Northwest of Earth (28 page)

“The man’s name I do not know, but he is of Mars, from the canal-countries, and his face is deeply scarred across both cheeks. He hides what I want in a little ivory box of drylander carving. If you can bring that to me you may name your own reward.”

Smith’s pale eyes turned again, reluctantly, to the woman beside him. He wondered briefly why he disliked even to look at her, for she seemed lovelier each time his gaze rested upon that exquisitely tinted face. He saw that her eyes were still lowered, the feather lashes brushing her cheeks. She nodded without looking up as he echoed,

“Any price I ask?”

“Money or jewels or—what you will.”

“Ten thousand gold dollars to my name in the Great Bank of Lakkjourna, confirmed by viziphone when I hand you the box.”

If he expected a flicker of displeasure to cross her face at his matter-of-factness, he was disappointed. She rose in one long gliding motion and stood quietly before him. Smoothly, without lifting her eyes, she said,

“It is agreed, then. I will see you here tomorrow at this hour.”

Her voice dropped with a note of finality and dismissal. Smith glanced up into her face, and at what he saw there started to his feet in an involuntary motion, staring undisguisedly. She was standing quite still, with downcast eyes, and all animation and allure were draining away from her face. Uncomprehending, he watched humanity fading as if some glowing inward tide ebbed away, leaving a husk of sweet, inanimate flesh where the radiant Judai had stood a moment before.

An unpleasant little coldness rippled down his back as he watched. Uncertainly he glanced toward the door, feeling more strongly than ever that inexplicable revulsion against some inner alienness he could not understand. As he hesitated, “Go, go!” came in an impatient voice from between her scarcely moving lips. And in almost ludicrous haste he made for the door. His last glance as it swung to of its own weight behind him revealed Judai standing motionless where he had left her, a still figure silhouetted white and scarlet against the immemorial pattern of the wall beyond. And he had a curious impression that a thin gray fog veiled her body in a lowly spreading nimbus that was inexplicably unpleasant.

Dusk was falling as he came out into the street again. A shadowy servant had given him his coat, and Smith departed so quickly that he was still struggling into the sleeves as he stepped out under the low arch of the door and drew a deep breath of the keen, icy air in conscious relief. He could not have explained, even to himself, the odd revulsion which Judai and her house had roused in him, but he was very glad to be free of them both and out in the open street again.

He shrugged himself deep into the warm fur coat and set off with long strides down the Lakklan. He was headed for The Spaceman’s Rest. Old Mhici, if Smith found him in the right mood and approached him through the proper devious channels, might have information to give about the lovely lost singer and her strange house—and her credit at the Great Bank of Lakkjourna. Smith had small reason to doubt her wealth, but he took no needless chances.

The Spaceman’s Rest was crowded. Smith made his way through the maze of tables toward the long bar at the end of the room, threading the crowd of hard-faced men whose wide diversity of races seemed to make little difference in the curious similarity of expression which dwelt upon every face. They were quiet and watchful-eyed and wore the indefinable air of those who live by their wits and their guns. The low-roofed place was thick with a pungent haze from the
nuari
which nearly all were smoking, and that in itself was evidence that in Mhici’s place they considered themselves secure, for
nuari
is mildly opiate.

Old Mhici himself came forward to the voiceless summoning in Smith’s single pale-eyed glance as it met his in the crowd about the bar. The Earthman ordered red
segir
-whisky, but he did not drink it immediately.

“I know no one here,” he observed in the drylander idiom, which was a flagrant misstatement, but heavy with meaning. For the hospitable old saltlands’ custom demands that the proprietor share a drink with any stranger who comes into his bar. It is a relic from the days when strangers were rare in the salt-lands, and is very seldom recalled in populous cities like Righa, but Mhici understood. He said nothing, but he took the black Venusian bottle of
segir
by the neck and motioned Smith toward a corner table that stood empty.

When they were settled there and Mhici had poured himself a drink, Smith took one gulp of the red whisky and hummed the opening bars of “Starless Night,” watching the old drylander’s pointed, leathery features. One of Mhici’s eyebrows went up, which was the equivalent of a start of surprise in another man.

“Starless Nights,” he observed, “are full of danger, Smith.”

“And of pleasure sometimes, eh?”

“Ur-r! Not this one.”

“Oh?”

“No. And where I do not understand, I keep away.”

“You’re puzzled too, eh?”

“Deeply. What happened?”

Smith told him briefly. He knew that it is proverbial never to trust a drylander, but he felt that old Mhici was the exception. And by the old man’s willingness to come to the point with a minimum of fencing and circumlocution he knew that he must be very perturbed by Judai’s presence in Righa. Old Mhici missed little, and if he was puzzled by her presence Smith felt that his own queer reactions to the Venusian beauty had not been unjustified.

“I know the box she means,” Mhici told him when he had finished. “There’s the man, over there by the wall. See?”

Under his brows Smith studied a lean, tall canal-dweller with a deeply scarred face and an air of restless uneasiness. He was drinking some poisonously green concoction and smoking
nuari
so heavily that the clouds of it veiled his face. Smith grunted contemptuously.

“If the box is valuable he’s not putting himself into any shape to guard it,” he said. “He’ll be dead asleep in half an hour if he keeps that up.”

“Look again,” murmured Mhici. And Smith, wondering a little at the dryness of the old man’s voice, turned his head and studied the canal-dweller more carefully.

This time he saw what had escaped him before. The man was frightened, so frightened that the
nuari
pouring in and out of his lungs was having little effect. His restless eyes were hot with anxiety, and he had maneuvered his back to the wall so that he could command the whole room as he drank. That in itself, here in Mhici’s place, was flagrant. Mhici’s iron fist and ready gun had established order in The Spaceman’s Rest long ago, and no man in years had dared break it. Mhici commanded not only physical but also moral respect, for his influence with the powers of Righa was exerted not only to furnish immunity to his guests but also to punish peace-breakers. The Spaceman’s Rest was sanctuary. No, for a man to sit with his back to the wall here bespoke terror of something more deadly than guns.

“They’re following him, you know,” Mhici murmured over the rim of his glass. “He stole that box somewhere along the canals, and now he’s afraid of his shadow. I don’t know what’s in the box, but it’s damn valuable to someone and they’re out to get it at any cost. Do you still want to relieve him of it?”

Smith squinted at the drylander through narrowed eyes. How old Mhici learned the secrets he knew, no one could guess, but he had never been caught in error. And Smith had little desire to call down upon himself the enmity of whatever perils it was which kindled the fear of death in the canal-dweller’s eyes. Yet curiosity rode him still. The puzzle of Judai was a tantalizing mystery which he felt he must solve.

“Yes,” he said slowly. “I’ve got to know.”

“I’ll get you the box,” said Mhici suddenly. “I know where he hides it, and there’s a way between here and the house next door that will let me at it in five minutes. Wait here.”

“No,” said Smith quickly. “That’s not fair to you. I’ll get it.”

Mhici’s wide mouth curved.

“I’m in little danger,” he said. “Here in Righa no one would dare—and besides, that way is secret. Wait.”

Smith shrugged. After all, Mhici knew how to take care of himself. He sat there gulping down segir as he waited, and watching the canal-dweller across the room. Terror played in changing patterns across the scarred face.

When Mhici reappeared he carried a small wooden crate labeled conspicuously in Venusian characters. Smith translated,

“Six Pints Segir, Vanda Distilleries, Ednes, Venus.”

“It’s in this,” murmured Mhici, setting down the box. “You’d better stay here tonight. You know, the back room that opens on the alley.”

“Thanks,” said Smith in some embarrassment. He was wondering why the old drylander had taken such pains in his behalf. He had expected no more than a few words of warning. “I’ll split the money, you know.”

Mhici shook his head.

“I don’t think you’ll get it,” he said candidly. “And I don’t think she really wants the box. Not half so much as she wants you, anyhow. There were any number of men who could have got the box for her. And you remember how she said she’d been looking a long time for someone like yourself. No, it’s the man she wants, I think. And I can’t figure out why.”

Smith wrinkled his brows and traced a design on the tabletop in spilt
segir.

“I’ve got to know,” he said stubbornly.

“I’ve passed her in the street. I’ve felt that same revulsion, and I don’t know why. I don’t like this, Smith. But if you feel you have to go through with it, that’s your affair. I’ll help if I can. Let’s drop it, eh? What are you doing tonight? I hear there’s a new dancer at the Lakktal now.”

Much later, in the shifting light of Mars’ hurrying moons, Smith stumbled up the little alley behind The Spaceman’s Rest and entered the door in the rear of the bar. His head was a bit light with much segir, and the music and the laughter and the sound of dancing feet in the Lakktal’s halls made an echoing beat through his head. He undressed clumsily in the dark and stretched himself with a heavy sigh on the leather couch which is the Martian bed.

Just before sleep overtook him he found himself remembering Judai’s queer little quirking smile when she said, “I left New York because something called—stronger than love …” And he thought drowsily, “What is stronger than love? …” The answer came to him just as he sank into oblivion. “Death.”

Smith slept late the next day. The tri-time steel watch on his wrist pointed to Martian noon when old Mhici himself pushed open the door and carried in a tray of breakfast.

“There’s been excitement this morning,” he observed as he set down his burden.

Smith sat up and stretched luxuriously.

“What?”

“The canal man shot himself.”

Smith’s pale eyes sought out the case labeled “Six Pints Segir” where it stood in the corner of the room. His brows went up in surprise.

“Is it so valuable as that?” he murmured. “Let’s look at it.”

Mhici shot the bolts on the two doors as Smith rose from the leather couch and dragged the box into the center of the floor. He pried up the thin board that Mhici had nailed down the night before over the twice-stolen box, and pulled out an object wrapped in brown canvas. With the old drylander bending over his shoulder he unwound the wrappings. For a full minute thereafter he squatted on his heels staring in perplexity at the thing in his hands. It was not large, this little ivory box, perhaps ten inches by four, and four deep. Its intricate drylander carving struck him as remotely familiar, but he had been staring at it for several seconds before it dawned upon him where he had seen those odd spirals and queer twisted characters before. Then he remembered. No wonder they looked familiar, for they had stared down upon him bafflingly from the walls of countless Martian dwellings. He lifted his eyes and saw a band of them circling the walls above him now. But they were large, and these on the box intricately tiny, so that at first glance they looked like the merest waving lines incised delicately all over the box’s surface.

Not until then, following those crawling lines, did he see that the box had no opening. To all appearances it was not a box at all, but a block of carved ivory. He shook it, and something within shifted slightly, as if it were packed in loose wrappings. But there was no opening anywhere. He turned it over and over, peering and prying, but to no avail. Finally he shrugged and wrapped the canvas back about the enigma.

“What do you make of it?” he asked.

Mhici shook his head.

“Great Shar alone can tell,” he murmured half in derision, for Shar is the Venusian god, a friendly deity whose name rises constantly to the lips of the Hot Planet’s dwellers. The god whom Mars worships, openly or in secret, is never named aloud.

They discussed the puzzle of it off and on the rest of the afternoon. Smith spent the hours restlessly, for he dared not smoke nuari nor drink much, with the interview so close ahead. When the shadows were lengthening along the Lakklan he got into his deerhide coat again and tucked the ivory box into an inner pocket. It was bulky, but not betrayingly so. And he made sure his flame-gun was charged and ready.

In the late afternoon sun that sparkled blindingly upon the snow crystals blowing along the wind, he went down the Lakklan again with his right hand in his pocket and his eyes raking the street warily under the shadow of his cap. Evidently the pursuers of that box had not traced it, for he was not followed.