Strickenly, Thokan looked into the visitor’s bleak eyes: «But you said you were from the Patrol!»
«I am.»
«The Patrol—» Thokan’s voice rose. «But Cosmos! The Patrol is the law-enforcement agency of the League!»
«That’s right. And, friend, you don’t know what a really dirty campaign is like till you’ve seen the Patrol in action. However, we don’t want to ruin your reputation and your private business and the honesty of a lot of officials connected with elections. We would much prefer simply to pay you to stop campaigning so effectively.»
«But—Oh, no—But why?»
«You are an honest being, too honest and too set in your views—including a belief in the League constitution’s clause that the Patrol should stay out of local politics—for us. Ruhoc is a scoundrel, yes, but he is open to suggestions if they are, shall I say, subsidized. Also, under him the present corruption and hopeless inefficiency of the Sirian military forces will continue.»
«I know—it’s one of the major points in my campaign—Cosmos, you race-traitor, do you want the Centaurians simply to come in and take us over?» Thokan snarled into the Patrolman’s impassive face. «Have they bribed the Patrol? Do they really run the League? You incredible villain, I—»
«You have your choice.» The voice was pitiless. «Think it over. My orders are simply to spend what is necessary to win Ruhoc the election. How I spend it is a matter of indifference to me.»
As the policeman approached him, Alak drew a deep breath and let one hand, hanging by his side, squeeze the bulb in that tunic pocket. The situation was suddenly desperate, and his act was of ultimate emergency.
The sphere of brain-stunning supersonic vibrations emitted by the bulb was so heterodyned that most of Alak’s body, including his head, was not affected. But otherwise it had a range of some meters, and the detective dropped as if poleaxed. They’d be out for some minutes, but there was no time to lose, not an instant of the fleeing seconds. Alak grabbed his cloak, reversing it to show a dark blue color quite unlike the gray he had been seen wearing. He put its cowl over his red hair, shading his thin sharp features, and went out the door. The change should help some when his description was broadcast. It had better help, he thought grimly. He was the only Patrolman on a planet that had just proclaimed its intentions of killing Patrolmen on sight.
Hurry, hurry!
He went down the nearest gravity shaft and out the lobby into the street. Voal’s speech had just ended, and the crowds were howling themselves hoarse. Alak mingled with them. Luan having been colonized largely by Baltravians, who in turn were descendants of Terrestrials, he was physically inconspicuous, but his Solarian accent was not healthy at the moment. Sol was notoriously the instigator and leader of the Galactic League.
The street telescreens were showing a parade of the Palanthian Guard, rank upon brilliantly uniformed rank of the system’s crack troops, and the brassy rhythm of their bands pulsed in the veins and shrieked in the head. Beat, beat, beat, yelling bugles and rolling drums and the heart-stopping slam of a thousand boots landing simultaneously on the pavement. Swing and crash and tramp, aircraft snarling overhead with their sides afire in the sun, banners flying and trumpets roaring and the long wild charge of heroes to vengeance and glory. All Luan went crazy and shouted for blood.
Alak reflected tautly that the danger to Marhal was no less threatening other systems. The Luanian battle fleet could get to Sol, say, in three weeks, and if Voal suspected just how strong the Patrol really was—or wasn’t—
Alak had seen the dead planets swinging on their lonely way. Their seas mourned on ashen beaches, and the ash blew inland on whining winds, in over the dusty plains. Their suns were a dim angry copper-red, smoldering in skies of scudding dust and ash. Only the wind and the dust stirred, only the empty heavens and the barren seas had voice. At night there might still be an evil blue glow of radioactivity, roiling in the ash storms or glimmering out of the fused craters. Here and there the wind might briefly uncover crumbling skeletons of once sentient creatures, with only dust now stirring in their hollow skulls, with the storms piping through their ribs. A few snags of broken buildings still stood, and now and then there were acid rains sluicing out of the birdless skies. But no life stirred anywhere. War had passed by, and returned to the remotely shining stars.
He made his way through the jammed avenue into a quieter side street. Any moment, now, he could expect the hunt to start. He went with careful casualness over to a parked private car, a fast little ground-air job. He had a Patrol key, which would open any ordinary magnetolock, and with it he let himself into the vehicle and got started. Car stealing was a minor offense compared to what he was wanted for.
As he drove, he scowled in thought. That Voal’s police had known him for what he was indicated that the leader’s interests and spy system reached well beyond the local stars. He must have agents on Maxlan IV, which lay seventy lightyears from Luan’s sun. If he had known the name of the Patrol’s agent, it would indicate that he knew a lot more about the Patrol itself, and this supposition was supported by Voal’s mention of fully verified cases of League perfidy. Though it was no secret that the Patrol used corrupt methods, the details were carefully suppressed wherever possible.
What was more to the immediate point, the police must have followed all Alak’s movements. So now his underworld contacts must be arrested, leaving Alak stranded and alone on Luan. And a League agent who had associated himself with some of the worst crooks on the planet could expect no particular mercy.
Headquarters underestimated the danger, thought Alak. They took this to be just another obscure squabble between frontier systems, and now Luan turns out to be a highly organized, magnificently armed power spoiling for a fight. I suppose slip-ups are bound to occur in trying to co-ordinate a million stars and this is one of the mistakes—and I’m in the middle of it.
He drove aimlessly, trying to collect his thoughts. Six weeks of careful work in the Luanian underworld were shot. His bribes and promises had been getting a program of sabotage under way which should have thrown plenty of sand in the gears of the war machine. He was on the point of contacting ambitious officers who were ready to overthrow the elected government and establish their own dictatorship—one amenable to the Patrol as long as it had free access to the public treasury. Only—Cosmos, he’d been finding it too easy! The police had been stringing him along, giving him enough rope to hang himself several times over and now—
Wing Alak licked his lips. A lot of Patrolmen got killed on the job, and it looked as if he would be another name on the list, and he personally much preferred being a live coward to a dead hero. He did not have a single lethal weapon, and he was alone on a planet out to get him. It didn’t look good.
The hall was old, a long dim structure of gray stone, where only the leaping ruddy flames broke the chill dusk and where the hollow echoes were like voices of the dead centuries which had stirred bloodily here. Many a council had been held in the great chamber, the results being announced with screaming war-horns and the clash of arms and armor, but perhaps none so dark as the secret meeting tonight.