Watchers of the Dark (3 page)

“Nonsense!”

“Miss Schlupe!” Darzek said sternly. “Your loyalty is not in question here—just your common sense. Go!”

“Nonsense!” She stood on tiptoe to joggle a carton from the top of a pile, caught it deftly, and placed it on her desk. “Open it. It isn’t heavy enough to be a very big bomb.”

“Then we’ll die together, in a small way,” Darzek said cheerfully. He slit the tape with his penknife, peered inside, closed the flap.

“You didn’t even let me see,” Miss Schlupe complained. “What is it?”

“Money.”

“Money? You mean all of these boxes—but that’s ridiculous!”

“It’s more than that. It’s outrageous.” He handed her the penknife. “Try one yourself.”

She lifted down another box and slit the tape. “Money!” she whispered. “Wait’ll Internal Revenue hears about this!”

“I don’t suppose there’s a return address.”

“I don’t see any.”

“Pity. Then I can’t send it back. Do we know anyone who has a room-size vault?”

“Aren’t you going to count it?”

Darzek perched frowning on the edge of her desk. “It would take hours. Anyway, I know how much it is. It’s a million dollars. Did you see the truck that delivered it?”

She shook her head.

“Pity. If you’d gotten the license number—”

“You never left any instructions about getting license numbers.”

“I never thought the occasion would arise. From now on, let’s make it standard procedure. Any time a million dollars is delivered here, get the license number.”

“Have you any idea at all who sent it?” she asked.

“Certainly. Mr. Smith sent it. I knew as soon as I saw him that he was trying to pull some kind of gag.”

“Gag!” she exclaimed indignantly. “Why, there must be hundreds of dollars in every box!”

“Thousands, I think. Who besides the U.S. Treasury would have this much ready cash for a practical joke? Several New York banks, I suppose, but financial institutions have notoriously bad senses of humor. The government has none at all. It has to be Smith.”

“You ought to find out if it’s real. I could take some of it down to the bank and ask.”

“Quiet. I want to think.”

Obediently she returned to her rocking chair, and Darzek remained seated on her desk. “Smith offered me a job,” he said slowly. “I named my price, and he seems to have met it. I think that constitutes a contract.”

“What sort of a job?”

“Quiet. First I’ll have to figure out how to get the money to a bank. Then I’ll cancel the Tahiti trip, and see a lawyer—”

“You need a whole law firm. Internal Revenue—”

“I’m not worried about the taxes. I want to make a will. Smith said the job might take years, with extensive travel, so there’s no point in keeping the office open. It’s a shame.”

“What’s a shame?”

“I’ve never had to do anything that I liked less.”

“What do you have to do?”

“Schluppy,” Darzek said sadly, “I never thought it would come to this, but here it is. You’re fired.”

“Mr. Darzek!”

“I’ll pay you two years’ salary in lieu of a month’s notice. Make that five years. No objections, now—it won’t scratch the surface of that million. You can set up your own detective agency. Or retire, and take my trip to Tahiti.”

Miss Schlupe blew a blast into her hankerchief. “I don’t want to retire,” she blubbered. “I want to work for you.”

“It’s nothing to cry about. There wouldn’t be anything for you to do if I kept you on.”

“I’m not crying about that.”

“Then why are you crying?”

“That’s the first time you ever called me Schluppy!”

Darzek picked up a box of money, hefted it thoughtfully, and put it down again. “I don’t like this at all. But I made a bad joke, and Smith called me on it, and I feel obligated to take his job. I wonder what it is.”

He liked being alive. He had fully expected the rabid mob to tear him to pieces, but the proctors had marched him off to the Interstellar Trade Building, held him captive with other foreigners for three suspenseful days and nights, and finally transmitted the lot of them to a transfer station, where they were assigned to ships.

All cargos had been jettisoned and the ships’ hulls packed with passenger compartments, and these now held four times their planned capacity. No one knew how much longer the Quarmers would hold the ship in the paralyzing safety field of the transfer station. The captain, worried about his reserves of air and water and food, had imposed strict rationing.

Biag-n was hungry, but he made no complaint. Eventually they would reach safety, and he liked being alive. He even enjoyed the crowded lounge, where occasionally he could eavesdrop on the conversation of a colossus of interstellar trade, or watch his wife carelessly squandering solvency at a game of
jwur.
In normal circumstances he was not even privileged to glimpse such fabulous animates from afar. The warp of fortune was indeed crossed with both good and bad.

Biag-n quietly got to his feet and trailed after the captain, who was carrying the vain appeal for accommodations to the other end of the lounge. Gul E-Wusk, an enormous old trader and a giant even among the colossuses, sprawled near the entrance to the night lounge in a complicated ooze of arms and legs, proboscis dangling limply in a long-necked goblet of clear liquid. Common gossip had it that he drank water; Biag-n was curious, but lacked the temerity to ask him. The door to the night lounge lay open, and E-Wusk was conversing with a nocturnal invisible in the darkness beyond. An awed group of young undertraders stood nearby, listening with polite fascination.

The captain stated his problem, and E-Wusk quivered with laughter. “Oh, ho ho! A
hundred
more? I didn’t even know there
were
so many foreigners on Quarm! Where were they hiding?”

“Under rocks, with the rest of the slime,” the captain said gloomily.

“Oh, ho ho! Take my compartment. There’s room for twenty there if I stay out of it. Take Gul Meszk’s, too, and send him back to Quarm. He’s a Quarmer at heart—they didn’t even burn his warehouses!”

Gul Meszk, an angular sexrumane, was shuffling past with a look of constrained boredom on his pebbly face. He said resentfully, “Is it my fault that I don’t stock combustibles? Anyway, they did burn them. They burned all of them. You just didn’t happen to see it.”

E-Wusk delivered a long, gargling laugh. “You saw
my
warehouse burn. I hope the rascals singed their knobs.”

Meszk looked at him slyly. “Now that you mention it, your warehouse
did
produce an unusual smudge.”

“Smudge! You saw the flames. The Quarmers had to run home for their light shields. Oh, ho ho!” Rippling waves of laughter encircled his body. “I saw it coming. You can’t say I didn’t warn you. I cleared out my warehouse ten days ago. I told you then—”

“You told me,” Meszk agreed resignedly. “I thought it was another of your jokes.”

“Oh, ho ho!” E-Wusk flopped out supinely, gasping for breath. “Thought it was a joke!” He gurgled helplessly. “Oh, ho ho! That
is
a joke!”

“I hadn’t forgotten that gag of yours about the
frunl,”
Meszk grumbled. “I dumped my whole stock at a loss. So did everyone else.”

‘That wasn’t my gag,” E-Wusk said. “It was Gul Rhinzl’s. I saw what he was doing and cut myself in on it.”

“Anyway, the two of you cornered every scrap of Quarm, and then you doubled the price. With operators like you fleecing them at every turn, no wonder the Quarmers revolted.”

E-Wusk shook with merriment.

“So when you came around with that tale of doom and disaster, naturally I didn’t believe it. All I did was check through my inventory to try to figure out what items you were after
that
time. Tell me something. If you cleared out your warehouse ten days ago, what made it burn so spectacularly?”

“I leased my warehouse—oh, ho ho—to a
native!
He just got it filled with
mron
oil in time for the fire!”

The undertraders laughed uproariously; Meszk seemed puzzled. “If it was native oil, why did the Quarmers burn it?”

“Quarmer reasoning,” E-Wusk gasped. “It was a foreigner’s warehouse, don’t you see, so they had to burn it. But they were careful to set fire only to the building. They didn’t disturb the contents at all!”

The joke spread through the lounge in widening circles. Meszk laughed and moved away, and Biag-n edged closer to E-Wusk. He was smitten with a severe palpitation of the conscience. He had his full report indited and ready to send at the earliest opportunity, and he suddenly realized that he knew nothing at all about the critical question, the only one he had been specifically instructed to investigate. He had forgotten the Weapon.

The wealth of detail provided by a world in revolt had overburdened his senses. He had eagerly inventoried every aspect of the Quarmers’ behavior except the one that mattered. He had not once asked himself
why.

He said timorously, “Excuse me, Excellency, but you—you say that you—
saw it coming?”

E-Wusk regarded him curiously. “I don’t believe that we’ve met.”

“Biag-n, at Your Excellency’s service,” Biag-n said, with a sweeping genuflection.

“Biag-n. I don’t seem to recall—what is your line?”

“Textiles, Sire,” Biag-n said humbly.

“Textiles? I still can’t place you. Where was your office?”

“I—I sold direct,” Biag-n stammered, face suffused with humiliation.

“Ah! But you needn’t be apologetic about it. One must start somewhere. I, too, have ‘sold direct.’ Don’t look so startled. I sold direct on Jorund. I had to. I arrived there completely destitute of solvency, after having been evicted from Utuk. The natives took everything. I was also evicted from Jorund, but that didn’t cost me much. I may be old, but I haven’t forgotten how to learn. After Utuk, I had the good sense to record my surplus solvency in a safe place.”

“You’ve experienced the Dark
three times?”
Biag-n asked breathlessly.

“Four. After Jorund I went to Suur, with distressingly similar results. Now it’s Quarm. The Blight, or Dark, or whatever you choose to call it, seems to be pursuing me. But as I said, I’ve learned. On Quarm I lost almost nothing.”

“Excellency, what
is
it?”

“Who knows? Not I, certainly, but I don’t think it’s any
thing.
It’s merely a state of mind.”

“Ah! Mind!”

“It’s a form of madness, as any fool should be able to see. And it’s sweeping the galaxy. These idiots think they’re going to transfer to a nice safe world where it’ll never bother them again. Nonsense. Intelligent beings can lose their reason any time and anywhere. The Dark, if you want to call it that, will move again. And again. There’s no point in trying to run away from it. I’m going only as far as the first world that will let me in. When the Dark next moves, I’ll be moving just ahead of it.”

“But if it’s madness, why didn’t we catch it? Why did it affect only the natives?”

E-Wusk delivered himself of a monumental shrug. “As a trader, I deal exclusively in inanimate objects. I’ve never had occasion to regret that. As long as I know
what,
and I can make a reasonably accurate guess as to
when,
I’ll leave the
why
to others. Did you lose much?”

“I didn’t have much to lose. Just a few personal effects and my sample case—and they let me keep my sample case!”

“Congratulations! You’ll be ready for business the moment you land.”

Biag-n withdrew discreetly. He had a new line for his report, and he wanted to think about it. The Weapon, whatever it was, induced a state of madness. That much was obvious—was already known and accepted. And for some inexplicable and highly complicated reason, it worked only on the natives. That, too, was known and accepted.

But a foreigner who had experienced the Dark several times might become aware of the Weapon, might even be able to predict the Dark’s coming. Biag-n felt certain that Supreme would find this very interesting.

* * * *

Miss Effie Schlupe was indeed a dear. She was over twenty-one and under seventy; a year before she’d had to stop saying she was over twenty-one and under sixty, for she refused to tell a lie except for money. She typed 130 words per minute from her office rocking chair, though when her rocking got too rambunctious her accuracy suffered somewhat. She could peer innocently over her old-fashioned, rimless spectacles at a policeman while picking the pocket of the man behind her. If the subject she was tailing sought solace in a bar, she could drink him under the table while he sobbed out his troubles to her. Three purse snatchers who thought her a likely victim had regained consciousness in hospitals with broken bones. Darzek loved her as he would have loved his own mother if she’d been a jujitsu expert and owned an unsurpassed secret recipe for rhubarb beer. He paid her more money than she had ever earned before, and she retaliated by trying to do all of his work for him.