It was embarrassing. There was no occasion for the man to so thrust his blindness on us.
I shook his hand and it was as flabby as it looked, as nearly limp as a living hand can be. Immediately he fumbled his way back into the chair again.
“Perhaps this chair,” Sara said to me. “There’ll be drinks immediately. I know what the others want, but...”
“If you have some Scotch,” I said.
I sat down in the chair she had indicated and she took another and there were the four of us, huddled in a group before that looming fireplace and surrounded by the heads of creatures from a dozen different planets.
She saw me looking at them. “I forgot,” she said. “You’ll excuse me, please. You had never heard of me-until you got my note, I mean.”
“I am sorry, madam.”
“I’m a ballistics hunter,” she said, with more pride, it seemed to me, than such a statement called for.
She could not have missed the fact that I did not understand. “I use only a ballistics rifle,” she explained. “One that uses a bullet propelled by an explosive charge. It is,” she said, “the only sporting way to hunt. It requires a considerable amount of skill in weapon handling and occasionally some nerve. It you miss a vital spot the thing that you are hunting has a chance at you.”
“I see,” I said. “A sporting proposition. Except that you have the first crack at it.”
“That is not always true,” she said.
A robot brought the drinks and we settled down as comfortably as we could, fortified behind our glasses.
“I have a feeling, captain,” Sara said, “that you do not approve.”
“I have no opinion at all,” I told her. “I have no information on which opinion could be based.”
“But you have killed wild creatures.”
“A few,” I said, “but there was no such thing involved as sporting instinct. For food, occasionally. At times to save my life.”
I took a good long drink. “I took no chance,” I told her. “I used a laser gun. I just kept burning them as long as it seemed necessary.”
“Then you’re no sportsman, captain.”
“No,” I said, “I am-let us say I was-a planet hunter. It seems I’m now retired.”
And I wondered, sitting there, what it was all about. She hadn’t invited me, I was sure, just for my company. I didn’t fit in this room, nor in this house, any better than the other two who sat there with me. Whatever was going on, they were a part of it and the idea of being lumped with them in any enterprise left me absolutely cold.
She must have read my mind. “I imagine you are wondering, captain, what is going on.”
“Ma’am,” I said, “the thought had crossed my mind.”
“Have you ever heard of Lawrence Arlen Knight?” “The Wanderer,” I said. “Yes, I’ve heard of him. Stories told about him. That was long ago. Well before my time.”
“Those stories?”
“The usual sort of stories. Space yarns. There were and are a lot of others like him. He just happened to snare the imagination of the story tellers. That name of his, perhaps. It has a ring to it. Like Johnny Appleseed or Sir Launcelot.”
“But you heard...”
“That he was hunting something? Sure. They all are hunting something.”
“But he disappeared.”
“Stay out there long enough,” I told her, “and keep on poking into strange areas and you’re bound to disappear. Sooner or later you’ll run into something that will finish you.”
“But you...”
“I quit soon enough,” I said. “But I was fairly safe, at that. All I was hunting were new planets. No Seven Cities of Cibola, no mystic El Dorado, no trance-bound Crusade of the Soul.”
“You mock at us,” said Friar Tuck. “I do not like a mocker.”
“I did not mean to mock,” I said to Sara Foster. “Space is full of tales. The one you mention is only one of many. They provide good entertainment when there’s nothing else to do. And I might add that I dislike correction at the hands of a phony religico with dirty fingernails.”
I put my glass down upon the table that stood beside the chair and got up on my feet.
“Thanks for the drink,” I said. “Perhaps some other time...”
“Just a moment, please,” she said. “If you will please sit down. I apologize for Tuck. But it’s I you’re dealing with, not him. I have a proposal that you may find attractive.”
“I’ve retired,” I said.
“Perhaps you saw the, ship standing on the field. Two berths from where you landed.
“Yes, I saw the ship. And admired it. Does it belong to you?”
She nodded. “Captain, I need someone to run that ship. How would you like the job?”
