“You’re from Luribar?”
She nodded. “My family helped to colonize it a century and a half ago. Ben took me dancing—once. He was so terribly clumsy I laughed at him. Then I saw I had hurt him. Imagine, hurting a powerful giant of a man like that! He was next to tears. I felt I had to apologize. He’s never gone on a dance floor again, with me or with anybody else. But he left Luribar the next night, to return to Starhaven. He told me who he was and what he was, and asked me to come with him to Starhaven.”
“And you did.”
“Yes.”
“Oh,” Mantell said, after a while.
He glanced up at the star-speckled bowl of the night, thinking of Ben Thurdan who had put those stars up there and who had built an iron shell around this planet, and who was soon going to be dead.
Then he turned to Myra.
She seemed to flow into his arms.
Chapter XVI
At 10:45 he left her. Thurdan was expecting her to arrive at his place in less than an hour, and she had to pick up her brief case and then go to central headquarters for the papers he wanted. In seventy-five minutes Thurdan would be dead, Mantell thought. The seconds dragged by interminably.
Myra had asked him to arrive at Thurdan’s apartment at about ten minutes past midnight, to help her with the body. Until then, he was simply to stay out of trouble. He passed half an hour in a bar not far from the Pleasure Dome, a small place with poor lighting and worse liquor. A girl was dancing in the back, accompanying herself by singing in a nasal drone. When she finished her song a thin pockmarked man circulated and passed the hat among the patrons of the bar.
Mantell tossed in a single-chip note. The pock-marked man thanked him effusively and moved on. Mantell ordered a beer and sipped it reflectively. The minutes were crawling.
After a while he got tired of the bar, and left. He paced the Starhaven streets for nearly another half hour. He had already consumed the greater part of the seventy-five minutes he had to waste.
Now it was eleven thirty-five.
He found another bar, stopped in long enough to buy himself a second beer, drank hah of it and left. He was feeling less calm with each passing minute. She was so slim and small, he thought, and Thurdan so powerful-Eleven forty.
Eleven forty-five. She would be just about arriving at his apartment by now. Mantell flagged down an aircab and in a tension-tightened voice gave the robodriver a street not far from the address of Thurdan’s private dwelling.
Eleven fifty.
He stood alone beneath a flickering street lamp, waiting for the minutes to pass. Eleven fifty-two.
Eight minutes to go. Then seven. Mantell started to walk toward the building. He was thinking: A month ago I was just a bum, wandering around the beaches, and now I’m on my way to help out in the assassination of the ruler of a world! It was almost like moving in a dream, except that this was real.
He reached the building at eleven fifty-seven. Three minutes. Of course, there was no positive assurance that Myra would act precisely on the dot of twelve. They had not bothered to synchronize watches too precisely, and in any event there might be unforeseen delays of a moment or two before she would strike. He prayed the blade would be sharp, her aim true.
A robot sat behind a desk in the lobby of Thurdan’s building and surveyed him owlishly as he passed through the main doors. “Yes, please?”
“I’m visiting Mr. Thurdan,” Mantell said. “Sorry, please. Mr. Thurdan is very busy on important government matters, and cannot be interrupted.” Mantell glanced at his watch. Eleven fifty-nine.
The tension was mounting. “This is most urgent,” he said.
At this very moment Myra might be unsheathing the weapon. The robot grinned obstinately, blocking his path.
“Mr. Thurdan is not to be disturbed,” the robot said.
Mantell shrugged and drew the blaster he carried inside his jacket. He fired once, aiming for the robot’s neural channel. The smile remained fixed idiotically on the metal face and the voice continued, locked now in an endless monotone.
“Mr. Thurdan is not to be disturbed Mr. Thurdan is not to be disturbed Mr. Thurdan is not to be disturbed Mr. Thurdan is not to be—”
Mantell fired again. The robot sagged and toppled to the deep wine-red carpet, quivered once, subsided, and lay there in a useless chrome-plated heap. It was just scrap, now, its delicate cryotronic brain hopelessly shorted out.
Midnight.
The elevator seemed to take little short of forever to climb the forty-eight storeys to Thurdan’s penthouse. Mantell counted seconds, waiting, watching the clock hands moving.
Twelve-of-one. He had plenty of time. Myra had told him to be there at ten past twelve.
He stepped through the lift tube door on the forty-eighth level and found himself in an endless brightiy hghted corridor. Unsurprisingly, there was a robot patrolling the area; Thurdan was not a man to take many chances. His apartment, like Starhaven itself, was well guarded—but always subject to attack from within.
The robot turned and shouted a quick “Halt” at him.
Mantell knew that this one had its response channels set for guard duty; it wouldn’t be as slow on the draw as the defunct lobby attendant had been.
He slid into an alcove, hoping the robot wasn’t equipped with range perceptors keen enough to smell him out where he crouched. Or with a portable force screen, as the one who killed Marchin had been.
Metal feet clattered down the hallway.
“Halt! You are ordered to appear from hiding! Mr. Thurdan does not wish to be disturbed!”
The robot steamed on past Mantell without seeing him. He emerged from the alcove and fired once, blasting through its spinal column, paralyzing • it and blocking its motor responses. Then, ducking in front of it, he shorted out its brain and put a stop to its impotent whirrings.
The time was twelve-oh-five. Mantell sprinted down the corridor toward Thurdan’s suite.
And stopped outside. And hstened.
And heard the sound of sobbing. It was Myra. In an agony of remorse, he wondered?
Twelve-oh-six.
Thurdan lay six minutes dead now. Mantell knew what his job was now: to go inside, to snap Myra out of the state of shock she probably had gone into after the killing. He pushed against the door, and to his surprise it gave readily. She had left it open for him.
He flung the door open and burst into Thurdan’s apartment. The suite seemed to stretch in every direction. Rare and costly draperies cloaked the oval windows; rich thick rugs brocaded the floor. This was the suite of a czar, of a possession-hungry potentate. Paintings filled the wall space.
The sound of sobbing grew louder. Mantell ran toward it.
He heard Myra shouting to him—“Johnny! Johnny! No!”
But by then it was too late.
He blundered into the room and in virtually the same instant two hundred forty pounds of irresistible force crashed into him. The drawn blaster he had been clutching went clattering across the room; he reeled back, struggling for balance.
Ben Thurdan was still alive.
The living room was brightly lighted. With terrible clarity Mantell saw the huge disordered desk, the crumpled papers on its top stained with blood. Myra entered.
Her face was tear-streaked and blotchy; her upper Hp was spHt, and a dab of blood oozed from it. One whole side of her face was Hvid and swoUen where she had received a ferocious blow. She was sobbing hysterically, her whole body quaking with each outcry.