I broke off because the strong-arm lug with the bruised jaw was grinning toothily through his black bush of beard and I saw a flash of cool amusement in the contemptuous eyes of the girl.
“Please do not trouble yourself,” the old man smiled. “I rather pride myself on having considered all facets of this affair and let me ease your mind by saying at once that you are already home—you got there about twenty minutes ago.”
The bewildered expression on my face must have been a singularly stupid-looking one, because Konstantin growled out a grunting laugh. Then the old man dug into his attache case and presented me with a plain manila envelope, the eight-by-ten size that professional modeling agencies use to hold glossies. I dug into it and drew out a sheaf of expensive depth photos. They were of me. Good likenesses too. The only trouble was that I could not recall having posed for them.
Looking a bit closer, I saw the discrepancies. That lump of scar tissue on the bridge of my nose, a small souvenir from the time the Colonial cops had “interrogated” me, was not quite the same coffee color as my Italian Riviera tan. It was plasmoid, the kind of professional stage makeup actors use to simulate a broken nose. And the set of the shoulders was a bit too jaunty to successfully imitate my weary slump. But the hairline was perfect, and the eyes were good, very good. Even the mouth.
“The cinema industry has died here since the center of world filmmaking made one of its periodic moves, this time, I believe, to Pan-India. It was not difficult to locate a specimen of your physical type from the local equivalent of central casting, or to hire the actor without a formal contract, which would demand registry with the unions. He speaks his Italian with just your kind of a German accent, and as he once played Cristoffsen in a local film epic, he knows how to walk with a—what is it you call it?”
“A Mars shuffle,” I supplied the term. I felt a little numb. The Doc had, in fact, thought of everything. There was no real excuse I could find for backing out of this…not that I wanted to, I told myself fiercely…or did I? I wanted to be alone, to examine my feelings, but there was no time for that, no leisure to contemplate the alternatives or count the chances against failure. The Doctor wanted to leave within the hour: it was now or never. And I knew this was my last chance. My only chance. That one-in-a-billion chance I had dreamed about all these past two years.
Perhaps the old man took my lapse into brooding silence for suspicion. Anyway, he spoke up in that soothing voice of his that could have made his fortune in the diplomatic corps.
“You needn’t be afraid that I have brought any unseen partners in to finance this expedition, my friend. My retirement pension is very adequate to one of my spartan requirements. And I have recorded a few textbooks in my time that bring in a surprising royalty twice each year. We coached the actor all week long in your habits and drinking tastes; he was eager to get work, and he was not expensive. After a week or ten days he will pack up and go to Milan, and there he will drop out of sight and resume his own identity. There is a registered package for him at the express office in Milan, but he can not pick it up until the seventeenth of the month. Oh, they will know you have eluded them but not right away. We will have vanished into the hinterlands of Mars long before the police realize you cannot be found: trust me, my friend. I have as much to lose, should we fail in this endeavor, as do you.”
I chewed it over, and it tasted good. But still…
“Your actor looks good, damn good, I’ll admit. He would fool the average storekeeper or gondola jockey, who knows me enough to say buon giorno. But he isn’t good enough to fool someone who sees and talks to me every day, and he’ll run a gauntlet of plenty of those: the kid that bring me my New York Times-Post-News every morning, the old woman in the market who sells me rolls and sausage, my landlady—or the waiter who serves me my brandy every afternoon—”
“Probably not; but he won’t have to. This evening you are going to develop a terrible toothache. You will bandage your jaw and growl curtly to your landlady and keep to your bed very much of the time: the street boy that brings you your newsfax will run your errands for you and will innocently spread the word of your discomforture. Really, Cn. Tengren, you must trust me. I have anticipated everything.”
“Not quite. There are a few mementos I would rather not be parted from and at least one item which I will need on Mars—”
I broke off as he smiled again that saintly, beaming smile and dipped into the attache case to bring out precisely those of my few belongings I would not want to have left behind. They were nothing much, a battered Everyman copy of Dowson, an old pre-Troubles Loeb edition of Quintus Smyrnaeus, and the antique Tauchnitz Shakespeare I had carried everywhere since school. I fingered the things absently, the depth photo of my mother and father and brother, and the little portrait-bust of Yakla that the old sorcerer had delicately carved out of slidar ivory for me that tenday we hid from the CA skimmers in the ruins of Ygnarh.
And the crown itself, of course.
I did not unwrap it from its place in the folds of the million-year-old yonka. A Jamad Tengru does not lay bare the Sacred Things before the eyes of Outworlders. But my fingertips knew the curves of the old, worn iron hoops and the settings of the nine-sided thought crystals.
To think that I might wear it once again in the presence of the People…to hear the hill-shaking shout of the haiyaa…to lead again the war horde against the Hated Ones…and perhaps this time, to lead it to victory! If I said yes.
So I said yes.
* * * *
While the Doctor settled his bill and checked out and Bolgov collected their luggage and got it into the freight shaft, the girl and I took the lift to the roof. Thank God for the age of automation: the lift was self-operationed and the only attendant on the parking roof was a camera eye. The girl blocked its view of me as we emerged into the open.
The sky was plum-purple by this time: dull, opaque, and dusty, like the bloom of a grape. We walked swiftly down the ranks of parked cars, not speaking to each other. The air was thick with the smell of sunbaked tar and lubricating oil, hot metal and rubber. Over all was the stink of Venice itself, a vast cacophony of stenches, wherein the odors of rotting garbage, stagnant water, and floating sewage dominated.
The first stars were out. They shone dully and looked neither convincing nor real. They were more like tarnished asterisks of foil pinned to the purple curtains of the creche play or the dusty decorations on the domed ceiling of a run-down dance hall. Under this imitation sky we crossed the rooftop and found the Doctor’s Lanzetti. Within a minute or two I was safely tucked away in the back seat, out of range of observation, with the rear windows opaqued. The luggage went thumping into the rear, and in a bit my companions climbed in, sealing the doors. The Doctor tuned in on Traffic Central, climbed steeply, and merged with the pattern. He chose a sideline which meandered across the country at five thousand feet in the general direction of Naples, but once the traffic had thinned out, he edged into a local level and unobtrusively followed a northerly route for a while, until he hit the turnoff for Strato 104. From then on we could relax, but he was careful to keep the car well within the speed and altitude limit. It would not have been wise to attract any attention from the traffic monitors, who spot-checked their radar from time to time.
We climbed at a leisurely rate until we were well over Europe. I switched on my seat scope and watched Switzerland go past beneath us and then Germany. You could see the lights of Munich and Frankfurt even from this height, but New Berlin was lost in a haze of pollution. Something very much like tears stung my eyes, and I glared them back stubbornly.