“You won’t know Cam.” Paula’s tense muscles throbbed. Her arms began to hurt from her thumbs to her shoulders. “She’s had a Styth education. She isn’t—”
Behind Lore Saba heaved himself up onto his knees. The redhead saw him. She wheeled, the gun swinging toward him, and Paula lunged into her. With a flat crack the gun fired into the floor. Saba blundered up onto his feet. Lore thrust Paula off and raised the gun again and Paula dove into her. She heard the nasty snap of the gun firing again. Lore struck her in the neck and she fell, but before Lore could turn Saba crashed into her.
The gun sailed off and Paula on her knees scrambled after it. Saba was still only half-conscious. He tripped, and Lore got away from him. She raced for the gun. Paula dropped stomach-first across it. Lore was panting. She wrenched at Paula, grabbing for the gun pressing into her stomach. Saba stumbled toward them. Lore dodged. She came up against the bed and tried to duck past him, and the Styth knocked her down and fell on her.
Paula rocked onto her side. She brought her knees up to her chest and dragged her cramped arms around under her feet. Lore Smythe lay still on her back. Beside her, Saba was trying to sit, his head wobbling. Paula went over to him and helped him get up.
“What’s going on?” he said, muzzy.
“You are a champion.” The dart was gone. On the front of his shirt was a damp stain. “I forgive you every rotten thing you’ve ever done. How do you feel?” Sliding her joined hands under his shirt, she found the wound in the heavy muscle of his chest. Part of the barbed needle was still stuck in his body.
“I feel…” He shook his head. His eyes were not focusing well. “She shot me.”
“She was about to shoot me, and with me it would have been permanent. Do you have any scissors?”
He blinked at her. She held up her hands and he blinked at the thumblock. He wagged his head down the room. She went past the bed to the washroom. On the glass shelf below the mirror was a pair of clippers. When she came out, the bedroom door was shaking under a heavy pounding knock.
“Prima!” It was Ketac.
“It’s all right,” she called. “Wait a minute.” She knelt behind Saba. The clipper blades were shorter than the thumb-bridge. She hacked at the tough plastic.
“She shot me,” he said.
“She shot you with a drug. She’s from the Sunlight League.”
“Paula,” Ketac roared. “Let me in.”
Saba’s head swung toward the door. “Stay the hell out!”
Paula bore down hard with both hands on the clippers, her teeth clenched, and the tool bit through half the thumblock. “Unh. She was taking you to Mars. I guess to ransom the Middle Planets. Cowboy stuff. All Fascists are romantics.” She struggled with the clippers.
Lore Smythe groaned. He flexed his arms, and the half-severed lock broke. On his hands and knees he went over to the Martian girl.
“Don’t—save her to question,” Paula said.
He put his hand on Lore’s throat and choked her. When she was dead, he came back to Paula and unfastened the lock on her thumbs.
“Damn Newrose.” He pulled her hands apart. “I told you he was fake.”
“He didn’t have anything to do with it.”
He touched his chest, and she caught his hand and held it away from the wound. “Be careful. There’s a piece of the needle broken off in there.”
He ground the heel of his hand into his eye and shook his head. “It’s still no good. Newrose.”
“Think about it, Saba. We have a hook in him now—we can pressure him now.”
“I don’t see the use.”
“You will when you wake up.”
Lore Smythe lay on the table, covered with a red blanket. Paula sat down in one of the three chairs before it, her back to the body. The only lights in the room were the two ceiling lamps near the door, and this end of the room was plunged in shadow. The Styths moved past her like shadows. Tanuojin went behind her to the table and pulled back the blanket.
“I wish you hadn’t killed her.”
“Don’t blame me. He did it.”
Ketac and David came single-file through the door. Ketac said, formal, “The Prima.” Saba walked into the room, and David ran up to arrange a chair for him.
“I’m telling you, this Martian is hoaxing us.” He sat down. “This won’t do any good.” Ketac and David hurried around bringing him a cup, putting a little round table beside him, turning out one lamp that shone in his eyes and turning on another. Junna came in to serve Tanuojin.
The tall man walked around the room, his hands on his hips. “If he really didn’t know about this Leaguer woman, maybe we can use it to get something out of him.”
Even if Newrose had known, Lore Smythe could be a tool. Paula hoped he had not known. She began to devise ways of talking the Styths into treating with him even if he had engineered the whole plot. Tanuojin was prowling along the wall. Saba said, “Sit down, will you. You make me nervous.”
Tanuojin had found the wall switch, and he clicked it on. The whole wall lit up, one great illusion picture: a moonlit cliff, at its foot the night-blue ocean rolling in to boil its white surf among the rocks.
“There should be sound,” Paula said.
He touched another switch, and the sound came on, soft, the growl of the surf. Saba said, “What is that?”
“These people live in a fantasy,” Tanuojin said. He walked up the room toward his chair.
“Where is Newrose?” Paula asked Ketac.
“In the next room.”
“Let him wait,” Saba said.
Tanuojin slouched in his chair. “Everything here is an imitation. In Mars, too. They left the Earth, but they took it with them in their heads. They couldn’t make anything new or real where they went. But they forgot the Earth, too—when they came back, they had forgotten how to live there. They destroyed your city out of sheer ignorance of how it worked.”
Paula was chewing on her fingernails. The Styths had destroyed the city. Everything depended on Newrose. “Your way is just as much an illusion as theirs.”
Saba made a loud, contemptuous noise. Tanuojin said, “My way works.”
“It’s all in your mind,” Paula said.
Saba raised his hand to Ketac. “Go get Newrose.”
“You need a shovel,” Tanuojin said to her. “There’s only one law.”
“There is no law.” She stood and went behind her chair, her eyes on the door where Newrose would appear. “You glorify your superstitions into laws, just like the Martians.” Newrose came into the room, Ketac behind him. She raised her voice and spoke to him in the Common Speech.
“The Prima has called you here on a very serious matter, Newrose.”
He approached them, squinting in the dim light, his face bland. “Then I wonder why I was kept waiting for nearly thirty minutes.”
“I warn you,” she said. “Anything you say may strike back at you. David, turn on that light.” She pointed at the lamp over the table. “Come here, Newrose.”
He circled Saba’s chair to the table, his smooth egg-face sucked thin with uncertainty. The light came on. He put one hand up, dazzled. She pulled him by the arm another step closer to Tanucjin and threw back the red blanket.
His jaw dropped. He leaned toward Lore Smythe, her white throat mottled with bruises. “But—what—” Paula flung the blanket over the dead woman.
“She tried to murder the Prima.”
“Oh my God,” Newrose said. “Oh my God.”
Tanuojin left his chair and walked to the other end of the room. Paula nodded to David, who shut the light off. In the dark Newrose obeyed her touch like a child, moved into the center of the room, and stood. He said, “I assume you have proof of these charges.” His voice was higher than before.