“Why do you think the Lady Dallona will try to reach you?”
“She needs all the help she can get. She knows she can get plenty from me. Why do you think I interrupted my search for her, and risked my carnate existence, to fight those people over a matter of verbalisms and political propaganda?” Verkan Vall went to the newscast visiplate and snapped it on. “We’ll see if I’m getting results, yet.”
The plate lighted, and a handsome young man in a gold-laced green suit was speaking out of it:
“... where he is heavily guarded by Assassins. However, in an exclusive interview with representatives of this service, the Assassin Hirzif, one of the two who seconded the men the Lord Virzal fought, said that in his opinion all of the three were so outclassed as to have had no chance whatever, and that he had already refused an offer of ten thousand System Monetary Units to discarnate the Lord Virzal for the Statisticalist Party. ‘When I want to discarnate,’ Hirzif the Assassin said, ‘I’ll invite in my friends and do it properly; until I do, I wouldn’t go up against the Lord Virzal of Verkan for ten million S.M.U.’”
Verkan Vall snapped off the visiplate. “See what I mean?” he asked. “I fought those politicians just for the advertising. If Dallona and Dirzed are anywhere near a visiplate, they’ll know how to reach me.”
“Hirzif shouldn’t have talked about refusing that retainer,” Klarnood frowned. “That isn’t good Assassin ethics. Why, yes, Lord Virzal; that was cleverly planned. It ought to get results. But I wish you’d get the Lady Dallona out of Darsh, and preferably off Terra, as soon as you can. We’ve benefited by this, so far, but I shouldn’t like to see things go much further. A real civil war could develop out of this situation, and I don’t want that. Call on me for help; I’ll give you a code word to use at Assassins’ Hall.”
A real civil war was developing even as Klarnood spoke; by mid-morning of the next day, the fighting that had been partially suppressed by the Constabulary had broken out anew. The Assassins employed by the Solar Hotel—heavily re-enforced during the night—had fought a pitched battle with Statisticalist partisans on the landing stage above Verkan Vall’s suite, and now several Constabulary airboats were patrolling around the building. The rule on Constabulary interference seemed to be that while individuals had an unquestionable right to shoot out their differences among themselves, any fighting likely to endanger nonparticipants was taboo.
Just how successful in enforcing this rule the Constabulary were was open to some doubt. Ever since arising, Verkan Vall had heard the crash of small arms and the hammering of automatic weapons in other parts of the towering city unit. There hadn’t been a civil war on the Akor-Neb Sector for over five centuries, he knew, but then, Hadron Dalla, Doctor of Psychic Science, and intertemporal trouble-carrier extraordinary, had only been on this sector for a little under a year. If anything, he was surprised that the explosion had taken so long to occur.
One of the servants furnished to him by the hotel management approached him in the drawing room, holding a four-inch-square wafer of white plastic.