The next three days were a time of lazy waiting. I ate and slept and sat around and felt my battered body rebuilding
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itself. I shaved the beard away and was astonished at the face revealed beneath; it was unchanged. All over my body were the marks of my recent existence, everywhere but on my face. Hidden away beneath all the hair, this face had survived intact, unscathed, looking now foolish and anachronistic, a lone toy forgotten and left behind in the room of a boy who has grown up.
The Embassay doctor looked me over and pronounced me in surprisingly good condition, considering my recent history. As to my wrist, he told me the amputation had been rough and ready but the wrist had healed well, the residual pain should soon end, and a prosthetic hand could be attached to the stump with little or no trouble.
"Not here, of course," he said. "On Earth. I doubt there's any prosthetic devices at all on this benighted planet."
The UC people I met within the Embassy were unanimous in their hatred and contempt of Anarchaos and the entirety of its population.
On the morning of the fourth day Chafrey came to me at breakfast and said, "We've got transportation for you to Ni. When you've had breakfast well go on up."
"I'm done now," I said.
I had wanted to ask for transit to Ulik, but it would have been hard to explain why I wanted to go back there without also explaining about Gar, so I'd agreed to the trip to Ni. The Embassy people assumed I would then take the next shuttle flight off-planet, and I said nothing to dissuade them. The fact was, I intended to pick up some more money and fresh clothing from my luggage checked at Ni, and then return to Ulik by surface transportation, as I had done the first time.
Chafrey and I went up in the elevator to the roof, where the helicopters landed. The elevator opened into a small bare room with a bench along one wall. Chafrey walked over to the door across the way, opened it, and said, "Here he is, Mr. Rose."
Thank you." A youngish, smiling, burly man came in and looked at me. "You ran away," he said. His head was shaved.
Rose!
Chafrey said, as the second one came in, "Can you and Mr. Malik handle him all right?" x
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"Oh, I'm sure we can," said Rose. He produced a pistol and pointed it at me. "Don't be stupid now," he said.
I yelled, "Chafrey! What have you done?"
"You weren't even smart about it," Chafrey said to me, and I could hear in his voice the hatred and contempt these people all expressed when they spoke of Anarchaos or its inhabitants. "Didn't you know we'd check? No Rolf Malone arrived at Ni Spaceport within the last six months or the last year or the last two years!"
^But I did! I did!"
"The only Rolf Malone on their list down there is a man who came here over four years ago, went to work for Ice Syndicate, and was shot by robbers. Ice Syndicate reported his death. You're an escaped slave, all right, but everything else you said was hogwash. The Union Commission isn't interested in what you people do to one another; you can stew in your own juices. Your owners reported you missing, warned us you might come here, and asked for you back." He gave Malik and Rose a look of superiority and contempt. "We were happy to oblige," he said sarcastically, turned on his heel, entered the elevator, and the doors slid shut in my face as I tried desperately and uselessly to run after him.
Rose said, softly, "You surprised us, Rolf. So we missed you the first time, isn't that odd?"
Malik spoke for the first time, saying, "But we're lucky. We've got a second chance."
They wouldn't dare shoot me here, in the UC building. I fought them, but they pinned my arms and dragged me out onto the roof and across the windy flatness to the green and yellow helicopter with the symbol on its side: A hammer with a dog's head.
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malik tapped my knee and pointed at the window. "Take a look," he said. "We're flying over Moro-Geth."
I looked, without interest. Below me was the familiar cluster of needle shapes surrounded by its sprawl of shacks, the whole scabbed over by the flushed light of Hell. "It's lovely," I said.
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Malik laughed and said, "I love you, Rolf; 111 be sorry to say goodbye to you." Then, laughing and shaking his head, he went up front to tell Rose the funny thing I had said.
I had now lived two days longer than I had expected, and in these two days I had come to know Malik and Rose well enough to be bored by them. They were no more than large children, great hearty boys with blunt hearty senses of humor and easy hearty camaraderie, even in the company of someone they had once tried to murder. Even in the company of someone they would soon be trying to murder once again.
My lethargy and boredom was perhaps at least partially the result of terror, of not knowing when my last breath would come, of not knowing what lay in store for me before that last breath was drawn. I found myself somnolent, always half asleep, never able to really care about what was happening to me.
It wasn't that I was drugged, though I might have been, since I did eat whatever they fed me. But this lethargy struck me earlier than that, came over me the instant Malik and Rose put their hands on me and dragged me out to the waiting helicopter. My resistance, useless anyway, ceased entirely once they had me inside the copter. I sat between them, my eyes closed as the copter lifted from the roof, and waited for the bullet.
It didn't come. Instead, I was flown a short distance to another tower, taken down inside it to a plain but comfortable room, and kept there for two days. I was fed, but not talked to, not threatened, not dealt with at all. It seemed almost as though they had forgotten what they meant to do with me.
Until today. Malik and Rose abruptly entered my room, joked together as I dressed, and then took me up to the top of the tower and back into the helicopter. The helicopter then flew us to an airfield I took to be south-west of Prudence, and we transferred to the plane in which we now were riding. On the plane, on the hangars, on the backs of the ground crew's coveralls, everywhere was that same yellow and green symbol, the hammer with the dog's head.
I roused myself sufficiently as we entered the plane to ask Malik, "What is this syndicate called?"
"Sledge," he said.
"What corporation has it?"
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He laughed in a jolly manner. "That would be telling,** he said. Then we took our seats, the plane lifted, and we traveled south and west under the red sun.
On the trip, Malik and Rose joked together and with me, their voices and manner turning the interior of the plane into a locker room after a strenuous game of some sort. I didn't even pretend to be interested.
After we flew over Moro-Geth, their heartiness seemed to diminish. They glanced at one another and at me like men entering a situation they themselves didn't fully understand. The plane seemed to veer away into a more determinedly western direction, Hell receded down the sky behind us, and out ahead grew the darkness and cold of the rim.
In a way, I welcomed that onrushing black. It was like going home, like leaving an evil place and going to a place that was safe. But of course that was foolish; I was traveling with Malik and Rose, and no place that they were would be safe for me.
Rose was the wanderer of the two. While Malik spent most of his time sitting near me, watching me, Rose drifted back and forth, sometimes up front with the pilot, sometimes back with us, sometimes in the compartment behind us, sometimes merely pacing the aisle like an usher waiting for the show to begin.