A Logic Named Joe Part 3
Tony had bought it for a lucky charm in one of those tiny shops on side-streets in New York, where antique jewelry and ivory chessmen and similar wares are on display in the windows. He picked it out because it looked odd. His conscience-he had been raised with a very articulate conscience-reluctantly consented to the purchase because the coin was very heavy for its size and might be gold. (It certainly wasn't a medal, and therefore had to be a coin.) It bore an inscription in conventionalized Arabic script on one side, and something on the other that looked like an elaborate throne without anybody sitting on it. But when Tony tried to look it up, there simply wasn't any record in any numismatic catalogue of any coinage even resembling it.
One night-this was his first visit, not the later one when he learned about the fourth dimension-he went down on East Broadway forshishkebab,and it occurred to him to ask the Syrian restaurant-keeper what the Arabic inscription might say. The Syrian read it, frowned darkly, and told Tony that the coin was a ten-dirhim piece, that the inscription said it was a coin of Barkutand, that he had never heard of any place called Barkut. Neither had Tony.So Tony got a little curious about it, and the next day spent half an hour in the Fifth Avenue library trying to find out something about either the coin or the country it came from. But as far as the library was concerned, there wasn't any place called Barkut. Never had been.
The coin was solid gold, though. A jeweler verified that. At bullion, it was worth somewhere around six dollars. And since Tony had paid only a dollar and a half for it, he was rather pleased. Even his conscience smugly approved. It isn't often that you pick up anything in an antique shop that you can sell for more than you paid for it, no matter what people tell you. So Tony kept it for a luck-piece, and every night on the way home from the office he paused outside Paddy Scanlon's Bar and Grill and gravely tossed the coin to see whether he should have a drink or not. Which was a pretty good way of being neither too abstemious nor too regular in such matters. His conscience approved of this, too.
He didn't really think the coin brought him good luck, but the small mystery of it intrigued him. He was a rather ordinary young man, was Tony. He'd enlisted in the Second World War, but had never got beyond a base camp although he'd howled for action. Instead, he sat on his rear and pounded a typewriter for three long years. Then he was discharged and got his old job back-at the same old salary-and went back to his old lodging house-at a bright new rate per week. Kind of a sour deal all around. So now he was glad he had the coin-because he liked to imagine things. His conscience sternly and constantly reminded him that he should be polite, attentive to his duties, efficient and no clock-watcher; and the radio reminded him every morning while he was dressing that he'd better use a specific tooth paste, hair stick.u.m, breath deodorant, and brand of popular-priced suits. It was pleasant, therefore, to have something vague and mysterious around, like the coin.
It couldn't have been made as a novelty or anything like that. Not when it was gold. But it came from no country anyone had ever heard of. He liked to think that there was some mystery about its having reached his hands; some significance in the fact that he had come to own it and no one else. To make it seem more significant, probably, he got into the habit of tossing it for all decisions of no particular moment. Whether to go to a ball game or not. Whether or not to eat at his regular restaurant. On this excess, his conscience dourly reserved decision.
He'd owned the coin two months, and the habit of using it to make small decisions had become fixed, when one evening he tossed it to see whether or not he should go to his regular restaurant for dinner. It came tails. No. He was mildly amused. To another restaurant uptown? Tails again. He flipped and flipped and flipped. His common sense told him that he was simply running into a long sequence of tails.
But he liked to think that the decisions of the coin were mysterious and significant. Tonight he got a little excited when one place after another was negatived. He ran out of restaurants he could remember having dined in. So he tossed his coin with the mental note that if it came heads he'd try a new restaurant, where he'd never dined before. But the coin came tails. Negative. Then he really racked his brains-and remembered the little Syrian restaurant down on lower East Broadway. He flipped for that. And the coin came heads.
He got on the subway and rode downtown, while his conscience made scornful comments about superst.i.tion. He went into the small converted store with something of an antic.i.p.atory thrill. His way of life was just about as unexciting as anybody's life could be. He had been pretty well tamed by the way he was raised, which had created a conscience with a mind of its own and usually discouraging opinions. His conscience now spoke acidly, and he had to a.s.sure it that he didn't really believe that the coin meant anything, but that he only liked to pretend it did.
So he sat down at a table and automatically flipped the coin to see whether he should ordershishkebabor not. The swarthy, slick-haired proprietor grinned at him. There was a bald-headed man at a table in the back-a man in impeccably tailored clothing, with gold-rimmed eyegla.s.ses and the definite dark dignity of a Levantine of some sort.
"Say," said the proprietor, in wholly colloquial English. "You showed me a funny goldpiece last time you were here. Is it that? Mr. Emurian, back there, he knows a lot about that stuff. A very educated man!
You want I should ask him about it?"
This seemed to Tony a mysterious coincidence. He agreed eagerly. The restaurant-keeper took the coin.
He showed it to the bald-headed man. They talked at length, not in English. The restaurant-keeper came back.
"He never seen one like it," he reported. "And he never heard of Barkut, where it says it come from. But he says there's a kinda story about coins and things like that-things that come from places that n.o.body ever heard of. He'll tell you if you want."
"Please!" said Tony. He found his heart beating faster. "If he'll join me-"
"Oh, he'll have a cuppa coffee, maybe," said the restaurant-keeper. "On the house. He's a very educated man, Mr. Emurian is."
He went back. The bald-headed man rose and came with easy dignity toward Tony's table. His eyes twinkled. Tony was fl.u.s.tered because this Mr. Emurian looked so foreign and spoke such perfect English and was so perfectly at ease.
"There is a legend," he told Tony humorously, "which might amuse you-if I may put down my coffee cup? Thank you." He sat. "It is an old wives' tale, and yet it fits oddly into the theories of Mr. Einstein and other learned men. But I know a man in Ispahan who would give you a great sum for that coin because of the legend. Would you wish to sell?"
Tony shook his head.
"Say-five hundred dollars?" asked Mr. Emurian, smiling behind his eyegla.s.ses. "No? Not even a thousand? I will give you the address of the man who would buy it, if you ever wish to sell."
Tony was too flabbergasted to even shake his head.
Mr. Emurian laughed. "This man," he explained amiably, "would say that the coin comes from a country which is not upon our maps because it is unapproachable by any ordinary means. Yet it is wholly real and actually has a certain commerce with us. It is-hm-have you ever heard of worlds supposed to be like ours, but in other-ah-dimensions, say, or in parallel but not identical times?"
"I've read Wells'Time Machine,"said Tony awkwardly.
"Not at all the same," the dark man a.s.sured him. "And notions of startling new machines for traveling between sets of dimensions or in time itself are quite absurd. Discoveries of that sort are never drastic!
When electricity was discovered, it was your own Franklin who observed that it was no new force, but quite commonplace. Every thunderstorm since time began had demonstrated it. Similarly, if travel between worlds or to other times should ever become really practical, it is certain that the discovery will not be dramatic. It will turn out that people have been doing it for centuries as a matter of course, without ever realizing it."
"You mean-" Tony stopped.
"The legend," said Mr. Emurian, "suggests that your coin came from a world not our own. That it came from a world where history quite truthfully denies much of the history we truthfully teach to children." He regarded Tony zestfully and said, "Ordinarily, two things which are equal to the same thing are equal to each other. But two places which are exactly equal to each other are identical-are the same place. Now consider! Suppose that somewhere there existed a world in which Aladdin's lamp existed and was in good working order. Suppose that upon that world there was a place which was absolutely identical with a place in this world. It would have to be a place where the working or not working of Aladdin's lamp made absolutely no difference. Now, according to the legend, those two places, on two worlds, would actually be one place which was on both worlds, and which would serve as a perfectly practical gateway between them. Travelers would pa.s.s casually through it without ever noticing it. You and I perhaps, pa.s.s through such gateways every day without the least realization."
The dark man seemed to find amused satisfaction in the look of mystified enthusiasm on Tony's face. He waved a manicured hand.
"Look at this restaurant. Here. Tonight," he said, beaming. "Today, for example, Calcutta could have vanished in a tidal wave and be sunk forever under the sea. Or it could not. Here and now, we knowing nothing about it, such an event would still have made no slightest difference. So that from this restaurant tonight we could walk out into two different worlds-you into the one where such an event had taken place, and I into the world where it did not. And I might go and live peacefully and die of old age in the Calcutta which to you was utterly destroyed."
"But we are in the same world!" protested Tony. "We'll stay in the same world!"
"Probably, but are you sure?" Mr. Emurian twinkled through his gla.s.ses. "We have never seen each other before. How do you know that I have always lived in this particular world? How do you know that the history of the world in which I was born is the same? I was surely not taught the same history! And if we separate here tonight, and you never see or hear of me again, how will you know that I remain in the world you inhabit?"
Tony said painfully, but with his heart beating fast: "I-guess I won't. But there's no proof, either, that-"
"We agree," said Mr. Emurian, nodding. "There can be no proof. I have told you a legend. It says that there are other worlds. They are not quite real to us, because we cannot reach them at will. But according to legend they touch each other at many places, and it is possible to travel from one to another, and in fact we constantly visit the frontier cities of other worlds without ever knowing it. We do not know it, because we are a part of our own world, and there is an attraction; a magnetism; a gravitation, perhaps; which draws us back before we stray far through the gateway of a world which is not our own."
He regarded Tony benevolently through his eyegla.s.ses.
"As for your coin-sometimes that gravitation or that attraction is not enough. We stray deep into other worlds and doubtless we are very unhappy. Or an object from another world strays into ours. But always the gravitation or the magnetism remains to some degree. That is what my friend in Ispahan believes-so firmly that he might be willing to pay you as much as two thousand dollars for the coin in your hand."
Tony looked at the coin with deep respect. He had never in all his life before owned anything worth even a fraction of two thousand dollars. His conscience spoke in no uncertain terms. He said slowly: "I-suppose I ought to sell it, then. I can't really afford to carry around a luck-piece as valuable as that.
I-might lose it." After a moment, he said wistfully: "I suppose your friend is a coin collector?"
"Not at all," said Mr. Emurian. "He is a businessman. He would use the coin, I am sure, to get into this other world and set up a branch of his business there. He would import Barkutian dates or dried figs or rugs, or possibly gold and frankincense and myrrh. He might deal in ivory and apes and peac.o.c.ks in exchange for Birmingham cutlery, printed cotton cloth, and kerosene lamps. And if the atmosphere were congenial he might establish a residence there, staffed with pretty slave girls and Mameluke guards, and settle down to a life of comfortable luxury with no fear of atomic bombs and Communism."
Tony said more wistfully still: "How would the coin guide him to Barkut?"
Mr. Emurian gently shook an admonitory finger.
"You accept my legend as fact, my dear sir! You are a romantic!" Then he added comfortably: "I do not know how he would use the coin as a guide. I do know that he would consider that it was not quite real in this world, and hence should be exempt from some physical laws. He would expect it to have some tendency to become more real, which it could only do by returning to its own time and place. How the tendency would show itself, I cannot guess. But I will write down my friend's name and address. I promise that he will pay you a high price for your token."
Tony Gregg looked almost hungrily at the coin. An idea came into his head. His conscience, its eyes on that two thousand, protested indignantly.
"I'll let the coin decide," he said unhappily. "Heads I sell it, tails I don't."
He tossed. The coin thumped on the table. Tails. He gulped in relief and pushed back his chair.
"It's settled," he said, flushing a little in his excitement. "And-and I won't take your friend's address because I-don't want to be able to change my mind."
Mr. Emurian beamed.
"A romantic!" he said approvingly. "It is admirable! I wish you good fortune, sir!"
Tony thanked him confusedly and paid his bill and departed.
Outside, in the spottily lighted street, he felt more or less dazed; his conscience prodded him, bitingly reproachful, demanding that he go back and get the address he had just refused. This was in the Syrian quarter, on lower East Broadway, with signs in Arabic in those scattered shop windows still lighted.
Most of the buildings about were dark and silent, and there were only very occasional lumbering trucks for traffic. The atmosphere was a compound of the exotic and the commonplace that did not make for clear thinking. The facts were staggering, too. If the coin in Tony's pocket was worth two thousand dollars, that in itself was enough to make him dizzy. He had never carried more than a week's salary in his pocket at any time, and never that for long.
So he rode uptown on a subway train which had come from Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn, and would go uptown only to Times Square. At Times Square he changed trains like a sleepwalker and went further uptown still. He was lost in excited, dazzled speculation which hardly let him notice his surroundings. He had come up from the subway exit and was walking toward his lodging when he realized he'd been too agitated to eat theshishkebabhe'd paid for. He came to a diner, and was still hungry. He automatically flipped the coin. It came heads. He went into the diner. The man at the stool next to him got up and went out. He left a paper that he'd stuck under him when he finished with it. Tony thriftily retrieved it while waiting for his hamburger and coffee. Then a thrill went all the way down his backbone and he nearly choked. The paper wasRacing Form.
On the way uptown Tony'd had a bitter argument with his infuriated conscience. He'd insisted defensively that if an importer of dates and dried figs and rugs in Ispahan could find profit in a journey to Barkut, why couldn't an up-and-coming young American do even better? Tony was no businessman, but he'd been trained to believe that anybody who did not desire above all things to be a brisk young executive had something wrong with him. So he'd been insisting feverishly that commerce in electric refrigerators, nylon stockings, fertilizer, lipstick and bubble gum was his life's ambition, and this was his chance. But actually, his mind had kept slipping off sidewise to visions of white-walled cities under a blazing sun, and of l.u.s.trous-eyed slave girls and Mamelukes armed with scimitars, and of camel caravans winding over desert wastes.
It was in a hopeless confusion of such images that he left the diner and went to his room, clutchingRacing Formfast. He sat up till long past midnight, flipping the coin and charting out a crucial test of its virtues.
He dreamed chaotically all night, and when morning came he awoke with common sense-i.e., his conscience-reviling him bitterly for his plans.
But he would not be shamed out of them. His conscience grew strident and then almost hysterical, but he sneaked out of the house with a hangdog air as if to avoid his own eyes, and rode to Belmont Racetrack with his hat pulled down over his forehead. When he put down the first two dollars at the betting window his conscience had been reduced to the point of simply jeering at him for a fool and a romantic, refusing a chance to sell a crazy luck-piece for two thousand dollars so he could use it to guide him in making two-dollar bets! A horse named Rainy Sunday? said his conscience derisively. Tomorrow would be Black Friday when he was fired for taking an unauthorized day off!
But Rainy Sunday won, paying six for two. Then Occiput paid off. Then, in order, Slipstream, and Miss Inflation, and Quiz Kid, and Armageddon . . . and the daily double . . .
Tony rode back to town in a sort of stunned composure. He had a trifle-a few hundred-more than eleven thousand dollars in his pocket. His conscience told him with icy disapproval that it had all been coincidence, and that now the proper thing for him to do was put that eleven thousand dollars in good, conservative securities, and never go near a race track again.
So Tony went up to his room and packed in feverish haste while his conscience yammered at him in mounting agitation, paid his rooming-house bill, and went out and flagged a taxi while the mood of resolution-and escape-was upon him. In the taxi he flipped the coin to see where he should head in order to take the coin nearer to Barkut. If there was a mysterious attraction trying to pull the coin back to its own world, it would obviously work on probability, operating to cause coincidences that would take it home. And if somebody was letting it guide him by flipping it for heads and tails . . .
Well, there was eleven thousand dollars to make the theory seem likely.
A couple of weeks later Tony considered the theory proved. At that time he had reached, he was fairly sure, a place well off any imaginable map of the world he had been born in. He stood on a sandy beach with blue sea to his left and desert on all other sides. A middle-sized whirlwind or sand-devil spun meditatively in one place a quarter-mile away, seeming to watch.
Tony had one desert Arab, very much unwashed, squirming under his right foot, and two other equally unwashed scoundrels coming furiously at him with spears from right and left. At this moment he thought irrelevantly, but not at all regretfully, of the tossings of the coin that had begun his journey.
He did not have time for philosophizing, however. So he swung the long, curved scimitar in his hand, pulled his belted-in-the-back topcoat out of the way with his left hand, and faced his would-be a.s.sa.s.sins.
Chapter 2.
It could have been a very happy journey-up to the unwashed scoundrels, at least-but Tony's conscience had tried to spoil everything. It spoke with an inflection very much like the maiden aunt who'd raised him. Tony would get into trouble, said his conscience gloomily, for slipping off without a pa.s.sport, and actually bribing somebody to help him do it. He should have paid the income tax on that eleven thousand dollars and put the rest in gilt-edged bonds. He should not have flown across the South Atlantic in a plane of such antiquity, to a flying field in Tunisia instead of to a proper airport where he would have been arrested for not having proper papers. He should not have slugged the Tunisian customs official who was planning to arrest him anyhow, even though the coin had blithely come heads when tossed for the decision. And certainly, having done so, he should not have tucked a hundred-dollar bill in officialdom's fingers for the man to find when he came to. To be sure, the official had pocketed the bill and kept his mouth shut, but fifty would have been enough. After all, where was more money coming from when this was gone, and what was Tony gaining in exchange for wasted cash?
So said Tony's conscience, which was a born killjoy. He ignored it as much as he could. It was exhilarating to dodge regulations and red tape after a lifetime subject to them. His conscience said aggrievedly that he was now a felon and would presently be confined in a jail with primitive sanitary arrangements. Tony's maiden aunt, who had formed his conscience, had been h.e.l.l on sanitation.
But Tony paid no heed. He spent money lavishly and got in return things which he prized highly. A sight of the sun setting on the desert. Once a bare glimpse of a dusky Arab damsel's face when the wind blew aside her veil. The smell of horses and camels and the East generally-concentrated it was bad, but when sufficiently diluted it was delectable-and that gorgeous time near the end of his journeying when a skinny thief tried to rob him in the bazaar at Suakim on the Red Sea and Tony grandly rescued him from the blows of indignant merchants who had meant to rob Tony in another manner. Afterward, too, he'd hired the thief to be his guide and interpreter. The coin came heads when he tossed it for the decision.
These things gave him satisfactions not to be obtained from the actions approved by common sense and the code of conduct a right-thinking young future executive should abide by. Tony thrived on them. He put on weight. He grew sunburned. Contentedly going where the toss of a coin suggested, knowing nothing of what the next instant would bring except that it would be unexpected, he straightened up from what had been an incipient bookkeeper's stoop. He walked with a freer motion and looked-this was the odd part-a much more likely prospect for a young executive's job than he had ever looked before.
His conscience grudgingly conceded as much, but waxed ever more bitter as Tony spent his funds lavishly for progress toward whatever unknown destination the supposedly homing coin would lead him to. Curiously, the coin did come an almost mathematically exact even number of heads and tails over a reasonable period of time. The laws of chance were not broken by an excess of heads, or tails, or excessively long runs of either. There could be absolutely no guarantee that Tony's travels were guided by anything but purest arbitrary chance. But his journeying was convincingly direct, when he plotted it on a map. He'd come as straight as transportation facilities would allow to Suakim on the Red Sea.
Suakim is and always will be a hot and sleepy and odorous town full of Arabs, Tamils, Somalis, and other persons who regard non-Moslems-their official rulers included-as the destined and legitimate prey of the Faithful. Tony's newly hired interpreter considered Tony his express and particular prey. For a time he tried valiantly to collect by wheedling Tony to make purchases on which he-the interpreter-would collect commissions of from fifty to seventy-five percent. For one long night he waited hopefully for Tony to snore, so that he could rob his baggage. But Tony slept dreamlessly and silently, like a child.
Then the interpreter's opportunity came.
On the third day of Tony's stay in Suakim-the coin came invariably tails at any suggestion of departure-Tony made some small purchase in the bazaar. He gave an Egyptian pound in payment. In the change there was a small silver coin with an inscription in conventionalized Arabic script on one side, and an ornate, empty throne on the other. Tony regarded it with apparent calm. He showed it to his hired thief.
"This is a coin of Barkut," he told the man who was itching to rob him. "It is my desire to go to Barkut.
Arrange it."
He went back to the fly-infested hotel, where he paid nine prices for his lodging. He spent some time flipping the coin. He had changed a good deal inside as well as out, once he'd learned how to grow really stern with his conscience. The coin turned up some heads and some tails. If it actually had a homing instinct, it gave him essential information. If everything had been a matter of chance up to now, and the series of coincidences between fact and the heads-and-tails decisions of the coin were about to end, it simply led him to preparations for an over-elaborate suicide.
Within the hour, his interpreter came back to the hotel with voluble a.s.surances that he had engaged a bakhilto carry Tony to Barkut. It was taking on the last of its cargo now. It would put out into the harbor at sunset, and Tony must board it secretly during the night because of harbor regulations.
Tony packed. He was reasonably well outfitted, now. He dressed for his journey in the absolute ultimate of the inappropriate. He wore a soft felt hat, brightly polished brown shoes, and a camel's-hair topcoat with a belt in the back. He slipped a revolver in his pocket.
Night fell. Tony dined, as well as the resources of Suakim would permit, and felt expansive and contented and antic.i.p.ative. Two hours after dark, his interpreter returned with news that thebakhilwas out in the harbor and awaited his coming. Tony went down to the water front of Suakim-a not too cautious move in itself, alone and at night. He climbed down a ladder into a small boat and placidly let himself be rowed out into the darkness. The night was black, save that stars glowed enormously against a sky like velvet. The sleepy, murmurous sounds of the city were very romantic indeed. There was the lapping of waves, and somewhere a wraith of string music where revelers made merry, and somewhere a dog barked indignantly in the darkness. That was all, except the sound of the oars.
Presently a dark form loomed ahead. Thebakhilwas an ungainly shape some seventy or eighty feet long, with the stubby thick mast and colossal boom on her lateen rig. Tony's interpreter hailed. A guttural voice replied. The small boat came alongside thebakhiland the interpreter steadied it for Tony to step on board.
He climbed to the deck. Thebakhilstank glamorously of fish and pearl oysters and goat hides and kerosene and tar and bilge water and humanity. Its deck was an impenetrable maze of shadows in the starlight. Tony drew a deep breath of complete satisfaction. He moved aside to be out of the way.
Then there was an infuriated howl, plus the sound of oars being worked at most enthusiastic speed.
Tony's interpreter and guide had obsequiously held the small boat to allow him to board thebakhil.The unwashed cutthroats of its crew had prepared to receive Tony's baggage. Instead, they saw and heard the sh.o.r.e boat being rowed away at the topmost speed of which the interpreter was capable.
Thebakhil'screw howled with rage, which was not righteous indignation at the witnessing of a theft, but the much greater rage of being cheated of the privilege of stealing Tony's possessions for themselves.
Men raved up and down the deck, uttering deep-throated maledictions at the top of their voices. Then, forward, the loudest voice shouted down the others. A small boat from thebakhilsplashed overside. It went cursing after the racing oar strokes of the boat with Tony's baggage in it.
Tony stepped delicately to the stern and ensconced himself against the rail. He got a cigarette lighter and lighted a cigarette and smoked it happily, still holding the lighter in his hand. This event had been implied in the series of heads and tails the golden coin of Barkut had turned up when he spun it for decisions on how he should prepare for the trip by sea. All this uproar was consoling confirmation of the homing tendency of the ten-dirhim piece. He smoked beatifically, while out on the dark harbor water one small boat manned by cutthroats went raging after another small boat manned by a sneak thief, and the crew of thebakhillistened between cursings to the sounds on the water.
Far off, there was a howl of fury. Still farther, a triumphant yell of derision. The small boat of thebakhil came back in a thick fog of sulphurous language, Tony's late interpreter evidently having made the sh.o.r.e and gotten away with his loot.
The boat's crew scrambled to the deck. The boat itself was made fast overside. There was much muttered talk. Then men came astern to where Tony smoked in blissful excitement. They circled him deliberately. He snapped his cigarette lighter. Its glow showed him the villainous bearded faces of the bakhil'screw. Hairy chests and ragged garments. Knives gleaming and ready.
And the lighter's flame showed them Tony, puffing joyously on a cigarette, with one hand holding the lighter with its flickering flame, and the other holding a c.o.c.ked revolver.
There was a pause without words.
Then a launch's internal combustion engine caught somewhere. It began to run with a sort of purring roar. A harbor launch. A police launch, probably, ready to investigate the howls of fury on the harbor's dark waters. If Tony were murdered here and now, his body might have to be slid overboard still unrobbed, and even that would be dangerous. More, he might kill somebody first.
The sound of the police-launch motor moved across the harbor. A voice grunted urgently on thebakhil's deck, and the group before Tony melted. Men swarmed to ropes and spars. The great lateen sail rose creaking against the sky, and forward, men hauled feverishly at a crude windla.s.s to lift thebakhil'sanchor.
Then slowly, slowly, slowly, in what were hardly catspaws of wind off the land, thebakhilgathered way.
It moved creakingly but very smoothly over the water. When the police launch was at its nearest, Tony tossed his cigarette overboard and blandly watched it go by. He was contentedly confident that all went well.
But his conscience wailed, as the police launch departed. Now he would be killed, and there would be n.o.body in all the world who would ever admit to the least idea of his fate. He could be traced-perhaps!-to Suakim, though even that was unlikely. But from Suakim on he would seem to have evaporated. With dawn, thebakhilwould be remote from all witnesses to happenings on its deck.
Tony would be murdered and robbed, and his few remaining possessions divided among these cutthroats who had surely no intention of taking him to any agreed-on destination! And what good had he done, or even tried to do? Even if he unthinkably escaped murder, now, he had not even pretended to make inquiries in Suakim on the probable products of Barkut, of the market it might offer for imports, or even of the possible profit in import-export trade! He had thrown away his life, and more-here Tony's conscience grew acrimonious-he had not made one single move that a brisk young executive would have made first of all!