“The way we are right now, this is a palace.” Sam clasped his hand. “No way I can thank you, really, grozh.”
“No need. Who knows? You may be doing the same for me someday.” He squeezed her arm. “Enjoy what you can. I’ll check in every now and then.” He stepped back through the doorway, and the wall-segment rolled back into place.
“Of course,” Dar observed, “you realize we can’t get out now.”
“Lesser of two evils.” Sam settled herself on one of the hard chairs. “We can get him to tell us when the next ship lands, and duck out to the port.”
“A month in this crackerbox?”
“This one, or one like it, maintained by the authorities.” Sam shrugged. “Your choice. Personally, I’ll take this one.”
“No contest,” Dar sighed, flopping down onto the other chair. “I didn’t know your tribe was so widespread.”
“There’re a lot of us—an awful lot. Oh, there always have been some, at least as far back as the late nineteenth century—but they’re always a minority, unless something’s going wrong in the government. When a political system has engine trouble, alternative cultures spread.”
“Until the engine starts running again?”
Sam nodded. “But the numbers have been on the increase, steadily, for more than a hundred years now.”
“I always seem to come in on the end of things,” Dar sighed.
“And the beginning.” Sam’s face lit with a rare, dazzling smile. “That’s what comes after the end, you know.”
The monster in his dream was knocking on his head with a very loud, hollow sound. Dar waded up out of the morass of slumber to check on the objectivity of the knocking.
Sure enough, it was objective—but in the drab reality of their roomlet, it sounded only as a tapping, not a booming pounding.
Dar frowned. Why would the AYM tap? He knew how to open the door!
Therefore, the tapper didn’t know how.
Therefore, it wasn’t the AYM.
Dar reached out and squeezed Sam’s ankle. Her head came up slowly, eyes squinting painfully. “What …?”
“Sh.” Dar laid a finger across her lips, then pointed toward the wall/door.
She turned toward the tapping, irritated. He could virtually see her brain waking up as her eyes widened and her mind traced the same path of logic his had.
“Double-crossed?” Dar whispered.
“Can’t be!” Sam scrambled to her feet. “I just won’t believe it!”
The door/wall began to hum.
“Uh oh.” Dar tried to get between Sam and the entryway. “He found the right leaf.”
The door rolled back to show a segment of a man.
It was sort of the center stripe of a personality. Dar could see the man’s face, and a little of his shoulders to either side (he had no neck), a slice of chest and belly, one knee and the other thigh, and the middle of the front of an armchair. The rest of both the man and the armchair went on to either side of the doorway and, from the look of him, went on for quite a distance. If the average Falstavian was fat, he was enormous. His face was a beachball with four chins and a blob of nose over a thin-lipped, tight mouth. But the eyes, tiny as currants in a vat of dough, were sharp and alive, quick with intelligence, chill with shrewdness. His chest and belly had been cast in one piece and, if there was a ribcage beneath, it was sunk full fathom five. His legs were sections of whale, and his foot was the whaleboat.
The chair floated a good eighteen inches off the floor—anti-gravity, no doubt; and the connection sparked in Dar’s mind: the man couldn’t get out of the chair. He couldn’t move without it. That fat.
“Greetings,” Gargantua said. “I am Myles Croft.”
“Uh—a pleasure. I suppose.” Dar was willing to take a chance on it; after all, the man couldn’t get in. “Let me guess—you’re the landlord, and it’s the first of the month.”
“Closer than you intended.” The mouth didn’t smile, but the eyes twinkled. “I have the honor to be mayor of Haskerville.”
Dar levered his jaw back in place and swallowed.
“We’re doing better than I thought,” Sam said behind him. “The Humes’re getting chummy with the mayor.”
“Not particularly.” The irony in Croft’s voice had to be humor. “No one needed to tell me where you were hidden. Once I’d heard that you’d escaped from the House of Houses, it was obvious you’d be somewhere back in Haskerville—and, since I knew the lady of the party was a Hume, it was logical to conclude you’d seek refuge in this quarter.”
Sam nodded. “All right, so far as it goes—but how’d you know about the two of us? … Hold on, cancel that! Of course. If the police knew, you’d know. But how’d you know we’d been taken to Sard, let alone that we’d escaped?”
“I have my sources.”
“Interesting, interesting.” Dar nodded slowly. “But how’d you know which building to look in?”
“If anyone had hidden you, it would logically be Anthony Marne, who’s as much of a leader as the Humes have.”
“Angry-young-man type?”
“I thought you’d met. Therefore, you’d probably be hidden in his building—so I surveyed the establishment floor by floor, until I realized one hall was noticeably shorter than the others. Beyond that, I believe you heard my search for the activating control.”
Dar just stared.
Then he gave his head a quick shake. “Did you ever consider taking up detective work?”
“Frequently, young man—and I frequently do. The mayor should know something about the goings-on in his own city.”
“But if you know all that, the House shouldn’t be able to get away with anything, and ninety percent of your citizens ought to be in jail.”
The huge face smiled into waves of fat. “You are observant, young man. I leave it to your imagination to determine why all are still at large. Suffice it to say that I have some rather elaborate plans, which are working rather well in practice; but they result in a delicate balance, which could very easily be upset by a new and random factor.”
Dar’s spine turned into an icicle. “You mean us.”
Croft nodded. “It is in my interest to see that you’re removed from my planet as quickly as possible.”
“Shouldn’t you have brought along a little protection on this jaunt?” Sam asked grimly.
“I think not. I’ve discussed you with a friend of mine, and he seems to have high regard for you.”
“Well, it’s nice to have a good reference.” Dar was wary. “Who’s our yea-sayer?”
“A Mr. Tambourin; he styles himself ‘Whitey the Wino.’ And, too, I think, all things considered, that the best way to remove you from circulation is to assist you in your progress.”
“You mean you’ll get us out of here?” Dar pounced on it.
“I had that in mind, yes. You’ve certainly done nothing meriting permanent incarceration; but the longer you’re here, the more disruptive you’ll be. And I don’t relish having two police forces on my planet.”
“Two?” Now it was Sam who pounced. “Where’d the second one come from?”
“A gentleman named Canis Destinus, I believe. He came to me yesterday morning, bearing a letter ‘To Whom It May Concern,’ from the Secretary for Internal Security for the I.D.E., requesting the reader to aid Mr. Destinus in any way possible. But the Secretary, as you may know, is head of the reactionary LORDS party …”
“I didn’t,” Sam said, “but I’m glad to.”
“Mr. Destinus seems to be more than he appears,” Dar said softly.
“Really? I thought his appearance quite indicative; looks somewhat like a rat.”