“Ben knows I’m here. The robots outside tipped him off ten minutes ago by remote wave.”
“Get out of here, then!”
“No,” Marchin said. “I’m hoping Ben will show up here in person. That way I have an even chance of getting in the first shot.”
“Leroy—” Her tone rose in shrill urgency. “You can’t—”
“Get away from me,” Marchin interrupted brusquely. “I don’t want you near me when the shooting starts.”
He looked terribly pale and tired, but there was no fear on his face. With exaggerated casualness he stepped past Myra and Mantell, crossed the floor to the roto-wheel table, and calmly put a hundred-chip bill down when the croupier called for bets.
Mantell turned to Myra and said, “What’s this all about? Who is he?”
She was taut with nervousness. “He—tried to ldll Ben, once. It was a conspiracy that didn’t succeed. He and Ben built Starhaven together, in the early years, but Marchin was always pushed aside. Ben had to run this place as a one-man enterprise.”
The suspense was becoming numbing. Mantell said, “Why did he come here?”
“He’s been in hiding. I guess Ben flushed him out and Leroy decided to fight it out with him here in the casino. Oh—!”
Again the hall became silent. This time it was a silence markedly more profound than the last.
A robot entered the hall, moving on silent caterpillar treads—a square-built robot, stocky, at least eight feet tall. Mantell watched as Marchin turned round to face the robot. People who had been standing within ten or twenty feet of the pale man melted quietly away. Mantell was aware that Myra was trembling uncontrollably.
“Hello, Roy,” the robot said. It was speaking in Ben Thurdan’s own voice, thanks to the use of some kind of electronic remote-wave hookup.
Marchin’s eyes blazed as he glared angrily at the robot.
“Damn you, Thurdan! Why didn’t you come here yourself? Why did you have to send a robot here to do your filthy job for you?”
“Too busy to bother with such trivial things in person, Roy,” was the calm reply. “And there’s less doubt of the outcome this way.”
Marchin drew his blaster. An instant later the house lights dimmed as though because of a sudden power drain, and a flickering transparent glow sprang up a-round the robot.
“Force screen,” Myra muttered. “Marchin doesn’t stand a chance.”
Mantell nodded. A robot could wear a force screen, though a human being couldn’t. A human being needed air to breathe, and a force screen blocked out everything —light and air as well as dangerous radiation. It was tremendously expensive to equip a robot with a force screen, but evidently Ben kept one around for jobs like this.
Marchin’s finger tightened on the firing stud. A burst of flame leaped across the gap, bathing the robot in fire but actually merely splattering impotently against the impassable barrier that was the force screen.
The metal creature, unharmed by the deadly blast, waited impassively. Almost a minute slipped by while Marchin hopelessly continued to direct his fire at the barrier that shielded the robot’s patient bulk. Then, seeing he was accomplishing nothing, Marchin cursed vividly and in a quick bitter gesture hurled the blaster across the room at the stiffly erect robot.
The weapon clanged off the creature’s chest and fell to one side.
The robot laughed. The laugh was unmistakably the laugh of Ben Thurdan.
Marchin howled an imprecation, and began to run.
For a moment at first Mantell thought he was going to try to dash out the door, but that was not Marchin’s intention, apparently. Instead he ran straight toward the robot in a mad suicidal dash.
He traveled ten feet. Then the robot lifted one ponderous arm and discharged a bolt of energy from grids in its fingers. The flare caught Marchin in the chest with such impact that it lifted him off the ground and hurled him backward the whole distance he had covered in his dash.
He tottered, clawed at his throat, and staggered into a swirly screen at a table behind him. He fell and didn’t get up.
Its work complete, the robot about-faced and vanished without another word. From somewhere in the ceiling came the sound of light music, and the tension dissolved. The croupiers began to chatter again; the jingle of falling chips could be heard. It was as if everyone in the room was determined to pretend that nothing at all had taken place in the casino just now.
Two attendants appeared and removed the charred, blasted corpse. Mantell watched them until Myra tugged at his arm and pulled him back to the radial-dice table.
He felt a hard knot of fear in his stomach. He had just had another sample of the way Ben Thurdan governed Starhaven. Ben Thurdan was no man to cross.
Chapter VIII
The killing put finish to any pleasure he might have had from gambling that afternoon.
Myra, oddly, was outwardly unmoved, except for a certain paleness and tenseness of face. It puzzled him for a while. Evidently, at sometime in the past, she had known Marchin well. Yet she seemed callously unmindful of his fate.
After a while he realized the reason. She was used to the phenomenon of killing. Death—violent death—was nothing uncommon on Starhaven.
They gambled for perhaps an hour more; Mantell’s mind was only faindy focused on what he was doing, and in a short time he had contrived to lose half his slim bank-roll on the rotowheel and at radial dice. Luckily Myra did well at swirly, and recouped most of their losses. But Mantell’s heart was hardly in the sport now. He waited for Myra to collect her swirly wirinings. Then, as she started across the room to the magneroulette board, he tugged on her sleeve and said, “No. No more games for now. Let’s get out of here.”
“Where?”
“Anywhere. I need a drink.”
She smiled, understanding. Together they cut their way through the crowd, which was noisy now with a kind of desperate gaiety, heading for the entrance. A thick crowd of new arrivals was flocking into the casino as they left; evidently they had been attracted by reports of the excitement, no doubt filtering all through the Pleasure Dome now. Mantell and Myra had to fight their way out of the casino like fish swimming upstream in rapid current.
“Gambling is the number one industry of Starhaven,” Myra said when they emerged at the lift shafts and stood wiping away some of the perspiration their exit had induced. “The working day starts around noon for most of the professionals. It gets heaviest at four or five in the afternoon, and continues all night.”
Mantell mopped away perspiration without making any reply. He was not interested in small talk just now. He was thinking of a tall, gaunt, pale man named Leroy Marchin, who had been gunned down in full sight of five hundred people, without arousing more than polite comment here and there.
They rode upward and Myra led the way to a bar somewhere on the middle levels of the building. It was a dim place, smoky with alcohol vapors, fit only by faint and sputtering inert-gas light tubes.
Mantell found an empty table far to the rear, ornate and encrusted with possibly authentic gems. A vending robot came over and they dialed for their drinks.
He ordered straight rye, preferring not to drink anything fancy this time. Myra was drinking clear blue wine out of a crystal goblet. Mantell gulped his drink and had another.
Looking up, he spotted a tri-di video set mounted in the angle between the wall and the ceiling, back of the bar. He peered at it. He saw the drawn, weary face of Leroy Marchin depicted on the screen in bright harsh unreal colors.
“Look up there,” he said.
Myra looked. The camera suddenly panned away from the figure of Marchin to show the entire casino as it had looked at the moment of the duel. There was the robot, massive, smugly supreme; there, facing it, Marchin. And he saw clearly in the vast screen his own lean face, staring at the scene uncomprehendingly. Myra was at his side. She was gripping his arm tensely in the shot; he didn’t remember that, but he supposed it must have actually been that way. He had been too absorbed in the duel to notice.