Mack Reynolds - Planetary Agent X

Another floater was screaming up the sub-freeway toward them, its lights blazing. Billy ducked to the floor again. It was past.

His lips, white, thinned back over his prominent teeth in his wolf grin. As long as the fuzz-yokes were heading in the direction of the Pleasure Palace , he was comparatively safe. But as soon as the usher there revealed that Billy had left in a cab with a companion who was dead drunk, then the fat would be in the fire. They’d know what they were looking for.

Suddenly inspiration came. He grabbed up a directory, thumbed through it. Then quickly redialed the cab.

The auto-motel was only a few hundred yards away. The cab pulled up. As usual, there was but one clerk.

Billy got out and said, “Ay Mac, my buddy here took on too big a load. Gotta room?”

The clerk had seen drunks before. In his time he had seen literally thousands of drunks. Drunks no longer interested him in the slightest. “He got a credit card to register with?”

“Sure, here it is.”

“You registering too?”

“Naw, just my buddy. Wait’ll I dismiss this here cab.” Billy manhandled Barry from the floater-cab, turned him over to the clerk to balance waveringly for the moment necessary to press the Horace Barrymore credit card to the payment screen, then turned back.

Between them, they managed to usher, push, half carry the flopping drunk to a room. Billy let him drop to a bed. He grinned at the clerk.

“I’ll see he gets into the bed, and all. How about lettin’ me have a bottle of pseudo?”

The other looked at him. “Ain’t you guys had enough liquor?”

Billy chuckled deprecation. “Ernie here has, but not me. I only had one or two. Besides, when he wakes up tomorrow, he’s gonna need a couple quick ones to keep him from dying. That’s the way he handles it. Hair of the dog.”

The clerk shrugged. “Each man can go to hell in his own way, I always say. I’ll get the pseudo.”

Billy began taking off the drunken Horace Barrymore’s shoes. His mind, behind his poker mask, was racing. He had to handle this exactly right. He couldn’t afford any mistakes now. On the road outside he could hear the floaters screaming by.

It was one chance in a million. Whoever was in overall command would expect—Billy was gambling—for the quarry to put as much distance between himself and the Pleasure Palace as possible. Instead, Billy had gone into hiding less than half a mile from the alleged palace of pleasure.

The pseudo-whisky came, the clerk gave another listless look at the drunk sprawled on the bed, grunted and left.

Billy Antrim had already taken the vital papers of the other. Now he stared down at him.

The spaceship left tomorrow.

Once spaceborne, he would be outside the jurisdiction of Earth. The ship wasn’t even scheduled to set down on a United Planets world. It was colonizing a new planet. Billy Antrim would be answerable only to whatever authorities the colonists would set up. And Billy was going to be an invaluable citizen, so far as such authority was concerned. A new world, a frontier world, could use citizens with Billy’s qualifications.

He turned his right hand over so that it was palm upward and gave it a flick. A double edged fighting knife slid into his grip.

He could put a sign, on the door requesting that the room not be disturbed. He could leave a call with the auto-service to the same effect. It would be well into tomorrow afternoon before Horace Barrymore was discovered.

By that time Billy Antrim would be well on his way to the stars. And who knew what he would find out there? Perhaps the chance at a new life. A different life than the one Luigi Agrigento had decreed for him when he’d been a boy of eleven. A life not composed of gun and stiletto. A life with meaning, such as his mother and he had once dreamed of for him.

The thought went through his mind. Perhaps he might even meet Ruth Antrim out there, once again. It was only seven or eight years, after all. But then he sneered self-deprecation, even as he stepped toward the unconscious Barrymore, the knife blade gleaming. Seven years, but look what he had managed to become. Would Ruth Antrim want to see what he was today, or would he want her to?

There was a line slowly trailing into the huge passenger-freighter—reminiscent, somewhat, of Noah’s animals trailing into the Ark. Indeed, most were filing along two by two. Billy Antrim was one of the few who were single. That was just as well, he told himself. Married couples were conservative, lacking aggressiveness, compared to a single man. Billy would be able to make his place in this New Arizona.

They gave you a shot here. A little bit further on, they asked some questions. Further on they checked your papers, and still later, you had to sign some things. Then you shuffled along again.

Toward the end, there were two burly ship’s officers. Before Billy realized what they were about, they had touched him here, there, the places a man carries a gun. A quick frisk.

He started to protest, but the senior of the two grinned at him and whipped the gun from his belt.

“Sonny,” he said, “in spite of all you’ve heard about adventure in space, it’s not like that at all. Sorry. Captain’s orders. No weapons among the passengers so long as we’re spaceborne. You’ll get this oversized cannon back when you land.” He looked at it and grunted. “Where’d you get this thing, anyway?”

“It usta belong to my old man,” Billy said sourly. “He usta be a gun crank, like.”

“He must have been,” the other chuckled. “Hey, Bob, look at this. Front sight filed away, and all.”

But his companion had taken on the next colonist in the line.

Billy shuffled on toward the ship. He had carried the last hurdle.

There had been some crucial moments during the past twelve hours, but he had cleared every obstacle. He had crossed Greater Washington in another cab, using Horace Barrymore’s credit card. He had got through the press of people at the shuttle-spaceport, without exposure, hiding his face in a handkerchief and sneezing time after time, just as he’d passed the ticket gate. He had sat in the back of the shuttle rocket, hiding his head in his arm and pretending sleep every time someone had come near.

Once outside Greater Washington, he felt some relief. He assumed they had circulated the inadequate drawing of him throughout the globe. Most likely. He didn’t know. But at least people weren’t expecting to run into him out here.

His papers had been cleared without difficulty. He had, on the rocket shuttle, practiced Horace Barrymore’s shaky signature a few times. It wasn’t difficult. A scribble.

It had carried him past, easily enough.

And now he was actually entering the ship.

At the entry level stood another ship’s officer, sheaf of papers in hand.

“Name?”

“Horace Barrymore.”

“Horace Barrymore. Here it is. Berth 33, Compartment Twelve. Down that way, son.”

Billy Antrim went as indicated. He had no baggage, but on the other hand, neither did most of the others. The baggage had been checked earlier. Billy, of course, had none to check. After they were spaceborne he would put up a big howl, to cover. He could claim that they’d lost his things. It shouldn’t be difficult. He might even get some sort of reimbursement.

Compartment Twelve was but a hundred feet or so down the corridor along which he walked. The door was closed. He opened it and stepped in.

Billy Antrim scowled. It didn’t look to be the type of compartment devoted to passengers. On the far side of the room was a desk at which was seated an easy-going looking young man, his face tired and his clothing rumpled and dirty—like Billy himself.