“Garrett,” he said, “you’re not going to believe this. But in some twisted, crazy, and very damned beautiful way I’m proud of this assignment. Sure, I know, I’m the guy that was going to write for posterity and here I am making a fortune under a dome in Sollywood and drinking my liver out of existence. But some things are still important to me, and Devarupa’s one of them. People take him for granted now. They take for granted the whole state of peace that he created. They’re forgetting that peace itself is the greatest of all battles. What I want to do—”
The dictotyper pinged. Uranov removed the finished copy, looked at it, and crumpled it up with a curse. Then he smoothed it out again and laid it on his desk. “It might do. I can’t write this right; but I’m going to die trying. What I want to stress is his early years. Even before that. I want to show the false peaces in the War of the Twentieth Century, the T9 to ’39 gap, for instance. The way the smug sat back and said ‘Swell, it’s peace, now there’s nothing to worry about.’ And you stop worrying and you cease to belong to mankind. Then I want to take some of Devarupa’s own utterances—the Bombay Document, for example—and show the real fighting strength that’s in them. I’ve got to make these dopes see that pacifism isn’t passivism—while S.B.,” he added despondently, “bewitches the whole thing up with our darling Astra.”
Garrett drank. “I’m with you,” he said simply.
“What I’d even like,” Uranov went on heatedly, “is to work in a little propaganda at the end on this Martian business—show how a true living peace can function. You know, a sort of ‘Join the space crews and see another world’ whoozit. And, God, there is something you can get really excited about. To think of those—how many is it, near thirty now?—who’ve made the landing, accomplished man’s impossible dream, and died there, on a bitterer one-way trip than any criminal ever made, all because this peaceful world—”
He broke off as Garrett was reaching for the bottle again. “Sorry. I talk too much. And in another minute you’ll be asking me why I don’t sign up myself if I feel so strongly. For the matter of that, why don’t I? Nice swizard you’re wearing there.”
“Very. It’s a Kubi— Hey! Did you say swizard? Then you know her?”
“Know who?”
“The girl who used to call them swizards when she was little. Black hair. Blue eyes. Funny little nose that tilts up. You know her?”
Uranov frowned. “I know her,” he said abstractedly. “Works here in public relations. Fix you up any time, though how you— But what’s your swizard made of? Lovestonite?”
“Yes.”
“Funny use for it. Why, you don’t maybe—” He killed the bottle. “If we’re going to get together on this, comrade, you know what we need? A drink. Come on. We’re going to paint Sollywood a bright magenta and end up seeing pink swizards. And maybe before the evening’s over, we’ll even have a talk about lovestonite.”
“I should just warn you,” said Gan Garrett. “Don’t mind if a dagger hits you. It’ll be meant for me.”
But the next attack was not made with a dagger. It took place hours later when they were leaving the Selene, that resplendent night spot with its exact replica of its famous namesake in Luna City, even down to the longest bar in the universe—a safe enough statement so long as no spaceship had yet managed to return from another planet.
“In a way, you can’t blame S.B.,” Uranov was saying. This surprising tolerance was the only noticeable effect on him of the evening’s liquor. “He’s a frustrated creator. He’d flopped as a writer and as a musician before he discovered his executive talents. He hasn’t a spark of the creative ability that I used to have or that a man like Mig Valentinez has; but he’s got all the urge. And he takes it out in shoving around the ones who can create and then crying, ‘Behold my creation!’ In a way, it’s sad rather than—”
The man appeared out of nowhere. He wore a heavy cloak and was only a black blob in the bright night. The flash came from the core of the blackness of his cloak, and there was no noise with it.
Gan Garrett’s eyes blinked as he jumped, his popgun appearing automatically in his hand, and when they opened, the man was gone. Ten minutes of joint search failed to disclose him, though his cloak lay abandoned around the next corner.
“Did you see what he had in his hand?” Uranov asked. “It looked like a prop pistol from an historical picture. But it didn’t—” He stopped by the wall where the attack had happened, stared, and whistled.
Garrett looked at the charred xyloid.
“Could it—” Uranov groped. “It can’t be that. . . that somebody really has found the power of disintegrator guns, like in that world-of-the-future epic I turned out last year?”
Garrett rubbed his cheek. “I felt something. I didn’t dodge quite enough to—”
“Look, my boy.” Uranov was serious. “I thought it was a gag when you babbled about daggers. I don’t know what this
