"That was good." Armand sighed as he wiped oil from his mouth. "You certainly know how to cook, Earl. But then you would, wouldn't you?"
"Why?"
"A traveler has to be the master of many skills. To hunt, trap, butcher, cook-without that ability how to survive? And to eat when food is available because there can never be any certainty of when the next meal will offer the chance to eat again. You see? I know a little about such things."
"You've traveled?"
"A little when young. It is a disease of youth, is it not? The urge to be up and moving, to see new worlds, new places. To find adventure and excitement and, perhaps, romance. Well, I found no treasure and no rich women waiting to fall into my arms. I was offered no exotic employment and found no natural advantage. But some things I did find."
"Dirt," said Dumarest softly. "Discomfort. Pain and hunger. Cold indifference, men who cheated, women who lied. Poverty and what it can bring."
"The need to be utterly selfish," whispered Armand. "To be greedy, to give nothing away which could be sold, to concentrate every thought and action on the need to survive. And the loneliness. The loneliness."
"So you returned to Harald?"
"After a couple of years, yes. I'd made a friend, together we traveled Low, but when we landed he had died in transit. It decided things for me. Some men are not made in an adventurer's mold. So I came back home and took up a post with-well, never mind. And then-but that doesn't matter now either."
"Perhaps one thing does."
"Hilda?" Armand looked bleakly at his hands. "It's too late for that now. Once we could have made a life together but I was weak while she was strong. Weak!" His fist slammed against the table. "The story of my life. Always I have been weak. Earl!"
He needed his demon and it would do little harm on top of such richly oiled food. And his metabolism, accustomed to alcohol, would be demanding it. Silently Dumarest handed the man a glass, watched as he plunged it into the bubbling vat. A gulp and it was empty.
"How are you progressing?"
"On the spectrogram?" Armand helped himself to another drink. "Slowly. The work is engrossing and a puzzle of interest but there are so many variables to take into account before it will be possible to present a final picture."
"Just what are you trying to do?"
"Nothing a computer couldn't do if correctly programmed. Basically, by a process of elimination, I'm saving you money. You want to find a certain star, right? But stars are not all the same. There are blue-violets, red giants, white dwarfs, variables, binaries, stars rich in radio waves, others verging on neutronic collapse."
"So?"
"I have determined that your spectrogram belongs to a G-type star, one of medium size, fairly stable, past the first flush of its creation but far from age-collapse. This alone, as you can see, is a great saving. A hired computer can be programmed to make comparisons only with stars of a similar type."
Dumarest said, grimly, "Did the woman lie to me? She said-"
"What, in her position, she had to say. The company does not exist to teach its customers how to save money. If you asked for a complete comparison check then that is what you would have been given." Armand shrugged. "Come, Earl, did you expect them to be charitable?"
On Harald nothing could be charitable. Dumarest said, "So you've isolated the spectral type. Good. What remains? A simple check?"
"Not so simple." Armand sipped at his drink and shrugged at Dumarest's expression. "You think that all we need to do is to expand the spectrum, isolate and determine the thickness and density of the Fraunhofer lines and then, as soon as we have found a match, there is the answer. Is that so?"
"What else?"
"The red shift." Armand lifted his glass, saw Dumarest's eyes and hastily placed it down. "Stars are at varying distances," he explained. "Any spectogram taken from one point will serve to identify all stars as seen from that point. Good enough-but what happens if we take a spectrogram of the same star but from different distances? They would have to be great, naturally, but only relatively so. And the direction too, that can have a bearing."
"The Doppler Effect," said Dumarest. "If the light comes from a source moving towards you it moved towards the blue end of the spectrum. If from a source moving away then it shifts towards the red."
"Exactly, and so we get the name for the phenomena." Armand frowned, thoughtful. "But why call it that? Why not the blue shift or the red-blue shift? You called it what- the Doppler Effect?"
"A name given to it by an old scientist I once knew. He learned it from an old book." Dumarest dismissed the matter of terminology with an impatient gesture. "Never mind what we call it, what effect does it have as far as I'm concerned?"
"It introduces a variable. If your spectrogram was taken from a point close to the primary it will be minutely different from those taken at great distances and they, in turn, will differ from each other depending on which position relative to the source they were taken. You see the difficulty?"
Find Earth and he would be able to identify Earth's sun- but his only interest in the primary was as a guide to the planet itself. A vicious circle-or was it?
"No." Boldly Armand took another drink. "I mentioned it to illustrate the difficulties but the real answer lies in the Fraunhofer lines. What I am doing is to isolate them, determine their position and density, correlate them with the elements which gave them birth and so build up a pattern stripped of all unessentials. Once I have done that a computer-comparison will be relatively cheap." He anticipated Dumarest's question. "At a rough guess I'd say in the region of a fifth to a tenth. It would depend, of course, on the company."
"Of course," said Dumarest, and clamped his hand on the other's wrist as he again made to lift his glass. "You'd better get back to work, yes?"
"And you?"
"I'm going to look around town."
The night had come with a thin scatter of rain and it puddled the streets, gleaming on the sidewalks, rising in pluming fountains from beneath the wheels of passing traffic. It was close to midnight, the area around the house dark with shuttered windows, sparse overhead lights throwing patches of brightness interspersed with pools of shadow.
A quiet, safe place by the look of it, but if it were it would be the first Dumarest had seen. Already he knew that the old vices ruled beneath the surface but here was not the place to look for what he wanted to find. Closer to the field he found it.
"Mister!" The voice whispered from a shadowed doorway. "You lost?"
"No, just looking."
"For a little fun?" His clothing had told the woman he was a stranger. The tunic with its high collar and long sleeves held tight at the wrists together with pants of matching grey plastic tucked into knee-high boots were the mark of a traveler. Such a man could be lonely.
"I could help out, maybe." She stepped into the light, tilting her head so as to look into his face. Her body sagged beneath the faded clothing she wore and her face was lost beneath a mask of paint. Only the eyes were alive, hard, questing. "I've a place nearby. Music, wine, some food if you want. I'm a good cook."
"No thanks."
"Not hungry?" She wasn't talking about food. "I've a spice which will take care of that. Something to get you in the mood and keep you in it for as long as you want. And I won't skin you, mister. We'll make a fair deal." Her eyes searched his face. "No? Something else then?"
Dumarest handed her coins. "If I wanted to watch some fights where would I go?"
"Fights?" Her tone sharpened. "You mean with knives?"
"Yes."
"You fooled me, mister. You don't look like a degenerate. Is that the way you get your kicks? Watching kids slash each other to ribbons? Betting, maybe? God, at times you men make me sick." Then, as he stood waiting, she added, "Try Benny at the Novator. It's down the road to the right of the gate as you come out."
The place was as Dumarest expected and similar to others he had known. A room with girls serving drinks. Food on a counter. Music from concealed speakers and the lights turned low so as to shield the faces of those who sat huddled in cubicles. But the whole thing was a facade. Behind lay the ring, the tiered seats, the lights, the stench of sweat and oil and blood.
The arena!
Always they were to be found, the places where men and women vented their primitive lust for blood, taking a vicarious pleasure from another's victories, gloating at another's pain. An escape some called it, a release from accumulated pressures. A few spoke of it as a therapy, a means to cool the aggressive instincts, to govern the beast which lurked always beneath the skin. Others called it butchery.
To Benny it was a business.