“Listen to me, damn you!” snarled Max behind him. The smaller man grabbed Jim’s arm and tried to swing him around. Jim turned.
“I’ll tell you—you’re not going to take those things!” said Max.
“Yes, I am,” said Jim.
“I say you’re not!” shouted Max. “Who do you think you are, anyway? You’re just the man who was picked to go into the Throne World and observe. Got that? Observe! Not stick people with knives, or shoot them with guns, or do anything else to draw any more Imperial attention to Earth than there is already. You’re an anthropologist, play-acting a bullfighter, not some cloak-and-dagger spy!”
“I’m all three,” said Jim quickly and a little coldly.
The color slowly went from Max’s face. “God…” said the smaller man. His hand fell away from Jim’s arm. “Ten years ago we didn’t know they existed—a whole empire of human-occupied worlds stretching in from Alpha Centauri here toward the galactic center. Five years ago you were only a name on a list. I could have put a pencil mark through you, and you wouldn’t have been here now. Even a year ago I was ready to start questioning whether we’d been training the right man—and you picked just then to put on such a good show nobody’d have listened to me. Now it turns out I was right, after all. An Empire of a thousand worlds, and one little Earth. They forgot us once, and maybe they could forget us again—but not if you’re the man who goes in and observes them. I was right a year ago. You’ve got some ax of your own to grind with these High-born—”
He choked and broke off. He breathed deeply and straightened his back.
“Forget it,” he said more calmly. “You’re not going. I’m aborting the project—on my own responsibility. Earth can ask me all the questions they want, after that Imperial ship leaves—”
“Max,” said Jim almost gently. “It’s too late for you to stop me now. I’ve been invited by the Princess Afuan. Not you, or the whole project, or the whole Earth would be permitted to interfere with her invitation now. Do you think she’d allow that?”
Max stood staring at Jim with dark-circled, bloodshot eyes. He did not answer.
“I’m sorry, Max,” said Jim. “But it was bound to come to this sooner or later. From here on out the project can’t guide me any longer. From now on I have to follow my own judgment.”
He turned back to his packing.
“Your judgment!” A little moisture flew with the words, to touch coldly against the side and back of Jim’s neck. “You’re so sure of your judgment? Compared to those High-born like Afuan, you’re just as ignorant, just as primitive, just as savage as all the rest of us back on Earth! You don’t know anything! Maybe Earth is one of their colonies that they forgot about… Or maybe it’s just coincidence that we seem to belong to the same race as them and these people we found here on Alpha Centauri III! Who knows? I don’t; no Earthman does. And neither do you! So don’t talk about your judgment to me, Jim! Not with the whole future of Earth riding on what you do, once you get there, into the Imperial household!”
Jim shrugged. He turned back to his packing and felt his arm violently seized and wrenched as Max tried to turn him around once more.
Swiftly, this time, Jim turned. He knocked Max’s grip loose with the edge of his right hand, and then put that same hand, calmingly, it seemed, upon the smaller man’s shoulder. But the thumb reached up from the grip of the other four fingers to lay itself against Max’s neck behind the right point of the angle of his jawbone; and it pressed in slightly.
Max’s face whitened, and he gasped. He drew a quick, short breath and tried to back away. But the grip of Jim’s hand held him.
“You—you’re a fool!” stammered Max. “You’d kill me?”
“If I had to,” said Jim calmly. “That’s one of the reasons I’m the right man to go.”
He released his grip, turned away, closed the open suitcase into which he had put the kilt and the shirt with the Sam Browne belt, and picked up both the heavy suitcases. He turned and went out through the door, turning left and away up the corridor in the opposite direction, which led to the street and the vehicle that was waiting for him outside the arena. As he neared the entrance, he heard Max shouting after him, his words distorted by the long tunnel of the corridor. Glancing back, he saw that the other man had come out of the dressing room to stand staring after him.
“Observe!” Max shouted in English after him up the corridor. “Do anything else, Jim, get Earth into trouble with the High-born, and we’ll shoot you for it, like a mad dog, when you get home again!”
Jim did not answer. He stepped out into the bright, yellow sunlight of Alpha Centauri III, and into the open, four-wheeled, jeeplike vehicle that was there waiting for him with its driver at the controls.
Chapter 2
The driver of the vehicle was a staff member of the Earth Trade Delegation, which, with the trade delegations from two other Empire-inhabited solar systems, had combined with the Alpha Centaurans of this planet to put on various local-culture shows for the visiting High-born. It was always the hope of those putting on such shows that the result would be some form of preference by the High-born visitors. Earth had stood the best chance of arousing interest, being, in theory, a newly rediscovered part of the Empire, and now its show of the art of bullfighting was being carried back by the visitors to the Throne World to amuse the Emperor.
The driver took Jim and his luggage through the surrounding city and out to the open spaceport, an endless stretch of brownish, cementlike material. In one area of this, all by itself, sat a huge ovoid that was the ship of the High-born. The driver drove Jim up to this ship and stopped.
“Want me to wait?” asked the driver.
Jim shook his head. He took the two suitcases out of the vehicle and watched as the driver put it in motion and drove off, dwindling to toy size in the distance across the spaceport area.
Jim set his suitcases down and turned to look at the ship. From the outside it seemed perfectly featureless. There were no ports, no airlocks, no signs of apertures or entrances to the interior. Nor did anyone aboard the huge vessel seem to be aware that Jim was there.
He sat down on one of his suitcases and began to wait.
For a little over an hour nothing happened. Then, abruptly, while he was still sitting on his suitcase, he was no longer on the spaceport concrete, but with both bags in what appeared to be a green-walled, egg-shaped room with some sort of darker green carpet underfoot and cushions of all colors and sizes, from six inches in diameter to something like six feet, furnishing it.
“Were you waiting long, Wolfling?” asked a girl’s voice. “I’m sorry. I was busy taking care of the other pets.”
He stood up and turned about from his suitcase; and he saw her then. By the standards of the High-born, she was short—probably no more than five feet, ten inches in height. Also her skin, although it approached the onyx-white of the Princess Afuan and the others, had a brownish tinge, like a pale shadow of the brownishness of an American Indian. The brownishness extended to her eyes, which were rather a dark gold, flecked with little sparkles of red highlights—not like the lemon yellow Jim had seen in Afuan. Her face was less long than Afuan’s, and more rounded of jaw. She smiled in a way that was very unlike the inscrutability of the High-born princess; and when she smiled, the ghosts of a small cloud of something like freckles appeared across her nose and up her cheeks. Finally, her hair, though she let it hang straight down her back, as had the other High-born females Jim had seen in the arena, was plainly yellow-blond rather than white, and it did not hang as straight as Afuan’s, but had a perceptible wave and thickness to it.