“Yes,” the harassed Mayor cried. “Oh, yes, yes, yes. Anything!”
“Six is my point,” said Ess Pu, rattling the dice cup. His membranes became oddly mottled. He wriggled his eye stalks unnervingly. Macduff, remembering the Lethean dust, began to edge towards the door.
There was a bellow of surprised rage from the Algolian as the disobedient cubes turned up seven.
Ess Pu clawed at his throat, snatched up his glass and peered suspiciously into it. The jig was up.
Roars of fury reverberated from wall to wall of the Dream-Mill as Macduff slipped out through the curtains and pattered rapidly off down the street in the cool musky dark of the Aldebaran night.
“Nevertheless, I still need a ticket,” he reflected. “I also need Ao if possible. This leads me, by obvious degrees, to the Mayor’s palace. Provided I’m not torn limb from limb in the meantime,” he added, dodging into another alley to avoid the spreading torchlit mobs that were by now seething hither and thither through the aroused city.
“How ridiculous. At times like these I’m grateful for being born into a civilized race. There’s no sun like Sol,” he summed up, creeping hastily under a fence as a mob poured down the alley toward him.
Emerging on the other side and trotting down a lane, he reached the back door of a luxurious palace done in pink porphyry with ebony edgings and banged the knocker firmly against its plate. There was a soft, sliding noise and Macduff fixed a peremptory gaze upon the one-way Judas mirror in the door.
“Message from the Mayor,” he announced in a brisk voice. “He’s in trouble. He sent me to bring that Lesser Vegan girl to him immediately. It’s a matter of life or death. Hurry!”
A gasp sounded from inside the door. Feet pattered away into inner distances. A moment later the door opened, revealing, the Mayor himself.
“Here!” cried that frantic official. “She’s yours. Just take her away. I never saw her before in my life.
Never saw Ess Pu. Never saw you. Never saw anybody. Oh, these reform riots! One scrap of incriminating evidence and I’m lost, lost!”
Macduff, a little astonished at finding himself fortune’s favorite, rose to the occasion capably.
“Depend on me,” he told the unhappy vegetable as a slim and lovely being was pushed out of the door into his arms. “She’ll leave Aldebaran Tau on the Sutter tomorrow at dawn. In fact, I’ll take her aboard unmediately.”
“Yes, yes, yes,” the Mayor said, trying to close the door. Macduff’s foot kept it ajar.
“She’s got her space ticket?”
“Ticket? What ticket? Oh, that. Yes. In her wrist band. Oh, here they come! Look out!”
The terrified Mayor slammed the door. Macduff seized Ao’s hand and sped with her into the shrubbery of a plaza. A moment later the tortuous mazes of Aldebaran City swallowed them up.
At the first convenient doorway Macduff paused and looked at Ao. She was worth looking at. She stood in the doorway, thinking of nothing at all. She didn’t have to think of anything. She was too beautiful.
Nobody has ever yet succeeded in describing the beings of Lesser Vega and probably nobody ever will. Electronic calculators have broken down and had their mercury memory-units curdled trying to analyze that elusive quality which turns men into mush. Like all her race, however, Ao wasn’t very bright. Macduff regarded her with entirely platonic greed.
For she was the perfect come-on. Probably some subtle emanation radiates from the brains of the Lesser Vegans which acts as a hypnotic. With Ao on the stage Macduff knew he could almost certainly have quelled his unruly audience an hour ago and averted the rapt. Even the savage breast of Angus Ramsay might have been soothed by Ao’s magical presence.
Curiously enough, male relationship with Ao was entirely platonic, with the natural exception of the males of Lesser Vega. Outside of this dim-brained species, however, it was enough for a beholder simply to look at Ao. And vision really had little to do with it, since standards of beauty are only species deep. Almost all living organisms respond similarly to the soft enchantment of the Lesser Vegans.
“There’s dark work afoot, my dear,” Macduff said, resuming their progress. “Why was the Mayor so eager to get rid of you? But there’s no use asking you, of course. We’d better get aboard the Sutter. I feel certain I can get Captain Masterson to advance me the price of another ticket. If I’d thought of it I might have arranged a small loan with the Mayor-or even a large one,” he added, recalling the mayor’s obvious guilt reactions. “I seem to have missed a bet there.”
Ao appeared to float delicately over a mud puddle. She was considering higher and lovelier things.
They were nearly at the spaceport by now and the sights and sounds Macduff heard from the far distance gave him an idea that the mob had set fire to the Mayor’s porphyry palace. “However, he’s merely a vegetable,” Macduff told himself. “Still, my tender heart cannot help but -good heavens!”
He paused, aghast. The misty field of the spaceport lay ahead, the Sutter a fat ovoid blazing with light. There was a distant mutter of low thunder as the ship warmed up. A seething crowd of passengers was massed around the gangplank.
“Bless my soul, they’re taking off,” Macduff said. “Outrageous! Without even notifying the passengers-or perhaps there was a video warning sent out. Yes, I suppose so. But this may be awkward.
Captain Masterson will be in the control room with a no NOT DISTURB sign on the door. Take-offs are complicated affairs. How on Aldebaran Tau can we get aboard with only one ticket between us?”
The motors muttered sullenly. Haze blew like fat ghosts across the light-and-dark patterns of the tarmac. Macduff sprinted, dragging Ao, as thistledown, after him.
“I have a thought,” he murmured. “Getting inside the ship is the first step. After that, of course, there’ll be the regular passenger check but Captain Masterson will-hm-m.”
He studied the purser who stood at the head of the gangplank, taking tickets, checking names off the list he held, his keen eyes watchful. Though the passengers seemed nervous they kept fair order, apparently reassured by the confident voice of a ship’s officer, who stood behind the purser.
Into this scene burst Macduff at a wild run, dragging Ao and screaming at the top of his voice.
“They’re coming!” he shrieked, dashing through the crowd and overturning a bulky Saturnian. “It’s another Boxer rebellion! One would think the Xerians had landed. They’re all running around screaming, ‘Aldebaran Tau for the Aldebarans’.”
Towing Ao and flailing frantically with his suitcase, Macduff burst into the center of a group and disintegrated it. Instantly he dashed through the line at the gangplank and back again, squealing bloody murder.
At the ship’s port the officer was trying to make himself heard with little success. He was apparently stolidly sticking to his original lines, which had something to do with the fact that the Captain had been injured but there was no reason to be alarmed- “Too late!” shrieked Macduff, bundling himself into the center of a growing nucleus of loud panic. “Hear what they’re yelling? ‘Kill the foreign devils!’-listen to the bloodthirsty savages. Too late, too late,” he added at the top of his voice, scrambling through the mob with Ao. “Lock the doors! Man the gunports! Here they come!”
By now all thought of order had been lost. The passengers were demoralized into a veritable Light Brigade of assorted species and Macduff, clinging to Ao and his suitcase, rode the tide up the gangplank, over the prostrate bodies of the officer and the purser and into the ship, where he hastily assembled his various possessions and scrambled for cover. He fled down a passage, doubled and twisted, finally slowed to a rapid walk. He was alone, except for Ao, in the echoing corridor. From the far distance came annoyed curses.