My mirth finally faded out in chuckles. The old fellow regarded me in a stiff, rather shocked, and disapproving manner that showed me where his granddaughter got the syndrome. I wiped my eyes on the soiled cuff of my travel-alls. And I was about to say something more or less polite and very final, before bidding them a last adieu and ambling back to my flat, when Bolgov did it.
He kicked back his chair and started to rise, hot black eyes boiling with vicious temper, growling, “I tol’ you this was a waste of time! Maybe you want to sit here and listen to this broken-down, Cat-lovin’ old wino laugh in your face, but not me! I got better things to do with my time.”
There was a silence, in which I could feel my face grow stiff and hot. My heart thudded, and my hand trembled just a little, rattling the tumbler.
Cat-lover…
I had heard those words before. Many times.
They hung there in the cool, shadowy, late afternoon air, echoing in my ears. Then I relaxed, as if the tension was over, as if a decision had been reached. And a vast and exhilarating joy welled up within me, rising from the depths of me and went tingling through my veins. I rose to my feet very swiftly, a joyous grin on my face, and braced myself before Bolgov quite realized what I was doing.
Then I planted one balled fist right in the pit of his stomach with everything I had in my back, shoulder, and arm. And followed through with a honey of a left that caught him on the side of the bearded jaw with a beautiful, meaty smack. It was superb.
He went over backward, legs tangling with the wrought-iron chair in a terrible clatter and flurry of kicking feet, landing full on his shoulders. I stood there and watched him groggily spew the contents of his stomach all over that handsome suit of gray kyrolan and felt a vast inner contentment such as I had not known for many, many months. We ex-monarchs, though deposed, have our pride. We rarely get a chance to show it so pleasantly.
I made a small bow to the Doctor and the girl, both of whom were frozen with the suddenness of the thing.
“Thank you for a delightful conversation,” I said lightly. “A pity it has to terminate in such a very physical way. However, I am not in the least interested in investing in any treasure maps to the Lost City, thank you. They are half a dozen to the dollar in any of the better bazaars anywhere in Sun Lake City. I am not interested. Good evening!”
And I turned grandly on my heel to make my way through the tables. But the Doc was quicker on the uptake than I would have thought. He uttered eight words in a quiet voice that stopped me dead in my tracks.
“Not interested in a free ticket to Mars?”
I stood there and felt the ache rise up within me, who could never legally go off-planet for the rest of my days.… It had been the price of my freedom, so-called: permanent, life-long revocation of my off-planet visa. I was glad my back was turned so they could not see the expression on my face.
And then the old man clinched it, and I was lost.
“It’s not a treasure map, Cn. Tengren,” he said softly, very softly. “It was a thought record that I found there in the ruins near Thoth-Nepenthes.”
I think I forgot to breathe for a while. I know that suddenly my chest ached and blood was roaring in my ears. A thought record! They could not be faked. Nor forged. Nor imitated. Only the mysterious savants of the Ancients knew the strange art of indelible mind recordings—io—photha, they call them in the High Tongue. There have only been two of them discovered in all the three-quarters of a century that terrestrial man has been on Mars, and they are beyond price. If he had a genuine thought record…
“Start talking,” I said, as I turned around and took my seat again.
2. An Hour Before Earthrise
All my life I have taken the most obvious route to the things I wanted, and with unfailing accuracy this has led me into the most obvious pitfalls. Often I have wanted to make myself over, dreamed of being a subtle, devious man, full of shrewdness and cunning, but the gods did not mold me of such clay. Of course, I was an idealist, a young reckless fool, and of course, I dreamed the old humanitarian dreams of “love thy neighbor” and all the rest of it. When I went to Mars ten years before, a wise man could have predicted almost everything that was going to happen to me: but there I was, a dreamy boy, eyes filled with starry hopes, heart drunk on high ideals that had gone out of fashion generations before, a young sociotician, a student of the ancient indigenous civilization of that dim, far-off, age-old desert world. It was the most natural thing in the world that I should be shaken and disgusted by the callous inhumanity and naked greed and terracentric contempt with which the Colonial Administration treated a people whose dignity and graciousness and lonely pride were all they had left of a magnificent civilization that had already begun to die while our own ancestors still slunk or slithered through the steamy fens of the Paleozoic…
Of course, I could not resist the old man’s offer. The plan was simplicity itself, and as for the offer, it was irresistible. For—how many years was it now? Only two?—I had dreamed of nothing else. “A free ticket to Mars…” I would gladly have paid any price, were it possible for me to buy my way back to that dim red world that fate or chance or fortune had made my heart’s home. But that could never be. No liner would carry me, no ticket agent would accept my fare, no visa could be obtained; I was like one of the old sailors back in the distant days of sailing ships—marooned for the unforgivable crime, the ultimate sin against a society I had come to loathe. Mutiny.
The only difference was that in my case they had chosen my desert island with exquisite cruelty: for I was an exile on the planet of my birth, my body’s homeland, my spirit’s prison. And now an old man’s avarice or lust for fame or whatever it was offered me a way out. A way home.
It all came out over coffee and cigars and a Lunarian liqueur I had never tasted before and whose name I have forgotten. The plaza before the old cathedral was a bit too public; I went back to their hotel, to the private suite Keresny had taken for the week. The suite was in one of the towers of The Grand Canal; this had been the newest of Venice’s innumerable hotels, a big, dull, Kremlin-style edifice the Russians had put up in the eighties during their transitory dream of world empire. It had been the administration center of all this part of Italy. After that particular dream crashed to ruin in the fire shower of the Twenty-Nine-Minute War, the Italians reclaimed it, knocked off the Ivan-the-Terrible gingerbread, dynamited the onion-shaped domes, and turned it into a first-class hotel. Today it was dingy, smelling of mildew and rat dung, slumping into decay.
Before we got down to the talking, the girl, Ilsa, drew the soundproof curtains while the greasy-faced Ukrainian, favoring me all the while with surly, glowering looks, unpacked a slim plastic case from the mound of luggage and set it going. I cocked a thumb at the gadget and raised an inquiring eyebrow.
“Is all well, Konstantin?” the Doctor asked, before answering my unspoken query. The surly Russian growled assent.
“Merely a slight precaution, Cn. Tengren. I believe the Americans, in their delightful slang, call it a debugging device. We have no particular reason to believe our rooms are under electronic surveillance; still, one can never be sure in these troubled times. And rumor has it that most hotels these days tape everything that happens on their premises as a matter of course. I believe some of the less scrupulous of them make a tidy sum giving information to the government spies and the political police.”
“It’s been a national custom for years,” I grinned. “Won’t they be suspicious, though, when this room registers a blank tape?”
He smiled that saintly smile again. “Not at all; almost everyone uses one of these devices. They are easily available on the Gray Market and most reasonably priced. Spies and criminals and revolutionaries—but also ordinary businessmen with an important contract to negotiate and everyday people cheating on their wives—use them. The instrument merely broadcasts a heterodyne