never bother them again. Nonsense. Intelligent beings can lose their reason any time and anywhere. The Dark, if you want to call it that, will move again. And again. There’s no point in trying to run away from it. I’m going only as far as the first world that will let me in. When the Dark next moves, I’ll be moving just ahead of it.”
“But if it’s madness, why didn’t we catch it? Why did it affect only the natives?”
E-Wusk delivered himself of a monumental shrug. “As a trader, I deal exclusively in inanimate objects. I’ve never had occasion to regret that. As long as I know what, and I can make a reasonably accurate guess as to when, I’ll leave the why to others. Did you lose much?”
“I didn’t have much to lose. Just a few personal effects and my sample case—and they let me keep my sample case!”
“Congratulations! You’ll be ready for business the moment you land.”
Biag-n withdrew discreetly. He had a new line for his report, and he wanted to think about it. The Weapon, whatever it was, induced a state of madness. That much was obvious—was already known and accepted. And for some inexplicable and highly complicated reason, it worked only on the natives. That, too, was known and accepted.
But a foreigner who had experienced the Dark several times might become aware of the Weapon, might even be able to predict the Dark’s coming. Biag-n felt certain that Supreme would find this very interesting.
* * * *
Miss Effie Schlupe was indeed a dear. She was over twenty-one and under seventy; a year before she’d had to stop saying she was over twenty-one and under sixty, for she refused to tell a lie except for money. She typed 130 words per minute from her office rocking chair, though when her rocking got too rambunctious her accuracy suffered somewhat. She could peer innocently over her old-fashioned, rimless spectacles at a policeman while picking the pocket of the man behind her. If the subject she was tailing sought solace in a bar, she could drink him under the table while he sobbed out his troubles to her. Three purse snatchers who thought her a likely victim had regained consciousness in hospitals with broken bones. Darzek loved her as he would have loved his own mother if she’d been a jujitsu expert and owned an unsurpassed secret recipe for rhubarb beer. He paid her more money than she had ever earned before, and she retaliated by trying to do all of his work for him.
But now he had fired her. Her pride was hurt. She felt that her employer was unjustly casting aspersions on both her loyalty and her competence, and she resented it.
He was also underestimating her stubbornness, and she resented that, too.
With binoculars she watched from a curtained window across the street while Jan Darzek packed his suitcase.
She knew the suitcase. It had been made to Darzek’s specifications, and it would thwart forcible entry by any device less potent than an acetylene torch. Once when Darzek temporarily mislaid his keys an expert locksmith had toiled for five hours trying to open it—unsuccessfully.
Miss Schlupe watched openmouthed as Darzek methodically fitted equipment into the suitcase. “Isn’t he taking any clothing at all?” she wondered.
He always carried extra ammunition on a trip—but so much? And were those the gas grenades he’d told her about? And could that be a submachine gun?
“Gracious!” she murmured awesomely. “He’s going to start a war!”
* * * *
In the basement of a house in an old, eminently respectable section of Nashville, Tennessee, Jan Darzek stepped through an oddly designed transmitter frame.
He emerged in a small circular room, bare except for the transmitting receiver. Through two arched openings could be seen a larger circular room that surrounded it. Curiously he released his heavy suitcase, watched it settle slowly toward the floor, caught it again.
He turned to greet Smith, who emerged from the transmitter on his heels.
“So here we are,” he said.
Smith reached for the instrument panel. “Yes—”
A third party shot out of the transmitter and crashed into Smith. The momentum carried both of them through an arch and into the room beyond. Smith lay dazed, too bewildered for speech. Miss Effie Schlupe picked herself up and primly smoothed down her skirt.
“Where are we?” she asked innocently.
“Schluppy!” Darzek exclaimed. His suitcase floated away as he collapsed in laughter. “You followed us—” He wiped his eyes. “You followed us to Nashville?”
Miss Schlupe perched on the wide ledge that ran around the circumference of the outer room. “A hell of a chase you gave me,” she complained.
“How’d you get into the house?”
“I picked the lock. You didn’t really think you could get away with it, did you? Firing me from the only job I ever had that I really liked. The idea!”
Smith got slowly to his feet and tried unsuccessfully to speak.
“It’s my fault,” Darzek told him. “I should have expected something like this. Miss Schlupe has a certain bulldog tenacity—female bulldog tenacity, which is the worst kind. Just what were you trying to do, Schluppy?”
“I’m coming along,” Miss Schlupe said. “Isn’t that obvious?”
“Obviously you’ve come along, but this is where you get off. Sorry, Schluppy. I’m going to be gone a long time, and Smith thinks the odds are decidedly against my ever coming back. Even when I allow for his naturally pessimistic disposition, I have to admit that the outlook isn’t good. There will be dangers the likes of which neither of us have ever imagined. I won’t have you mixed up in it. Do your stuff with the controls, Smith, and we’ll send Miss Schlupe back to Nashville. Then you’d better throw the switch fast. She has an uncanny sense of timing. Another two seconds, Schluppy, and your dive through the transmitter would have brought you nothing more than an embarrassing familiarity with the basement wall.”
“Poo!” Miss Schlupe said. “I’d have made it with plenty of time to spare if you hadn’t kept me waiting on those creaky basement stairs until my leg went to sleep. Don’t think you can scare me. If there are dangers the likes of which I’ve never imagined, I want to see them.”
Smith spoke for the first time. “Impossible. I could not permit it.”
Darzek turned slowly. “What do you have to say about it?”
“My instructions are precise on that point. Supreme requested yourself only.”
“Our agreement,” Darzek said coldly, “was that I accept your commission and its general objectives, but that I am to have complete freedom in accomplishing these. Did I misunderstand you?”
“No. That arrangement should be fully satisfactory to Supreme.”
“Surely that freedom includes the right to select an assistant.”
Smith did not answer.
“Miss Schlupe and I wish to converse privately,” Darzek said. “No, just stay
