Suicide, Inc Read online

  “Slick as ever,” murmured Saint, smiling thinly to himself. “Now then, old man, let us concentrate on the jewel box of the princess.”

  Just then the door of his stateroom unexpectedly burst open.

  “Blackguard!”

  “Rogue!”

  Narrowing his left eye, Saint scanned the furry couple who’d come barging in on his privacy. “I don’t believe we’ve been introduced,” he informed them. “So if you’ll kindly withdraw, I-”

  “We came aboard at Seton’s Landing,” said the burly catman in the two-piece checkered travelsuit. He held a kilgun in each piebald paw.

  “And poor dear put-upon Aunt Zorina has told us all about you, you fortune hunter,” added the husky cat-woman on the threshold. She had only one kilgun showing.

  “Ah, yes, to be sure.” Saint, carefully, rose to his feet. “Then you must be kinsmen of the dear princess.”

  “I’m Bud Barnstraw and this is my lovely wife Bess,” said the checksuited catman as he came stalking in out of the thick, steamy afternoon. “As if you didn’t know.”

  “I assure you, dear fellow, I had not even an inkling of your existence until your surprise entry,” said Saint amiably. “Of course, I’m quite flattered at your eagerness to make my acquaintance. Since, however, we’ll be docking in but scant minutes, and I’d like very much to change into a fresh suit of-”

  “We happen to be her only heirs,” Bess Barnstraw informed him, fur bristling.

  “She’s seventy-nine years old,” added Bud.

  Bess eased her bulk into the cabin and shut the louvered door. “And you’re a nasty fortune hunter.”

  “We don’t intend to let any picklecolored gigolo woo our auntie and have her cut us off without diddly-”

  “Sir, I shan’t listen to any slurs about my tint.” Saint drew himself up to his full five foot three. “I believe one ought to judge a man not by his color, nor by his fur, but by how he-”

  “Judging by any standard,” interrupted the angry Bud, “you’re out to persuade Aunt Zorina to marry you.”

  “I assure you, old man, that ours is merely a shipboard friendship.” Saint glanced casually at his suitcase next to the bunk, the one where his stungun was packed away.

  “What we’re going to do,” explained Bess while digging a paw into her neostraw shoulder bag, “is fix you so you won’t romance any more dotty old ladies.” From the bag she produced a large folded plyosack.

  Saint cleared his throat. “I think, dear people, I’d best make my true intentions clear to you. Crystal clear,” he said. “I am not the sort of fellow who weds repulsive old bimbos for their fortunes.”

  Bud gestured impatiently with one of his guns. “Like heck you aren’t.”

  “I am, trust me, simply a telekinetic cracksman.”

  “Hm?” Bess blinked, pausing in the unfurling of the big sack.

  “I mean, dear lady, that I am but a humble telek.” He bowed to her, then to her husband.

  Bud’s twin kilguns suddenly vanished from his hairy grasp. Seconds later they materialized up near the white ceiling.

  Grinning, Saint winked faintly at the perplexed Mrs. Barnstraw.

  Her gun disappeared with a faint popping sound. It didn’t materialize again.

  “Damn it all,” said Bud, disappointed. “How the heck are we going to sew you up in this sack, Mr. St. Moritz, and toss you in the river?”

  “I rather doubt you are, old boy.” Saint opened his green fingers wide and his own stungun materialized in his right hand. Gripping it, he pointed the weapon at the unhappy Barnstraws. “Your interest in the welfare of your dear aunt is most heartwarming. I’ll cherish our little meeting.”

  Zzzzzummmmmmm!

  The stunbeam hit Bud first. He gasped, flapped his arms twice and fell to the cabin floor.

  Bess said, “Why, you little emerald pipsqueak, where do you get off-”

  Zzzzzummmmmmm!

  She joined her unconscious husband.

  Slipping the gun into his breast pocket, Saint smoothed his jacket. “Ah, how pathetic to see such a great talent as mine thrown away on the likes of these ninnies,” he said forlornly. “Bud and Bess…gad.”

  Shrugging, Saint pressed one palm against his green forehead. He concentrated on the jewel case up in the princess’ cabin one deck above.

  Seconds later it was in his hand.

  “Damn, just goes to show what a rotten judge of character I am.”

  Turning, Saint saw that the door of his cabin was once more open. Framed in the doorway was the captain of the ship, a portly lizardman in a two-piece gold-and-blue unisuit. “Was there something, Captain?” he inquired. “I fear I didn’t hear your knock.”

  “I actually believed you were a man of honor and integrity,” said the captain, a sad look touching his scaly brownish face. “In fact, I came barging in here to discuss the buying of a block of Trinidad Skymine Development Corporation stock.” He struck his chest with his fist, causing his gold braid to jingle. “Now I find that you are not only a thief, Mr. St. Moritz, but a murderer as well.”

  “Captain, I had you down as a chap who kept his head,” said Saint. “These two are far from being defunct, and I was about to report to you the fact that they’d wandered into my digs and fainted when you-”

  “You’ll have a chance to refute all the charges I’m going to bring soon as we dock,” the captain informed him coldly. “Right now, however, I intend to summon several of my surliest crewmen to haul you to the brig, sir.”

  “Old man, I’ve always found incarceration of any sort deuced uncomfortable.” Saint lunged at the captain.

  He succeeded in tipping the larger man over and, as the captain dropped back onto the yellow deck planks, Saint left his cabin to go running along the deck.

  “Help! Escaping killer!” roared the sprawled captain.

  Saint hesitated only long enough to thrust the jewel case into the waist of his trousers before sprinting to the rail and, gracefully, vaulting over it.

  He hit the tepid river with a whomping splash and went sinking down in the brown silty water.

  Seconds later and several yards from the ship, he resurfaced, about a quarter-mile from the jungly shore.

  “For a chap in my tip top condition this swim’ll be a piece of cake.”

  The captain apparently had decided not to halt his craft and give chase, because, when the green man pulled himself up on the mossy stretch of overgrown shore, using the gnarled root of the nearest bluish tree to help him, the ship was already fading away in the hot afternoon haze.

  “Excellent, first rate! Couldn’t have devised a better test ourselves.”

  Resting on his heels, Saint brushed his sopping orange hair off his muddy forehead. He frowned over at the computer terminal that floated in the air near the trunk of a squat palm tree.

  “One does hope, old thing, you’re not a minion of the law.”

  “I’m Whistler,” explained the voxbox of the terminal. “Representing the Whistler Interplanetary Investigation Agency.”

  Saint shook water off his dripping sleeves. “Come to arrest me, have you?”

  “Nope, we want to hire you.”

  “To do an honest job, do you mean?”

  “Exactly.”

  “Jove,” said Saint thoughtfully as he rose, dripping, to his feet, “I may have sunk low enough to take you up on that.”

  CHAPTER 3

  It continued to rain on Barnum, a thin misty rain that turned the afternoons a pale, quiet grey.

  Jared Smith was looking, and feeling, considerably better than he had three days earlier. “Sure, I feel pretty good,” he told the thickset middle-aged scientist the Whistler Agency had assigned to look after him.

  “That’s discouraging,” remarked Doc Winner. “You ought to be feeling at least marvelous by now, if not outright stupendous. The cleverly plotted combination of diet, vitamin injections, dormtherapy and face-to-face bull sessions I’ve been using on you is guaranteed to-�
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  “I tend to be a shade pessimistic.”

  “The shots alone should’ve wiped that out,” fretted Winner as he paced the walled garden they were in.

  The rain was kept out by an unseen force screen, one of Doc Winner’s inventions.

  Smith was sitting in a sewdowicker lawn chair, legs stretched straight out, for his daily interview. “Suppose you fill me in a bit more on the assignment you folks have in mind for me.”

  Doc Winner tugged at his greying muttonchop whiskers. “You know the planet Zegundo very well,” he said, making another slow circuit of the dry flagstones. “Know every nook and cranny, for instance, of Selva Territory.”

  “I grew up there.”

  “Weren’t born there, though.”

  “Nope, I was born in the next territory over, Sombra.” Smith rubbed at his chin with his thumb knuckle. “There was a border war, some of us were relocated. My parents, along with quite a few others, were killed and…” He shrugged. “About forty of us eventually got sent to Horizon House to live.”

  Winner stopped pacing. “You haven’t yet mentioned Doctor Noah Westerland in these little autobiographical interludes, Jared,” he pointed out. “Any reason?”

  “No. Doctor Westerland ran the place. In fact, it was his home,” replied Smith. “He and his wife turned part of the mansion, an enormous joint, over to us refugee kids. Westerland was doing research for the Trinidad Interplanet Government at the time.”

  “I know, yes. You liked him?”

  Smith nodded.

  “And now?”

  “He’s dead.”

  “Apparently so.” Winner came striding over to seat himself in a white chair facing Smith. “He died, we are told, seven years ago on Zegundo.”

  “You sound like maybe you think he isn’t dead.”

  Spreading his stubby-fingered hands wide, Doc Winner answered with, “You were quite fond of his daughter, Jennifer Westerland.”

  “In my youth,” he said. “Starting about the time I was seventeen.”

  “It lasted awhile.”

  “We had a…romance, which continued during the time I was in the Territorial Police.” Smith looked up at the rain.

  “Her father suggested the romance cease.”

  “He did.” Smith fell silent, frowning.

  “They called all of you the Horizon Kids. There was quite a bit of media coverage on you lovable little tykes.”

  “Yep, there was.”

  “You keep in touch with any of the kids?”

  Smith shook his head. “Not a one.”

  “There were originally forty-three children in residence during that protracted wartime emergency. Some of them, yourself included, lived at Horizon House for nearly a decade.”

  “All of this, does it have something to do with the job?”

  Winner tugged at a sidewhisker. “You’ve heard we’re nicknamed Suicide, Inc.,” he said. “Media twaddle, but it’s not bad publicity. Impresses some of our nitwit clients. Actually, however, ninety percent of the jobs we tackle are relatively simple, straightforward assignments with a minimum of risk.”

  “And the one you have in mind for me is one of these easy, nondangerous ones?”

  “Precisely,” answered the scientist. “The Whistler Agency has thrived because of the clever ways, a good many of them, I modestly admit, cooked up by me, we go about our business. Our staffs are small, our overhead relatively low. What we do is recruit crews for specific jobs. We seek out people with unique or unusual abilities, match them up with the job at hand and function quite impressively. For your particular…” He paused, glanced up, then wiped at his plump cheek.

  “Drop of rain.”

  “Got through your screen.”

  “That’s not possible.” Doc Winner popped to his feet, scowling. “Unlike most similar systems, mine allows for not one single…Holy Hannah! Two more.”

  “About my job?”

  Winner was feeling at the pockets of his smock-like yellow jacket. “What?”

  “Now that I’m fast returning to marvelous shape and have decided to accept the job offer,” said Smith, “I’m sort of anxious to know what the hell I’m going to be asked to do.”

  “Oh, it’s a simple enough chore.” He produced an electric screwdriver from one cluttered side pocket. “In the nature of a scavenger hunt.” Shoulders slightly hunched, he approached a flowering shrub. “Control box is hidden under this fragrant bit of foliage. The flowers, and a snappy shade of purple they are indeed, bloom the whole year round. Thing also repels all major insects. My idea.”

  “The flowers smell somewhat like old boots.” Smith had joined him near the high garden wall.

  “Do you think so? Well, I was trying for something offbeat, not being fond of sweet cloying scents myself.”

  “What am I going to be hunting for, Doc?”

  Dropping to his knees, Winner began poking around at the roots of the plant. “People, my boy, you’ll be rounding up people. In fact, your old school chums. Former residents of Horizon House,” he said. “Ah, here’s the dang control box, under this glob of super-efficient synthetic fertilizer I inven-”

  “Are these people missing or-”

  “Missing, or lost. Five of ’em.” Winner pried the lid off the small gunmetal box that sat on the loamy soil. “Assumption is that most of ’em are still on Zegundo, but scattered to the winds.”

  “Who wants them?”

  “Our client.”

  “Who is?”

  “Well, no wonder this was on the fritz, no wonder. This unappealing blue bug has snuck inside my box and committed suicide in the midst of my ingenious and colorful circuitry. Shoo.” With thumb and forefinger Doc Winner lifted the tiny blue corpse free of the box. “A Trinidad-based company called Triplan, Ltd. is financing your mission. Even as we speak, which Whistler may’ve mentioned, we’re merrily scouring the planets in search of a crackajack crew for you.”

  Walking back to his chair, Smith sat. “Would your contact at Triplan be a guy named Benton Arloff?”

  Winner shut the box, nudged it into its former position, and grunted to his feet. “Arloff’s the lad who married Jennifer Westerland a couple years back, I believe,” he said. “Yes, he’s our client, Jared. Do you object to working for him and his firm?”

  After a few silent seconds Smith answered, “Nope. But why’s Arloff so anxious to find these missing Horizon Kids?”

  “A sentimental gesture,” said Doc Winner. “What he, along with his dear wife and her sweet greyhaired mother, has in mind is a reunion of all you tots. Years have passed, you’re all full grown, time to get together once again to wax tearful about old times.”

  Smith, slouched in his chair, watched him for a while, a thin grin on his tanned face. “You really believe, Doc, that that’s their only motive?”

  “Not a bit,” he admitted. “You ought to have fun finding out what they’re really up to.”

  A long drop of rain came falling down through the force screen to splash on his broad, flat nose.

  CHAPTER 4

  Smith turned his back on the vast enormity of space, left the view window and crossed the spaceliner saloon to one of the several empty tables.

  At the small floating table next to his sat a large greenish lizardman, slightly slumped and sniffing into a polkadot plyochief. After wiping at his weepy eyes, he gazed over at Smith. “You have a kindly, understanding face, sir,” he said in a croaky voice.

  Smith brought up a hand and touched his face. “I do?”

  The five empty mulled skullpop mugs on the lizard’s tabletop hopped when he released a heartfelt sigh. “I judge you to be the sort of man upon whom I can unburden myself.”

  “That’s an error in judgment, because-”

  “Permit me to introduce myself.” He was poking and probing his scaly hands into the pockets of his two-piece checkered travelsuit. “I think I must’ve blown my nose on the last business card I had. At any rate, I am Norman Vincent Bagdad.”<
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  “Mr. Bagdad, I truly don’t want to hear your-”

  “I am a practicing polygamist.”

  “That’s of no-”

  “I have four wives.” He held up a quartet of green fingers. “Four. And where are they now?”

  “Fooling around?”

  The lizardman gave a sad shake of his head. “Would that they were,” he said. “No, they’re in our luxurious cabin, rehearsing.”

  “Rehearsing what?” Smith noticed that the servobot was three tables off.

  “Their act. My wives are the Sophisticates.” He studied Smith’s face for a sign of recognition.

  “Never heard of them. What do they do?”

  Bagdad laughed hollowly. “By George, sir, this is refreshing,” he said. “I’m glad we began this pleasant discourse, because it gives me a fresh perspective on my-”

  “It’s really not a discourse, Bagdad. I’d prefer to sit in solitude and contemp-”

  “The Sophisticates, sir, happen to be the hottest singing group in the Hellquad System of planets,” the lizard explained. “They’re en route now to the Trinidads for a series of SRO concerts. Their last musivid album just went lead.”

  “That’s good?”

  “On the Hellquads, where there’s very little metal, it’s akin to going platinum.”

  “Oh, so?”

  The big lizardman said, “Try to imagine how you’d feel, sir, if every single one of your wives started straying from your hearth and home in order to pursue a show business career.” He leaned closer. “You’ve really never seen their hit single Don’t Sit Under the Utumbo Tree With-”

  “Okay, what’ll she be, cobber?” The tall, wide copperplated servobot had rolled over to Smith’s table. He stood grinning, silver teeth sparkling in his ball of a head. “Name’s Think-A-Drink.” Holding up his right hand, he revealed that all five fingers were spigots. “You name it, I’ll pour it, buddy.”

  Smith said, “Sparkling water.”

  Think-A-Drink’s metallic eyelids fluttered; his round coppery head did a complete turn. “Do these old earflaps deceive me? A big strapping lad like you asking for…ugh…a pansy drink like bubble water?”