Androids -- Fiction; Political fiction; Science fiction; Short stories
He stopped obediently for a through highway, and roared on. But the
second was no better. There was sweat on his forehead, and his hands
were slippery with it when he headed out Mars Center Canal into the
suburbs. Damn Curtis! It was impossible for him to have found the
hideout--or should have been!
But there was no warning light in the window of the third and last
place. The lawyer's faded sign swung in the thin wind, and everything
was serenely peaceful. Fleigh jerked Slim out of the car, set its
automatic chauffeur, and let it go rolling off.
Then he moved up the steps with the outlaw at his heels, listened
cautiously at the door, and nodded. The steady click of a typewriter
indicated that the scrawny little secretary was doing the routine
office-work, and Sammy must have been undisturbed. He opened the door
eagerly, to a louder clicking from the typewriter.
* * * * *
Above it, Curtis looked up with an assured smile, and waved the
grandfather of all hand weapons at him in genial greeting!
"Come in, Max," he said cordially. "Like my double's speech?"
Slim's trembling hand fumbled out automatically in the sign of the
horns. His blanched mouth worked furiously, but the words refused to
come until Curtis turned to him. Then jerked back, waving his fingers.
"He couldn'ta.... We'd of beat him ... _Max!_ He's dead! He's a
ghost!"
Fleigh's hand groped for him, and missed. Another apparition came into
the room from the inner office. This one was a shrivelled, little man,
with owl-eyes that blinked at them out of thick-lensed spectacles.
Jeremiah Greek picked up a pencil with a contented grin, drew it across
the bare flesh of his arm; and held the red mark that rose on the skin
out toward the outlaw.
"In the flesh," he stated.
But Slim was no longer listening. Slowly, as if moved by worn-down
clock-works, he slid down the wall and his dead-faced head bent forward
to meet the knees that drew upwards. There he stayed, motionless.
"If that's catatonic return to the foetal position, it's an all-time
record for speed," Curtis commented with quiet interest. "Sit down,
Max. You seem to have overestimated your companion's moral fiber, and
underestimated your opponent's. Never count on luck! It takes planning
to get anywhere in this universe.... By the way, Jeremiah Greek is the
original inventor of pancyclic tape: you should have checked up on him,
before you trusted him, and found out the way your Plutarchy gypped him
out of his invention. He wasn't the sort of man who'd cooperate very
well with Earth. In fact, he was the sort who could and would fake a
tape for your recorder to cover up the call he put in under my code to
the Martian Council!"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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