What had been no more than a notion in his mind not many hours before suddenly looked not only practicable, but foolproof. Or very nearly—
Whistling gently, he settled down in the central room of his living area, to think out the details. Now he could afford to let the excitement grow up in him.
“Know what, Sally?” he addressed his silent companion genially. “That might, just possibly, have been my old man we bumped off today!”
It was a point Sally wasn’t interested in. She had jumped up on a table and was thumping its surface gently with her tapered, muscular tail, watching him—waiting to be fed. Frazer brought a container that held a day’s rations for Sally out of a wall cabinet. and emptied its liquid contents into a bowl for her. Sally began to lap. Frazer hesitated a moment, took out a second container and partly filled another bowl for himself. Looking from it to the animal with an expression of sardonic amusement, he raised the second bowl to his lips. Presently be set it down empty. Sally was still lapping.
It wasn’t too likely, he knew, that the late Nachief of Frome actually had been his father. But it was far from being an impossibility. Frazer had known since he was twelve years old that he had been fathered by a Nalakian living in the Hub Systems. His mother had told him, when an incident involving one of the humanoids of the mainland had revealed Frazer’s developing Nalakian inclinations. She had made a fumbling, hysterical attempt to kill him immediately afterward, but had died herself instead. Even at that age, Frazer had been very quick. It had taught him, however, that to be quick wasn’t enough—even living on the fringes of the unaware herds of civilization as he usually was, there remained always for one of the Nalakian breed the disagreeable necessity of being very cautious.
Until today—
At this point in his existence, he could afford to drop caution. Pure, ruthless boldness should make him sole lord and owner of the colony and the world of Frome within a week. Frazer was comfortably certain that he had enough and to spare of that quality to take over his heritage in style.
He studied the Nachief’s ultrasonic transmitter a while.
“Have to learn how to use this gadget,” he informed Sally idly. “But it’s not very complicated. And if he has them already conditioned—”
Otherwise, he decided, he was quite capable now of doing it himself. An attempt to assume hypnotic control of his two latest station assistants had turned out unsatisfactorily half a year before, so that he’d been obliged to dispose of them. The possibility of reinforcing controls by mechanical means hadn’t occurred to him at the time. His admiration for the Nachief of Frome’s ingenuity was high. But it was mingled with a sort of impersonal contempt.
“Sally, if he hadn’t overplayed it like a fool, he would have had all he could want for life. But a pure carnivore’s bound to have a one-track mind, I suppose—”
He completed the thought to himself: That he had a very desirable advantage over the Nachief there. Biologically, he could get by comfortably on a humanly acceptable diet. Aside from the necessity of indoctrinating Lane Rawlings with a suitable set of memories, he might even decide to refrain from the use of hypnotic conditioning, until an emergency might call for it. His Nalakian qualities, sensibly restrained, would make him a natural leader in any frontier colony. There was something intriguing now about the notion of giving up the lonely delights of the predator to assume that role on Frome. In another generation, the genetically engineered biological pattern should be diluted beyond the danger point in his strain. No one need ever know.
Frazer chuckled, somewhat surprised by the sudden emergence of the social-human side of him—and also aware of the fact that he probably wouldn’t take the notion too seriously in the end. But that was something he could decide on later . . .
He sat there a while, thinking pleasurably of Lane’s strong young body. To play the human role completely should have undeniable compensations. Finally he became aware of Sally again, watching him with quiet black eyes. She had finished her bowl.
“Have some more?” he invited good-humoredly. “It’s a celebration!”
Sally licked her lips.
He poured the balance of his container into her bowl and stood beside her, scratching her gently back of the ears, while she lapped swiftly at the thick, red liquid, shivering in the ecstasy of gorging. Frazer waited until she had finished the last drop before shooting her carefully through the back of the skull. Sally sank forward without a quiver and lay still.
“Hated to do it, Sally,” he apologized gravely. “But I just couldn’t take you along. We carnivores can’t ever really be trusted.”
Which was, he decided somewhat wryly, the simple truth. He might accept the human role, at that; but, depending on the circumstances, never quite without qualification.
It was almost his last coherent thought. The very brief one that followed was a shocked realization that the sudden, terrible, thudding sensation in his spine and skull meant that a Deen gun was being used on him.
* * *
Lane Rawlings remained motionless in the doorframe behind Frazer, leaning against it as if for support, for a good three minutes after he had dropped to the floor and stopped kicking. It wasn’t that she was afraid of fainting. She only wanted to make very sure, at this distance, that Frazer was going to stay dead. She agreed thoroughly with his last remark.
The thought passed through her mind in that time that she could be grateful to the Nachief of Frome for one thing, at any rate—it had amused him to train his secretary to be a very precise shot.
After a while, she triggered the Deen gun once more, experimentally. Frazer produced no reactions now; he was as dead as Sally. Lane gave both of them a brief inspection before she pocketed the little gun and turned her attention to the food containers in the wall cabinet. With some reluctance, she opened one and found exactly what she expected to find. Now, the mainland humanoids Frazer had talked about might have a less harried existence in the future.
She looked down at Frazer’s long, muscular body once more, with almost clinical curiosity. Then left the room and locked it behind her. She had no intention of entering it again, but there was evidence here that would be of interest to others—provided she found herself capable of operating the type of communicators used by the station.
Thirty minutes later, with no particular difficulty, she had contacted the area headquarters of the Bureau of Agriculture. She gave them her story coherently. Even if they didn’t believe her, it was obvious they would waste no time in getting a relief crew to the station. Which was all Lane was interested in. After the Bureau concluded its investigations, somebody might do something about providing psychological treatment for the Frome colonists. But she wasn’t concerned about that. She was returning to the Hub Systems.
She remained seated in the dim light of the communications cell for a time. She watched her dark reflection in the polished surfaces of its walls and listened to the intermittent whirring of a ventilator in the next office, which was all that broke the silence of the station now. She wondered whether she would have become suspicious of Frazer soon enough to do her any good, if she hadn’t known for the past few weeks that she was carrying a child of the Nachief of Frome. For the past three days, she had been wondering also whether saving her life, at least for a while, by informing the Nachief of the fact, would be worthwhile. It was easy to imagine what a child of his might grow up to be.
Unaware, detail by detail since their meeting, Frazer had filled out her mental picture of that. So she had known enough to survive the two feral creatures in the end . . .
As soon as she returned to the easy-going anonymity of the Hub Systems, this other one of their strain would die unborn. The terrible insistence on life on their own terms which Frazer and the Nachief had shown was warning enough against repetition of the nightmare.
Lane caught herself thinking, though, that there had been something basically pitiful about that inward-staring, alien blindness to human values, which forced all other life into subservience to itself because it could see only itself. She stirred uneasily.
The ventilator in the next office shut off with a sudden click.
“Of course, it will die!” she heard herself say aloud in the silence of the station. Perhaps a little too loudly . . .
After that, the silence remained undisturbed. A new contemplation grew in Lane as she sat there wondering about Frazer’s mother.