“Must be a fake, sir,” the bellhop agreed.
“I will tell you what I did next,” Vane went on. “I read all the contemporary accounts I could find of frontier days on this planet. A couple of centuries ago, nobody on Meng thought the Maracks were legends. They looked enough like the natives to pass, but they had certain special powers. They could turn one thing into another. They could influence your mind by telepathy, if you weren’t on your guard against them. I found this interesting. I next read all the export records back to a couple of centuries ago. Also, the geological charts in Planetary Survey. I discovered something. It just happens, there is no known source of natural diamonds anywhere on Meng.”
“No, sir?” said the bellhop nervously.
“Not one. No diamonds, and no place where they ever could have been mined. But until two hundred years ago, Meng exported one billion stellors’ worth of flawless diamonds every year. I ask, where did they come from? And why did they stop?”
“I don’t know, sir.”
“The Maracks made them,” said Vane. “For a trader named Soong and his family. They died. After that, no more diamonds from Meng.” He opened a suitcase, rummaged inside it a moment, and took out two objects. One was a narrow oval bundle of something wrapped in stiff yellow plant fibers; the other was a shiny gray-black lump half the size of his fist.
“Do you know what this is?” Vane asked, holding up the oval bundle.
“No, sir.”
“Air weed, they call it upcountry. One of the old men had this one buried under his hut, along with the jar. And this.” He held up the black lump. “Nothing special about it, would you say? Just a piece of graphite, probably from the old mine at Badlong. But graphite is pure carbon. And so is a diamond.”
He put both objects carefully down on the nearby table, and wiped his hands. The graphite had left black smudges on them. “Think about it,” he said. “You’ve got exactly one hour, till three o’clock.” Delicately he tapped his cigar over the mouth of the jar. A few flakes of powdery ash floated down on the bellhop’s upturned face.
Vane went back to his chair. He moved deliberately and a little stiffly, but did not stagger. He peeled the foil off the bottle of Ten Star. He poured himself a substantial drink, added ice, splashed a little seltzer in. He took a long, slow swallow.
“Sir,” said the bellhop finally, “you know I can’t make any diamonds out of black rock. What’s going to happen, when it comes three o’clock, and that rock is still just a piece of rock?”
“I think,” said Vane, “I will just take the wrappings off that air weed and drop it in the jar with you. Air weed, I am told, will expand to hundreds of time its volume in air. When it fills the jar to the brim, I will put the lid on. And when we’re crossing that causeway to the spaceport, I think you may get tipped off the packrat into the bay. The bottom is deep silt, they tell me.” He took another long, unhurried swallow.
“Think about it,” he said, staring at the jar with red eyes.
Inside the jar, it was cool and dim. The bellhop had enough room to sit fairly comfortably with his legs crossed, or else he could kneel, but then his face came right up to the mouth of the jar. The opening was too small for his head. He could not straighten up any farther, or put his legs out. The bellhop was sweating in his tight uniform. He was afraid. He was only nineteen, and nothing like this had ever happened to him before.
The clink of ice came from across the room. The bellhop said, “Sir?”
The chair springs whined, and after a moment the Earth-man’s face appeared over the mouth of the jar. His chin was dimpled. There were gray hairs in his nostrils, and a few gray and black bristles in the creases of loose skin around his jaw. His red eyes were hooded and small. He looked down into the bellhop’s face without speaking.
“Sir,” the bellhop said earnestly, “do you know how much they pay me here at this hotel?”
“No.”
“Twelve stellors a week, sir, and my meals. If I could make diamonds, sir, why would I be working here?”
Vane’s expression did not change. “I will tell you that,” he said. “Soong must have been sweating you Maracks to get a billion stellors a year. There used to be thousands of you on this continent alone, but now there are so few that you can disappear among the natives. I would guess the diamonds took too much out of you. You’re close to extinction now. And you’re all scared. You’ve gone underground. You’ve still got your powers, but you don’t dare use them—unless there’s no other way to keep your secret. You were lords of this planet once, but you’d rather stay alive. Of course, all this is merely guesswork.”
“Yes, sir,” said the bellhop despairingly.
The house phone rang. Vane crossed the room and thumbed the key down, watching the bellhop from the corner of his eye. “Yes?”
“Mr. Vane,” said the voice of the desk clerk, “if I may ask, did the refreshments you ordered arrive?”
“The bottle came,” Vane answered. “Why?”
The bellhop was listening, balling his fists on his knees. Sweat stood out on his brown forehead.
“Oh nothing really, Mr. Vane,” said the clerk’s voice, “only the boy did not come back. He is usually very reliable, Mr. Vane. But excuse me for troubling you.”
“All right,” said Vane stonily, and turned the phone off. He came back to the jar. He swayed a little, rocking back and forth from heels to toes. In one hand he had the highball glass; with the other he was playing with the little osmiridium knife that hung by an expanding chain from his lapel. After a while he said, “Why didn’t you call for help?”
The bellhop did not answer. Vane went on softly, “Those hotel phones will pick up a voice across the room, I know. So why were you so quiet?”
The bellhop said unhappily, “If I did yell, sir, they would find me in this jar.”
“And so?”
The bellhop grimaced. “There’s some other people that still believe in Maracks, sir. I have to be careful, with my eyes. They would know there could only be the one reason why you would treat me like this.”
Vane studied him for a moment. “And you’d take a chance on the air weed, and the bay, just to keep anyone from finding out?”
“It’s a long time since we had any Marack hunts on this planet, sir.”
Vane snorted softly. He glanced up at the wall clock. “Forty minutes,” he said, and went back to his chair by the door.
The bellhop said nothing. The room was silent except for the faint whir of the clock. After a while Vane moved to the writing desk. He put a printed customs declaration form in the machine and began tapping keys slowly, muttering over the complicated Interstellar symbols.
“Sir,” said the bellhop quietly, “you know you can’t kill a biped person and just get away. This is not like the bad old times.”
Vane grunted, tapping keys. “Think not?” He took a sip from his highball and set it down again with a clink of ice.
“Even if they find out you have mistreated the headman upcountry, sir, they will be very severe.”
“They won’t find out,” Vane said. “Not from him.”
“Sir, even if I could make you your diamond, it would only be worth a few thousand stellors. That is nothing to a man like you.”
Vane paused and half turned. “Flawless, that weight, it would be worth a hundred thousand. But I’m not going to sell it.” He turned back to the machine, finished a line, and started another.
“No, sir?”