Night Train to Rigel

His smile vanished. “You are joking.”

“Maybe a little less,” I added. “We’ll have to see how it all shakes out.”

“How it shakes out is that you’ve outstayed your welcome,” he said tartly, signaling for the guards standing in the shade of the door palms. “My accountant will contact you when he’s finished totaling up what you owe me.”

“I’m sure he will,” I said, making no move to stand up. “Interesting thing about that young man who died outside the New Pallas the night I left New York. You do remember him, don’t you?”

Hardin’s forehead creased slightly. “What about him?”

“He’d been shot six times,” I said. “Three of those shots being snoozers. Yet apparently he was still able to made it from my apartment all the way here to the New Pallas Towers.”

“Must have had a very strong constitution.”

“Indeed,” I said, lifting my eyebrows. “You don’t seem surprised to hear that he’d come here from my apartment.”

The guards had arrived at my bench now. “Yes, sir?” one of them asked.

Hardin hesitated, then shook his head. “Never mind.”

“Yes, sir,” the guard said. He gestured to his companion, and the two of them headed back through the foliage toward their posts.

“You see, I got to thinking about him during the trip back to Earth,” I continued when they were out of earshot again. “There are really only three possibilities as to who might have killed him.” I held up three fingers and started ticking them off. “It wasn’t your average mugger, because your average mugger carries snoozers or thudwumpers but usually not both. It also wasn’t the man’s enemies— never mind who they are—because his presence here would have alerted them to my relationship with you and they would certainly have moved to exploit that. Which leaves only the third possibility.”

I ticked off the third finger. “You.”

I saw the muscles in his throat tighten briefly. “I was in here with you when it happened,” he reminded me.

“Oh, I don’t mean you personally,” I said. “But you were certainly involved. The way I read it, your people reported there was someone hanging around my apartment, which got you wondering if our deal maybe wasn’t as secret as you’d hoped. You told them to bring him in for a chat, but they weren’t able to do that. So you told them to get rid of him.”

Hardin snorted. But it was a desperate, blustering sort of snort. “This is nonsense,” he insisted.

“Only he wasn’t as easy to kill as they thought,” I continued. “So when they hopped into their car and headed back here to report, he pulled himself up off the pavement, grabbed an autocab, and followed them. That’s the only way he could have been waiting for me when I came out that night.”

I gestured toward McMicking. “And it’s the only way to explain how McMicking was on the scene so fast. He’d gotten the frantic report that the target was not only alive, but was standing on your doorstep, and had gone down to finish the job. Unfortunately for you, I got there first.”

“Ridiculous,” Hardin murmured. But the denial was pure reflex, without any real emotion behind it.

“That was the real reason you made a point of coming to see me at Jurskala, wasn’t it?” I asked. “You’d figured out that the dead man and I were connected, and you needed to find out if I knew you’d been involved.”

Hardin took a deep breath; and with that, he was on balance again. “Interesting theory,” he said. “Completely unprovable, of course.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “We could subpoena all the personnel who were on duty in Manhattan that night. Unless the messenger gave someone time to change clips, the presence of both snoozers and thudwumpers implies two shooters. I’d bet at least one of them would be willing to skid on you to save his own skin.”

“I’d take that bet, actually,” he said with a touch of grim humor. “But I’m forgetting—you don’t have anything left to bet with anymore, do you?”

“You really think your people will fall on their swords for you?”

“No falling necessary,” he said calmly. “All you’ve got is conjecture. There’s absolutely no proof of any of it.”

“And the courts are open to the highest bidder?”

He shrugged. “I wouldn’t go quite that far,” he said. “But you’d be surprised what the right legal representation can do.”

“What about the court of public opinion?” I persisted. “This kind of accusation splashed across the media would make you look pretty bad. And you have plenty of enemies ready to fan the flames.”

He smiled tightly. “You, of all people, should know how fickle public opinion is,” he said. “A couple of months, and whatever fire you managed to kindle would quietly burn itself out.”

I glanced up at McMicking. He was looking back at me, his face completely neutral. “So you’re not afraid of me, the courts, or public opinion,” I said, looking back at Hardin. “Is there anything you are afraid of?”

“Nothing that’s worth a trillion dollars in hush money,” he said. “And now you really have outstayed your welcome.” He started to get up.

“How about the Spiders?” I asked.

He paused halfway up. “What do you mean?”

“Oh, that’s right—you didn’t know,” I said, as if the thought had only now occurred to me. “The man your people killed was an agent for the Spiders. The way I hear it, the Spiders are very unhappy about his death.”

Slowly, Hardin sat down again. “It wasn’t the way you think,” he insisted, his voice tight. “Yes, I was concerned about this stranger hanging around; and yes, I wanted him out of the picture. But I never wanted him dead. That was a completely unauthorized over-reaction.”

“I’m not sure that the Spiders would understand that kind of subtlety,” I said. “And I’d bet you’d lose an awful lot of money if they embargoed you from shipping anything through the Quadrail. Probably a lot more than a measly trillion dollars.”

His eyes hardened. “This is blackmail.”

“This is business,” I corrected. “Can I expect your credit authorization in a timely fashion? Or do you need the Spiders to cut off all your shipments for a month or two to prove you can’t slide anything past them?”

For a dozen heartbeats he continued to glare at me. Then the corner of his mouth curled in surrender. “The money will be messengered to you by tomorrow afternoon,” he said, his voice as dark-edged as a death notice.

“Thank you,” I said. “If it helps any, the money will be going to a very worthy cause.”

“I’m sure it will,” he ground out. “Once you leave this apartment, you’re to stay out of my way. Far out of my way.”

“Understood,” I said, getting to my feet. I looked again at McMicking, got a microscopic nod of confirmation in return. Hardin would pay up, all right, and he wouldn’t make trouble. McMicking would see to that.

And in paying up, Hardin would save the Spiders, the Quadrail, and the entire galaxy. Just one more bit of irony for my new collection. “Thank you, Mr. Hardin. I’ll see myself out.”

Six months later, I stood at the edge of the icecap that covered Yandro’s Great Polar Sea and waited for the enemy to appear.

He came in the form of a dumpy little man in a polar suit who emerged from a small meteorological station perched on the Polar Sea’s rocky shore. “Hello,” he called as he walked toward me. “Can I help you?”

“Hello, Modhri,” I said. “Remember me?”

For a moment the man just stared. Then his eyes seemed to go blank, his face sagged briefly, and he nodded. “Compton,” he said, his voice subtly changed. “You who disappeared, only to return from the dead.”

“Which is more than can be said for that particular segment of your mind, of course,” I said. “My condolences.”

“A great mystery, still unsolved,” the Modhri said. “Would you care to tell me the story?”

“There’s not much to tell,” I said. “The mind segment tried to kill me. I killed him instead.”

“And now you face me here,” the Modhri said, his eyes glittering with anticipation. “A very accommodating Human, saving me the trouble of preparing a suitable death for you in the far reaches of the galaxy.”