by Mike Resnick
"Don't you understand?" said Terwilliger. "ManMountain Bates is coming here to kill me!"
"Not without cause, or so I've been told," said the Angel.
The gambler turned to Virtue. "You get him to protect me, or I'll tell him what you had me do."
"He might be useful to us, after all," said Virtue carefully.
"I gather he's already been useful to you," replied the Angel dryly. "He is of absolutely no use to me."
"I can tell you things about Cain," said Terwilliger urgently. "Where he's been, where he's going, things like that."
"I already know where he's been and where he's going."
"I can tell you where Santiago is!"
"You don't know where Santiago is," replied the Angel. "Now go away."
"But I—"
Suddenly Terwilliger froze, his eyes fixed on the hotel's doorway. There was an awed murmuring throughout the lobby, and Virtue and the Angel turned to see the cause of the commotion.
Standing just outside the door was a huge mountain of a man. His shaggy brown mane swirled down to his shoulders, his teeth gleamed white through his thick beard, and his blue eyes glared balefully at Halfpenny Terwilliger. He was dressed in a handmade outfit composed entirely of the cured pelts of animals he had killed with his bare hands, and his boots, except for the steel heels, were also made of animal skins.
"I want you!" bellowed ManMountain Bates, pointing his finger at Terwilliger.
The desk clerk quickly touched his computer panel, and the thick front door slid shut.
"You've got to help me!" pleaded Terwilliger.
"You got yourself into this situation," said the Angel. "Get yourself out."
Terwilliger began cursing in frustration and terror, his eyes glued to the door. There was a sudden thudding noise, which was repeated at regular intervals of about five seconds apiece, and he knew that ManMountain Bates was attempting to hammer the door down with his fists.
"Can't you do something?" asked Virtue.
"There's no paper on him," replied the Angel emotionlessly.
The door began buckling, and a moment later it caved in entirely. The customers and staff scuttled for positions of safety as Bates entered the room.
"I'm ManMountain Bates!" he roared. "My father was a whirlwind and my mother was a lightning bolt! I'm Leviathan, the great beast of the murky deep!" He began pacing back and forth in front of the terrified Terwilliger. "I'm half cyclone and half tornado! I'm Behemoth, the giant hellcat of the Frontier! I was spawned in a supernova and baptized in a lake of lava! I can outfight and outdrink and outfuck and outswear any man or alien that was ever born or whelped or hatched!"
Terwilliger, tears running down his face, turned to the Angel, who had moved a few feet away from him.
"Please!" he whined.
"You think this midget is going to help you?" demanded Bates. He threw back his huge head and laughed. "Why, I'd crush him like an insect! I'd bite off his arms and legs and spit out the bones!"
The Angel stared at him with an expression of mild interest but made no comment.
"I've traveled half the galaxy to find you, you skinny little worm!" shouted Bates, turning his attention back to Terwilliger. "I've gone without food and without sleep and without women, just waiting for this moment."
He reached out with surprising swiftness for so large a man and grabbed the gambler by the front of his tunic, pulling him close.
"Now you're going to learn what happens to anyone who thinks he can cheat ManMountain Bates!"
He lifted Terwilliger high above his head with a single hand.
"Virtue!" wailed the gambler. "For God's sake, make him do something!"
The Angel watched, expressionless, as Bates wrapped his immense arms around Terwilliger and squeezed. There was a single agonized shriek, followed by a sharp cracking noise, and then Bates threw the gambler's lifeless body onto the lobby floor.
The huge man glared at the faces around the room, then placed a foot on Terwilliger's neck.
"I'm ManMountain Bates, and I've claimed my just and terrible vengeance!" he bellowed defiantly. "Now you've all got something you can tell your grandchildren about!"
He pivoted slowly until he was facing Virtue and the Angel.
"You!" he thundered, pointing an enormous finger at her.
"Me?" asked Virtue.
"He called to you," said Bates. "Why?"
Virtue tried to formulate an answer, found that her mouth was too dry to speak, and shrugged.
"He owed me two hundred thousand credits. What's your connection to him?"
"I hardly knew him," she managed to say.
"Who are you?"
"Oh, nobody very important," she said, taking a frightened step backward.
"If I find out that you've lied to me, I'll be back for you," he promised.
She swallowed once and nodded.
"Well?" he demanded, turning to glare at the desk clerk.
"Well what, sir?" asked the man, his voice shaking.
Bates pointed to the corpse at his feet. "Aren't you going to clean this mess up?"
"Yes, sir," said the clerk, pressing the Maintenance code on his computer. "Right away, sir."
"Good. I wouldn't want people to think that a classy hotel like this caters to ugly little worms like that." He emphasized the last word by spitting on Terwilliger's body, then looked up again. "All right! Everyone go on about your business."
Nobody moved.
"I mean now!" he roared.
Suddenly the lobby became a beehive of activity as people raced for exits and elevators. In another moment no one was left except Bates, Virtue, the Angel, the desk clerk, and two recently arrived maintenance men who were preparing to remove the little gambler's twisted body.
ManMountain Bates took a couple of steps toward Virtue and the Angel.
"You, too!" he said. "Get out."
The Angel began walking toward the front door.
"I've never seen anything like him!" whispered Virtue. "He's like some kind of primal force!"
"He talks too much," said the Angel.
"I heard that!" said Bates ominously.
The Angel continued walking, and Bates strode over, grabbed him by the shoulder, and spun him around.
"Nobody walks out on me when I'm talking to them," said Bates, a nasty smile on his face.
The Angel twisted free and met his gaze.
"I don't like to be touched," he said softly.
"You don't, eh?" Bates grinned, laying his hand on the Angel's shoulder again.
The Angel slapped his hand away. "No, I don't."
Bates suddenly shoved him on the chest, sending him careening backward into a wall.
"Leave him alone!" said Virtue. "He hasn't done anything to you!"
"He insulted me," said Bates, taking a menacing step toward the Angel. "Besides, my blood's up now! There's nothing like breaking a back to get a man's juices flowing."
"Angel, tell him you're sorry and let's get the hell out of here!" said Virtue desperately, visions of wealth and fame departing as she imagined the Angel's body lying in a crumpled heap next to Terwilliger's.
"You're the Angel?" demanded Bates, a look of uncertainty momentarily flickering across his face.
"That's right."
"Then why did you say I talked too much?"
"Because you do," replied the Angel.
"I don't care who you've killed!" bellowed Bates, suddenly enraged again. "You're going to apologize, or I'm going to be known as the man who killed the Angel with his bare hands."
The Angel stared coldly at him for a long moment. Finally he spoke.
"I'm sorry that you talk too much."
"That's it!" growled Bates. "You're a dead man! There's going to be one more angel in hell tonight!"
He took two more steps forward and was within arm's reach of the Angel.
"You can still stop," said the Angel. "There's no paper on you."
Bates roared a curse, reached
back, and swung a haymaker at the Angel's head. The Angel ducked, and the huge man's fist went right through the wall. While he was trying to extricate his hand, the Angel reached forward, made two incredibly quick motions with his right hand, and stepped aside.
Bates bellowed another curse as he tried once again to pull his hand out of the wall. Then a curious expression spread across his face, and he slowly looked down to where his innards were spilling out through the slash in the front of his coat.
"I don't believe it!" he muttered, trying to hold himself together with his free hand.
The Angel retriggered his weapon to the mechanism hidden beneath his sleeve.
"But I'm ManMountain Bates!" murmured the giant incredulously, and died.
"My God!" exclaimed Virtue, staring with morbid fascination at Bates, who still hung from the wall by his hand. "What did you cut him with?"
"Something sharp," replied the Angel calmly. He walked over to the registration desk. "You'd better call the police," he said.
"I hit the alarm the second that guy broke down the door," answered the clerk, his face pale and sweating. "They'll be here any minute now."
"I trust that you'll be willing to testify that I killed him in self-defense," continued the Angel.
"Absolutely, Mr.... ah ... Mr. Angel?"
The Angel stared at him for a moment, then turned to Virtue.
"This was your fault, you know," he said.
"Mine?" she repeated.
He nodded. "If you hadn't promised Terwilliger that I'd protect him, he wouldn't have waited around here until Bates showed up."
"Then Bates would have killed him two hundred feet away from here, or half a mile, or at the spaceport," said Virtue. "Don't go blaming me for that."
"But I wouldn't have had to kill Bates," explained the Angel patiently. "It was just wasted effort. He's not worth a credit anywhere in the Frontier."
"That's all he represents to you?" said Virtue unbelievingly. "Just a wasted effort? My God, he was Leviathan himself, just like he said!"
"He was just a man. He bled like any other."
The police arrived then, and the Angel spent the next couple of minutes recounting the events to a very respectful officer, who had the good sense not to ask him to produce his passport.
Finally, after he finished making his statement, and the officer was interviewing the desk clerk, and two more policemen were trying to remove Bates's hand from the wall, the Angel walked over to Virtue once again.
"By the way, exactly what was it that Terwilliger did for you in exchange for my protection?"
"Nothing."
"I asked you a question," he said. "I expect an answer."
"He sent a totally unnecessary message to a man I'm never going to see again," said Virtue earnestly, staring in awe at the huge corpse of ManMountain Bates.
"Cain?" he asked.
She turned to him and smiled.
"Who's Cain?"
18.
Simple Simon met a pieman going to the fair;
Simple Simon killed the pieman on the thoroughfare.
Simple Simon likes the taste of his new outlaw life:
It's not for pies that Simon needs his shining steel knife.
* * * *
He never used a knife; that was just a case of Black Orpheus practicing a little poetic license.
And he was anything but simple.
In fact, he had degrees in mathematics and laser optics and two or three of the more esoteric sciences, and he taught at one of the larger universities on Lodin XI for the better part of a decade. He was heavily invested in the commodities market when a bumper crop of kirtt, the Lodinian equivalent of wheat, sent prices plummeting down and wiping out his life's savings. It was shortly thereafter that he decided a professor's salary would never buy him all the things that he wanted.
So he left the Democracy and set out for the Inner Frontier, where he embarked on a new course of studies, which included a major in murder and a minor in bigamy. He killed his first four wives and managed to collect the insurance on three of them before it occurred to him that there was a lot more money to be made if he didn't limit his killing to his spouses.
He forthwith became a free-lance killer for hire. Because he had a scientific turn of mind, he favored laser weapons of his own creation; and because he had a healthy respect for those with greater physical skills than himself, he tended to specialize in meticulously devised deathtraps rather than in personal confrontations.
His new profession forced a certain degree of modesty upon him, so much so that he took on the protective coloration of the scientific illiterate. Orpheus saw right through him, of course—seeing through facades was one of the things he did best—and named him Simple Simon as a private joke. The name stuck, and before long Simple Simon's holograph was gracing the walls of the Inner Frontier's postal stations.
The Angel stood in the spaceport's post office, glancing briefly at Simon's face while checking to see if there were any new fugitives worthy of his attention, while Virtue, her satchel slung over her shoulder, stood in the doorway and waited for him.
"I thought you were closing in on Santiago," she said as he rejoined her. "Why bother studying a bunch of second-rate villains?"
"Force of habit," he replied, heading off down the corridor that led to his spaceship. "Besides, for all I know Cain or somebody else has already killed him—and I've still got a planet to buy."
"So in effect, the post office wall is your professional trade journal," commented Virtue.
"I never thought of it that way."
"That's because you're not a journalist," she said.
There was considerably less red tape this time than during their last trip through the spaceport—Virtue guessed that the local authorities had issued orders to get the Angel off the planet as swiftly as possible—and a few minutes later they were in one of the three dozen rental hangars for private spacecraft, climbing into the ship.
"Something's wrong," said the Angel, inspecting the auxiliary control panel that was just inside the hatch.
"What do you mean?"
"The security system's been tripped. Don't touch anything."
"Is it going to explode?" she asked apprehensively.
He shook his head. "I doubt it. If they'd planted a bomb, you'd have triggered it the moment you set foot on the ship."
"Is that why you let me go through the hatch first?" she demanded.
He made no reply, but looked carefully around for another minute without moving farther into the ship, then turned back to her.
"All right," he said. "Let's get back on the ground—carefully."
She followed him through the hatch, and a moment later she was standing some fifty feet away, staring at the ship, while the Angel was speaking to spaceport security on an intercom.
"Nothing's happening," she said when he rejoined her.
"If it didn't blow up while you were walking around in it, it's not likely to blow up just because you're looking at it," he said.
"Then what was done to it?" she asked.
"That's what I intend to find out."
A moment later a harassed-looking security officer appeared.
"What seems to be the problem?" he asked.
"Someone's been in my ship since I landed," said the Angel.
"Oh? Who?"
"That's what I'd like to find put."
The security officer walked to the intercom, asked for an office extension, whispered in low tones for a moment, and then returned to the Angel.
"From what I understand, your mechanic came by just before sunrise."
"I don't carry a mechanic."
"They tell me that his papers were all in order, and that he even had a work order with your signature on it."
"Which signature?" demanded the Angel sharply.
"The Angel, I suppose," responded the officer. "Your identity isn't exactly a secret since last night."
"How did they know it was my signature?
" said the Angel. "What did they compare it against?"
"How the hell do I know?" asked the officer. "My guess is that they didn't bother to check it against anything. The man works for a reputable firm. They probably took him at his word."
"What repairs did he say he planned to make?"
"I haven't the slightest idea," said the security officer.
"Why not?"
"Look—I've spent the last five hours helping the shipping department trying to track down a missing animal that was supposedly flown in from the Antares Sector. I can find out what you want to know, but I'll have to check with security and maintenance and whoever the hell else is likely to have his work order on file."
"Do so immediately," said the Angel. "Then check with his employer and see if they've ever heard of him. And then get a mechanic that you can personally vouch for and have him check my ship over from top to bottom."
"Where can I reach you?" asked the security officer.
"I'll be in the restaurant, waiting for your report."
"It may take a while."
"See that it doesn't."
The Angel headed off down the corridor, followed by Virtue. They passed several souvenir shops and a pair of alien restaurants and finally came to a large restaurant that catered to Men. The bounty hunter looked around, then walked past a number of empty tables until he came to one in the corner of the room that suited him.
"Why here?" asked Virtue, sitting down opposite him.
"Somebody sabotaged my ship," he said. "I feel more comfortable sitting with my back to the wall."
"But you don't mind having my back facing a doorway?" she demanded.
"Not in the least," he replied.
"Were you always this considerate of others, or did it just come with maturity?" she asked sarcastically.
"Sit anywhere you want," he said, indicating a number of empty tables. "It makes no difference to me."
She sighed. "Let's change the subject. Did you learn anything useful this morning?"
"I learned the name and location of the next world we'll be visiting."
"Would you care to share that little tidbit of information, or are we going to play guessing games?"