Taen raised his kauri on its perch-staff in assent. "No doubt he
retained clothing that had touched her body and with that The Assassin
was able to train the skar." Taen whipped the hood from the kauri and
it clattered its beak and hummed its incredibly small wings. "Are we in
turn to purchase the death of Konrad?"
"No."
With the mismatched hands the doctor had fitted him from the Body Bank,
Taen unsheathed his kauri's spurs. A year before, when Jeff found this
mountain man lying with bleeding wrist stumps in the jungle he readily
admitted he had killed without hiring The Assassin. Caught, he had been
maimed and left to die in the jungle. Since only The Assassin could
directly take life, since he was too expensive to be hired to execute
any but the most aristocratic murderers, Taen had been merely maimed
and deserted. Against his protests of the unthinkableness of it, the
young doctor had saved his life and given him arms.
Taen rasped, "Then The Assassin shall not profit from my master.
Though I again shatter tradition, though Konrad is Manager of the City
and guarded by walking machines and ones of my people who love the
imitation of power, I will do the job myself if you so wish, sire."
"You misunderstand," Jeff replied. "I would buy Konrad's life in the
customary way if it would give me back my wife's. But while he lives
there is a chance he will relent and leave us in peace."
"Peace is gone, sire. The bargain has been made. The honor of the
countless generations of his clan demands The Assassin do his job.
It has always been so. For him to fail or to accept a bribe is
unthinkable. Only the purchasing party, Konrad, could cancel the
agreement."
"You can't visualize Konrad doing that, can you."
"Sire, it is said that in this last year he has become a mad man of
steel and poison."
The young doctor shook his head. His voice rushed out, a pressure leak
of his tension. "No Taen, he was always that way. But before he lost
Kit he felt safe. He felt he owned us both. He felt he owned the power
of the city, and, since few clashed with his managerial decisions, for
they were usually wise ones, this illusion grew in him until he felt
like a god holding the world in the palm of his hand. Kit's loss is a
blow at everything he thinks he holds. Now he strikes back desperately
at Kit and me, at anything that threatens his power."
Jeff fumbled in his pajama pocket for his cigarettes, but they weren't
there. "What can I do? He has always been set to go that way. I saw
his inability to take the loss of anything, the way he identifies even
small possessions with the core of himself. When I first accompanied
him into the jungle to hunt suri," Jeff smiled grimly, "he lost his
wrist watch, a very ordinary wrist watch, but he made us camp two days
while we looked for it. He drove those beaters like animals. We had
exhausted our supply of tablets for purifying the water of the jungle
puddles, but, no matter, we must find his watch. He had won it in some
sort of athletic contest in his youth. Although he began to blister
with the fever, that fool wouldn't go to his hammock. He could hardly
stand, but he kept thrashing the bushes, looking for his watch. He
shouted and raved and finally tried to shoot some of the beaters. We
stayed until we found his watch."
* * * * *
Taen shifted uneasily. "Your wife is safe until the spies of The
Assassin report they see her alive, that the skar failed. Skars are
expensive. He won't send another till then. We have at least until
morning to do the only thing we can do, to go to him, to give him
presents and please him with us so that he will rub the most expensive
poison on the beak of the next skar and let your wife die as painlessly
as possible."
Jeff flashed Taen a look of utter hatred. With a curse he smashed the
skar against the pillar. Then he swung his fist against it with a grunt
of pain, again, as though he would smash the inevitable.
"Don't punish yourself, sire. It is Konrad who must suffer."
Kit ran down the hallway to them with her hair streaming across her
sleep-swollen face and her negligee clutched tight across her swelling
bosom. She threw her arms about Jeff.
His face must have been very strange, for she said, "Jeff, have I done
something? You wanted a baby, you said you did."
Wearily he stroked her brow. "I'm all right. Nightmare. Walking in my
sleep."
Taen nodded eager assent, then stalked off as he always did in the face
of sentimentality.
"Smile, Kit. I dreamt I was defending you--and our son. Of course I
want a son. What gives you such funny ideas?"
She sniffed and rubbed her cheek against his chest. "I don't know.
Sometimes when I start thinking of all the planets you've seen, the
strange and wonderful people, the monsters and kings you've healed, I
get frightened. This one planet--and I--won't be enough to hold you.
I'll wake up some morning and where your head should rest I'll find a
dent in the pillow. I'll hear the rockets blast off and you'll be gone
wandering among the stars the way Konrad said you would."
He stiffened at Konrad's name. But she rushed on: "He used to call you
The Wanderer, you know." Then she smiled at him. "I think wanderers are
afraid of babies, just like seafaring men in story books were afraid of
reefs and mudbanks."
Jeff managed a smile. "You're wrong, dimple cheeks, babies aren't
mudbanks, they're anchors. Sure they're troublesome. You have to lug
them around, hoist them up and down, clean off the rust. But without an
anchor in a storm, a ship, a man and a woman, will go on the rocks.
"Taen?" Jeff called. Hawklike eyes appeared around the pillar. "Would
you ask Garth to come sit with Kit."
"You going someplace at this time of night." Then she inhaled with a
great gasp of breath as she noticed the crushed skar. "Konrad!"
"Very unlikely. He's probably more interested in bossing the city
than in carrying out any crazy threats he once made. This airsquid
undoubtedly blundered through the dome ventilators. It's a wild one.
Now you go back to bed while Taen and I go raise a fuss with the
Security Guards."
"Couldn't you use the telephone?" Quickly she cupped her palm over
his lips. "Don't answer that if you don't want to, Doctor Jeff," she
laughed. "Keep your secrets. I'm not like--like Konrad." Her voice
trailed away.
As Jeff watched her hurrying back down the hall, he felt as though
he could close his hands on something solid again. He didn't have a
plan yet, but he had a plan for determining one. It was poker, it was
play-by-ear, it was the exploratory operation. No one was going to kill
his wife.
"Garth," he whirled at the ponderous jungle man. "Get the gas gun
out of my gun rack. Taen, give him an amulet with an extra lively
skar-killer. Here, I'm writing a note to Kit, Garth. If she should wake
up before I get back and want to go outside, give it to her. It will
explain why she mustn't. It will explain what I've got to do."
Jeff dressed in his study, slung his sten gun and, pressing
the signal-emitter in his pocket, opened the spike-topped gate
characteristic of all the great houses of the dome city. They stepped
echoingly along the sidewalk.
"Sire," Taen's voice hissed. His face was searching the shadows. "I
wouldn't take that sten gun. It would give The Assassin the fear to
kill you. The excuse too, if your life has been purchased. If you are
unarmed while you are on his territory it would be hardly honorable
to kill you. And he may believe you have come to purchase the life of
Konrad or to pay a smaller sum to assure that the inevitable death of
your wife will be a painless one."
"My intentions are different," Jeff retorted, but at the corner he
threw the gun over the wall into his garden.
Taen crowhopped behind, still in his shortlegged stance.
* * * * *
"But sire, to purchase the life of Konrad and a painless end for your
wife is the way these things are done. Where could you hide her? There
is no rocket leaving this planet for two months, and even in the
jungle The Assassin's followers would find her."
Jeff did not reply as they rode the all-night street escalator up the
hilly side of the city past the steep-roofed granite houses of the
wealthier mountain men, constructed centuries before the city was domed
over, past the flat-roofed, functional houses of the Earthmen who cared
nothing for the traditional architecture, all for comfort.
"Sire, Konrad's house is still alight."
A waltz tune rose above the drone of the ventilators.
"He's having a party, sire. We could go back for the guns. We may never
have another chance like this."
"No. While he lives there is still hope for Kit."
"But such a man does not relent."
"We shall see. But first I want to try to learn The Assassin's
thoughts. Perhaps Taen, there are certain conditions under which he
does not operate entirely by custom that you do not know about."
"He is incorruptible, sire."
"Sometimes a man's price is not wholly monetary." Jeff fitted on his
respirator, then inserted their pass cards into the mouth slot of the
automatic gate guard. The rush of wind as the gate of the city swung
outward swept them into the ammoniated world of jungles and mountains.
A dozen jetcopter drivers rushed at them, jabbering, tugging at their
arms. But Taen motioned as if to loose his kauri, rasping: "Back,
sons of suri," then to Jeff: "To approach The Assassin afoot is more
traditional."
The quick climb up the mountain made Jeff's breath whistle back and
forth through his respirator. Below, the city was a glistening bubble,
and below it the alien jungle was soft black fur, its lakes and rivers
mirrors for The Dancers.
"Sire," Taen fairly screamed with exhilaration. "This clean air sweeps
the thick oxygen from my lungs. My soul awakes. Anything is possible."
Hitching up to full height, he raced ahead like a great ground bird and
with a challenging war screech hurled his kauri from its perch stick
toward the crags of The Assassin, bulbous and black, close-packed like
a herd of great bulls upon the field of the Milky Way, a long climb, a
high flight for skar or kauri.
The bird arched back in the windmoan, hissed over their heads, plunging
toward the dome of the city.
"Sire, she stoops. A mountain man!" Taen shrilled his recall whistle
frantically as the kauri pursued and struck repeatedly at a leaping,
dodging shadow that silhouetted smaller and smaller against the dome in
its pell-mell retreat toward the gate. Finally the bird soared up and
back like a dark meteor across the stars and glided with a smack onto
her perch.
"The Assassin's spy?"
"Or Konrad's, sire. A pity I called her off without thinking. We could
have searched the body and learned whose."