Gordon R. Dickson (3 page)

He turned back to his main room and with a corner of his eye saw the door to the bathroom slide shut behind him. He picked up his two suitcases, put them on the bedlike hassock, and opened them. No sooner had he done so than another section of the wall opened, and he found himself looking into what might have been the closet if there had been any pole or clothes hangers in it.

Experimentally—he was beginning to get the hang of things aboard ship now—he tried to imagine his clothes as being hung up in the closet.

Obligingly, they were suddenly there—the only unusual part of their appearance and situation being that they hung as he had imagined them, but without any visible means of support, suspended vertically in midair as if held by invisible hangers from an invisible rod.

Jim nodded. He was about to think the closet closed again, when a second thought made him take the Scottish costume, complete with kilt and knife, from where it hung unsupported in midair, and change into it, placing his suit of lights in the closet in its place, where it hung invisibly supported with the rest of his clothes.

The closet closed, and Jim was just turning away from it when a visitor materialized in the center of his room. But it was not Ro. Instead, it was one of the male Highborn—a man with onyx-white skin, at least seven feet tall.

“There you are, Wolfling,” the Highborn said. “Come along. Mekon wants to see you.”

They were suddenly in a room which Jim had not been in before. It was rectangular and long, and they stood in about the middle of it. There were no other humans in the room. But at the far end, on a sort of pillow-strewn dais, there lay curled a feline similar in every respect to the one among Ro’s pets. It lifted its horse’s head at the sight of them in the room, and its eyes fastened upon Jim.

“Wait here,” said the Highborn who had brought him. “Mekon will be with you in just a moment.”

The tall man vanished. Jim found himself left alone with the feline beast, which was now lazily rising to its feet, staring down the room at him.

Jim stood still, staring back.

The animal made a curious, whining sound—a sound almost ridiculously small to come from something obviously so physically powerful. Its short stub of a tufted tail began to jerk vertically up and down, stiffly. Its heavy head lowered until its lower jaw almost touched the floor of the dias, and its mouth gradually opened to reveal heavy, carnivorous teeth.

Still whining, it began slowly to move. Softly, almost delicately, it put one front paw down from the dais; and then the other. Slowly it began to move toward him, crouching and whining as it did. Its teeth were fully visible now, and as it approached, its whine grew in volume, until it was a sort of singing threat.

Jim waited, moving neither backward nor forward.

The animal came on. About a dozen yards from him it stopped and gradually crouched. Its tail was jerking like a metronome now, and the singing whine that came from its throat was filling the whole room.

For what seemed a long time, it crouched there, jaw hung open, whining. Then, without warning, the whining stopped, and it launched itself through the air at Jim’s throat.

The feline creature flashed forward and upward into Jim’s face—and vanished.

Jim had not moved. For a moment he was alone in the long, rectangular room; and then suddenly there were three of the Highborn males around him, one of them with the dragonlike insignia upon his shirt, or tunic, front. That one had brought Jim here. Of the other two, one was almost short by Highborn standards—barely three inches taller than Jim. The third was the tallest of the three—a slim, rather graceful-looking man with the first expression resembling a smile Jim had ever seen on purely onyx-colored features; and this last of the three Highborn wore a red insignia which looked somewhat like the horns and head of a stag.

“I told you they were brave, these Wolflings,” drawled this last member of the group. “Your trick didn’t work, Mekon.”

“Courage!” said the one addressed as Mekon angrily. “That was too good to be true. He didn’t even move a muscle! You’d think he’d been—” Mekon bit off the words abruptly, glancing hastily at the tall Slothiel, who stiffened.

“Go on. Go on, Mekon,” drawled the tall Highborn, but there was an edge to his drawl now. “You were going to say something like … ‘warned’?”

“Of course Mekon didn’t mean to say anything like that.” It was Trahey, almost literally pushing himself between the other two men, whose eyes were now fixedly fastened on each other.

“I’d like to hear Mekon tell me that,” murmured Slothiel.

Mekon’s eyes dropped. “I—of course, I didn’t mean anything of the sort. I don’t remember what I was going to say,” he said.

“Then I take it,” said Slothiel, “that I’ve won. One Lifetime Point, to me?”

“One—” The admission clearly stuck in Mekon’s throat. His face had darkened with a rush of blood similar to the flush that Jim had noticed come too easily to the face of Ro. “One Lifetime Point to you.”

Slothiel laughed. “Don’t take it so hard, man,” he said. “You can have a chance to win it back anytime you’ve got a decent wager to propose.”

But Mekon’s temper had flared again. “All right,” he snapped, and swung to face Jim. “I’ve given up the point—but I’d still like to know why this Wolfling didn’t even twitch when the beast went for him. There’s something unnatural here.”

“Why don’t you ask him?” drawled Slothiel.

“I am asking him!” said Mekon, his eyes burning upon Jim. “Speak up, Wolfling. Why didn’t you show any sign of a reaction?”

“The Princess Afuan is taking me to the Throne World to show me off to the Emperor,” Jim answered quietly. “I could hardly be shown off if I were badly torn up or killed by an animal like that one. Therefore, whoever was responsible for the cat coming at me was certain to make sure that I wouldn’t be hurt by it.”

Slothiel threw back his head and laughed loudly. Mekon’s face, which had paled back to its normal color, now flushed again with a dark rush of angry blood.

“So!” snapped Mekon. “You think you can’t be touched, is that it, Wolfling? I’ll show you—”

He broke off, for Ro had suddenly appeared in the room beside them; and now she literally shoved herself between Jim and the angry Highborn.

“What’re you doing to him?” she cried. “He’s supposed to be left with me! He’s not for the rest of you to play with—”

“Why, you little mud-skinned throwback!” snapped Mekon. His hand darted out to the small black stick running through the two loops of the ropelike material that acted as a belt to her white dress. “Give me that rod!”

As his hand closed upon it, she snatched at it herself; and for a moment there was a tug-of-war in which the rod had come loose from the belt and they both had hold of it.

“Let go, you little—” Mekon raised one hand, clenching his fingers into a fist as though to strike down at Ro; and, at that moment, Jim stepped suddenly up to him.

The Highborn yelled suddenly—it was almost a bass scream—and let go of the rod, falling back and holding his right arm with his left hand. All down along his forearm a line dripped red, and Jim was putting the little knife back into its scabbard.

There was a sudden, utter, frozen silence in the room. Trahey, the heretofore self-possessed Slothiel, and even Ro were utterly still, staring at the blood running down Mekon’s forearm. If the walls of the ship had begun to crumble about them, they could not have looked more overwhelmed and stupefied.

“He—the Wolfling damaged me,” stuttered Mekon, staring wildly at his bleeding arm. “Did you see what he did?”

Slowly Mekon raised his eyes to his two companions.

“Did you see what he did?” Mekon screamed. “Get me a rod! Don’t just stand there! Get me a rod!”

Trahey made a slow move as if to step toward Ro, but Slothiel, with suddenly narrowed eyes, caught Trahey’s arm.

“No, no,” murmured Slothiel. “Our little game isn’t a game anymore. If he wants rods, let him get them himself.”

Trahey stood still. Ro abruptly disappeared.

“Blind you, Trahey!” shouted Mekon. “I’ll collect from you for this! Get me a rod, I say!”

Trahey slowly shook his head, though his lips were almost bloodless.

“A rod—no. No, Mekon,” he said. “Slothiel’s right. You’ll have to do that for yourself.”

“Then I will!” screamed Mekon—and disappeared.

“I still say you’re a brave man, Wolfling,” said Slothiel to Jim. “Let me give you a piece of advice. If Mekon offers you a rod, don’t take it.”

Trahey made an odd little sound, like a man who has started to speak and then suddenly thought better of it. Slothiel turned his eyes upon the other Highborn.

“You were going to say something, Trahey?” he asked. “Perhaps you were going to object to my advising the Wolfling?”

Trahey shook his head. But the glance he threw at Jim was baleful.

Mekon suddenly reappeared, his arm still bleeding, but the hand at the end of it clutching two short black rods like the one Ro had worn in the loops of her belt. He held one of these in his good hand, and stepping forward, thrust it at Jim.

“Take this, Wolfling!” he snapped.

Jim shook his head and drew the small knife from his kilt.

“No thanks,” he said. “I think I’ll stick to this.”

Mekon’s face lit up savagely.

“Suit yourself!” he said, and threw the rod he had offered across the room. “It makes no difference to me—”

“But it does to me!” cut in a new voice. It was a woman’s voice, behind Jim. Jim turned quickly and backed off a step so as to keep everyone in the room in front of him. Ro had reappeared, he saw; and with her was a tall female Highborn whom Jim believed he recognized as Afuan. Behind both women towered a slim Highborn male, possibly even an inch or two taller than Slothiel.

“Well?” went on Afuan, if it was indeed she. “Has something happened to alter the tables of precedence, so that you think you can take it on yourself to rod one of my pets, Mekon?”

Mekon had frozen. Even the expression on his face, caught halfway between rage and astonishment, seemed fixed there by a sort of paralysis.

Behind the two women the unusually tall male Highborn smiled slowly. It was a smile something like the lazy smile of Slothiel, but there was more of a feeling of power—and perhaps more of cruelty—in it.

“I’m afraid you’ve offended Her Majesty, Mekon,” he said. “That could cost you more than a few Lifetime Points. Men have been banished to the Colony Worlds for less.”

Surprisingly, it was Slothiel who came to the defense of the paralyzed Mekon.

“Not perhaps in just such a case as this,” said Slothiel. “The Wolfling assaulted Mekon first. Certainly someone like Galyan would understand how a man could react to something like that.”

The eyes of the tall Highborn addressed as Galyan went out to meet with Slothiel’s. They looked at each other with a mutual amusement that seemed to hang upon the very lip of animosity. Someday, those looks seemed to say, we will clash, but not now. The Princess Afuan noticed the exchange, and instantly her own manner changed to one of brisk reasonableness.

“Nonsense!” she said. “He’s only a Wolfling, after all! Do you enjoy looking disgusting, man?” This last phrase was addressed to Mekon. “Heal yourself!”

Mekon woke abruptly from his trance and looked down at his wounded arm. Jim looked at it also; and before his eyes he saw the long shallow cut slowly begin to close and firm over—without any of the ordinary signs of scabbing or healing. Within perhaps a second and a half the wound had disappeared, leaving only white-onyx skin that looked as if it had never been cut. The dried blood on the arm remained, but after a second Mekon passed his other hand along it, and this too vanished. He was left with an arm not only whole but clean. Jim put the knife back into its scabbard at his belt.

“That’s better,” said Afuan. She turned to the tall man beside her. “I’ll leave it to you now, Galyan. See that Mekon pays some kind of a fine.”

She vanished.

“You can go too, girl,” Galyan said, looking down at Ro. “I didn’t have a chance to watch this Wolfling putting on his act on the planet. After I deal with Mekon, I’d like to examine the wild man myself.”

Ro hesitated. Her face was unhappy.

“Go along,” said Galyan softly but sharply. “I’m not going to hurt your Wolfling! You’ll have him back in perfect shape before you know it.”

Ro hesitated a second longer, then vanished, in her turn, casting a strangely appealing glance at Jim just before she went, as if to caution him against any act that might lead to further trouble.

“Come with me, Wolfling,” said Galyan. He disappeared. After a second, he reappeared, smiling quizzically at Jim.

“So you don’t know how to move around in the ship, do you?” he said. “Very well, Wolfling. I’ll provide your motive power.”

At once Jim found himself in a large, oval, low-ceilinged room with yellow walls, which more resembled an office or a place of work than any of the rooms he had so far visited aboard the vessel. At hard-surfaced slabs of what looked like stone floating in midair and plainly in use as desktops, three men were at work—none of them Highborn.

Two were brown, squat men—about the color of a white-skinned human from Earth with a good heavy suntan. They were no more than five and a half feet tall. The third, who was looking at what appeared to be a map, was possibly six inches taller and a hundred pounds heavier than the other two. His greater weight was not in body fat, but plainly in a very heavy, even massive skeleton and corresponding musculature. Unlike the two shorter men, who had long, straight brown hair hanging down their backs almost in the fashion in which the white hair of the Highborn women was allowed to hang, the third man was completely bald. His round, hairless skull, with its grayish skin stretched tightly over the bone beneath, was the most prominent feature about him, so that it made his eyes, his nose, his mouth, and even his fairly good-sized ears seem small by comparison. This third man got up on seeing Galyan and Jim appear in the room.

“No, no. It’s all right, Reas,” said Galyan. “Back to your work.”