the balcony above and at the barricade they had erected across the
openings to the lifter tubes. Verkan Vall was not satisfied with this
last; it looked to him as though they had provided a breastwork for
somebody to fire on them from, more than anything else.
He was about to step around the cabinet which partially blocked the
gun-room door when he glanced up, and saw a six-foot circle on the
ceiling turning slowly brown. There was a smell of scorched plastic.
He grabbed Sarnax by the arm and pointed.
“Thermite,” the Assassin whispered. “The ceiling’s got six inches of
spaceship-insulation between it and the floor above; it’ll take them a
few minutes to burn through it.” He stooped and pushed on the
barricade, shoving it into the room. “Keep back; they’ll probably drop
a grenade or so through, first, before they jump down. If we’re quick,
we can get a couple of them.”
Dirzed and Sarnax crouched, one at either side of the door, with
weapons ready. Verkan Vall and Dalla had been ordered, rather
peremptorily, to stay behind them; in a place of danger, an Assassin
was obliged to shield his client. Verkan Vall, unable to see what was
going on inside the room, kept his eyes and his gun muzzle on the
barricade across the openings to the lifter tubes, the erection of
which he was now regretting as a major tactical error.
Inside the gun room, there was a sudden crash, as the circle of
thermite burned through and a section of ceiling dropped out and hit
the floor. Instantly, Dirzed flung himself back against Verkan Vall,
and there was a tremendous explosion inside, followed by another and
another. A second or so passed, then Dirzed, leaning around the corner
of the door, began firing rapidly into the room. From the other side
of the door, Sarnax began blazing away with his rifle. Verkan Vall
kept his position, covering the lifter tubes.
Suddenly, from behind the barricade, a blue-white gun flash leaped
into being, and a pistol banged. He sprayed the opening between a
couch and a section of bookcase from whence it had come, releasing his
trigger as the gun rose with the recoil, squeezing and releasing and
squeezing again. Then he jumped to his feet.
“Come on, the other place; hurry!” he ordered.
Sarnax swore in exasperation. “Help me with her, Dirzed!” he implored.
Verkan Vall turned his head, to see the two Assassins drag Dalla to
her feet and hustle her away from the gun room; she was quite
senseless, and they had to drag her between them. Verkan Vall gave a
quick glance into the gun room; two of the Starpha servants and a man
in rather flashy civil dress were lying on the floor, where they had
been shot as they had jumped down from above. He saw a movement at the
edge of the irregular, smoking, hole in the ceiling, and gave it a
short burst, then fired another at the exit from the descent tube.
Then he took to his heels and followed the Assassins and Hadron Dalla
into Prince Jirzyn’s apartment.
As he ran through the open door, the Assassins were letting Dalla down
into a chair; they instantly threw themselves into the work of
barricading the doorway so as to provide cover and at the same time
allow them to fire out into the central well.
[Illustration: ]
For an instant, as he bent over her, he thought Dalla had been killed,
an assumption justified by his knowledge of the deadliness of Akor-Neb
bullets. Then he saw her eye-lids flicker. A moment later, he had the
explanation of her escape. The bullet had hit the game bag at her
side; it was full of spools of metal tape, in metal cases, and notes
in written form, pyrographed upon sheets of plastic ring fastened into
metal binders. Because of their extreme velocity, Akor-Neb bullets
were sure killers when they struck animal tissue, but for the same
reason, they had very poor penetration on hard objects. The
alloy-steel tape, and the steel spools and spool cases, and the
notebook binders, had been enough to shatter the little bullet into
splinters of magnesium-nickel alloy, and the stout leather back of the
game bag had stopped all of these. But the impact, even distributed as
it had been through the contents of the bag, had been enough to knock
the girl unconscious.
He found a bottle of some sort of brandy and a glass on a serving
table nearby and poured her a drink, holding it to her lips. She
spluttered over the first mouthful, then took the glass from him and
sipped the rest.
“What happened?” she asked. “I thought those bullets were sure death.”
“Your notes. The bullet hit the bag. Are you all right, now?”
She finished the brandy. “I think so.” She put a hand into the game
bag and brought out a snarled and tangled mess of steel tape. “Oh,
_blast_! That stuff was important; all the records on the preliminary
auto-recall experiments.” She shrugged. “Well, it wouldn’t have been
worth much more if I’d stopped that bullet, myself.” She slipped the
strap over her shoulder and started to rise.
As she did, a bedlam of firing broke out, both from the two Assassins
at the door and from outside. They both hit the floor and crawled out
of line of the partly-open door; Verkan Vall recovered his
submachine-gun, which he had set down beside Dalla’s chair. Sarnax was
firing with his rifle at some target in the direction of the lifter
tubes; Dirzed lay slumped over the barricade, and one glance at his
crumpled figure was enough to tell Verkan Vall that he was dead.
“You fill magazines for us,” he told Dalla, then crawled to Dirzed’s
place at the door. “What happened, Sarnax?”
“They shoved over the barricade at the lifter tubes and came out into
the well. I got a couple, they got Dirzed, and now they’re holed up in
rooms all around the circle. They—Aah!” He fired three shots,
quickly, around the edge of the door. “That stopped that.” The
Assassin crouched to insert a fresh magazine into his rifle.
[Illustration: ]
Verkan Vall risked one eye around the corner of the doorway, and as he
did, there was a red flash and a dull roar, unlike the blue flashes
and sharp cracking reports of the pistols and rifles, from the doorway
of the gun room. He wondered, for a split second, if it might be one
of the fowling pieces he had seen there, and then something whizzed
past his head and exploded with a soft _plop_ behind him. Turning, he
saw a pool of gray vapor beginning to spread in the middle of the
room. Dalla must have got a breath of it, for she was slumped over the
chair from which she had just risen.
Dropping the submachine-gun and gulping a lungful of fresh air from
outside, Verkan Vall rushed to her, caught her by the heels, and
dragged her into Prince Jirzyn’s bedroom, beyond. Leaving her in the
middle of the floor, he took another deep breath and returned to the
drawing room, where Sarnax was already overcome by the sleep-gas.
He saw the serving table from which he had got the brandy, and dragged
it over to the bedroom door, overturning it and laying it across the
doorway, its legs in the air. Like most Akor-Neb serving tables, it
had a gravity-counteraction unit under it; he set this for double
minus-gravitation and snapped it on. As it was now above the inverted
table, the table did not rise, but a tendril, of sleep-gas, curling
toward it, bent upward and drifted away from the doorway. Satisfied
that he had made a temporary barrier against the sleep-gas, Verkan
Vall secured Dalla’s hunting pistol and spare magazines and lay down
at the bedroom door.
For some time, there was silence outside. Then the besiegers evidently
decided that the sleep-gas attack had been a success. An Assassin,
wearing a gas mask and carrying a submachine-gun, appeared in the
doorway, and behind him came a tall man in a tan tunic, similarly
masked. They stepped into the room and looked around.
Knowing that he would be shooting over a two hundred percent negative
gravitation-field, Verkan Vall aimed for the Assassin’s belt-buckle
and squeezed. The bullet caught him in the throat. Evidently the
bullet had not only been lifted in the negative gravitation, but
lifted point-first and deflected upward. He held his front sight just
above the other man’s knee, and hit him in the chest.
As he fired, he saw a wisp of gas come sliding around the edge of the
inverted table. There was silence outside, and for an instant, he was
tempted to abandon his post and go to the bathroom, back of the
bedroom, for wet towels to improvise a mask. Then, when he tried to
crawl backward, he could not. There was an impression of distant
shouting which turned to a roaring sound in his head. He tried to lift
his pistol, but it slipped from his fingers.
* * * * *
When consciousness returned, he was lying on his back, and something
cold and rubbery was pressing into his face. He raised his arms to
fight off whatever it was, and opened his eyes, to find that he was
staring directly at the red oval and winged bullet of the Society of
Assassins. A hand caught his wrist as he reached for the small pistol
under his arm. The pressure on his face eased.
“It’s all right, Lord Virzal,” a voice came to him. “Assassins’
Truce!”
He nodded stupidly and repeated the words. “Assassins’ Truce; I won’t
shoot. What happened?”
Then he sat up and looked around. Prince Jirzyn’s bedchamber was full
of Assassins. Dalla, recovering from her touch of sleep-gas, was
sitting groggily in a chair, while five or six of them fussed around
her, getting in each others’ way, handing her drinks, chaffing her
wrists, holding damp cloths on her brow. That was standard procedure,
when any group of males thought Dalla needed any help. Another
Assassin, beside the bed, was putting away an oxygen-mask outfit, and
the Assassin who had prevented Verkan Vall from drawing his pistol was
his own follower, Marnik. And Klarnood, the Assassin-President, was
sitting on the foot of the bed, smoking one of Prince Jirzyn’s
monogrammed and crested cigarettes critically.
Verkan Vall looked at Marnik, and then at Klarnood, and back to
Marnik.
“You got through,” he said. “Good work, Marnik; I thought they’d
downed you.”
“They did; I had to crash-land in the woods. I went about a mile on
foot, and then I found a man and woman and two children, hiding in one
of these little log rain shelters. They had an airboat, a good one. It
seemed that rioting had broken out in the city unit where they lived,
and they’d taken to the woods till things quieted down again. I
offered them Assassins’ protection if they’d take me to Assassins’
Hall, and they did.”
“By luck, I was in when Marnik arrived,” Klarnood took over. “We
brought three boatloads of men, and came here at once. Just as we got
here, two boatloads of Starpha dependents arrived; they tried to give
us an argument, and we discarnated the lot of them. Then we came down
here, crying Assassins’ Truce. One of the Starpha Assassins, Kirzol,
was still carnate; he told us what had been going on.” The
President-General’s face-became grim. “You know, I take a rather poor
view of Prince Jirzyn’s procedure in this matter, not to mention that
of his underlings. I’ll have to speak to him about this. Now, how
about you and the Lady Dallona? What do you intend doing?”
“We’re getting out of here,” Verkan Vall said. “I’d like air transport
and protection as far as Ghamma, to the establishment of the family of
Zorda. Brarnend of Zorda has a private space yacht; he’ll get us to
Venus.”
Klarnood gave a sigh of obvious relief. “I’ll have you and the Lady
Dallona airborne and off for Ghamma as soon as you wish,” he promised.
“I will, frankly, be delighted to see the last of both of you. The
Lady Dallona has started a fire here at Darsh that won’t burn out in a
half-century, and who knows what it may consume.” He was interrupted
by a heaving shock that made the underground dome dwelling shake like
a light airboat in turbulence. Even eighty feet under the ground, they
could hear a continued crashing roar. It was an appreciable interval
before the sound and the shock ceased.
For an instant, there was silence, and then an excited bedlam of
shouting broke from the Assassins in the room: Klarnood’s face was
frozen in horror.
“That was a fission bomb!” he exclaimed. “The first one that has been
exploded on this planet in hostility in a thousand years!” He turned
to Verkan Vall. “If you feel well enough to walk, Lord Virzal, come
with us. I must see what’s happened.”
They hurried from the room and went streaming up the ascent tube to
the top of the dome. About forty miles away, to the south, Verkan Vall
saw the sinister thing that he had seen on so many other time-lines,
in so many other paratime sectors—a great pillar of varicolored
fire-shot smoke, rising to a mushroom head fifty thousand feet above.
“Well, that’s it,” Klarnood said sadly. “That is civil war.”
“May I make a suggestion, Assassin-President?” Verkan Vall asked. “I
understand that Assassins’ Truce is binding even upon non-Assassins;
is that correct?”
“Well, not exactly; it’s generally kept by such non-Assassins as want
to remain in their present reincarnations, though.”
“That’s what I meant. Well, suppose you declare a general, planet-wide
Assassins’ Truce in this political war, and make the leaders of both
parties responsible for keeping it. Publish lists of the top two or
three thousand Statisticalists and Volitionalists, starting with
Mirzark of Bashad and Prince Jirzyn of Starpha, and inform them that
they will be assassinated, in order, if the fighting doesn’t cease.”
“Well!” A smile grew on Klarnood’s face. “Lord Virzal, my thanks; a
good suggestion. I’ll try it. And furthermore, I’ll withdraw all
Assassin protection permanently from anybody involved in political
activity, and forbid any Assassin to accept any retainer connected
with political factionalism. It’s about time our members stopped
discarnating each other in these political squabbles.” He pointed to
the three airboats drawn up on the top of the dome; speedy black
craft, bearing the red oval and winged bullet. “Take your choice, Lord
Virzal. I’ll lend you a couple of my men, and you’ll be in Ghamma in
three hours.” He hooked fingers and clapped shoulders with Verkan
Vall, bent over Dalla’s hand. “I still like you, Lord Virzal, and I
have seldom met a more charming lady than you, Lady Dallona. But I
sincerely hope I never see either of you again.”
* * * * *
The ship for Dhergabar was driving north and west; at seventy thousand
feet, it was still daylight, but the world below was wrapping itself
in darkness. In the big visiscreens, which served in lieu of the
windows which could never have withstood the pressure and friction
heat of the ship’s speed, the sun was sliding out of sight over the
horizon to port. Verkan Vall and Dalla sat together, watching the
blazing western sky—the sky of their own First Level time-line.
“I blame myself terribly, Vall,” Dalla was saying. “And I didn’t mean
any of them the least harm. All I was interested in was learning the
facts. I know, that sounds like ‘I didn’t know it was loaded,’ but—”
“It sounds to me like those Fourth Level Europo-American Sector
physicists who are giving themselves guilt-complexes because they
designed an atomic bomb,” Verkan Vall replied. “All you were
interested in was learning the facts. Well, as a scientist, that’s all
you’re supposed to be interested in. You don’t have to worry about any
social or political implications. People have to learn to live with
newly-discovered facts; if they don’t, they die of them.”
“But, Vall; that sounds dreadfully irresponsible—”
“Does it? You’re worrying about the results of your reincarnation
memory-recall discoveries, the shootings and riotings and the bombing
we saw.” He touched the pommel of Olirzon’s knife, which he still
wore. “You’re no more guilty of that than the man who forged this
blade is guilty of the death of Marnark of Bashad; if he’d never
lived, I’d have killed Marnark with some other knife somebody else
made. And what’s more, you can’t know the results of your discoveries.
All you can see is a thin film of events on the surface of an
immediate situation, so you can’t say whether the long-term results
will be beneficial or calamitous.
“Take this Fourth Level Europo-American atomic bomb, for example. I
choose that because we both know that sector, but I could think of a
hundred other examples in other paratime areas. Those people, because
of deforestation, bad agricultural methods and general mismanagement,
are eroding away their arable soil at an alarming rate. At the same
time, they are breeding like rabbits. In other words, each successive
generation has less and less food to divide among more and more
people, and, for inherited traditional and superstitious reasons, they
refuse to adopt any rational program of birth-control and
population-limitation.
“But, fortunately, they now have the atomic bomb, and they are
developing radioactive poisons, weapons of mass-effect. And their
racial, nationalistic and ideological conflicts are rapidly reaching
the explosion point. A series of all-out atomic wars is just what that
sector needs, to bring their population down to their world’s carrying
capacity; in a century or so, the inventors of the atomic bomb will be
hailed as the saviors of their species.”
“But how about my work on the Akor-Neb Sector?” Dalla asked. “It seems
that my memory-recall technique is more explosive than any fission
bomb. I’ve laid the train for a century-long reign of anarchy!”
“I doubt that; I think Klarnood will take hold, now that he has
committed himself to it. You know, in spite of his sanguinary
profession, he’s the nearest thing to a real man of good will I’ve
found on that sector. And here’s something else you haven’t
considered. Our own First Level life expectancy is from four to five
hundred years. That’s the main reason why we’ve accomplished as much
as we have. We have, individually, time to accomplish things. On the
Akor-Neb Sector, a scientist or artist or scholar or statesman will
grow senile and die before he’s as old as either of us. But now, a
young student of twenty or so can take one of your auto-recall
treatments and immediately have available all the knowledge and
experience gained in four or five previous lives. He can start where
he left off in his last reincarnation. In other words, you’ve made
those people time-binders, individually as well as racially. Isn’t
that worth the temporary discarnation of a lot of ward-heelers and
plug-uglies, or even a few decent types like Dirzed and Olirzon? If it
isn’t, I don’t know what scales of values you’re using.”
“Vall!” Dalla’s eyes glowed with enthusiasm. “I never thought of that!
And you said, ‘temporary discarnation.’ That’s just what it is. Dirzed
and Olirzon and the others aren’t dead; they’re just waiting,
discarnate, between physical lives. You know, in the sacred writings
of one of the Fourth Level peoples it is stated: ‘Death is the last
enemy.’ By proving that death is just a cyclic condition of continued
individual existence, these people have conquered their last enemy.”
“Last enemy but one,” Verkan Vall corrected. “They still have one
enemy to go, an enemy within themselves. Call it semantic confusion,
or illogic, or incomprehension, or just plain stupidity. Like
Klarnood, stymied by verbal objections to something labeled ‘political
intervention.’ He’d never have consented to use the power of his
Society if he hadn’t been shocked out of his inhibitions by that
nuclear bomb. Or the Statisticalists, trying to create a classless
order of society through a political program which would only result
in universal servitude to an omnipotent government. Or the
Volitionalist nobles, trying to preserve their hereditary feudal
privileges, and now they can’t even agree on a definition of the term
‘hereditary.’ Might they not recover all the silly prejudices of their
past lives, along with the knowledge and wisdom?”
“But ... I thought you said—” Dalla was puzzled, a little hurt.
Verkan Vall’s arm squeezed around her waist, and he laughed
comfortingly.
“You see? Any sort of result is possible, good or bad. So don’t blame
yourself in advance for something you can’t possibly estimate.” An
idea occurred to him, and he straightened in the seat. “Tell you what;
if you people at Rhogom Foundation get the problem of discarnate
paratime transposition licked by then, let’s you and I go back to the
Akor-Neb Sector in about a hundred years and see what sort of a mess
those people have made of things.”
“A hundred years: that would be Year Twenty-Two of the next
millennium. It’s a date, Vall; we’ll do it.”
They bent to light their cigarettes together at his lighter. When
they raised their heads again and got the flame glare out of their
eyes, the sky was purple-black, dusted with stars, and dead ahead,
spilling up over the horizon, was a golden glow—the lights of
Dhergabar and home.