128925.fb2 Time in Advance - читать онлайн бесплатно полную версию книги . Страница 5

Time in Advance - читать онлайн бесплатно полную версию книги . Страница 5

“Because it is to your profit to do so, sir. Not merely morally profitable—although let us not overlook the life of the spirit—but financially profitable. Financially profitable, Mr. Crandall.”

“Would you kindly tell me what you are talking about?”

The fat man leaned forward and smiled confidentially. “If you can forgive the person who caused you to go off and suffer seven long, seven miserable years of acute discomfort, Mr. Crandall, I am prepared to make you a most attractive offer. You are entitled to commit one murder. I desire to have one murder committed. I am very wealthy. You, I judge—and please take no umbrage, sir—are very poor.

“I can make you comfortable for the rest of your life, extremely comfortable, Mr. Crandall, if only you will put aside your thoughts, your unworthy thoughts, of anger and personal vengeance. I have a business competitor, you see, who has been—”

Crandall turned him off. “Go serve your own seven years,” he venomously told the blank screen. Then, suddenly, it was funny. He lay back in the chair and laughed his head off.

That butter-faced old slob! Quoting religious texts at him!

But the call had served a purpose. Somehow it put the scene with Polly in the perspective of ridicule. To think of the woman sitting in her frowsy little apartment, trembling over her dingy affairs of more than ten years ago! To think she was afraid he had bled and battled for seven years because of that!

He thought about it for a moment, then shrugged. “Well, anyway, I bet it did her good.”

And now he was hungry.

He thought of having a meal sent up, just to avoid a possible rendezvous with another of Stephanson’s ball-throwers, but decided against it. If Stephanson was really hunting him seriously, it would not be much of a job to have something put into the food he was sent. He’d be much safer eating in a restaurant chosen at random.

Besides, a few bright lights, a little gaiety, would be really welcome. This was his first night of freedom—and he had to wash that Polly taste out of his mouth.

He checked the corridor carefully before going out. There was nothing, but the action reminded him of a tiny planet near Vega where you made exactly the same precautionary gesture every time you emerged from one of the tunnels formed by the long, parallel lines of moist, carboniferous ferns.

Because if you didn’t—well, there was an enormous leech-like mollusc that might be waiting there, a creature which could flip chunks of shell with prodigious force. The shell merely stunned its prey, but stunned it long enough for the leech to get in close.

And that leech could empty a man in ten minutes flat.

Once he’d been hit by a fragment of shell, and while he’d been lying there, Henck— Good old Blotto Otto! Cranda smiled. Was it possible that the two of them would look back on those hideous adventures, one day, with actual nostalgia, the kind of beery, pleasant memories that soldiers develop after even the ugliest of wars? Well, and if they die they hadn’t gone through them for the sake of fat cats lik Mr. Edward Ballaskia and his sanctified dreams of evil.

Nor, when you came right down to it, for dismal little frightened trollops like Polly.

Frederick Stoddard Stephanson. Frederick Stoddard—Somebody put an arm on his shoulder and he came to, realizing that he was halfway through the lobby.

“Nick,” said a rather familiar voice.

Crandall squinted at the face at the end of the arm. The slight, pointed beard—he didn’t know anyone with a bears like that, but the eyes looked so terribly familiar … .

“Nick,” said the man with the beard. “I couldn’t do it.”

Those eyes—of course, it was his younger brother!

“Dan!” he shouted.

“It’s me all right. Here.” Something clattered to the floor Crandall looked down and saw a blaster lying on the rug, larger and much more expensive blaster than the one be was carrying. Why was Dan toting a blaster? Who was after Dan?

With the thought, there came half-understanding. Am there was fear—fear of the words that might come pouring out of the mouth of a brother whom he had not seen for all these years …

“I could have killed you from the moment you walked into the lobby,” Dan was saying. “You weren’t out of the sights for a second. But I want you to know, Nick, that the post-criminal sentence wasn’t the reason I froze on the firing button.”

“No?” Crandall asked in a breath that was exhaled slowly through a retroactive lifetime.

“I just couldn’t stand adding any more guilt about you. Ever since that business with Polly—”

“With Polly. Yes, of course, with Polly.” Something seemed to hang like a weight from the point of his jaw; it pulled his head down and his mouth open. “With Polly. That business with Polly.”

Dan punched his fist into an open palm twice. “I knew you’d come looking for me sooner or later. I almost went crazy waiting—and I did go nearly crazy with guilt. But I never figured you’d do it this way, Nick. Seven years to wait for you to come back!”

“That’s why you never wrote to me, Dan?”

“What did I have to say? What is there to say? I thought I loved her, but I found out what I meant to her as soon as she was divorced. I guess I always wanted what was yours because you were my older brother, Nick. That’s the only excuse I can offer and I know exactly what it’s worth. Because I know what you and Polly had together, what I broke up as a kind of big practical joke. But one thing, Nick: I won’t kill you and I won’t defend myself. I’m too tired. I’m too guilty. You know where to find me. Anytime, Nick.”

He turned and strode rapidly through the lobby, the metal spangles that were this year’s high masculine fashion glittering on his calves. He didn’t look back, even when he was walking past the other side of the clear plastic that enclosed the lobby.

Crandall watched him go, then said “Hm” to himself in a lonely kind of way. He reached down, retrieved the other blaster and went out to find a restaurant.

As he sat, poking around in the spiced Venusian food that wasn’t one-tenth as good as he had remembered it, he kept thinking about Polly and Dan. The incidents—he could remember incidents galore, now that he had a couple of pegs on which to hang them. To think he’d never suspected—but who could suspect Polly, who could suspect Dan?

He pulled the prison discharge out of his pocket and studied it. Having duly served a maximum penalty of seven years, discounted from fourteen years, Nicholas Crandall is herewith discharged in a pre-criminal status.

—to murder his ex-wife, Polly Crandall?

—to murder his younger brother, Daniel Crandall?

Ridiculous!

But they hadn’t found it so ridiculous. Both of them, so blissfully secure in their guilt, so egotistically certain that they and they alone were the objects of a hatred intense enough to endure the worst that the Galaxy had to offer in order to attain vengeance—why, they had both been so positive that their normal and already demonstrated cunning had deserted them and they had completely misread the warmth in his eyes! Either one could have switched confessions in mid-explanation. If they had only not been so preoccupied with self and had noted his astonishment in time, either or both of them could still be deceiving him!

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw that a woman was standing near his table. She had been reading his discharge over his shoulder. He leaned back and took her in while she stood and smiled at him.

She was fantastically beautiful. That is, she had everything a woman needs for great beauty—figure, facial structure, complexion, carriage, eyes, hair, all these to perfection—but she had those other final touches that, as in all kinds of art, make the difference between a merely great work and an all-time masterpiece. Those final touches included such things as sufficient wealth to create the ultimate setting in coiffure and gown, as well as the single Saturnian paeaea stone glowing in priceless black splendor between her breasts. Those final touches included the substantial feminine intelligence that beat in her steady eyes; and the somewhat overbred, overin-dulged, overspoiled quality mixed in with it was the very last piquant fillip of a positively brilliant composition in the human medium.

“May I sit with you, Mr. Crandall?” she asked in a voice of which no more could be said than that it fitted the rest of her.

Rather amused, but more exhilarated than amused, he slid over on the restaurant couch. She sat down like an empress taking her throne before the eyes of a hundred tributary kings.

Crandall knew, within approximate limits, who she was and what she wanted. She was either a reigning post-debutante from the highest social circles in the System, or a theatrical star newly arrived and still in a state of nova.

And he, as a just-discharged convict, with the power of life and death in his hands, represented a taste she had not yet been able to indulge but was determined to enjoy.

Well, in a sense it wasn’t flattering, but a woman like this could only fall to the lot of an ordinary man in very exceptional circumstances; he might as well take advantage of his status. He would satisfy her whim, while she, on his first night of freedom—

“That’s your discharge, isn’t it?” she asked and looked at it again. There was a moistness about her upper lip as she studied it—what a strange, sense-weary patina for one so splendidly young!

“Tell me, Mr. Crandall,” she asked at last, turning to him with the wet pinpoints on her lip more brilliant than ever. “You’ve served a pre-criminal sentence for murder. It is true, is it not, that the punishment for murder and the most brutal, degraded rape imaginable are exactly the same?”

After a long silence, Crandall called for his check and walked out of the restaurant.

He had subsided enough when he reached the hotel to stroll with care around the transparent lobby housing. No one who looked like a Stephanson trigger man was in sight, although Stephanson was a cautious gambler. One attempt having failed, he’d be unlikely to try another for some time.