‘But maybe,’ I said steadily, ‘they won’t be nobodies forever. Maybe some day they’ll be somebodies again.’
Dunlap shouted hoarsely: ‘I don’t know what you’re trying to pull, Oliver, but I don’t like it. I’m getting out of here!’
I stood in front of him. ‘How did you know my name was Oliver?’
He rocked back, staring. ‘What?’
‘I never told you my name.’
‘But-’
‘Never mind.’ I raised my voice. ‘Quayle! Come on out here. I know you’re on the island. You wouldn’t miss a chance to get knives - and besides, I heard your canoe.’
A moment, while Dunlap’s face turned to flabby butter.
Then there was a soft sludgy sound of footsteps in the mud. Albert Quayle walked steadily up to us, his fat toad’s face a mask. He glanced at Dunlap, and even in the drenching heat of that little island in the Wallow Dunlap shivered.
Then Quayle turned to me. He waited.
I said cheerfully: ‘We’re ready, I think. Quayle here. Dunlap here. Diane and myself, here. Borton and the witnesses –‘
‘Witnesses?’ Quayle’s lips didn’t move, only the word popped out of the fog and hung there between us.
‘To a murder, Albert. Yours. You’re going to die.’
‘Ha!’ He was contemptuous. ‘You can’t kill me. I’m an important man here, Oliver. Who’s going to shun me on your say-so?’
I paused. ‘There are other ways of killing,’ I said softly.
He didn’t move a muscle. I let him think for a second. Then I said, ‘Vince, have you got what I asked for?’
He passed me something cold and sharp. It was hard to make it out in the fog, but I knew what it was; and then I held it up and they all knew.
‘A knife, Quayle!’ I cried. It’s what you want, isn’t it? A knife to bribe a saposaur to wreck somebody else’s plantation. That’s what brought you here, and now you can have this one, at least!’
He stood frozen. I took a second turn to Diane. ‘Good-bye,’ I whispered. She didn’t know what I meant by it, but that was all right. If it turned out that she had to know, she would know.
And then I said loudly to Quayle: ‘I’m going to give you the knife - where it belongs. You put too much trust in conditioning, thinking I can’t use this. But maybe you’re wrong.’
He licked his lips.
‘Did you ever hear of a bribe?’ I demanded. ‘Ever hear of a man who was supposed to be conditioned - but wasn’t? Well, you’re looking at one - and now, Quayle, here’s your knife.’
And I tensed, and fought my own body to do it; and I jumped for him, the knife raised to plunge into his breast.
And that was the last I saw; I fell senseless to the ground; because, you see, what I had just told him had been a complete and utter lie.
I came to, very slowly, with much pain. A long time had passed. I hurt in places where I’d never known there was a nerve. I was weaker than any living man has a right to be.
But I was alive.
That was all I needed to know. If I was alive, everything was all right; that was the gamble I had taken. The conditioning doesn’t prevent, quite. It only punishes. I had sought out that punishment as a bluff, but it was a bluff that could easily have killed me.
Diane was leaning over me. Blearily I focused on her face. Her scent was musky, her expression calm and passionate. ‘Oliver,’-she murmured. ‘You’re all right. Don’t worry.’
‘I know,’ I whispered. ‘At least I lived through it. That was the hard part.’
I rubbed my face. There was heavy beard on It; I had been unconscious at least a full day. I was in a hospital room.
‘You didn’t kill Quayle with the knife.’
‘No. The attempt was bad enough. If I’d succeeded, there would have been no chance at all; the conditioning would have killed me.’
She looked at me with a glance of wonder and loving admiration. ‘You knew exactly what was going to happen, didn’t you? When you said all that about a man bribing the immigration people to get in without being conditioned, it was Quayle you were talking about, wasn’t it?’
I nodded.
‘You were right He wasn’t conditioned. He -’ She shuddered. ‘He killed his first two wives, Oliver. Did you know that? But I guess you did - for their inheritance. And he killed others to get them out of the way. He admitted it all, you see, once it was too late and they’d begun to shun him. And he was the one who grabbed me in the fog - from behind, so I couldn’t see his face. And then, when you went at him with the knife -’
‘I know.’ I nodded again, beginning to feel better. ‘He hit me, proving that he wasn’t conditioned.’
‘That’s right. And with Vince Borton and the others to see it, there was no doubt. The police listened to them. Vince was framed. Albert admitted it’
‘I know.’
‘And Dunlap? Did you know about him? He wasn’t an Earthie; he was from one of the South Pole cities, working for Quayle, running in knives for trade with the saposaurs.’
‘I know. When he called me Oliver I got suspicious, but I wasn’t really sure until I was in the Club. You see, he didn’t tell me what Quayle had done when I threw the drink in his face - tried to hit me then too - and he didn’t faint. It was suspicious. Vince Borton had to tell me about it. Then I began to think back. The brassard - Dunlap could have done it, and nobody else that I could think of.’
Diane leaned forward. ‘It’s all right now,’ she murmured huskily. ‘We can forget. Oliver, you’re wonderful!’
I said, reaching out to her: ‘I know.’
THE DAY THE ICICLE WORKS CLOSED
I
The wind was cold, pink snow was falling and Milo Pulcher had holes in his shoes. He trudged through the pink-gray slush across the square from the courthouse to the jail. The turnkey was drinking coffee out of a vinyl container. “Expecting you,” he grunted. “Which one you want to see first?”
Pulcher sat down, grateful for the warmth. “It doesn’t matter. Say, what kind of kids are they?”
The turnkey shrugged.
“I mean, do they give you any trouble?”
“How could they give me trouble? If they don’t clean their cells they don’t eat. What else they do makes no difference to me.”
Pulcher took the letter from Judge Pegrim out of his pocket, and examined the list of his new clients. Avery Foltis, Walter Hopgood, Jimmy Lasser, Sam Schiesterman, Bourke Smith, Madeleine Gaultry. None of the names meant anything to him. “I’ll take Foltis,” he guessed, and followed the turnkey to a cell.
The Foltis boy was homely, pimply and belligerent. “Cripes,” he growled shrilly, “are you the best they can do for me?”
Pulcher took his time answering. The boy was not very lovable; but, he reminded himself, there was a fifty-dollar retainer from the county for each one of these defendants, and conditions being what they were Pulcher could easily grow to love three hundred dollars. “Don’t give me a hard time,” he said amiably. “I may not be the best lawyer in the Galaxy, but I’m the one you’ve got.”
“Cripes.”
“All right, all right. Tell me what happened, will you? All I know is that you’re accused of conspiracy to commit a felony, specifically an act of kidnapping a minor child.”
“Yeah, that’s it,” the boy agreed. “You want to know what happened?” He bounced to his feet, then began acting out his story. “We were starving to death, see?” Arms clutched pathetically around his belly. “The Icicle Works closed down. Cripes, I walked the streets nearly a year, looking for something to do. Anything.” Marching in place. “I even rented out for a while, but-that didn’t work out.” He scowled and fingered his pimply face. Pulcher nodded. Even a body-renter had to have some qualifications. The most important one was a good-looking, disease-free, strong and agile physique. “So we got together and decided, the hell, there was money to be made hooking old Swinburne’s son. So-I guess we talked too much. They caught us.” He gripped his wrists, like manacles.