The Halfling and Other Stories Read online

  I fed her in my own quarters. She shuddered when I poured her coffee and refused it, saying she didn’t think she’d ever enjoy it again. She took tea instead. She was hungry, all right. I thought she’d never stop eating.

  Finally I said, “The pay’s forty credits, and found.”

  She nodded.

  I said gently, “You can tell me. What’s wrong?”

  She gave me a wide, purple stare. “What do you mean?”

  “A dancer like you could write her own ticket anywhere, and not for the kind of peanuts I can pay you. You’re in a jam.”

  She looked at the table and locked her fingers together. Their long pink nails glistened.

  She whispered, “It isn’t anything bad. Just a—a passport difficulty. I told you I was born in space. The records got lost somehow, and living the way we did—well, I had to come to Earth in a hurry, and I couldn’t prove my citizenship, so I came without it. Now I can’t get back to Venus where my money is, and I can’t stay here. That’s why I wanted so badly to get a job with you. You’re going out, and you can take me.”

  I knew how to do that, all right. I said, “You must have had a big reason to take the risk you did. If you’re caught it means the Luna cell-blocks for a long time before they deport you.”

  She shivered. “It was a personal matter. It delayed me awhile. I—was too late.”

  I said, “Sure. I’m sorry.” I took her to her tent, left her there and went out to get the show running, cursing Sindi. I stopped cursing and stared when I passed the cooch tent. She was there, and giving.

  She stuck out her tongue at me and I went on.

  That evening I hired the punk, just a scrawny kid with a white face, who said he was hungry and needed work. I gave him to Tiny, to help out in the brute top.

  CHAPTER II Voice of Terror

  We played in luck that week. Some gilded darling of the screen showed up with somebody else’s husband who wasn’t quite divorced yet, and we got a lot of free publicity in the papers and over the air. Laura went on the second night and brought down the house. We turned ’em away for the first time in history. The only thing that worried me was Sindi. She wouldn’t speak to me, only smile at me along her green eyes as though she knew a lot she wasn’t telling and not any of it nice. I tried to keep an eye on her, just in case.

  For five days I walked a tightrope between heaven and hell. Everybody on the pitch knew I was a dead duck where Laura was concerned. I suppose they got a good laugh out of it— me, Jade Greene the camy boss, knocked softer than a cup custard by a girl young enough to be my daughter, a girl from a good family, a girl with talent that put her so far beyond my lousy dog-and-pony show…

  I knew all that. It didn’t do any good. I couldn’t keep away from her. She was so little and lovely; she walked like music; her purple eyes had a tilt to them that kept you looking, and her mouth—

  I kissed it on the fifth night, out back of the cooch tent when the show was over. It was dark there; we were all alone, and the faint spicy breath of her came to me through the thin salt fog. I kissed her.

  Her mouth answered mine. Then she wrenched away, suddenly, with a queer fury. I let her go. She was shuddering, and breathing hard.

  I said, “I’m sorry.”

  “It isn’t that. Oh, Jade, I—” She stopped. I could hear the breath sobbing in her throat. Then she turned and ran away, and the sound of her weeping came back to me through the dark.

  I went to my quarters and got out a bottle. After the first shot I just sat staring at it with my head in my hands. I haven’t any idea how long I sat there. It seemed like forever. I only know that the pitch was dark, sound asleep under a pall of fog, when Sindi screamed.

  I didn’t know it was Sindi then. The scream didn’t have any personality. It was the voice of terror and final pain, and it was far beyond anything human.

  I got my gun out of the table drawer. I remember my palm was slippery with cold sweat. I went outside, catching up the big flashlight kept for emergencies near the tent flap. It was very dark out there, very still, and yet not quiet, there was something behind the darkness and the silence, hiding in them, breathing softly and waiting.

  The pitch began to wake up. The stir and rustle spread out from the scream like ripples from a stone, and over in the brute top a Martian sand-cat began to wail, thin and feral, like an echo of death.

  I went along between the tents, walking fast and silent. I felt sick, and the skin of my back twitched; my face began to ache from being drawn tight. The torchbeam shook a little in my hand.

  I found her back of the cooch tent, not far from where I’d kissed Laura. She was lying on her face, huddled up, like a brown island in a red sea. The little bells were still in her ears.

  I walked in her blood and knelt down in it and put my hand on her shoulder. I thought she was dead, but the bells tinkled faintly, like something far away on another star. I tried to turn her over.

  She gasped, “Don’t.” It wasn’t a voice. It was hardly a breath, but I could hear it. I can still hear it. I took my hand away.

  “Sindi—”

  A little wash of sound from the bells, like rain far off— “You fool,” she whispered. “The stage. Jade, the stage—”

  She stopped. The croaker came from somewhere behind me and knocked me out of the way, but I knew it was no use. I knew Sindi had stopped for good.

  Humans and halflings were jammed in all around, staring, whispering, some of them screaming a little. The brute top had gone crazy. They smelt blood and death on the night wind, and they wanted to be free and a part of it.

  “Claws,” the croaker said. “Something clawed her. Her throat—”

  I said, “Yeah. Shut up.” I turned around. The punk was standing there, the white-faced kid, staring at Sindi’s body with eyes glistening like shiny brown marbles.

  “You,” I said. “Go back to Tiny and tell him to make sure all his kids are there… All the roustabouts and every man that can handle a gun or a tent stake, get armed as fast as you can and stand by.. .Mike, take whatever you need and guard the gate. Don’t let anybody or anything in or out without permission from me, in person. Everybody else get inside somewhere and stay there. I’m going to call the police.”

  The punk was still there, looking from Sindi’s body to me and around the circle of faces. I yelled at him. He went away then, fast. The crowd started to break up.

  Laura Darrow came out of it and took my arm.

  She had on a dark blue dressing gown and her hair was loose around her face. She had the dewy look of being freshly washed, and she breathed perfume. I shook her off. “Look out,” I said. “I’m all—blood.”

  I could feel it on my shoes, soaking through the thin stuff of my trouser legs. My stomach rose up under my throat. I closed my eyes and held it down, and all the time Laura’s voice was soothing me. She hadn’t let go of my arm. I could feel her fingers. They were cold, and too tight. Even then, I loved her so much I ached with it.

  “Jade,” she said. “Jade, darling. Please—I’m so frightened.”

  That helped. I put my arm around her and we started back toward my place and the phone. Nobody had thought to put the big lights on yet, and my torchbeam cut a fuzzy tunnel through the fog.

  “I couldn’t sleep very well,” Laura said suddenly. “I was lying in my tent thinking, and a little while before she screamed I thought I heard something—something like a big cat, padding.”

  The thing that had been in the back of my mind came out yelling. I hadn’t seen Laska in the crowd around Sindi. If Laska had got hold of some coffee behind the cook’s back…

  I said, “You were probably mistaken.”

  “No. Jade.”

  “Yeah?” It was dark between the tents. I wished somebody would turn the lights on. I wished I hadn’t forgotten to tell them to. I wished they’d shut up their over-all obbligato of gabbling, so I could hear…

  “Jade. I couldn’t sleep because I was thinking—”

>   Then she screamed.

  He came out of a dark tunnel between two storage tents. He was going almost on all fours, his head flattened forward, his hands held in a little to his belly. His claws were out. They were wet and red, and his hands were wet and red, and his feet. His yellow-green eyes had a crazy shine to them, the pupils slitted against the light. His lips were peeled back from his teeth. They glittered, and there was froth between them— Laska, coked to hell and gone!

  He didn’t say anything. He made noises, but they weren’t speech and they weren’t sane. They weren’t anything but horrible. He sprang.

  I pushed Laura behind me. I could see the marks his claws made in the dirt, and the ridging of his muscles with the jump. I brought up my gun and fired, three shots.

  The heavy slugs nearly tore him in two, but they didn’t stop him. He let go a mad animal scream and hit me, slashing. I went part way down, firing again, but Laska was still going. His hind feet clawed into my hip and thigh, using me as something to push off from. He wanted the girl.

  She had backed off, yelling bloody murder. I could hear feet running, a lot of them, and people shouting. The lights came on. I twisted around and got Laska by the mane of fur on his backbone and then by the scruff. He was suddenly a very heavy weight. I think he was dead when I put the fifth bullet through his skull.

  I let him drop.

  I said, “Laura, are you all right?” I saw her brown hair and her big purple eyes like dark stars in her white face. She was saying something, but I couldn’t hear what it was. I said, “You ought to faint, or something,” and laughed.

  But it was me, Jade Greene, that did the fainting.

  I came out of it too soon. The croaker was still working on my leg. I called him everything I could think of in every language I knew, out of the half of my mouth that wasn’t taped shut. He was a heavy man, with a belly and a dirty chin.

  He laughed and said, “You’ll live. That critter damn near took half your face off, but with your style of beauty it won’t matter much. Just take it easy awhile until you make some more blood.”

  I said, “The hell with that. I got work to do.” After a while he gave in and helped me get dressed. The holes in my leg weren’t too deep, and the face wasn’t working anyway. I poured some Scotch in to help out the blood shortage, and managed to get over to the office.

  I walked pretty well.

  That was largely because Laura let me lean on her. She’d waited outside my tent all that time. There were drops of fog caught in her hair. She cried a little and laughed a little and told me how wonderful I was, and helped me along with her small vibrant self. Pretty soon I began to feel like a kid waking up from a nightmare into a room full of sunshine.

  The law had arrived when we got to the office. There wasn’t any trouble. Sindi’s tom body and the crazy catman added up, and the Venusian cook put the lid on it. He always took a thermos of coffee to bed with him, so he’d have it first thing when he woke up—Venusian coffee, with enough caffeine in it to stand an Earthman on his head. Enough to finish off a Callistan cat-man. Somebody had swiped it when he wasn’t looking. They found the thermos in Laska’s quarters.

  The show went on. Mobs came to gawk at the place where the killing had happened. I took it easy for one day, lolling in a shiny golden cloud with Laura holding my head.

  Along about sundown she said, “I’ll have to get ready for the show.”

  “Yeah. Saturday’s a big night. Tomorrow we tear down, and then Monday we head out for Venus. You’ll feel happier then?”

  “Yes. I’ll feel safe.” She put her head down over mine. Her hair was like warm silk. I put my hands up on her throat. It was firm and alive, and it made my hands bum.

  She whispered, “Jade, I—” A big hot tear splashed down on my face, and then she was gone.

  I lay still, hot and shivering like a man with swampfever, thinking, Maybe…

  Maybe Laura wouldn’t leave the show when we got to Venus. Maybe I could make her not want to. Maybe it wasn’t too late for dreaming, a dream that John Damien Greene had never had, sitting in a puddle of water at the end of a jetty stringer and fishing for perch.

  Crazy, getting ideas like that about a girl like Laura. Crazy like cutting your own throat. Oh, hell. A man never really grows up, not past believing that maybe miracles still happen.

  It was nice dreaming for a while.

  It was a nice night, too, full of stars and the clean, cool ocean breeze, when Tiny came over to tell me they’d found the punk dead in a pile of straw with his throat tom out, and the Martian sand-cat loose.

  CHAPTER III Carnival of Death

  We jammed our way through the mob on the midway. Lots of people having fun, lots of kids yelling and getting sick on Mercurian jitsi-beans and bottled Venusian fruit juice. Nobody knew about the killing. Tiny had had the cat rounded up and caged before it could get outside the brute top, which had not yet opened for business.

  The punk was dead, all right—dead as Sindi, and in the same way. His twisted face was not much whiter than I remembered it, the closed eyelids faintly blue. He lay almost under the sand-cat’s cage.

  The cat paced, jittery and snarling. There was blood on all its six paws. The cages and pens and pressure tanks seethed nastily all around me, held down and quiet by Tiny’s wranglers.

  I said, “What happened?”

  Tiny lifted his gargantuan shoulders. “Dunno. Everything quiet. Even no yell, like Sindi. Punk kid all lonesome over here behind cages. Nobody see; nobody hear. Only Mars kitty waltz out on main aisle, scare hell out of everybody. We catch, and then find punk, like you see.”

  I turned around wearily. “Call the cops again and report the accident. Keep the rubes out of here until they pick up the body.” I shivered. I’m superstitious, like all camies.

  They come in threes—always in threes. Sindi, the punk— what next?

  Tiny sighed. “Poor punk. So peaceful, like sleeper with shut eye.”

  “Yeah.” I started away. I limped six paces and stopped and limped back again.

  I said, “That’s funny. Guys that die violent aren’t tidy about their eyes, except in the movies.”

  I leaned over. I didn’t quite know why, then. I do now. You can’t beat that three-time jinx. One way or another, it gets you.

  I pushed back one thin, waxy eyelid. After a while I pushed back the other. Tiny breathed heavily over my shoulder. Neither of us said anything. The animals whimpered and yawned and paced.

  I closed his eyes again and went through his pockets. I didn’t find what I was looking for. I got up very slowly, like an old man. I felt like an old man. I felt dead, deader than the white-faced kid.

  I said, “His eyes were brown.”

  Tiny stared at me. He started to speak, but I stopped him. “Call Homicide, Tiny. Put a guard on the body. And send men with guns…”

  I told him where to send them. Then I went back across the midway.

  A couple of Europans with wiry little bodies and a twenty-foot wingspread were doing Immelmans over the geek top, and on the bally stand in front of it two guys with six hands apiece and four eyes on movable stalks were juggling. Laura was out in front of the cooch tent, giving the rubes a come-on.

  I went around behind the tent, around where I’d kissed her, around where Sindi had died with the bells in her ears like a wash of distant rain.

  I lifted up the flap and went in.

  The tent was empty except for the man that tends the jukebox. He put out his cigarette in a hurry and said, “Hi, Boss,” as though that would make me forget he’d been smoking. I didn’t give a damn if he set the place on fire with a blowtorch. The air had the warm, musty smell that tents have. Enhali’s Primitive Venus was crying out of the jukebox with a rhythm like thrown spears.

  I pulled the stage master, and then the whites. They glared on the bare boards, naked as death and just as yielding.

  I stood there a long time.

  After a while the man behind me said un
easily, “Boss, what—”

  “Shut up. I’m listening.”

  Little bells, and a voice that was pain made vocal.

  “Go out front,” I said. “Send Laura Darrow in here. Then tell the rubes there won’t be a show here tonight.”

  I heard his breath suck in, and then catch. He went away down the aisle.

  I got a cigarette out and lit it very carefully, broke the match in two and stepped on it. Then I turned around.

  Laura came down the aisle. Her gold-brown hair was caught in a web of brilliants. She wore a sheath-tight thing of sea-green metal scales, with a short skirt swirling around her white thighs, and sandals of the shiny scales with no heels to them. She moved with the music, part of it, wild with it, a way I’d never seen a woman move before.

  She was beautiful. There aren’t any words. She was—beauty.

  She stopped. She looked at my face and I could see the quivering tightness flow up across her white skin, up her throat and over her mouth, and catch her breath and hold it. The music wailed and throbbed on the still, warm air.

  I said, “Take off your shoes, Laura. Take off your shoes and dance.”

  She moved then, still with the beat of the savage drums, but not thinking about it. She drew in upon herself, a shrinking and tightening of muscles, a preparation.

  She said, “You know.”

  I nodded. “You shouldn’t have closed his eyes. I might never have noticed. I might never have remembered that the kid had brown eyes. He was just a punk. Nobody paid much attention. He might just as well have had purple eyes—like yours.”

  “He stole them from me.” Her voice came sharp under the music. It had a hiss and a wail in it I’d never heard before, and the accent was harsher. “While I was in your tent, Jade. I found out when I went to dress. He was an I-man. I found his badge inside his clothes and took it.”

  Purple eyes looking at me—purple eyes as phony as the eyes on the dead boy. Contact lenses painted purple to hide what was underneath.

  “Too bad you carried an extra pair, Laura, in case of breakage.”

  “He put them in his eyes, so he couldn’t lose them or break them or have them stolen, until he could report. He threw away the little suction cup. I couldn’t find it. I couldn’t get the shells off his eyeballs. All I could do was close his eyes and hope—”