THE telephone circuit went off again. “Who is it?” he snarled. “Mr. Edward Ballaskia.”

  “What’s he want?” Not Polly, not Pretty Polly!

  An extreme fat man came on the screen. He looked to right and left cautiously. “I must ask you, Mr. Crandall, if you are positive that this line isn’t tapped.”

  “What the hell do you want?” Crandall found himself wishing that the fat man were here in person. He’d love to sail into somebody right now.

  Mr. Edward Ballaskia shook his head disapprovingly, his jowls jiggling slowly behind the rest of his face. “Well, then, sir, if you won’t give me you assurances, I am forced to take a chance. I am calling, Mr. Crandall, to ask you to forgive your enemies, to turn the other cheek. I am asking you to remember faith, hope and charity—and that the greatest of these is charity. In other words, sir, open your heart to him or her you intended to kill, understand the weaknesses which caused them to give offenses—and forgive them.”

  “Why should I?” Crandall demanded.

  “Because it is to your profit to do so, sir. Not merely morally profitable—although let us not overlook the life of the spirit—but financially profitable. Financially profitable, Mr. Crandall.”

  “Would you kindly tell me what you are talking about?”

  The fat man leaned forward and smiled confidentially. “If you can forgive the person who caused you to go off and suffer seven long, seven miserable years of acute discomfort, Mr. Crandall, I am prepared to make you a most attractive offer. You are entitled to commit one murder. I desire to have one murder committed. I am very wealthy. You, I judge—and please take no umbrage, sir—are very poor.

  “I can make you comfortable for the rest of your life, extremely comfortable, Mr. Crandall, if only you will put aside your thoughts, your unworthy thoughts, of anger and personal vengeance. I have a business competitor, you see, who has been—”

  Crandall turned him off. “Go serve your own seven years,” he venomously told the blank screen. Then, suddenly, it was funny. He lay back in the chair and laughed his head off.

  That butter-faced old slob! Quoting religious texts at him!

  BUT the call had served a purpose. Somehow it put the scene with Polly in the perspective of ridicule. To think of the woman sitting in her frowsy little apartment, trembling over her dingy affairs of more than ten years ago! To think she was afraid he had bled and battled for seven years because of that!

  He thought about it for a moment, then shrugged. “Well, anyway, I bet it did her good.”

  And now he was hungry.

  He thought of having a meal sent up, just to avoid a possible rendezvous with another of Stephanson’s ball-throwers, but decided against it. If Stephanson was really hunting him seriously, it would not be much of a job to have something put into the food he was sent. He’d be much safer eating in a restaurant chosen at random.

  Besides, a few bright lights, a little gaiety, would be really welcome. This was his first night of freedom—and he had to wash that Polly taste out of his mouth.

  He checked the corridor carefully before going out. There was nothing, but the action reminded him of a tiny planet near Vega where you made exactly the same precautionary gesture every time you emerged from one of the tunnels formed by the long, parallel lines of moist, carboniferous ferns.

  Because if you didn’t—well, there was an enormous leechlike mollusc that might be waiting there, a creature which could flip chunks of shell with prodigious force. The shell merely stunned its prey, but stunned it long enough for the leech to get in close.

  And that leech could empty a man in ten minutes flat.

  Once he’d been hit by a fragment of shell, and while he’d been lying there, Henck—Good old Blotto Otto! Crandall smiled. Was it possible that the two of them would look back on those hideous adventures, one day, with actual nostalgia, the kind of beery, pleasant memories that soldiers develop after even the ugliest of wars? Well, and if they did, they hadn’t gone through them for the sake of fat cats like Mr. Edward Ballaskia and his sanctified dreams of evil.

  Nor, when you came right down to it, for dismal little frightened trollops like Polly.

  Frederick Stoddard Stephanson. Frederick Stoddard—

  Somebody put an arm on his shoulder and he came to, realizing that he was halfway through the lobby.

  “Nick,” said a rather familiar voice.

  Crandall squinted at the face at the end of the arm. That slight, pointed beard—he didn’t know anyone with a beard like that, but the eyes looked so terribly familiar. . . .

  “Nick,” said the man with the beard. “I couldn’t do it.”

  THOSE eyes—of course, it was his younger brother!

  “Dan!” he shouted.

  “It’s me all right. Here.” Something clattered to the floor. Crandall looked down and saw a blaster lying on the rug, a larger and much more expensive blaster than the one he was carrying. Why was Dan toting a blaster? Who was after Dan?

  With the thought, there came half-understanding. And there was fear—fear of the words that might come pouring out of the mouth of a brother whom he had not seen for all these years . . .

  “I could have killed you from the moment you walked into the lobby,” Dan was saying. “You weren’t out of the sights for a second. But I want you to know, Nick, that the post-criminal sentence wasn’t the reason I froze on the firing button.”

  “No?” Crandall asked in a breath that was exhaled slowly through a retroactive lifetime.

  “I just couldn’t stand adding any more guilt about you. Ever since that business with Polly—”

  “With Polly. Yes, of course, with Polly.” Something seemed to hang like a weight from the point of his jaw; it pulled his head down and his mouth open. “With Polly. That business with Polly.” Dan punched his fist into an open palm twice. “I knew you’d come looking for me sooner or later. I almost went crazy waiting—and I did go nearly crazy with guilt. But I never figured you’d do it this way, Nick. Seven years to wait for you to come back!”

  “That’s why you never wrote to me, Dan?”

  “What did I have to say? What is there to say? I thought I loved her, but I found out what I meant to her as soon as she was divorced. I guess I always wanted what was yours because you were my older brother, Nick. That’s the only excuse I can offer and I know exactly what it’s worth. Because I know what you and Polly had together, what I broke up as a kind of big practical joke. But one thing, Nick: I won’t kill you and I won’t defend myself. I’m too tired. I’m too guilty. You know where to find me. Anytime, Nick.” He turned and strode rapidly through the lobby, the metal spangles that were this year’s high masculine fashion glittering on his calves. He didn’t look back, even when he was walking past the other side of the clear plastic that enclosed the lobby.

  Crandall watched him go, then said “Hm” to himself in a lonely kind of way. He reached down, retrieved the other blaster and went out to find a restaurant.

  AS he sat, poking around in the spiced Venusian food that wasn’t one-tenth as good as he had remembered it, he kept thinking about Polly and Dan. The incidents—he could remember incidents galore, now that he had a couple of pegs on which to hang them. To think he’d never suspected—but who could suspect Polly, who could suspect Dan?

  He pulled the prison discharge out of his pocket and studied it. Having duly served a maximum penal sentence of seven years, discounted from fourteen years, Nicholas Crandall is herewith discharged in a pre-criminal status—

  —to murder his ex-wife, Polly Crandall?

  —to murder his younger brother, Daniel Crandall?

  Ridiculous!

  But they hadn’t found it so ridiculous. Both of them, so blissfully secure in their guilt, so egotistically certain that they and they alone were the objects of a hatred intense enough to endure the worst that the Galaxy had to offer in order to attain vengeance—why, they had both been so positive that their normal and already demonstrated cunning had deserted them and they had completely misread the warmth in his eyes! Either one could have switched confessions in mid-explanation. If they had only not been so preoccupied with self and had noted his astonishment in time, either or both of them could still be deceiving him!

  Out of the corner of his eye, he saw that a woman was standing near his table. She had been reading his discharge over his shoulder. He leaned back and took her in while she stood and smiled at him.

  She had everything a woman needs for great beauty—figure, facial structure, complexion, carriage, eyes, hair, all these to perfection—but she had those other final touches that make the difference between a mere beauty and a work of art. Those final touches included such things as sufficient wealth to create the ultimate setting in coiffure and gown, as well as the single Saturnian paeaea stone glowing in priceless black splendor between her breasts. Those final touches included the look of feminine intelligence in her large eyes, and the overbred, overindulged, overspoiled quality that chilled while attracting desire.

  “May I sit with you, Mr. Crandall?” she asked in a voice of which no more could be said than that it fitted the rest of her.

  SOMEWHAT amused, but more exhilarated than amused, he slid over on the restaurant couch. She sat down like an empress taking her throne before the eyes of a hundred tributary kings.

  Crandall knew, within approximate limits, who she was and what she wanted. She was either a reigning post-debutante from the highest social circles in the System, or a theatrical star newly arrived and still in a state of nova.

  And he, as a just-discharged convict, with the power of life and death in his hands, represented a taste she had not yet been able to indulge but was determined to enjoy.

  Well, in a sense it wasn’t flattering, but a woman like this could only fall to the lot of an ordinary man in very exceptional circumstances; he might as well take advantage of his status. He would satisfy her whim, while she, on his first night of freedom—

  “That’s your discharge, isn’t it?” she asked and looked at it again. There was a moist beading on her upper lip as she avidly studied it—what a strange, satiated animal for one so splendidly young!

  “Tell me, Mr. Crandall,” she asked at last, turning to him with the wet pinpoints above her lip more brilliant than ever. “You’ve served a pre-criminal sentence for murder. It is true, is it not, that the punishment for murder and the most brutal, degraded rape imaginable are exactly the same?”

  After a long, sick silence, Crandall called for his check and walked out of the restaurant.

  HE had subsided enough when he reached the hotel to stroll with care around the transparent lobby housing. No one who looked like a Stephanson trigger man was in sight, although Stephanson was a cautious gambler. One attempt having failed, he’d be unlikely to try another for some time.

  But that girl! And Edward Ballaskia!

  There was a message in his box. Someone had called, leaving only a number to be called back.

  Now what? he wondered as he went back up to his room. Stephanson making overtures? Or some unhappy mother wanting him to murder her incurable child?

  HE GAVE the number to the set and sat down to watch the screen with a good deal of curiosity.

  It flickered—a face took shape on it. Crandall barely restrained a cry of delight. He did have a friend in this city from pre-convict days. Good old dependable, plodding, realistic Irv. His old partner.

  And then, just as he was about to shout an enthusiastic greeting, he locked it inside his mouth. Too many things had happened today. And there was something about the expression on Irv’s face . . .

  “Listen, Nick,” Irv said heavily at last. “I just want to ask you one question.”

  “What’s that, Irv?” Crandall kept himself rock-steady.

  “How long have you known? When did you find out?”

  Crandall ran through several possible answers in his mind, finally selecting one. “A long time now, Irv. I just wasn’t in a position to do anything about it.” Irv nodded. “That’s what I thought. Well, listen, I’m not going to plead with you. I know that after seven years of what you’ve gone through, pleading isn’t going to do me any good.

  But, believe me or not, I didn’t start dipping into the till very much until my wife got sick. My personal funds were exhausted. I couldn’t borrow any more, and you were too busy with your own domestic troubles to be bothered. Then, when business started to get better, I wanted to prevent a sudden large discrepancy on the books.

  “So I continued milking the business, not for hospital expenses any more and not to deceive you, Nick—really!—but just so you wouldn’t find out how much I’d taken from it before. When you came to me and said you were completely discouraged and wanted out—well, there I’ll admit I was a louse. I should have told you. But after all, we hadn’t been doing too well as partners and I saw a chance to get the whole business in my name and on its feet, so I—I—”

  “So you bought me out for three hundred and twenty credits,” Crandall finished for him. “How much is the firm worth now, Irv?”

  The other man averted his eyes. “Close to a million. But listen, Nick, business has been terrific this past year in the wholesale line. I didn’t cheat you out of all that! Listen, Nick—”

  Crandall blew a snort of grim amusement through his nostrils. “What is it, Irv?”

  IRV drew out a clean tissue and wiped his forehead. “Nick,” he said, leaning forward and trying hard to smile winningly. “Listen to me, Nick! You forget about it, you stop hunting me down, and I’ve got a proposition for you. I need a man with your technical know-how in top management. I’ll give you a twenty per cent interest in the business, Nick—no, make it twenty-five per cent. Look, I’ll go as high as thirty per cent—thirty-five per cent—”

  “Do you think that would make up for those seven years?”

  Irv waved trembling, conciliatory hands. “No, of course not, Nick. Nothing would. But listen, Nick. I’ll make it forty-five per—”

  Crandall shut him off. He sat for a while, then got up and walked around the room. He stopped and examined his blasters, the one he’d purchased earlier and the one he’d gotten from Dan. He took out his prison discharge and read it through carefully. Then he shoved it back into the tunic pocket.

  He notified the switchboard that he wanted a long-distance Earthside call put through.

  “Yes, sir. But there’s a gentleman to see you, sir. A Mr. Otto Henck.”

  “Send him up. And put the call in on my screen as soon as it goes through, please, Miss.” A few moments later, Blotto Otto entered his room. He was drunk, but carried it, as he always did, remarkably well.

  “What do you think, Nick? What the hell do you—”

  “Sh-h-h,” Crandall warned him. “My call’s coming in.”

  The Tibetan operator said, “Go ahead, New York,” and Frederick Stoddard Stephanson appeared on the screen. The man had aged more than any of the others Crandall had seen tonight. Although you never could tell with Stephanson: he always looked older when he was working out a complex deal.

  STEPHANSON didn’t say anything; he merely pursed his lips at Crandall and waited. Behind him and around him was a TV Spectacular’s idea of a hunting lodge.

  “All right, Freddy,” Crandall said. “What I have to say won’t take long. You might as well call off your dogs and stop taking chances trying to kill and/or injure me. As of this moment, I don’t even have a grudge against you.”

  “You don’t even have a grudge—” Stephanson gasped, in spite of his rigid self-control. “Why not?”

  “Because—oh, because a lot of things. Because killing you just wouldn’t be seven hellish years of satisfaction, now that I’m face-to-face with it. And because you didn’t do any more to me than practically everybody else has done—from the cradle, for all I know. Because I’ve decided I’m a natural born sucker: that’s just the way I’m constructed. All you did was take your kind of advantage of my kind of construction.”

  Stephanson leaned forward, peered intently, then relaxed and crossed his arms. “You’re actually telling the truth!”

  “Of course I’m telling the truth! You see these?” He held up the two blasters. “I’m getting rid of these tonight. From now on, I’ll be unarmed. I don’t want to have the least thing to do with weighing human life in the balance.”

  The other man ran an index nail under a thumb nail thoughtfully a couple of times. “I’ll tell you what,” he said. “If you mean what you say—and I think you do—maybe we can work out something. An arrangement, say, to repay you a bit for what you went through out there. I’d like to, but it’s really up to you whether I can. We’ll see.”

  “When you don’t have to?” Crandall was astonished. “But why didn’t you make me an offer before this?”

  “Because you’d have thought I was trying to buy you off. I’d protect myself, yes, but I wouldn’t bribe you to spare my life.”

  Crandall considered the point. “I don’t get it. But maybe that’s the way you’re constructed. Well, we’ll see, as you said.”

  When he rose to face Henck, the little man was still shaking his head slowly, dazedly, intent only on his own problem. “What do you think, Nick? Elsa went on a sightseeing jaunt to the Moon last month. The line to her oxygen helmet got clogged, see, and she died of suffocation before they could do anything about it. Isn’t that a hell of thing, Nick? One month before I finish my sentence—she couldn’t wait one lousy little month! I bet she died laughing at me!”

  CRANDALL put his arm around him. “Let’s go out for a walk, Blotto Otto. We both need the exercise.”

  Funny how the capacity for murder affected people, he thought. There was Polly’s way—and Dan’s. There was old Irv bargaining frantically but still shrewdly for his life. Mr. Edward Ballaskia—and that girl in the restaurant. And there was Freddy Stephanson, the only intended victim—and the only one who wouldn’t beg.