Rand grinned and stepped into the machine and closed the door. There was no flashing light — nothing to show the machine had operated.
And yet by now, Blaine knew, Kirby Rand was back in Fishhook.
He turned from the transo and started back for the chair beside the fire.
The door from the store up front swung open, and Grant came into the room. He had a striped robe folded on his arm.
“I’ve got just the thing,” he announced. “I had forgotten that I had it.”
He lifted the robe off his arm and shook it out.
“Isn’t it a beauty?” he demanded.
It was all of that. It was a fur of some sort and there was something about the fur itself that made it glitter in the firelight, as if someone had dusted it with tiny diamond fragments. It was a golden yellow with black stripes that ran diagonally and it had the look of silk rather than of fur.
“It’s been around for years,” said Grant. “There was this man camping on the river and he came in and ordered it. Fishhook had a bit of trouble locating one immediately, but they finally delivered. As you know, sir, they always do.”
“Yes, I know,” said Blaine.
“Then the man never did show up. But the fur was so beautiful I could never send it back. I kept it on inventory, pretending that someday I’d have a chance to sell it. I never will, of course. It costs too much money for a one-horse town like this.”
“What is it?”
“The warmest, lightest, softest fur in the universe. Campers carry it. Better than a sleeping bag.”
“I couldn’t use it,” protested Blaine. “Just an ordinary blanket—”
“But you must,” Grant told him. “As a favor to me, sir. My accommodations are so poor, I feel deeply shamed. But if I knew you were sleeping in a luxury item . . .”
Blaine laughed and held out his hand.
“All right,” he said. “And thanks.”
Grant gave him the robe, and Blaine weighed it in his hand, not quite believing it could be so light.
“I’ve still got a little work,” the factor told him. “If you don’t mind, I’ll go back and finish it. You can bed down anywhere.”
“Go ahead,” said Blaine. “I’ll finish up my drink and then turn in. Would you have one with me?”
“Later on,” the factor said. “I always have a snort before I go to bed.”
“I’ll leave the bottle for you.”
“Good night, sir,” the factor said. “See you in the morning.”
Blaine went back to the chair and sat down in it, with the robe lying in his lap. He stroked it with his hand and it was so soft and warm that it gave the illusion of being still alive.
He picked up the glass and worked leisurely on the liquor and puzzled over Rand.
The man was probably the most dangerous man on earth, despite what Stone had said of Finn — the most dangerous personally, a silky, bulldog danger, a bloodhound of a man who carried out the policies of Fishhook as if they had been holy orders. No enemy of Fishhook was ever safe from Rand.
And yet he had not insisted that Blaine go back with him. He had been almost casual in his invitation, as if it had been no more than a minor social matter, and he had displayed no resentment nor no apparent disappointment upon Blaine’s refusal. Nor had he made a move toward force, although that, Blaine told himself, was more than likely due to his lack of knowledge with what he might be dealing. Along the trail, apparently, he had happened on enough to put him on his guard, to know that the man he followed had some secret abilities entirely new to Fishhook.
So he’d move slowly and cautiously, and he’d cover up with a nonchalance that fooled no one at all. For Rand, Blaine knew, was a man who would not give up.
He had something up his sleeve, Blaine knew — something so well hidden that no corner of it showed.
There was a trap all set and baited. There was no doubt of it.
Blaine sat quietly in his chair and finished off the liquor in his glass.
Perhaps it was foolish of him to remain here in the Post. Perhaps it would be better if he just got up and left. And yet that might be the very thing Rand would have figured him to do. Perhaps the trap was outside the door and not in the Post at all. It could be very likely that this room was the one safe place in all the world for him to spend the night.
He needed shelter, but he did not need the sleep. Perhaps the thing to do was stay here, but not to go to sleep. He could lie on the floor, with the robe wrapped tight about him and pretend to sleep, but keeping watch on Grant. For if there were a trap in this room, Grant was the one to spring it.
He put his glass back on the table beside the one that Rand has used, still a quarter full of liquor. He moved the bottle over to make a set piece out of the bottle and the glasses, the three of them together. He bundled the robe underneath his arm and walked over to the fire. He picked up the poker and pushed the burning logs together to revive their dying flame.
He’d bed down here, he decided, just before the fire, so that the light of it would be back of him, out into the room.
He spread the robe carefully on the floor, took off his jacket and folded it for a pillow. He kicked off his shoes and lay down on the robe. It was soft and yielding, almost like a mattress despite its lack of thickness. He pulled it over him and it fell together smoothly, like a sleeping bag. There was a comfort in it that he had not felt since those days when he had been a boy and had snuggled down into his bed, underneath the blankets, in his room on the coldest winter nights.
He lay there, staring out into the darkness of the storeroom beyond the living quarters. He could see the faint outlines of barrels and bales and boxes. And lying there in the silence, unbroken except by the occasional crackle of the fire behind him, he became aware of the faint scent which perfumed the room — the indescribable odor of things alien to the Earth. Not an offensive scent, nor exotic, not in any way startling at all, but a smell such as was not upon the Earth, the compounded smell of spice and fabric, of wood and food, of all the many other things which were gathered from the stars. And only a small stock of it here, he knew, only the staples considered necessary for one of the smaller Posts. But a Post with the entire resources of the massive Fishhook warehouses available within a moment’s notice, thanks to the transo standing in its corner.
And this was only a small part of that traffic with the stars — this was only the part that you could put your hands upon, the one small part of it that one could buy or own.
There was also that greater unseen, almost unrealized part of the Fishhook operation — the securing and collecting (and the hoarding, as well) of ideas and of knowledge snared from the depths of space. In the universities of Fishhook, scholars from all parts of the world sifted through this knowledge and sought to correlate and study it, and in some cases to apply it, and in the years to come it would be this knowledge and these ideas which would shape the course and the eventual destiny of all humanity.
But there was more to it than that. There was, first of all, the revealed knowledge and ideas, and secondly, the secret files of learning and the facts kept under lock and key or at the very best reviewed by most confidential boards and panels.
For Fishhook could not, in the name of humanity as well as its own self-interest, release everything it found.
There were certain new approaches, philosophies, ideas, call them what you might, which, while valid in their own particular social structures, were not human in any sense whatever, nor by any stretch of imagination adaptable to the human race and the human sense of value. And there were those others which, while applicable, must be studied closely for possible side effects on human thinking and the human viewpoint before they could be introduced, no matter how obliquely, into the human cultural pattern. And there still were others, wholly applicable, which could not be released for perhaps another hundred years — ideas so far ahead, so revolutionary that they must wait for the human race to catch up with them.