He wondered how many of these people of this work-ridden planet, sitting around him in this restaurant now, would find their scruples vanish, and their desires to no longer be the underdogs strong enough to make them actually think. They weren’t quite ready yet. They hadn’t been brought all the way to the boil. Give them time, a few more whirls of their planet around their sun.
But Caradine didn’t have that time.
Three of his friends—he counted them all his friends on the relationship twining between them—were being held here in Alpha-Horakah’s central city of Horak. Cunning ploys, machinations, ferreting out of interstellar secrets—all those would have to wait. His direction of action had been subdy changed, and he didn’t have much time.
He rose, paid the bill and left. As he walked leisurely away from the restaurant four black squad cars dropped down and brown-clad police belted in through the front doors. They smashed a lot of glass going in. Caradine chuckled. All that drama—and the bird had flown.
They were on to him.
All right. That meant that now he was technically on the run. His sphere of action had been widened.
His alarm detector strapped to his wrist remained dead. He went into another restaurant, this time choosing a high-class establishment with tablecloths over the slick plastic, and headed straight for the men’s room. He made a pretense of washing his hands and drying them under the infrareds.
When the place was empty save for one other—one that Caradine had waited for as being most suitable—he walked across and cut the edge of his palm across the man’s neck. He caught him under the armpits before he fell and dragged him into a cubicle. It was some crush.
The man wasn’t dead, but he’d be unconscious for an hour. Caradine stripped him,/slowing down when others used the washroom. The clothes fitted well. That’s why Caradine had waited for the right victim. There was plenty of money, Galaxos as well as local currency. There was a tiny dartgun, loaded with poisonous darts that could puff silently for fifty feet. Nasty litde thing. But it, too, was a pointer.
The ident papers showed that Caradine’s new name was Jefferson Raoul Logan. He was a laboratory attendant, first-class. Caradine supposed that that meant he wiped up the mess when an experiment fouled up. He fastened the last magneclamp on his cherry-colored shirt, after having weakened it, propped Logan comfortably, bound and gagged with surplus items of clothing, and left. He dogged the door and shot the engaged-tab up. He went out whistling.
Logan’s air car was parked in the lot and the robot brought it out at once as soon as Caradine presented the parking stub. He got in and sent the car up steeply, heading into the fast traffic lanes, heading straight into Horak.
He was not challenged. He had about forty minutes left, and as much time after that as it took Logan to attract attention.
He was not overly confident about the Horak controls. They’d been watchful. Somehow they knew he was near, and they’d be trigger-happy.
The towers ahead grew, rising into the sky until they overtopped the traffic lane he was following. They worried him a little. The moguls might live there, although rumor had it that they lived stricdy isolated aboard a floating platform half a mile up, supported on an antigrav stilt. And rumor, circulating in this workers’ warren, was relatively reliable on matters like that.
Now that he was embarked on the thick ear stuff he could find out where they lived all right; getting to them might not be so easy.
There was a floating check point up ahead, a round-bellied flier, all portholes and gun barrels and aerials. Air cars were hanging on their antigravs lined up waiting to be checked past. Brown-uniformed police with personal antigrav flier packs flitted from car to car. If he left the traffic lane now he’d be calling attention to himself. Brazen it through.
There were ten minutes of his estimated forty of free time left when the police checked the car. They glanced at him —he felt thankful that a haircut and a new way of combing his hair made a difference—glanced at his credentials, glanced inside the car, and waved him on. He left sedately.
Logan’s home address was a rabbit-warren type of dormitory housing technicians and laboratory workers. It towered ninety stories and was as exciting as a slab of wormy cheese. Caradine put down near the block and sat in the car, waiting.
The ninety-story dormitory crouched in the shadow of those omnipresent towers, scintillating up there in the sunshine.
Caradine waited until a prowling policeman on a one-man antigrav flier pulled in and began the usual rigmarole.
He put his head in the opened driving-side window. His broad face wore a scowl. Caradine brought the gun barrel down onto the man’s forehead. Then he had opened the door against the sag of body, pulled the man in, closed the door and started up. Ten blocks away he pulled into a covered archway leading to a green-painted gate on a loading platform fifty stories above ground. He pulled into the side and the shadow, allowing other traffic to pass to and from the gate.
The policeman groaned and opened a bleary eye.
The question was: “Where is the head office, chum? Where do the moguls hang out?”
After a promise, made with a granite-set face, that he’d •be killed unpleasantly if he didn’t answer, the man told all.
At least, he told all that a man in his position would know.
There was a floating platform, anchored in the sky directly above that cluster of roseate towers. All approaches were guarded so that—and then he went off into obscenity.
Caradine hit him again and turned him off. He put the flier at full lift and went up. His time had run out, now, and he wondered if he could beat the deadline. If he didn’t a bolt of that ferocious energy that had destroyed Baksi’s car would scorch him out of thin air.
Keeping a cool head was becoming harder and harder.
So far he’d been dealing with civilians and the lower orders of the police hierarchy. As he rose into the sky he was rising, too, into a new level of authority and power. He kept the radar turned on a 360° sweep and was rewarded by a blip coming onto the screen from ahead and to his left. He carried on as though unaware. Below, the towers fell, dwindling with distance, until a drifting thread of cloud blotted them out altogether.
The approaching flier turned out to be a private job. Two more went past, some way off. Caradine switched on the small interflier radio.
“Can you help me?” he asked plaintively. “Something’s wrong and I don’t seem to get the robot’s help. I think it’s failed.”
The occupant of the other flier when they matched courses and doors and he looked through the windows, was young, square-faced and wore that stamp of authority that is so much more than a mere physical impression.
“Sure. Just hold things as they are. I’m coming aboard.”
Caradine smiled, and he was still wearing that smile as he brought the gun down. His new name, then, was Pearsall Adlai Korunna Swarthout. A Personal Assistant. That was all. The ident papers told nothing of what or who he was a Personal Assistant to. Caradine put the new clothes on, finding that they fitted tolerably well, turned the man—who was wearing Logan’s clothes and carrying Logan’s ident papers and riding in Logan’s air car—adrift, and put his new vehicle steeply upwards. If the man was shot up before they questioned him, well, this was not a case of war is war, but of preventing a war. Caradine was growing more and more convinced that if he was to succeed he would have to forget the civilized decencies.
They must have a pretty fair description of him circulated by now plus photographs and all the other ident devices. Speed and deception were his two major weapons. They couldn’t stop up every bolthole. The planetary setup was too big and overbalanced. Horakah was finding out that the hard way.