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Chapter 10

IT WAS A LONG WAIT, in the cold and the dark, while the little moon, now past the meridian, slowly slipped down the starless sky. The policemen—and, to an only slightly lesser degree, Billinghurst and Pahvani—were used to vigils beside yet-to-be-sprung traps; Grimes was not. He wanted to be doing something. Finding that the lieutenant had a pass key that fitted the lock of the toilets under the stand he borrowed it, although what he really wanted was a smoke. His battered, stinking pipe was very comforting after he got it going and he was in no hurry to rejoin his comrades. Then, looking at his watch, he decided that he had better. The time was 0155 hours.

As soon as he was back outside he heard the noise. Something was approaching from the direction of the city, something in the sky. The irregular stuttering of a small inertial drive unit was unmistakable. He looked up, in the direction from which the sound was coming, but saw nothing. But it was not likely that the smugglers’ aircraft would be showing running lights.

It was visible at last, but only when it dropped to a landing in the centre of the ellipsoid formed by the track. It just sat there, but nobody came out of it. Its crew was waiting, just as the police were waiting.

Grimes looked at his watch again. 0201 . . . 0202 . . .

“Here it comes!” whispered the lieutenant.

Here it came.

At first it was no more than a barely audible, irritable muttering drifting down from the zenith. It became louder, but not much louder. The machine that finally dropped into sight was no more than a toy, no more than a model of a ship’s boat. It might have accommodated the infant child of midget parents who had bred true, but nobody larger. But it could carry quite a few kilos of dreamy weed.

The police had their stunguns ready, trained on the smugglers’ aircraft and on the robot, which were covered from three points—from the Owners’ Stand, from the Saddling Paddock, from the Totalizator. The lieutenant had stationed his men well; whoever had come to pick up the consignment would be inside the effective range of the weapons, but each police party would be just outside the range of the guns of the others.

Somebody was coming out of the aircraft at last, walking slowly and cautiously towards the grounded robot spaceboat, hunkering down on the grass beside the thing.

“Fire,” said the lieutenant in a conversational tone of voice, speaking into his wrist transceiver.

The air was alive with the vicious buzzing of the stunguns. The smuggler was frozen in his squatting posture, paralyzed, unable to stir so much as a finger. But the robot moved. Its drive unit hammered shockingly and unrhythmically and it shot straight upwards. Beams from hastily switched on police searchlights swept the sky like the antennae of disturbed insects—then caught it, held it, a tiny bright star in a firmament that had never known any stars. At least four machine rifles were hammering, and an incandescent tracer arched upwards with deceptive slowness. The lieutenant had drawn his laser pistol and the purple beam slashed across the darkness, power wasting and desperate. Some hapless night-flying creature caught by the sword of lethal light exploded smokily.

It might have been the machine rifles that found their mark, it might have been the laser pistol. Nobody ever knew. But the broken beat of the inertial drive ceased abruptly and the robot was falling, faster and faster, still held in the searchlight beams. It hit the ground almost exactly at the point of its initial landing.

It hit the ground—and, “Down!” shouted somebody. “Get down!”

It hit the ground, and where it struck an instantaneous flower of intolerable flame burgeoned, followed by a crack! that sounded as though the very planet were being split in two. The blast hit the grandstand, which went over like a capsizing windjammer—but, freakishly, the structure remained intact. Had it not done so there would have been serious injuries, at least to those upon it. Dazed, deafened, Grimes struggled to his feet, crept cautiously along the back of the bench upon which he had been sitting. Lights were flashing as men helped each other from the wreckage.

Billinghurst got clear of the stand before Grimes. He had found a torch and was running clumsily across the grass to the still smoking crater. The commodore followed him. He gagged as the customs officer’s light fell on the tangle of broken limbs and spilled entrails that had been the smuggler who had come out from the air car. The head was missing. After a cursory glance Billinghurst ignored the dead man, carried on to the wrecked vehicle, which had been blown on to its side. He shone his light in through the open door. The girl inside appeared to be uninjured, but she was very still. A strand of hair glowed greenly across her white face. Her hair? Grimes could see the beam of the torch reflected from her shaven, polished scalp. The fat man stooped, lifted the hank of green fibre, twisted it between his thick fingers, sniffed it.

“Dreamy weed,” he said flatly. Then, “The poor little bitch got what she came for. It’s the very last thing that she did get.” He shifted the beam of his torch and Grimes saw that the girl’s body, below the waist, was no more than a crimson pulp.

The commodore looked away hastily, up to the empty blackness of the sky. Somewhere up there was a ship. Somewhere up there was somebody who had killed, ruthlessly, to destroy all evidence that could be used to stop his profitable racket.

“Losing your neutrality, Commodore Grimes?” asked Billinghurst.


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Framed