The Andre Norton Megapack - 15 Classic Novels and Short Stories

he had come into this place two months earlier he felt like a real person again. And he had wits enough to guess that the potion he had just swallowed contained some drug. Only now he did not care at all. Anything which could wipe out in moments all the shame, fear, and sick despair the Starfall had planted in him was worth swallowing. Why the other had drugged him was a mystery, but he was content to wait for enlightenment.
    Lansor’s companion once more applied that compelling pressure to the younger man’s bony forearm. Linked by that hold they left the Starfall, came into the cooler, far more pleasant atmosphere of the street. They were a block away before Vye’s guide halted, though he did not release his prisoner.
    “Forty names of Dugor!” he spat.
    Lansor waited, breathing in the air of early morning. The confidence of the drug still held. At the moment he was certain nothing could be as bad as the life behind him, he was willing to face what this strange patron of the Starfall had in mind.
    The other slapped his hand down on an air-car call button, stood waiting until one of the city flitters landed on beam before them.
    From the seat of the air-car Vye noted they were heading into the respectability of the upper city, away from the stews ringing the launch port. He tried to guess their destination or purpose, not that either mattered much. Then the car descended on a landing stage.
    The stranger waved Lansor through a doorway, down a short corridor into a room of private quarters. Vye sat down gingerly on the foam seat extending from the wall as he neared. He stared about. Dimly he could just remember rooms which had this degree of comfort, but so dimly now he could not be sure they did not exist only in his vivid imagination. For Vye’s imagination had buoyed him first through the drab existence in a State Child’s Crèche, then through a state-found job which he had lost because he could not adapt to the mechanical life of a computer tender, and had been an anchor and an escape when he had sunk through the depths of the port to the last refuge in the Starfall.
    Now he pressed both his hands into the soft stuff of the seat and gaped at a small tri-dee on the wall facing him, a miniature scene of life on some other planet wherein a creature enveloped in short black and white striped fur crept belly flat, to stalk long-legged, short-winged birds making blood-red splotches against yellow reed banks under a pale violet sky. He feasted on its color, on the sense of freedom and off-world wonders which it raised in him.
    “Who are you?”
    The stranger’s abrupt question brought him back, not only to the room but to his own precarious position. He moistened his lips, no longer quite so aglow with confidence.
    “Vye—Vye Lansor.” Then he added his other identification, “S. C. C. 425061.”
    “State child, eh?” The other had pushed a button for a refresher cup, then was sipping its contents slowly. He did not ring for a second to offer Vye. “Parents?”
    Lansor shook his head. “I was brought in after the Five-Hour Fever epidemic. They didn’t try to keep records, there were too many of us.”
    The man was watching him levelly over the rim of that cup. There was something cold in that study, something which curbed Vye’s pleasant feeling of only moments earlier. Now the other set down his drink, crossed the room. Cupping his hand under Lansor’s chin, he brought up his head in a way which stirred a sullen resentment in the younger man, yet something told him resistance would only bring trouble.
    “I’d say Terran stock—not more than second generation.” He was talking to himself more than to Vye. He loosed his hold on the boy’s chin, but he still stood there surveying him from head to foot. Lansor wanted to squirm, but he fought that impulse, and managed to meet the other’s gaze when it reached his face again.
    “No—not the usual port-drift. I was right all the way.” Now he looked at Vye again as if the younger man did have a brain, emotions, some call on his interest as a personality. “Want a job?”
    Lansor pressed his hand deeper into the foam seat. “What—what kind?” He was angry and ashamed at that small betraying break in his voice.
    “You have scruples?” The stranger appeared to think that amusing. Vye reddened, but he was also more than a little surprised that the man in the worn space uniform had read hesitancy right. Someone out of the Starfall should not be