Killer

Vonones bit his lip. "I don't believe in the gods, Lycon," he said, with his face twisted in a frown of concern. "Not like that, but…"

"Let's just pray that N'Sumu is a friendly god-or magician," Lycon said. "At least, friendlier toward us than toward the lizard-ape."

Chapter Seventeen

N'Sumu rented a suite of rooms on the second floor of an apartment block in rather a better neighborhood than that of last night's conflagration. The block included another thirty or so similar apartment suites, most of them broken up and sublet to other tenants. That the strange Egyptian was wealthy enough to occupy an entire suite of rooms by himself did not excite half as much curiosity as did the scandal that N'Sumu lived there without a single slave to serve him-at least, none had ever been observed to enter or depart, although at times questionable sounds were to be heard from within the Egyptian's chambers.

There was a window overlooking the courtyard, but it seemed to be masked with some sort of curtain, and no one could catch any glimpse of what was within even when the shutters were open. This was not surprising, since the screen that blocked out this sun's dangerous ultraviolet radiation also insured complete privacy from any human range of vision. Another field had been calibrated to trigger sensations of fear and unease in any human who approached too closely. If this would not discourage a potential intruder, there were other measures inside the apartment that would terminate any unwelcome visit. N'Sumu had returned one night to find the corpse of a thief, obviously one who had been too drunken to react to artificially induced fear but not so drunken that he could not reach the window. The body lay broken upon the stones of the courtyard, and when the other tenants assumed that the thief had slipped and fallen,N'Sumu did not disabuse them.

N'Sumu unlocked the door of his apartment with the cumbersome key he had been given-after first disarming his own security system by means of one of the devices from the belt he wore beneath his tunics. Once inside, he reactivated all systems. Heretofore his concerns were limited to the chance intrusions and prying curiosity of this world's aboriginal populace; since the night past he now harbored a very real dread in the form of a blue-scaled killer that now had sensed the presence here of its original captor. The situation on this assignment was definitely deteriorating.

RyRelee-or N'Sumu, as he was known to the natives of this world-dropped the corpse of the phile hatchling onto the floor of the barely furnished room and began to pull off the stifling folds of his native clothing. That accomplished, the emissary stripped off the most accessible portions of the bronze-colored protective sheathing he wore over his natural scales-sheathing both a disguise and a protection from the deadly ultraviolet radiation of this scalding hot planet. Carefully he removed the major segments of the mask that enclosed his head. He dared not attempt to make himself any less uncomfortable, as it would take too long to reassemble all of his cosmetic features, and RyRelee had too much to do before he rejoined his native helpers.

The emissary considered them. Their cooperation seemed to be as necessary as it was frustrating. It wasn't that they blundered badly, the two of them. On the contrary, their competence and the way they chose to apply it were dangerous to RyRelee's plans. That was the problem, after all: they made choices instead of doing as they were told, the way Class 6 natives ought to do when given orders by a civilized life form. The plump one, Vonones-he seemed to be soft and safe enough to deal with, but RyRelee had witnessed the aborigine's courage, and he now recognized the shrewd cu

No matter. The emissary had already decided that the two of them would not outlive their usefulness to him. If they survived the phile, RyRelee meant to finish them himself-or better yet, leave them to a slower death at the hands of their enemies among the other natives.

RyRelee examined the molds that had matured in his crudely improvised incubator. They were unpalatable, as were the bricks of refined native foodstuffs, but at least they had begun the process of breaking down the complex structures that otherwise would have made even the refined residues as digestible to the emissary as a mouthful of straw to one of this world's aborigines. He managed to ingest enough to help assimilate the fortified concentrates of his stores, then washed it all down with osmotically filtered water. Again he cursed the Cora for allowing him only minimal field equipment: no artifacts must be discovered by the autochthones.

His hunger less painful, the emissary decided to maintain a heightened level of consciousness for the present and adjusted the external metabolism controls of his support system accordingly. He was pushing himself too hard, but there would be time for rest once the current crisis was resolved. And that resolution, RyRelee knew, must be accomplished soon. The Cora awaited results with the same impatience as did the deranged chieftain who ruled this region of the planet.

It galled RyRelee that his own efficiency was in part to blame. He should have foreseen that the phile would already have begun to produce a brood-either she had mated earlier than his agents had reported, or her gestation period was a shorter interval in lighter gravity than anticipated. If he had not interfered in his zeal to see the phile safely housed in the Emperor's menagerie, another few days would have seen Rome infested with immature philes, capable of hunting on their own.

Still, the Cora might have observed this as well, and then would come the cleansing. For all their fine talk of protecting the natural development of intelligent life-forms, the Cora would be willing to obliterate this failure of their policy with thermonuclear destruction. Of course, the philes' savage homeworld had given the creatures the capacity for sudden intracellular changes which made them immune to toxins and even to genetically-tailored viruses.

But there was in any case a hard edge to the Cora, an arrogance perhaps necessary in a race able to rule the galaxy. The emissary had no idea as to exactly what had provoked the wrath of the Cora and brought about the destruction of another native civilization on an island close to here some fifteen hundred of this world's years earlier-Creta, he believed they called what remained of the place today-but he supposed someone had been supplying the aborigines with illegal advanced technology. The Cora might believe that such demonstrations would serve as warning to others who might be tempted to violate their policies of galactic peace, but RyRelee could almost feel sorry for the natives whose civilization had been thus sacrificed for the example.

RyRelee spread the corpse of the phile chick onto a table and laid out the instruments required for his examination. He had to work with only edged metal cutting tools-more obsessive caution on the part of the Cora-but he was nonetheless able to lay bare the concealed genital cleft in the creature's abdomen. But at this stage of its development, it was morphologically impossible to distinguish the immature ovipositor from the male organ, and RyRelee gave it up in favor of conclusive cytological examination. Cellular tissues introduced into the more sophisticated instruments provided by the Cora established that the chromosomal pattern of the dead chick was male.