He slept soundly, waking just after dawn with a ferocious hangover. Triphammers kept exploding behind his forehead, as he made his way muzzily to the washstand and gobbled down a pill. The pill eased the throbbing considerably, but his head continued to ache. Lori was not in the hotel dining room for breakfast when he arrived. Gardner wondered if she were sleeping late, and debated going up to her room to pay her a visit. But he decided against that, and went straight to the jewel exchange from the dining room.
That evening, when he returned from his day’s commerce, she was in the lobby again. She smiled graciously at him as he entered.
“Hello, Roy. Sleep well last night?”
“I slept fine. It was waking up that hurt.”
She grinned. “I know what you mean.”
“I missed you at breakfast,” Gardner said. “You sleep through all the racket the chambermaids make?”
“It’s easier to juggle hot coals,” she said. “No, I was up and out early at the crack of dawn. I went down to the produce markets at sunup to watch the cockfights they stage down there.”
Gardner’s eyebrows rose. “I’m impressed. You couldn’t have had more than four hours’ sleep.”
“It’s the natural resiliency of youth,” she said lightly. “But I’m starting to feel it now. I’m crumbling around the edges, if you know what I mean.”
Gardner invited her into the casino for a drink; this time, they limited themselves to one apiece, then went on into the dining-room for dinner, and spent the rest of the evening in the hotel lounge talking to each other.
The next day, when Gardner arrived at the jewel exchange for his day’s trading session, he saw Tom Steeves heading toward him. Steeves, the veteran of twenty years of jewel trading on Lurion, had made several attempts to get friendly with Gardner, but the Security man had warded Steeves off as politely as possible, not wanting to get entangled in a friendship with a man he had to kill.
But this morning Steeves would not be shaken off. “Are you free for lunch today, Roy?”
“Yes, I am … uh … why? ” Gardner asked, wishing he had had the good sense to offer a defensive excuse.
Steeves smiled jovially. “I’m having lunch with a couple of interesting fellows, and I’m looking around for company. I’d very much like you to join us, Roy. I think it would be well worth your while.”
There was something almost cajoling in Steeves’ tone, as if the stout, middle-aged jewel merchant were pleading with Gardner to say yes.
Frowning, Gardner asked, “What sort of fellows do you mean? Are they in the jewel line?”
“Not exactly. They’re … well, philosophers, for lack of a better word. Two young Lurioni.”
The idea of Lurioni philosophers seemed unlikely to Gardner, unless it was a philosophy of evil that Steeves’ friends expounded. But the Security man felt strangely moved by Steeves’ insistence. Wondering whether he were making another major tactical error, he accepted Steeves’ invitation and agreed to meet the older man at noon.
It was a hectic morning. Gardner threw himself into his trading with such energy that he surprised himself; it was almost as if this really were his life’s focus, this trading of stones and amassing of money. At noon, he found Steeves waiting at the prearranged street corner.
“The restaurant is a few blocks from here,” Steeves said. “It’s quickest to walk. My friends will meet us there.”
As they made their way through the narrow, crowded streets, Steeves said, “Well, Gardner, you’ve been on Lurion close to a week now. What do you think of the place, eh?”
“You want me to be blunt?”
“I want you to be honest.”
Gardner shrugged. “It’s a hellhole, the most unmitigatedly evil planet I’ve ever seen; a world where the prime commandment seems to be Hate thy neighbor. ”
“You seem to have sized the place up pretty quickly,” Steeves said. “It doesn’t take long, does it?”
“Not at all.”
“Yet I’ve been here twenty years,” the older man remarked. “I’m almost used to it. And you know something, Gardner? It doesn’t bother me any more. My first couple of months on Lurion, I kept thinking that this planet was the pinnacle of savagery. I hated it here. But gradually I began to understand why Lurion was the way it was, and I stopped hating.” He laughed self-consciously. “You think I’m a fat old fool, eh, Gardner?”
“I didn’t say—”
“Of course not. But you’re new here, and you can’t possibly believe that anyone could learn to tolerate Lurioni ways. And maybe I am a fat old fool. Maybe living here so long has dissolved my brain. Here’s the restaurant.”
They turned in the doorway of a small, dimly-lit place with only a scattering of patrons. Two Lurioni were sitting at a table to the left of the door, and they rose the moment Steeves and Gardner entered. They looked young, and there was something about their eyes—a gentleness, a sadness, that Gardner had not observed before on this planet. He felt uneasy and troubled, and told himself that once again his curiosity had led him into risks. Meeting Lurioni socially was unwise, considering the nature of his assignment.
Steeves said, “Roy Gardner, meet Elau Kinrad and Irin Damiroj.” As they all sat, Steeves said to the two Lurioni, “Mr. Gardner is new to Lurion. He’s only been here a few days, and he told me just now that he despises Lurion.”
Before Gardner could say something that would take the sting from Steeves’ truthful remark, Damiroj said softly, “Your attitude is quite understandable, ser Gardner. We despise our culture ourselves.”
The conversation was interrupted by the arrival of the waiter. After they had ordered, Steeves said to Gardner, “Kinrad and Damiroj are what you’d call progressive Lurioni. They’re active in philosophical circles here.”
“I wasn’t aware that there were philosophical circles on Lurion,” Gardner said.
Kinrad smiled. “It is a recent development, say, of the past three years. That is, our organization dates only from three years past. Previously there were always a few of us, isolated, generally unaware of the existence of any others like themselves. Usually their fate was suicide. Damiroj and I hope to counteract this.”
Gardner was silent while they explained, speaking alternately, with Steeves bridging the occasional linguistic gaps. They began with a brief history of Lurion, a poor planet to begin with, badly cheated by nature; its soil was barren and devoid of many useful heavy elements, and its climate was treacherous and unstable from pole to pole. Dank hot seasons were succeeded by blood-freezing cold ones.
There was only one race of Lurioni, but there had been many nations, each toiling along at a bare subsistence level. Marginal life had given rise to a counsel of despair; on a world like Lurion, it was each man for himself. War had been frequent, usually for the basest imperialistic motives.
Some fifteen hundred years ago, the scattered nations of Lurion had finally begun to amalgamate. First came the alliances and ententes; then, the beginning of linkage between the alliances. Until finally Lurion had attained its present confederate form of government, with one central authority, one main language; but with considerable autonomy in the confederated nations. With such a shaky union, Lurion entered the era of interstellar space travel and established communications with most of the other planets.
But the old ways of fear and greed had remained. A planet-wide religion, conceived in ancient pre-technological days, still survived, though transformed and secularized; it was a free-enterprise kind of religion which counseled each man to do evil lest evil be done to him first.
“Our world is not an attractive one,” Kinrad admitted. “Our laws are archaic, our ethics brutish, our art debased, our commerce rapacious. There are those on Lurion who even agitate for war with other worlds.”
“No!” Gardner said.
“Alas, yes,” Damiroj replied mournfully. “We hope this will not come to pass. But in the meantime we work quietly, privately, in hopes of influencing our countrymen. An
d Earthmen like ser Steeves are invaluable to us.”
Steeves grinned. “I’ve become sort of father-confessor to the outfit, you might say. I try to show them how they can work for the betterment of life here. And I help out with cash. We’re trying to get men into the government, you see, and that takes money, for we have to bribe bigger and better than the politicos if we ever hope to abolish the bribe system at all. So I contribute. Maybe now you can see what I’m driving at, Gardner.”
“I see it; this is a pitch for funds.”
“Exactly.”
“But what makes you think I’ve got loose cash? And anyway, why should I give a damn about the Lurioni way of life?” Gardner asked.
Steeves did not flinch. “Even if you gave a couple of coppers, it would help. And I know you give a damn about Lurion, Gardner. Just in these few days, I’ve been able to size you up as a man who’s got social conscience. You aren’t just a money-grubber like most of our colleagues. You’re intelligent. You understand that we’ve got to help the Lurioni to help themselves, or else civilization is going to stay on the backstabbing level here forever. Which makes Lurion undesirable for us. And which might lead to war, for all we know. So that’s why I brought you along to meet these friends of mine. I thought—”
“No,” Gardner said hoarsely. He rose from the table, though his meal was only half-finished. “You’ve got the wrong man. I’m not interested in contributing to anything. Let Lurion solve its own problems.”
Pale, shaky, he bolted from the restaurant, while the others gaped in astonishment. Out in the street, Gardner stopped, wiping the sweat from his forehead. He was weak and shaky. The meeting had been a fiasco. Nothing could be more dangerous to his mission than getting mixed up with a bunch of Lurioni radicals.
He made his way to a sidewalk pub.
“ Khall ,” he muttered.
He gripped the drink tightly and gulped it down. It was essential that he blot this luncheon from his mind, as soon as possible.
Chapter Eight
That day and the next, Gardner saw a good deal of Lori—too much, he admitted bitterly. He was a deeply troubled man. The smiling, gentle faces of Kinrad and Damiroj haunted him, carrying along the damning knowledge that Lurion was not wholly black, that there were those sincerely determined to help the world outgrow its ruthless past. And the involvement with Lori left him equally worried.
They spent most of their time in the hotel casino or in the lobby, since Gardner steadfastly refused to try to lure her to his room, and carefully avoided any opportunity of entering hers.
As they sat together at the casino table, Gardner wondered just what she thought of him. That he was a queer one, certainly; either that or a man of an unbreakably puritan frame of mind, someone who simply didn’t care for the joys of the flesh. What other reason could there be for his failure to attempt the establishment of an intimate liaison with her?
She was wrong on both counts, Gardner thought, but he didn’t dare let her find that out. There was no way of avoiding her company, but he was aware of the mortal dangers of letting their relationship get any more intense than mere friendship.
On the last night of the week, Gardner suggested that she let him take her on a field trip. “You probably haven’t been to this place,” he said, “and you ought to take it in before you leave Lurion. It’s way out in North City, but it’s worth the trip.”
“You’ve got my curiosity aroused.”
“Does that mean you’ll go?”
It did. After dinner that night, Gardner summoned a cab, and they traveled into North City, to the bar on One Thousand Six and the Lane of Lights, the place where he had met Smee.
Gardner uneasily half-expected to meet Smee there again, despite the definite instruction Smee had received to leave the city and go to his action post. But, to Gardner’s relief, Smee did not seem to be in the bar. He hoped Smee had actually moved on without a hitch to his permanent locale.
“You’ll see cruelty at its most refined tonight,” he promised her, as they entered.
Inwardly, Gardner hoped that there would again be a raid, with all the ruthless violence of the last one. He hoped the knife-dancers would be out in full glory. He wanted another reassuring demonstration of the foulness of this world.
They took a table at the back, where he had sat with Smee. Gardner looked around, checking on the location of that door through which he and Smee had made their escape the last time.
“What time does the show start?” Lori asked.
“About an hour after midnight, I guess. We’ve got lots of time yet.”
They ordered khall from the scornfully obsequious waiter. In the past few days Gardner and Lori had sampled a few of the other Lurioni drinks, but had found them all equally unpalatable.
As they sipped their drinks, Lori said, “Can I have a preview of what I’m going to see? It always helps when I’m prepared to evaluate what’s taking place.”
Gardner told her, in detail. She listened in silence, her eyes wide and startled. When he had finished, she coughed a little and said sarcastically, “That sounds very lovely. I’m going to have the most lurid doctoral thesis ever written when I get back to Earth. I guess I could fill a whole book with the sins of Lurion.”
When I get back to Earth , she had said. Gardner felt a pang, but shrugged it off. “It ought to make for exciting reading,” he said. “Provided your examiners like exciting reading, that is.”
“They don’t. It’s not the number of instances of cruelty I cite that measures how thorough a job I’ve done; it’s my evaluation that matters.”
“Quality, not quantity, of observation.”
“Exactly.”
The evening passed slowly. Gardner fought a rousing inner battle to keep sober. He won, but it was far from easy. It was so simple to bathe the brain in khall and cease to think, cease to brood. But the thought of Davis kept him temperate—Davis, the sober Security man who had turned into a shambling rummy in less than two weeks on Lurion.
Shortly after midnight the familiar hush fell over the place. The tables were cleared away, the front windows opaqued. The wall sphinctered open.
“It’s beginning,” Gardner murmured.
The dancers appeared. They were different from last time’s, and this time there were three of them instead of a pair: two men and a woman. Sharp, harshly dissonant music began to grind in the background, piped in from the hidden rooms elsewhere in the building, and the dance started.
Gardner took a quick glance at Lori. She was watching, fascinated, leaning forward on the edge of her seat, as the dancers began their stylized motions.
Back and forth, up and down, now rapidly, now slowly, with a slash of the knife at each pass, until blood trickled down oiled skins, the dance went on. Fifteen minutes passed, twenty, thirty. Gardner split his attention between the dancers and Lori and the front door, knowing that he would have to move fast in the event of another raid.
But there was no raid. The dance, this time, was permitted to wind through to its conclusion. Feeling a curious chill, Gardner watched detachedly as the two male dancers advanced stiffly on the female, swung round her in a grotesque goose step, raised their knife-hands at the same time and, suddenly, simultaneously, transfixed her with both their blades.
Lori was taking notes at a fantastic rate. “Sexual symbolism?” he heard her mutter, as she scribbled.
Gardner gasped. The female was crumpling daintily to the floor, and the hypnotized audience was drumming its heels in lusty applause, yet Lori had not lost her composure. Gardner was astonished. It was a remarkable display of scientific zeal, not to mention sheer toughness of mind.
A riot of light bathed the floor as attendants dragged off the corpse of the female dancer. Suddenly, a new light struck Gardner’s eyes, a sharp, insistent flash of green.
He glanced down at the indicator band on his wrist. The green panel was pulsating brightly.
Deever Weegan had just arrived on Lurion.
“Is there something wrong, Roy?” Lori asked. “You look so pale all of a sudden.”
“I’m not used to public bloodshed, that’s all,” he said in a hoarse voice. “After all, I’m not an anthropologist, you know.”
His fingers were quivering. He looked at the firm green light again.
Three fifths of the chain that would destroy Lurion had been forged.
Chapter Nine
They left the bar without incident, hailed a cab, and returned to the hotel. As ever, Gardner made his goodnights as quick as possible.
In his room, he stared for a long while at the green band on the indicator. Weegan was here, somewhere. So now only Kully Leopold and Damon Archer remained to complete the link.
The days of the next week passed smoothly. Gardner had developed into a skilled trader of jewels by this time; he kept his stock moving around, buying some jewels, selling others, appearing active at all times. He rented a visi-screen and had it installed in his hotel room, ostensibly for the benefit of customers who might have some need to get in touch with him.
At least, that was the reason he gave to the management in answer to their persistent inquiries. But in truth he had no interest in receiving calls from clients. He anticipated calls from the newly-arriving members of his team and, aside from finding it awkward and inconvenient to do his communicating in an open alcove in the hotel lobby, he preferred to see their faces as he spoke. He was something more than a figurehead leader; it was part of his job to see that each of the other four was alert, stable, and ready to do his share of the job when the time came.
Gardner wondered what might happen if one of them weren’t ready. Himself, for instance. Doubt loomed large in his mind. But he told himself that he would find the strength he needed, when he needed it.
He saw Lori frequently during that week, too. She gallantly insisted on paying her share of their entertainment costs, as if tacitly acknowledging the fact that Gardner was not getting full measure from her. Gardner made the proper protests, but allowed her finally to win the argument.