A whimsical face, with a dark, secretive look and a strongly cleft chin…
Rawson had used his instrument and obtained what he wanted. The instrument, once used, could be tossed aside.
Well, Caradine had had to discard unwanted tools in the past. He thanked God that he’d never stooped to letting them hang or burn or be brain-probed on a charge that really should have been laid at his door. He finished his drink and went to his cabin.
His two-berth cabin had been allotted him as a matter of routine and he had considered himself fortunate that he had no roommate. He opened the door—robots were a luxury these low-down quarters did not extend to—and a hearty voice said:
“Welcome to our litde palace, friend. Step right in.” Caradine did so.
“Who the hell are you?” he said. Then he smiled. “Sorry. Reflex action. Take no notice. They told me I was having this cabin to myself.”
“Oh really? Sorry. Ill check, see if there’s another. I only managed to get a booking at the last moment.”
Caradine looked at him. Medium height, broad, a toughly pugnacious face with two strong grooves running down from his nose to the comers of his mouth. Firm hps and uneven teeth. A quiet dark-green shirt and slacks. The suspicion of a bulge under the armpit, just by that easily unfastened mag-neclamp.
Just like his own magneclamp on his white shirt, in fact.
“I’m Carson Napier. From the Belmont group.”
Caradine extended his hand. “John Carter. Shanstar.”
Carson Napier’s hand faltered, then he recovered, and when he shook hands Caradine felt the violent tremble in the man’s hand. He had lost all the color from his face and great drops of sweat started out on his brow like rain dripping off the eaves of an old, slanted-roof house.
“John Carter? You did say John Carter?”
“Yes. Is anything the matter. Are you all right?” Caradine, still holding Napier’s hand, turned him to sit on the edge of the bunk.
“I’m all right. It was just something unexpected, that’s all.” He looked up and Caradine released the trembling hand. “I suppose the name Carson Napier means nothing to you?”
Caradine laughed. “As a matter of fact, it does. But it’s something that you can know nothing of. Just an amusing, faraway memory, shall we say.”
Napier was recovering. He still sat hunched up, looking at Caradine. And there was something in that look, some familiar image that brought Caradine up, wondering, surmising, remembering. Once men had looked at him like that, in the long ago…
“You say I can know nothing of it—” Then Napier sat up straight, forced himself to laugh, and stood up. “And you’re right, of course. I need a drink. Would you care to join me?”
“Thank you, but not right now. I’ve just come from the lounge. Before dinner?”
“Delighted. Now, if you’ll excuse me—” and Napier went out fast. The door slammed shut.
Caradine sat down and began to think hard. It wasn’t impossible; just— Then he brushed the notion away as absurd. Just because two names had come from the same stable didn’t mean a thing. Names were universal property, now that all men were equal. Only, of course, men from a larger stellar grouping were more equal than men from a smaller. Oh, well.
That was present-day life in this our galaxy.
Even so, if the fantastically impossible had become fact, then Carson Napier had acted much as Caradine might expect him to act. After all, John Carter was one of his favorite cover names. Hmm. Carson Napier would bear watching.
“The toughest job of being an interstellar businessman is finding out just what a particular stellar grouping does not have or produce. Then you shop around your own group, or an allied friendly cluster, and ship in the goods. But in almost any planetary group you can find almost any type of goods. You have to develop specialties.”
Caradine wasn’t talking. He was listening to the large, jovial, beefy-faced man with the alcohol breath and the wilting flower in his buttonhole. And he’d made a success of it. He knew what he was talking about. The others in the lounge, sitting about sipping drinks, smoking, sometimes lending half an ear to the music in the background, knew that he knew what he was talking about.
“But don’t you find it a rat race, Mr. Lobengu?” asked Carson Napier. He and Caradine were sitting at the same table. There was a curious sort of prickly truce between them.
“If you let your nerves get you down, Napier, you’re finished. You new to the fame?”
Napier laughed self-consciously. “More or less. I have a lot to learn.”
“Well, I’m your man.” Lobengu took the fat cigar from his mouth and used it to threaten Napier. “It took me just three weeks to secure a visa to Alpha. I’m told that’s a pretty good record. But I’d had it figured from the other Horakah planets just what Horakah was missing. I have samples of it safely stowed away iirthe holds.” He smiled quite charmingly. “Of course, you don’t expect me to tell you what that something is? No, of course not. But that’s the way to operate, young Napier. Find yourself a toe hold, and then go in punching.”
A woman giggled and her husband nudged her. They were clerks, going home after a holiday on Gamma, too poor to afford the first-class travel to which they were entitled. But they’d had a good holiday. Caradine liked them both.
They had their kid with them, a girl about six or seven, with a bright crop of golden curls, and wearing a simple, pretty little white dress that fell in straight, charming lines. Caradine had won a shiplong friendship with a smile and a bar of local confectionary. Just how the conversation began, Caradine couldn’t afterwards remember; he thought it must have been Jinny. But straight from the self-confident Lobengu they were talking about fairy stories and Jinny was perched on Carson Napier’s knee, and a thin woman with overbright eyes and a bead necklace was telling the child about Father Christmas.
“Mummy’s told me about him,” Jinny said firmly. “I want to hear that other story about the man with the white face.”
Jinny’s mother and father laughed self-consciously, glancing at each other. Lobengu laughed heartily. Napier said, “Which story was that, Jinny?”
“You know. About the man who blew up the Earth.”
Everyone chuckled, thinking back to the bedtime stories of their own childhood. Everyone, that is, except Caradine. Oh, sure, he chuckled. That was camouflage. But he wasn’t thinking back over the billions of miles to a never-never land as were the others. As the others—except, perhaps, Napier?
“But how do you know he blew the Earth up?” asked Napier.
“Daddy said so. Everyone was very wicked. There was a war. That’s nasty.” She made a face and everyone smiled sympathetically. “All the worlds were blown up all over the place.”
“Well,” Lobengu said heavily. “That’s true enough.”
“Have you been there, Mr. Lobengu?” asked Caradine politely.
Lobengu faced him. “As a matter of fact, Mr. Carter, I have. I did a field trip out to the edge of the Blight only last year. A planet out there with the most amazing, well, trade secrets and all, y’know. But I looked through the scopes and I saw the area—black, sunless, dead.” He wiped a hand across his forehead. “After the normal stars of home, it was upsetting. Most upsetting.”
“D’you think,” Napier said carefully, “that anyone’s ever ventured into the Blight?”
Lobengu snorted. Jinny’s father, Harold Jiloa, said, “But why would anyone want to do that? There’s nothing there, is there? It was all destroyed.”
“It must have been terrible,” said Rita Jiloa in a whisper.
Jinny pouted. “You said all the worlds were blown up. And you said you saw where they weren’t,” she looked at Lobengu. “So that part of it’s true. But why isn’t the part about Earth and the man with the white face true? Why is that a fairy story?”