Sixth Square was one of the areas of carefully tended vegetation intended by the city planners to break the structure pattern of the district. Troy jumped from the roller and went to the map on a side pillar.
“Kyger,” he said into the mike.
“Kyger’s,” the finder announced. “Gentle Homoa, Gentle Ferns—visit Kyger’s, where the living treasures of a thousand worlds are paraded before you! See and hear the Lumian talking fish, the dofuld, the priceless Phaxian change-coat—the only one of its kind known to be in captivity alive. Follow the light, Gentle Homo, Gentle Fern, to Kyger’s—merchant dealer in extraordinary pets!”
A small spark, which had glowed into life on the wall below the map, loosed itself and now danced through the air ahead, blinking with a gem flash. A pet shop! The inquiry about animal knowledge was now explained. But Troy lost some of his zest. The thin story he had told the assignor was now thinner, to the point of being full of holes. He was ten years out of Norden, ten years away from any contact with animals at all. Yet Troy clung to one hope. The assignor had sent him, and the machine was supposed to be always right in its selection.
He looked about him. The massed foliage of the center square was a riot of luxuriant vegetation, which combined plants and shrubs from half-a-dozen worlds into a pattern of growing—red-green, yellow-green, blue-green, silver— And he began to long with every fiber of his semistarved body that he would be the one Kyger wanted, even for just one day.
His spark guide danced up and down, as if to center his attention on the doorway before which it had paused, and then snuffed out. Troy faced Kyger’s display and drew a deep breath of wonder, for he seemed to be staring at four different landscapes, each occupying one-quarter of the space. And each landscape was skillfully contrived so that a section of an outlandish planet had been transported in miniature. In each, small creatures moved about the business of living and dying. It was all art tri-dee, of course, but the workmanship was superb and would completely en- thrall any prospective customer.
Reluctantly Troy approached the door itself, a barrier where plexaglass had been impressed with a startling and vivid pattern of weird and colorful insects, none of which he recognized. There was no sign that the establishment was open for business, and he had no guide to lead him behind the mass of buildings to a rear entrance. Troy hesitated uncertainly before the closed door until, among the imprisoned creatures of the center panel, a portion of face with reasonable human features appeared. Round dark eyes set in yellow skin regarded him with no trace of interest or emotion.
Troy held up his wrist so that the employment mark might be fully visible to those eyes. Unblinkingly they centered upon it. Then the stretch of yellow cheek, the broad nose, vanished. The creatures in the panel seemed to flutter as that barrier arose. And a flow of warm air, redolent with many strange smells, engulfed Troy. As if drawn by an invisible cord, he entered
Kyger’s. He was given no time to look about the outer reception lounge with its wall cabinets of more miniature other-world scenes, for the owner of the eyes was awaiting him impatiently. Used as he was to oddities, human, humanoid, and nonhuman, Troy still found the small man strange enough to study covertly. He could have walked under Horan’s out-stretched arm but his small, wiry body was well proportioned and not that of a dwarf. What hair he had was black and grew in small tufted knobs tight to the rounded bowl of the skull. In addition, there was a rough brush of the same black on his upper lip and two tufts or knots on his chin, one just below the center of his lower lip and the other on the point of the jaw beneath.
His clothing was the conventional one-piece suit of an employed subcitizen, with the striking addition of a pair of boots clinging tightly to his thin legs and extending knee-high, fashioned of reptile skin as soft as glove leather, giving off tiny prismatic sparks with every movement of their wearer. About a slight potbelly he had a belt of the same hide, and the knife that swung from it was not only longer but also wider than those usually worn in Tikil.
“Come—“ His voice was guttural. A crook of finger pointed the way, and Troy followed him through two more showrooms into a passage from which opened a number of screened doors. Now the effluvium of animal—a great many animals—was strong, and sounds from each of the screened doors they passed testified to the stock Kyger kept on hand. Troy’s guide continued to the end of the hall, set his small hand into the larger impression of a palm lock, and then stood aside for Horan to enter.
If the yellow man was an oddity, the man who sat waiting for Troy to cross his office was almost as great a surprise. Horan had seen many of the merchants of Tikil, and all of them had been glittering objects indeed. Their jewels, their ultrafashionable dress, their eye- catching coiffures had all been designed as advertisements to attract general attention.
But Kyger, if this was Kyger, was no such starburst. His muscular body was covered with a hora-silk half tunic and kilt, but the color was a dark and sober blue, and he wore no jewels at all. On his right wrist was the broad service bracelet of a veteran spacer with at least two constellations starring its sweep, while his skull was completely shaven as if to accommodate the helmet of a scout-ship man. The bareness of that deeply tanned stretch of skin made the red, puckered scar down along his right ear the more noticeable. Troy wondered fleetingly why he chose to keep that disfiguring brand; plastic surgery could have erased it completely.
The other regarded Troy for a long moment, his stare both as aloof and as searching as that the yellow man had used through the door panel.
“The assignor reported you as Norden,” he remarked, but gave the planet name a slight accent new to Troy. “I would rather have thought Midgard—“
Troy met him eye to eye. This man had a spacer’s knowledge of racial types and other worlds right enough.
“I was born on Norden—“
The other might not have heard him. “Midgard—or even Terra—“
Troy flushed. “Norden,” he repeated firmly. Lang Horan’s father had been from Midgard, right enough. Before that—well, who traced any planet-pioneering family back through generations and star systems to the first hop?
“Norden. And you think that you know something about animals.” Those gray eyes, cold as space between far-flung suns, dropped from Troy’s face to the belt with its lovingly polished silver studs. “Range Master, eh?”
Troy refused to be drawn. He shrugged, not knowing why the other was trying to bait him. Everyone knew that Norden had been handed over to the Confederation, that none of her former inhabitants could hope to return to her plains.
“All right. If the assignor sent you, you’re the best it could find.” Kyger arose from the enveloping embrace of his eazi-rest. The yellow man slipped to his side. “Zul will give you your orders. We are expecting a shipment in on the Chasgar. You’ll go to the dock with Zul and do just as he tells you—no more, certainly no less. Understand?” There was a flick of razor-sharp whip in that. Troy nodded.
Zul was certainly not a talkative companion. He merely beckoned Troy out through another door into a courtyard. This, too, was sided with pens and cages, but Troy was given no time to inspect their inhabitants. Zul waved him to a waiting flitter. As Troy took his place in the foreseat, the small man reached for the controls and they lifted with practiced ease to the air lanes. Zul circled, then headed them toward the west and the spaceport.
There was more traffic aloft now, personal flitters, heavier vans, and small flyers such as their own. Zul slipped through the lanes with a maximum of speed and a minimum of effort, bringing them down without a jar on the landing strip behind the receiver station. Again a jerk of thumb served to bring Troy, trailing his guide, into one of the many entrances of the clearance section. His small companion was well known here, for he bypassed two barriers without explanation, their guardians waving him on.
“Kyger’s.” Zul spoke at last, putting a claim disk down before the man in charge of the third grill.
“Right section, third block—“
Now they were in a corridor with a wall on one side, a series of bins, room size, on the other, each well filled with shipping crates, bales, and containers. There were men hauling these in and out, which testified that the contents of the packages in this particular section were too precious to be left to the mechanical transportation of the port robots.