He’dfry all right.
Unless by some miracle the Gamma police believed Allura’s story.
He went to find her. How long he had before Rawson wanted his answer he wasn’t sure. The police were bound to pick up the couple from Ahansic as soon as they could, and that perhaps explained why they hadn’t gone in to dinner with Caradine. He had made a good meal. Danger never had bothered his appetite; which was useful. In his previous career had it done so he’d have starved.
His previous career! Hell, that was a laugh. Here he’d thought himself finished with all this sort of nonsense and able to setde down to being an urbane businessman, and he was caught up in trouble to his neck again. Only this time he was on the receiving end. The sensation was most unpleasant.
Allura Koanga wasn’t in the hotel and he didn’t remember seeing her in the dining room. Hsien, her uncle, wasn’t about, either. Caradine strolled out onto the terrace, looking in on the patio on his way. Empty. The patio reminded him vividly of Harriet Lafonde and of the visa that might or might not be awaiting him there.
He rather badly wanted to talk to her before Rawson returned for his answer. Allura might just be able to tip the scales. All these people were so much more than they seemed. Posing as businessmen with nieces and casual acquaintances tagging along, they might fool all but the important five percent of officialdom. At first, they’d certainly fooled him.
It seemed pretty clear that Rawson had fixed the murder. Then with Caradine out of the way on an alibi the key to which was firmly held in Rawson’s hands, he had him just where he wanted him. With his nose in the dirt. Caradine forced his anger down. Temper wouldn’t be the slightest use now.
Maybe Rawson could swing the alibi if he wanted. That he was an Outworlder from Ahansic would normally tell against him and his word; but maybe, just maybe, there were other factors at work. Caradine paced up and down the terrace, smoking a red stogie and trying to think a way through the mess.
If Rawson had stagemanaged the murder, then he had others working for him on Gamma-Horakah. Caradine recalled the man with the dark secretive face and the cleft chin. He’d automatically assumed the man to be a secret policeman working for Gamma-Horakah. Now he wasn’t so sure. It was possible for Rawson to have bribed a Horakah official. That way he’d know about the Beatty one millimeter. The pieces of the puzzle kept jumping about in Caradine’s brain. But the pieces by themselves had only limited importance; the main picture held the threat.
The sky began to darken and a news bulletin broadcast a warning of the weather bureau’s next ten-minute shower for cleansing purposes.
Control of the weather was kid’s stuff compared with trying to control the emotions in men and women.
For a few extra planets, a little more prestige, men would fight and kill and destroy. It didn’t really make sense. It added up to a black question mark against the name of Homo sapiens in the galaxy. Was Man fitted to five in an interstellar civilization? There were plenty of other races of non-humans who lived on their own planets, totally unfit for comfortable human habitation, who managed to five amicably. Fighting, it seemed, having been bred into humanity, took a darn sight longer to be bred out.
Colored lights were going on all along the terrace and were twinkling merrily over the city. The rain had begun to fall, straight glinting lances in the lamplight. Allura and her uncle returned. They stepped from a black car which drove off fast.
Allura’s face was drawn and strained as she came face to face with Caradine.
“So giving you a lift brings all this,” she said bitterly. “Police?”
Hsien Koanga said, “Of course. They took Allura in for questioning. I am surprised to see you still at large, Mr. Carter.”
“They’ve seen me. I’m under surveillance. They know where to pick me up.”
He waited for Allura to tell him. The police had got to her first. Well, that was to be expected.
“They say,” she said, visibly bringing herself under control, “that you shot a boy in an alley this afternoon.”
He inclined his head gravely.
“Well, we know you didn’t. But they don’t believe me.” She was holding the anger, the humiliating, almost hysterical anger, in very well. “That, of course, is because we wouldn’t he to save one of our own people.”
“And there,” Hsien Koanga said with great bitterness, “lies the irony.”
“Irony?”
“Why, yes, Mr. Carter. Or whatever your name is. I received intelligence from Shanstar today. You have bought a ranch on Five. You are well-known there, well-liked, too, I’m told.”
Caradine kept that grave, polite smile on his face. But he was feeling that any more blows under the belt would put him down forever.
“The irony is, Mr. What’s-your-name, that you’re not one of us. You don’t belong to Shanstar at all.”
VIII
Standing there with the rain falling in pencil-thin streaks of color against the lights, Caradine took his chance.
“So I’m not one of you. So I wasn’t born on Shanstar. But I come from Shanstar. I am a member of your planetary group. I am one of you!”
Slowly, Hsien Koanga shook his head. He stood back and stared up at Caradine and all the perkiness had gone from him.
“We asked you to do a job for Shanstar. Had you been one of us you would have complied. I should have wondered, then.”
“So what are you going to do?”
“Do?” Allura swung a slender hand pettishly in the lamplight. “What is there to do? I’ll say my piece, I won’t be believed, and if you are condemned then I’ll suffer for perjury. A nice position you’ve worked me into, Mr. What’s-your-name!”
“I’m sorry, Allura. But I didn’t work you into it. I was rigged into this mess, too, remember. I was framed like this because I’m from Shanstar.”
“No.” Koanga spoke sharply. “That won’t wash. Because you have a visa to visit Alpha. That’s why.”
Caradine couldn’t argue. “Rawson framed me. He’s putting pressure on me to get him and the girl onto Alpha on the strength of my visa. Just how he expects me to do that, I don’t know. But if he can get me off the hook of this false charge, then I figure I’ll go along with him. I value my skin.”
“He could be taken care of.”
“That would be rather stupid. He and Sharon are the only two people who can help. I’d appreciate it if you left them alone.” Caradine mustered a smile. “Anyway, Allura, if I agree to their proposal and they say they were out in the car today, that let’s you out. They can’t charge you with perjury.”
“That’s true,” said Allura. She didn’t sound hopeful.
Koanga rocked back on his heels and cocked his head up, as though summing up Caradine for the first time. He moistened his lips. Then he said distinctly, “Tell me. Where are you from?”
Caradine had already made up his mind that when this inevitable question came he would tell the truth. But now it was here, he couldn’t face the problem; it took more courage than he had at his disposal at that disillusioned moment. “What is truth?” he said. “I don’t know. Truth is, I suppose, what a man wants to hear. I am from Shanstar. That is my home. What I was before, where I was born, they don’t matter any more.”
“You are wrong. They do matter.”
“But only to intolerant people. Men and women who cannot accept the new, who shut their minds to anything outside their normal comfortable horizons. Your ancestry, Hsien Koanga, is told to me in your name. But you don’t know that. You don’t understand race relations at all. You only know a man is a man. You cannot conceive of there being men of different color, can you?”