"I'll tell you," offered the farmer. "They'll prowl the strato-
lanes, check all ships, clamp down on the spaceports and—" he grinned at the black scowl on the face of the other. "You seem damned happy about it!"
"Sure. You'll have to try it on foot now—Mary won't get splashed all over the lowlands." Miles pushed back his chair and stifled a belch. "You're a gone gosling, mister!"
Jord looked at him steadily, then sighed. "I don't know why I shouldn't blast the sass out of you—" and he stood up, juggling the gun speculatively. The newscast had knocked all the I've-got-the-gun-but-let's-be-chums out of him.
Miles jumped. To conceal the sudden movement he carried his hand to his breast pocket, got the cigarette Jord had given him, lit it. An idea was beginning to take form—
"I'll give you one good reason," he said, and he told his second lie easily, almost without thought: "You blast me and you'll have a crowd of Alcron natives on your neck!"
He saw that Jord was nodding, apparently weighing the menace of the Cronies, so he added a few more pounds of menace. "Seven feet up," he said, "and they'll walk miles to look at blood!"
rv
Max Miles leaned back, dribbling smoke from his nostrils. He hoped he'd made it good. There actually wasn't a more peace-loving race in the Galaxy. To his knowledge, none of them had ever raised a duke. They didn't have to. Nature had created the Cronies invulnerable, and had in the process, with perfect logic, omitted in them any capacity for offense— a fact which Miles regretted deeply under the present circumstances.
At any rate, he had Jord worried about the Cronies and it was a theme that should be worth developing. But not ostentatiously. It might even be a good idea to change the subject,' before Jord got to thinking too hard and began to remember his biology lessons . . . the Cronies' peculiarity was no secret.
So Miles grinned and said loudly, "What're you going to do now? Not that I give a damn so long as you get out of here and stop messing up my routine." He saw the big man jump at the sound of his voice, and thought Score one! Now, when Lin comes, maybe I can—
Jord's face tightened at the cheeks.
"I'm going to think," he said, "and maybe slap a gag in that big mouth of yours!" He walked over to Miles and showed him the muzzle of the handblast. "Now, shut up," he said evenly, "and get into the bedroom. I'm getting sick of by-play!"
Miles' grin soured. Jord stood back, his shallow eyes bright with anger. He gestured again with the gun.
"Move, farmer—the honeymoon's over."
Miles shrugged and went into the bedroom, the big man stepping carefully after him. "What now?"
"Lie down on the bunk." Jord's eyes roved, settled. He gathered a handful of Miles' sashes from the dresser-top and tossed them to the farmer. "Tie your legs together. Tight!"
Miles did as he was directed. Then, under the alert nose of the hand-blast, he permitted his wrists to be tied one by one to the bunk-posts.
"Absurd things, sashes—" Jord grunted as he drew the knots tight—"but with at least one practical use, eh?"
Miles tried the knots and met Jord's amused stare. He growled disgustedly, "Yeah."
Jord went back into the other room and rummaged in the deep-freeze. After a while he returned with an opened space-tin and a spoon. "I hate to cheat a man out of his dessert, mine host," he said flatly, "or his deserts. I'm either going to feed you peaches with this spoon—or gouge out your eyes with it. I want some information."
"What information?"
"Do you have any maps?"
Miles shook his head. Jord ladled out some peaches and slid them into the farmer's mouth. He did this carefully, and seemed to be enjoying the situation.
"What's the nearest city?"
"Three Major—about thirty miles magnetic north." Miles licked at a dribble of syrup. "You'll have a tough time hiding out there—strangers aren't the custom. You'll stand out like a spotlight."
lord's pleasant mien had definitely returned. It didn't make Miles feel any easier. "You sound almost as if you wanted to help me, Miles. Why don't you invite me to hide out here?"
"Sure. Stick around. It'll take the Patrol about ten minutes to compute the probable course of your life-shell. They're spotting the Alcron lowlands right now or I'm a monkey!"
Jord took a moment to consider one, or both, of these possibilities, then asked:
"How's the country between here and Three Major?"
"No problem."
"Can a man go it afoot?"
Miles didn't hesitate. "A man could," he admitted—a thundering half-truth if ever one was.
"Any natural barriers? Oceans, mountains?" "No. Farm country, mostly."
Jord shoveled some more peaches into the farmer's mouth. "I really ought to kill you, natives or no natives," he explained. "I can rip out your visiphone, but there's nothing to prevent you from getting into that stratocoupe of yours and following me until you can contact a Patrol ship—" He looked at Miles expectantly.
There's plenty to prevent it, Miles thought uncomfortably. Brother, if you only knew! But you don't . . . you're a stranger to this system, and you came here in a life-shell without ports. You couldn't see, so you don't know! And that would make it just perfect—if only you weren't hanging around here!
"You can take out the C, L. Integrator," he said hastily. "She won't budge without it."
"Convince me."
"There's an instruction-book on Moslev stratocoupes in that case. Check with it."
Jord rose to get the book, and Miles began to sweat. What the devil had happened to Lin? The big fellow always showed up about this time before Grandpa—not once in six years had he failed in his self-set task of warning the farmer. Had he met with an accident? Miles wondered glumly what sort of an accident it would take to incapacitate a Crony. A direct blow from a meteorite, maybe. No, there was that time when Fir's cousin had caught one right in the—
Jord grunted as he reached for the book. He sat on the edge of the bunk and riffled the pages. He studied several diagrams, turned to the index and back to the diagrams, reading under his breath. Finally he nodded in satisfaction.
"I'll have to leave you tied up, of course," he said. "You can get loose in a few hours. Peach?"
Miles chewed, thinking dully that if Grandpa's morning came and he were still tied, there wouldn't be anything but a blot on the bunk after those few hours. He might have been able to jump the big man when Lin showed up—
Damn it! Why had he yapped himself into getting tied up this way! And where was Lin?
Jord rose and went to Miles' closet, slid it open. He looked critically at the rough work clothes. "Haven't you any civilized—?"
"Over to your left. Couple of suits there."
"Oh, yes. Fine. We're just about the same distance around— but—" Jord stripped out of his rumpled and dirty clothing and got into one of Miles* best suits. He looked doubtfully in the mirror. "What do you think?" he asked.
"Up to you. If you like it, buy it."
Jord tugged at the bottoms of the tapered legs and adjusted the tunic. Choosing Miles' most colorful sash, he twisted it about his waist, eyed his reflection and nodded. "It'll do."
To be roasted in, thought Miles, and clamped down on his leaping fear. He wasn't a fighting man—with fists or guns. The more significant dangers of pioneering in space were his meat. Or measuring his prowess alongside that of another man in some intelligent pastime—that was different. Empire, for
instance, whose ancestor was the ancient game of chess. He'd played Lew Levin this last trip to Three Major and won an unusual victory. One insignificant little page, helpless, ringed by enemy men, had keystoned the structure that had forced Lew's Black Emperor out into the open field. Miles' White Guardsman had swooped down for the kill.
His own situation, as Miles saw it, was very similar. He lay on the bunk, a helpless page. Jord was the Black Emperor. And the Guardsman—Miles glanced at the binary-chart stencilled on the wall—
The Guardsman was coming.
The helpless page pressed the only advantage he had at the moment: Jord's queasiness about the Cronies. The possible results of the move were not yet evident. But if Lin showed up, as he surely must, something might come of it.
Miles said casually: "What time do you plan to leave, Jord?"
Jord looked up, frowning. "I hadn't thought. About sun-up, I suppose. Why?"
"You'd better jet-off before then. My natives get up early, and the first thing they do is come up here for orders. I'm not worrying about what they'll do to you—which'11 be plenty— but I don't want any of them to get—"
v
Speak of the Devil, they said in the old days—and times haven't changed much. Miles spoke of the Cronies—and Lin poked his head through the window, blinked, and began, in his Crony whisper, the usual warning speech:
"Miles, it is nearly time to go undergr—" This much, and then he did a slow take at the scene before him. He made a little movement of astonishment; the armor of his elbow rasped against the sill.
Jord's hand-blast lay on the bunk beside Miles' legs. Instantly it was snatched up to cover the Crony. Lin stared into the three little holes calmly and Miles felt a twitch of cynical amusement. God knows what Cronies have for itches, but whenever one of the farm-hands had an itching back he would come to have it scratched with a hand-blast. "What this, bwana?" enunciated Lin.
Miles winced, closed his eyes. This was one sweet hell of a time to start pulling that nonsense. Too many old novels-Maugham probably. Lin spoke perfect English, better even than his own.
Jord rose slowly, staring at the huge native, his face a loose, crudely-drawn question mark. "What is this ghoul?" "One of my men."
"Men!" Jord gasped. "He looks like something from a roach city. Tell him to go away!" "You tell him."
Lin threw a massive leg over the sill. He poised there, his eyes bright and curious.
"Get back," Jord flung at him shakily. "Go away and me no kill native!"
"You bet you won't," Lin replied. "Me heap savvy white boy!" He shoved his other leg into the room and stretched to his full height. Jord's considerable size seemed abruptly whittled down.
The Crony closed his fists and took an ominous step toward the killer.
Miles craned his neck from the bunk. Was his big foreman, unable to attack Jord, trying to frighten the man into dropping the gun?
If so, Jord didn't scare easily. He skinned his lips back over his teeth and squeezed at the trigger. The charge leaped at the Crony's body, spreading out over his barrel chest in eye-aching waves, jolting him back on his heels with its force. Lin's eyes met Miles', narrowing a little—
And Miles stiffened as if the charge had struck him, instead of Lin. The knowledge had come instantly, an icy-certain hunch—
Jord would fail to kill Lin—had failed already, although he didn't know it and stood, face ugly, waiting for the Crony to drop. The killer's urbane mask had fallen, the silk was gone.
He was giving way to the murderous hysteria that had probably led to the death of his partner.
All this Miles realized as the hand-blast made its sound, sent its crackling, futile energy at the big native. And it was grimly logical to suppose that Jord's next move, when Lin didn't fall, would be to swing the weapon toward the farmer, to pull the trigger in frustrated, unreasoning fear and fury.
"Lin!" Miles shouted in Alcronese. "Fall and play dead! Pretend that you are dead!"
Lin flashed him a puzzled look but did as directed. With a plausible assumption of pain and terror he let out a siren bleat and sank to the floor. Apparently overcome with enthusiasm, he continued to squirm and kick his legs and groan until Miles, again under guise of an outraged yell, told him to he still.
Jord wheeled to confront the farmer. "You see!" His voice had risen an octave, was shrill. "That's how it happened. He asked for it. So did Harry. I'll kill you too if you act up!"
The helpless page continued his force-move. The end-game strategy had clicked into place; had come to him, in fact, just as Lin had flashed him that puzzled look and obediently dropped dead. Miles stared at Jord for a moment. Then:
"You killed Lin," he said coldly. "But you can't get two hundred of them I" Which was another whopper; there were only thirty-one Cronies in the local Hive.
"Two hundred!" Jord blinked uneasily.
Miles went on: "Unless your aberration includes a strong death-wish too, you'll get out of here fast. If they find you here—and that—" he nodded at the prone body. The body barely managed to close its eyes in time as Jord's troubled gaze followed the gesture. The big man frowned in thought, then wheeled nervously as Miles began to sing softly in Alcronese.
"What're you doing?" he demanded. "Death chant. Custom here." "Well, do you have to do it?"
Miles drew in his lips unhappily. "I wouldn't feel right, somehow, if I didn't. I—I really liked Lin—" and in Alcronese, "Lin, call your comrades. Tell them to approach the cottage. Tell them to converse in low tones, in your tongue. Tell them to hurry!"
Lin's brow contracted as he beamed the thought to his fellows, waiting expectantly outside the Hive on the hill. In his mind's ear he heard anxious exclamations and questions. The other Cronies had carefully kept their minds away from the cottage for the past few minutes—too many Presences would have been psychically detectable, would have added to Jord's jumpiness and instability.
To their questions, Lin replied that Miles was safe so far and that all had gone exactly as planned. . . .
It had been difficult for the Cronies to know what to do, with Grandpa coming inexorably closer. They were constitutionally unable to attack Jord and tie him up or knock him senseless. If Tos and Fir had detected the killer sooner they could have easily frightened him away. But they had been tired and preoccupied, and it was only after they'd casually sent their thoughts after Miles, seen him accosted in front of the cottage, that they became aware of Jord's unfamiliar, unpleasant vibrations.
From the Hive, Lin, by common consent, had watched the following events. It was futile to try to take over Jord's mind— they'd all tried, one by one. It was closed to them by its distortion. One by one they had withdrawn from the attempt, sickened.
Lin had read Miles' stubborn, ingrained unwillingness to do anything that would aid Jord in escaping—even at the risk of his own life. And he'd read Miles' anticipation of his, Lin's, diverting arrival at the cottage.
"He'll try to jump the man," the Cronies had decided, "and probably get himself killed." So Lin, wincing at the contact, had managed to get Jord to tie Miles up—after first, through much easily established remote-control, carefully coloring Miles'
behavior with a puppet cockiness that irritated the big man and put him in the right frame of mind.
Then had come the question of how to get Jord out of the cottage before the arrival of Grandpa. Without having him turn his gun on Miles as hostage. Approaching en masse, without first having taken the edge off Jord's latent viciousness, might have proven as fatal to the farmer as the coming of Grandpa. The problem of the itching trigger finger had needed to be taken up with delicacy.
Lin thought he'd handled it nicely. Now that he'd barged in and forced Jord to "kill" him, throwing the big man off balance into the reactive side of his killing impulse, Jord's fear of punishment—not yet entirely dead—should cause him to break and run under the proper stimulus. Namely, a present and immediate threat of retribution.
And Jord, not basically criminal, having reached his exhausting murderous peak for the second time, should decline away from a third murder—Miles' murder—if that fear were played upon.
This was the script that Lin wrote.
And Miles had called the cues—he thought.
Lin shuddered. It had been nauseating to ball his fists that way, to step forward as if in aggression-Miles lay on the bunk and hoped that this would do it. He pressed his eyelids shut and prayed that it would. Although it was only seven o'clock in the "evening," sunris
e was so near that his flesh crawled.
A light flashed on the binary-chart. A red light. Simultaneously, a chime struck softly.
"What's that?" Jord said nervously, looking at the chart.
"Time signal," Miles said, glad that he had turned off his wrist-meter, the violent part of it—it would have been white hot by now. "I've got it fixed to announce my favorite telaudio programs. Do you ever listen to Sam Space, Detective? That should interest—"
"Shut up. Do you hear anything?"
Jord crossed to the window, peered out. His jaw dropped and he stepped back in dismay. "God in Heaven, there's a million of those beetle-men out therel"
Miles could hear them now. Lin had evidently improved upon his instructions, had told them to growl and snarl as menacingly as a Crony could. The effect was that of a horde of baritone kittens; but to Jord's horrified eyes, in the half light, they must have looked like a shiny-skinned legion of Hell. He raised the hand-blast, hesitated, turned from the window to point the gun at Miles.
Quickly, Lin gave Jord's Nemesis fears a solid boost and sent a thought to Miles.
"If you do," the farmer said levelly, "they'll hunt you down and use you for sacrifice. They know this country. You couldn't escape."
Not the wisest thing to say, Lin admitted to himself with superfluous logic, for it as much as stated that Jord had done nothing yet to warrant the Cronies' taking out after him. Granting that, it certainly didn't give the Cronies credit for much esprit de corps, since Jord thought Lin was dead.
But the killer was much too unsettled to follow up this discrepancy or even notice it. He made up his mind quickly. The after-a-mouse growlings were louder now. Slow, deliberate footsteps scuffed the metal of the path—another of Lin's improvements, for a Crony can move as silently as night.
Jord darted into the next room, collected a hasty pocketful of concentrated foods. Ludicrous in Miles' undersized suit, he threw a passing glance through the window and what he saw all but lifted his hair. For Lin had told his comrades to crouch and wave their arms like great apes.