The man actually reached over and seized Rod’s belt.
He lifted the knife to slash.
Rod became frightened and angry. His brain ran red.
He spat thoughts at them—
pommy!
shortie!
Earthie
red duly blue stinking little man,
die, puke, burst, blaze, die!
It all came out in a single flash, faster than he could control it. The red-cloaked man twisted oddly, as if in spasm. His two companions threshed in their belts. They turned slowly.
High above them, two women began screaming.
Further up a man was shouting, both with his voice and with his mind, “Police! Help! Police! Police! Brainbomb! Brainbomb! Help!”
The effort of his telepathic explosion left Rod feeling disoriented and weak. He shook his head and blinked his eyes. He started to wipe his face, only to hit himself on the jaw with the package of books, which he still carried. This aroused him a little. He looked at the three men. Redcloak was dead, his head at an odd angle. The other two seemed to be dead. One was floating upside down, his rump pointing upmost and the two limp legs swinging out at odd angles; the other was rightside up but had sagged in his belt. All three of them kept moving a steady ten meters a minute, right along with Rod.
There were strange sounds from above.
An enormous voice, filling the shaft with its volume, roared down: “Stay where you are! Police. Police. Police.”
Rod glanced at the bodies floating upward. A corridor came by. He reached for the grip-bar, made it, and swung himself into the horizontal passage. He sat down immediately, not getting away from the Upshaft. He thought sharply with his new hiering. Excited, frantic minds beat all around him, looking for enemies, lunatics, crimes, aliens, anything strange.
Softly he began spieking to the empty corridor and to himself, “I am a dumb cat. I am the messenger C’rod. I must take the books to the gentleman from the stars. I am a dumb cat. I do not know much.”
A robot, gleaming with the ornamental body-armor of Old Earth, landed at his cross-corridor, looked at Rod and called up the shaft.
“Master, here’s one. A c’man with a package.”
A young subchief came into view, feet first as he managed to ride down the shaft instead of going up it. He seized the ceiling of the transverse corridor, gave himself a push and (once free of the shaft’s magnetism) dropped heavily on his feet beside Rod. Rod hiered him thinking, “I’m good at this. I’m a good telepath. I clean things up fast. Look at this dumb cat.”
Rod went on concentrating, “I’m a dumb cat. I have a package to deliver. I’m a dumb cat.”
The subchief looked down at him scornfully. Rod felt the other’s mind slide over his own in the rough equivalent of a search. He remained relaxed and tried to feel stupid while the other hiered him. Rod said nothing. The subchief flashed his baton over the package, eyeing the crystal knob at the end,
“Books,” he snorted.
Rod nodded.
“You,” said the bright young subchief, “you see bodies?” He spoke in a painfully clear, almost childish version of the Old Common Tongue.
Rod held up three fingers and then pointed upward.
“You, cat-man, you feel the brainbomb!”
Rod, beginning to enjoy the game, threw his head backward and let out a cattish yowl expressing pain. The subchief could not help clapping his hands over his ears. He started to turn away, “I can see what you think of it, cat-fellow. You’re pretty stupid, aren’t you?”
Still thinking low dull thoughts as evenly as he could, Rod said promptly and modestly, “Me smart cat. Very handsome too.”
“Come along,” said the subchief to his robot, disregarding Rod altogether.
Rod plucked at his sleeve.
The subchief turned back.
Very humbly Rod said, “Sir and Master, which way, Hostel of Singing Birds, Room Nine?”
“Mother of poodles!” cried the subchief. “I’m on a murder case and this dumb cat asks me for directions.” He was a decent young man and he thought for a minute. “This way—” said he, pointing up the Upshaft — “it’s twenty more meters and then the third street over. But that’s ‘people only.’ It’s about a kilometer over to the steps for animals.” He stood, frowning, and then swung on one of his robots: “Wush’, you see this cat!”
“Yes, master, a cat-man, very handsome.”
“So you think he’s handsome, too. He already thinks so, so that makes it unanimous. He may be handsome, but he’s dumb. Wush’, take this cat-man to the address he tells you. Use the upshaft by my authority. Don’t put a belt on him, just hug him.”
Rod was immeasurably grateful that he had slipped his shaftbelt off and left it negligently on the rack just before the robot arrived.
The robot seized him around the waist with what was literally a grip of iron. They did not wait for the slow upward magnetic drive of the shaft to lift them. The robot had some kind of a jet in his bedpack and lifted Rod with sickening speed to the next level. He pushed Rod into the corridor and followed him.
“Where do you go?” said the robot, very plainly.
Rod concentrating on feeling stupid just in case someone might still be trying to hier his mind, said slowly and stumblingly,
“Hostel of the Singing Birds, Room Nine.”
The robot stopped still, as though he were communicating telepathically, but Rod’s mind, though alert, could catch not the faintest whisper of telepathic communication. “Hot buttered sheep!” thought Rod, “he’s using radio to check the address with his headquarters right from here!”
Wush appeared to be doing just that. He came to in a moment. They emerged under the sky, filled with Earth’s own moon, the loveliest thing that Rod had ever seen. He did not dare to stop and enjoy the scenery, but he trotted lithely beside the robot-policeman.
They came down a road with heavy, scented flowers. The wet warm air of Earth spread the sweetness everywhere.
On their right there was a courtyard with copies of ancient fountains, a dining space now completely empty of diners, a robot waiter in the comer, and many individual rooms opening on the plaza. The robot-policeman called to the robot-waiter,
“Where’s number nine?”
The waiter answered him with a lifting of the hand and an odd twist of the wrist, twice repeated, which the robot-policeman seemed to understand perfectly well.
“Come along,” he said to Rod, leading the way to an outside stairway which reached up to an outside balcony serving the second story of rooms. One of the rooms had a plain number nine on it.
Rod was about to tell the robot-policeman that he could see the number nine, when Wush’, with officious kindness, took the doorknob and flung it open with a gesture of welcome to Rod.
There was the great cough of a heavy gun and Wush, his head blown almost completely off, clanked metallically to the iron floor of the balcony. Rod instinctively jumped for cover and flattened himself against the wall of the building.
A handsome man, wearing what seemed to be a black suit, came into the doorway, a heavy-caliber police pistol in his hand.
“Oh, there you are,” said he to Rod, evenly enough. “Come on in.”
Rod felt his legs working, felt himself walking into the room despite the effort of his mind to resist. He stopped pretending to be a dumb cat. He dropped the books on the ground and went back to thinking like his normal Old North Australian self, despite the cat body. It did no good. He kept on walking involuntarily, and entered the room.
As he passed the man himself, he was conscious of a sticky sweet rotten smell, like nothing he had ever smelled before. He also saw that the man, though fully clothed, was sopping wet.
He entered the room.
It was raining inside.
Somebody had jammed the fire-sprinkler system so that a steady rain fell from the ceiling to the floor.