The difficulty for a marauder was in knowing what cargoes would be going where at what time. Rodrone had hit on the idea of getting his information at source, from the Houses’ own computer records. His early investigations had soon revealed, however, that the Houses were already alert to this possibility; they kept their information in out-of-the-way places whose locations were known to only a few. Crule, Rodrone’s master con-man, had spent six months as a spy in the Jal-Dee household to find out where this one was.
But now for the pleasurable experience he had promised himself. It was a very cerebral pleasure. Normally the book that lay on his table would have been all but unintelligible to him. His way of thinking was too ephemeral, his interests too widely scattered for concentrated study. That was why he had recourse to the drug DPKL-59. It brought on enhanced consciousness, coupled with such a fantastic heightening of comprehension that meaning glowed at him from equations that otherwise would have left him baffled. So speeded up was his thought that he could race through a book of this kind at twenty times his natural pace.
Afterwards he often understood little of what he had read. But meantime he had the experience of plumbing mysteries and entering extraordinary realms of the intellect, and the flavor of that experience stayed with him.
“Genius in a bottle,” he murmured to himself, taking a little phial of the drug from a locked cabinet. As he poured it carefully into a pressure injector, his mind went back momentarily to the disappointed bondsmen. They were unlucky, he reflected, to have got caught up in his affairs. Rodrone, for all his introspection, had never been sure whether to sum himself up as an unusually strong man or an unusually weak one, for though he was given some sort of allegiance by enough men to man a whole squadron of ill-assorted ships, that was no criterion; men of their sort tended to congregate around the most unlikely characters. He often had the feeling that there was no aim to his leadership, that in the end his willfulness would send the men who trusted him to irrevocable disaster.
But he was not one to feel regret or guilt about his shortcomings. Tomorrow they would set out for Sultery and action. For now, there was the heady delight of thoughts he had never before experienced. With a slight hiss the injector sprayed the drug in a high-pressure mist that penetrated the skin of his wrist and mingled with his bloodstream. His senses reeled; he went hurtling deep down into a fever of mystic abstraction where bodiless intelligence was lord of all.
II
They landed some miles out in the desert. It was dry, dusty and yellow; uneven plains were strewn with what looked like dirty sulphur. The Stond and the Revealer—the elephantine, clapped-out freighter had been abandoned after the fifth breakdown—settled down amid clouds of tawny dust and stood there like twin castles standing guard over a desolated chessboard.
They were close to sunset. The stars, visible even at noon, were brightening into the familiar blazing aspect of the Hub by night. In the distance, on the edge of the wilderness, could just be seen the flat-roofed buildings of Maintown.
Kulthol clapped his hands together with relish. “It looks like a real border town. Well, I could do with a night out!”
“Not a bad procedure,” Rodrone mused. “No point in trying to be inconspicuous. We’ll all go in and sample the local color. While that’s going on, Clave and myself will get the print-out.”
He phased up the external view screen to maximum magnification. Lights were flicking on in the town as the sun faded. The buildings were of colored plastic, the universal building material that in the last few hundred years had crawled all over the galaxy like a gaudy cancer, creating camp towns, transit towns, and endless stretches of quickly erected temporary shelters that lasted forever.
At nightfall Rodrone took eighteen men and five girls and made off over the desert in runabouts. None of the ex-bondsmen were among them—they had elected to drop out during a stopover in order to seek quieter employment—but he would never have included them in a job like this anyway.
They parked in the main street. Superficially the town was much like a thousand others, although very few people seemed to be about. A dusk wind blew up and spilled desultory veils of dust into the streets, moaning between the buildings. Rodrone’s gaze traveled the frontages on either side of the street, locating the Desert Trading Company, an undistinguished building sandwiched between a bar and a small processing plant.
Despite its tawdry air, there was an undercurrent to the town, Rodrone decided. A gauntness, a skeleton-in-the-cupboard feeling. He fingered his beard thoughtfully. Probably they didn’t get many visitors here, he mused.
Further down the street was a larger bar, fronted with a lit-up advertising display. Kulthol pointed. “Let’s tank up.” Pushing through swing doors, they crowded into a big, dusky room. A group of locals seated at a table inspected them curiously, warily. Noisily Rodrone’s people debouched on to a cluster of tables, calling to the bar at the other end of the room for drinks. But Kulthol headed straight for the bar and Rodrone, Clave and a few others drifted after him.
Kulthol’s practiced eye ranged over the rows of bottles and casks. “What’s that green stuff?”
The barman was chewing a stick of something that gave off a faint flavor of spice. “The local brew. ‘Roadrunner’.”
“I’ll try some of that.”
The man poured out several glasses. Kulthol picked up one and knocked it straight back. Rodrone took one too, drank it more cautiously. At the first sip a thousand red-hot needles seemed to be gouging out the inside of his mouth, but after that he became numb and it was fairly pleasant.
“What the hell do you make this poison from?” Kulthol demanded, taking another.
“It’s brewed from a desert plant. It pulls its roots up and migrates with the seasons.”
“You mean to say you have seasons out here?”
“The plants think so, but I don’t.”
They laughed briefly. “We saw your ships coming down,” the barman said. “You here on business?”
“Just dropped in for a drink,” Clave said. The barman looked uneasy but moved off to serve the others.
Probably scared we’re going to loot the town, Rodrone thought. He glanced around at the locals in the bar, then became aware of moaning harmonies emanating from some-where above them. Clave’s gaze went to the ceiling as if in fascination.
“Listen to that!” he murmured.
The barman returned in time to hear his evident praise. “That’s Ruby,” he declared proudly. “Plays just beautifully, doesn’t she?” He jerked his thumb. “We’ve got another place upstairs. You can go and listen if you want. It will be pretty crowded soon, though.”
“I think I will.” Clave made for a stairway. Rodrone moved to restrain him, then thought better of it.
“What’s wrong?” Kulthol whispered a few moments later. He was quick to notice any change on Rodrone’s face.
Rodrone stroked his beard uncertainly. “Let’s go upstairs,” he said finally.
The upper room was more luxuriously furnished than the one down below. The lights were warm, soft and skillfully arranged. The drinks were dispensed from a decorated counter.
“Just listen to it. That’s real music.”
The remark was made reverently by a man sitting at a corner table. A girl sat with him, her face as rapt as his own.
From the opposite end of the room came an apallingly ugly noise compounded of gut-jarring discords and childish travesties of melody. A grossly fat woman sat at an electronic instrument, the flesh of her upper arms rippling as she attacked the keyboard. She was dressed in a frilly, flowered frock grotesquely inappropriate to her bulging form.