Robert Silverberg - World of a Thousand Colors

When Jolvar Hollinrede discovered that the slim, pale young man opposite him was journeying to the World of a Thousand Colors to undergo the Test, he spied a glittering opportunity for himself. And in that moment was the slim, pale young man’s fate set.

Hollinrede’s lean fingers closed on the spun-fibre drinkflask. He peered across the burnished tabletop. “The Test, you say?”

The young man smiled diffidently. “Yes. I think I’m ready. I’ve waited years—and now’s my big chance.” He had had a little too much of the cloying liqueur he had been drinking; his eyes shone glassily, and his tongue was looser than it had any right to be.

“Few are called and fewer are chosen,” Hollinrede mused. “Let me buy you another drink.”

“No, I—”

“It will be an honor. Really. It’s not every day I have a chance to buy a Testee a drink.”

Hollinrede waved a jeweled hand and the servomech brought them two more drinkflasks. Lightly Hollinrede punctured one, slid it along the tabletop, kept the other in his hand unopened. “I don’t believe I know your name,” he said.

“Derveran Marti. I’m from Earth. You?”

“Jolvar Hollinrede. Likewise. I travel from world to world on business, which is what brings me to Niprion this day.”

“What sort of business?”

“I trade in jewels,” Hollinrede said, displaying the bright collection studding his fingers. They were all morphosims, not the originals, but only careful chemical analysis would reveal that. Hollinrede did not believe in exposing millions of credits’ worth of merchandise to anyone who cared to lop off his hand.

“I was a clerk,” Marti said. “But that’s all far behind me. I’m on to the World of a Thousand Colors to take the Test! The Test!”

“The Test!” Hollinrede echoed. He lifted his unpunctured drinkflask in a gesture of salute, raised it to his lips, pretended to drain it. Across the table Derveran Marti coughed as the liqueur coursed down his throat. He looked up, smiling dizzily, and smacked his lips.

“When does your ship leave?” Hollinrede asked.

“Tomorrow midday. It’s the Star Climber. I can’t wait. This stopover at Niprion is making me fume with impatience.”

“No doubt,” Hollinrede agreed. “What say you to an afternoon of whist, to while away the time?”

An hour later Derveran Marti lay slumped over the inlaid cardtable in Hollinrede’s hotel suite, still clutching a handful of waxy cards. Arms folded, Hollinrede surveyed the body.

They were about of a height, he and the dead man, and a chemotherm mask would alter Hollinrede’s face sufficiently to allow him to pass as Marti. He switched on the playback of the room’s recorder to pick up the final fragments of their conversation.

“…care for another drink, Marti?”

“I guess I’d better not, old fellow. I’m getting kind of muzzy, you know. No, please don’t pour it for me. I said I didn’t want it, and—well, all right. Just a little one. There, that’s enough. Thanks.”

The tape was silent for a moment, then recorded the soft thump of Marti’s body falling to the table as the quick-action poison unlatched his synapses. Smiling, Hollinrede switched the recorder to record and said, mimicking Marti, “I guess I’d better not, old fellow. I’m getting kind of muzzy, you know.”

He activated the playback, listened critically to the sound of his voice, then listened to Marti’s again for comparison. He was approaching the light, flexible quality of the dead man’s voice. Several more attempts and he had it almost perfect. Producing a vocal homologizer, he ran off first Marti’s voice, then his own pronouncing the same words.

The voices were alike to three decimal places. That would be good enough to fool the most sensitive detector; three places was the normal range of variation in any man’s voice from day to day.

In terms of mass there was a trifling matter of some few grams which could easily be sweated off in the gymnasium the following morning. As for the dead man’s gesture-complex, Hollinrede thought he could manage a fairly accurate imitation of Marti’s manner of moving; he had studied the young clerk carefully for nearly four hours, and Hollinrede was a clever man.

When the preparations were finished, he stepped away and glanced at the mirror, taking a last look at his own face—the face he would not see again until he had taken the Test. He donned the mask. Jolvar Hollinrede became Derveran Marti.

Hollinrede extracted a length of cotton bulking from a drawer and wrapped it around Marti’s body. He weighed the corpse, and added four milligrams more of cotton so that Marti would have precisely the mass Jolvar Hollinrede had had. He donned Marti’s clothes finally, dressed the body in his own, and, smiling sadly at the convincing but worthless morphosim jewels on his fingers, transferred the rings to Marti’s already-stiffening hands.

“Up with you,” he grunted, and bundled the body across the room to the disposall.

“Farewell, old friend,” he exclaimed feelingly, and hoisted Marti feet-first to the lip of the chute. He shoved, and the dead man vanished, slowly, gracefully, heading downward towards the omnivorous maw of the atomic converter buried in the deep levels of Stopover Planet Niprion.

Reflectively Hollinrede turned away from the disposall unit. He gathered up the cards, put away the liqueur, poured the remnant of the poisoned drink in the disposall chute.

An atomic converter was a wonderful thing, he thought pleasantly. By now the body of Marti had been efficiently reduced to its component molecules, and those were due for separation into atoms shortly after, and from atoms into subatomic particles. Within an hour the prime evidence to the crime would be nothing but so many protons, electrons, and neutrons—and there would be no way of telling which of the two men in the room had entered the chute, and which had remained alive.

Hollinrede activated the tape once more, rehearsed for the final time his version of Marti’s voice, and checked it with the homologizer. Still three decimal places; that was good enough. He erased the tape.

Then, depressing the communicator stud, he said, “I wish to report a death.”

A cold robot face appeared on the screen. “Yes?”

“Several minutes ago my host, Jolvar Hollinrede, passed on of an acute embolism. He requested immediate dissolution upon death and I wish to report that this has been carried out.”

“Your name?”

“Derveran Marti. Testee.”

“A Testee? You were the last to see the late Hollinrede alive?”

“That’s right.”

“Do you swear that all information you might give will be accurate and fully honest?”

“I so swear,” Hollinrede said.

The inquest was brief and smooth. The word of a Testee goes without question; Hollinrede had reported the details of the meeting exactly as if he had been Marti, and after a check of the converter records revealed that a mass exactly equal to the late Hollinrede’s had indeed been disposed of at precisely the instant witness claimed, the inquest was at its end. The verdict was natural death. Hollinrede told the officials that he had not known the late jeweltrader before that day, and had no interest in his property, whereupon they permitted him to depart.

Having died intestate, Hollinrede knew his property became that of the Galactic Government. But, as he pressed his hand, clad in its skintight chemotherm, against the doorplate of Derveran Marti’s room, he told himself that it did not matter. Now he was Derveran Marti, Testee. And once he had taken and passed the Test, what would the loss of a few million credits in baubles matter to him?