Verkan Vall nodded. “That ties in with what you learned at Assassins’ Hall,” he said. “They’re hiding out somewhere. Is there any chance of reaching Dirzed through the Society of Assassins?”
Olirzon shook his head. “If you’re right—and that’s the way it looks to me, too—he’s probably just called in and notified the Society that he’s still carnate and so is the Lady Dallona, and called off any search the Society might be making for him.”
“And I’ve got to find the Lady Dallona as soon as I can. Well, if I can’t reach her, maybe I can get her to send word to me,” Verkan Vall said. “That’s going to take some doing, too.”
“What did you find out, Lord Virzal?” Olirzon asked. He had a piece of soft leather, now, and was polishing his blade lovingly.
“The Reincarnation Research people don’t know anything,” Verkan Vall replied. “Dr. Harnosh of Hosh thinks she’s discarnate. I did find out that the experimental work she’s done, so far, has absolutely disproved the theory of Statistical Reincarnation. The Volitionalists’ theory is solidly established.”
“Yes, what do you think, Olirzon?” Marnik added. “They have a case on record of a man who worked up from field hand to millionaire in five reincarnations. Deliberately, that is.” He went on to repeat what Harnosh of Hosh had said; he must have possessed an almost eidetic memory, for he gave the bearded psychicist’s words verbatim, and threw in the gestures and voice-inflections.
Olirzon grinned. “You know, there’s a chance for the easy-money boys,” he considered. “ ‘You, too, can Reincarnate as a millionaire! Let Dr. Nirzutz of Futzbutz Help You! Only 49.98 System Monetary Units for the Secret, Infallible, Autosuggestive Formula.’ And would it sell!” He put away the hone and the bit of leather and slipped his knife back into its sheath. “If I weren’t a respectable Assassin, I’d give it a try, myself.”
Verkan Vall looked at his watch. “We’d better get something to eat,” he said. “We’ll go down to the main dining room; the Martian Room, I think they call it. I’ve got to think of some way to let the Lady Dallona know I’m looking for her.”
The Martian Room, fifteen stories down, was a big place, occupying almost half of the floor space of one corner tower. It had been fitted to resemble one of the ruined buildings of the ancient and vanished race of Mars who were the ancestors of Terran humanity. One whole side of the room was a gigantic cine-solidograph screen, on which the gullied desolation of a Martian landscape was projected; in the course of about two hours, the scene changed from sunrise through daylight and night to sunrise again.
It was high noon when they entered and found a table; by the time they had finished their dinner, the night was ending and the first glow of dawn was tinting the distant hills. They sat for a while, watching the light grow stronger, then got up and left the table.
There were five men at a table near them; they had come in before the stars had grown dim, and the waiters were just bringing their first dishes. Two were Assassins, and the other three were of a breed Verkan Vall had learned to recognize on any timeline—the arrogant, cocksure, ambitious, leftist politician, who knows what is best for everybody better than anybody else does, and who is convinced that he is inescapably right and that whoever differs with him is not only an ignoramus but a venal scoundrel as well. One was a beefy man in a gold-laced cream-colored dress tunic; he had thick lips and a too-ready laugh. Another was a rather monkish-looking young man who spoke earnestly and rolled his eyes upward, as though at some celestial vision. The third had the faint powdering of gray in his black hair which was, among the Akor-Neb people, almost the only indication of advanced age.
“Of course it is; the whole thing is a fraud,” the monkish young man was saying angrily. “But we can’t prove it.”
“Oh, Sirzob, here, can prove anything, if you give him time,” the beefy one laughed. “The trouble is, there isn’t too much time. We know that that communication was a fake, prearranged by the Volitionalists, with Dr. Harnosh and this Dallona of Hadron as their tools. They fed the whole thing to that idiot boy hypnotically, in advance, and then, on a signal, he began typing out this spurious communication. And then, of course, Dallona and this Assassin of hers ran off somewhere together, so that we’d be blamed with discarnating or abducting them, and so that they wouldn’t be made to testify about the communication on a lie detector.”
A sudden happy smile touched Verkan Vall’s eyes. He caught each of his Assassins by an arm.
“Marnik, cover my back,” he ordered. “Olirzon, cover everybody at the table. Come on!”
Then he stepped forward, halting between the chairs of the young man and the man with the gray hair and facing the beefy man in the light tunic.
“You!” he barked. “I mean you.”
The beefy man stopped laughing and stared at him; then sprang to his feet. His hand, streaking toward his left armpit, stopped and dropped to his side as Olirzon aimed a pistol at him. The others sat motionless.
“You,” Verkan Vall continued, “are a complete, deliberate, malicious, and unmitigated liar. The Lady Dallona of Hadron is a scientist of integrity, incapable of falsifying her experimental work. What’s more, her father is one of my best friends; in his name, and in hers, I demand a full retraction of the slanderous statements you have just made.”
“Do you know who I am?” the beefy one shouted.
“I know what you are,” Verkan
