by Chad Oliver
A cool night wind swished across the grasslands and rattled the windows.
“Let’s go home,” said Robert Quinton.
“There’s our man,” said Pat Conway, three weeks later.
Robert Quinton followed the psychologist’s pointing finger and saw him. The man came walking out of the courthouse, his hands in his pockets, absently whistling convenient extracts from “But Oh! Those Bars on Mars,” the old drinking song. He looked like the guy next door, the guy who sat next to you at lodge meetings.
He was the most dangerous man in the world.
Quinton eyed him closely. The man was of medium stature, a bit on the thin side. He looked hard and muscular, but that could have been imagination. He had very light, straw-colored hair, brushed straight back. He was dressed conservatively in a green business cape with a brown-and-yellow neckline. He was tanned and he had a ring on his left hand. As they watched, he stepped into a shuttle and hummed off westward, toward the old causeway.
“No need to follow him,” Conway explained, steering Quinton to their parked copter. “We can pick him up again on the way to his house.”
They got into the copter and lifted up into a cloudy gray sky. Quinton let Conway handle the controls, and when they had gained some altitude he looked down and watched the Gulf toss and roll restlessly off the island, sloughing off white breakers that bubbled in and broke on the colorless sands. It felt like rain, and there were very few bathers on the beach.
“Doesn’t look like much, does he?” asked Conway.
“No,” agreed Quinton. “Neither did Napoleon for that matter.”
Conway grinned. “But take Josephine, now—”
Quinton relaxed a little, listening to the hum of the copter. Conway was a good man to have around, a good man to work with on a job like this. He knew how to laugh. Pat’s appearance was deceptive, to say the least. He was thin and animated, with a lively and expressive face. He cut his hair short to the vanishing point and affected violent clothes and suspenders. He looked like he was perpetually on the verge of going into it a soft-shoe routine on a burlesque stage—which he had been known to do upon occasion—and he had fooled a good many people who couldn’t look beneath the surface.
The copter intersected the shuttle route and lazed along above it, following it across the island toward where the almost abandoned causeway stretched away to the mainland. It looked like a toy dropped by a child, but Quinton could see a few old men fishing on the gray spans. His eyes returned to the shuttle beneath him, the shuttle that carried the man who had unwittingly called him home from the stars.
The man’s name was Donald Weston. It was an average sort of name, the kind that you wouldn’t look at twice. The viz books were full of names like Donald Weston. It was a non-dangerous, pleasant sort of a name. Donald Weston was twenty-seven years old, and had been educated at a small Texas secondary college. Since his graduation four years ago, he had been doing moderately well on the surface, though not sensationally so. He was an officer in the Galvez Syntho Supply Company, which was engaged in selling special supplies to the Mars and Venus colonies. It was a very ordinary sort of a job.
Recently, Weston had shown mild symptoms of political ambitions. He had announced as a candidate for City Councilman, a position of minor importance, but one that could serve as a stepping-stone toward bigger things. The UNBAC scanner had gone over Weston with a finetoothed comb—his old school records, his associates, his background—and had found very little of interest. There were a few intriguing hints of outside activity, but for the most part Weston seemed almost painfully average.
Camouflage, Quinton wondered, or accident?
The gray clouds turned a shade darker. Big, fat drops of rain began to patter down on the copter cowl, and Quinton saw the fishermen far below start to scurry for shelter. Hissing rain sheets swept in across the Gulf and thunder rolled faintly in the west.
As the copter hovered discreetly in the distance, they saw Weston hurry out of the shuttle and run through the rain to his small suburban home. There was a warm glow of light as the door opened, a glimpse of a woman with golden hair, and Weston was gone.
“Well, back to the salt mines,” Conway said, and turned the copter in a slow arc.
Quinton looked at the slanting rain and listened to the fast drops patter on the cowl. He felt a cold chill inside him that was not due to the rain, and Conway’s light talk didn’t ease it much. They had seen their man, and both of them knew what that meant. They had to get him, and it wasn’t going to be easy. They were outside the law, men without legal status, and if they got into hot water they would have to get themselves out—or not get out at all. They could expect no help from UNBAC if they failed. They could not even ask for help.
It was cat and mouse—and no ordinary mouse, either. Sometimes the cat didn’t get back.
Below them, almost invisible, the gray buildings of the city huddled together to keep warm. A city full of people, Quinton thought, and one small copter lost in the sky. It was a deadly game they were playing, and the city didn’t even know. Had it known—if it found out—it would turn on them with the mindless ferocity of a beast gone mad.
Quinton looked down, thinking. The sea leaped and roared in a rising wind, and now the beach was deserted. An old beach umbrella rolled along the sand, waiting for the sun.
“Take a look at this,” said Pat Conway.
Robert Quinton looked up from the paper, where he had been reading one of Weston’s campaign speeches, and took a sheaf of film blowups from Conway’s outstretched hand. He glanced at the psychologist questioningly.
“We got a chance to get inside last night while the Westons were out lapping it up at a business party,” Conway explained. “A couple of the boys and myself picked the house over, and we got a sheaf of manuscript in Weston’s handwriting under a false bottom in an upstairs desk. We photographed the lot—seems that our boy fancies himself to be another Machiavelli.”
“Um-m-m,” said Quinton.
“Just a clean, red-blooded American boy,” Conway observed. “A credit to the force.”
Robert Quinton started to read the blowups and felt the cold knot tie itself like ice in his stomach. He lit a cigarette, but the smoke seemed cold, black, gritty—
Weston’s manuscript was charming stuff.
Night.
Black, black night and the red blood flowing. It swirls and eddies around my legs. It soaks me and mixes with my blood.
In the black night.
I walk through the black world, and it is red. I see it but I cannot speak. It is too red. I walk through the world, and I think.
In the black, black night.
They do not see me. I am alone. I will be one of them, a part of them. And they will be a part of me, slowly. Redly. I only want to help them, but they cannot see me. It is too black. It is very hard, but I will do it. For them.
I love them.
I walk on.
In the black, black night—
There was more, much more, and Robert Quinton read it all. When he had finished, he did not speak. He put the blowups down, got to his feet, and walked out of the building. Out into the open air, the blue sky, the people and the sunshine.
So that was Donald Weston. Not much, now. A clever man, a warped man. Perhaps even an evil man, although Quinton was wary of the word. He wasn’t particularly dangerous—yet. Not until his moment came, a moment yet lost in the twisted paths of future time. But the moment would come, inevitably. It was in the cards.
The cards had to be reshuffled.
What was it that the man had written? “I only want to help them, but they cannot see.” Was that so very different from what UNBAC was trying to do? Was it?
Robert Quinton watched the people passing him. All kinds of people. Men, women, children. Drunks, lovers, dreamers. Kids on their way to the beach and businessmen on their way back to work. Happy people, sad people. Contented people and people who would one day throw themselves from
copters just to get away from it all. They weren’t worried about survival, these people. That wasn’t fashionable, and never had been. They just wanted to be let alone, and Quinton didn’t blame them.
Was there a difference, a difference between a Weston and an UNBAC? There was one difference: reason. Reason, logic, science, humanity. Words, of course. Just words—but a man had to have something, had to believe in something down deep, even when believing wasn’t popular. Man had been given a mind, and with that mind he had evolved science. Science was a tool. Were they wrong to use it?
Were they just kidding themselves?
The people who walked by him wouldn’t like him, if they knew. They would turn on him, hate him, fear him. Weston, on the other hand, was a man they could put their trust in, believe in. He was a regular guy.
Robert Quinton walked on down the beach, alone in the crowd. The sea breeze whispered in his ears and the hot sun burned his shoulders under his shirt. Tomorrow, they would go after him.
If they failed—
“Sit down, sit down,” said Donald Weston pleasantly. “Drink?”
“Thank you,” said Robert Quinton, smiling. “Scotch and soda, if you don’t mind.”
“Fine, don’t mind at all,” Weston assured him, his voice warm and exceptionally friendly. “Honey—”
Jo, his wife, vanished into the kitchen to fix the drinks. She was a magnetic, blue-eyed blonde, the kind that dominated a room just by being in it. Quinton sat back in his chair, relaxed, and surveyed the room. It was just as Conway had described it to him; comfortable, but not pretentious, in good taste. A few books were in a case against one wall. They were of the type usually displayed in homes not much addicted to reading—several book-club best-sellers, a treatise on how to keep your figure slim by living on orange juice, a family Bible, a volume of condensations from the Reader’s Digest, and a set of Greek and Roman classics, from Homer to Marcus Aurelius. The latter were spotlessly clean and unread. Jo emerged from the kitchen, smiled engagingly, and handed him his drink. She had fixed one for herself, but her husband did without.
“I’ll try to come right to the point,” Quinton said, after sipping his drink. “I know you’re a busy man.”
Weston waved the remark aside, his straw-colored hair neatly combed as always. “Lots of time,” he assured him. “I’ve been looking forward to meeting you; I’m very flattered, really, that you think I have any possibilities along those lines.”
Jo smiled.
“Our business is finding men with potentialities,” Quinton said truthfully. “Finding them and lining them up before they get too expensive. It’s just good business.”
Jo produced an ashdisposer when Quinton fumbled for a cigarette, and he paused to light up. Weston didn’t smoke, his green eyes sharply alert in contrast to his easy-going manner.
“I know you’ve read our letters with care, Mr. Weston, and looked over the literature we sent you. I think you will agree that we have made a generous offer?”
“Certainly, certainly,” Weston said. “I appreciate it.”
“Your name was suggested to us by various sources here in Galveston, Mr. Weston, and—”
Weston waved his hand. “Please,” he said. “The name is Don.”
Jo smoothed her long skirt over her silken legs.
Robert Quinton found it difficult not to let down his hidden guard. These people were charming, and no doubt about it. Sitting here with them, in their homey living room, it was virtually impossible to fear them. They were typical to an extreme, even idealized. And yet—
“Black, black night, and the red blood flowing—
“Don, then—and my name is Bob. Your record in college, and your enviable reputation here in town, together with your often-expressed interest in the Mars Colony, has convinced us that you are one of the men we are looking for. Now, I’m not going to make you any sales-talk; you know as well as I do the prospects and opportunities you would have with our company on Mars. There’s no question of success or failure involved; it’s purely a matter of how far you can go. We think you could go a long way with us.”
Or without us, Quinton thought. He remembered: it was not so much who he was that made him deadly. It was when he was and where he was. The who and the when couldn’t be changed. That left the where. They had to get Donald Weston out of Galveston, and do it legally.
“It’s a break, all right,” Weston said. “We know that.”
Quinton nodded, feeling the sweat in his hands, and took a deep drag on his cigarette. “You bet it is. I know that you two have talked it all over, and have looked up our company’s standings and ratings to check on what we’ve told you. I’ve taken the liberty of bringing some papers with me this evening, and the rest is up to you.” Quinton crossed his mental fingers—tight. He smiled. “What do you say, Don?”
“I’m afraid our answer is no,” Donald Weston said, smiling back at him. “I’ve decided not to accept the position.”
Robert Quinton’s heart took a long nose dive to nowhere. He kept his face expressionless, except for a polite look of disappointment. Their strategy had failed completely. Donald Weston was going to stay right where he was. How much did the man know?
Quinton looked into the other’s eyes. They stared back at him, guilelessly. They were open, frank, friendly—on the surface. And their green depths were frigid with the cold hardness of ice.
“I’m mighty sorry to hear that, Don,” Quinton said. “I find it hard to understand—”
Jo Weston brushed a soft blond hair out of her blue eyes. “It’s just a marvelous chance for Don,” she said. “But with the election coming up and all, we really feel that our place is here, at least for the present.”
Jo Weston. What part was she playing in the invisible game?
Quinton stood up, nodding. “I see your point, of course,” he said. “I won’t overstay my welcome—but if you should happen to change your mind in the near future, just get in touch with us. We’ll be glad to see you at any time.”
“Thank you very much,” said Donald Weston, his rather boyish face very earnest. “We’ll certainly think it over.”
I’ll bet you will, thought Quinton. He said: “Well, thanks very much for the drink. Perhaps I’ll see you around sometime.”
“Perhaps,” agreed Donald Weston, smiling,
Little man, what now?
Robert Quinton said good-by and walked out through the night to his copter, and death walked at his side.
“We’ve underestimated our man,” Robert Quinton said slowly. “Weston didn’t tumble for it, period.”
“How much does he know, do you think?” asked Pat Conway, perched on the edge of the bed in Quinton’s Galveston apartment.
“No telling; I can’t read him. But Weston is a smart one, Pat, and so is that bombshell wife of his. We’re not dealing with any pawn, and that’s for sure. He must suspect something, or else why would he turn the offer down? We’ve got to watch our step, boy.”
“I don’t entirely get it, Bob,” objected Conway, his thumbs hooked in his suspender straps. “It looks like this All-American Boy pose of his is strictly for the birds, but why? He can’t possibly know he’s the key pivot in a developing cultural situation, he hasn’t done much of anything—or has he? What’s he got to be afraid of?”
Quinton shrugged. “My guess would be that he’s just plain old-fashioned smart. He’s got big ideas, and he’s playing the political game. This just-call-me-Don stuff is just about what you’d expect, after all. He’s setting himself up as a regular Joe for the voters, that’s all.”
“It’s more complex than that, I think,” Conway said. “He’s probably got his finger in some pies we haven’t even smelled yet. He’s no dope, and he’d have covered his tracks. Did you notice his eyes?”
“I noticed them,” Quinton nodded.
There was a long silence.
“Nuts,” Conway laughed shortly. “We’re still gulping over the Evil Eye.”
“Maybe,” said Quinton. “Maybe we’d better be.”
They had both seen “simple” situations blow up in their faces before. In this game, the rules changed while you played, and you changed with them—or else.
“Well, the next step is clear, anyhow,” Conway said, breaking the uncomfortable silence.
“Unfortunately,” Quinton agreed.
He was just getting to his feet to fix himself a drink when it happened. His scalp prickled and there was an explosive poof. Quinton dropped like a stone, twisted, and fired a chair at the wall switch. The lights went out.
He lay very still, hardly breathing, listening to his heart pound in his ears. There was silence, utter and complete. Quinton strained every muscle in his body, trying to hear. But there was nothing. Not a whisper. He waited a long time, wondering why he was still alive.
“Pat.” His voice was very low. “Pat.”
Silence. Quinton felt a sick dread wash through him. The killers were gone now, but he didn’t want to turn on the lights. He didn’t want to see. He tried again, without hope.
“Pat.”
Nothing. Or—was that shallow breathing he heard in the room with him? Silently, Quinton wormed his way across the floor to the bed. He held his breath and felt ahead of him on the floor. Pat was there, and the floor was wet and sticky. Quinton let out his breath through set teeth. He felt sick and tired.
Quinton explored the body with a practiced hand, not daring to take a chance on the lights. There was a heartbeat, a faint one. The wound was in the chest, low on the right. That wasn’t good, but it could have been worse. Pat was still breathing, but he wouldn’t be for long. Not without help.
The hospital was out of the question. Quinton couldn’t afford to get mixed up with a shooting at this stage of the game. There was just one thing to do.
He crawled over to the closet and fished the special wave radio out of its hiding place in the wall. Regulations or no regulations, he wasn’t going to let Pat die if he could help it. He beamed New Mexico Station, setting the dials by means of a tiny red light on the set, and sent a code message: UNBAC IMPERATIVE OFFICIAL. CONTACT: BORDIE, NEW MEXICO STATION. CONWAY SHOT GET THE DOC AND COME A’RUNNIN’. REPEAT IMPERATIVE. QUINTON.