Inarticulately, he nodded.
"I think her 'emergency' was a fake," said Dimanche flatly as soon as
she left. "I'm positive she wasn't operating the communicator. She
merely went through the motions."
"Motions," murmured Cassal dreamily, leaning back. "And what motions."
"I've been watching her," said Dimanche. "She frightens me."
"I've been watching her, too. Maybe in a different way."
"Get out of here while you can," warned Dimanche. "She's dangerous."
* * * * *
Momentarily, Cassal considered it. Dimanche had never failed him. He
ought to follow that advice. And yet there was another explanation.
"Look," said Cassal. "A machine is a machine. But among humans there
are men and women. What seems dangerous to you may be merely a pattern
of normal behavior...." He broke off. Murra Foray had entered.
Strictly from the other side of the Galaxy, which she was. A woman can
be slender and still be womanly beautiful, without being obvious about
it. Not that Murra disdained the obvious, technically. But he could see
through technicalities.
The tendons in his hands ached and his mouth was dry, though not with
fear. An urgent ringing pounded in his ears. He shook it out of his
head and got up.
She came to him.
The ringing was still in his ears. It wasn't a figment of imagination;
it was a real voice--that of Dimanche, howling:
"Huntner! It's a word variant. In their language it means Hunter. _She
can hear me!_"
"Hear you?" repeated Cassal vacantly.
She was kissing him.
"A descendant of carnivores. An audio-sensitive. She's been listening
to you and me all the time."
"Of course I have, ever since the first interview at the bureau," said
Murra. "In the beginning I couldn't see what value it was, but you
convinced me." She laid her hand gently over his eyes. "I hate to do
this to you, dear, but I've got to have Dimanche."
She had been smothering him with caresses. Now, deliberately, she began
smothering him in actuality.
Cassal had thought he was an athlete. For an Earthman, he was. Murra
Foray, however, was a Huntner, which meant hunter--a descendant of
incredibly strong carnivores.
He didn't have a chance. He knew that when he couldn't budge her hands
and he fell into the airless blackness of space.
* * * * *
Alone and naked, Cassal awakened. He wished he hadn't. He turned over
and, though he tried hard not to, promptly woke up again. His body was
willing to sleep, but his mind was panicked and disturbed. About what,
he wasn't sure.
He sat up shakily and held his roaring head in his hands. He ran aching
fingers through his hair. He stopped. The lump behind his ear was gone.
"Dimanche!" he called, and looked at his abdomen.
There was a thin scar, healing visibly before his eyes.
"Dimanche!" he cried again. "Dimanche!"
There was no answer. Dimanche was no longer with him.
He staggered to his feet and stared at the wall. She'd been kind
enough to return him to his own rooms. At length he gathered enough
strength to rummage through his belongings. Nothing was missing. Money,
identification--all were there.
He could go to the police. He grimaced as he thought of it. The
neighborly Godolphian police were hardly a match for the Huntner; she'd
fake them out of their skins.
He couldn't prove she'd taken Dimanche. Nothing else normally
considered valuable was missing. Besides, there might even be a local
prohibition against Dimanche. Not by name, of course; but they could
dig up an ancient ordinance--invasion of privacy or something like
that. Anything would do if it gave them an opportunity to confiscate
the device for intensive study.
For the police to believe his story was the worst that could happen.
They might locate Dimanche, but he'd never get it.
He smiled bitterly and the effort hurt. "Dear," she had called him
as she had strangled and beaten him into unconsciousness. Afterward
singing, very likely, as she had sliced the little instrument out of
him.
He could picture her not very remote ancestors springing from cover and
overtaking a fleeing herd--
No use pursuing that line of thought.
Why did she want Dimanche? She had hinted that the agency wasn't always
concerned with legality as such. He could believe her. If she wanted it
for making identification tabs, she'd soon find that it was useless.
Not that that was much comfort--she wasn't likely to return Dimanche
after she'd made that discovery.
* * * * *
For that matter, what was the purpose of Travelers Aid Bureau? It was a
front for another kind of activity. Philanthropy had nothing to do with
it.
If he still had possession of Dimanche, he'd be able to find out.
Everything seemed to hinge on that. With it, he was nearly a superman,
able to hold his own in practically all situations--anything that
didn't involve a Huntner woman, that is.
Without it--well, Tunney 21 was still far away. Even if he should
manage to get there without it, his mission on the planet was certain
to fail.
He dismissed the idea of trying to recover it immediately from Murra
Foray. She was an audio-sensitive. At twenty feet, unaided, she could
hear a heartbeat, the internal noise muscles made in sliding over
each other. With Dimanche, she could hear electrons rustling. As an
antagonist she was altogether too formidable.
* * * * *
He began pulling on his clothing, wincing as he did so. The alternative
was to make another Dimanche. _If_ he could. It would be a tough job
even for a neuronic expert familiar with the process. He wasn't that
expert, but it still had to be done.
The new instrument would have to be better than the original. Maybe not
such a slick machine, but more comprehensive. More wallop. He grinned
as he thought hopefully about giving Murra Foray a surprise.
Ignoring his aches and pains, he went right to work. With money not a
factor, it was an easy matter to line up the best electronic and neuron
concerns on Godolph. Two were put on a standby basis. When he gave them
plans, they were to rush construction at all possible speed.
Each concern was to build a part of the new instrument. Neither part
was of value without the other. The slow-thinking Godolphians weren't
likely to make the necessary mental connection between the seemingly
unrelated projects.
He retired to his suite and began to draw diagrams. It was harder than
he thought. He knew the principles, but the actual details were far
more complicated than he remembered.
Functionally, the Dimanche instrument was divided into three main
phases. There was a brain and memory unit that operated much as the
human counterpart did. Unlike the human brain, however, it had no body
to control, hence more of it was available for thought processes.
Entirely neuronic in construction, it was far smaller than an
electronic brain of the same capacity.
The second function was electronic, akin to radar. Instead of material
objects, it traced and recorded distant nerve impulses. It could count
the heartbeat, measure the rate of respiration, was even capable of
approximate analysis of the contents of the bloodstream. Properly
focused on the nerves of tongue, lips or larynx, it transmitted that
data back to the neuronic brain, which then reconstructed it into
speech. Lip reading, after a fashion, carried to the ultimate.
Finally, there was the voice of Dimanche, a speaker under the control
of the neuronic brain.
For convenience of installation in the body, Dimanche was packaged in
two units. The larger package was usually surgeried into the abdomen.
The small one, containing the speaker, was attached to the skull
just behind the ear. It worked by bone conduction, allowing silent
communication between operator and instrument. A real convenience.
It wasn't enough to know this, as Cassal did. He'd talked to the
company experts, had seen the symbolical drawings, the plans for an
improved version. He needed something better than the best though, that
had been planned.
The drawback was this: _Dimanche was powered directly by the nervous
system of the body in which it was housed_. Against Murra Foray, he'd
be over-matched. She was stronger than he physically, probably also in
the production of nervous energy.
One solution was to make available to the new instrument a larger
fraction of the neural currents of the body. That was dangerous--a
slight miscalculation and the user was dead. Yet he had to have an
instrument that would overpower her.
Cassal rubbed his eyes wearily. How could he find some way of supplying
additional power?
Abruptly, Cassal sat up. That was the way, of course--an auxiliary
power pack that need not be surgeried into his body, extra power that
he would use only in emergencies.
Neuronics, Inc., had never done this, had never thought that such an
instrument would ever be necessary. They didn't need to overpower their
customers. They merely wanted advance information via subvocalized
thoughts.
It was easier for Cassal to conceive this idea than to engineer it. At
the end of the first day, he knew it would be a slow process.
Twice he postponed deadlines to the manufacturing concerns he'd
engaged. He locked himself in his rooms and took Anti-Sleep against
the doctor's vigorous protests. In one week he had the necessary
drawings, crude but legible. An expert would have to make innumerable
corrections, but the intent was plain.
One week. During that time Murra Foray would be growing hourly more
proficient in the use of Dimanche.
* * * * *
Cassal followed the neuronics expert groggily, seventy-two hours sleep
still clogging his reactions. Not that he hadn't needed sleep after
that week. The Godolphian showed him proudly through the shops, though
he wasn't at all interested in their achievements. The only noteworthy
aspect was the grand scale of their architecture.
"We did it, though I don't think we'd have taken the job if we'd known
how hard it was going to be," the neuronics expert chattered. "It works
exactly as you specified. We had to make substitutions, of course, but
you understand that was inevitable."
He glanced anxiously at Cassal, who nodded. That was to be expected.
Components that were common on Earth wouldn't necessarily be available
here. Still, any expert worth his pay could always make the proper
combinations and achieve the same results.
Inside the lab, Cassal frowned. "I thought you were keeping my work
separate. What is this planetary drive doing here?"
The Godolphian spread his broad hands and looked hurt. "Planetary
drive?" He tried to laugh. "This is the instrument you ordered!"
Cassal started. It was supposed to fit under a flap of skin behind his
ear. A Three World saurian couldn't carry it.