Space search v1, p.8
Space Search (v1.)), page 8
Whip Gunther shook his head. “We don’t want anything that indicates you come from Harappa. Our friends might be on the lookout for anyone from Harappa.”
“It will be no problem,” Ahmed Abdallah said, his voice oily as it always seemed when he was discussing money. “A few thousand more credits and I will outfit you in the style of two travelers journeying between the stars for pleasure or business.”
“A few thousand credits!” Whip Gunther said. “What are you planning on clothing us in, diamonds?”
The other looked at him calmly. “You do not wish to be conspicuous. Anyone who can afford interplanetary travel is obviously wealthy.”
12
The house was huge and seemed to consist of various patios, many of them with gardens or fountains, with windowless rooms opening off them in the same fashion as had the one in which they had met their host. Whip Gunther and Venu were assigned a small one in a remote wing, away from the bustle of servant activities. It had three rooms and a bath; two small bedrooms and one larger chamber for living and dining. The quarters were richly, though sparsely, furnished. There were no chairs. The beds were on low platforms, the bed clothes exotic. In the dining room, the table stood no higher than six inches, and there were hassocks around it for sitting.
They put down Venu’s things and Whip* looked about, his hands on his hips.
He said, “All right. You stay here while I prowl around a bit. I want to get the lay of the land on the off chance that we might have to get out of here in a hurry.”
“Then don’t you trust Ahmed Abdallah? We are in his hands.”
“I don’t trust anybody when my neck is involved,” Whip Gunther growled, turning and leaving.
Venu sat down on one of the hassocks and brought the gun his companion had given him from his pocket. It was small but, to him, very vicious looking. He remembered how a beam of light had lanced out from it there before the Safari Bar, and how very crumbled Mohammed ibn Idriss had looked when Whip Gunther had cut him down with a similar ray.
He examined the death device carefully. He had seen guns, once again in historical Tri-Bi shows, though Harappans were largely inclined to avoid this type of entertainment. He thus knew vaguely what the different parts of the weapon were—the barrel, the stocks, the trigger. He carefully kept his finger from the trigger.
“Look out,” a voice growled. “You’ll slice your foot off.”
Venu looked up, startled. “I was merely …”
Whip Gunther took the laser pistol from him and clicked the power pack magazine from its butt. He said, “I’ll give you a rundown on using this later.”
“I … I am not sure I wish to know,” Venu said, a touch of defiance in his voice.
Whip Gunther sat down on a hassock across from the younger man. “Now look here, Venu,” he said. “You’re on the trail of Hari Maroon, who possibly did in your father. We’ll probably catch up to him. When we do, there’s going to be trouble. Now if you’re unwilling to get into the scrap, if and when it comes, you’d better decide now and we’ll forget about the whole project. So it’s a matter of put up or shut up.”
Venu’s avoided Gunther’s eyes.
“Well?” Whip Gunther growled.
“I accept your words, Sahib Whip. Please show me how one utilizes this device of violence.”
“Okay. Now listen to this. It’s a laser pistol, probably the most dangerous hand weapon ever devised. Unlike a gun that throws a projectile, such as a bullet, you don’t have to make a bullseye. It throws a beam of light, as you saw last night, as you sweep it across your target, almost as though you were cutting. That gives you the advantage of not having to be a crack shot to bring your man down. You can, kind of, spray the whole vicinity. I’ll have you operating this thing like a veteran before we * leave here.”
Venu closed his eyes in pain. “May the Lord Krishna forgive me,” he murmured.
In the morning, Whip Gunther entered Venu’s bedroom to find the boy kneeling beside the bed, his hands clasped together.
Venu was saying, “Lead me from the unreal to the real, lead me from darkness to light, lead me from death to immortality.”
Whip Gunther looked at him and twisted his mouth. “What’s all that?” he said as Venu came to his feet, his face composed.
“It is the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 8, VII. 19.”
“That tells me a lot.”
Venu explained gravely. “The Upanishads are holy books which were composed in Mother India about 1000 B.C. There are about one hundred of them and they contain all the elements of Hindu thought. However, they do not constitute a compact philosophical system and are mainly poetic utterances on the nature of the Universe, social and ethical discussions, and metaphysical enquiries. These probings reveal the limitations of the human self and evolve the idea of the God-self which can be invoked to give absolute knowledge through direct inner experience.”
Whip Gunther laughed and shook his head. “I can see we come from different schools.
When I was your age, I was learning such quotations as ‘Never give a sucker an even break,’ ‘If I didn’t do it, somebody else would,’ ‘Do your neighbor before he does you,’ and ‘There’s a sucker born every minute and most of them live.’ “
Venu said in horror, “By Agni, the sacred fire, surely you jest.”
Whip Gunther sobered and, cocking his head slightly, said, “Are you sure? Besides, I said I was learning such quotations, not necessarily abiding by them.”
He switched subjects and said, “The doctor’s coming to chop up my face. While he’s doing it, you might practice up on your laser. The one big thing you’ve got to remember is that range stud. One of these pistols will range up to about a half mile—if you let it. If your target is twenty feet away, don’t let your beam reach out to fifty. You’ll wind up cutting down a city block, and people can take a dim view of that. Always thumb your range stud to approximately the distance of the target.”
“I will attempt to remember, Sahib Whip.”
13
The next day, Whip Gunther’s face partially bandaged, they were summoned to the informal office of Ahmed Abdallah. He was seated, as before, on his hassock, and again went through the amenities, including the three cups of tea, before getting down to business.
He said, finally, “I have heard from Medea, on the tight beam.”
Whip Gunther looked at him. “Where did Hari Maroon go when he left that planet?”
Ahmed shook a plump hand negatively. “Verily, you are my good friend, Whip Gunther. However, as each man knows, business is business. There is the small matter of one hundred thousand interplanetary credits, plus five thousand for other services.”
Whip Gunther scowled at him, but then turned to his young companion questioningly.
Venu said, “You have an account with the Geneva banks?”
“Yes, of course.”
“You have facilities for transferring from my account to yours?”
From behind him, the Moor brought a small credit transfer screen with a hyperspace antenna.
Venu put his interplanetary credit card on the screen and his thumbprint on the identification square. He said, “The planet Geneva. I wish to transfer 105,000 interplanetary credits to the account of Ahmed Abdallah of Meknes, of the planet Tangier.”
In approximately five minutes, during which time they remained quiet, the screen said, “Carried out.”
Whip Gunther looked at their host. “All right. Where did Hari Maroon go when he left Medea?”
The other said levelly, “He came here to Tangier.
The interplanetary adventurer stared at him. “You mean he is on Tangier?”
Venu could hardly refrain from jumping to his feet.
But the Moor shook his head. “No. He left this morning.”
“You mean he’s been here and you didn’t let us know!” Whip Gunther was obviously incensed.
“That was not in our bargain, my good friend,” Abdallah said. “Besides, if I had so informed you, you might have taken measures against him on Tangier, and a man of Hari Maroon’s resources could easily have traced out the fact that I had acted against his interests. I am not a fool, friend Whip Gunther.”
“Why did he come to Tangier?”
“I would not know. I would imagine to take advantage of our free-port facilities, to utilize some of our banking facilities, no records of which are kept on other worlds, not even Earth.”
“Where did he go?”
The other looked at him, his fat face bland. “But that was not in our bargain either, friend Whip Gunther. I was commissioned to find where he went from Medea. Very well, I fulfilled my commission.”
“Why, you Moslem pig!”
The other’s eyes narrowed and he said, his voice oily, “I see you have studied our customs sufficiently, Whip Gunther, to know the greatest insult you can give me. So I will double the price I originally expected to charge you.”
“Price for what!”
“For Hari Maroon’s new destination. You see, I also have connections with the Meknes spaceport authorities. It will cost you one hundred thousand additional credits.”
A silence fell. Finally, Venu brought forth his interplanetary credit card again and put it on the credit transfer screen. When the transaction had been completed, he looked back at the Moor.
Ahmed Abdallah said, “Hari Maroon is traveling in his private space yacht. He cleared from here to Elysium.”
“Elysium?” Venu said. “I don’t believe I have ever heard of this world.”
“I have,” Whip Gunther said. “In fact, I’ve been there. It’s the only place I’ve ever seen Hari Maroon. And, now that I recall, I remember hearing that he almost always heads there after swinging a particularly profitable coup. I should have guessed that was where he would go.” He looked at Venu in self-deprecation. “I would have saved you a lot of exchange.”
“Such are the fortunes of finance,” Abdallah said smoothly.
Whip Gunther’s eyes came back to him. “All right. But the rest of our bargain. Where are my forged papers, my interplanetary credit card, and my identity documents?”
The other fished into his djellabah and brought forth the papers in question. “I must remind you again that, unless you actually have interplanetary credits to your account, the first time you use this the computers will check it out and the authorities will be after you.”
Venu said evenly, “He will have credits to his account.”
Whip Gunther said, “When does the next spacer leave Tangier for Elysium?”
“In two days,” Ahmed Abdallah said. “But, of course, you will not be able to take that. Your face will not have healed. The next leaves in approximately a month. For a small sum you can remain here until …”
“We’ll have to take the first one,” Whip Gunther said grimly. “Otherwise, by the time we reached Elysium, Hari Maroon might have gone on to some new destination and I’m not sure we could find someone there that would sell out his flight plan.”
The interplanetary adventurer came to his feet. “Will you make reservations for us?”
“But your face.”
“There are no representatives of Interplanpol on Tangier. There’ll be nobody at the spaceport who’ll be curious when we leave. And by the time we reach Elysium, I can hope to be able to remove the bandages. It’s not the kind of world where the local authorities are overly curious about their visitors. They can’t afford to be. Our only obstacles will be if any Interplanpol men are at the Elysium spaceport giving more than a cursory examination to identity papers. How much of an inspection will these forged papers stand?”
“Not much,” Ahmed Abdallah admitted. “All they have to do is check back to your supposed home planet to discover that you don’t really exist.” He added grudgingly, “Your interplanetary credit card is better. The planet Geneva doesn’t care if you exist or not, just so long as your account has credits.”
“Make the reservations,” Whip Gunther sighed.
14
Back in their quarters, while they prepared for their midday meal, Venu said, “Why should it be that the local authorities on Elysium are not overly curious about their visitors?”
“They wouldn’t want to scare them off. Elysium is a pleasure world. There are several of them in Allied Worlds, but Elysium is probably the farthest out.”
“Pleasure world?”
“That’s right. One big resort. Practically the whole economy is based on supplying pleasure to visitors from other planets. Obviously, anybody who can travel between the stars, other than spacemen, is wealthy. Many of them can’t throw the type of wing-ding on their home planets that they like, particularly if they come from one of the religiously dominated or otherwise conservative worlds. So they come to Elysium and spend small, and sometimes not so small, fortunes on having a good time.”
“But what sort of pleasures would induce anyone to travel so far to indulge in them?”
Whip Gunther looked at him and laughed. “You’re too young to understand, Venu. But that’s sometimes the thing about the very rich. They start experiencing their jollies in all-out fashion early in life. When they’ve reached their middle years they’ve done just about everything there is to do in the way of having fun. So they begin looking for new thrills, more exotic pleasures, really far-out stuff. Well, Elysium tries to provide them.”
Venu Jhabvola was frowning. “I am not so young as all that, Sahib Whip. And if I am going to this world, surely I should know something about it. What do you mean by far-out stuff?”
Two of the servants were beginning to bring in dishes and to put them on the low table. Whip Gunther and Venu sat cross-legged, which was the only possible way to eat from such a table. Before Whip Gunther was an enormous cous-cous, the somewhat rice-like cereal which originated in the Near East of Earth long centuries before. It was covered over with chicken and sauce, and over that was sprinkled sugar and cinnamon. The first time he had eaten it, Whip Gunther had been set back by the sugar over a meat dish, but he was now as fond of cous-cous as any other food he had ever eaten on Tangier.
Before Venu were several dishes of fruits and vegetables, some cooked, some fresh. How he would have liked a well-done, highly spiced curry! He sighed and reached for an orange.
His companion thought about his last question. “Well, they have gambling. They have every kind of gambling I’ve ever heard of, and the highest stakes. I’ve seen an ultrarich tycoon from the planet Catalonia drop a million interplanetary credits on one horse race, and never blink an eye. Then there are the most exotic foods from every world in Allied Worlds. And there’s every drink I’ve ever heard of, and I’ve heard of a lot of them.”
Venu was frowning. “Thus far, you have said a great deal about extremely expensive pleasures, but nothing that would seem to live up to your expression ‘far-out stuff.’ “
“All right, here’s one for you,” Whip Gunther said around a large chunk of chicken. “You can obtain just about any narcotic used anywhere in Allied Worlds.”
Venu was shocked. “But that is against interplanetary law! It is against the Allied Worlds Covenant pertaining to giving interplanetary travelers addictive drugs.”
The big man laughed. “Thus far, Elysium has gotten around that by a cute trick. You can take any narcotic known to man on Elysium, but before you leave you first have to take the cure for addiction, and then they brainwash you to the point of having the memory of what drug you were taking wiped out. So, they point out, nobody gets addicted on Elysium and hence the drugs they take aren’t addictive.”
“And you say that this Hari Maroon goes to Elysium after each of his financial … adventures? He must be a very corrupt man.”
Whip Gunther chuckled. “I’ve been there a few times myself, when I could afford it, which, admittedly, isn’t very often. There are other attractions on Elysium besides taking narcotics, and picking up some of the most beautiful girls on 5,000 worlds. For instance, they can afford to import the best entertainers anywhere.”
It was at that moment that the two assassins darted into the dining room, knives drawn.
Venu sat there, frozen, his eyes staring. He would have been simple prey.
But the two bearded Moors must have realized that and for the moment ignored him, dashing toward Whip Gunther, their long, curved knives on high.
However, they were dealing with he who had been called the most dangerous man on Tangier. Big though he was, Whip Gunther seemed to bounce off the hassock on which he sat. Up to his feet and then back, until he was against the wall.
Once again, Venu Jhabvola witnessed the interplanetary adventurer move so fast that his hand seemed a blur as it plunged into a side pocket.
What transpired then came so fast that Venu could never remember the picture clearly. One of the two Moors, attacking, was impeded by the hassock upon which Whip Gunther had been seated. Cursing, he stumbled around it, heading for the big man.
The other was almost upon his victim, who stood up against the wall. Then Whip Gunther extended his arm and what looked like a snake extended out from his hand. Its head slashed into the attacker’s eyes. The man screamed, dropped his knife, and fell to his knees.
The other had circumvented the hassock and was upon his supposed victim.
But Whip Gunther had snapped his weapon back so that now he held one end of it in each hand. He banged it down upon the other’s knife wrist. He quickly twisted his hands so that his device was around the others wrist and forced the man to the floor. He let loose one end of the strange object, freeing it from the wrist, brought it up high, and then down on the fallen man’s temple.
He strode quickly across the floor and slashed down at the man he had blinded earlier, hitting him over the head and collapsing him completely.
He snapped to Venu, “All right, let’s get out of here before we run into more trouble! Get your things!’’
The order brought Venu Jhabvola out of his daze. He came to his feet.
