"Maybe," said Trehearne angrily. "Or maybe they just like to show off."
He demanded of the men in the dun-colored robes, "What have you got
against us?"
They did not answer, and Rohan said, laughing, "The same thing all the
non-Vardda have against us. Also, we're crass, crude traders. We don't
think."
"You think," said the Hedarin quietly. "And we do not want your
thoughts. Among you there is more than baseness. There is murder."
Again there was a silence, and this time it had a quality of shock. The
Vardda looked at one another, and suddenly Trehearne's spine turned
cold. Shadows under a waning star, an ugly forest tight around him like
a leprous wall, a tug, a snap, and death, unseen and unexplained but
very capable, closing on him like a great dark fist.
Murder?
Voices, Vardda voices, aroused, indignant, challenging. The merchants
were leaving, and the Hedarin had stepped down. The Vardda were
demanding proof.
It couldn't be. No one aboard the _Saarga_ had anything against him. It
must have been an accident. There was no reason to think it wasn't.
"Who is it?" roared the captain. "You can't make an accusation like
that and then walk out...."
"We have no part in your affairs. You demanded a reason, and it was
given. That is all."
Murder. It was an ugly word. Trehearne wished they hadn't said it. He
wished the episode of the air-line hadn't happened. It opened the way
for so much speculation. It made him apply the threat to himself, when
after all, every member of the crew probably had at least one enemy
he wouldn't mind killing. Everybody thought about it at one time or
another. He had thought himself about killing Kerrel, but thinking was
one thing, and doing it another.
Kerrel. Could he have hired somebody, to see that a certain Earthman
did not come back from the Hercules Cluster?
Say he did. Who? Rohan? Perri? Yann? No, Yann had saved his life, and
he couldn't see either of the youngsters in the role of a killer.
Somebody else, then. He looked around at the familiar faces, angry now,
resentful. Who? He could not pick one out. He knew them all. They were
his shipmates. They might do a lot of things, but--murder?
The First Officer said a skatological word. "You could probe into any
man's subconscious mind and find a wish to kill. It doesn't take a
parapsych to know that. They just wanted an excuse."
"Yeah," said Yann. "The hell with 'em. Well, let's pick up our traps
and go."
Trehearne thought the First Officer was probably right. It was the most
comforting explanation. He clung to it. It seemed that if anyone had
really wanted to kill, and had tried once, he would have tried again.
They'd been to a lot of worlds and done a lot of things. There had been
plenty of other chances.
Or had there? Who knew what might appeal to a murderer as a good
chance? And he couldn't just kill. He had to make it look like an
accident. That wouldn't be so easy.
Oh, hell, forget it. It _was_ an accident.
He did forget it, deliberately, as much as he could. But a certain
uneasiness stayed with him, and he dreamed more often of the fungoid
forest and the ghastly sensation of breathing without air. He began to
want a change. He wouldn't have believed it a few months before, but
he was getting sick of the ship, the confinement, the close quarters,
the manufactured air and the palatable but synthetic food. He was not
the only one. The most hardened veterans aboard were suffering from
the ennui of a long voyage. They looked forward more and more to the
landings, even on unpleasant worlds, and grumbled because they were so
brief. By the time the _Saarga_ reached the system of the green star,
the terminal point whence she would start the equally long return
voyage, Trehearne was so hungry for land that even that lurking unease
was thrust out of his mind by the sheer joy of making worldfall.
Yann was full of excitement. "This is the system I told you about,
Trehearne--the one where I was factor so long. I got to know the
natives like a brother." He laughed and clapped Trehearne on the
shoulder. "We make a good stop here, and when our work's done I'll show
you some things!"
The _Saarga_ set down on a world of emerald heat. Besides the starship
the landing field contained half a dozen battered interplanetary craft,
brought out piecemeal by the Vardda and operated by them between the
wild planets of the system. The great stockaded factory was one of the
largest Trehearne had seen and the strangest.
The "logs" that formed the stockade and made the walls of the
warehouses were of crystal, cut from the crystalline forests that
covered much of the land. Trehearne thought of them as trees and
forests, simply because they had stems and branches, but they were
inorganic, the glittering proliferation of sublimated alien chemicals.
They glowed and flashed under the fierce green sun, showing glints of
weird color where a prism formation broke the light. And also, in their
shining branches, they netted the many-colored rays of the brighter
stars that burned even in the daylight sky.
There was a town beyond the factory. It too was built of the crystal
logs over foundations of black rock sunk in the ooze. Thick vines
clambered everywhere, bearing bulbous fruit. Undergrowth, green almost
to blackness, stood between the trees. There was a smell of fragrant
rottenness, cloying, sweet.
Trehearne worked his long shifts, moving and sweating through a bath
of molten jade. It was a large world and heavy. The gravity dragged at
him. The letters of the freight lists swam under his eyes. When his own
job was finally finished, he found Rohan and Perri still hard at it,
but Yann was through and waiting for him.
"Come on with me now," said Yann, and smacked his lips. "Wine, cooled
in deep wells. Make a new man of you."
"A hell of a world," said Trehearne.
"You should see the others of this system. This is the pick of the lot."
They walked through the outer compound, a sort of caravanserai
crowded with folk from the other planets, brought in for the trading.
Cold-blooded creatures with crimson eyes, ophidian princes of the inner
worlds, wrapped in golden mantles against the chill. Slim, furred kings
of the outer planets, capped and girdled with precious stones, still
and panting in the heat. These and others watched the two tall Vardda,
thinking their own thoughts.
They passed through the gate out of the factory, wading in soggy mud.
The sun was setting in a welter of lurid green, tinged with peacock
hues. Trehearne looked at the town ahead, the straggling lanes, the
crystal huts that crouched in sordid beauty, the encircling forest of
ungodly trees. Doubt assailed him.
"Perhaps we should stay in the factory. There'll be plenty of wine and
more comfort."
Yann cursed him good-naturedly. "I told you I know these people better
than I know my own children! Come on, Trehearne, there's nothing to do
in the factory. Don't you want to see something new?"
Trehearne did. He was sick of the factory, after those long shifts of
sweating labor. He shrugged, and made sure of the prismed shock-tube
in his belt. It was customary, when the Vardda went abroad on strange
worlds, for them to carry a weapon. They were sometimes needed. Yann
noticed the gesture and grinned. His own belt-holster was empty.
"I'd feel safer with one myself," he said, "but these people we're
going to see are my friends. They'd be mortally offended if I came
armed--a sign I didn't trust them, you see, and then look out!" He led
the way down the muddy road, and Trehearne followed.
Night came. The glorious sky of the Cluster crashed down on them,
sown to bursting with stars as bright as moons. The crystalline trees
took on opaline fires. The hut walls glittered. Around the two Vardda
gathered a crowd of sloe-eyed children, silent and solemn, with hides
of dusky green. Women watched them from the doorways. Human enough and
pretty enough too, the younger ones, sleek and olive-colored, wearing
bright silks from Llyrdis about their hips and baubles in their hair.
Yann chattered happily as they went along the winding lanes, telling of
his multifarious sins and adventurings and the clever ways in which he
had cheated the factory. The hostile curious eyes of the women followed
them and now and again a man spat expressively into the mud behind them.
They came at last to a hut on the outskirts of the town. Beside it were
chained four pairs of beasts the size of harriers, milk-white with
dark muzzles and feet, the undulating bodies built light and long for
speed. They made shrill barking sounds and leaped at the strangers,
showing hungry fangs. Trehearne thought they looked like gigantic
weasels--and quite as friendly.
"Hounds," said Yann. "Kurat is a hunter. I had a private arrangement
with him for skins." He winked hugely and lifted up his voice, shouting
in the native tongue an obvious demand for Kurat to come out and
welcome his brother.
A lean, hard-muscled man emerged. He wore a loin-cloth of brilliant
blue silk, not very clean, and a necklet of hammered metal. He greeted
Yann with glad cries. Trehearne smiled inwardly. They were two of a
kind, the Vardda and the hunter, a brace of happy scoundrels. Kurat
welcomed him in the _lingua franca_ of the factory towns. A brother of
Yann, it seemed, was his brother also. He swept Trehearne before him
into the hut.
There was a numerous family inside. A very old man and woman sat in a
corner, doing nothing. Babes and children cluttered the floor. Kurat's
hulking wife waded imperturbably among them. A handsome younger woman
brought in a great sweating jug and poured from it into Trehearne's
cup. The wine was cold and bitter. Trehearne, draining it, began to
forget the heat and his weariness. Then, as he looked up into the young
woman's face, he was startled by the hatred in her watching eyes.