Last Enemy by H. Beam Piper (best novels to read for students TXT) 📗

Verkan Vall nodded. “My suite is on the fifteenth floor above; will that be all right?” He waited until the losers had finished settling their bets, then motioned to his own pair of Assassins.

As they emerged into the Martian Room again, the manager was waiting; he looked as though he were about to demand that Verkan Vall vacate his suite. However, when he saw the arm of the President-General of the Society of Assassins draped amicably over his guest’s shoulder, he came forward bowing and smiling.

“Larnorm, I want you to put five of your best Assassins to guarding the approaches to the Lord Virzal’s suite,” Klarnood told him. “I’ll send five more from Assassins’ Hall to replace them at their ordinary duties. And I’ll hold you responsible with your carnate existence for the Lord Virzal’s safety in this hotel. Understand?”

“Oh, yes, Honorable Assassin-President; you may trust me. The Lord Virzal will be perfectly safe.”

In Verkan Vall’s suite, above, Klarnood sat down and got out his pipe, filling it with tobacco lightly mixed with zerfa. To his surprise, he saw his host light a plain tobacco cigarette.

“Don’t you use zerfa?” he asked.

“Very little,” Verkan Vall replied. “I grow it. If you’d see the bums who hang around our drying sheds, on Venus, cadging rejected leaves and smoking themselves into a stupor, you’d be frugal in using it, too.”

Klarnood nodded. “You know, most men would want a pipe of fifty percent, or a straight zerfa cigarette, after what you’ve been through,” he said.

“I’d need something like that, to deaden my conscience, if I had one to deaden,” Verkan Vall said. “As it is, I feel like a murderer of babes. That overgrown fool, Marnark, handled his knife like a cow-butcher. The young fellow couldn’t handle a pistol at all. I suppose the old fellow, Sirzob, was a fair shot, but dropping him wasn’t any great feat of arms, either.”

Klarnood looked at him curiously for a moment. “You know,” he said, at length, “I believe you actually mean that. Well, until he met you, Marnark of Bashad was rated as the best knife-fighter in Darsh. Sirzob had ten dueling victories to his credit, and young Yirzol four.” He puffed slowly on his pipe. “I like you, Lord Virzal; a great Assassin was lost when you decided to reincarnate as a Venusian land-owner. I’d hate to see you discarnated without proper warning. I take it you’re ignorant of the intricacies of Terran politics?”

“To a large extent, yes.”

“Well, do you know who those three men were?” When Verkan Vall shook his head, Klarnood continued: “Marnark was the son and right-hand associate of old Mirzark of Bashad, the Statisticalist Party leader. Sirzob of Abo was their propaganda director. And Yirzol of Narva was their leading socio-economic theorist, and their candidate for Executive Chairman. In six minutes, with one knife thrust and two shots, you did the Statisticalist Party an injury second only to that done them by the young lady in whose name you were fighting. In two weeks, there will be a planet-wide general election. As it stands, the Statisticalists have a majority of the seats in Parliament and on the Executive Council. As a result of your work and the Lady Dallona’s, they’ll lose that majority, and more, when the votes are tallied.”

“Is that another reason why you like me?” Verkan Vall asked.

“Unofficially, yes. As President-General of the Society of Assassins, I must be nonpolitical. The Society is rigidly so; if we let ourselves become involved, as an organization, in politics, we could control the System Government inside of five years, and we’d be wiped out of existence in fifty years by the very forces we sought to control,” Klarnood said. “But personally, I would like to see the Statisticalist Party destroyed. If they succeed in their program of socialization, the Society would be finished. A socialist state is, in its final development, an absolute, total, state; no total state can tolerate extra-legal and para-governmental organizations. So we have adopted the policy of giving a little inconspicuous aid, here and there, to people who are dangerous to the Statisticalists. The Lady Dallona of Hadron, and Dr. Harnosh of Hosh, are such persons. You appear to be another. That’s why I ordered that fellow, Larnorm, to make sure you were safe in his hotel.”

“Where is the Lady Dallona?” Verkan Vall asked. “From your use of the present tense, I assume you believe her to be still carnate.”

Klarnood looked at Verkan Vall keenly. “That’s a pretty blunt question, Lord Virzal,” he said. “I wish I knew a little more about you. When you and your Assassins started inquiring about the Lady Dallona, I tried to check up on you. I found out that you had come to Darsh from Ghamma on a ship of the family of Zorda, accompanied by Brarnend of Zorda himself. And that’s all I could find out. You claim to be a Venusian planter, and you might be. Any Terran who can handle weapons as you can would have come to my notice long ago. But you have no more ascertainable history than if you’d stepped out of another dimension.”

That was getting uncomfortably close to the truth. In fact, it was the truth. Verkan Vall laughed.

“Well, confidentially,” he said, “I’m from the Arcturus System. I followed the Lady Dallona here from our home planet, and when I have rescued her from among you Solarians, I shall, according to our customs, receive her hand in marriage. As she is the daughter of the Emperor of Arcturus, that’ll be quite a good thing for me.”

Klarnood chuckled. “You know, you’d only have to tell me that about three or four times and I’d start believing it,” he said. “And Dr. Harnosh of Hosh would believe it the first time; he’s been talking to himself ever since the Lady Dallona started her experimental work here. Lord Virzal, I’m going to take a chance on you. The Lady Dallona is still carnate, or was four days ago, and the same for Dirzed. They both went into hiding after the discarnation feast of Garnon of Roxor, to escape the enmity of the Statisticalists. Two days after they disappeared, Dirzed called Assassins’ Hall and reported this, but told us nothing more. I suppose, in about three or four days, I could re-establish contact with him. We want the public to think that the Statisticalists made away with the Lady Dallona, at least until the election’s over.”

Verkan Vall nodded. “I was pretty sure that was the situation,” he said. “It may be that they will get in touch with me; if they don’t, I’ll need your help in reaching them.”

“Why do you think the Lady Dallona will try to reach you?”

“She needs all the help she can get. She knows she can get plenty from me. Why do you think I interrupted my search for her, and risked my carnate existence, to fight those people over a matter of verbalisms and political propaganda?” Verkan Vall went to the newscast visiplate and snapped it on. “We’ll see if I’m getting results, yet.”

The plate lighted, and a handsome young man in a gold-laced green suit was speaking out of it:

“... where he is heavily guarded by Assassins. However, in an exclusive interview with representatives of this service, the Assassin Hirzif, one of the two who seconded the men the Lord Virzal fought, said that in his opinion all of the three were so outclassed as to have had no chance whatever, and that he had already refused an offer of ten thousand System Monetary Units to discarnate the Lord Virzal for the Statisticalist Party. ‘When I want to discarnate,’ Hirzif the Assassin said, ‘I’ll invite in my friends and do it properly; until I do, I wouldn’t go up against the Lord Virzal of Verkan for ten million S.M.U.’”

Verkan Vall snapped off the visiplate. “See what I mean?” he asked. “I fought those politicians just for the advertising. If Dallona and Dirzed are anywhere near a visiplate, they’ll know how to reach me.”

“Hirzif shouldn’t have talked about refusing that retainer,” Klarnood frowned. “That isn’t good Assassin ethics. Why, yes, Lord Virzal; that was cleverly planned. It ought to get results. But I wish you’d get the Lady Dallona out of Darsh, and preferably off Terra, as soon as you can. We’ve benefited by this, so far, but I shouldn’t like to see things go much further. A real civil war could develop out of this situation, and I don’t want that. Call on me for help; I’ll give you a code word to use at Assassins’ Hall.”

A real civil war was developing even as Klarnood spoke; by mid-morning of the next day, the fighting that had been partially suppressed by the Constabulary had broken out anew. The Assassins employed by the Solar Hotel—heavily re-enforced during the night—had fought a pitched battle with Statisticalist partisans on the landing stage above Verkan Vall’s suite, and now several Constabulary airboats were patrolling around the building. The rule on Constabulary interference seemed to be that while individuals had an unquestionable right to shoot out their differences among themselves, any fighting likely to endanger nonparticipants was taboo.

Just how successful in enforcing this rule the Constabulary were was open to some doubt. Ever since arising, Verkan Vall had heard the crash of small arms and the hammering of automatic weapons in other parts of the towering city unit. There hadn’t been a civil war on the Akor-Neb Sector for over five centuries, he knew, but then, Hadron Dalla, Doctor of Psychic Science, and intertemporal trouble-carrier extraordinary, had only been on this sector for a little under a year. If anything, he was surprised that the explosion had taken so long to occur.

One of the servants furnished to him by the hotel management approached him in the drawing room, holding a four-inch-square wafer of white plastic.

“Lord Virzal, there is a masked Assassin in the hallway who brought this under Assassins’ Truce,” he said.

Verkan Vall took the wafer and pared off three of the four edges, which showed black where they had been fused. Unfolding it, he found, as he had expected, that the pyrographed message within was in the alphabet and language of the First Paratime Level: