Caradine snapped to alertness. A car passed overhead in the darkness with a low grumble of power. It turned, angled down. A black shape momentarily flitted before the stars.
The reputed crack efficiency of Alpha-Horakah had broken down in the matter of the fire brigade; Caradine had fully expected to have been challenged before this. He wondered if they’d sent a boy to do a man’s job.
The car landed, badike, on the road ahead. Caradine kept his headlights on with the dome light off, pushed himself away from the wheel across the seat, and then since the car ahead lay fairly across the road, cut the engine and let the car roll. His nose bumped the fascia and his eyes just peered over it, through the dusty windscreen. The rain had died hours back, and the road had been lousy.
A hint of colossal buildings lay ahead. Perhaps they hadn’t picked him up at all as a wanted man but were merely the final checkpoint to the last entry onto the true Alpha-Horakah. The countryside he had been traversing could well be a wide and camouflaging belt around the tourist center and spaceport.
The windscreen above his head shattered, melted, flowed down in molten puddles of white-hot glassite. The back of the car disappeared. Scorching heat battered at his head. His fumbling hand managed to reach the door. The next shot might rake down, onto the front seats, crisp him as he sprawled.
They’d said nothing. They hadn’t challenged. They’d just stopped in front of him and burned right through where a driver would be sitting.
Caradine felt the anger burn in sympathy along his veins.
There was no second shot.
The door was jammed, the intense heat must have convected along the frame and warped it. He was trapped inside. Heat was dying around him, now, and his eyes were readjusting after the intolerable brilliance of the flash.
Inexplicably, in the way of cars, his headlights were still burning. He cocked a cautious eye over the fascia and peered along the path of illumination. Pinned in that light the side of the air car glowed. The faces of two men looked out, one slightly echeloned behind the other as he lifted and turned to look over his comrade’s shoulder.
The Beatty took them, one after the other, neatly, delicately, completely lacking the monstrous wash of fire that had destroyed his car.
Without emotion, Caradine put his foot against the door, bashed it open, jumped out and walked across to the air car.
Their identifications told him that they were special field operatives, counter-espionage. There was no secrecy; counterespionage, that’s what their smart black-covered ident wallets proclaimed. Well, then. Caradine went about the business methodically and quickly, conscious of the probable alarm the fire had caused and aware of the pressing shadows of those monstrous buildings.
By the time he had finished, the buildings had resolved in dawn light into tall towers, multi-windowed, patch-painted in miserly maintenance so that they looked scabrous. He was feeling very tired, with a soreness about his eyes.
The larger of the two dead men’s clothing fitted well. The one millimeter aperture of the Beatty and its ravening, destructive cauterizing power made no mess. The two bodies, together with one uniform, were placed in Baksi’s ground car. Caradine sprayed the counter-espionage man’s handgun over the car and the splurge of fire sloughed everything into an orange holocaust and final, collapsing gray embers.
Then he sent the air car up and away in a long slant, not caring what blip he was sending across watching radar screens.
The drunk was not a providential stroke of good fortune.
What was fortunate and beyond Caradine’s calculations was the drunk’s insistence on committing suicide. It was an odd combination and by the time Caradine reached the body the man was not only dead, he was past recognition.
Philosophically, Caradine removed all the items he required and pushed the twisted dead body further into the antigrav stilt. The awful power of a planetary mass crushed down on the body and removed it forever from the ken of humanity. Caradine headed for the first cheap lodging house patronized by the workers along the badly lit alleyway.
He’d dumped the official air car long since. With controls set on auto and engine let out at full speed, it rose into the sky heading out and up. It was a powerful model. It would brush the fringes of space before it failed and plunged back. Somewhere serious scientific men might record a new meteor.
Then he’d known well enough what sort of locality to head for. In the tangle of streets huddled outside the gates of the factory site—a hiving twenty-square-mile complex of machine shops, gantries, testing rigs and admin blocks—he’d found the local equivalents of the beer hall, the night club, the pub, the doss house. Horakah demanded work and more work from its all but slave work people; it could not, through sheer matter-of-fact psychological considerations, refuse to provide amusement. That amusement was of the lowest and rawest kind. Caradine didn’t care. He’d waited for the drunk he knew to be inevitable, dodging with deceptive casualness the uniformed police who stalked always in pairs, and had followed him. He had intended only to steal the man’s papers.
But the man had stubbornly in his drunken state wanted to argue with an antigrav stilt supporting a fifty-story air platform. The platform floated half a mile high and no doubt acted as a focal point for freights. The drunk had ignored the warning barriers, had clambered over and had of course had his head crushed by the antigrav stilt. The stilt supported the platform and pressed against the ground—in a very real sense it contained the weight of the planet balanced on its foot.
And now, armed with the name of Constantin Chad, freighter licensed to operate between factories, Caradine was heading dog-tired for the nearest flophouse.
His tired mind found an explicable tie-up between the occupation of the drunk on this machine world and his death. A man who pushed freight trains through the sky at better than Mach Three might very well wish to argue with an antigrav stilt supporting a freight platform. The deeper complexities of the human mind were just as contrary here on this planet, in a section of the galaxy teeming with suns and planets, as they were back beyond the Blight, where Earth itself was the focal point of a million solar systems.
The two secret service men he had shot had had plenty of Horakah money on them. The surly human attendant— the flophouse facilities did not extend to robots—took the money and showed him into a single. The room was clean and bare, but it had that indefinable sleazy air that made Caradine’s skin crawl. He was too tired to worry over trifles. He checked the spy eye and bug detector, found it clear, and lay on the bed.
He trusted his own reflexes to wake him up swiftly and in deadly silence if anyone attempted to rob him. He went to sleep.
He did not sleep the clock around, but lay in bed, meditating, until the long Horakah night waned and he could decently go out to find breakfast. Caradine was a man who was used to dealing with the heart of a problem. Koanga had sent him here to spy, to find out the organization of the Horakah space fleets. The task might seem insuperable to a man without interstellar administration experience and in all truth it posed a nice problem to Caradine, who probably better than anyone else in this end of the galaxy, knew about interstellar admin and organization. After all, he’d handled or cajoled one million independently-minded solar systems; Horakah queened it over a bare thousand.
He washed up and made himself presentable and made for the door. The attendant stopped him.