The Astounding Science Fiction Anthology

by John W. Campbell Jr.

  “Is that another reason why you like me?” Verkan Vall asked.

  “Unofficially, yes. As President-General of the Society of Assassins, I must be nonpolitical. The Society is rigidly so; if we let ourselves become involved, as an organization, in politics, we could control the System Government inside of five years, and we’d be wiped out of existence in fifty years by the very forces we sought to control,” Klarnood said. “But personally, I would like to see the Statisticalist Party destroyed. If they succeed in their program of socialization, the Society would be finished. A socialist state is, in its final development, an absolute, total, state; no total state can tolerate extra-legal and para-governmental organizations. So we have adopted the policy of giving a little inconspicuous aid, here and there, to people who are dangerous to the Statisticalists. The Lady Dallona of Hadron, and Dr. Harnosh of Hosh, are such persons. You appear to be another. That’s why I ordered that fellow, Larnorm, to make sure you were safe in his hotel.”

  “Where is the Lady Dallona?” Verkan Vall asked. “From your use of the present tense, I assume you believe her to be still carnate.”

  Klarnood looked at Verkan Vall keenly. “That’s a pretty blunt question, Lord Virzal,” he said. “I wish I knew a little more about you. When you and your Assassins started inquiring about the Lady Dallona, I tried to check up on you. I found out that you had come to Darsh from Ghamma on a ship of the family of Zorda, accompanied by Brarnend of Zorda himself. And that’s all I could find out. You claim to be a Venusian planter, and you might be. Any Terran who can handle weapons as you can would have come to my notice long ago. But you have no more ascertainable history than if you’d stepped out of another dimension.”

  That was getting uncomfortably close to the truth. In fact, it was the truth. Verkan Vall laughed.

  “Well, confidentially,” he said, “I’m from the Arcturus System. I followed the Lady Dallona here from our home planet, and when I have rescued her from among you Solarians, I shall, according to our customs, receive her hand in marriage. As she is the daughter of the Emperor of Arcturus, that’ll be quite a good thing for me.”

  Klarnood chuckled. “You know, you’d only have to tell me that about three or four times and I’d start believing it,” he said. “And Dr. Harnosh of Hosh would believe it the first time; he’s been talking to himself ever since the Lady of Dallona started her experimental work here. Lord Virzal, I’m going to take a chance on you. The Lady Dallona is still carnate, or was four days ago, and the same for Dirzed. They both went into hiding after the discarnation feast of Garnon of Roxor, to escape the enmity of the Statisticalists. Two days after they disappeared, Dirzed called Assassins’ Hall and reported this, but told us nothing more. I suppose, in about three or four days, I could re-establish contact with him. We want the public to think that the Statisticalists made away with the Lady Dallona, at least until the election’s over.”

  Verkan Vall nodded. “I was pretty sure that was the situation,” he said. “It may be that they will get in touch with me; if they don’t, I’ll need your help in reaching them.”

  “Why do you think the Lady Dallona will try to reach you?”

  “She needs all the help she can get. She knows she can get plenty from me. Why do you think I interrupted my search for her, and risked my carnate existence, to fight those people over a matter of verbalisms and political propaganda?” Verkan Vall went to the newscast visiplate and snapped it on. “We’ll see if I’m getting results, yet.”

  The plate lighted, and a handsome young man in a gold-laced green suit was speaking out of it:

  “… where he is heavily guarded by Assassins. However, in an exclusive interview with representatives of this service, the Assassin Hirzif, one of the two who seconded the men the Lord Virzal fought, said that in his opinion all of the three were so outclassed as to have had no chance whatever, and that he had already refused an offer of ten thousand System Monetary Units to discarnate the Lord Virzal for the Statisticalist Party. ‘When I want to discarnate,’ Hirzif the Assassin said, ‘I’ll invite in my friends and do it properly; until I do, I wouldn’t go up against the Lord Virzal of Verkan for ten million S.M.U.’”

  Verkan Vall snapped off the visiplate. “See what I mean?” he asked, “I fought those politicians just for the advertising. If Dallona and Dirzed are anywhere near a visiplate, they’ll know how to reach me.”

  “Hirzif shouldn’t have talked about refusing that retainer,” Klarnood frowned. “That isn’t good Assassin ethics. Why, yes, Lord Virzal; that was cleverly planned. It ought to get results. But I wish you’d get the Lady Dallona out of Darsh, and preferably off Terra, as soon as you can. We’ve benefited by this, so far, but I shouldn’t like to see things go much further. A real civil war could develop out of this situation, and I don’t want that. Call on me for help; I’ll give you a code word to use at Assassins’ Hall.”

  A real civil war was developing even as Klarnood spoke; by mid-morning of the next day, the fighting that had been partially suppressed by the Constabulary had broken out anew. The Assassins employed by the Solar Hotel—heavily re-enforced during the night—had fought a pitched battle with Statisticalist partisans on the landing-stage above Verkan Vall’s suite, and now several Constabulary airboats were patrolling around the building. The rule on Constabulary interference seemed to be that while individuals had an unquestionable right to shoot out their differences among themselves, any fighting likely to endanger non-participants was taboo.

  Just how successful in enforcing this rule the Constabulary were was open to some doubt. Ever since arising, Verkan Vall had heard the crash of small arms and the hammering of automatic weapons in other parts of the towering city-unit. There hadn’t been a civil war on the Akor-Neb Sector for over five centuries, he knew, but then, Hadron Dalla, Doctor of Psychic Science, and intertemporal trouble-carrier extraordinary, had only been on this sector for a little under a year. If anything, he was surprised that the explosion had taken so long to occur.

  One of the servants furnished to him by the hotel management approached him in the drawing room, holding a four-inch-square wafer of white plastic.

  “Lord Virzal, there is a masked Assassin in the hallway who brought this under Assassins’ Truce,” he said.

  Verkan Vall took the wafer and pared off three of the four edges, which showed black where they had been fused. Unfolding it, he found, as he had expected, that the pyrographed message within was in the alphabet and language of the First Paratime Level:

  Vall, darling:

  Am I glad you got here; this time I really am in the middle, but good! The Assassin, Dirzed, who brings this, is in my service. You can trust him implicitly; he’s about the only person in Darsh you can trust. He’ll bring you to where I am.

  Dalla

  P.S. I hope you’re not still angry about that musician. I told you, at the time, that he was just helping me with an experiment in telepathy.

  D.

  Verkan Vall grinned at the postscript. That had been twenty years ago, when he’d been eighty and she’d been seventy. He supposed she’d expect him to take up his old relationship with her again. It probably wouldn’t last any longer than it had, the other time; he recalled a Fourth Level proverb about the leopard and his spots. It certainly wouldn’t be boring, though.

  “Tell the Assassin to come in,” he directed. Then he tossed the message down on a table. Outside of himself, nobody in Darsh could read it but the woman who had sent it; if, as he thought highly probable, the Statisticalists had spies among the hotel staff, it might serve to reduce some cryptanalyst to gibbering insanity.

  The Assassin entered, drawing off a cowllike mask. He was the man whose arm Dalla had been holding in the visiplate picture; Verkan Vall even recognized the extremely ornate pistol and knife on his belt.

  “Dirzed the Assassin,” he named himself. “If you wish, we can visi-phone Assassins’ Hall for verification of my identity,”

  “Lord Virzal of Verkan. A
nd my Assassins, Marnik and Oliron.” They all hooked fingers and clapped shoulders with the newcomer. “That won’t be needed,” Verkan Vall told Dirzed. “I know you from seeing you with the Lady Dallona, on the visiplate; you’re ‘Dirzed, her faithful Assassin.’”

  Dirzed’s face, normally the color of a good walnut gunstock, turned almost black. He used shockingly bad language.

  “And that’s why I have to wear this abomination,” he finished, displaying the mask. “The Lady Dallona and I can’t show our faces anywhere; if we did, every Statisticalist and his six-year-old brat would know us, and we’d be fighting off an army of them in five minutes.”

  “Where’s the Lady Dallona, now?”

  “In hiding, Lord Virzal, at a private dwelling dome in the forest; she’s most anxious to see you. I’m to take you to her, and I would strongly advise that you bring your Assassins along. There are other people at this dome, and they are not personally loyal to the Lady Dallona. I’ve no reason to suspect them of secret enmity, but their friendship is based entirely on political expediency.”

  “And political expediency is subject to change without notice,” Verkan Vall finished for him. “Have you an airboat?”

  “On the landing stage below. Shall we go now, Lord Virzal?”

  “Yes.” Verkan Vall made a two-handed gesture to his Assassins, as though gripping a submachine-gun; they nodded, went into another room, and returned carrying light automatic weapons in their hands and pouches of spare drums slung over their shoulders. “And may I suggest, Dirzed, that one of my Assassins drives the airboat? I want you on the back seat with me, to explain the situation as we go.”

  Dirzed’s teeth flashed white against his brown skin as he gave Verkan Vall a quick smile.

  “By all means, Lord Virzal; I would much rather be distrusted than to find that my client’s friends were not discreet.”

  There were a couple of hotel Assassins guarding Dirzed’s airboat, on the landing stage. Marnik climbed in under the controls, with Olirzon beside him; Verkan Vall and Dirzed entered the rear seat. Dirzed gave Marnik the co-ordinate reference for their destination.

  “Now, what sort of a place is this, where we’re going?” Verkan Vall asked. “And who’s there whom we may or may not trust?”

  “Well, it’s a dome house belonging to the family of Starpha; they own a five-mile radius around it, oak and beech forest and underbrush, stocked with deer and boar. A hunting lodge. Prince Jirzyn of Starpha, Lord Girzon of Roxor, and a few other top-level Volitionalists, know that the Lady Dallona’s hiding there. They’re keeping her out of sight till after the election, for propaganda purposes. We’ve been hiding there since immediately after the discarnation feast of the Lord Garnon of Roxor.”

  “What happened, after the feast?” Verkan Vall wanted to know.

  “Well, you know how the Lady Dallona and Dr. Harnosh of Hosh had this telepathic-sensitive there, in a trance and drugged with a zerfa-derivative alkaloid the Lady Dallona had developed. I was Lord Garnon’s Assassin; I discarnated him, myself. Why, I hadn’t even put my pistol away before he was in control of this sensitive, in a room five stories above the banquet hall; he began communicating at once. We had visiplates to show us what was going on.

  “Right away, Nirzav of Shonna, one of the Statisticalist leaders who was a personal friend of Lord Garnon’s in spite of his politics, renounced Statisticalism and went over to the Volitionalists, on the strength of this communication. Prince Jirzyn, and Lord Girzon, the new family-head of Roxor, decided that there would be trouble in the next few days, so they advised the Lady Dallona to come to this hunting lodge for safety. She and I came here in her airboat, directly from the feast. A good thing we did, too; if we’d gone to her apartment, we’d have walked in before that lethal gas had time to clear.

  “There are four Assassins of the family of Starpha, and six menservants, and an upper-servant named Tarnod, the gamekeeper. The Starpha Assassins and I have been keeping the rest under observation. I left one of the Starpha Assassins guarding the Lady Dallona when I came for you, under brotherly oath to protect her in my name till I returned.”

  The airboat was skimming rapidly above the treetops, toward the northern part of the city.

  “What’s known about that package bomb?” Verkan Vall asked. “Who sent it?”

  Dirzed shrugged. “The Statisticalists, of course. The wrapper was stolen from the Reincarnation Research Institute; so was the case. The Constabulary are working on it.” Dirzed shrugged again.

  The dome, about a hundred and fifty feet in width and some fifty in height, stood among the trees ahead. It was almost invisible from any distance; the concrete dome was of mottled green and gray concrete, trees grew so close as to brush it with their branches, and the little pavilion on the flattened top was roofed with translucent green plastic. As the air-boat came in, a couple of men in Assassins’ garb emerged from the pavilion to meet them.

  “Marnik, stay at the controls,” Verkan Vall directed. “I’ll send Olirzon up for you if I want you. If there’s any trouble, take off for Assassins’ Hall and give the code word, then come back with twice as many men as you think you’ll need.”

  Dirzed raised his eyebrows over this. “I hadn’t known the Assassin-President had given you a code word, Lord Virzal,” he commented. “That doesn’t happen very often.”

  “The Assassin-President has honored me with his friendship,” Verkan Vall replied noncommittally, as he, Dirzed and Olirzon climbed out of the airboat. Marnik was holding it an unobtrusive inch or so above the flat top of the dome, away from the edge of the pavilion roof.

  The two Assassins greeted him, and a man in upper-servants’ garb and wearing a hunting knife and a long hunting pistol approached.

  “Lord Virzal of Verkan? Welcome to Starpha Dome. The Lady Dallona awaits you below.”

  Verkan Vall had never been in an Akor-Neb dwelling dome, but a description of such structures had been included in his hypno-mech indoctrination. Originally, they had been the standard structure for all purposes; about two thousand elapsed years ago, when nationalism had still existed on the Akor-Neb Sector, the cities had been almost entirely underground, as protection from air attack. Even now, the design had been retained by those who wished to live apart from the towering city units, to preserve the natural appearance of the landscape. The Starpha hunting lodge was typical of such domes. Under it was a circular well, eighty feet in depth and fifty in width, with a fountain and a shallow circular pool at the bottom. The storerooms, kitchens and servants’ quarters were at the top, the living quarters at the bottom, in segments of a wide circle around the well, back of balconies.

  “Tarnod, the gamekeeper,” Dirzed performed the introductions. “And Erarno and Kirzol, Assassins.”

  Verkan Vall hooked fingers and clapped shoulders with them. Tarnod accompanied them to the lifter tubes—two percent positive gravitation for descent and two percent negative for ascent—and they all floated down the former, like air-filled balloons, to the bottom level.

  “The Lady Dallona is in the gun room,” Tarnod informed Verkan Vall, making as though to guide him.

  “Thanks, Tarnod; we know the way,” Dirzed told him shortly, turning his back on the upper-servant and walking toward a closed door on the other side of the fountain. Verkan Vall and Olirzon followed; for a moment, Tarnod stood looking after them, then he followed the other two Assassins into the ascent tube.

  “I don’t relish that fellow,” Dirzed explained. “The family of Starpha use him for work they couldn’t hire an Assassin to do at any price. I’ve been here often, when I was with the Lord Garnon; I’ve always thought he had something on Prince Jirzyn.”

  He knocked sharply on the closed door with the butt of his pistol. In a moment, it slid open, and a young Assassin with a narrow mustache and a tuft of chin beard looked out.

  “Ah, Dirzed.” He stepped outside. “The Lady Dallona is within; I return her to your care.”

  Verkan Vall entered,
followed by Dirzed and Olirzon. The big room was fitted with reclining chairs and couches and low tables; its walls were hung with the heads of deer and boar and wolves, and with racks holding rifles and hunting pistols and fowling pieces. It was filled with the soft glow of indirect cold light. At the far side of the room, a young woman was seated at a desk, speaking softly into a sound transcriber. As they entered, she snapped it off and rose.

  Hadron Dalla wore the same costume Verkan Vall had seen on the visiplate; he recognized her instantly. It took her a second or two to perceive Verkan Vall under the brown skin and black hair of the Lord Virzal of Verkan. Then her face lighted with a happy smile.

  “Why, Va-a-a-ll!” she whooped, running across the room and tossing herself into his not particularly reluctant arms. After all, it had been twenty years—“I didn’t know you, at first!”

  “You mean, in these clothes?” he asked, seeing that she had forgotten, for the moment, the presence of the two Assassins. She had even called him by his First Level name, but that was unimportant—the Akor-Neb affectionate diminutive was formed by omitting the -irz- or -am-. “Well, they’re not exactly what I generally wear on the plantation.” He kissed her again, then turned to his companions. “Your pardon, Gentlemen-Assassins; it’s been something over a year since we’ve seen each other.”

  Olirzon was smiling at the affectionate reunion; Dirzed wore a look of amused resignation, as though he might have expected something like this to happen. Verkan Vall and Dalla sat down on a couch near the desk.