The Hostage of Zir Read Free

talk, with the little Hercules interpreting. I picked up a piece not bad, at a good price.”
    Jussac showed a fire-opal ring. “Of course,” he continued, “the art of faceting is in its infancy here. I could show them a thing or two, if that Saint-Rémy treatment did not tie the tongue whenever an earthman tries to give a Krishnan technical information. In passing,” he added with a shrewd look, “do you get a commission from local merchants to whom you steer your tourists, the way guides do on earth?”
    “No,” said Reith. “For that, you have to live in the place. At Magic Carpet, we disapprove of such commissions. We can’t control the local guides, but we bear down on couriers from the home base.”

    ###

    During the following days, when not straining his guts in Heggstad’s gymnasium, or being lashed and prodded with a fencing saber, or cracking his skull over the Gozashtando and Duro tongues, Fergus Reith learned to ride. He rode an aya, which had six legs, horns, a hard trot, and a mean disposition. He also rode a shomal, which had only four legs, looked something like a humpless camel, and tended to balk like a mule.
    He learned to use Krishnan eating tools, which were little spears held like chopsticks.
    Although Reith felt like a heretic on the losing side of a theological argument with the Chief Inquisitor, he tried not to complain. His ancestor Robert the Bruce, he told himself, had not complained in equally dire straits.
    While Reith was being hardened for his task, Castanhoso took Reith’s tourists up the Pichidé River to Rimbid and down the river to Qou. At Qou they saw a village of the tame Koloftuma—the tailed primitives of Krishna. The sight touched off a furious argument between Professor Winston Mulroy and Shirley Waterford.
    “They were still at it when I left them,” Castanhoso told Reith. “Mulroy brought in intelligence tests, interspecies fertility, and those fossil Terran apemen called austral-something. The Senhorita Waterford just talked louder and louder about his racism. Anyway, nobody got lost or hurt.”

    ###

    One of Reith’s last conferences before leaving was with Pierce Angioletti, the Comptroller. Angioletti was a thin-lipped, graying, reserved man with a Bostonian twang. After they had gone over maps, written accounts of the lands the party was to see, and the expedition’s financial accounts, Angioletti said: “I can’t tell you too often to be careful. Between us, I opposed letting a mob of tourists loose on Krishna yet.”
    “Too risky, you think?”
    “Just so. We have enough trouble when the people we’ve been getting—missionaries, scientists, and adventurers—go off and disappear. The I.C. insists we avoid anything smacking of imperialism, while the Terran governments give us a hard time when we can’t find out what happened to their citizens, let alone rescue them. The French even put pressure on us when that fellow Borel vanished in Dur, although everyone knew he was just a con man.”
    “What did happen to him? After all, we’re going to Dur.”
    Angioletti shrugged. “If I knew, there wouldn’t be any mystery. But God knows what’ll happen when you set out with a dozen Ertsuma, some of them obvious damned fools. If nobody gets murdered or seized for ransom, I’ll eat my codfish with chocolate sauce.”
    Reith sighed. “I can only do my best. What did Castanhoso mean, warning me against the Regent Tashian? Could he have had anything to do with Borel’s disappearance?”
    “I don’t know. Tashian’s a shrewd operator with no more scruples than you expect of a Renaissance prince. But it’s to his advantage to build up tourist traffic to Dur, so he’ll probably stand by his promises.
    “I don’t think he did Borel in. Felix Borel disappeared in one of the wilder parts, not under the government’s control. The kind of man he was, he had it coming to him sooner or later. He tried one of his con games on that Russian big shot, Trofimov.