Sam swung the door open. They stepped into a room decorated in Late-Modern Junkyard. The walls were plain pastel-painted plastiboard, decorated with hangings of knotted, brightly colored twine, some of which held potted plants. The tables were plastic delivery drums, and the “chairs” were tree stumps, somewhat leveled off on the bottom. There was a counter against one wall; Dar recognized a section of it—it had “Wolmar” rolled across it. The far end was topped by an arcane plastic contraption that gave off clouds of steam and a rich, spicy aroma.
Most of the tables were filled, and all the patrons had shaved heads and loose gray coveralls. So, for that matter, did the people behind the counter. The musicians, on a small raised platform at the far end, wore the same attire.
Dar paused just inside the doorway, feeling a prickling along the back of his neck. He couldn’t help it; he felt as though he’d just stepped into a village populated by a tribe he hadn’t met, who might or might not be hostile.
“Don’t worry,” Sam murmured, “you’re with me.”
She sauntered over to the counter. A girl who looked enough like her to make Dar rub his eyes, came over and said, “Yeah?” in a neutral tone.
“Two cups,” Sam said, and Dar felt in his purse for nails. The girl turned to the arcane contraption, picked up a cup, and pressed a valve; then she turned back to them with two steaming mugs. “New here.”
“Am,” Sam confirmed. “Just in from Wolmar.”
Panic jammed Dar’s stomach up toward his throat. Why not just send up a rocket that’d explode into the words, “Here’re the suspects!”
But the girl’s face came alive. “The prison planet? Where they’re oppressing the natives? Hey, tell me about it!”
“Yeah, me too!” A tall, lanky man lounged up to lean on the bar beside Sam.
“Wolmar? I want to hear this!”
“Hey! The real word?”
In thirty seconds, they were surrounded by a small crowd. Dar kept trying to edge closer and closer to the counter, and to glance over both shoulders at once; but Sam launched happily into an account of her tour of Wolmar. Dar was amazed at her accuracy; under equivalent conditions, he couldn’t have resisted the temptation to color the tale a little, probably putting in a bevy of scantily clad maidens and a hair-raising escape from a bloodthirsty tribe or two; but Sam stuck to reporting what she’d seen and heard, introducing Dar as her guide, which won him a look of respect, then glares of scorn when she mentioned his being a trader, then looks of awe when she explained his teaching function.
“You mean it’s not really a prison colony?”
Sam shrugged. “Depends on how you look at it. They’ve all been sentenced to go there.”
“They’re not really oppressing the natives?” The asker sounded almost disappointed.
“No—but look what they are doing!” Sam fairly glowed with missionary fervor as she went into an explanation of Cholly’s educational program. Dar listened, enthralled. He hadn’t known he was that much of a hero.
“Hey—it sounds like heaven,” said one Hume, with a shaky laugh.
“Yeah. What crime do I have to commit to get sent there?” another joked; but the laughter that followed had a rather serious echo.
“Well, don’t jump too soon.” Sam leaned on the counter and pushed her cup over for a refill. “The Bureau of Otherworldly Affairs sent out a new governor.”
Dar was delighted at the groan.
“Bastards always gotta foul up something good when they find it,” muttered one Angry Young Man.
“Establishments can’t stand progress,” growled another.
“Yeah, but BOA didn’t figure on Shacklar.” Sam sipped her refill with relish.
“Why? What could he do?” The AYM frowned.
“Well, the new governor’s credentials kinda got, uh, ‘lost,’ before he could show them to Shacklar. And by the time Shacklar got done with him, he’d decided to resign and join the colony.”
The room rocked with a hoot of laughter. The AYM smote the counter gleefully. “Go, General! The Organic Will Grow, in spite of the defoliators!”
Sam nodded. “Dar and I got the job of carrying his resignation back to Terra. But the new ex-governor’s lefthand man didn’t like the whole idea, so he set out to sabotage us.”
“How?” The AYM scowled. “What could he do?”
“Well, first off, he seems to have wrangled himself in as the pilot of the courier ship that brought us here—and he sicced a bunch of pirates on us as soon as we broke out of H-space.”
A low mutter of anger ran around the crowd.
“Oh, it was okay—we got out of it, all right, and got picked up by a patrol cruiser. But when we got here, we found out he’d told the Haskerville government that one of us was a telepath and was a threat to social order.”
“You?” a voice hooted. “You’re the witches they’re hunting?”
“What’ve they got against telepaths, anyway?” the AYM grumbled. “They’re not hurting anybody.”
“Especially when they aren’t really telepaths,” Sam agreed. “But the House of Houses got wind of it, too, and tried to ‘script us. So we’re on the run two ways, and running out of hideouts.”
A chorus of protest filled the room, and a dozen Humes thrust forward with offers of sympathy.
“Sons o’ sobakas,” the AYM growled. “Just let one person try do do something decent, and they throw every roller they can in your way! Come on! We’ll hide you!”
And the whole crowd swirled them out with a chorus of agreement. Dar started to dig in his heels in alarm, then noticed Sam whirling by with a delighted grin. He relaxed, and let himself be borne by the current.
It deposited them in the street outside, with only the AYM and a few other Humes.
“Come on!” the AYM declared, and he set off down the street. Dar had to hurry to catch up.
“Lucky bumping into you,” Sam was saying as he came up with them.
“Not all that much luck. This’s the ideal place for us—they leave us alone.”
Dar could see why. The townsfolk would want to stay as far away as they could from the drab Humes and their shoestring existence. Of course, the shortage of radio communication and police might have had something to do with it, too—if the system was rigged to stay out of the way of the taxpayers’ pleasures, it wouldn’t be able to bother anyone else much, either.
The AYM led them into an old building that looked as though it had been an office collection in its youth, but had been converted to dwelling purposes. The liftshaft still operated, and took them up to the third level.
“Got to exploring one day.” The AYM ran his fingers over the bas-reliefs that decorated the wall at the end of the corridor. “I was doing a rubbing here, and I must have pressed just hard enough on the right thing, because …”
Something clicked; a hum sprang up; then, slowly, a portion of the wall retracted, to leave a doorway about two meters high.
Dar stared. Then, slowly, he nodded. “A very interesting suite.”
“Yeah, isn’t it?” The AYM grinned. “I don’t know what kind of business the office had in the old days, but they must’ve had some kind of a security problem. Import-export trade, at a guess.”
Dar stooped through the doorway. “Don’t suppose it comes equipped with little luxuries like light.”
“Try the wall-plate.”
It hadn’t occurred to Dar that there might be one. He slid his hand over the wall until he felt the smoother rectangle. It responded to his skin temperature by glowing a small, dim plate in the ceiling into life.
Sam stepped through, too. “You knew we were coming?”
“No, but I had a notion I might need it someday.” The AYM pointed to a few boxes of sealed packets and demijohns against the lefthand wall. “Made a deposit every time I could scrounge a little extra. There’s a week’s supply in here, at least. Pretty plain—biscuit and fruit, and some meat, and nothing to drink but water—but it’ll keep you alive.” He pointed to a neat stack of blankets just beyond the two straight chairs. “That’s all I could scrounge for sleeping and sitting. But all I promised was a hideout.”