was almost impossible for them to be found, even by a person deliberately searching.
It killed the evening for him.
CHAPTER NINE
HE WENT out again the next day and found himself gravitating into the spacemen’s quarter, which was just north of the main downtown district. Spacemen did hang out there—especially when they were broke or nearly broke—but they made up only a small fraction of the floating population. In character it was a tenderloin district, a Skid Row.
Crag had no business going there, he knew, for the quarter offered nothing that he couldn’t have obtained elsewhere—and much more safely. In the quarter, murders, fights and robberies were everyday matters, and the police went in squads of six; they were hated so much that a lone policeman wouldn’t have survived a day. Let alone a night.
Yes, it was a dangerous district for a man who was dressed expensively and was carrying almost a hundred thousand dollars in cash. Maybe that was why Crag liked it. Danger stimulated him, made him alert and alive. Only in danger of death did he find joy in life.
Was it because, he sometimes wondered, subconsciously death was what he really wanted? Was his hatred of humanity so great, and his loneliness so great that he could find happiness only in oblivion?
Sometimes he thought so, and at least casually contemplated the simple and obvious answer. Nephthin would do it. Nepthin was difficult to obtain, but anything could be obtained if you knew the ropes and had plenty of money. Even nephthin, the one drug that drug peddlers hated as much as policemen did. There was no future in selling nephthin because it didn’t build any repeat trade; you could sell only one dose to a customer because it killed him within twenty hours. It put him into a state of ecstasy for a while that was more intense by a hundred times than any other drug could achieve, and then put him in a berserker rage in which he went out and killed as many people as he could before being killed himself. If he wasn’t killed, if he was caught and restrained instead, he died just the same—but still in ecstasy, no matter what was being done to him. It was a perfect finish for a man who wanted, for whatever reason, to go out in a blaze of ecstatic glory, especially if he hated people and liked the idea of taking a few, or a dozen, of them along with him, so it was understandable why the sale or even the possession of nephthin had been legislated to be a crime punishable by nothing less than twenty years’ labor on Callisto, or the psycher. Even most hardened criminals and dope peddlers took a dim view of it—unless they themselves felt inclined to sample its pleasures, in which case of course they had nothing to lose.
But oddly although he would be perfectly content to be dead (and can the dead be otherwise than content?), Crag had no active desire to die. Not, at least, by his own hand.
He remembered a book, a very old one that he had read once, about the hunting of tigers in a part of Earth once known as India; it had told of a killer tiger, a man-eater, which had terrorized an Indian province for years and killed hundreds of people. To the terrified natives it had been known as “The Moaner” because of the sound it made constantly when it prowled near a village at night. When a white hunter, the author of the book, finally killed it, he had examined the tiger and found a very old and deep-seated infection; the bone was decayed and the flesh around it rotten and pulpy. For years every step the tiger had taken had been excruciating agony, yet he had prowled and killed and eaten. Tigers don’t commit suicide, not even with nephthin.
Crag tried gambling, but there wasn’t much in it for him. The big games, like the ones in the gambling rooms of the Luxor, were so ridiculously crooked that there was no point, no enjoyment, in bucking them. He might as well have made a bonfire of the money and enjoyed its warmth. He went to the Luxor’s main gambling salon once, but only once, the second day after he’d finished his drinking binge. For a while he drew cards in a mara game at a hundred dollars a card and managed to lose a few thousand dollars but the dealing was so obviously sleight of hand that finally, in utter disgust, he slapped his metal hand down, not too hard, on the hand of the dealer who was passing him a card. The dealer screamed and dropped two cards where only one should have been, and then stepped back whimpering to nurse his broken hand. Crag walked out, wondering whether the hotel would bill him for that. But the hotel didn’t; too many people had seen that extra card.
For a while he gambled in Spacetown dives. Honest games could be found there, if one looked hard enough. But spacemen and the hangers-on of Spacetown aren’t rich enough to play for high stakes and, after a while, low-stake play bored Crag because it didn’t matter whether he won or lost.
He drank a lot, but not too much at any one time or place, never letting himself get out of control. The go-for-drunk kind of drinking was something Crag did only rarely and after a long period of abstinence, enforced or otherwise. He never drank while he was working on a job, or in space, but if the job or the trip took a long time he made up for it afterwards. Ordinarily he drank steadily but never to excess.
He did most of his drinking in Spacetown and found himself using the bar in his Luxor suite only for a first drink each morning and a final one each night. He considered taking a room in Spacetown—which had no luxury hotels, but a few fairly nice ones—but decided against it. Knowing full well that it was ridiculous of him to keep so expensive a suite when he made so little use of it, he still kept it. It cost money and when he faced things frankly he admitted to himself that the sooner he got rid of his money the less unhappy he’d be. While it lasted he had no reason for stealing more, and he was out of work.
He was like a tiger shut in an abattoir, surrounded by meat he doesn’t have to hunt for. He can sate himself and keep himself sated, but pretty soon he comes to wish he was back in the jungle where the hunt and the kill comes before the feast. A sated tiger is only part a tiger, but still it does not kill for wanton enjoyment. A criminal with all the money he needs is no longer a criminal, but unless he is psychopathic he does not plot to get more.
Nor, unless he is psychopathic, does he deliberately throw away the money he has simply to restore his incentive. Because by doing so he negates to himself the value of money so no future sum of it would be worth having either, and willy-nilly destroys his incentive, his raison d’être, just as effectively.
No, the only thing Crag could do with the money was to spend it, and continuing to live at the Luxor was a help in that direction.
Too bad he’d never been interested in wealth per se, or in power. But he’d never considered money as other than something to spend, and power meant politics and he’d always hated politics, even before he’d become a criminal.
There were newscasts, of course. He never used the set in his suite any more
but from time to time he couldn’t avoid hearing or seeing the latest news on a set operating in whatever bar he happened to be in at the time.
On one of his early trips into Spacetown he was sitting in a small bar, one that was a bit more crowded than he liked although he had plenty of elbow room as he sat on the bar and stared into his glass of woji.
Suddenly the bartender flicked a switch under the bar and a radio blared into music, if you could call it music.
Crag reached across the bar and touched the man’s arm. “Shut it off,” he said.
The bartender met his gaze. “Mister, you ain’t the only one in here. Some of them like that stuff and want it.”
“I don’t,” Crag said, and his touch on the man’s arm turned into a grip. “Shut it off.”
The bartender winced and his eyes, looking into Crag’s, saw something there that changed his tone of voice. He said, “Mister, I’ll turn it down, but that’s the best I can do. Guy down at the other end of the bar told me to turn it on and he’ll make trouble if I turn it off. I don’t know how tough you are, but he’s plenty tough, as tough as they come in Mars City or anywhere else. You might make trouble if I leave it on, but I know damn well he’ll mop up the place with me if I turn it off.”
The bartender gently massaged his arm where Crag’s hand had held it. He said hopefully, “Unless you and him want to go outside and settle it. Then I can obey whichever of you comes back in.”
Crag grinned. He’d have enjoyed nothing better but he remembered he was getting into as few fights as possible these days and that anyway in this case he didn’t have sufficient cause to start one.
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