The Administrator went white to the lips. And now he showed a glint of steel behind the good old velvet glove.
“You’re aware, Linton, that I can order your deportation.”
“Space! I almost wish you would. You see, man, I’m spoiling for a fight. I’ve had my eyes stripped naked and seen the Galaxy for what it really is. I’m loafing around and soaking up wine because I don’t know which Bad Thing to strike out at. But, by Arion, if you try deporting me, you give me something to attack. I’ll truly be grateful, Mather. Why, man, I’ll make you famous. If you deport me for thinking my own thoughts, and for not being afraid to speak them either, then your kaking misgoverned misgovemment becomes a personal cause, a personal enemy. By Space, I think that’s a great ideal You deport me, and I’ll hold you up as the Living Example of Imperial Idiotic Provincial Confusion. My drunk of an older brother left me enough monetary units to live on, and a little over. I’ll spend every last munit on The Cause, Mather! Yes—a great ideal I’ll hold you up to contempt, derision, mockery and laughter on every last kaking planet in the whole filthy backwards Cluster. I’ll lampoon you, besmirch you, slander and libel you every time you open your fat mouth—and expose your fat brains, or lack of them. I’ll make speeches in the Planetary Parliament, to which I have a hereditary chair; I’ll publish articles about you in every newsfax circuit and magazine that wants to build circulation with some good old-fashioned controversy. I’ll hire artists to caricature you, put you up on posters from one end of the Cluster to the other, buy Parliament members to move to depose you, tie you up with law suits and counter-suits and counter-counter-suits until you don’t know which end is up. Yes, let’s do it, Mather! Come on—deport me, and you’ll die a famous man!”
Mather wilted before the blast, shrank back into his expensive pneumo.
“I am merely … cautioning you.”
“Kak on your warnings, then!”
The Administrator winced fastidiously.
“Please … must you be obscene? Can’t we discuss this matter like intelligent gentlemen?”
“No. Because you’re neither intelligent nor a gentleman. You’re a bureaucrat. And I say kak on bureaucracy—and let’s have done, Mather, once and for all, with cautioning and warning. If a lowly drive technic or impecunious shopkeeper was guilty of all the treasonable and suspiciously seditious practices you accuse me of, you’d slap him in Correction or deport him from Omphale faster than fast. But I’m a Linton, aren’t I, one of the Cluster’s Own, the Fine Old Families, and laws are different for such as I am, eh? Call that intelligent government, Mather? No. I won’t play. You’ve had spies on me, trailed me from winehouse to winehouse, searched my room, pawed through my luggage, tapped my communicator, fax’d my mail, opened a dossier under my name, and slandered me to my face. If you had one tiny kaking wisp of evidence—one rag or tatter of proof that I am any of the things you think I am—you’d have deported my corpus without a moment’s hesitation. But you haven’t. So I know you don’t.”
“Enough I You’ve been warned.” Administrator Mather got up, subtle intimation that the interview was over. But Linton remained seated, sprawled with calculated insolence, long legs thrust out before him. After a few moments of standing, Mather flushed, feeling foolish.
“Sit down, Mather; the interview isn’t over until I say it is,” Raul Linton drawled coolly. Mather sat—collapsed, rather—back into his chair. Such behavior was unthinkable!
“So let’s have done with warnings,” Linton continued. “I’m sick to death of them.”
He reached over and selected a fine cigarel from the burnished, satin-finished harpwood box that had been proffered at the beginning of the “interview.”
“I warn you Mather, be careful. Handle me gently. I’m on the brink. Right now I’m completely disgusted—another word for neutral. But push me the slightest, shove me just a wee bit, and I go over the edge. Right now I don’t give a leak how you govern Hercules—keep the natives ignorant, the border planets technologically backwards, the government blind and stupid. Go to hell at twenty parsecs a minute—I just don’t care. But—mess with me, push me about, deport me, and I’m one hundred percent dead set against you and your rotten Provincial Viceroy. Do you understand, Mather?”
He pulled his booted legs beneath him and came to his feet. Then he leaned over and spoke straight into the Administrator’s tight, white-lipped face.
“Leave. Me. Alone.”
The interview was over. Raul stalked out grandly, leaving Mather to stare blankly at the opposite wall. He sat and stared and thought for several minutes. Then he touched a stud on the under-surface of his desk.
“Yes, Administrator?” A female voice spoke from empty air.
“Get me P-5,” he snapped.
“P-5, sir. Connecting. Go ahead.”
“Ragul? Mather. Just spoke to Linton. You know the case? Fine. Get Pertinax—I don’t care what he’s working on at the moment. Put him on Linton’s tail. He’s the shrewdest spy in the Cluster, and I want him to watch Linton— the man’s a time-bomb, set to go off at a jiggle. Tell him to watch. I want to know everyone Linton speaks to, everything he does, everywhere he goes, every minute of the day and night. I want Linton, understand? He’s a traitor, and I want evidence—unshakable, documentary evidence. Photograms, tapes, video—the works. Tell Pertinax to be careful —to use long-range stuff, pinhead mikes, audio search-beams, the spyray, anything he needs. But get that man for me!”
No tapes were taken of this interview, but all Omphale was filled with ears—eyes—and noses. Someone overheard, or deduced, or was told—and soon many quiet men in little rooms knew. And one of these was a tall, rangy Border-worlder called Sharl of the Yellow Eyes. It was not true, as had earlier been reported, that Raul Linton and Sharl of the Yellow Eyes had been seen together in private conversation before this fateful interview. They had, perhaps, both been in the same cafe or wineshop at the same time. But now he of the Yellow Eyes determined they would, indeed, meet—and soon.
The Queen Dagundha Bazaar is the place of places on Omphale for local color, native exotica, and such-like. Night and day—especially during the Month of Harvest—it teems with the fruits and artistries of half the Cluster worlds. A great, staggered parallelogram floored with mosaic tiles and walled with cool arcades of shops and booths, one may buy virtually anything—with enough platinum Imperials. (The typical native distrusts paper munits, prefers something weighty, that jingles.)
After his exciting, and, although he could not know it, history-making interview with the Border Aministrator, Raul Linton headed for the bazaar, stopping off briefly for an indigestible lunch. He caught an air cab crosstown to the Queen Dagundha Bazaar in the native quarter for two reasons: first, he knew he could find Gundorm Varl there, haggling over livestock; second, he wanted a good long cold drink of that native-brewed liquid lightning called chark. He paid off his cab, tipped the driver handsomely, and strolled into the seething maelstrom of color, sound and stenches that was the great bazaar.
At the booths and stands along the arcade-walls was exhibited the produce of a thousand worlds. Vegetables, wine-fruit, pargolac and iogma, loaves of fresh-baked iskth bread, temple cakes and offering-meats, garments hand-loomed of iophodon-wool, fine suede cloaks from Dorrhea, leather jerkins fetched from Croma or Valthoom, basket-hilted swords with gemmed hilts, tasseled daggers in snakeskin sheaths, flowers, wine, ale, beer, fresh meat, spices, herbs, incense, perfumes, rugs and shawls and capes and sashes, jewels by the cask, keg or quart, the amulets, sigils, talismans and charms of half ten thousand religions, cults, magical sciences or occult persuasions.