to find out, I thought.
* * * *
The plan was so completely simple it might well work. The museum had kept an old Icarus under charter for many years; the AN Space Mandate, of course, made it highly illegal for any individual or organization to actually “own” any kind of spacecraft—they could be chartered by reputable corporations for provably legal purposes, but the charter was reviewed periodically and could be revoked in a second. This was one of the many clever little ways the AN had thus far kept any nasty little wars from cropping up in this Brave New Century.
The Doctor had retired from the museum staff, but he had not completely severed relations, for he was still on the rolls as a sort of emeritus. It had not been hard for him to lease the old Icarus from the museum for a little private expedition of his own. Nor to hire my sweaty friend with the bruised jaw as his pilot. The Icarus was in docking orbit around Luna, and we could be aboard by dawn, since the Doctor had a last year’s Lanzetti parked on the roof of the hotel and was set to check out this evening. There was simply no problem; no one would notice me as I accompanied them to the parking roof, and even if they did, they could hardly know who or what I was. There was no reason why a Mandate patrol should intercept the Lanzetti on its flight to the moon, providing the Doc kept to the right lane; and no particular reason why the Mandate should single out for scrutiny a rusty old tub of an Icarus as it broke out of docking orbit bound for Mars. It was perfection itself. With only one slight snag.
“And what is that, my friend?”
I inhaled another drop of the rare Lunarian liqueur before answering. “Me. They don’t keep me under regular surveillance—or at least, I don’t think they do: I’ve been a good boy for two years, and all I’ve done is warm an endless succession of bar stools and cafe chairs, nursing my growing reputation as a seedy, down-at-heels, lachrymose, middle-aging failure. More than a bit of a wino, as Konstantin would say, and did, to his regrets. But the woman who rents me my room will know when I don’t come home—I owe her this month’s rent—and she will go to the police. They will comb every gutter in Venice, and surely Luigi—my pet waiter—will remember the trio of tourists who spoke to me at my table this afternoon and who left with me. Luigi has an eye like a camera; he’ll give a detailed description of the three of you, and then all the police have to do is to cross-check those descriptions against the pictures of you people; perhaps you are not familiar with the routine, but the customs officials make photocopies of the identity pictures in every visitor’s visa, just for the files. By this time tomorrow noon they will have everything they need, including the flight plan of your Icarus. And the Mandate patrols will be right there when we approach docking orbit around Mars. I hate to let unpleasant facts intrude like this, but—”
I broke off because the strong-arm lug with the bruised jaw was grinning toothily through his black bush of beard and I saw a flash of cool amusement in the contemptuous eyes of the girl.
“Please do not trouble yourself,” the old man smiled. “I rather pride myself on having considered all facets of this affair and let me ease your mind by saying at once that you are already home—you got there about twenty minutes ago.”
The bewildered expression on my face must have been a singularly stupid-looking one, because Konstantin growled out a grunting laugh. Then the old man dug into his attache case and presented me with a plain manila envelope, the eight-by-ten size that professional modeling agencies use to hold glossies. I dug into it and drew out a sheaf of expensive depth photos. They were of me. Good likenesses too. The only trouble was that I could not recall having posed for them.
Looking a bit closer, I saw the discrepancies. That lump of scar tissue on the bridge of my nose, a small souvenir from the time the Colonial cops had “interrogated” me, was not quite the same coffee color as my Italian Riviera tan. It was plasmoid, the kind of professional stage makeup actors use to simulate a broken nose. And the set of the shoulders was a bit too jaunty to successfully imitate my weary slump. But the hairline was perfect, and the eyes were good, very good. Even the mouth.
“The cinema industry has died here since the center of world filmmaking made one of its periodic moves, this time, I believe, to Pan-India. It was not difficult to locate a specimen of your physical type from the local equivalent of central casting, or to hire the actor without a formal contract, which would demand registry with the unions. He speaks his Italian with just your kind of a German accent, and as he once played Cristoffsen in a local film epic, he knows how to walk with a—what is it you call it?”
“A Mars shuffle,” I supplied the term. I felt a little numb. The Doc had, in fact, thought of everything. There was no real excuse I could find for backing out of this…not that I wanted to, I told myself fiercely…or did I? I wanted to be alone, to examine my feelings, but there was no time for that, no leisure to contemplate the alternatives or count the chances against failure. The Doctor wanted to leave within the hour: it was now or never. And I knew this was my last chance. My only chance. That one-in-a-billion chance I had dreamed about all these past two years.
Perhaps the old man took my lapse into brooding silence for suspicion. Anyway, he spoke up in that soothing voice of his that could have made his fortune in the diplomatic corps.
“You needn’t be afraid that I have brought any unseen partners in to finance this expedition, my friend. My retirement pension is very adequate to one of my spartan requirements. And I have recorded a few textbooks in my time that bring in a surprising royalty twice each year. We coached the actor all week long in your habits and drinking tastes; he was eager to get work, and he was not expensive. After a week or ten days he will pack up and go to Milan, and there he will drop out of sight and resume his own identity. There is a registered package for him at the express office in Milan, but he can not pick it up until the seventeenth of the month. Oh, they will know you have eluded them but not right away. We will have vanished into the hinterlands of Mars long before the police realize you cannot be found: trust me, my friend. I have as much to lose, should we fail in this endeavor, as do you.”
I chewed it over, and it tasted good. But still…
“Your actor looks good, damn good, I’ll admit. He would fool the average storekeeper or gondola jockey, who knows me enough to say buon giorno. But he isn’t good enough to fool someone who sees and talks to me every day, and he’ll run a gauntlet of plenty of those: the kid that bring me my New York Times-Post-News every morning, the old woman in the market who sells me rolls and sausage, my landlady—or the waiter who serves me my brandy every afternoon—”
“Probably not; but he won’t have to. This evening you are going to develop a terrible toothache. You will bandage your jaw and growl curtly to your landlady and keep to your bed very much of the time: the street boy that brings you your newsfax will run your errands for you and will innocently spread the word of your discomforture. Really, Cn. Tengren, you must trust me. I have anticipated everything.”
“Not quite. There are a few mementos I would rather not be parted from and at least one item which I will need on Mars—”
I broke off as he smiled again that saintly, beaming smile and dipped into the attache case to bring out precisely those of my few belongings I would not want to have left behind. They were nothing much, a battered Everyman copy of Dowson, an old pre-Troubles Loeb edition of Quintus Smyrnaeus, and the antique Tauchnitz Shakespeare I had carried everywhere since school. I fingered the things absently, the depth photo of my mother and father and brother, and the little portrait-bust of Yakla that the old sorcerer had delicately carved out of slidar ivory for me that tenday we hid from the CA skimmers in the ruins of Ygnarh.
And the crown itself, of course.
I did not unwrap it from its place in the folds of the million-year-old yonka. A Jamad Tengru does not lay bare the Sacred Things before
