Joe took his atom pistol out of the drawer, handling it with unfamiliar
fingers. It had been a long time since those target shooting days in
Iowa. He checked the gun quickly, reloaded it with fresh pellets.
He had left the visiphone on, and when Reader had broken his
connection, the interior of Miss Kal's office and the surprised face of
that eavesdropper had automatically returned. She stared at the atom
pistol.
"Miss Kal," Joe said softly. "Get me a canal-cab."
* * * * *
The bodies were lying in a row beneath an overhanging ledge of
sandstone. They had burrowed deep into a miniature jungle of thick
leaved canal weeds, and it had taken him a long time to find them. The
gleam of four shiny new B-type spacesuits, less carefully concealed,
had finally ended the search. Kent and Ray had been busy this morning.
Standing where he was, Joe could look down the green and red dotted
slope and see the ashes of the picnic fire, the scatterings of food
that the night-crawling _nolls_ had found unpalatable. And, blown by
Mars' occasional winds--or taken by alien hands--to a spot only a few
feet from where it had been thrown away, was the scrap of paper with
his letterhead on it. The paper that he and Kent had marked up during
their discussion of tomorrow night's flight to _Aarn_, Callisto.
_If they didn't actually hear us talking_, Joe thought, _it was that
paper that started the whole thing._
He said loudly: "Are you here, _Uarnl_? You thought it was perfect,
didn't you? You thought you could repossess your bodies as the liner
went off-world. Well, look at this!"
With executival thoroughness, he blasted the four bodies into cinders.
* * * * *
Sarah came out of the kitchen as Joe opened the canal door and let
himself in. He turned and paid the cabby and the skimmer moved off.
"Hello, darling," she said, and tugged at his arm. "I've got a swell
supper fixed!"
Joe smiled at her as he shrugged out of his tunic. He flung it casually
over her favorite potted _Zinhaeat_. She didn't grab it off. _I should
have been a detective_, he thought. He followed her into the kitchen.
"Anything interesting happen today?" Sarah began to arrange the table,
moving things here and there fussily. She looked at Joe from the corner
of her eye. "That's about how you like it, isn't it?" she asked.
Joe said, "That's fine." He ground out his cigarette on a clean plate.
Sarah would have taken his head off if he had ever done that.
"No," he went on, "nothing happened. Same old stuff."
They sat down to eat. Joe tasted his soup. It was rotten. He wondered
if they cooked like that all over Callisto, or only in _Aarn_.
"Is it all right, darling?" Sarah was looking at him brightly, her
fingers twined under her chin with the left pinkie extended, her head
cocked to one side. It was all so cute that it made Joe sick. He
decided that if the showdown were put off much longer he'd never be
able to stand the sight of her again.
"You haven't called me 'darling' since our days of stardust and
chivalry," he said. "Call me Joe."
"What?"
"I said--call--me--Joe."
Sarah pushed her plate away. Her brown eyes were muddy.
"I wasn't hungry anyway," she said coldly.
Big Kent and Ray came through the door that led into the living room.
Kent leaned against the wall and folded his massive arms. He grinned
mockingly at Joe. "We never give up," he said. Ray stared nervously and
wet his lips.
Joe shoved back his chair inch by inch.
"_Uarnl's_ dead," he said. "He blundered things in my office and got
scared and tried to get off-world in a passenger. The Patrol blasted
him."
Sarah rose calmly and looked at Ray and Kent. Their faces were stony.
She said: "_Lof--Dir_--I think the four of us together can break down
his resistance to Occupancy." Her eyes traveled to an empty corner of
the kitchen. "Are you ready, _Uarnl_?"
She faced Joe again, a sly smile on her lips.
"_Uarnl_ wasn't killed, Yoe--atomics don't kill us. The passenyer was."
Joe wasn't surprised when she floated away from the chair and toward
him, her slippers hardly seeming to touch the floor. He'd been
expecting to be attacked.
But what almost broke him into little pieces was her third eye--the
one that blinked open in the middle of her forehead, brushing aside a
brittle shell of skin and glaring at him with its wide, unhuman hunger.
Then, for one terrible second, his brain felt packed in ice; the room
was grotesque, filled with alien contrivances. The only sensible thing
in it was _Ih's_ warm, familiar third eye.
With all his melting strength, Joe thought, "_I destroyed the bodies!_"
and the whole scene dangled unmoving before him, the weird, distant
setting for the climax of a play, as he heard his own voice in a
wrenching groan:
"Our bodies--destroyed!"
Appalling misery and hatred for _himself_ rocked Joe's brain. Then
_Uarnl_ recoiled, as the _Aarnians'_ rapport was broken.