Read Online Hard-Luck Diggings: The Early Jack Vance, Volume One by Jack Vance - Free Book Online Page A

Dicantropus night tinkled and throbbed with her laughter. She and Landry toasted each other and exchanged laughing comments at Root’s expense—who now sat slumping, stupid, half-asleep. Finally he lurched to his feet and stumbled off to the station.
    On the table by the lake the candles burnt low. Barbara poured more brandy. Their voices became murmurs and at last the candles guttered.
    In spite of any human will to hold time in blessed darkness, morning came and brought a day of silence and averted eyes. Then other days and nights succeeded each other and time proceeded as usual. And there was now little pretense at the station.
    Barbara frankly avoided Root and when she had occasion to speak her voice was one of covert amusement. Landry, secure, confident, aquiline, had a trick of sitting back and looking from one to the other as if inwardly chuckling over the whole episode. Root preserved a studied calm and spoke in a subdued tone which conveyed no meaning other than the sense of his words.
    There were a few minor clashes. Entering the bathroom one morning Root found Landry shaving with his razor. Without heat Root took the shaver out of Landry’s hand.
    For an instant Landry stared blankly, then wrenched his mouth into the beginnings of a snarl.
    Root smiled almost sadly. “Don’t get me wrong, Landry. There’s a difference between a razor and a woman. The razor is mine. A human being can’t be owned. Leave my personal property alone.”
    Landry’s eyebrows rose. “Man, you’re crazy.” He turned away. “Heat’s got you.”
    The days went past and now they were unchanging as before but unchanging with a new leaden tension. Words became even fewer and dislike hung like tattered tinsel. Every motion, every line of the body, became a detestable sight, an evil which the other flaunted deliberately.
    Root burrowed almost desperately into his rocks and bones, peered through his microscope, made a thousand measurements, a thousand notes. Landry and Barbara fell into the habit of taking long walks in the evening, usually out to the pyramid, then slowly back across the quiet cool sand.
    The mystery of the pyramid suddenly fascinated Landry and he even questioned Root.
    “I’ve no idea,” said Root. “Your guess is as good as mine. All I know is that the natives don’t want anyone trying to get into it.”
    “Mph,” said Landry, gazing across the desert. “No telling what’s inside. Barbara said one of the natives was wearing a diamond necklace worth thousands.”
    “I suppose anything’s possible,” said Root. He had noticed the acquisitive twitch to Landry’s mouth, the hook of the fingers. “You’d better not get any ideas. I don’t want any trouble with the natives. Remember that, Landry.”
    Landry asked with seeming mildness, “Do you have any authority over that pyramid?”
    “No,” said Root shortly. “None whatever.”
    “It’s not—yours?” Landry sardonically accented the word and Root remembered the incident of the shaver.
    “No.”
    “Then,” said Landry, rising, “mind your own business.”
    He left the room.
    During the day Root noticed Landry and Barbara deep in conversation and he saw Landry rummaging through his ship. At dinner no single word was spoken.
    As usual, when the afterglow had died to a cool blue glimmer, Barbara and Landry strolled off into the desert. But tonight Root watched after them and he noticed a pack on Landry’s shoulders and Barbara seemed to be carrying a handbag.
    He paced back and forth, puffing furiously at his pipe. Landry was right—it was none of his business. If there were profit, he wanted none of it. And if there were danger, it would strike only those who provoked it. Or would it? Would he, Root, be automatically involved because of his association with Landry and Barbara? To the Dicantrops, a man was a man, and if one man needed punishment, all men did likewise.
    Would there be—killing? Root puffed at his pipe, chewed the stem, blew