‘Oh, yez. Jim ztalled, and Tommie went looking for help, knowing the government here thoroughly corrupt. Impozzible to alleviate intolerable zituazion.’
‘What a vocabulary!’
‘Iz wrong?’ Vesta demanded.
‘No, is right,’ Cloud assured her. ‘I was complimenting you,
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young lady—you’ll be teaching me English before this trip is over.’
The class in English Conversation went on until the Manar-kan warned its two participants to get ready; that Tommiej having identified the gangster, had left the lobby, had joined her brother, and was bringing him with her.
‘Is that safe, do you think?’ Vesta asked.
‘For now, before anything starts, yes.’ Cloud replied. ‘After tonight, no.’
The Tomingans arrived; Vesta let them in and introduced Jim to Nadine and Cloud. The brother was taller, heavier, craggier than the sister; his cigar was longer, thicker, and blacker than hers. Otherwise, they were very much alike. Cloud waved them both into comfortable chairs, for there was no time for conversation. Nadine began to write; Vesta to record.
The Big Shot—Nadine took an instant to flash into Cloud’s mind a very good picture of the fellow—was in his private room, but if a dinner were to be on the program it would be later. There were two men in the room; Number One and another man, whom he thought of and spoke to as ‘Number Nine’. At present the affair was strictly business. Number Nine was handing money to Number One, who was making notes in a book. Twenty credits from Number Seventeen; 50 from No. 20; 25 from No. 26; 175 from No. 29; 19 credits—all he could raise— from No. 30; 125 from No. 31, and so on….
The gangsters thought that they were being very smart and cagey in using numbers instead of names, but neither had any idea of the power of a really good telepathic mind, or of that of a really good linguist. Each of those numbers meant something to either or to both of those men, and whatever it was—a name, a picture, a storefront or address, or a fleeting glimpse of personality pattern—Nadine seized and transmitted, either in shorthand or by force of mind, or both; and Vesta taped, in machine-gun-fast Spanish, every written word and every nuance of thought.
The list was long. At its end:
‘Three more didn’t pay up, huh? The same ones holding out as last time, and three more besides, huh?’ This was Number One, thinking deeply. ‘I don’t like it … Ninety Two, huh? I don’t like it a bit—or him, either. I’ll have to do something about him.’
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‘Yeah. Ninety Two. The others all give the same old tear-jerker that they didn’t have it, that our assessments were too stiff for their take, and so on, but Ninety Two didn’t, this time. He simply blew his top. He was hotter than the business end of a blow-torch.’ Not much to Cloud’s surprise, Nadine at this point poured into his mind the picture of excessively angry Jim. ‘Not only he didn’t fork over, he told me to tell you something.’
There was a long pause.
‘Well, spill it!’ Number One barked. ‘What did he say?’
‘Shall I give it to you straight boss, or maybe I better tone it down some?’
‘Straight!’
‘He said for you to go roast, for fourteen thousand years, in the hottest corner you can find of the hottest hell of Telemachia, and take your Srizonified association with you. Take your membership papers and stick ’em. Blow his place up and be damned to you, he says. If you kill him in the blast he’s left stuff in a deposit box that’ll blow all the Srizonified crooked politicians and lawmen in the Fourth Continent off their perches and down onto their Srizonified butts. An’ if you don’t get him, he says, he’ll come after you with blasters in both hands. Make it plain, he says, that it’s you he’ll be after—not me. That’s exactly what he told me to tell you, boss.’
‘Me? ME?’ Number One demanded. The towering rage, which he had been scarcely able to control, subsided into a warily intense speculation. ‘How did he find out about me? Somebody’11 burn for this!’
‘I dunno, boss, but it looks like you said a mouthful about having to do something about him. We got to make an example of somebody, boss—or else—in my book it’d better be 92. He’s organizing, sure as hell, and if we don’t knock him off it’ll spread fast.’
‘Hm … m … m. Yes, but just him personally, not his place. I’m not afraid of any evidence he can leave, of itself, but in connection with the other thing it might be bad. His place is too big; too centrally located. No matter what time of night it goes off it’ll kill too many people and do too much damage. Yellow Castle might dump us instead of trying to ride out such a storm.’ ‘Yeah, they might, at that. Prob’ly would. And the do-gooders might get some of them Srizonified Lensmen in here besides. But an ordinary bomb would do the job.’
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‘No. Got to be a vortex. We promised ’em an atomic flare, so that’s what it’s got to be. It doesn’t have to be 92, though. We can get away easy enough with killing a few people, so I’d say somebody in the outskirts—53 would be as good as any. So tell 53 his place gets it at midnight tomorrow night, and the fewer people in it the more will stay alive.’
‘Check. And I’ll take care of 92?’
‘Of course. You don’t have to be told every move to make.’
‘Just wanted to make sure, is all. What do I do in the big fireworks?’ It was clear that the underling was intensely curious about the phenomenon, but his curiosity was not to be satisfied.
‘Nothing,’ his chief informed him flatly. ‘That isn’t your dish. Now we’ll eat.’
Number One stopped talking, but he did not stop thinking; and Nadine could read, and Vesta could transcribe, thoughts as well as words.
‘Besides, it’s about time for 31 to earn some of the credits we’re paying him,’ was the grimly savage thought.
This thought was accompanied by a picture, which Nadine spread in full in Cloud’s mind. A tall, lean, gray Tellurian was aiming a mechanism—the details of which were so vague that it could have been anything from a vest-pocket flash-pencil up to a half-track mobile projector—at a power-plant, which immediately and enthusiastically went out of control in a blind-ingly incandescent flare of raw energy.
Fairchild!
Cloud’s mind raced. That vortex on Deka hadn’t been accidental, then, even though there had been no evidence—no suspicion—even the Lensmen hadn’t guessed that the radiation-ist had been anything other than a very minor cog in Graves’ thionite-producing machine! Nobody except Fairchild knew what he did or how he did it—the mob must have tried to find out, too, but he wouldn’t give—but this stuff was very definitely for the future; not for now.
‘QX, girls. A nice job—thanks,’ he said. ‘Now Vesta, please tape the actual facts and the actual words of the interview— none of the pictures or guesses—in Middle Plateau Tomingan. Wherever possible, bracket real names and addresses with the code numbers. Tommie and Jim can help you on that.’
She did so.
When the came to that part of the transcription dealing with
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Number Ninety Two, Jim stiffened and swelled with rage.
‘Ask him if that’s an accurate report,’ Cloud directed.
‘It’s accurate enough as far as it goes,’ Jim boomed. His voice, deeper and louder than Tommie’s, and not nearly as musical, almost shook the walls. ‘But he left out half of it. What I really told him would have burned all the tape off that recorder.’
‘But they left in that … that awful one, three times.’ Tommie, tough as she was, was shocked. ‘You ought to be ashamed of yourself.’
‘Srizonified?’ Cloud whispered to Vesta. ‘It sounded bad, but not that hot. It it?’
‘Yes, the hottest in the language. I never saw it in print, and heard it only once, and that was by accident. Like most such things, though, it doesn’t translate—”descended from countless generations of dwellers in stinking, unflowering mud” is as close as I can come to it in Spanish.’
‘QX. Finish up the tape and make two copies of it.’
When the copies were ready Cloud handed them to Tommie.
‘Tell him to take one of these down to the Tomingan equivalent of the D.A.’s office the first thing in the morning,’ he instructed Vesta. ‘The other ought to go to a big law firm—an honest one, if she knows of any. Now ask Jim what he thinks he’s going to do.’
‘I’m going to get a pair of blasters and …’
‘Yeah?’ Cloud’s biting monosyllable, so ably translated by the Vegian, stopped him in mid-sentence. ‘What chance do you thing you stand of getting home tonight in one piece? Your copter is probably mined right now, and they’ve undoubtedly made arrangements to blast you if you leave here any other way, even on foot. If you want to stay alive, though, I’ve got a suggestion to make.’