"Verrick!" he screamed, pulsing with terror. "Who am I?"
"You're Keith Pellig," Verrick answered irritably, wiping his forehead with one immense paw and pushing his tapes away. "You're the assassin picked by the Convention. You have to be ready to go to work in less than two hours."
Chapter VI
Groves continued working at his navigation table.
"Captain Groves, they're coming," Konklin said.
Groves nodded, and then returned to his navigation instruments.
The ship was now thirty astronomical units from the sun. Against the blackness of space bits of cold fire glowed, distant planets and suns wheeling silently round the creaking, lumbering ore freighter.
Down in the cargo hold fog lay over the dozing men and women. The warmth of the reactors had crept everywhere: the vibrating metal floor had become a surface of dull-glowing heat. Within the last few hours dust and water vapour had settled on flushed skins, on pots and pans, and was dripping from the walls to form warm pools.
Bruno Jereti sat running his horny fingers over the threads of a steel bolt. "I'm too old to get excited. If we're going back, that's all right with me."
Mary Uzich lay sprawled out resentfully among the bedding piled everywhere. "All those years of planning and working—and now we're giving up."
"We didn't know Cartwright was going to be Quizmaster." The old carpenter tossed the bolt aside. "I voted to go back myself."
"Then why did you join the Society? What the hell did you come along for, if you're going to back out now?"
Jereti picked up a pipe wrench and examined it intently. "I suppose you don't remember the burnings."
"Burnings! You mean all the books?"