Northwest of Earth by Moore C.L

Author:Moore, C.L. [Moore, C.L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780575119369
Publisher: Gollancz
Published: 2011-09-28T22:00:00+00:00

YVALA

NORTHWEST SMITH LEANED against a pile of hemp-wrapped bales from the Martian drylands and stared with expressionless eyes, paler than pale steel, over the confusion of the Lakkdarol spaceport before him. In the clear Martian day the tatters of his leather spaceman’s garb were pitilessly plain, the ray-burns and the rents of a hundred casual brawls. It was evident at a glance that Smith had fallen upon evil days. One might have guessed by the shabbiness of his clothing that his pockets were empty, the charge in his ray-gun low.

Squatting on his heels beside the lounging Earthman, Yarol the Venusian bent his yellow head absently over the thin-bladed dagger which he was juggling in one of the queer, interminable Venusian games so pointless to outsiders. Upon him too the weight of ill fortune seemed to have pressed heavily. It was eloquent in his own shabby garments, his empty holster. But the insouciant face he lifted to Smith was as careless as ever, and no more of weariness and wisdom and pure cat-savagery looked out from his sidelong black eyes than Smith was accustomed to see there. Yarol’s face was the face of a seraph, as so many Venusian faces are likely to be, but the set of his mouth told a tale of dissoluteness and reckless violence which belied his features’ racial good looks.

“Another half-hour and we eat,” he grinned up at his tall companion.

Smith glanced at the tri-time watch on his wrist.

“If you haven’t been having another dope dream,” he grunted. “Luck’s been against us so long I can’t quite believe in a change now.”

“By Pharol I swear it,” smiled Yarol. “The man came up to me in the New Chicago last night and told me in so many words how much money was waiting if we’d meet him here at noon.”

Smith grunted again and deliberately took up another notch in the belt that circled his lean waist. Yarol laughed softly, a murmur of true Venusian sweetness, as he bent again to the juggling of his knife. Above his bent blond head Smith looked out again across the busy port.

Lakkdarol is an Earthman’s town upon Martian soil, blending all the more violent elements of both worlds in its lawless heart, and the scene he watched had under-currents that only a ranger of the spaceways could fully appreciate. A semblance of discipline is maintained there, but only the space-rangers know how superficial that likeness is. Smith grinned a little to himself, knowing that the bales being trundled down the gangplank from the Martian liner Inghti carried a core of that precious Martian “lamb’s-wool” on which the duties run so high. And a whisper had run through the New Chicago last night as they sat over their segir-whisky glasses that the shipment of grain from Denver expected in at noon on the Friedland would have a copious leavening of opium in its heart. By devious ways, in whispers running from mouth to mouth covertly through the spaceman’s rendezvous, the outlaws of the spaceways glean more knowledge than the Patrol ever knows.

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