"My patience departs, like sand through a sieve."
"Then you have not learned the lesson of the rock."
I lit a cigarette. "I'm in a position to choose my proverbs as I go along. You are not," I said.
He finished bandaging himself, then, "I wish to propose a bargain."
"Name it."
"You have a vessel hidden somewhere. Take me .to it. Take me with you, away from this world."
"In return for what?"
"Your life."
"You're hardly in a position to threaten me."
"I am not making a threat. I am offering to save your life for the moment, if you will do the same for me."
"Save me from what?"
"You know that I can restore certain persons to life."
"Yeah, you stole some Recall Tapes. --How did you do it, by the way?"
"Teleportation. It is my talent. I can transfer small objects from one place to another. Many years ago, when I first began studying you and plotting my vengeance, I made visits to Earth--each time one of your friends or enemies died there, in fact. I waited then until I had accumulated sufficient funds to purchase this world, which I thought to be a fitting place for what I had in mind. It is not difficult for a worldscaper to learn to employ the tapes."
"My friends, my enemies--you restored them here?"
"That is correct."
"Why?"
"For you to see your loved ones suffer once again, before you died yourself; and for your enemies. to watch you in your pain."
"Why did you do what you did to the one called Dango?"
"The man annoyed me. By setting him up as an example and warning for you, I also removed him from my presence and provided him with a maximum of pain. In this fashion, he served three useful purposes."
"What was the third?"
"My amusement, of course."
"I see. But why here? Why Illyria?"
"Second to Homefree, which is inaccessible, is this world not your favorite creation?"
"Yes."
"What better place then?"
I dropped my cigarette, ground it out with my heel.
"You are stronger than I thought, Frank," he said after a moment, "because you killed him once, and he has beaten me, taken away from me a thing without price ...
Suddenly I was back on Homefree, in my roof garden, puffing a cigar, seated next to a shaved monkey named Lewis Briggs. I had just opened an envelope, and I was running my eyes down a list of names.
So it wasn't telepathy. It was just memory and apprehension.
"Mike Shandon," I said softly.
"Yes. I did not know him for what he was, or I would not have recalled him."
It should have hit me sooner. The fact that he had recalled all of them, I mean. It should have, but it didn't. I'd been too busy thinking about Kathy and blood.
"You stupid son of a bitch," I said. "You stupid son of a bitch... ."
Back in the century into which I had been born, like number twenty, the art or craft--as the case may be--of espionage enjoyed a better public image than either the U.S. Marine Corps or the AMA. It was, I suppose, partly a romantic escape mechanism with respect to international tensions. It got out of hand, though, as anything must if it is to leave a mark upon its times. In the long history of popular heroes, from Renaissance princes through poor boys who live clean, work hard and marry the bosses' daughters, the man with the cyanide capsule for a tooth, the lovely traitoress for a mistress and the impossible mission where sex and violence are shorthand for love and death, this man came into his own in the seventh decade of the twentieth century and is indeed remembered with a certain measure of nostalgia-- like Christmas in Medieval England. He was, of course, abstracted from the real thing. And spies are an even duller lot today than they were then. They collect every bit of trivia they can lay their hands on and get it back to someone who feeds it to a data-processing machine, along with thousands of other items, a minor fact is thereby obtained, someone writes an obscure memo concerning it and the memo is filed and forgotten. As I mentioned earlier, there is very little precedent for interstellar warfare, and classical spying deals, basically, with military matters. When this extension of politics becomes well-nigh impossible because of logistics problems, the importance of such matters diminishes. The only real talented, important spies today are the industrial spies. The man who delivered into the hands of General Motors the microfilmed blueprints of Ford's latest brainchild or the gal with Dior's new line sketched inside her bra, _these_ spies received very little notice in the twentieth century. Now, however, they are the only genuine items around. The tensions involved in interstellar commerce are enormous. Anything that will give you an edge--a new manufacturing process, a classified shipping schedule--may become as important as the Manhattan Project once was. If somebody has something like this and you want it, a real spy is worth his weight in meerschaum.
Mike Shandon was a real spy, the best one I'd ever employed. I can never think of him without a certain twitch of envy. He was everything I once wished I could be.
He was around two inches taller than me and perhaps twenty-five pounds heavier. His eyes were the color of just-polished mahogany and his hair was black as ink. He was damnably graceful, had a sickeningly beautiful voice and was always dressed to perfection. A farm boy from the breadbasket world Wava, he'd had an itchy heel and expensive tastes. He'd educated himself while being rehabilitated after some antisocial acts. In my youth, you would have said he'd spent his free hours in the prison library while doing time for grand larceny. You don't say it that way any more, but it amounts to the same thing. His rehabilitation was successful, if you judge it by the fact that it was a long time before he got caught again. Of course, he had a lot going for him. So much, in fact, that I was surprised he'd ever been tripped up--though he often said he was born to come in second. He was a telepath, and he had a damn near photographic memory. He was strong and tough and smart and he could hold his liquor and women fell all over him. So I think my certain twitch is not without foundalion.
He'd worked for me for several years before I'd actually met him. One of my recruiters had turned him up and sent him through Sandow Enterprises' Special Executive Training Group (Spy School). A year later he emerged second in his class. Subsequent to that, he distinguished himself when it came to product research, as we call it. His name kept cropping up in classified reports, so one day I decided to have dinner with him,
Sincerity and good manners, that's all I remembered afterwards. He was a born con man.
There are not too many human telepaths around, and telepathically obtained information is not admissable in court. Nevertheless, the ability is obviously valuable.
Valuable as he might have been, however, Shandon was something of a problem. Whatever his earnings, he spent more.
It was not until years after his death that I learned of his blackmail activities. The thing that tripped him up, actually, was his moonlighting.
We knew there was a major security leak at SE. We didn't know how or where, and it took close to five years to find out. By then, Sandow Enterprises was beginning to totter.
We nailed him. It wasn't easy, and it involved four other telepaths. But we cornered him and brought him to trial. I testified at great length, and he was convicted, sentenced and shipped off for more rehabilitation. I undertook three worldscaping jobs then, to keep SE functioning smoothly. We weathered the vicissitudes that followed, but not without a lot of trouble.
... One item of which was Shandon's escape from rehabilitative custody. This was several years later, but word of it spread fast. His trial had been somewhat sensational.
So his name was added to the wanted lists. But the universe is a big place ...
It was near Coos Bay, Oregon, that I'd taken a seaside place for my stay on Earth. Two to three months had seemed in order, as I was there to watch over our merger with a couple North American companies.