punched scanning buttons on the glassy surface. Shadows
came and went, and I saw myself half-reflected, a tipsy shadow in a
flurry of racing colors. The pattern finally stabilized and the clerk read
off names.
"Brill, Cameron ... ah, yes. Cargill, Race Andrew, Department 38,
transfer transportation. Is that you?"
I admitted it and he started punching more buttons when the sound of
the name made connection in whatever desk-clerks use for a brain. He
stopped with his hand halfway to the button.
"Are you Race Cargill of the Secret Service, sir? The Race Cargill?"
"It's right there," I said, gesturing wearily at the projected pattern under
the glassy surface.
"Why, I thought--I mean, everybody took it for granted--that is, I
heard--"
"You thought Cargill had been killed a long time ago because his name
never turned up in news dispatches any more?" I grinned sourly, seeing
my image dissolve in blurring shadows, and feeling the long-healed
scar on my mouth draw up to make the grin hideous. "I'm Cargill, all
right. I've been up on Floor 38 for six years, holding down a desk any
clerk could handle. You for instance."
He gaped. He was a rabbit of a man who had never stepped out of the
safe familiar boundaries of the Terran Trade City. "You mean you're
the man who went to Charin in disguise, and routed out The Lisse? The
man who scouted the Black Ridge and Shainsa? And you've been
working at a desk upstairs all these years? It's--hard to believe, sir."
My mouth twitched. It had been hard for me to believe while I was
doing it. "The pass?"
"Right away, sir." He punched buttons and a printed chip of plastic
extruded from a slot on the desk top. "Your fingerprint, please?" He
pressed my finger into the still-soft surface of the plastic, indelibly
recording the print; waited a moment for it to harden, then laid the chip
in the slot of a pneumatic tube. I heard it whoosh away.
"They'll check your fingerprint against that when you board the ship.
Skylift isn't till dawn, but you can go aboard as soon as the process
crew finishes with her." He glanced at the monitor screen, where the
swarming crew were still doing inexplicable things to the immobile
spacecraft. "It will be another hour or two. Where are you going, Mr.
Cargill?"
"Some planet in the Hyades Cluster. Vainwal, I think, something like
that."
"What's it like there?"
"How should I know?" I'd never been there either. I only knew that
Vainwal had a red sun, and that the Terran Legate could use a trained
Intelligence officer. And not pin him down to a desk.
There was respect, and even envy in the little man's voice. "Could
I--buy you a drink before you go aboard, Mr. Cargill?"
"Thanks, but I have a few loose ends to tie up." I didn't, but I was
damned if I'd spend my last hour on Wolf under the eyes of a
deskbound rabbit who preferred his adventure safely secondhand.
But after I'd left the office and the building, I almost wished I'd taken
him up on it. It would be at least an hour before I could board the
starship, with nothing to do but hash over old memories, better
forgotten.
The sun was lower now. Phi Coronis is a dim star, a dying star, and
once past the crimson zenith of noon, its light slants into a long
pale-reddish twilight. Four of Wolf's five moons were clustered in a
pale bouquet overhead, mingling thin violet moonlight into the crimson
dusk.
The shadows were blue and purple in the empty square as I walked
across the stones and stood looking down one of the side streets.
A few steps, and I was in an untidy slum which might have been on
another world from the neat bright Trade City which lay west of the
spaceport. The Kharsa was alive and reeking with the sounds and
smells of human and half-human life. A naked child, diminutive and
golden-furred, darted between two of the chinked pebble-houses, and
disappeared, spilling fragile laughter like breaking glass.
A little beast, half snake and half cat, crawled across a roof, spread
leathery wings, and flapped to the ground. The sour pungent reek of
incense from the open street-shrine made my nostrils twitch, and a
hulked form inside, not human, cast me a surly green glare as I passed.
I turned, retracing my steps. There was no danger, of course, so close to
the Trade City. Even on such planets as Wolf, Terra's laws are
respected within earshot of their gates. But there had been rioting here
and in Charin during the last month. After the display of mob violence
this afternoon, a lone Terran, unarmed, might turn up
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