“Hail Mary, full of grace—”

  And he had thought he had come to know her.

  -2-

  Their acquaintance had only begun after Flandry struck his bargain with Leon Ammon. That had been toward the end of a night on the Imperial frontier world Irumclaw.

  Soon after the red-orange sun had set, the Terran had left the Naval compound where he was quartered and had walked downhill. No one had paid him any heed. A former commandant had tried to discourage his young men from seeking the not undangerous corruptions of Old Town. He had declared a large part of it flat-out off limits. Meeting considerable of the expenses out of his own pocket, he had started an on-base recreation center which was to include facilities for sports, arts and crafts—as well as honest gambling and medically certified girls. But the bosses below knew well how to use money and influence. The commandant was transferred to a still more bleak and insignificant outpost. His successor dismantled what had been built, informed the men jovially that what they did off duty was their own business and was said to be drawing quite a nice little extra income.

  Flandry sauntered in elegance. The comets gleaming on both his shoulders were so new that one might have looked for diffidence from him. But his cap was tilted more rakishly on his seal-brown hair than a strict interpretation of rules would have allowed. His frame was draped in a fantastic glittergold version of dress tunic and snowy trousers tucked into handmade beefleather boots. The cloak that fluttered behind him glowed with phosphorescent patterns through the chill dusk. And while he strolled he sang a folk ballad concerning the improbable adventures of a Highland tinker.

  It made a good cover for the fact that he was not on pleasure bound but on possibly lethal business.

  Beyond the compound walls the homes of the wealthy loomed amidst the grandly downsweeping private parks. In a way, Flandry thought, they epitomized man’s trajectory. Once the settlement had been sufficiently large and prosperous and sufficiently within the Imperial sphere to attract not only merchants but aristocrats. Old Town had bustled busily with culture as well as with commerce-provincial, no doubt, a couple of hundred light-years from Terra but live and genuine, worthy of the respectful emulation of the autochthons.

  Tonight Irumclaw lay like a piece of wreckage at the edge of the receding tide of empire. Such mansions as were not standing hollow had become the property of oafs and showed it. The oafs were not to be laughed at. Many of them directed large organizations devoted to preying on the spacemen who visited and the Navy men who guarded what transshipment facilities remained in use. Outside the treaty port boundaries barbarism rolled forward as the natives abandoned civilization with what was perhaps justifiable contempt.

  Past the residential section workshops and warehouses hulked black in the night and Flandry moved alert with a hand near the needle gun under his tunic. Robberies and murders had happened here. Lacking the police to clean out this area—assuming he even wanted to—the commandant had settled for advising men on liberty to go through in groups.

  Flandry had been shocked to learn as much when he first had arrived.

  “We could certainly do it ourselves—establish regular patrols—if he’d order it. Doesn’t he care? What kind of chief is he?”

  His protest had been delivered in private to another scout, Lieutenant Commander Eisenschmitt. The latter, having been around a while, had shrugged.

  “The kind that any place like this gets,” he had answered. “We don’t rate attention at GHQ—so naturally we’re sent the hacks, boobs and petty crooks. Good senior officers are too badly needed elsewhere. When Irumclaw does get one, it’s an accident and he isn’t here long.”

  “Damn it, man, we’re on the border.” Flandry had gestured out the window of the room where they sat. It had been dark then, too. Betelgeuse glowed bloody and brilliant among the hosts of stars where no writ ran. “Beyond that buffer region—Merseia.”

  “Yeh. And there our great greenskinned ’gator-tailed rivals continue expanding in all directions—except where we bar the way. I know. But this is the far edge of nowhere in the eyes of an Imperial government that can’t see past its own perfume-sniffing nose. You’ve just come from Terra, Dom. You ought to understand that better than I. I expect we’ll pull out of Irumclaw entirely inside another generation.”

  “No—can’t be. Why, a pullout would leave this whole flank exposed for six parsecs inward. We’d have no way of protecting its commerce—”

  “Uh-huh.” Eisenschmitt had nodded. “On the other hand, the commerce isn’t too profitable any more. Less each year. And think of the saving to the Imperial treasury if we end operations here. The Emperor should be able to build a dozen new palaces complete with harems.”

  Flandry had not been able to agree at the time. He had been too freshly out of a fighting unit and a subsequent school where competence was demanded. Over the months, though, he saw things for himself and drew his own sad conclusions.

  There were moments when he would have welcomed a set-to with a bandit. But it had not happened—nor did it on this errand into Old Town.

  The district grew around him, crumbling buildings left over from pioneer days, many of them simply the original beehive-shaped adobes of the natives, slightly remodeled for other life forms. Streets and alleys twisted about under flimmering glowsigns. Traffic was chiefly pedestrian, but constant noise beat on the eardrums—clatter, shuffle, clop and clangor, raucous attempts at music, more than a hundred different languages, once in a while a muffled scream or a bellow of rage. The smells were equally unpleasant and strong—body odors, garbage, smoke, incense, dope. Humans predominated, but quite a few autochthons were present and space travelers of numerous different breeds circulated among them.

  Outside a particular joy house, otherwise no different from the rest, an Irumclavian used a vocalizer to chant in Anglic: “Come one, come all, come in, no cover, no minimum. Every form of amusement, pleasure and thrill. No game too exotic, no stakes too high or low. Continuous sophisticated entertainment. Delicious food and drink, we have stimulants, narcotics, ’cinogens, emphasizers, to your order, to your taste, to your purse. Every sex and every technique of seventeen, yes, seventeen distinct species ready to serve your desires—and this does not count racial, mutational and biosculp variations. Come one, come all—”

  Flandry went in. He happened to brush against two or three of the creature’s arms. The blue integument felt cold in the cold air.

  The entrance hall was hot and stuffy.

  An outsize human in a gaudy uniform said, “Welcome, sir. What is your wish?”

  The eyes resting upon him were like chips of black ice.

  “Are you Lem?” Flandry responded.

  “Uh, yeh. And you?”

  “I am expected.”

  “Urh. Take the gravshaft to the top—that’s the sixth floor. Go left down the hall to a door numbered six-six-six, stand in front of the scan and press the button. When it opens, go up the stairs.”

  “Six-six-six?” murmured Flandry, who had read a bit more than was common in his service. “Is Citizen Ammon a humorist by any chance?”

  “No names.” Lem dropped a hand to the blaster at his hip. “On your way, kid.”

  Flandry obeyed, even to letting himself be frisked and leaving his gun at the checkstand. He was glad when Door 666 admitted him—that was the sado-maso level and he had glimpsed things.

  The office he entered scaled itself noiselessly behind him. It recalled Terra in its size and opulence and in the animation of a rose garden which graced a wall. Then he looked more closely and saw the shabbiness of the old furnishings, the garishness, of the new. No other human save Leon Ammon was present. A Grozunian mercenary stood like a hairy statue in one corner. When Flandry turned his back, the being’s musky scent continued to remind him that if he didn’t behave he could be plucked into small pieces.

  “Good evening,” said the man behind the desk. He was grossly fat, hairless, sweating and not especially clean, although his scarlet tunic was of the finest. His voice was high and scratchy. “You know who I am, right? Sit down. Cigar? Brandy?”

  Flandry accepted everything offered. It was of prime quality. He said so.

  “You’ll do better than this if you stick by me,” Ammon said. His smile went no deeper than his mouth. “You haven’t told about the invitation my man whispered to you the other night?”

  “No, sir, of course not.”

  “Wouldn’t bother me if you did. Nothing illegal about inviting a young chap for a drink and a gab. Right? But you could be in trouble yourself. Mighty bad trouble—and not merely with your commanding officer.”

  Flandry had his suspicions about the origin of many of the subjects on the floor below. Brain channeling and surgical disguise worked wonders. He studied the tip of his cigar.

  “I don’t imagine you’d have asked me here, sir, if you thought I needed threatening,” he said.

  “No. I like your looks, Dominic,” Ammon said. “Have ever since you starting coming to Old Town for your fun. You’re cool and tough and closemouthed. I had a check done on your background.”

  Flandry expanded his suspicions. Various incidents, when he had been leaned on one way or another, began to look like engineered testing of his reactions.

  “Wasn’t much to find out, was there?” he said. “I’m only a fresh-minted j.g. Just a former flyboy reassigned to Intelligence, sent back to Terra for training and now here for scouting duty.”

  “I can’t really compute that.” Ammon said. “If they aim to make you a spy, why have you spent months flitting in and out of this system?”

  “I need practice in surveillance, especially of planets that are poorly known. And the no-man’s land yonder needs watching. Our Merseian chums could build an advanced base there, for instance, or start some other kettle boiling, unbeknownst to us, if we didn’t keep scout boats sweeping around.”

  “Yes, I got that answer before when I asked—and it still sounds to me like a waste of talent. But it got you to Irumclaw and I did notice you and had you studied. I learned more than stands on any public record, boy. The whole Starkad business pivoted on you.”

  Shocked, Flandry wondered how deeply the decadence had eaten if the agent of a medium-scale vice boss on a tenth-rate outpost planet could obtain such information.

  “Well, your tour here’ll soon be up,” Ammon said. “Precious little to show for it, right? Right. How’d you like to turn a profit before you leave? A mighty nice profit, I promise you.” He rubbed his hands. “Mighty nice.”

  “Depends,” Flandry said. If he had actually been investigated as thoroughly as it appeared, there was no use in pretending he had private financial resources or that he didn’t require them to advance his career. “The Imperium has my oath.”

  “Sure, sure. I wouldn’t ask you to do anything against His Majesty. I’m a citizen myself, right? No, I’ll tell you exactly what I want done—if you’ll keep your mouth shut.”

  “It would doubtless not do me any good to blab, the way you’ll tell me.”

  Ammon giggled.

  “Right. You’re a sharp one, Dominic. Handsome, too,” he added exploringly.

  “I’ll settle for the sharpness and buy the handsomeness later.”

  Ammon sighed and returned to business. “All I want is for you to survey a planet for me. You can do it on your next scouting trip. Report back—confidentially, of course—and it’s worth a flat million in small bills or in whatever shape you prefer.” He reached into his desk and extracted a packet. “Take the job and here’s a hundred thousand on account.”

  “I have to carry out my assignment,” Flandry objected.

  “I know,. I know. I’m not asking you to skimp it. I told you I’m a loyal citizen. But, if you jogged off your track a while—it shouldn’t cost more than a couple of weeks extra—”

  “Cost me my scalp if anyone found out,” Flandry said.

  Ammon nodded. “That’s how I’ll know I can trust you to keep quiet. And you’ll trust me, because suborning an Imperial officer is even today a capital offense—anyhow, it usually is when it involves a matter like this.”

  “Why not send your personal vessel to look?”

  Ammon laid aside his mannerisms. “I haven’t got one. If I hired a civilian, what hold would I have on him? Especially an Old Town type. I’d likely end up with an extra mouth in my throat once the word got around what’s to be had out there. Let’s admit it—even on this miserable crudball I’m not so big.” He leaned forward. “But I want to become big,” he said. The lust smoldered in eyes and voice—he shook with the intensity of it. “Once I know from you that the operation’s worthwhile then I’ll quietly sink everything I own into building up a reliable outfit. We’ll work secretly for the first several years, sell our stuff through complicated channels, sock away a fortune. Then maybe I’ll surface, doctor the story a bit, start paying taxes, move to Terra—maybe buy a patent of nobility, maybe go into politics—I don’t know. But I’ll be big—do you understand?” Ammon dabbed at his glistening forehead. “It wouldn’t hurt you, having a big friend. Right?”

  Associate. Never friend…

  “I suppose I could cook my log, record how trouble with the boat caused delay. She’s a superannuated jalopy and inspections are lax. But you haven’t yet told me, sir, what the bloody dripping hell this is all about.”

  “I will, boy. I will.” Ammon mastered his emotions. “It’s a lost treasure. Listen. Five hundred years ago the old Polesotechnic League had a base here. You’ve heard?”

  Flandry nodded wistfully. He would much rather have lived in the high and spacious days of the trader princes—when no distance and no deed looked too vast for man—than in this twilight of empire.

  “It got clobbered during the Troubles, didn’t it?” he said.

  “Right. However, a few underground installations survived. Not in good shape. Not safe to go into. Tunnels apt to collapse, full of nightskulks—you know. Now I thought those vaults might be useful for—never mind. I had them explored. A microfile turned up. It gave the coordinates and galactic orbit of a planetary system out in what’s now no man’s land. Martian Minerals, Inc., was mining one of the worlds. They weren’t publicizing the fact. You remember what rivalries got to be like toward the end of the League era. That’s the main reason why knowledge of the system was completely lost. But it was quite a place for a while.”

  “Rich in heavy metals,” Flandry pounced.

  Ammon blinked. “How did you guess?”

  “Nothing else would be worth exploiting by a minerals outfit at such a distance from the centers of civilization. Yes.” His own excitement surged in Flandry. “A young, metal-rich star with corresponding planets, on one of them a robotic base. It was robotic, wasn’t it? High-grade central computer—consciousness grade, I’ll bet—directing machines that prospected, mined, refined, stored and loaded the ships when those called. Probably manufactured spare parts for them, too, and did needful work on them as well as expanding its own facilities. You see, I don’t suppose a world with that many violently poisonous elements in its ground would be easily colonizable by men.”

  “Right. Right.” Ammon’s chins quivered with his nodding. “A moon, actually, of a planet bigger than Jupiter. More massive, that is—a thousand Terras—though the file does say its gravity condensed it to a smaller size. The moon itself—Wayland they named it—Wayland has about three per cent the mass of Terra but half the surface pull. It’s that dense.”

  That dense…

  Mean specific gravity circa eleven. Uranium, thorium—probably still some neptunium and plutonium—and osmium, platinum, everything rare simply waiting to be scooped out—my God! My greed…

  From behind a rather hard-held coolness he drawled, “A million doesn’t seem extravagant pay for opening that kind of opportunity to you.”

  “It’s plenty for a look-see,” Ammon said. “That’s all I want of you—a report on Wayland. I’m taking the risk, not you. Suppose it turns out the place is no good. I’ll be short a million for nothing. More than a million, actually. Then there’s the hire of an agent—reliable ones don’t come cheap. And supplies from him and transporting them to a spot where you can pick them and him up after you’ve taken off for some other planet in this system. Consider yourself lucky I’m this generous.”

  “Wait a minute,” Flandry said. “An agent?”

  Ammon leered. “You don’t think I’d let you travel alone, do you? What would prevent your telling the government you’d happened to come on Wayland? Not that that’d be worth a lot. Why should the bureaucrats care when there’s nothing in it for them but extra work? You might think differently, though. Right? Right. So my agent will ride along and give you the navigational data after you’re safely away in space. He’ll never leave your side till you’ve returned and told me personally what you found. Afterward, as a witness to your behavior while on active duty—a witness who’ll testify under hypnoprobe if need be— Why, he’ll be my insurance against any change of heart you might suffer.”

  Flandry blew a smoke ring. “As you wish,” he conceded. “It’ll be rather cozy, two in a Comet. But let’s discuss this further, shall we? I think I will take the job if certain conditions can be met.”

  Ammon would have bristled were he able.

  “Conditions? From you?”

  Flandry waved his cigar. “Nothing unreasonable, sir,” he said airily. “For the most part, precautions that I’m sure you will agree are sensible and that you may already have thought of for yourself. And that agent you mentioned. Not ‘he,’ please. It could get fatally irritating, living cheek by unwashed jowl with some goon for weeks. I’m sure you can find a capable and at the same time amiable human female. Right? Right.”

  But that moment of self-confidence had been back then.