it filled with mron oil in time for the fire!”
The undertraders laughed uproariously; Meszk seemed puzzled. “If it was native oil, why did the Quarmers burn it?”
“Quarmer reasoning,” E-Wusk gasped. “It was a foreigner’s warehouse, don’t you see, so they had to burn it. But they were careful to set fire only to the building. They didn’t disturb the contents at all!”
The joke spread through the lounge in widening circles. Meszk laughed and moved away, and Biag-n edged closer to E-Wusk. He was smitten with a severe palpitation of the conscience. He had his full report indited and ready to send at the earliest opportunity, and he suddenly realized that he knew nothing at all about the critical question, the only one he had been specifically instructed to investigate. He had forgotten the Weapon.
The wealth of detail provided by a world in revolt had overburdened his senses. He had eagerly inventoried every aspect of the Quarmers’ behavior except the one that mattered. He had not once asked himself why.
He said timorously, “Excuse me, Excellency, but you—you say that you—saw it coming?”
E-Wusk regarded him curiously. “I don’t believe that we’ve met.”
“Biag-n, at Your Excellency’s service,” Biag-n said, with a sweeping genuflection.
“Biag-n. I don’t seem to recall—what is your line?”
“Textiles, Sire,” Biag-n said humbly.
“Textiles? I still can’t place you. Where was your office?”
“I—I sold direct,” Biag-n stammered, face suffused with humiliation.
“Ah! But you needn’t be apologetic about it. One must start somewhere. I, too, have ‘sold direct.’ Don’t look so startled. I sold direct on Jorund. I had to. I arrived there completely destitute of solvency, after having been evicted from Utuk. The natives took everything. I was also evicted from Jorund, but that didn’t cost me much. I may be old, but I haven’t forgotten how to learn. After Utuk, I had the good sense to record my surplus solvency in a safe place.”
“You’ve experienced the Dark three times?” Biag-n asked breathlessly.
“Four. After Jorund I went to Suur, with distressingly similar results. Now it’s Quarm. The Blight, or Dark, or whatever you choose to call it, seems to be pursuing me. But as I said, I’ve learned. On Quarm I lost almost nothing.”
“Excellency, what is it?”
“Who knows? Not I, certainly, but I don’t think it’s any thing. It’s merely a state of mind.”
“Ah! Mind!”
“It’s a form of madness, as any fool should be able to see. And it’s sweeping the galaxy. These idiots think they’re going to transfer to a nice safe world where it’ll never bother them again. Nonsense. Intelligent beings can lose their reason any time and anywhere. The Dark, if you want to call it that, will move again. And again. There’s no point in trying to run away from it. I’m going only as far as the first world that will let me in. When the Dark next moves, I’ll be moving just ahead of it.”
“But if it’s madness, why didn’t we catch it? Why did it affect only the natives?”
E-Wusk delivered himself of a monumental shrug. “As a trader, I deal exclusively in inanimate objects. I’ve never had occasion to regret that. As long as I know what, and I can make a reasonably accurate guess as to when, I’ll leave the why to others. Did you lose much?”
“I didn’t have much to lose. Just a few personal effects and my sample case—and they let me keep my sample case!”
“Congratulations! You’ll be ready for business the moment you land.”
Biag-n withdrew discreetly. He had a new line for his report, and he wanted to think about it. The Weapon, whatever it was, induced a state of madness. That much was obvious—was already known and accepted. And for some inexplicable and highly complicated reason, it worked only on the natives. That, too, was known and accepted.
But a foreigner who had experienced the Dark several times might become aware of the Weapon, might even be able to predict the Dark’s coming. Biag-n felt certain that Supreme would find this very interesting.
* * * *
Miss Effie Schlupe was indeed a dear. She was over twenty-one and under seventy; a year before she’d had to stop saying she was over twenty-one and under sixty, for she refused to tell a lie except for money. She typed 130 words per minute from her office rocking chair, though when her rocking got too rambunctious her accuracy suffered somewhat. She could peer innocently over her old-fashioned, rimless spectacles at a policeman while picking the pocket of the man behind her. If the subject she was tailing sought solace in a bar, she could drink him under the table while he sobbed out his troubles to her. Three purse snatchers who thought her a likely victim had regained consciousness in hospitals with broken bones. Darzek loved her as he would have loved his own mother if she’d been a jujitsu expert and owned an unsurpassed secret recipe for rhubarb beer. He paid her more money than she had ever earned before, and she retaliated by trying to do all of his work for him.
But now he had fired her. Her pride was hurt. She felt that her employer was unjustly casting aspersions on both her loyalty and her competence, and she resented it.
He was also underestimating her stubbornness, and she resented that, too.
With binoculars she watched from a curtained window across the street while Jan Darzek packed his suitcase.
She knew the suitcase. It had been made to Darzek’s specifications, and it would thwart forcible entry by any device less potent than an acetylene torch. Once when Darzek temporarily mislaid his keys an expert locksmith had toiled for five hours trying to open it—unsuccessfully.
Miss Schlupe watched openmouthed as Darzek methodically fitted equipment into the suitcase. “Isn’t he taking any clothing at all?” she wondered.
He always carried extra ammunition on a trip—but so much? And were those the gas grenades he’d told her about? And could that be a submachine gun?
“Gracious!” she murmured awesomely. “He’s going to start a war!”
* * * *
In the basement of a house in an old, eminently respectable section of Nashville, Tennessee, Jan Darzek stepped through an oddly designed transmitter frame.
He emerged in a small circular room, bare except for the transmitting receiver. Through two arched openings could be seen a larger circular room that surrounded it. Curiously he released his heavy suitcase, watched it settle slowly toward the floor, caught it again.
He turned to greet Smith, who emerged from the transmitter on his heels.
“So here we are,” he said.
Smith reached for the instrument panel. “Yes—”
A third party shot out of the transmitter and crashed into Smith. The momentum carried both of them through an arch and into the room beyond. Smith lay dazed, too bewildered for speech. Miss Effie Schlupe picked herself up and primly smoothed down her skirt.
“Where are we?” she asked innocently.
“Schluppy!” Darzek exclaimed. His suitcase floated away as he collapsed in laughter. “You followed us—” He wiped his eyes. “You followed us to Nashville?”
Miss Schlupe perched on the wide ledge that ran around the circumference of the outer room. “A hell of a chase you gave me,” she complained.
“How’d you get into the house?”
“I picked the lock. You didn’t really think you could get away with it, did you? Firing me from the only job I ever had that I really liked. The idea!”
Smith got slowly to his feet