The Astounding Science Fiction Anthology

by John W. Campbell Jr.

A sudden happy smile touched Verkan Vall’s eyes. He caught each of his Assassins by an arm.

  “Marnik, cover my back,” he ordered. “Olirzon, cover everybody at the table. Come on!”

  Then he stepped forward, halting between the chairs of the young man and the man with the gray hair and facing the beefy man in the light tunic.

  “You!” he barked. “I mean YOU.”

  The beefy man stopped laughing and stared at him; then sprang to his feet. His hand, streaking toward his left armpit, stopped and dropped to his side as Olirzon aimed a pistol at him. The others sat motionless.

  “You,” Verkan Vall continued, “are a complete, deliberate, malicious, and unmitigated liar. The Lady Dallona of Hadron is a scientist of integrity, incapable of falsifying her experimental work. What’s more, her father is one of my best friends; in his name, and in hers, I demand a full retraction of the slanderous statements you have just made.”

  “Do you know who I am?” the beefy one shouted.

  “I know what you are,” Verkan Vall shouted back. Like most ancient languages, the Akor-Neb speech included an elaborate, delicately-shaded, and utterly vile vocabulary of abuse; Verkan Vall culled from it judiciously and at length. “And if I don’t make myself understood verbally, we’ll go down to the object level,” he added, snatching a bowl of soup from in front of the monkish-looking young man and throwing it across the table.

  The soup was a dark brown, almost black. It contained bits of meat, and mushrooms, and slices of hard-boiled egg, and yellow Martian rock lichen. It produced, on the light tunic, a most spectacular effect.

  For a moment, Verkan Vall was afraid the fellow would have an apoplectic stroke, or an epileptic fit. Mastering himself, however, he bowed jerkily.

  “Marnark of Bashad,” he identified himself. “When and where can my friends consult yours?”

  “Lord Virzal of Verkan,” the paratimer bowed back. “Your friends can negotiate with mine here and now. I am represented by these Gentlemen-Assassins.”

  “I won’t submit my friends to the indignity of negotiating with them,” Marnark retorted. “I insist that you be represented by persons of your own quality and mine.”

  “Oh, you do?” Olirzon broke in. “Well, is your objection personal to me, or to Assassins as a class? In the first case, I’ll remember to make a private project of you, as soon as I’m through with my present employment; if it’s the latter, I’ll report your attitude to the Society. I’ll see what Klarnood, our President-General, thinks of your views.”

  A crowd had begun to accumulate around the table. Some of them were persons in evening dress, some were Assassins on the hotel payroll, and some were unattached Assassins.

  “Well, you won’t have far to look for him,” one of the latter said, pushing through the crowd to the table.

  He was a man of middle age, inclined to stoutness; he made Verkan Vall think of a chocolate figure of Tortha Karf. The red badge on his breast was surrounded with gold lace, and, instead of black wings and a silver bullet, it bore silver wings and a golden dagger. He bowed contemptuously at Marnark of Bashad.

  “Klarnood, President-General of the Society of Assassins,” he announced. “Marnark of Bashad, did I hear you say that you considered members of the Society as unworthy to negotiate an affair of honor with your friends, on behalf of this nobleman who has been courteous enough to accept your challenge?” he demanded.

  Marnark of Bashad’s arrogance suffered considerable evaporation-loss. His tone became almost servile.

  “Not at all, Honorable Assassin-President,” he protested. “But as I was going to ask these gentlemen to represent me, I thought it would be more fitting for the other gentleman to be represented by personal friends, also. In that way—”

  “Sorry, Marnark,” the gray-haired man at the table said. “I can’t second you; I have a quarrel with the Lord Virzal, too.” He rose and bowed. “Sirzob of Abo. Inasmuch as the Honorable Marnark is a guest at my table, an affront to him is an affront to me. In my quality as his host, I must demand satisfaction from you, Lord Virzal.”

  “Why, gladly, Honorable Sirzob,” Verkan Vall replied. This was getting better and better every moment. “Of course, your friend, the Honorable Marnark, enjoys priority of challenge; I’ll take care of you as soon as I have, shall we say, satisfied, him.”

  The earnest and rather consecrated-looking young man rose also, bowing to Verkan Vall.

  “Yirzol of Narva. I, too, have a quarrel with you, Lord Virzal; I cannot submit to the indignity of having my food snatched from in front of me, as you just did. I also demand satisfaction.”

  “And quite rightly, Honorable Yirzol,” Verkan Vall approved. “It looks like such good soup, too,” he sorrowed, inspecting the front of Marnark’s tunic. “My seconds will negotiate with yours immediately; your satisfaction, of course, must come after that of Honorable Sirzob.”

  “If I may intrude,” Klarnood put in smoothly, “may I suggest that as the Lord Virzal is represented by his Assassins, yours can represent all three of you at the same time. I will gladly offer my own good offices as impartial supervisor.”

  Verkan Vall turned and bowed as to royalty. “An honor, Assassin-President; I am sure no one could act in that capacity more satisfactorily.”

  “Well, when would it be most convenient to arrange the details?” Klarnood inquired. “I am completely at your disposal, gentlemen.”

  “Why, here and now, while we’re all together,” Verkan Vall replied.

  “I object to that!” Marnark of Bashad vociferated. “We can’t make arrangements here; why, all these hotel people, from the manager down, are nothing but tipsters for the newscast services!”

  “Well, what’s wrong with that?” Verkan Vall demanded. “You knew that when you slandered the Lady Dallona in their hearing.”

  “The Lord Virzal of Verkan is correct,” Klarnood ruled. “And the offenses for which you have challenged him were also committed in public. By all means, let’s discuss the arrangements now.” He turned to Verkan Vall. “As the challenged party, you have the choice of weapons; your opponents, then, have the right to name the conditions under which they are to be used.”

  Marnark of Bashad raised another outcry over that. The assault upon him by the Lord Virzal of Verkan was deliberately provocative, and therefore tantamount to a challenge; he, himself, had the right to name the weapons. Klarnood upheld him.

  “Do the other gentlemen make the same claim?” Verkan Vall wanted to know.

  “If they do, I won’t allow it,” Klarnood replied. “You deliberately provoked Honorable Marnark, but the offenses of provoking him at Honorable Sirzob’s table, and of throwing Honorable Yirzol’s soup at him, were not given with intent to provoke. These gentlemen have a right to challenge, but not to consider themselves provoked.”

  “Well, I choose knives, then,” Marnark hastened to say.

  Verkan Vall smiled thinly. He had learned knife-play among the greatest masters of that art in all paratime, the Third Level Khanga pirates of the Caribbean Islands.

  “And we fight barefoot, stripped to the waist, and without any parrying weapon in the left hand,” Verkan Vall stipulated.

  The beefy Marnark fairly licked his chops in anticipation. He outweighed Verkan Vall by forty pounds; he saw an easy victory ahead. Verkan Vall’s own confidence increased at these signs of his opponent’s assurance.

  “And as for Honorable Sirzob and Honorable Yirzol, I choose pistols,” he added.

  Sirzob and Yirzol held a hasty whispered conference.

  “Speaking both for Honorable Yirzol and for myself,” Sirzob announced, “we stipulate that the distance shall be twenty meters, that the pistols shall be fully loaded, and that fire shall be at will after the command.”

  “Twenty rounds, fire at will, at twenty meters!” Olirzon hooted. “You must think our principal’s as bad a shot as you are!”

  The four Assassins stepped aside and held a long discussion about something, with
considerable argument and gesticulation. Klarnood, observing Verkan Vall’s impatience, leaned close to him and whispered:

  “This is highly irregular; we must pretend ignorance and be patient. They’re laying bets on the outcome. You must do your best, Lord Virzal; you don’t want your supporters to lose money.”

  He said it quite seriously, as though the outcome were otherwise a matter of indifference to Verkan Vall.

  Marnark wanted to discuss time and place, and proposed that all three duels be fought at dawn, on the fourth landing stage of Darsh Central Hospital; that was closest to the maternity wards, and statistics showed that most births occurred just before that hour.

  “Certainly not,” Verkan Vall vetoed. “We’ll fight here and now; I don’t propose going a couple of hundred miles to meet you at any such unholy hour. We’ll fight in the nearest hallway that provides twenty meters’ shooting distance.”

  Marnark, Sirzob and Yirzol all clamored in protest. Verkan Vall shouted them down, drawing on his hypnotically acquired knowledge of Akor-Neb duelling customs. “The code explicitly states that satisfaction shall be rendered as promptly as possible, and I insist on a literal interpretation. I’m not going to inconvenience myself and Assassin-President Klarnood and these four Gentlemen-Assassins just to humor Statisticalist superstitions.”

  The manager of the hotel, drawn to the Martian Room by the uproar, offered a hallway connecting the kitchens with the refrigerator rooms; it was fifty meters long by five in width, was well-lighted and sound-proof, and had a bay in which the seconds and others could stand during the firing.

  They repaired thither in a body, Klarnood gathering up several hotel servants on the way through the kitchen. Verkan Vall stripped to the waist, pulled off his ankle boots, and examined Olirzon’s knife. Its tapering eight-inch blade was double-edged at the point, and its handle was covered with black velvet to afford a good grip, and wound with gold wire. He nodded approvingly, gripped it with his index finger crooked around the cross-guard, and advanced to meet Marnark of Bashad.

  As he had expected, the burly politician was depending upon his greater brawn to overpower his antagonist. He advanced with a sidling, spread-legged gait, his knife hand against his right hip and his left hand extended in front. Verkan Vall nodded with pleased satisfaction; a wrist-grabber. Then he blinked. Why, the fellow was actually holding his knife reversed, his little finger to the guard and his thumb on the pommel!

  Verkan Vall went briskly to meet him, made a feint at his knife hand with his own left, and then side-stepped quickly to the right. As Marnark’s left hand grabbed at his right wrist, his left hand brushed against it and closed into a fist, with Marnark’s left thumb inside of it. He gave a quick downward twist with his wrist, pulling Marnark off balance.

  Caught by surprise, Marnark stumbled, his knife flailing wildly away from Verkan Vall. As he stumbled forward, Verkan Vall pivoted on his left heel and drove the point of his knife into the back of Marnark’s neck, twisting it as he jerked it free. At the same time, he released Marnark’s thumb. The politician continued his stumble and fell forward on his face, blood spurting from his neck. He gave a twitch or so, and was still.

  Verkan Vall stooped and wiped the knife on the dead man’s clothes—another Khanga pirate gesture—and then returned it to Olirzon.

  “Nice weapon, Olirzon,” he said. “It fitted my hand as though I’d been born holding it.”

  “You used it as though you had, Lord Virzal,” the Assassin replied. “Only eight seconds from the time you closed with him.”

  The function of the hotel servants whom Klarnood had gathered up now became apparent; they advanced, took the body of Marnark by the heels, and dragged it out of the way. The others watched this removal with mixed emotions. The two remaining principals were impassive and frozen-faced. Their two Assassins, who had probably bet heavily on Marnark, were chagrined. And Klarnood was looking at Verkan Vall with a considerable accretion of respect. Verkan Vall pulled on his boots and resumed his clothing.

  There followed some argument about the pistols; it was finally decided that each combatant should use his own shoulder-holster weapon. All three were nearly enough alike—small weapons, rather heavier than they looked, firing a tiny ten-grain bullet at ten thousand foot-seconds. On impact, such a bullet would almost disintegrate; a man hit anywhere in the body with one would be killed instantly, his nervous system paralyzed and his heart stopped by internal pressure. Each of the pistols carried twenty rounds in the magazine.

  Verkan Vall and Sirzob of Abo took their places, their pistols lowered at their sides, facing each other across a measured twenty meters.

  “Are you ready, gentlemen?” Klarnood asked. “You will not raise your pistols until the command to fire; you may fire at will after it. Ready. Fire!”

  Both pistols swung up to level. Verkan Vall found Sirzob’s head in his sights and squeezed; the pistol kicked back in his hand, and he saw a lance of blue flame jump from the muzzle of Sirzob’s. Both weapons barked together, and with the double report came the whip-cracking sound of Sirzob’s bullet passing Verkan Vall’s head. Then Sirzob’s face altered its appearance unpleasantly, and he pitched forward. Verkan Vall thumbed on his safety and stood motionless, while the servants advanced, took Sirzob’s body by the heels, and dragged it over beside Marnark’s.

  “All right; Honorable Yirzol, you’re next,” Verkan Vall called out.

  “The Lord Virzal has fired one shot,” one of the opposing seconds objected, “and Honorable Yirzol has a full magazine. The Lord Virzal should put in another magazine.”

  “I grant him the advantage; let’s get on with it,” Verkan Vall said.

  Yirzol of Narva advanced to the firing point. He was not afraid of death—none of the Akor-Neb people were; their language contained no word to express the concept of total and final extinction—and discarnation by gunshot was almost entirely painless. But he was beginning to suspect that he had made a fool of himself by getting into this affair, he had work in his present reincarnation which he wanted to finish, and his political party would suffer loss, both of his services and of prestige.

  “Are you ready, gentlemen?” Klarnood intoned ritualistically. “You will not raise your pistols until the command to fire; you may fire at will after it. Ready, Fire!”

  Verkan Vall shot Yirzol of Narva through the head before the latter had his pistol half raised. Yirzol fell forward on the splash of blood Sirzob had made, and the servants came forward and dragged his body over with the others. It reminded Verkan Vall of some sort of industrial assembly-line operation. He replaced the two expended rounds in his magazine with fresh ones and slid the pistol back into its holster. The two Assassins whose principals had been so expeditiously massacred were beginning to count up their losses and pay off the winners.

  Klarnood, the President-General of the Society of Assassins, came over, hooking fingers and clapping shoulders with Verkan Vall.

  “Lord Virzal, I’ve seen quite a few duels, but nothing quite like that,” he said. “You should have been an Assassin!”

  That was a considerable compliment. Verkan Vall thanked him modestly.

  “I’d like to talk to you privately,” the Assassin-President continued. “I think it’ll be worth your while if we have a few words together.”

  Verkan Vall nodded. “My Suite is on the fifteenth floor above; will that be all right?” He waited until the losers had finished settling their bets, then motioned to his own pair of Assassins.

  As they emerged into the Martian Room again, the manager was waiting; he looked as though he were about to demand that Verkan Vall vacate his suite. However, when he saw the arm of the President-General of the Society of Assassins draped amicably over his guest’s shoulder, he came forward bowing and smiling.

  “Larnorm, I want you to put five of your best Assassins to guarding the approaches to the Lord Virzal’s suite” Klarnood told him. “I’ll send five more from Assassins’ Hall to replace them at their o
rdinary duties. And I’ll hold you responsible with your carnate existence for the Lord Virzal’s safety in this hotel. Understand?”

  “Oh, yes, Honorable Assassin-President; you may trust me. The Lord Virzal will be perfectly safe.”

  In Verkan Vall’s suite, above, Klarnood sat down and got out his pipe, filling it with tobacco lightly mixed with zerfa. To his surprise, he saw his host light a plain tobacco cigarette.

  “Don’t you use zerfa?” he asked.

  “Very little,” Verkan Vall replied. “I grow it. If you’d see the bums who hang around our drying sheds, on Venus, cadging rejected leaves and smoking themselves into a stupor, you’d be frugal in using it, too.”

  Klarnood nodded. “You know, most men would want a pipe of fifty percent, or a straight zerfa cigarette, after what you’ve been through,” he said.

  “I’d need something like that, to deaden my conscience, if I had one to deaden,” Verkan Vall said. “As it is, I feel like a murderer of babes. That overgrown fool, Marnark, handled his knife like a cow-butcher. The young fellow couldn’t handle a pistol at all. I suppose the old fellow, Sirzob, was a fair shot, but dropping him wasn’t any great feat of arms, either.”

  Klarnood looked at him curiously for a moment. “You know,” he said, at length, “I believe you actually mean that. Well, until he met you, Marnark of Bashad was rated as the best knife-fighter in Darsh. Sirzob had ten dueling victories to his credit, and young Yirzol four.” He puffed slowly on his pipe. “I like you, Lord Virzal; a great Assassin was lost when you decided to reincarnate as a Venusian landowner. I’d hate to see you discarnated without proper warning. I take it you’re ignorant of the intricacies of Terran politics?”

  “To a large extent, yes.”

  “Well, do you know who those three men were?” When Verkan Vall shook his head, Klarnood continued: “Marnark was the son and right-hand associate of old Mirzark of Bashad, the Statisticalist Party leader. Sirzob of Abo was their propaganda director. And Yirzol of Narva was their leading socio-economic theorist, and their candidate for Executive Chairman. In six minutes, with one knife thrust and two shots, you did the Statisticalist Party an injury second only to that done them by the young lady in whose name you were fighting. In two weeks, there will be a planet-wide general election. As it stands, the Statisticalists have a majority of the seats in Parliament and on the Executive Council. As a result of your work and the Lady Dallona’s, they’ll lose that majority, and more, when the votes are tallied.”