They entered the ground car.
“I’m taking you outside, Carter. All this pretty-pretty setup is stricdy for the tourists and salesmen and others the moguls have to let onto Alpha. If the moguls had their way no one apart from their techs and work people would set foot on Alpha. The whole planet is one immense arsenal.”
“So I’m learning. How have you been getting on?”
Baksi hunched over the wheel. They turned off the hotel driveway and began to ride, fast and silently, through lighted streets with imposing buildings flanking both sides. A light rain began to drift down and the pavements sheened in reflected color. Other ground traffic and air cars riding strict lanes above thickened.
“Not so good. Horakah is a tough nut, Carter. I was detailed to uncover as many items as I could of their new FaZcon-class battleships. So far I’ve seen the outside of the perimeter wall.” He had a nervous tic that dragged down the side of his face from time to time. Caradine found the feeling of impotent waiting in him hurting.
Rain pelted the windscreen. There had been no warning that Caradine knew of, but now the skies were emptying of the held-up rain Weather Control had ordained for this spring evening. The tires began to sussurate on the macadam.
“A flier car would have been useless,” Baksi said. His knuckles on the wheel gripped like knots.
He was peering ahead now, trying to penetrate the curtain of rain. “Ah…” The car slowed, stopped.
The rear door opened, and closed, the newcomer flopped back on the upholstery. “Rotten night.- Caught me without a coat.”
“Got the passes?” Baksi was looking into the rearview TV screen.
“Sure.” A damp shirt-sleeved arm stretched forward between Baksi and Caradine. “Here. Take ’em, Carter. One each.”
Caradine accepted the slips of flexible red plastic. A number was deeply stamped on each, and, from his own experience, he guessed that the cards were molecularly stressed. Any attempt by amateurs to alter a single dot on the card would cause its molecular lattices to collapse. Result, no card.
“These are to get outside, I suppose?”
“Yes. Horakah keeps it close to the chest.”
“Howd’ you get ’em?”
“Channels. Our concern. Damn this rain!”
The car was going faster than Caradine cared for, considering the circumstances. Tires squealed loudly as Baksi took a comer. Now they were out in open country, with only darkness about, rushing wind, slanting shards of rain and a single distant red light, like a beckoning finger.
Caradine didn’t like it that Hoe, the newcomer, sat in the hack where there was room for him up front.
The car worked up a good speed. The lance of crimson light neared. Minutes later Baksi was pressing the brake. The car slowed its headlong rush. It stopped, bathed all in a crimson flood of fight. Helmeted heads and uniforms crowded.
“Passes?”
“Here.” The three passengers showed the red, heavily stamped cards. A wait. Then the passes came back through the rolled-down window.
“Okay. Scram.”
Baksi’s fumbling hand missed the starter twice, and Caradine bent over and pressed the button. The mill growled to life and the car moved forward. Baksi was shaking like a leaf in a storm—like a leaf on that tree above Harriet La-fonde’s head, in the storm this would cause back on Gamma.
That, suddenly, Caradine saw and realized. He felt a severe pang of horror at what he had let Harriet in for. And then he tried to console himself that she, whatever her merits as a woman, represented a culture full of aggrandizement and war fever. It didn’t work very well. Poor Harriet.
He had a severe tussle, there in the darkness of the hurtling car in the rushing night, to prevent himself from turning around and going back.
These two wouldn’t stop him, of course.
Those passes—tricky things to meddle with…
A ground car, straight out of the tourist trap and into the true Alpha-Horakah, filled with unnameable wonders and horrors.
Hmm. The feeling in him that Baksi wasn’t what he should be. And would Hsien Koanga have sent a gram? Hadn’t he said that he didn’t know if his agents were still free?
“Much farther?” he asked, easing his shoulder in the seat upholstery.
“No. I don’t know what particular mission you have been assigned by Koanga, but whatever it is you’ll need a base outside. We’re going there. People can walk about pretty freely outside providing they have the correct identifications.”
“What do you do? Knock a man over for his?”
“Something like that. It’s all manufacturing plants and spacefields and testing sites. I doubt there’s a single blade of grass.”
“Grass is tough stuff. Grows on a bald man’s head.”
“Yeah.” Baksi tried to laugh. And Hoe, from the back seat, raised a guffaw.
Caradine made up his mind. Even if he was wrong, even if these two were still working in some bona fide fashion for Koanga, he wanted no truck with frightened men. They were ready for the chopper. That was only too evident. And those so-convenient passes…
Trap. Caradine smelled it, sniffed around it, came to the same inescapable conclusion: Trap.
“Do you and your pal Hoe have much exercise?” he asked.
“Huh?” Baksi flashed him a glance spared from his continual manual driving. “Exercise?”
“That’s what I said. Y’know, walking sets up a man’s muscles like nothing else. Expands his chest. Gives him a bounce to his stride.”
“I don’t follow you.”
“I don’t want you to.” The Beaty was in Caradine’s hand. “I also don’t care if you make me use this.” He flicked the cut-switch and the engine died in a dwindling sigh of wind and tires. “Out. Both of you.”
“You can’t do this! Baksi was shaking and yelling.
Hoe had backed up in his seat. But the Beatty could cut him down before he moved three inches. He knew it.
“How did you find out?” Baksi was yelling. His weak face was contorted with the fear freezing his guts. “Did Koanga know? I had to do it! They forced me. They made me turn you over.”
“Cut it, you idiot!” That was Hoe, lividly violent, cursing foully.
“Out,” said Caradine.
The two doors opened and slammed. If they had guns they didn’t dare use them under the threat of the Beatty.
“Now start walking. I’ll drop you if you turn around.”
The two walked off, into the darkness, back along the road. When the blackness had swallowed them up, Caradine started the car and left at more than a hundred miles an hour.
He was on the outside. He was on his own.
XII
There had probably been a better way of dealing with them. But all that was now in the past. Ahead lay dangers that were all the more ominous because they were unknown. If all this planet, as rumored, was workshop and factory and spacefield, then how come this road, winding through the country darkness?
Dawn was not far off. A lot of miles and a lot of country separated Caradine from the point where he had turned Baksi and Hoe off, and he needed to find a hole for the car and himself to hide out during the day. Days here were about thirty Earth hours and, the spring solstice being at hand, were divided up pretty evenly between day and night.
Baksi had pretty clearly been taken by the authorities, forced to work with them, and had no doubt been testing and turning over all the agents Koanga had managed to smuggle into Alpha. Normally, there would have been no reason to suspect hini; a fresh man, coming to this planet would welcome a friend and an outstretched hand. But those passes had been the tip-off. Baksi had overreached himself with those.