The last attack came on the night of the captain’s dinner. In the concert that followed, Arthur heard Parva sing (other than in practice) for the first time since the audition. She did not choose to unleash her pyrotechnics for this somewhat indifferent audience. She merely sang a few popular songs, and the dark rich purity of her voice was as clean and deep as Space itself.
When Ivor Harden began (he had the incredible nerve to sing Jet Song to the spacemen who had grown up on it), Arthur slipped out to the smoking chamber. Parva’s singing had stirred him deeply (what was it Steele had said about Kleinbach and Storm?), but that was partly because he was a specialist, a connoisseur. He had watched the unmoved faces of the average listener . . .
The attack came from a direction which indicated the defensive use of the Seventh Position of juzor—which was also advisable because it was reasonably certain to leave the attacker alive . . . and in no mood to argue.
Arthur retrieved the weapon—one of those damnable South Martian thorns, as long as your forearm and instant death once the bloodstream meets it—and looked down at the gasping understeward. The door was still open; Harden was off to hounds with a treble shout for an encore.
Arthur weighed the thorn suggestively and nodded toward the source of the voice. “He hired you to do it, didn’t he? So he’d have an alibi from the whole ship’s company.”
Nerve-wrenched and feeble though he was, the steward protested. “He didn’t have to hire me. I’m as good a Populist as he is any day! The hell with science! Let’s be men again!”
“And all have a jolly time sticking thorns in each other . . . Get out! Tell him he’ll have to try again—oh, and another message: Tell him he’s still flatting on his G’s.”
Tomorrow they would land. Ivor’s opportunities should be plentiful on a strange planet. Now to stay alive until he found Kleinbach . . .
Irita Storm had been (Arthur had seen early stereos) as enchanting a soubrette as ever graced operetta and opera, with a voice whose light brilliance had been supported by a strong lower register. Now at 65, she retained only her middle voice, but with so complete a command of style and musicianship that you hardly regretted the absence of necessary notes. And she had so perfected the soubrette’s art of coquetry that you could enjoy it as an abstract technical triumph without concern over the more physiological aspects of the male-female relationship.
But there was little coquetry evident, even though she was alone with a man, when she talked with Jon Arthur after first hearing the Parva. Her professional concern was too strong.
“Of course you were right as a judge to select her,” she pouted. “It’s one of those voices that make legends. It’s in the tremendous tradition—Pasta, Mantelli, Schumann-Heink, Geyer, Supervia, Pharris, Krushelnitsa . . . and now Parva. And she’s trained to perfection—nothing for me to do there. But my dear young man, can you imagine the greatest voice in the world with the emotional and interpretive warmth of a carefully constructed robot?”
“I can,” Arthur smiled, “because I’ve heard it. The robot, I mean, and I will say that Parva comes closer to humanity than that.”
“I’m furious, do you hear me? There’s never been a voice so perfected—and so wasted! It’s high time she came here! Give me six months. That’s all I ask, young man—six months, and you won’t know her!”
Six months, Jon Arthur reflected as he left, and you may not know the system . . .
He had met one impasse after another since his arrival on Venus. He had expected to receive almost immediately one of the familiar rice-paper messages; he had received nothing. Even, in its way, more perturbing: he had expected the necessity of holding his guard high against Ivor Harden and his allies; he had moved unharmed through an apparently tranquil existence.
The cliff he was strolling along, the surf far below, reminded him of the Big Sur country in California. Venus had, in most respects, proved surprisingly Ter-ra-like after the great project of the gyro-condensers had removed the vapor layer. But it was to him a Never-Never-Terra in which his tensions and problems seemed to have removed themselves—and thereby agonizingly increased his anxiety.
No clue anywhere to the retreat of Kleinbach, and yet the message had been so specific—and someone should have contacted him at once. There had been, he’d learned, two recent “accidental” deaths on the staff of the Storm Resident Laboratory. That might explain the lack of contact—but then what explained his own charmed life? Why not an “accident” to—
He heard a soft chuckle behind him and sprang around through one hundred and eighty degrees of arc so that he should be no longer between the sound and the cliff.
Ivor Harden smiled at him almost patronizingly. “These cliffs are dangerous,” he observed. “You should be more careful.” And he walked off with as strictly ham a laugh as any baritone ever emitted at the end of the creed in Otello.
Jon Arthur stared after him. In his preoccupation he had almost invited Harden to kill him. The opportunity had been perfect. But the baritone had declined it, and even made a point of stressing his forbearance.
Therefore . . .
“He’s either dead or dying,” he said flatly to Mme. Storm. “They don’t even care now whether I reach him. But they’re stupid—they may have guessed wrong; there may still be a chance. You must take me to him.”
Mme. Storm fluttered her eyelashes with a skill rarely attained at an age when they are worth fluttering. “My dear boy,” she murmured with the faintest hint of throatiness, “flattering though it is to be accused of having a lover hidden away . . .”
“You’re the only one of his former intimates on Venus. He loved you once. He’d turn to you when he was
