The inexorable, sacrilegious, limitlessly powered cameras that were taking the picture swung across the table, and caught the woman full face.
It was a handsome face, but there was passion and fury twisting it now, and a very blaze of fire in her eyes, as she leaned forward, and said in a voice at once familiar – how often Fara had heard its calm, measured tones on the telestats – and distorted. Utterly distorted by anger and an insolent certainty of command. That caricature of a beloved voice slashed across the silence as clearly as if he, Fara, was there in that room: “I want that skunk killed, do you understand? I don’t care how you do it, but I want to hear by tomorrow night that he’s dead.”
The picture snapped off and instantly – it was as swift as that – Fara was back in the weapon shop. He stood for a moment, swaying, fighting to accustom his eyes to the dimness; and then—
His first emotion was contempt at the simpleness of the trickery – a motion picture. What kind of a fool did they think he was, to swallow something as transparently unreal as that? He’d—
Abruptly, the appalling lechery of the scheme, the indescribable wickedness of what was being attempted here brought red rage.
“Why, you scum!” he flared. “So you’ve got somebody to act the part of the empress, trying to pretend that—Why, you—”
“That will do,” said the voice of Rad; and Fara shook as a big young man walked into his line of vision. The alarmed thought came that people who would besmirch so vilely the character of her imperial majesty would not hesitate to do physical damage to Fara Clark. The young man went on in a steely tone, “We do not pretend that what you saw was taking place this instant in the palace. That would be too much of a coincidence. But it was taken two weeks ago; the woman is the empress. The man whose death she ordered is one of her many former lovers. He was found murdered two weeks ago; his name, if you care to look it up in the new files, is Banton McCreddie. However, let that pass. We’re finished with you now and—”
“But I’m not finished,” Fara said in a thick voice. “I’ve never heard or seen so much infamy in all my life. If you think this town is through with you, you’re crazy. We’ll have a guard on this place day and night, and nobody will get in or out. We’ll—”
“That will do.” It was the silver-haired man; and Fara stopped out of respect for age, before he thought. The old man went on: “The examination has been most interesting. As an honest man, you may call on us if you are ever in trouble. That is all. Leave through the side door.”
It was all. Impalpable forces grabbed him, and he was shoved at a door that appeared miraculously in the wall, where seconds before the palace had been.
He found himself standing dazedly in a flower bed, and there was a swarm of men to his left. He recognized his fellow townsmen and that he was – outside.
The incredible nightmare was over.
“Where’s the gun?” said Creel, as he entered the house half an hour later.
“The gun?” Fara stared at his wife.
“It said over the radio a few minutes ago that you were the first customer of the new weapon shop. I thought it was queer, but—”
He was eerily conscious of her voice going on for several words longer, but it was the purest jumble. The shock was so great that he had the horrible sensation of being on the edge of an abyss.
So that was what the young man had meant: “Advertise! We’ll advertise his presence and—”
Fara thought: His reputation! Not that his was a great name, but he had long believed with a quiet pride that Fara Clark’s motor repair shop was widely known in the community and countryside.
First, his private humiliation inside the shop. And now this – lying – to people who didn’t know why he had gone into the store. Diabolical.
His paralysis ended, as a frantic determination to rectify the base charge drove him to the telestat. After a moment, the plump, sleepy face of Mayor Mel Dale appeared on the plate. Fara’s voice made a barrage of sound, but his hopes dashed, as the man said, “I’m sorry, Fara. I don’t see how you can have free time on the telestat. You’ll have to pay for it. They did.”
“They did!” Fara wondered vaguely if he sounded as empty as he felt.
“And they’ve just paid Lan Harris for his lot. The old man asked top price, and got it. He just phoned me to transfer the title.”
“Oh!” The world was shattering. “You mean nobody’s going to do anything. What about the Imperial garrison at Ferd?”
Dimly, Fara was aware of the mayor mumbling something about the empress’ soldiers refusing to interfere in civilian matters.
“Civilian matters!” Fara exploded. “You mean these people are just going to be allowed to come here whether we want them or not, illegally forcing the sale of lots by first taking possession of them?”
A sudden thought struck him breathless. “Look, you haven’t changed your mind about having Jor keep guard in front of the shop?”
With a start, he saw that the plump face in the telestat plate had grown impatient. “Now, see here, Fara,” came the pompous words, “let the constituted authorities handle this matter.”
“But you’re going to keep Jor there,” Fara said doggedly.
The mayor looked annoyed, said finally peevishly: “I promised, didn’t I? So he’ll be there. And now – do you want to buy time on the telestat? It’s fifteen credits for one minute. Mind you, as a friend, I think you’re wasting your money. No one has ever caught up with a false statement.”
Fara said grimly, “Put two on, one in the morning, one in the evening.”
“All right. We’ll deny it completely. Good night.”
The telestat went blank; and Fara sat there. A new thought hardened his face. “That boy of ours – there’s going to be a showdown. He either works in my shop, or he gets no more allowance.”
Creel said: “You’ve handled him wrong. He’s twenty-three and you treat him like a child. Remember, at twenty-three you were a married man.”
“That was different,” said Fara. “I had a sense of responsibility. Do you know what he did tonight?”
He didn’t quite catch her answer. For the moment, he thought she said, “No; in what way did you humiliate him first?”
Fara felt too impatient to verify the impossible words. He rushed on: “He refused in front of the whole village to give me help. He’s a bad one, all bad.”
“Yes,” said Creel in a bitter tone, “he is all bad. I’m sure you don’t realize how bad. He’s as cold as steel, but without steel’s strength or integrity. He took a long time, but he hates even me now, because I stood up for your side so long, knowing you were wrong.”
“What’s that?” said Fara, startled; then gruffly: “Come, come my dear, we’re both upset. Let’s go to bed.”
He slept poorly.
There were days then when the conviction that this was a personal fight between himself and the weapons shop lay heavily on Fara. Grimly, though it was out of his way, he made a point of walking past the weapon shop, always pausing to speak to Constable Jor and—
On the fourth day, the policeman wasn’t there.
Fara waited patiently at first, then angrily: then he walked hastily to his shop, and called Jor’s house. No, Jor wasn’t home. He was guarding the weapon store.
Fara hesitated. His own shop was piled with work, and he had a guilty sense of having neglected his customers for the first time in his life. It would be simple to call up the mayor and report Jor’s dereliction. And yet—
He didn’t want to get the man into trouble—
Out in the street, he saw that a large crowd was gathering in front of the weapon shop. Fara hurried. A man he knew greeted him excitedly: “Jor’s been murdered, Fara!”
“Murdered!” Fara stood stock-still, and at first he was not clearly conscious of the grisly thought that was in his mind: Satisfaction! A flaming satisfaction. Now, he thought, even the soldiers would have to act. They—
With a gasp, he reali
zed the ghastly tenor of his thoughts. He shivered, but finally pushed the sense of shame out of his mind. He said slowly, “Where’s the body?”
“Inside.”
“You mean, those . . . scum—” In spite of himself, he hesitated over the epithet; even now, it was difficult to think of the fine-faced, silver-haired old man in such terms. Abruptly, his mind hardened; he flared: “You mean those scum actually killed him, then pulled his body inside?”
“Nobody saw the killing,” said a second man beside Fara, “but he’s gone, hasn’t been seen for three hours. The mayor got the weapons shop on the telestat, but they claim they don’t know anything. They’ve done away with him, that’s what, and now they are pretending innocence. Well, they won’t get out of it as easy as that. Mayor’s gone to phone the soldiers at Ferd to bring up some big guns and—”
Something of the intense excitement that was in the crowd surged through Fara, the feeling of big things brewing. It was the most delicious sensation that had ever tingled along his nerves, and it was all mixed with a strange pride that he had been so right about this, that he at least had never doubted that here was evil.
He did not recognize the emotion as the full-flowering joy that comes to a member of a mob. But his voice shook, as he said, “Guns? Yes, that will be the answer, and the soldiers will have to come, of course.”
Fara nodded to himself in the immensity of his certainty that the Imperial soldiers would now have no excuse for not acting. He started to say something dark about what the empress would do if she found out that a man had lost his life because the soldiers had shirked their duty, but the words were drowned in a shout:
“Here comes the mayor! Hey, Mr. Mayor, when are the atomic cannons due?”
There was more of the same general meaning, as the mayor’s sleek, all-purpose car landed lightly. Some of the questions must have reached his honor, for he stood up in the open two-seater and held up his hand for silence.
To Fara’s astonishment, the plump-faced man looked at him with accusing eyes. The thing seemed so impossible that, quite instinctively, Fara looked behind him. But he was almost alone; everybody else had crowded forward.
Fara shook his head, puzzled by that glare; and then, astoundingly, Mayor Dale pointed a finger at him, and said in a voice that trembled, “There’s the man who’s responsible for the trouble that’s come upon us. Stand forward, Fara Clark, and show yourself. You’ve cost this town seven hundred credits that we could ill afford to spend.”
Fara couldn’t have moved or spoken to save his life. He just stood there in a maze of dumb bewilderment. Before he could even think, the mayor went on, and there was quivering self-pity in his tone, “We’ve all known that it wasn’t wise to interfere with these weapons shops. So long as the Imperial government leaves them alone, what right have we to set up guards, or act against them? That’s what I’ve thought from the beginning, but this man . . . this . . . this Fara Clark kept after all of us, forcing us to move against our wills, and so now we’ve got a seven-hundred-credit bill to meet and—”
He broke off with, “I might as well make it brief. When I called the garrison, the commander just laughed and said that Jor would turn up. And I had barely disconnected when there was a money call from Jor. He’s on Mars.”
He waited for the shouts of amazement to die down. “It’ll take three weeks for him to come back by ship, and we’ve got to pay for it, and Fara Clark is responsible. He—”
The shock was over. Fara stood cold, his mind hard. He said finally, scathingly, “So you’re giving up and trying to blame me all in one breath. I say you’re all fools.”
As he turned away, he heard Mayor Dale saying something about the situation not being completely lost, as he had learned that the weapons shop had been set up in Glay because the village was equidistant from four cities, and that it was the city business the shop was after. This would mean tourists, and accessary trade for the village stores and—
Fara heard no more. Head high, he walked back toward his shop. There were one or two catcalls from the mob, but he ignored them.
He had no sense of approaching disaster, simply a gathering fury against the weapons shop, which had brought him to this miserable status among his neighbors.
The worst of it, as the days passed, was the realization that the people of the weapon shop had no personal interest in him. They were remote, superior, undefeatable. That unconquerableness was a dim, suppressed awareness inside Fara.
When he thought of it, he felt a vague fear at the way they had transferred Jor to Mars in a period of less than three hours, when all the world knew that the trip by fastest spaceship required nearly three weeks.
Fara did not go to the express station to see Jor arrive home. He had heard that the council had decided to charge Jor with half of the expense of the trip, on the threat of losing his job if he made a fuss.
On the second night after Jor’s return, Fara slipped down to the constable’s house, and handed the officer one hundred seventy-five credits. It wasn’t that he was responsible, he told Jor, but—
The man was only too eager to grant the disclaimer, provided the money went with it. Fara returned home with a clearer conscience.
It was on the third day after that the door of his shop banged open and a man came in. Fara frowned as he saw who it was: Castler, a village hanger-on. The man was grinning.
“Thought you might be interested, Fara. Somebody came out of the weapon shop today.”
Fara strained deliberately at the connecting bolt of a hard plate of the atomic motor he was fixing. He waited with a gathering annoyance that the man did not volunteer further information. Asking questions would be a form of recognition of the worthless fellow. A developing curiosity made him say finally, grudgingly, “I suppose the constable promptly picked him up.”
He supposed nothing of the kind, but it was an opening.
“It wasn’t a man. It was a girl.”
Fara knitted his brows. He didn’t like the idea of making trouble for women. But – the cunning devils! Using a girl, just as they had used an old man as a clerk. It was a trick that deserved to fail, the girl probably a tough one who needed rough treatment. Fara said harshly, “Well, what’s happened?”
“She’s still out, bold as you please. Pretty thing, too.”
The bolt off, Fara took the hard plate over to the polisher, and began patiently the long, careful task of smoothing away the crystals that heat had seared on the once shining metal. The soft throb of the polisher made the background to his next words:
“Has anything been done?”
“Nope. The constable’s been told, but he says he doesn’t fancy being away from his family for another three weeks, and paying the cost into the bargain.”
Fara contemplated that darkly for a minute, as the polisher throbbed on. His voice shook with suppressed fury, when he said finally, “So they’re letting them get away with it. It’s all been as clever as hell. Can’t they see that they mustn’t give an inch before these . . . these transgressors. It’s like giving countenance to sin.”
From the corner of his eye, he noticed that there was a curious grin on the face of the other. It struck Fara suddenly that the man was enjoying his anger. And there was something else in that grin; something – a secret knowledge.
Fara pulled the engine plate away from the polisher. He faced the ne’er-do-well, scathed at him, “Naturally, that sin part wouldn’t worry you much.”
“Oh,” said the man nonchalantly, “the hard knocks of life make people tolerant. For instance, after you know the girl better, you yourself will probably come to realize that there’s good in all of us.”
It was not so much the words, as the curious I’ve-got-secret-information tone that made Fara snap: “What do you mean – if I get to know the girl better! I won’t even speak to the brazen creature.”
“One can’t always choose,” the other said with enormous casualness. “Suppose he brings her home.”
&
nbsp; “Suppose who brings who home?” Fara spoke irritably. “Castler, you—”
He stopped; a dead weight of dismay plumped into his stomach; his whole being sagged. “You mean—” he said.
“I mean,” replied Castler with a triumphant leer, “that the boys aren’t letting a beauty like her be lonesome. And, naturally, your son was the first to speak to her.”
He finished: “They’re walkin’ together now on Second Avenue, comin’ this way, so—”
“Get out of here!” Fara roared. “And stay away from me with your gloating. Get out!”
The man hadn’t expected such an ignominious ending. He flushed scarlet, then went out, slamming the door.
Fara stood for a moment, every muscle stiff; then, with an abrupt, jerky movement, he shut off his power, and went out into the street.
The time to put a stop to that kind of thing was – now!
He had no clear plan, just that violent determination to put an immediate end to an impossible situation. And it was all mixed up with his anger against Cayle. How could he have had such a worthless son, he who paid his debts and worked hard, and tried to be decent and to live up to the highest standards of the empress?
A brief, dark thought came to Fara that maybe there was some bad blood on Creel’s side. Not from her mother, of course – Fara added the mental thought hastily. There was a fine, hard-working woman, who hung on to her money, and who would leave Creel a tidy sum one of these days.
But Creel’s father had disappeared when Creel was only a child, and there had been some vague scandal about his having taken up with a telestat actress.
And now Cayle with this weapon shop girl. A girl who had let herself be picked up—
He saw them, as he turned the corner onto Second Avenue. They were walking a hundred feet distant, and heading away from Fara. The girl was tall and slender, almost as big as Cayle, and, as Fara came up, she was saying, “You have the wrong idea about us. A person like you can’t get a job in our organization. You belong in the Imperial Service, where they can use young men of good education, good appearance and no scruples. I—”
The Mammoth Book of Golden Age SF Page 10