He took another drink and set the bottle back.
“I don’t know what you done,” he said. “I don’t know why they want you. But I got my orders.”
He half lifted the bottle, then thought better of it. He shoved it back to the center of the table. He walked forward and stood towering over Blaine.
There was another picture, of another planet, and there was a thing that walked along what might have been a road. The thing was nothing such as Blaine had ever seen before. It looked something like a walking cactus, but it was not a cactus and there was every doubt that it was vegetable. But neither the creature nor the road were too significant. What was significant was that following at the creature’s heels, gamboling awkwardly along the could-be road, were a half dozen of the robes.
Hunting dogs, thought Blaine. The cactus was a hunter and these were his hunting dogs. Or he was a trapper and these things were his traps. Robes, domesticated from that other jungle planet, perhaps picked up by some space-going trader, tough enough to survive stellar radiation, and brought to this planet to be bartered for something else of value.
Perhaps, Blaine thought wildly, it was from this very planet that the robe now wrapped about him had been found and taken back to Fishhook.
There was something else pounding in his brain — some sort of phrase, a very alien phrase, perhaps a phrase from the cactus language. It was barbarous in its twisting of the tongue and it made no sense, but as Grant stooped with his hands outstretched to lift him, Blaine shouted out the phrase with all his strength.
And as he shouted, the robe came loose. It no longer held him. Blaine rolled, with a powerful twist of body, against the legs of the man who was bending over him.
Grant went over, face forward on the floor, with a roar of rage. Blaine, clawing his way to his hands and knees, broke free and lunged to his feet out beyond the table.
Grant swarmed off the floor. Blood dripped slowly from his nose where it had struck against the boards. One hand was raw with blood oozing from the knuckles where his hand had scraped.
He took a quick step forward and his face was twisted with a double fear — the fear of a man who could free himself from the clutches of the robe, the fear of having failed his job.
Then he lunged, head lowered, arms outthrust, fingers spread, driving straight for Blaine. He was big and powerful and he was driven by an utter desperation that made him doubly dangerous since he would be careless of any danger to himself.
Blaine pivoted to one side — not quite far enough. One of Grant’s outstretched hands caught at his shoulder, slipped off it, the fingers dragging, clawing wildly, and closing on Blaine’s shirt. The cloth held momentarily throwing Blaine off balance, then the fabric parted and ripped loose with a low-pitched screeching.
Grant swung around, then flung forward once again, a snarl rising in his throat. Blaine, his heels dug into the floor, brought his fist up fast, felt the jolt of it hitting bone and flesh, sensed the shiver that went through Grant’s body as the big man staggered back.
Blaine swung again and yet again, following Grant, blows that started from his knees and landed with an impact that made his arm a dead thing from the elbow down — blows that shook and staggered Grant and drove him back, ruthlessly and relentlessly.
It was not anger that drove Blaine, although there was anger in him, nor fear, nor confidence, but a plain and simple logic that this was his only chance, that he had to finish the man in front of him or himself be finished.
He had gotten in one lucky blow and he must never stop. No rough-and-tumble fighter, he would lose everything he’d gained if he let Grant regain his balance, if he ever gave him a chance to rush him again or land a solid blow.
Grant tottered blindly, hands clawing frantically at the air, groggy with the blows. Deliberately, mercilessly, Blaine aimed at the chin.
The blow smacked hollowly, and Grant’s head snapped back, pivoting to one side. His body became a limp thing without any bone or muscle that folded in upon itself. Grant slumped and hit the floor, lying like a rag doll robbed of its inner strength of sawdust.
Blaine let his arms fall to his side. He felt the stinging of the cuts across his knuckles and the dead, dull ache that went through his punished muscles.
A faint surprise ran through him — that he should have been able to do a thing like this; that he, with his own two fists, should have beaten this big brute of a man into a bloody pulp.
He’d got in the first good blow and that had been nothing but pure and simple luck. And he had found the key that unlocked the robe and had that been a piece of luck as well?
He thought about it and he knew that it had not been luck, that it had been good and solid information plucked from the file of facts dumped into his brain when the creature on that planet five thousand light years distant had traded minds with him. The phrase had been a command to the robe to get its clutches off whatever it had trapped. Sometime in its mental wanderings across unimagined space, the Pinkness had soaked up a wondrous amount of information about the cactus people. And out of this incredible junk heap of miscellaneous facts the terribly discerning brain that belonged to humankind had been able to select the one undistinguished fact which at a given moment had high survival value.
Blaine stood and stared at Grant and there was still no movement in the man.
And what did he do now? Blaine wondered.
He got out of here, of course, as quickly as he could. For in just a little while someone from Fishhook would be stepping from the transo, wondering why he had not been delivered, all neatly trussed and gentle.
He would run again, of course, Blaine told himself with bitterness. Running was the one thing he could do really well. He’d been running now for weeks on end and there seemed no end to it.
Someday, he knew, he would have to stop the running. Somewhere he’d have to make a stand, for the salvation of his self-respect if for no other reason.
But that time had not yet come. Tonight he’d run again, but this time he’d run with purpose. This night he’d gain something for the running.
He turned to get the bottle off the table and as he moved, he bumped into the robe, which was humping slowly on the floor. He kicked it savagely and it skidded weakly, almost wetly, into a lump in the fireplace corner.
Blaine grabbed the bottle in his fist and went across the room to the pile of goods stacked in the warehouse section.
He found a bale of goods and prodded it and it was soft and dry. He poured the contents of the bottle over it, then threw the bottle back into the corner of the room.
Back at the fireplace, he lifted the screen away, found the shovel and scooped up flaming coals. He dumped the coals on top the liquor-wetted goods, then flung the shovel from him and stepped back.
Little blue flames licked along the bale. They spread and grew. They crackled.
It was all right, Blaine knew.
Given five good minutes and the place would be in flames. The warehouse would be an inferno and there’d be nothing that could stop it. The transo would buckle and melt down, and the trail to Fishhook would be closed.
He bent and grasped the collar of Grant’s shirt and tugged him to the door. He opened the door and hauled the man out into the yard, some thirty feet distant from the building.
Grant groaned and tried to get to hands and knees, then collapsed upon the ground again. Blaine bent and tugged him another ten feet along the ground and let loose of him. Grant muttered and thrashed, but he was too beaten to get up.
Blaine walked to the alley and stood for a minute, watching. The windows of the Post were filling very satisfactorily with the red of roaring flames.
Blaine turned and padded softly down the alley.