Adventure stories; Mars (Planet) -- Fiction; Science fiction
There was a scratching against the closed shutter in the back wall,
followed by a rapid drumming of fingertips. Derech rose, his face
suddenly alert. He rapped twice on the shutter to say that he
understood and then turned to Carey. "Finish your wine."
He took the cup and went into another room with it. Carey stood up.
Mingling with the sound of the wind outside, the gentle throb of motors
became audible, low in the sky and very near.
Derech returned and gave Carey a shove toward an inner wall. Carey
remembered the pivoted stone that was there, and the space behind it.
He crawled through the opening. "Don't sneeze or thrash about," said
Derech. "The stonework is loose, and they'd hear you."
He swung the stone shut. Carey huddled as comfortably as possible in
the uneven hole, worn smooth with the hiding of illegal things for
countless generations. Air and a few faint gleams of light seeped
through between the stone blocks, which were set without mortar as in
most Martian construction. He could even see a thin vertical segment of
the room.
When the sharp knock came at the door, he discovered that he could hear
quite clearly.
Derech moved across his field of vision. The door opened. A man's voice
demanded entrance in the name of the United Worlds and the Council of
Martian City-States.
"Please enter," said Derech.
Carey saw, more or less fragmentarily, four men. Three were Martians in
the undistinguished cosmopolitan garb of the City-States. They were the
equivalent of the FBI. The fourth was an Earthman, and Carey smiled to
see the measure of his own importance. The spare, blond, good-looking
man with the sunburn and the friendly blue eyes might have been an
actor, a tennis-player, or a junior executive on holiday. He was Howard
Wales, Earth's best man in Interpol.
Wales let the Martians do the talking, and while they did it he drifted
unobtrusively about, peering through doorways, listening, touching,
_feeling_. Carey became fascinated by him, in an unpleasant sort of
way. Once he came and stood directly in front of Carey's crevice in the
wall. Carey was afraid to breathe, and he had a dreadful notion that
Wales would suddenly turn about and look straight in at him through the
crack.
The senior Martian, a middle-aged man with an able look about him,
was giving Derech a briefing on the penalties that awaited him if he
harbored a fugitive or withheld information. Carey thought that he was
being too heavy about it. Even five years ago he would not have dared
to show his face in Jekkara. He could picture Derech listening amiably,
lounging against something and playing with the jewel in his ear.
Finally Derech got bored with it and said without heat,
"Because of our geographical position, we have been exposed to the New
Culture." The capitals were his. "We have made adjustments to it. But
this is still Jekkara and you're here on sufference, no more. Please
don't forget it."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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