'How short a time a century really is . . .' The speaker was Immortal Karmesin, and he had lived a thousand years. He stood, a gigantic figure against the rush of time, a permanently open channel for the infants of the galaxy to explore the deep past. He was anathema to the Phoenixes, for their creed was that of birth in death, of regeneration in destruction. And he knew that he - one man - had to unravel the Phoenix mystery, or live to watch it bring fiery death to all the planets of man . . . (First published 1963)
Release date:
September 29, 2011
Publisher:
Gateway
Print pages:
117
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IT SEEMED like a miracle to Merry when the immortal came into the foyer of the vast hotel. So far, her desperate venture had been ill-starred.
She had staked everything on it, her financial resources as well as her hopes, and yet for all her planning, things had been
going wrong.
For instance, thinking to make herself inconspicuous, she had dressed in a dark blouse drawn modestly over her bosom and dark
leotards, and had put on no eye-catching jewelry. She had realized that was a mistake the moment she walked with studied casualness
into the foyer. Of the hundred-odd people—and near-people—standing or lounging around the enormous hall, stationary or riding
the flo-ways, she was by far the most noticeable. Peacock-gaudy, men in shimmersynth suits turned their tiaraed heads towards
her; women wearing ropes of diamonds and strategically placed paint tried not to look calculatingly towards her when it occurred
to them to wonder whether they too should break out from the bonds of fashion.
Clutching her purse, alarmed to realize that at any moment the service supervisor in his bubble overhead might decide to assign
her an inquiry robot, Merry was on the point of postponing her investigation when there was a commotion at the main door.
The word passed, like a breeze over a grassy plain. Merry caught it being whispered a few feet away from her.
“One of the immortals is here! He’s coming in!”
Instantly, there was surge towards the door. It encountered another surge coming the opposite way as the bowing and scraping
human staff, at least twenty service robots, and a string of floating camera-bubbles accompanied the immortal into the foyer.
Merry had one glimpse of him before the crowd closed in: a man of middle height and build, wearing an old-fashioned thermostatic
suit of a subdued neutral shade, whose hair was quite white and whose eyes were unusually large and bright in his very pale
face. But this commotion was her opportunity; she didn’t wait a moment longer.
Trying not to hurry too much, she stepped on the flo-way leading out of the main foyer towards the older, and cheaper, wing
of the hotel.
The flo-way reached its destination. It was surface-activated: only the topmost layer of three or four molecules’ thickness
flowed forward. At the end of its run, the surface layer interpenetrated with an immobile layer directly below, and brought
her to a halt facing a range of old-styled elevators—physical capsules sliding in vertical shafts. In the new main wing of
the hotel there were the very latest nulgee tubes.
Steadily, Merry moved to the elevator she was looking for. It gave access to the viewroof as well as the intermediate floors,
and consequently was not privilege-locked to residents only. On her approach, its doors slid apart, and the smiling mask of
an immobile service robot, there was little wasted on frills in this wing of the building, inquired her destination.
“Viewroof,” she said. She had to lie. If she gave a room number, the robot would verify in milliseconds that she was not the
occupant, and would put in a call to find out if she was an invited or approved guest. (Merry had considered posing as a hired
girl, but the hotel had its own arrangements, and she had been compelled to come in as a mere sight-seer.)
“Please enter,” the robot said. She complied, and the doors closed.
The moment she felt the capsule move, Merry went into frantic action. She opened her purse and drew out the first of the costly devices concealed in it. This was a simple field-disruptor,
to put the robot out of action.
She thumbed the switch to maximum and swept the beam over the robot’s figure. According to her informant, it was possible
to put its courtesy and information circuits out of order without immobilizing the entire lift mechanism of the capsule. He
might have been wrong. Merry’s heart was in her mouth for an eternal moment. Then she saw that the robot’s face had gone as
slack as an unconscious man’s, and she heard the capsule still streaking upwards.
Keeping the field-disruptor leveled at the robot, she stabbed with one finger of her other hand at the stop button on the
capsule wall. Her information was that no one had bothered to disconnect these anachronistic override circuits; yet, the statement
might be untrue.
It wasn’t.
Merry was too cynical to believe in luck, but since the fortunate intrusion of the immortal into the foyer she was inclined
to change her mind. Purse swinging from her arm, she peered to see which was the selector button for the eightieth floor.
There wasn’t one.
For a terrible second she panicked and almost let the beam of the field-disruptor wander from the robot’s body; then she caught
on. You had to press the 8 and the 0 simultaneously to get floor 80. Her hand was just large enough for finger and thumb to
reach the two buttons; if she had wanted floor 90, she couldn’t have made it. Her hands, like the rest of her, were on a miniature
scale, exquisite, but tiny.
The capsule had already passed floor 80. She felt it pause, hesitate almost, and again knew raw terror before the mechanism
responded. The direction of travel reversed for a few heart beats, and then the elevator stopped.
The door didn’t open.
Was it interlocked with the robot’s internal circuitry? No. She saw with relief that the manual overrides were complete and
included a button labeled: OPERATE DOORS. It occurred to her that these elevators must be three or four centuries old; she had never seen such elaborate manual controls before.
She got the doors open. Cautiously, ready to drop her field-disruptor back in her purse the instant she was in the corridor,
she backed away from the robot.
Its face returned to normality. It looked almost puzzled for an instant, and then the doors closed. What it would do when
it discovered that its information—passenger in capsule en route to viewroof—was false, Merry had no idea. She didn’t much
care.
There was nobody in the corridor. It was hardly surprising. The older, cheaper wing of the hotel would be used by people who
came to Aryx with definite business in mind; those vacationing or at leisure would pay for the greater luxury of the modern
side.
Were the doors numbered? That was the next question. They were, luckily. Each bore a four-figure group in luminous plastic;
rooms vacant were shown by the numbers being dull, rooms assigned were shown by a pale pink glow, and rooms at present occupied
by their residents were shown by a bright red glow. 8010, the room she was going into, was unassigned.
More luck! She was prepared to go ahead, even if it was both assigned and occupied, but at least she wouldn’t have to overpower
anybody. She slid her gun to the bottom of her purse and took out a lock-pick which she clamped to the door.
The seller had claimed it would cope easily with any lock more than a decade old. She had tried it out surreptitiously. It
worked fine. But there was always the risk that new locks had been fitted …
The door opened. Breathing rapidly, Merry slipped through.
The room was small, with old-fashioned furnishings. There was a thermostatic bed, but it had no nulgee unit. There was an
ordinary voice-operated room-service commander, not one of the new person-keyed follow-you bubbles. So that was all right.
There was a sensiset, of course, a euphoricon, and the usual trappings. Merry took them in at a glance and then forgot them. She was in too great a hurry to examine the room more closely.
Now, the last crucial item from her purse. She lifted it out gingerly, hoping it hadn’t been knocked or damaged in any way.
She looked around for a place to set it up. The bed—that would do.
She moved with practiced deftness. First, the wide-angle coarse-focus scanner. Then the fine-focus scanner. Then the analyzer.
She spun connections between them from a canister of liquid conductor.
Power. In an unoccupied room, the power source was probably disconnected; anyway, she hadn’t been able to find out whether
the hotel monitored the outlets for wasted current. She attached the fuel cell she had brought, and set it to maximum output.
And now—the basic datum. She felt inside the neck of her blouse for her treasured locket. Supposedly, it was of Earth-side
origin; at any rate, Rex had said when giving it to her, you’d have to go back a long way to find anyone sentimental enough
to make such things. He’d grinned. But Merry had found the idea of a locket rather charming, and had insisted that he do the
job properly—which was why the locket contained a plaited twist of Rex’s hair.
With trembling fingers she put the hair into the field of the fine-focus scanner.
Now she had to wait. Anything up to ten minutes, the seller had told her. And this was going to be the longest and toughest
wait of her life.
She hardly dared take her eyes from the small, neat device she had erected on the bed. It was humming faintly; it was old
and much-used, and there was a little slack in the analyzer. But the odds against a false reading were still in the thousand-to-one
region, and Merry would be satisfied with that.
Was there a flicker from the pilot light? Merry started forward and craned closer to the machine. And the moment she did so,
the door of the room slid open.
Merry cried out and whirled to face the intruders. They were both human. The woman, she didn’t recognize; she had an air of authority which suggested she might be a senior member of the hotel staff. And that fitted. Because her unmistakable
companion was the immortal with the pale face and white hair whom she had glimpsed some minutes ago on his arrival in the
foyer.
THE WOMAN blanched visibly on seeing Merry. She lost her self-control only for a moment, however, and then barked in a voice like a
Sirian smew:
“What are you doing in here? What’s the meaning of this? By the stars, I know you! You’re that woman who made false allegations
against—”
She broke off, turning to her companion. “Immortal Karmesin!” she exclaimed in a contrasting tone of abject apology. “I don’t
know how to excuse this extraordinary happening! I’ll call a service robot and the lawforce as well, and possibly you may
reconsider your decision to reside in this wing of the hotel in view of the impeccable security arrangements we have in the—”
A flicker of interest had come into Immortal Karmesin’s impassive face as his eyes roved first over Merry and then over the
device she had set up on the bed.
“I told you, Mistress Gamal,” he broke in wearily, “I’m a man of somewhat old-fashioned tastes. Why you should find that extraordinary
in view of my age, I don’t understand. I don’t want to stay in a modern room with a damned room-service commander floating
over my head all the time like an aura. I want comfort, peace and quiet. If you press me one more time to move into the new
wing I’ll move—to another hotel. Clear?”
Abashed, the woman swallowed hard.
“As for your question to this girl,” Karmesin continued, moving forward with a meditative expression, “it seems about as ridiculous
as everything else I’ve heard from you so far. What she is doing is perfectly clear; she’s operating a person-spoor analyzer. All I’d like to be told is what the significance may be of the positive reading she’s just had from
it.”
Merry jerked her head around. Sure enough, in the minute or so that had passed since Karmesin’s entrance, the analyzer had
finished its work of digestion and there was a red light showing on the top of its case.
“He was here!” she said fiercely.
“Immortal Karmesin!” Mistress Gamal cried in alarm. “Don’t listen to her. She’s subject to some kind of delusion, and for
months she’s been pestering the hotel with false allegations!”
That’s not true!” Merry blazed. “What I said was right I’ve just proved it! You said you were going to get the law-force.
Well, go ahead and do it! I want them here, as soon as possible, so I can prove my charges!”
“I’ll call a service robot,” Mistress Gamal said, turning to the door. “And a psychiatrist. Obviously she needs his attention
more than the law’s.”
“You will do nothing of the kind,” Karmesin said in a voice of such authority tha. . .
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