Jon Arthur was all affable interest and musical companionship. He had learned what he needed to know.
It was as he left Weddergren’s, still a little dazed by what the scientist had displayed, that the first attempt was made on his life.
It was a clumsy attempt and undoubtedly Populist in origin. An Academy assassin might simply have brushed against him and deposited a few bacilli; it was fortunate that the Populists’ abhorrence of science extended even to its criminal uses.
The plan had obviously been to insert a knife between his ribs. The moment he sensed the rush of his attacker, he set his muscles in the Fifth Position of juzor—that extraordinary blend of Terran judo and Martian zozor on which he had spent so many months under Steele Morrison’s eye, with Steele’s sharp tongue keeping him going whenever he was tempted to point out the absurdity of a peace-loving music critic as a juzor-expert secret agent.
Somewhat to his amazement, the Fifth Position worked. The Populist lay sprawled on the sidewalk, looking like a not too bright but rather friendly young man who has just passed out amiably. Arthur did not stop to check if the skull was fractured in the precise spot indicated in the book of instructions; he simply pocketed the knife and, once he had convinced himself there was not another on his tail, hurried to “Headquarters.”
“So now maybe you’ll begin to think it’s serious,” Morrison grunted after the third drink, “Until you reach Kleinbach and get back with his message—if he’ll give you one—your chances of enjoying good health are about as good as for a bonfire on an airless asteroid. Especially watch it on the liner; they’re bound to have somebody aboard.”
They did, but it was a week before Jon Arthur spotted him.
The liner was one of the new deluxe fleet, completely autogravitized and hyperjetted to the point where the trip to Venus was cut down to three months. With the election seven months off, a half-year’s round trip left him one month to find Kleinbach and persuade him; that was timing it as fine as writing music for splitsecond telecast tapes.
But all the time-tension would come when they hit Venusberg. For three months on the liner there was nothing to do but enjoy himself—and, incidentally, stay alive.
The latter task seemed to offer no difficulties at the moment; certainly neither did the former, once he began to become really acquainted with Faustina Parva.
The audition winner had at first treated him merely with the courtesy due to a judge who had cast one of the votes that sent her to Venus. The slight coldness that he had detected in her singing was accentuated in her speaking personality, and he was more than willing now to believe that she was Dr. Wedtiergren’s creation.
Then, one week out, came the episode of her practicing.
Whether it was consideration for others or the sense of relaxation that strikes all space voyagers, Jon Arthur was uncertain; the first seemed a little unlikely. But for a week she had refrained from practicing. Now she began.
The most beautiful voice in the world (which it was quite possible that the Parva possessed) is somewhat lacking in appeal when it practices scales, when it takes one single phrase of great technical difficulty and scant musical interest and repeats it, worries it, frets it until at last the phrase is perfect and the accidental listener is cutting out paper dolls.
No space crew in history has ever mutinied, but few space crews have traveled with a contralto whose tremendous voice can fill an amphitheater—or a space liner.
What made Jon Arthur pause in front of the captain’s cabin was the unusual quality of intense emotion in the Parva’s voice.
“You can’t do this!” she was saying, toward the very top of her extensive range. “I have to practice. If I go three months without practicing, I’ll land at Venusberg in such shape that Mme. Storm will wonder why they ever picked me!”
“If you go three months with practicing, my dear young lady,” the captain announced, “there won’t be a man on this liner capable of landing you at Venus-berg!”
It was a pretty impasse, Arthur thought. Both parties were unquestionably right. It seemed a problem to which there was no key . . .
Key . . .
Key . . . !
Jon Arthur pushed open the door. “Pardon me, I couldn’t help overhearing the discussion. Wouldn’t it solve the problem,” he hurried on before he could be interrupted, “if Miss Parva were assigned one hour a day in which she might practice in one of the air locks?”
Both captain and contralto stared at him, then turned to each other with broad smiles.
“So the key was the lock,” Arthur was saying to the Parva later in the bar. “Vacuumsealed, soundproof. . .”
“I’m afraid I’m very much indebted to you.” She sounded as though she really regretted the fact. “First the audition, now this . . .”
“Honestly, I’m indebted to you.” Why had he thought her plain at that audition? “Simply for existing with the voice that you have.”
“Do you mind?” a man’s voice asked. “Since we’re all going to the same place, why not get acquainted now?”
The Parva seemed not to place him, but Arthur’s mind rang instantly with sounds about saddles and hounds and the treble shout of the merry rout. The robustious baritone introduced himself as Ivor Harden, explained that though he’d lost out on the scholarship he had scraped up barely enough money to make it on his
