Warlord of Kor | Page 5

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, this is what I was after when I took this damned job. Survey teams are a dime a dozen out here, Lee; it's no job for a man."
"We've got sort of a special case here," Rynason said evenly, glancing at Mara. She smiled at him. "We haven't run into any alien races before that were intelligent."
Manning laughed, and took a long swallow of his drink. "Twenty-six lousy horsefaces--now there's an important discovery for you. No, Lee, this is peanuts. For that matter, they may be running into intelligent aliens all over the Edge by now--communication isn't so reliable out here that we'd necessarily know about it. What we've found here isn't any more important than all the rubble and trash the Outsiders left behind."
"Still, it is unique so far," Mara said.
"I'll tell