Warlord of Kor | Page 5

and the outskirts of the town, where
the streets ended in garbage heaps and new cemeteries or faded into the trackless flat
where the spacers touched down.
The Earthmen filled the streets ... drinking, fighting, laughing and cursing, arguing over
money or power or, sometimes, women. The women here were hard and self-sufficient,
following the path of Terran expansion in the stars and taking what they felt was due
them as women or what they could get as men. Supply houses did a thriving business,
their prices high between shipments on the spacers from the inner worlds; bars and
gambling houses stayed open all night; rooming houses and restaurants and laundries
displayed crude handlettered signs along the streets.

Rynason pushed his way through a jostling crowd outside the door of a bar. He was
supposed to meet the head of his Survey team here--Rice Manning, who had been
pushing the survey as hard as he could since the day they'd set foot on Hirlaj. Manning
was hard and ambitious--a leader of men, Rynason thought sardonically as he surveyed
the tables in the dim interior. The floor of the bar was a dirty plastic-metal alloy, already
scuffed and in places bloodstained. The tables were of the cheap, light metals so common
on the spacer-supplied worlds of the Edge, and they wobbled.
The low-ceilinged room was crowded with men. Rynason didn't know many of them by
name, but he recognized a lot of the faces. The men of the Edge, though they lacked
money, education, often brains and usually ethics, at least had the quality of
distinctiveness: they didn't fit the half-dozen convenient molds which the highly
developed culture of the inner worlds fitted over the more civilized citizens of the Terran
Federation. These men were too self-interested to follow the group-thoughts which
controlled the centers of empire, and the seams and wrinkles of their faces stamped a
rough kind of individuality even more visually upon them.
Of them all, the man who was instantly recognizable in any crowd like this was Rene
Malhomme; Rynason immediately saw the man in one corner of the room. He stood six
and a half feet tall, heavily muscled and a bit wild-eyed; his greying hair fell in disorder
over his dirty forehead and sprayed out over his ears. He was surrounded by laughing and
shouting men; Rynason couldn't tell from this distance whether he was engaged in one of
his usual heated arguments on religion or in his other avocation of recounting stories of
the women he had "converted". He waved a black-lettered sign saying REPENT! over his
head--but then, he always did.
Rynason found Manning in the back, sitting under a cheap print of a Picasso nude with
cold light trained on it in typically bad taste. He had a woman with him. Rynason
recognized her--Mara Stephens, in charge of communications and supplies for the survey
team. She was a strange girl, aloof but not hard, and she carried herself with a quiet
dignity. What was she doing with Manning?
He passed a waiter on his way to the table and ordered a drink. Malhomme saw him as he
passed: "Lee Rynason! Come and join me in repentance! Give your soul to God and your
money to the barman, for as the prophet sayeth, lo, I am dry! Join us!"
Rynason grinned and shook his head, walking past. He grabbed one of the light-metal
chairs and sat down next to Mara.
"You wanted to see me," he said to Manning.
Manning looked up at him to apparent surprise. "Lee! Yes, yes--sit down. Wait, we'll get
you a drink."
So he was in that kind of a mood. "I've got one coming," Rynason said. "What's our
problem today?"
Manning smiled broadly. "No problem, Lee; no problem at all. Not unless you want to

make one." He chuckled goodnaturedly, a tacit statement that he was expecting no such
thing. "I've got good news today, by god. You tell him, Mara."
Rynason turned to the girl, who smiled briefly. "It just came over the telecom," she said.
"Manning has a good chance for the governorship here. The Council is supposed to
announce its decision in two weeks."
Rynason looked over at Manning, his face expressionless. "Congratulations. How did this
happen?"
"I've got an inside track; friend of mine knows several of the big guys. Throws parties,
things like that. He's been putting in a word for me, here and there."
"Isn't this a bit out of your line?" Rynason said.
Manning sat back, a large man with close-cropped dark hair and heavy features. His
beard was trimmed to a thin line along the ridge of his jaw--a style that was popular on
the inner worlds, but rarely seen here on the Edge. "This is my line," he said. "God,