There was a Blat! Blat! from the horn, and the engine roared.
The crowd swarmed aboard, and a head thrust out the side window.
“Not much room in back, gents. Double price up front.”
With a shock, Horsip recognized that the driver was an Earthman.
Horsip glanced back at the crowd clinging to the brass rail with one hand and their baggage with the other, and climbed in the front. Moffis got in after him and slammed the door. The driver bent over the controls, there was a roar, a rumble, and the vehicle jerked forward. He manipulated a long lever, there was a clash of metal, the vehicle picked up speed, slowed to avoid a big pothole, gathered speed with another adjustment of the lever, and bounded along the road with shouts and screams from behind.
The driver thrust a hand toward Horsip. “One way, or round trip?”
“One way,” said Horsip.
“That’s two, even. Plus thirty-five in advance for the tip, and then I’ll help you off with your bags when we get there. I could see you were first-class gents when I pulled up. That’s two thirty-five total, and I can’t make no change. Any bill you got over two will do it.”
Moffis growled under his breath. Horsip reached into an inside jacket pocket and took out a worn leather change purse. He undid the drawstring, and drew out two small twelve-sided silver coins, which he put in the driver’s hand.
“We’ll carry out the bags,” he said, pulled the drawstring tight, and put the purse back in his pocket. “What’s wrong with the iron road?”
The driver slid the money into his pocket, and looked at Horsip sidewise.
“Price of progress.”
“What’s wrong with it?”
“Hard to say. That’s out of my line.” He studied Horsip’s uniform. “Not many troops on this planet, are there? You just here for a little vacation?”
“Weapons procurement,” said Horsip, vaguely.
“Oh? How’s that?”
“In line of duty,” growled Horsip.
“What’s that mean?”
“Just what it says.”
“You going to buy weapons here?”
“Do you have any to sell?”
“Well, now, that depends.”
“On what?”
“Price you care to pay, and how much red tape there is.”
For an instant Horsip didn’t realize what had happened. Then it dawned on him that the driver had been talking Centran, practically without an accent, and then had used two words Horsip wasn’t familiar with: “red tape.” Those words must be in some Earth tongue.
Horsip took a guess at the meaning. “This would be an official sale, with all the necessary formalities.”
The driver looked uncomfortable.
“Can’t help you, then.”
While talking, they streaked past a stand of second-growth trees and several farms, detoured a pugnacious-looking molk with lowered horns, and now, looking up the road, Horsip could see that they were approaching the outskirts of the city. Smaller plots were becoming the rule, with the houses closer together, and barns and outbuildings more rare. They rounded a curve, to pass a tall narrow metal frame.
“Oil well,” said the driver. “Want to get into that line myself, if I can scrape a stake together. . . . You gents interested in a fast shot at a small bundle?” He nodded toward a large gray wooden building with a sign out front:
THE DAILY TRUMPET
None Bigger—None Better
Top Circulation
All the News—Fit or Unfit—
THE TRUMPET PRINTS IT!
“Any place they sell that paper can fix you up.”
“I see,” said Horsip, who didn’t see at all, but didn’t want to reveal his ignorance. Ignorance looked expensive on this planet.
A pall of smoke now dimmed the view, and they passed a number of huge buildings. Many tracks of iron road led through a high fence to the buildings, outside of which a gigantic lot was filled with glittering new ground-cars.
The driver leaned over, and hissed, “Railroad from the spaceport would have had to cross these lines. . . . That’s what happened to it.”
“Oh.”
“Can’t get in the way of progress,” said the driver. “You can’t lick ’em, join ’em. You change your mind on those guns, let me know.” He swerved around a corner, and soon they were going down the main street of a considerable Centran city, past houses four and five stories high.
The vehicle slammed to a stop.
The driver leaned out. “Everybody off!” He glanced at Horsip and Moffis. “Kind of keep your eyes open when you get off here, gents.”
Moffis shoved open the door, and Horsip followed, keeping a tight grip on his bag. As they stepped to the sidewalk, a uniformed individual with six rows of ribbons, straggly fur on his face, and a hideous scar, stepped forward holding out a helmet with coins in it.
“Wounded on Earth and Centralis. Twenty years in the line. If you’ll just give—”
Moffis gave a snarl, his left hand shot out, gripped the upper end of the “scar,” and stripped it off like a length of flypaper. He knocked the imitation veteran back against the granite front of the nearest building.
Horsip caught a blur of motion, and turned to see someone start off with Moffis’ bag.
Horsip jerked his service pistol from its holster. “Stop, thief!” The thief did not stop. Horsip fired one shot.
There was a scream, and then another movement caught Horsip’s gaze.
Behind Moffis’ back, a pickpocket expertly cut open Moffis’ trouser pocket and removed the wallet. Horsip cracked the pickpocket over the head. As he stepped forward, Horsip’s suitcase became light in his hand.
He whirled, to find an individual directly behind him holding a piece of uniform in one hand, and a knife in the other; right beside this individual, a second put a pair of powerful snippers back in his pocket as he bent to pick up Horsip’s bag, the handle of which was still in Horsip’s left hand.
Horsip muttered to himself, shot the pickpocket in the shoulder and the thief in the leg. He broke the gun open, reloaded it, and looked around.
The thieves he had shot were now on the ground. One was smearing blood on his face. Another was tearing his clothes to bits.
Moffis finished ripping combat badges and ribbons from the imitation veteran’s uniform, looked around, and discovered that his suitcase was gone.
Horsip nodded toward the farthest of the thieves, who had now reduced himself to a ragged shambles, and was rolling around spitting out foam, and rubbing blood on his face.
Moffis stared.
Horsip said, “I shot him, Moffis. He was making off with your bag.”
“What’s he doing now?”
“Don’t ask me.”
As Moffis came back with his bag, a small man emerged from the crowd wearing a tag reading “Press,” and bent beside the nearer thief. A second person, taller and carrying a camera, pushed through the crowd. The man wearing the “Press” tag spoke sympathetically to the thief.
“What happened, fella?”
The thief said eagerly, “It was terrible. One of them held me while the other shot me and beat me up. I got a real wound. Do you suppose you could get a doctor?”
“Not now. What happened?”
“Will this come out with my name on it and everything?”
“Sure, don’t worry.”
“Can I sue?”
“Of course you can sue. Come on, come on, let’s have it! I haven’t got all day!”
“This hurts awful.”
“It can wait. Here we go. What happened, fella? Did the beasts get you? Speak right into the mike.”
“Yeah. They . . . they shot me. They held me. They beat me. I . . . I’m weak.”
The Centran reporter raised the microphone, and spoke into it smoothly. “In the Integral Union, here in a main thoroughfare of a principal city on the planet, even here citizens are not safe from the attacks of the murderers. They learned to kill on foreign planets, and now they bring their blood-lust home with them. . . . Fella, I don’t know what to say to you. I . . . I guess all of us are guilty. . . .”
Moffis glanced at Horsip.
“Which one is the thief?”
“The one on the ground.”
Moffis looked baffled.
The Centran reporter gestured to the photographer, and rose from beside the thief.
“Yes, we all are guilty, for allowing beasts to walk among us like men. There!” He pointed dramatically at Horsip and Moffis.
“There they are!” cried the reporter. “The kill-crazed murderers! This time the people must rise against the cowards!”
There was a murmur from the crowd.
Moffis gave a start.
“Cowards?”
He dumped his bag on the sidewalk, and stepped forward.
The Centran reporter backed up into the crowd.
The crowd looked interested, and shoved him forward.
“Wait a minute,” said the reporter. He glanced at the photographer. “Help!”
The photographer eagerly raised his camera.
Moffis smashed the reporter on the jaw, knocking him back into the crowd. The crowd, cheering, heaved him forward, and Moffis knocked him flat.