Under Two Moons

III

Smells of fungi, smells of the sea. The tang of hot-running metal machinery and the reek of stale sewage. Johan Gull expanded his chest and sucked in the thousand fragrances of the Martian waterfront as he shouted: “Boy! My bags. To my cabin, chop-chop!”

He followed the lascar-robot at a slow self-satisfied pace, dropping ashes from his panatella, examining the fittings of the submarine with the knowing eye of the old Martian hand. He did indeed feel well pleased with him-self.

In the role Costumery had set up for him, that of a well-to-do water merchant from the North Polar Ice Cap, he had arrived at the docks in a custom Caddy. He cast largesse to the winds, ordered up a fine brandy to his cabin and immediately plunged into a fresh-water bath. When you were playing a part, it was as well to play a wealthy one, he thought contentedly; and when he had luxuriated in his bath for fifteen minutes and felt the throb of the hydrojets announce the ship’s getting under weigh, he emerged to dress and play his tapes with a light heart.

To all intents and purposes, Gull must have seemed the very archetype of a rich water vendor of substantial, but not yet debilitating, age. He sat at ease, listening to the tapes through a nearly invisible earplug and doing his nails. He did not touch the eye patch which gave his face distinction, nor did he glance toward the framed portrait of Abdel Gamal Nassar behind which, he rather thought, a hidden camera-eye was watching his every move. Let them damned well look. They could find nothing.

He sat up, stretched, yawned, lighted an expensive Pittsburgh stogie, blew one perfect smoke ring and resumed his task.

The T Coronae Borealis was a fine old ship of the Finucane-American line. As a matter of fact Johan Gull had voyaged in her more than a time or two before, and he looked forward with considerable pleasure to his dinner that night at the captain’s table, to a spot of gambling in the card room, perhaps—who knew?—to a heady tête-à-tête with one of the lovely ladies he had observed as he boarded. The voyage to Heliopolis was sixteen hours by submarine, or just time enough for one’s glands to catch up with the fact that one had changed one’s mise-en-scène. Ballistic rockets, of course, would do it in fifty minutes. In Johan Gull’s opinion, ballistic travel was for barbs. And he was grateful that Mars’s atmosphere would not support that hideous compromise between grace and speed, the jet plane. No, thought Gull complacently. Of all the modes of transport he had sampled on six worlds and a hundred satellites, submarining through the Martian canals was the only one fit for a man of taste.

He snapped off the last of the tapes and considered his position. He heard with one ear the distant, feminine song of T Coronae’s, nuclear hydrojets. Reassuring. With every minute that passed they were two-fifths of a mile closer to the junction of four canals where Heliopolis, the Saigon of Syrtis Major, sat wickedly upon its web of waters and waited for its prey.

Gull wondered briefly what he would find there. And as he wondered, he smiled.

The knock on the door was firm without being peremptory. “Another brandy, sir?” called a voice from without.

“No, thank you, steward,” said Gull. No Martian water vendor would arrive at dinner half slopped over. Neither would Gull—if not because of the demands of his role, then because of the requirements of good manners to the handiwork of T Coronae’s master chef. Anyway, he observed by his wrist chronometer that it was time to think things over.

He reviewed what he had heard on the tapes.

Those two prospectors, he thought. Damned confusing thing.

Their names, he recalled, were Harry Rosencranz and Clarence T. Reik. He had checked their dossiers back to pre-emigration days. There had been nothing of interest there: Rosencranz an ex-unemployed plumber from Fort Leavenworth, Kansas; Reik a cashiered instructor in guerrilla tactics from the nearby Command & General Staff School. Like so many of Earth’s castoffs, they had scraped together money to cover passage to Mars, and enough over to outfit one expedition. They had managed to subsist ever since on what scrubby topazes they could scratch out of the sands of the Great Northern Desert. With, thought Hull, no doubt a spot of smuggling to make ends meet. Duty-free Martian souvenirs into the city, and chicle for the natives out. So much for Harry Rosencranz and Clarence T. Reik, thought Gull, blowing gently on the second coat of polish and commencing to buff his nails to a soft gleam. But it was not who the prospectors were that mattered. It was what they had to say… and above all, what they had done.

Gull paused and frowned.

There was something he could not recognize in the atmosphere. A soft hint of fragrances—tantalizing—it strove to recall something to him, but he could not be sure what. A place? But what place? A girl?

He shook his head. There could be no girl here. He put the thought from his mind and returned to the two prospectors and their strange story.

Their testimony far outran the parameters of normal credibility. Gull could repeat the important parts of what they had said almost verbatim. Reik had been the more loquacious of the two—

Well, Harry was like cooking up our mulligan outside the tent when I thought I heard him yell something. I stuck—

Q. One minute, Mr. Reik. You couldn’t hear what he said clearly?

A. Well, not what you’d call clearly. You see I had the TV sound up pretty loud. Can’t hear much when you got the TV sound up pretty loud.

Q. Go on.

A. Well, I just reached out and turned off the set and stuck my neck out the flap. Geez! There it was. Big as life and twice as scary. It was a flying saucer, all right. It glowed with like a sort of pearly light that made you feel—I dunno how to say it exactly—like, peaceful.

Q. Peaceful?

A. Not only that. Good. It made me sorry I was such a rat.

Q. Go on.

A. Well, anyway, after a minute a door opened with like a kind of a musical note. F sharp, I’d say. Harry, he thought it was F natural. Well, we got to fighting over that, and then we looked up and there were these three, uh creatures, Extraterrestrials, like. They told us they had long watched the bickerings and like that of Earthmen and they had come to bring us wisdom and peace. They had this sealed book that would make us one with the Higher Creation. So we took a couple—

Q. They gave you each one?

A. Oh, no. I mean, they didn’t give them to us. They sold them to us. Twenty-five bucks apiece. We paid them in topazes.

Q. You each had to have a book?

A. Well, they only work for one person, see? I mean, if it’s anybody else’s book you can’t see it. You can’t even tell it’s there.

Gull frowned. It would be sticky trying to learn much about the book if one couldn’t see it. Still, even if the book itself were invisible, its effects were tangible indeed —or so said the account on the tapes. Reik had described his actions on entering Heliopolis:

Harry he lemme his switchblade. I stuck it right through my cheeks, here. I didn’t bleed a drop, and then I kind of levitated myself, and after a while I did the Indian Rope Trick, except since I just had my good necktie for a rope I couldn’t get far enough up to disappear. You have to get like seventy-five per cent of your body height up before you disappear.

Q. Could you disappear if you had a long enough rope?

A. Hell, yes. Only I won’t. You get to a higher cycle of psychic. Oneness like me and you don’t kid around with that stuff any more.

Q. Did you do anything else?

A. Well, not till after dinner. Then I put myself in a cataleptic trance and went to sleep. I didn’t do that any more after that, though. Catalepsy doesn’t really rest you. I was beat all the next day, but I figured, what the hell. I was still only on page seven.

Gull sighed, relit his stogie and contemplated the shimmering perfection of his nails.

And at that moment his door-chime sounded. Through the open switch of the announcer-phone came a sound of terrified sobbing and the throaty, somehow familiar voice of a frightened girl:

“Please! Open the door quickly, I ‘ave to see you. I beg you to ‘urry, Meesta Gull!”

Gull froze. He realized at once that something was amiss, for the name on his travel documents was not Gull. Steadily he considered the implications of that fact.

Someone knew his real identity.

Gull called, “One moment.” He was stalling for time, while his mind raced to cope with the problems that deduction entailed. If his identity were known, then security had been breached. If security were breached, then his mission was compromised. If his mission were compromised—

Gull grinned tightly, careless of the possible camera-eye that would even now be recording his every move. If his mission were compromised the only intelligent, safe, approved procedure would be to return to Marsport and give it up. And that, of course, was what Johan Gull would never do.

Carefully, quickly, he slid into his socks and slippers, blew on his nails to make sure they were dry and threw open the door, one hand close to the quick-draw pocket in his lounging robe where his gun awaited his need.

“Thank God,” whispered the girl at the doorway. She was lovely. A slim young blonde. Blue eyes, in which a hint of recent tears stained the eyeshadow at the corners.

Courteously Gull bowed. “Come in,” he said, closing the door behind her. “Sit down, if you will. Would you care for coffee? A drop of brandy? An ice cream?”

She shook her head and cried: “Meesta Gull, your life is in ‘ideous danger!”

Gull stroked ‘his goatee, his smile friendly and unconcerned. “Oh, come off it, my dear,” he said. “You expect me to believe that?” And yet, he mused, she was really beautiful, no more than twenty-seven, no taller than five feet three.

And the tiny ridge at the hemline of her bodice showed that she carried a flame-pencil.

“You must believe me! I ‘ave taken a frightful chance to come ‘ere!’

“Oh, yes, no doubt,” he shrugged, gazing at her narrowly. It was her beauty that had struck him at first, but there were more urgent considerations about this girl than her charms. For one thing, what was that she carried? A huge bag, perhaps; it almost seemed large enough to be a suitcase. For another—

Gull’s brows came together. There was something about her that touched a chord in his memory. Somewhere… sometime… he had seen that girl before. “Why do you come her with this fantastic story?” he demanded.

The girl began to weep. Great soft tears streamed down her face like summer raindrops on a pane. But she made no sound and her eyes were steady on his. “Meesta Gull,” she said simply, “I come ‘ere to save your life because I must. I love you.”

“Hah!”

“But it is true,” she insisted. “I love you more than life itself, Meesta Gull. More than my soul or my ‘opes of ‘Eaven. More even than my children—Kim, who is six; Marie Celeste, four; or little Patty.” She drew out a photograph and handed it to him. It showed her in a plain knitted suit, with the three children grouped around a Christmas tree.

Gull softened slightly. “Nice-looking kids,” he commented, returning the picture.

“Thank you.”

“No, really. I mean it.”

“You’re being kind.”

Gull started to reply, then stopped himself.

For he was falling into the oldest trap in the business. He was allowing his gentler emotions to interfere with the needs of the assignment. In this business there was no room for sentiment, Gull thought wryly. Better men than he had been taken in by the soft passions and had paid for it, in death, in torture, in dismemberment— worst of all, in the failure of a mission. “Hell with all that stuff,” he said gruffly. “I still can’t accept your story.”

“You must. The Black ‘Ats ‘ave a plan to kill you!”

He shook his head. “I can’t take a stranger’s word for it.”

The tears had stopped. She gazed at him for a long opaque moment. Then she smiled tantalizingly.

“A stranger, Meesta Gull?”

“That’s what I said.”

“I see.” She nodded gravely. “We ‘ave never met, eh? And therefore I could not possibly know something about you—oh, something that perhaps is very private.”

“What are you talking about? Get to the point!”

“Something,” she continued, her eyes veiled but dancing with amusement, “that perhaps you ‘ave told no one else. A—shall we say—a sore lip, Meesta Gull? Received, perhaps, in an alley in the Syrian quarter of Marsport?”

Gull was startled. “Really! Now, look. I—confound it, how could you possibly know about that? I’ve mentioned it to no one!”

She inclined her head, a tender and mocking gesture.

“But it’s true! And there was no one there at the time! Not a single living soul but myself and the woman who trapped me!”

The girl pursed her lips but did not speak. Her eyes spoke for her. They were impudent, laughing at him.

“Well, then!” he shouted. He was furious at himself. There had to be some rational explanation! Why had he let her catch him off-balance like this? It was a trick, of course. It could be no more than that. There were a thousand possible explanations of how she could have found out about it—”Well, then! How did you know?”

“Meesta Gull,” she whispered soberly, “please trust me. I cannot tell you now. In precisely seven minutes—” she glanced at her watch—”an attempt will be made on your life.”

“Rot!”

Her eyes flamed with sudden anger. “Idiot!” she blazed. “Oh, ‘ow I ‘ate your harrogance!”

Gull shrugged with dignity.

“Very well! Die, then, if you wish it. The Black ‘Ats will kill you, but I will not die with you.” And she began to take off her clothes.

Johan Gull stared. Then soberly, calmly, he picked up his stogie, relit it and observed, “Your behavior is most inexplicable, my dear.”

“Hah!” The girl stepped out of her dress, her lovely-face bitter with anger and fear. A delicate scent of chypre improved the air.

“These tactics will get you nowhere,” said Gull.

“Pah!” She touched the catch on her carrying case. It fell open and a bright rubbery coverall fell out, with mask and stubby, bright tanks attached.

“Good heavens!” cried Gull, startled. “Is that a warmsuit? SCUBA gear?”

But the girl said only, “You ‘ave four minutes left.”

“You’re carrying this rather far, you know. Even if there are Black Hats aboard, we can’t leave the submarine underwater.”

“Three minutes,” said the girl calmly, wriggling into her suit. But she was wrong.

The submarine seemed to run into a brick wall in the water.

They were thrown against the forward wall, a Laocoon of lovely bare limbs and rubbery warmsuit and Gull entwined in the middle. A huge dull sound blossomed around them. Gull fought himself free.

The girl sat up, her face a mask of terror. “Oh, damn the damn thing,” she cried, shaking her wrist, staring at her watch. “I must’ve forgot to set it. Too late, Meesta Gull! We ‘ave been torpedoed!”