A. Van Vogt - Slan

A councilor said, "He's right!" Several voices echoed the conviction; and there was suddenly no doubt which way the verdict would go. Kathleen saw Kier Gray glance keenly from face to face. He said:

"If that is to be our decision, then I should consider it a grave mistake for any one of us at the present time to take this slan as mistress. It might give a wrong impression."

The silence that followed was the silence of agreement, and Kathleen's gaze leaped to Jem Lorry's face. He met her eyes coolly, rose languidly to his feet, walked over and bent toward her. "I'm remembering what you said about choice." He spoke in a low tone. "If I were to pursue my suit more humbly, would you consider me?"

Kathleen said, "You're not a humble man, Mr. Lorry."

"You don't want a weakling, surely?"

"There's a difference between strength and hardness."

He said earnestly. "In comparison with human beings, you're already a woman. Do you plan to spend a loveless life here in the palace?"

"Are you offering me love?" she asked simply.

He hesitated, and there were suddenly overtones in his mind that indicated emotional disturbance. He said at last, reluctantly, "I suppose you'd require me to give up the others."

The conversation was threatening to undo the result of the dangerous and deadly fight she had put up this past hour to escape him. She said, "Isn't this talk impractical? What I would, or would not require scarcely matters. You cannot afford to be associated with a slan. Isn't that the important fact."

Except for Kier Gray, the other ministers had departed. The dictator glanced at them, and then walked off to a window out of ear shot. Jem Lorry seemed almost unaware of his surroundings. He had straightened, and he stared over her head. Finally, he said in a husky voice, "I had just a glimpse there of what it might be like to have a slan woman in love with me. The impulse came to take every risk, gamble my position and my life. But that would be madness, wouldn't it?" He brought his gaze down to her face. His eyes searched hers hungrily. When she did not reply, he shook himself, as if he had exposed himself to an icy wind. It seemed to sober him. Abruptly, the mocking manner came back. He said, "I see that I must return to my earlier philosophy. I shall never possess the spirit but perhaps I can still obtain the body. So don't build up any false hopes." He smiled confidently, and went out.

Kathleen went over to Kier Gray, and told him of William Dinsmore's plan for his son, and of her objection to being a part of it. "But I don't want to hurt Davy," she finished, "so the refusal should not come from me."

The dictator did not make a direct reply. He walked over to a desk intercom, activated it, and said, "Connect me with William Dinsmore." Kathleen started for the door. As she opened it, Kier Gray was saying, "... Very unwise... your son's future compromised..." Softly, she closed the door.

It was over. The danger was over... for one more day.

Jommy Cross stared urgently yet thoughtfully down at the human wreck that was Granny. There was no rage in him at her betrayal of him. The result was disaster, his future abruptly blank, unplanned, homeless.

His first problem was what to do with the old woman.

She sat blithely in a chair, an extravagantly rich and colorful dressing gown swaddled jauntily around her ungainly form. She giggled up at him. "Granny knows something, yes, Granny knows – " Her words trailed into nonsense, then, "Money, oh, good Lord, yes. Granny's got plenty of money for her old age. See!"

With the trusting innocence of a drink-sodden old soak, she slid a bulging black bag from inside her dressing gown, then with ostrich-like common sense jerked it back into hiding.

Jommy Cross was conscious of shock. It was the first time he had actually seen her money, although he had always known her various hiding places. But to have the stuff out here now, with a raid actually in progress – such stupidity deserved the furthest limits of punishment.

But still he stood undecided, becoming tenser as the first faint pressure of men's thoughts from outside the shack made an almost impalpable weight against his brain. Dozens of men, edging closer, the snub noses of their submachine guns protruding ahead of them. He frowned blackly. By all rights, he should leave the betrayer to face the rage of the baffled hunters, to face the law which said that every human being, without exception, who was convicted of harboring a slan must be hanged by the neck until dead.

Through his mind ran the nightmare picture of Granny on the way to the gallows, Granny shrieking for mercy, Granny fighting to prevent the rope from being placed around her neck, kicking, scratching, slobbering at her captors.

He reached down and grabbed her naked shoulders where the dressing gown was loosely drawn. He shook her with a cold, deadly violence until her teeth rattled, until, she sobbed with a dry, horrible pain, and a modicum of sanity came into her eyes. He said harshly:

"It's death for you if you stay here. Don't you know the law?"

"Huh!" She sat up, briefly startled, then abruptly slipped off again into the cesspool of her mind.

Hurry, hurry, he thought, and forced his brain into that squalor of thought to see if his words had brought any basic balance. Just as he was about to give up he found a startled, dismayed, alert little section of sanity almost buried in the dissolving, incoherent mass that was her thoughts.

" 'S all right," she mumbled. "Granny's got plenty of money. Rich people don't get hung. Stands to reason."

Jommy stepped back from her, indecisive. The weight of the men's minds was a heavy, dragging thing on his brain. They were drawing ever nearer, drawing an ever-tighter circle. Their number appalled him. Even the great weapon in his pocket might be useless if a hail of bullets swept the flimsy walls of the shack. And only one bullet was needed to destroy all his father's dreams.

"By God," he said aloud. "I'm a fool! What will I do with you even if I get you out? All highways out of the city will be blocked. There's only one real hope, and that will be almost hopelessly difficult even without a drunken old woman to hinder me. I don't fancy climbing a thirty-story building with you on my back."

Logic said he should abandon her. He half turned away; and then, once more, the thought of Granny being hanged came in all its horror. Whatever her faults, her very existence had made it possible for him to remain alive. That was a debt which must be paid. With a single snatching movement he tore the black bag from its hiding place under Granny's dressing gown. She grunted drunkenly, and then awareness seeped into her as he held the bag tantalizingly before her eyes.

"Look," he taunted, "all your money, your whole future. You'll starve. They'll have you scrubbing floors in the poorhouse. They'll whip you."

In fifteen seconds she was sober, a hot, burning soberness that grasped essentials with all the clarity of the hardened criminal.

"Granny'll hang!" she gasped.

"Now we're getting somewhere," Jommy Cross said. "Here, take your money." He smiled grimly as she grabbed it from him. "We've got a tunnel to go through. It leads from my bedroom to a private garage at the corner of 470th street. I've got a key to the car. We'll drive down near the Air Center and steal one of – "

He stopped, conscious of the flimsiness of that final part of his plan. It seemed incredible that the tendrilless slans would be so poorly organized that he would actually be able to get one of those marvelous spaceships which they launched nightly into the sky. True, he had escaped from them once with absurd ease, but...

With a gasp, Jommy set the old woman down on the flat roof of the spaceship building. He collapsed, beside her heavily and lay there panting. For the first time in his life he was conscious of muscular weariness contracted from exertion at the full of vibrant health.