Ride the Star Winds (18 page)

These adults, despite their apparent age, seemed to be showing far more life than did the children. They stood up as the two trishaws passed, salaaming deeply. And Grimes thought that he read hate in their yellow eyes.

“Mr. Mendoza,” he said, “shouldn’t these kids be at school?”

“School, Your Excellency? What for? Whatever skills they will need when they join our work force they will learn from their parents.”

“Shouldn’t they be . . . playing?”

“Playing, Your Excellency?”

“Yes. I’ve seen children on more worlds than you’ve had hot dinners and, more than once, I’ve cursed the noisy little bastards. But these. . . . Anybody would think that they were doped.”

“They are, Your Excellency.”

“What!”

“It is their way of life. Their parents start them on the dreamweed almost as soon as they are weaned. By adolescence they have built up at least a partial immunity and are able to function as members of the work force.”

“What a life!” exclaimed Grimes.

“They have never known any better, Your Excellency. And who can say that they are not happy, sitting there and dreaming their dreams?”

“Would you want
your
children to grow up like that, Mr. Mendoza?”

“I have no children, Commodore Grimes. It is extremely unlikely that I shall ever be a father. To me the necessary preliminaries, undertaken with a woman, would be extremely distasteful.”

His voice must have carried. From the following trishaw came Su Lin’s scornful laugh.

The manager lapsed into sullen, haughty silence. The vehicles sped on, hardly slackening speed when, once they were clear of the compound, there were hills to negotiate. The road was now a winding one, threading its way between hillocks on each of which the fleshy stems and leaves of the dreamweed flourished. In this locality the crop was not yet ready for harvesting; the predominant colour of the vegetation was a greenish blue. As they progressed, however, Grimes saw an increasing number of purple leaves.

And then they came to an area in which the harvest was in full swing. On either side of the winding roadway rose the glowing purple mounds, over which crawled the small, dark-skinned people, their white loincloths in vivid contrast to the almost-black of their thin bodies. They were working in pairs—usually it was the man who wielded the knife, hacking the fleshy leaves from the thick, convoluted stems while a woman filled a basket with the yield. Filled baskets stood by the roadside, awaiting collection. Overseers moved among the workers. These wore white jackets and turbans as well as loincloths. Their skin was lighter than those of the laborers, their build heavier. They carried short whips.

The air was heavy with a sweet yet acrid aroma. Grimes wondered if it were safe to breathe. He asked Mendoza as much.

“Perfectly safe, Your Excellency,” the manager told him scornfully. “The dreamweed has to be taken orally—chewed and swallowed. If you care to look you will see the fieldhands doing just that. Doesn’t it say in the Bible, ‘Thou shall not muzzle the ox that treads the corn’?” He barked an order to the trishaw driver and the vehicle slowed to a crawl, as did the one carrying Su Lin. “On the other hand, it is not desirable that the ox make a pig of himself. As that man there is doing.”

The person indicated was working far more slowly than the others. The leaves that he was hacking from the stems he was stuffing into his busily chewing mouth while his woman, holding her almost empty basket, watched.

An overseer was making his way around and over the tangle of stems, shouting angrily. The man paid no heed, although his woman put out a hand to try to catch his wrist as he was raising another bundle of leaves to his mouth. He shook her off, went on chewing. The overseer was now within striking range. He raised his whip and used it, slashing the addict across the face. The laborer screamed shrilly. He brought up his long, heavy knife to ward off the whip that was descending for a second blow. And then there was a flurry of fast action, after which the whipwielder was staring stupidly at his right wrist from which the bright red, arterial blood was spurting, then at his hand, still clutching the whip, on the ground at his feet. The woman was wailing loudly; it seemed odd to Grimes that so loud a noise could come from so small a body. But she was soon quieted. The knife silenced her, slashing down onto the juncture of scrawny neck with thin shoulder.

There was blood everywhere.

On the hillock both workers and overseers were scrambling desperately away from the scene of the maiming and the killing. Down in the road the trishaw drivers were attempting to turn their vehicles so that they could return to the safety of the compound. The madman, purple froth spattering from his working mouth, his yellow eyes glaring, was jumping down the hillside toward them, miraculously avoiding being tripped by the tangled roots and stems.

Su Lin’s trishaw was around, making off downhill. Grimes’s trishaw was turning. As it did so it heeled over. Mendoza fell heavily against Grimes—and Grimes fell out on to the roadway. He scrambled to his feet. He would have run but, in his fall, he had twisted his right leg. He was weaponless. He looked around frantically. A stone to throw at the fast advancing homicidal maniac . . .

But there weren’t any stones, and it was a very long time since, as a very junior officer in the Survey Service, he
had
taken a course in unarmed combat.

He decided that if he were to die all his wounds would be in front. He would not turn his back on his murderer. And perhaps—perhaps!—he might be able to cow the man into submission with his best quarterdeck glare . . .

The killer was down on the road now, loping toward Grimes. Grimes stood there, facing him.

“Stop!” he barked.

And the man did stop and momentarily—but only momentarily—the light of sanity gleamed in his yellow eyes. Then he came on again, the bloody knife upraised.

“Stop! Drop that knife!”

The man came on.

Grimes heard running feet behind him. So Mendoza, he thought, had returned to sort things out. Presumably he was used to such emergencies and, probably, armed.

But it was not Mendoza. It was Su Lin. She ran past Grimes as he shouted at her, “Get back, you stupid bitch! Get back!”

She had something in her right hand, something small that gleamed golden in the sunlight. Grimes recognized it. It was the lighter that she had used to ignite the tobacco in his pipe.

He staggered after her. He had to save her from the madman, even though it might cost his own life.

The maniac screamed dreadfully. Before he threw up his hands, his knife dropped and forgotten, to cover his face Grimes saw the two-meter-long flame, a thin pencil of intense radiance, that slashed across the mad, staring eyes, searing and blackening them. There was a sickening stench of burned flesh in the air. Then the man, hunched and moaning, turned and shambled blindly away. Sightless, he could not keep to the road. He crashed into the dreamweed plants, tripped and fell heavily. His thin, high whining was a dreadful thing to hear.

Su Lin, the lethal lighter back in a pocket, stopped to pick up the knife.

“What . . . What are you going to do?” asked Grimes.

“Finish him off quickly,” she said. “It will be the kindest way.”

She was right, of course.

Grimes made no attempt to stop her but did not watch.

Chapter 29

The two trishaws returned.

Mendoza got out of the leading one, walked past Grimes and Su Lin to where the huddled form of the dead maniac was sprawled face down, the hilt of his knife protruding from his back. Two of the overseers were squatting by the corpse, talking in low voices. The manager went to them, was obviously questioning the men. He returned to the governor and the girl. His expression, decided Grimes, was an odd combination of condemnation and disappointment.

He said, “This is a serious matter.”

“Too right it is,” said Grimes. Then, “And where were
you
when the shit hit the fan?”

“A man is dead, Your Excellency.”

“For all the help that you were, I could be dead too. As for your dead man—he is responsible for one death himself. Possibly two.”

“But this is a serious matter, Your Excellency. This woman may be your servant but she is a native of this world—and not a citizen. Only citizens may carry weapons.”

“Only citizens, Mr. Mendoza?” Grimes gestured toward the dead man. “Was
he
a citizen? What about his knife?”

“A working tool, Commodore.”

“And a murder weapon.”

Mendoza ignored this.

He said to Su Lin, “Give me your flamethrower, girl. It will have to be produced as evidence when you are brought to trial.”

Grimes thought hard and fast.

He said, “It is not hers to give to you, Mr. Mendoza.”

“What do you mean?”

“It is
my
lighter. During my career as commodore of a privateer flotilla
I
found it convenient to carry on my person gadgets such as that lighter—seemingly innocent but capable of being used in selfdefense . . .” While he was speaking he was filling his pipe. “I had to use it once,” he went on untruthfully, “to quell a mutiny . . .”

“Then what is
she
doing with it?”

By this time the bit of Grimes’s pipe was between his teeth. Su Lin lit it for him, using a flame of normal dimensions and intensity.

“You see what she’s doing with it,” Grimes said through a cloud of acrid smoke. “She regards this as part of her duties.”

“Like stabbing a blinded man in the back, Your Excellency.”

“He would not have lived,” said Su Lin. “Not only was he blinded but his brains were fried.”

“This is a matter for Mr. Lopez,” said Mendoza stiffly.

“Naturally,” agreed Grimes. “After all, it was one of his employees—or slaves—who would have murdered me had it not been for Su Lin.”

“It was one of his employees who was murdered by your servant, Your Excellency. At the very least there will be a heavy claim for compensation.”

“Quite possibly,” said Grimes. “I shall have to look into the legal aspects. I am not as young as I was and being attacked by homicidal maniacs puts a severe strain upon my nervous system. It is likely that I shall require the services of an expensive psychiatrist to undo the mental damage that I sustained.” He drew deeply from his pipe and then exhaled the smoke. “But no doubt Mr. Lopez is rich enough to pay both the doctor’s bill
and
the damages that I shall demand.”

“Your Excellency,” almost sneered Mendoza, “is quite a space lawyer.”

“As far as this planet is concerned,” growled Grimes, “I am the law—and the prophets. The members of my personal staff answer only to me, and don’t go forgetting it. Come, Su Lin, we will share a trishaw back to Mr. Lopez’s not so humble abode. Mr. Mendoza can do as he pleases.”

The two of them clambered aboard one of the waiting vehicles.

“Home, James,” ordered Grimes, “and don’t spare the horses.”

To his surprise the man understood. It was a pity as it meant that he and the girl were not able to compare notes during the ride back to the Lopez establishment.

Understandably Mr. Lopez was not pleased when he heard Grimes’s story. He would have been far happier, Grimes could not help thinking, if Mendoza had returned alone with the news of the murder of yet another troublesome planetary governor. And yet, Grimes knew, the messy affair had not been planned. How could it have been? But Mendoza had been quite prepared to let nature take its course and would have been commended rather than otherwise if Grimes had been hacked to pieces.

“A sorry business, Your Excellency,” sighed Lopez.

“It could have been sorrier still as far as I’m concerned,” said Grimes coldly. And then—he might as well put the boot in while he had the chance—“I was far from impressed by the conduct of your Mr. Mendoza. Any officer of the Survey Service behaving as he did would face a court martial on the charge of cowardice in the face of the enemy.”

“My trishaw driver bolted,” Mendoza said.

“So did Su Lin’s. But she managed to jump out and run back to help me.”

“Ah, yes,” murmured Lopez, “there is the matter of the weapon that she was carrying, quite illegally.”

“Not a weapon,” Grimes told him. “A lighter.
My
lighter.”

“A very special sort of lighter,” insisted Lopez.

“Anything
can be used as a weapon,” said Grimes. “You should see what the average petty officer instructor in the Survey Service, a specialist in unarmed combat, can do with a rolled-up newspaper. And when I was privateering one of my officers could do quite dreadful damage with a pack of playing cards.”

“You realize, Your Excellency,” persisted Lopez, “that I shall be obliged to make a full report to President O’Higgins’s chief of police and to Colonel Bardon.”

“Report away, Mr. Lopez. I am Colonel Bardon’s superior officer. And, legally speaking, I rank above the president. As far as I am concerned
my
servant took steps, effective steps, to save my life while yours, Mr. Mendoza, was rattling down the road as fast as his trishaw could carry him.”

“The driver panicked!” almost shouted Mendoza.

“That’s
your
story. Stick to it, if you feel like it. I could hardly care less.”

There was what seemed to be a long silence, broken at last by Lopez.

“Well, Your Excellency, what has been done has been done. I suppose that now you will wish to return aboard your airship to freshen up before joining Madam Lopez and myself for dinner. . . .”

“I shall return aboard my airship,” said Grimes, “and then I shall order my pilot to cast off.”

“But I have instructed my chef to prepare a meal, a very special meal, for the occasion of your visit.”

“You’ll just have to eat it yourself. Come, Su Lin.”

The butler escorted them from the oriental opulence of Lopez’s reception room up to the roof. Grimes regretted having missed what probably would have been a superb curry. But, he consoled himself, there might have been some subtle poison in the portions served to him, or, possibly, a stiff infusion of dreamweed essence.