“On principle,” said Eric. “I hate to confess it, but you really have something there.” He beamed. “Yes, you most certainly—” The two swarthy heads moved close together over the table.
Neither of the Arnik brothers was in a position to see the man who stepped out of the blue Carrington and strode purposefully into the Purple Pileus. Protecting his jauntiness with a hundred-dollar bill, he evaded the grim headwaiter’s intention of locking him out, and marched up to the bar.
He was a most extraordinary figure, from the top of his mauve streamlined hat, through his iridescent vest to his flexi-glastic shoes. He barely cleared five feet. His body was tubby but his arms apparently couldn’t understand that, for they were long and scrawny. From his brow to an inch below his eyes, his nose turned up; from there on, down. His short upper lip slanted sharply toward his tonsils, which had the effect of making his chinlessness positively jut. He ordered lyanka, which is the Martian word for “equalizer,” with the air of a man who couldn’t possibly hold even one but who has just had three. The large bill on the bar overcame the barkeep’s desire to protect a customer against himself, and the man was served. He slurped from the goblet and looked around him.
“So this is the top. This is the—wha’ you call—ul-timate.”
“This is the Poiple Pileus,” said the bartender.
“Oh, yeah … yeah … I know. What I mean, this’s what people work up to. People put down numbers in books, maybe, drive transports—stuff like that, five hours a day, five days a week, week in, week out.” He ran out of breath and inhaled some lyanka with his air. “People … fft … ‘scuse me … all got the idea someday they’ll be rich. When they get rich, they come to a place like this. Fft. What I want to know is, why? Get just as drunk at Casey’s Hardwater Store.”
“Casey’s ain’t exclusive,” the barkeep pointed out.
“Take me, now,” said the fantasy on the paying side of the board. “Biddiver’s my name. Two days ago I’m on the assembly line up at General, and somebody name of Phoebe Biddiver dies. Yesterday I got two million bucks, free and clear. Today I buy everything I ever thought I wanted and go every place I ever wanted to see. An’ now what?”
“What?”
“An’ now I don’t know what to do tomorrow.” The bartender was fascinated by the way the teardrops proceeded down Biddiver’s amazing nose. One drop would dash almost halfway, and then hesitate, daunted by the hump. Then it would be joined by another teardrop, and the two, merging, would surmount the obstacle and slip down to hang glittering over the disappearing lip until a sob came along to shake them off. “I ain’t done nothin’ to nobody,” complained Biddiver brokenly. “I don’t want to do nothin’ to nobody. What did I do to deserve this?”
“Guys what don’t want to do nothin’ to nobody,” said the bartender, in a philosophic flash, “most generally don’t amount to nothin’.”
“What do you mean?”
“Just what I say. This place, now, it crawls with big shots. Every one of them walked up to the top on other guys’ faces. Take that Fang feller now, that’s in all the papers. Bad egg, sure. But at the top all the same. Sneaks up on a tanker on the Earth-Venus run, swipes the cargo, burns the ship and the crew, and disappears. Then he tells three planets an’ the whole Belt, speakin’ through every ultraradio set that happens to be turned on, that he is The Fang, an’ he is the one who done it, an’ he’ll do it again whenever he feels like it. Not a direction indicator in the System can locate where he’s broadcasting from. See what I mean? He’s smart an’ he doesn’t give a damn about who he roughs up. Now look. See those two guys in that semiprivate over there? They’re the Arnik brothers. One’s a shipper an’ the other’s a kind of freelance gorilla. They operate the same way as The Fang. They must like it or they wouldn’t keep it up.” He nodded sagely. “If I had as much change as you do, I wouldn’t get down in the mouth about it. The main idea in gettin’ really rich is to be rich in the first place; then you make your money, take people out, lose ’em and come back with their bank accounts. I seen it done right here.”
Biddiver shook his head weakly. “I don’t think I could be that kind of a heel.”
“You can be. Rich people can’t afford to be nice about things. Only guys who work for a living can do that, an’ even then they got to watch themselves or they’ll get took over.” He peered at Biddiver, judging expertly his state of insobriety, and then pointedly took away his goblet, rinsed it and put it away.
Biddiver took the hint because, by now, he wasn’t feeling so good. He waved the change from his bill back to the bartender and weaved out. The barkeep pocketed the money, shaking his head sourly, quite unaware of the fact that his little speech had created an interplanetary menace.
Biddiver somehow reached the Carrington and nudged the door open. He sprawled into the driver’s seat and touched the starting lever. The door locked as the machine rose up on its two wheels, gyroscopes whirring ever so faintly. On each side of Biddiver, an upholstered arm swung upward until it embraced him in foamy comfort. He pressed the panel which presented itself to his right forefinger; the brakes released themselves and the machine started forward. Pulling gently with his right and then his left hand, he turned the car and wheeled it out of the gate and into the street. Plastered as he was, he realized that in this machine he had one thing that it would take him a long, long while to tire of. He pressed the accelerator under his finger, and as he passed the 150-k.p.h. mark the speedometer’s mechanical whisper cut in—“One sixty—One sixty-eight—One eighty—” He loved the sleepy surge of the car, its metrical obedience. “Damn if she won’t up an’ take off one of these days,” he muttered as he leaned over to turn on the radio.
And when he flipped the switch she did take off.
“What I don’t understand,” said Eric Arnik, “is why you bother to come to me at all. You have the goods on me, to a certain extent; you have the car and you have some rather sweet ideas on how to use it.”
“Oh, that.” Budd inspected his stylishly scalloped fingernails. “I have to have a lot of research done, you see. I could have it taken care of easily enough, but news gets around, you know. You have all the facilities in your little undercover laboratories. If I work along with you, I can get it done right and fast. Particularly since you realize how much it will be to your own interest.”
“What sort of research?”
“On the car, of course. You don’t think I built it myself, do you? It was like this—I ran across a bright old fellow who had a few ambitious ideas along the lines of auto design. I asked him if he could build something like this baby of mine. He could and he did, but he was curious about why I wanted it and was fool enough to ask me some questions. Luckily for all concerned, he died of natural causes.”
“You mean you just naturally slipped him a ticket out?”
“Something like that,” said Budd carelessly. “Terrible, the filtrable viruses that can get accidentally into a man’s air conditioning unit. Anyway, here I am with the car and no plans or blueprints of any kind. I’ll have to get it to someone who can knock it down and duplicate it. That’s up to your boys.”
“I see. Is the car really on the up-and-up? I mean, have you tested it?”
“And how.” A gleam of enthusiasm crept across Budd’s deadpan face. “Come on—let’s get out of here. I’ll show you.” Eric paid the bill and they left. When they were seated in the big blue Carrington Budd said, “Oh—by the way. I can’t show you any altitude yet. The one thing the old boy hadn’t quite perfected was the Heaviside screen.”
“He didn’t?” Eric’s face flushed with anger. “Damn it, what good is the car to us without that? You expect my technicians to build a Heaviside unit small enough to fit into this jalopy? Why, the smallest one ever built weighs more than three tons!”
“Take it easy, pal,” soothed his brother. “There are a lot of new principles involved in this wagon. Your boys are pretty good—they ought to get a lead after looking
over the rest of the equipment.”
“I hope so. Damn that Heaviside business anyway.”
“You ought to be glad that the layer’s there, chum, and that science knows a way to synthesize one for spacecraft. Did you ever hear what happens to a man when he’s exposed to unfiltered cosmic radiation?”
“I heard.” Unaccountably, Eric Arnik shuddered. Budd started the car.
Biddiver was in that enviable state of inebriation in which he could not be surprised. When he threw the switch to get some music and nothing happened, he did what any trained driver will do—glance far ahead through the windshield to see if the road is clear enough to allow him to investigate his controls for a few seconds. Only there wasn’t any road. He blinked carefully and looked again, and there still was no road. Just a blankness, with a silly little cloud in the middle of it. He suddenly realized that he was looking into the sky; but he was looking, not up, but ahead into it. He grunted surprisedly and hauled at the left chair arm. The cloud ahead disappeared and was replaced by a rapidly expanding relief map. It struck Biddiver as a little ominous; he pulled at the right chair arm until the windshield framed a horizon.
For no reason at all he was reminded of a satire, centuries old, which he had read, concerning a college boy who yielded to the temptation of his evil companions, drank a glass of beer and staggered out of the saloon with delirium tremens. “Been a good boy all m’ life,” he reflected bitterly, “because I couldn’t afford to be any other way. And now—four drinks, an’ this.” He wagged his head, hauled back on both arms at once. When he saw the little cloud again, he let go and slumped down in his seat. He was quite convinced he was dreaming, but he didn’t want to dream about a crack-up in a flying automobile, and he felt he would far rather bump the cloud. He went quite peacefully to sleep then, ignoring the new whispering voice that joined that of the speedometer:
“Four hundred twelve k.p.h.—”
“Altitude twenty-three thousand fifty—”
“Four eighty-three k.p.h.—”
“Altitude twenty-five thousand, thirty-three—”
But he woke, completely sober, when the car hurtled through the Heaviside layer.
Twenty minutes after the second Carrington ’78 pulled away from the Purple Pileus, it swept back again and two men leaped out. One was flushed and one was pale, but both were furious. They pounced on the frightened doorman.
“Where’s my car? What happened to the other Carrington?”
“Wh—Mr. Arnik, I—” His eyes bulged in terror. He had heard of the Arniks. “A gentleman drove off in it. He had only stayed a half hour or so. His car was exactly like—”
“That’s what you think,” spat Budd, hurling the man down the resilient plastic steps. The brothers went in and collared the bartender.
That worthy was a true philosopher; that is, his morbid view of life extended to himself as well as to his fellow man. He came along uncomplainingly when it was demanded of him, which was immediately after he had said that he had spoken with the man who drove the Carrington. They whisked him to Eric’s shipping offices, into an inner room, and down an elevator whose entrance was under Eric’s desk. Far underground he was seized by a staff of highly trained men who lived out their lives in secrecy underground because they dared not show their faces above.
The bartender was given four injections in rapid succession and for the next six hours was subjected to the most thorough of grillings. He was powerless to tell anything but the truth. Highly detailed information about the man in the other Carrington was fed, item by item, into a monster card-sorting machine. His name; height; weight; probable age; dress; accent; timbre of voice; physical peculiarities; each of these was gone into with incredible nicety.
The machine dealt in probabilities; if a man of a given height and weight reacts in such and such a way to such a statement, uttered so, then he may have spent a specified number of years in any one of eight professions. Each of these was taken in order, compared with other characteristics, canceled out or in. Each result was checked and rechecked, compared with every other result. At the end of the grilling, the Arniks had a complete dossier on Biddiver, as well as a slightly conventionalized full-length portrait. Looking at it, they doubted that their machine was working correctly, but it hadn’t failed so far.
“Well,” said Budd, scratching his head, “we know what we’re after. Where is it?”
“It’s probably well out of the way,” said Eric. He turned away to give orders about the disposal of the mindless wreck that had been the head bartender of the Purple Pileus. He would be found dead days later, after wandering through the city, starving because he was incapable of realizing it, freezing because he couldn’t understand that he needed shelter. “You see,” he went on, staring at the picture, “from what you tell me, the space-travel mechanisms on the car had their master switch where any other Carrington has its radio. This guy was apparently one of those people who can’t breathe unless a radio’s pounding their ear. Drunk as he was, you can bet that the first thing he did after he started the car was to turn on the radio. As soon as he did that, he took off. He hasn’t crashed; I’d have heard about it if he had. He hasn’t been seen flying around, either. He must have gone—straight up.”
“And the car isn’t shielded against the cosmics. So—”
“So they probably got the rat. I hope.”
Budd shook his head. “You can’t count on it. What that radiation did to him depends on factors that no one’s been able to chart. I hope it killed him. Maybe it didn’t—but what’s the difference? That car’s as fast as anything in space. By this time it’s reached terminal velocity and is ‘way out of reach. I’m out an automobile, I guess. Oh, well. I should kick. At least I’m where I know my dear brother will look out for me.” He smirked at Eric and the way he made an infinitesimal move toward his shoulder holster and then visibly thought better of it.
“I can just barely stand you,” gritted Eric after a taut moment. “Don’t make it any tougher for me by your lip.”
Somewhere in space, a chrome and blue automobile raced the green light of Earth. Biddiver was quite dead now, if death is complete loss of personality, of human hopes and dreams and desires. There was another at the controls, certainly, one who moaned and gibbered and mewed at the stars spread about him, one who snatched and pawed at the sensitive, unprotesting controls before him. But it was not Biddiver, any more than the car itself was the ores and gases and fluids from which it was fabricated. The car was new, and even newer was the creature at the controls.
After those first mad moments, he quieted to stare with his new, scarlet eyes at the car, the dials and meters that now presented themselves in place of the conventional dashboard that had slid up out of sight when the car had reached the thousand-k.p.h. mark. He fingered the upholstery with an animal’s preoccupied attention, touched metal and glass and fabric with listless hands. Then he looked down at himself, snarled, and began to strip the clothes from his body. He worked slowly, systematically, from his shoes upward, ignoring clasps and slides, depending on the invariable rule that each chain has a weakest link. His flesh had a greenish cast, and it puffed tautly everywhere except near the joints, which were all simply skin on bone. When he had tossed the last tatter over his shoulder, he put both hands to his head and wiped off his frowsy mane. The hair came quite easily off the puckered skull. He giggled then, and went to sleep for three Earth days.
“Who’s The Fang?” asked Budd Arnik, a couple of weeks after he had bulldozed his way into the titular vice-presidency of Eric’s shipping firm. “I’ve seen some sweet write-ups about him in the tele-facsimiles. He’s a crazy Martian. He’s an exiled scientist from another solar system. He’s a refugee from a sunspot. Everybody has a different idea about him, except you. Seems funny, somehow,” he went on, affecting the lightly sarcastic tone which he knew infuriated his brother. “The gentleman steals a cargo which is not aboard a ship, destroys the vessel, and leaves you with your pockets fu
ll of money. I wouldn’t be curious if I didn’t happen to know that you’ve made no big payoffs to anyone recently. If you’d hired the guy, it would have cost you plenty. If you didn’t, why should he scuttle a ship with a nonexistent, heavily insured cargo, and then announce to the Universe that he is The Fang and will be heard from again?”
“You found out about the payoff,” growled Eric. “Why bother asking me any questions at all? Figure it out for yourself.”
“I will,” promised his brother smoothly. “Which reminds me—I have an idea that’ll make us some money, if The Fang can be depended on to do a little more work for us. Can he?”
Eric hesitated and then said, “Pretty much.”
“Ah,” said Budd. “Well, you know that uranium mine on Pallas?”
“Mm.”
“Well, there’s a lot of money tied up on it. That uranium, you know, is about forty per cent 235. U-235 from Pallas supplies most of the System, since it’s so easy to refine. There’s still plenty of market for it, you know. Lucasium is more efficient, but it’s a hell of a lot more expensive. Now—here’s my idea. Just to see if The Fang has any kind of reputation as yet, we’ll have him threaten the colony. We’ll set a price—not too much; maybe they’ll pay it—and tell ’em to set it adrift in space, static, right there in the Asteroid Belt. By the time it has moved more’n a couple hundred miles toward the Sun, it’ll intersect the orbits of quite a few planetoids. One of our boys can be roosting there in a small ship to pick it up.”
Eric sent him a glance. “Is that what you meant when you said you had imagination?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“I’m surprised, that’s all. It’s not bad. Let’s get going.”
In a very few days they had a ship outfitted. It was decided that Budd would take her out to the Belt. As they stood in the control room just before the take-off, Budd asked:
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