Night of Light

“ Fratt? Fratt?” he muttered. “Fratt? The name means nothing to me. I remember no Fratt, yet I should. I have an excellent memory. But those few years were so crowded, and I was so careless of the identity of my victims. I, God forgive me, killed or even tortured many whose names I did not know.

“So it may be that I remember no Fratt because I did not know his, or her, name. Fratt’s son? That should be some clue. But I may not even have known that Fratt had a son. God!”

He took another drink and wished that it could wash away all knowledge of his past. He was not the John Carmody that Fratt had known. The name and the body might look the same but within he was not that John Carmody. That man was as dead as if he had truly died on Kareen.

But others had not died, and they had neither forgotten nor forgiven.

He drank another bourbon. There was nothing he could do at the moment. But, at least, he would be on his guard. Fratt would not find it easy to get at him. Nor would he find a passive victim, one weak with contrition and shame and hoping to pay for the deaths through his own, one willing to go to the sacrificial altar of his own conscience.

He struck the top of the table with his fist and almost unbalanced the glass. To hell with Fratt! If Carmody had been evil, he had shed that evil. There was more than Fratt could say for himself. If Fratt had been an i

Then he thought, But I am responsible for turning Fratt to evil. If I had not done what I did, I would not have generated this hate in Fratt. Perhaps I twisted Fratt so much that he shed whatever good was in him, as I later shed my evil, and he became the monster that I was. Action and reaction. Turnabout is fair play. Whatever has happened or will happen, I am the guilty one.

Nevertheless, he felt the old vigor flow through his veins. Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord. But He uses all sorts of weapons with which to effect vengeance.

“No,” he said to himself, and he shook his head, “I am rationalizing. I must forgive and love my enemy as a brother. That is what I have preached all these years, all these years. And I meant it. Or thought I did.”

He struck the tabletop again. “But I hate! I hate! Oh, God, how I hate!”

Self-hate?

“Oh, God!” he said. “Make me see that I am wrong!”

He emptied the glass and buzzed the waitress for another.

After the bourbon had come, he took Fratt’s letter from the ‘ducer and inserted Raspold’s. On the screen of the visor he saw the living room of Raspold’s apartment on the sixtieth level of the city of Denver. Raspold himself was not sitting down to face the screen. As nervous and energetic as Carmody, he found it difficult to sit for any length of time.

Raspold was a rapier clothed in flesh, a tall, very lean man with slick black hair, brown-black eyes as sharp and glittering as two tomahawks. He had a large bulbous nose, like a bloodhound’s. He wore the scarlet coveralls and black neck-ruff of an employee of the Prometheus Interstellar Lines. Carmody was not surprised at this, for he had seen the detective in many disguises.

Raspold stopped pacing long enough to wave at Carmody and say, “Greetings, John, you old reprobate! Forgive me if this is a short letter.”

He resumed walking back and forth, while he spoke loudly in his deep baritone. “I have to be off in a few minutes, and there’s no telling how long I’ll be on this particular scent. Also, the ship that’ll be taking this letter is scheduled to leave in half an hour.

“John, while I was on this case—for which you see me dressed up—I accidentally learned of something irrelevant to the case, but very grave. Believe me, very grave. A group of rich and fanatical laymen, of your religion I’m sorry to say, have determined to assassinate Yess, the god of Kareen. None of their own members will be doing this, but they’ve hired an assassin, maybe several, to do the deed. He’s one of the really big pros. I don’t know his identity. But I believe the killer will be from Earth. Anyway, if the assassin is successful, or even if he fails and is caught, the repercussions will be bad.

“I can’t do anything about this myself, because I’m tied up until this case can be completed. I’ve notified 3-E, and they’ll undoubtedly send agents to Kareen. They’ll also probably warn Yess. Then again, they may not, because they won’t want it known that Earthmen are attempting this.

“But I think you might want to go yourself, take a hand in things. I say this because the killer may be a man who has gone through the Night, become an Algulist, and is therefore a thoroughly dangerous man. It’ll take another Nighter to oppose him, and an Earth Nighter would understand him better. Of course, his being an Algulist is only a supposition, actually, a rumor. Maybe it’s not even possible. I don’t know enough about Kareen to be sure.

“If the killer hasn’t been Nightized, he’ll have to do his work before the Night starts. So he, and therefore you, don’t have much time.

“Maybe you’ll choose to ignore this. Maybe Yess is well able to take care of himself. However, here are the names of some potential assassins, top pros. You won’t know any of them. All the big boys of the days of our youth are dead, imprisoned, lost, or, like yourself, transmogrified.”

Raspold gave ten names, spelled them, and added a brief description of each man. He ended, “Good luck and my blessings to you, John. Next time you get to Earth, I hope I’ll be there, too. It’ll be nice to see your pleasantly ugly face again, and you can derive pleasure from gazing upon my noble Roman features and listening to my scintillating wit and enormous erudition. But as of now, I’m off! Tallyho!”

Carmody took the reader from his head and reached out for the second bourbon. Before touching it, his hand stopped. Now was not the time to get half-drunk. Not only did he have to consider Fratt—for all he knew Fratt might be on this ship—but he had an even more important problem. The cardinal should be informed of this turn of events. If what Raspold said was true—and he was usually reliable—then the Church was in even more danger than the cardinal had predicted. Assassination of Yess by members of the Church itself would cause an eruption that might be cataclysmic.

“The fools!” Carmody swore softly. “The blind hate-filled fools!”

He inserted two Stanleys into a slot; a blank letter sheet issued from the hole beneath it. Carmody turned on the screen on the wall by the table, inserted the blank into the ‘ducer, dropped three Stanleys into its slot, and punched the DIC button. After dictating the letter to the cardinal, he called the waitress and asked her if the letter would be sent out to be shipped on the next vessel to Wildenwooly. She brought a charger for him to sign and fingerprint, since letters were very expensive and he did not have enough money on him to pay for it.

Carmody then went to the men’s room and took an oxidizer to burn up the alcohol in his blood. The only other tenant was Abdu, the import-export businessman who had gotten on at Wildenwooly.

Abdu did not respond to Carmody’s maneuvers to engage him in conversation. Beyond “Yeah,” or “Is that so?” and several grunts, he was silent. Carmody gave up and returned to his seat in the passenger room.

He had been seated no more than ten minutes, his eyes half-shut and ignoring the movie on the screen, when he was interrupted.

“Father, is this seat taken?”

A young priest of the Jesuit order was standing by him, smiling somewhat long- toothedly at him. Tall and thin, he had an ascetic face, light-blue eyes, dark hair, and a pale skin. His accent was Irish, and a moment later he identified himself as Father Paul

O’Grady from Lower Dublin. He had served in the parish of Mexico City, Western Middle Level, for only a year after graduation from the seminary. Then he had been sent to Springboard to help with the situation there.