by Andre Norton
The box reshouldered, Miles cut away from the path and knelt. The racks were spread with neat rows of round, soggy kanl leaves, all ready for Grandpa. He straightened, took a deep breath. It was a good life. He let out the breath—if you could stand Grandpa and the unholy stink.
n
Miles rounded the corner of the cottage and came to a surprised halt. His cheery whistle turned atonal and perished. The big man's voice was oddly soft, almost friendly in tone.
"Does it always smell like this?" he inquired.
He stood by the door, his back leaned against the tangled jongar. His round face might have been weak, almost childlike, with its shallow eyes and nubbin of a nose—but the small mouth beneath was tucked in at the corners, stamping an ugly determination over all. And as far as smells went, he was no peony himself—he had the horsy odor of a big man long unwashed; his tunic was rumpled and dirty, his face stub-bled and sweat-shiny.
Miles lowered his gaze and had his first opportunity—if you didn't count the detective thrillers he followed on the screen of his telaudio—to study the triple nozzle of a hand-blast pointed at him with intent to do him dirt. It did indeed command attention, and Miles gave his to the stranger's next words.
"Is that food you're carrying?" Hopefully.
"Some of it," Miles admitted.
The man moved backward through the doorway. "Come in, said the spider—although it's your parlor."
Max Miles followed, ducking to clear the trailing jongar vines, more puzzled than afraid. Strangers were uncommon on Goran Three. One of many pioneer worlds, it bore a purely functional population. Importing supplies was a headache, living conditions were flexible and still under critical analysis, and space visas were proportionately hard to get. There were only two cities on the tiny planet; one a shipping center, and the other a glorified department store. These, along with the farms and outlying districts, contained in aggregate exactly 964 humans, most of whom were known to one another and one of whom, Miles was sure, this stranger was not.
Habit brought Miles' hand to the house-board. He inserted his key, turned the cottage on. Coming to electronic life, it detected their presence and spilled soft, duffuse light from the walls.
From the center of the room the big man murmured his surprise: "Pretty fancy for a farmer."
Miles blinked to adjust his sight. "What'd you expect— candles?"
The stranger's mouth tightened. "Kick the door shut." Miles did so.
The stranger indicated the box of supplies with a wave of the hand-blast. "Set it."
Miles bit down on his anger and slid the box onto the table. He said mildly, "Okay, Mister—?"
"Jord. Henry Jo—" the stranger broke off with an appreciative grin. "Say, aren't you the smart one? I like a smart man." He took a step forward, the grin stiffening over his small, even teeth. "Now, put your hands in your pants pockets and turn around."
Miles pivoted slowly to face the wall. Henry Jord's free hand patted up and down his torso, removing his wallet, his pocket-talkie. A moment later he heard the tiny 'tronic shatter on the floor. Then Jord's steps retreated to the center of the room, his soft-steel voice said, "All right, farmer. At ease."
Miles wheeled, picked the wallet out of mid-air as it was tossed to him. Its thickness told him that his money was still there.
Jord put the hand-blast on the table. "Ten to one," he said casually, "that I can pick it up and shoot you before you get to me."
"Wouldn't buck those odds," Miles grunted. He leaned against the wall, watching silently as the big man unpacked the box of supplies, item by item. At one point Jord exclaimed happily and set aside a container of Venus-Blue Garol.
"I guess we'll have that for supper," Miles interpreted.
"I said you were smart, farmer—" Jord's hand explored the bottom of the box. "I just wanted to make sure there wasn't a hand-blast mixed in here. No reason why there should be-but wouldn't I be a fool to take the chance?" He picked up the gun from the table and gave Miles his wide, meaningless smile.
The little farmer bared his teeth in a returning smile that meant a great deal—most of it nasty.
"As long as you're my guest," he said, "suppose you call me by name—you got it from the wallet—and tell me what in hell this is all about!"
Jord raised his eyebrows. "Isn't that obvious? Or don't you listen to the telaudio?"
"No, it isn't obvious," Miles snapped, "and I listen to the telaudio. But my set isn't any government I. P. pick-up. And you're not from Goran Three, mister!"
Something of surprise flickered in Jord's pale gaze.
"Maybe you're too damned smart," he said. "How did you figure that?"
"Three's like a small town—there's nobody on this clod I can't call by his first name."
Jord's face lost its wary tension. "Of course," he murmured, "I'd forgotten. That's very nice—my not being known here should expedite things." He sat down and stretched his long legs under the table, keeping the hand-blast targeted on Miles' chest. "Well . . . since you don't know who I am, I'll tell you. We all hope for notoriety, of course, but you must understand that I would have preferred a different sort. Henry Jord, galactic explorer, perhaps—or Henry Jord, famous author. I do write, you know. No, I suppose you don't. At any rate, these things are not in our hands, are they?" He flung out a casual hand, as if in demonstration. "So I am Henry Jord, embezzler, murderer, fugitive."
Miles stared at the big man blankly, while a cold ball of horror gathered in his chest, dropped to his stomach and stuck there.
A murderer! A rare animal, these days—almost extinct. The little farmer had been inclined to take the threat of the hand-blast only half seriously. Now he suddenly developed an intense respect for it, in inverse proportion to the respect he lost for its holder. And for the first time in his life he knew fear of another human being. It was an atavistic, somehow unclean, feeling, and it made him a little sick.
To keep the ball rolling while he considered his situation, he said, "Where'd all this murdering and embezzling take place?"
"Jason One—and in the opposite order. First, I embezzled from my firm. My partner discovered the loss and we had a disagreement. I disposed of the body, but you know how it is. One thing after another. Eventually questions were asked and although I lied magnificently I was booked on suspicion."
He tossed the can of Garol to Miles and the farmer turned, pressed it into the opener. Near his fingertips lay the inviting bulk of the short-wave cook-all and it occurred to him that with luck he might be able to brain the big man with it. The can opened with a hiss. Miles shoved it into the cook-all, wrapped his fingers around the grill to get a firm hold. He put his weight on his toes and bunched his arm muscles—
"That's fine!" The hand-blast bored cruelly into his back and twisted. "Now get back against the wall, little man, and think up something better to try!"
For one reckless moment Miles toyed with the idea of swinging around abruptly, wrestling for the weapon. Jord sensed this, however. He stepped back quickly to the center of the room and barked a single word, "Don't"—underlining it with the chat! of the hand-blast. The charge whined past Miles' head and out of the window, raising small thunder and a sudden white plume near the base of the sun-mill. The farmer heard Jord's sarcastic laugh:
"You might as well find out right now that I'm an excellent shot, and that I'm not a careless man or a fool. Mind that, and well get along."
Miles snapped on the cook-all, his face impassive. "I'll mind it." He moved to the wall, and sat down cross-legged. "I don't have to stand, do I?"
"No."
Miles forced himself to consider his position logically, screening out certain impulses that he recognized as neurotic in origin. Such reactions were dangerous, could very well result in his death. The attempt with the cooker, for example, had been quite foolish.
This train of thought gave him a minor inspiration. He turned it over in his mind, thinking moodily that every little bit helps.
; The old bar-rag stench of jongar filled the room, bringing its picture of the vines that crowded the cottage walls, lacing over the windows with a persistence that no amount of blasting could inhibit. Burn the vines, sear their roots—and jongar would regenerate from a cinder.
in
Max Miles versus the vines had been a primary issue soon after his arrival from Earth, and he had tackled them with indignation. But, after ten or a dozen futile sessions with a hand-blast, he had shrugged his shoulders and saved his pellets. Whereupon jongar had, during a single night, regained and consolidated, twisting and matting so that from afar the cottage looked like a blue haystack; and there jongar stopped its growth, took a million bites of Mercury-steel with a million mouths and sat back to digest, perhaps also shrugging its shoulders.
Miles cleared his throat. "Got something to tell you—" he said.
Jord looked at him without much interest and Miles deliberately wet his lips uneasily, refusing to meet the big man's gaze.
"Those vines—" Miles pointed at the tendrils of jongar dangling outside the window— "their odor is toxic." He cleared his throat again, looking Jord squarely between the eyes. "You— you have to get injections every week or you die. It's a horrible death. If you stay here much longer, you'll—I—it'll be too late—" he trailed his voice off into a hopeful silence.
Jord's irises were twin chips of polar ice as he studied Miles' face. Then, slowly, amused contempt dulled the hard glitter. He shook his head.
"You're lying," he said. "And very badly. I forgot to tell you that I'm also an excellent judge of men."
Miles shrugged philosophically . . . and mentally patted his back on a fair job of acting. When he told his next lie, minus the fidgets, Jord would probably believe it. His ego would want him to believe, and so he would. This gave the farmer a slight edge, a toehold. Men like Jord, who prided themselves on their caution, sometimes looked so hard for subtleties that they overlooked the Letter on the Mantle. Miles had no idea yet what his next lie was going to be, but he knew that it would be a dilly.
After a moment, he said: "What about the body?"
Jord frowned. "What about it?"
"No body—you say you disposed of it. No corpus delicti."
"Corpus delic—oh, Earth law. I'm afraid that doesn't throw much weight out here. If you've ever read western stories, you know what I mean. Men were men and all that, and the law was a—Holt, I believe the blaster was called? Here on the pioneer worlds, just as on the western frontier, we're beyond contemporary law. Will be for some years, I imagine—though never a fraction as lawless." Jord got up and crossed to adjust the cook-all, moving crab-wise to keep an eye on Miles. "It'll catch up to us in time," he went on, "but until then we won't have legalities to confound justice . . . Funny, isn't it?"
"What?"
"My concern for the blind lady Justice."
Miles answered inanely, his intelligence nowhere near the conversation. "I hardly imagine that you're looking forward to your just punishment."
Jord laughed shortly. "Oh, Lord, you're right there! I plan to escape it! Obvious as hell that I killed Harry, you know. In an Earth court I might have wheedled and bribed my way out of it. Here—" he shrugged. "So I skipped my bail and got off-world."
Miles stood up and shouldered out from the wall, and the hand-blast snapped up to level on his midriff. He pointed at the supplies on the table. "Do you mind if I put some of that stuff away?" he growled. "That steak is soaking up these smells like a sponge."
Jord moved away from the cooker to a neutral corner and nodded. Miles slid open the deep-freeze and stacked in the perishables, slanting his attention at the big man. His covert glances didn't pass unnoticed.
"Don't try to throw anything at me," he was warned, "or this place will smell even worse. These hand-blasts really cook a man, you know!"
Hand-blast? Miles thought grimly. Brother, you haven't met Grandpa! And then he frowned, his hands pausing in their work. He'd almost forgotten about Grandpa. On Goran Three— or Two or One, for that matter—people didn't forget about Grandpa and live to tell about it. He glanced casually at his wrist-meter. An hour, a little over. He ground his teeth almost audibly. This was getting nastier by the minute.
He'd have to get Jord out of here before Grandpa's arrival or take the big man underground; and he didn't favor the latter very much. First, because he didn't want to be cooped up with the killer for seven hours; second—and more important— if Jord got out of the lowlands he might possibly manage to escape from Three. Another killing, maybe two. A stolen visa. A quick interstellar jaunt through hyperspace and Henry Jord would vanish into the crowds of Earth or Mars. And this, Miles thought with naive logic, should not be allowed to happen.
As if reading his mind, Jord said, "You'd like to stop me, wouldn't you?" He nodded, not waiting for an answer. "I've been tempted to stop myself several times since this thing began. At such times I forget that I am the criminal—the impulse to remove such a danger-potential to our society is almost overwhelming . . ." he rapped his knuckles lightly on the table top, then seemed to remember what he had been about to say. "But luckily, speaking as an individual rather than as a component of that society, my aberration has included a revival of the self-preservation 'instinct.' Otherwise I'm sure I would have offered myself for elimination."
Miles closed the deep-freeze and hipped himself onto it. Keep him talking about himself, he thought with controlled calm, and look for an opening—because, brother, you're between the devil and the Saturnian Sea! Exactly Imlf an hour left to do something—but what?
He said aloud, "Jason One's a good week's spacing from here. Why come to Goran?"
"Oh, it wasn't intentional. I had some vague idea of heading for Sol—lose myself in a crowd, you know." Jord pulled a roll of cigarettes from a pocket and scratched one alight on the table. He flipped the roll to Miles. "But I never was much of an astrogator. Piled on the drive till I blew a tube. Barely managed to get into the life-shell before the whole business went kaput. I set the spectro for an Earth-type planet."
He shifted and made a face. "Beastly little things, those shells. Stuffy—no ports, you know—completely automatic. No place for a claustrophobe. So here I am—and you never did answer my first question. What the devil stinks so?"
"Plants, mister. Jongar, linla, kanl, herck—"
"And slithy toves. I wish I had a breath of fresh air!"
Miles grinned crookedly. "You get used to it after a while."
Jord fell back a step, his grin taking on that peculiar stiffness heavily, like bright blue lava. He snapped off the cook-all and raised an eyebrow at the little farmer. "I won't be here that long—thanks to your stratocoupe."
"Now, wait a minute," Miles growled. He took the cigarette out of his mouth and glared at the big man.
Jord fell back a step, his grin taking on that peculiar stiffness again. "You can address your complaints to this hand-blast."
Miles shook his head angrily. "You'll have a real party flying Mary. It took me a month to get on to her bag of tricks!"
"I'll manage. Strength of desperation and all that. Suppose we eat?"
Followed closely by Jord, Miles made several trips to Mary to bring in the remaining supplies. Jord poked among the cans and containers, selecting the most expensive and exotic items.
Miles, in turn, busied himself at the cook-all under the careful guidance of his guest who, it seemed, liked his food just so. And without poison. They ate silently, Miles evolving and discarding schemes, Jord very carefully on guard against them.
Later, Jord switched on the telaudio and fiddled with the dials. To the farmer's surprise the old set picked up a bleared image from Leyville on Goran Two. A symphony orchestra, one of the many extrovert organizations springing from this lonely outer space existence, was struggling fiercely with Verklärte Nacht. It probably wasn't half bad at the point of origin, but forty million miles of space gave it a hell of a kicking around.
Jord grunted, "
Plenty verklärte—" and turned the dial methodically until he located a newscast. There was the usual stuff: local news, polo scores, spaceship arrivals and departures, births and deaths. Nothing about fugitive killers.
Jord flashed a lop-sided smirk at Miles as if to say, "Looks like I'm safe, eh?"
His assumption, it developed, was premature, for the newscaster was handed a slip of paper by some unseen associate and immediately registered professional agitation. He rolled his smooth voice, carefully raised to the "flash-big-news!" pitch, into the two cities and outlying farm districts of Goran Three:
"The wreckage of an interstellar has been detected off-world. It is thought to be that of Henry Jord, J-O-R-D, wanted by the authorities of Jason One for murder and unauthorized spacing—"
"In that order?" murmured Miles; but Jord didn't hear him, which was just as well. So the story's finally gotten to Goran, he thought. Perfect timingl Maybe he was followedl
Jord had bared his teeth and snapped them together. He leaned forward until his face almost touched the visiscreen and he moved his hands—twitched them—as if wishing he could strangle the distant throat and its unwelcome words.
"—assumed that Jord is dead, but until such is proven all Goranians are cautioned to watch for this man. Warning—he is probably armed. His description—"
Jord cut off the telaudio viciously. "So now what?" he grated, his shallow eyes looking through Miles, through walls and jongar, at the strange and suddenly inhospitable world of Goran Three.