The Door Through Space | Page 6

rights they should have laughed, made some barbed remark about
my command of language and crossed their hands in symbol of a jest
decently reversed on themselves. Then we would have bought each
other a drink, and that would be that.
But it didn't happen that way. Not this time. The tallest of the three
whirled, upsetting his drink in the process. I heard its thin shatter
through the squeal of the alabaster-haired girl, as a chair crashed over.
They faced me three abreast, and one of them fumbled in the clasp of
his shirtcloak.
I edged backward, my own hand racing up for a skean I hadn't carried
in six years, and fronted them squarely, hoping I could face down the
prospect of a roughhouse. They wouldn't kill me, this close to the HQ,
but at least I was in for an unpleasant mauling. I couldn't handle three
men; and if nerves were this taut in the Kharsa, I might get knifed.
Quite by accident, of course.
The chaks moaned and gibbered. The Dry-towners glared at me and I
tensed for the moment when their steady stare would explode into
violence.
Then I became aware that they were gazing, not at me, but at something
or someone behind me. The skeans snicked back into the clasps of their
cloaks.
Then they broke rank, turned and ran. They ran, blundering into stools,

leaving havoc of upset benches and broken crockery in their wake. One
man barged into the counter, swore and ran on, limping. I let my breath
go. Something had put the fear of God into those brutes, and it wasn't
my own ugly mug. I turned and saw the girl.
She was slight, with waving hair like spun black glass, circled with
faint tracery of stars. A black glass belt bound her narrow waist like
clasped hands, and her robe, stark white, bore an ugly embroidery
across the breasts, the flat sprawl of a conventionalized Toad God,
Nebran. Her features were delicate, chiseled, pale; a Dry-town face, all
human, all woman, but set in an alien and unearthly repose. The great
eyes gleamed red. They were fixed, almost unseeing, but the crimson
lips were curved with inhuman malice.
She stood motionless, looking at me as if wondering why I had not run
with the others. In half a second, the smile flickered off and was
replaced by a startled look of--recognition?
Whoever and whatever she was, she had saved me a mauling. I started
to phrase formal thanks, then broke off in astonishment. The cafe had
emptied and we were entirely alone. Even the chaks had leaped through
an open window--I saw the whisk of a disappearing tail.
We stood frozen, looking at one another while the Toad God sprawled
across her breasts rose and fell for half a dozen breaths.
Then I took one step forward, and she took one step backward, at the
same instant. In one swift movement she was outside in the dark street.
It took me only an instant to get into the street after her, but as I
stepped across the door there was a little stirring in the air, like the
rising of heat waves across the salt flats at noon. Then the street-shrine
was empty, and nowhere was there any sign of the girl. She had
vanished. She simply was not there.
I gaped at the empty shrine. She had stepped inside and vanished, like a
wraith of smoke, like--
--Like the little toy-seller they had hunted out of the Kharsa.

There were eyes in the street again and, becoming aware of where I
was, I moved away. The shrines of Nebran are on every corner of Wolf,
but this is one instance when familiarity does not breed contempt. The
street was dark and seemed empty, but it was packed with all the little
noises of living. I was not unobserved. And meddling with a
street-shrine would be just as dangerous as the skeans of my three
loud-mouthed Dry-town roughnecks.
I turned and crossed the square for the last time, turning toward the
loom of the spaceship, filing the girl away as just another riddle of
Wolf I'd never solve.
How wrong I was!
CHAPTER THREE
From the spaceport gates, exchanging brief greetings with the guards, I
took a last look at the Kharsa. For a minute I toyed with the notion of
just disappearing down one of those streets. It's not hard to disappear
on Wolf, if you know how. And I knew, or had known once. Loyalty to
Terra? What had Terra given me except a taste of color and adventure,
out there in the Dry-towns, and then taken it away again?
If an Earthman is very lucky and very careful, he lasts about ten years
in Intelligence. I had