Calvin M. Knox (14 page)

"I have to play very well. It's my
livelihood." Catton raised an eyebrow. "Doveril sends you out to
work?"

"I'm—not with Doveril any more,"
she said in a barely audible voice.

Catton
let the point go for a moment. He said, "You've caused quite a stir by your
disappearance. There's been a galaxy-wide hunt for you. And you're sitting out
in the open for anyone who has eyes to see!"

"They—they
haven't seemed to be looking for me for weeks. The first few weeks we were
here, Doveril made me stay out of sight. But now it doesn't seem to matter. The
Skorg police have forgotten all about me."

Catton said, "You ran away quite
suddenly. As I member, you asked me to get you some information—about Doveril.
Then, before I had a chance to see you again, you were gone."

Her
eyes did not meet his. "Doveril found out what I had asked you to do. He
came to me that night, late, and asked if I trusted him. He said he had two
tickets for Skorg for a flight two hours after midnight. He—insisted I go with
him."

"And you went."

"Yes," she said bitterly. "I
went. I suppose you found out about Doveril?"

He nodded. "We rounded up a bunch of his
accomplices in the hypnojewel business not long after you left. But Doveril was
the kingpin, and Doveril was gone. You say you left him?"

She shook her head sadly. "No. He left
me.
Three weeks after we arrived on Skorg."
"He left
you?"

"He lost interest, I guess," she
said with a pale smile. "We were really strangers to each other, after
all, despite everything. I found a note from him one morning when I woke. I
haven't seen him since. But I know where he is."

"He isn't on Skorg any more?"

"He's—somewhere
else. I don't want to talk about it here." "Where are you
living?"

"There's a hotel, not far from here. I'm
registered under another name."

"And how long have you been working at
this place?"

"Since Doveril left.
It's a Morilaru-owned restaurant. Doveril took me here a couple of
times. I asked for a job, and they gave it to me. Playing the gondran is about
the only useful trade I picked up, being an ambassador's daughter. I'm afraid
I wouldn't be much good at waiting on tables, or something like that." She
smiled again—a pale, wan smile. She looked exhausted. "They don't pay me
much, but it's enough to keep my rent up to date, and I get most of my meals
here."

"Why don't you just notify the
authorities? You don't need to work in a restaurant," Carton said.
"You could be on your way back to Morilar
tonight,
if you let someone know you were here."

She shook her head. "I'm afraid to go
back. I don't dare face my father, after what I did. Running away, giving
myself to an alien—" She tightened her jaws, fighting back tears. "So
I've been staying here, frightened of returning, frightened of living on a
strange world all alone. I don't know what to do. I've been hoping someone
would find me and turn me in—I don't have the strength to do it myself. And I
know things.
About the hypnojewels, about worse.
Doveril talked. But I don't dare tell anyone the things I know."

She looked pitiful, Catton thought. Cast away
by her sly lover, afraid to return home, probably living in fear every minute
here on Skorg—it was not a pretty picture for a girl who had been raised in the
splendor of an ambassadorial mansion.

He
looked down at the food on his plate. He was not hungry any more.

"How
much longer do you have to stay here tonight?" he asked.

"I have to do one more turn. Ill
be
through in about an hour."

"Do you trust me,
EstilP
"

"I—I
think so," she said faintly. "It isn't easy to trust anyone,
after—after—"

"Believe me, 111 help you. Ill
wait
for you to finish your stint here. Then I want you to
leave here with me and tell me all the things you're afraid to tell me.
Nothing's going to happen to you. The worst is over. Will you believe
that?"

"111
by."

"Good.
Get up there and earn your pay, then. Ill
be
waiting
for you back here."

She returned to the dais. There was a
scattered trickle of applause. Catton watched her carefully. She adjusted the
height of the seat and, back straight, fingers arched over the keyboard, began
to play as if for
all the
world she were back in the
Embassy drawing-room, with her tutor looking on and beaming with pride.

XIII.

T
he
hotel
where Estil Seeman
was living was almost incredibly dingy. Sputtering argon tubes gave the only
illumination in the halls. Her room was nothing more than a cubicle with a
bed, a dresser, and a mirror in it. There was a common lavatory at the end of
the hall. The rank Skorg odor was everywhere.

Catton quelled his disgust. "How much do
you pay for this place?"

"Five normits a
week."

The
Earthman scowled. His own room, halfway across the city, cost more than that by
the day. "How much does the restaurant pay you?"

"Twelve normits a week, plus food at
cost," she said tiredly. "I haven't been able to save very much since
I've been here."

"I
imagine you haven't," Catton said, sitting down in a creaky, deflated
pneumochair. He swung around to face her. "All right, Estil. Let's talk.
Let's talk about Doveril."

"If
you want to."

"The
night of your father's ball, when you spoke to me, you said you suspected
Doveril was mixed up in hypnojewel trading. How soon was it before you found
out definitely that he was?"

"As soon as we landed on Skorg,"
she said. "He—seemed to change.
To grow cold, and hard,
and self-confident.
Before he seemed, well, almost shy. But all that
left him. He started boasting to me."

"About what?"

"About how important he was in the
hypnojewel racket, and how rich he was going to get. He told me all this as if
he expected me to applaud him."

"Just what does he do to be so
important?"

"He's—a courier. He
helps distribute the hypnojewels."

Carton's
eyes gleamed. "Did you ever leam where the jewels come from in the first
place?"

She
shook her head.
"N-no.
He kept that part very
mysterious. I never found out."

Catton
frowned; he had hoped Estil could give him that vital bit of information.
"Will you tell me where Doveril is now?"

"He's on a planet named Vyom," the
girl said.

Catton
had heard of Vyom only several times; it was a remote world, hundreds of
thousands of fight-years from the central lens of the galaxy. And it was not an
oxygen-breathing world; as he recalled, it had a chlorine atmosphere. The inhabitants
were completely non-humanoid and had litde dealing with that vast majority of
peoples that breathed oxygen.

Catton grasped her arm. "Is that where
the hypnojewels come from?"

"No." She dropped her eyes.
"On Vyom they make matter duplicators. Doveril went there to buy
some."
"What?"

"I
know. It sounds horrible. But one day there was a call from Morilar—from Pouin
Beryaal. I listened in, but Doveril didn't know it. And Beryaal told Doveril to
leave for Vyorn immediately, to arrange for the shipment of matter duplicators.
I don't know what Beryaal is planning to do with a cargo of duplicators,
but—"

"I
know," Carton said darkly. "He's planning to dump them on
Earth."

"No!"

"Beryaal's
behind a plot to smash Earth before it gets too powerful in the galactic scheme
of things. The way to do it is to drop matter duplicators." Catton's head
was beginning to ache. Beryaal was like an octopus, with tentacles wandering
everywhere. He ran the Crime Commission, he schemed to shatter Terran
civilization, he employed Nuuri Gryain to spy on Catton, he employed Doveril
Halligon to obtain the matter duplicators for him, not seeming to care that
Doveril was also involved in an illegal traffic which Beryaal was supposedly
trying to stamp out. Or was Beryaal bound up in the hypnojewel business too? It
would hardly be surprising.

And
Nuuri had tried to betray Doveril. Either the right hand knew not what the left
was doing, or else the entire incident had been another scheme within a scheme.
Catton tried to puzzle out the whole complex plan, without success.

"You look so troubled," Estil said.
"What's wrong?"

"I'm
trying to put the pieces of a puzzle together. But the puzzle keeps getting
more complicated every day." Catton shook his head. "How long ago did
Doveril go to Vyorn?"

"Four weeks ago."

Four
weeks, Catton thought. He did not remember how long it took to reach Vyom by
nullspace drive, but it was certainly several weeks. So Doveril had just
arrived there. Catton realized he would have to follow him.

He rose. "It's getting late, Estil. I
shouldn't be in a

young
lady's hotel room at this hour without a
chaperone."

She reddened. "I don't have much
reputation left to lose," she said softly.

"If that's a proposition, consider it
refused," Catton said, laughing. "I'd never be able to look your
father in the eye again."

He walked toward the door. She followed him—a
tired litde girl who had grown up too fast, still wearing the tight, low-cut
dress that was her costume as a restaurant performer.

"Are you going to go
to Vyorn?" she asked.

"Maybe.
Ill
see
you again before I leave Skorg, in any
event. Good night, Estil."

"Good night."

The
next morning, Catton paid a visit to the travel agency office in the lobby of
his hotel. The agent at the desk was a female Skorg of forbidding height, who
flashed a professional smile at him—a neat touch, since Skorgs used a hand
gesture rather than a mouth gesture to indicate amiability, and it showed her
familiarity with Terran customs of courtesy.

He said, "I want to book passage for
Vyom on the next ship."

She looked a little surprised. "I'm
sorry, sir. There is no through service from Skorg to any planets in the Vyom
region."

"You aren't going to tell me that I
simply can't get there from here, are you?"

The
old Terran joke was lost completely on her. She smiled again, gravely, and
said, "Oh, certainly not, sir. I merely said that there was no
direct
route from Skorg to Vyom, but that should not be taken to mean that no
link exists between those worlds."

"I
see," Catton said, choking back a grin. "Would you work out a route
for me, then?"

She began thumbing through books, consulting
timetables, examining maps. Finally she said, "There
is
a way, sir. But it is a complex one. You would have to take a liner to
Thar-rimar—a ten-day trip. There you would make connections with a ship bound
for Dirlak, and at Dirlak you would get the passenger ship to Hennim, which is
the closest world to Vyom in its own solar system. A shutde runs from Hennim to
Vyom."

"And how long will all this take?"

She
jotted down figures. "Ten days from Skorg to Tharri-mar . . . then a
two-day stopover waiting for the Dirlak trip . . . five days more to Dirlak
...
a one-day wait until the ship for
Hennim leaves . . . three days from Dirlak to Hennim . . . one more day for the
Hennim-Vyom shuttle.
A total of twenty-two days from
departure to arrival.
Will that be acceptable?"