Alexei lay on the bed faking sleep. It had been easy to palm Dr. Rasputin's sleeping pill, to pretend to swallow it. Alexei held back a laugh. Even his mother had believed him to be asleep. He had wanted to jump up and ask her permission to go exploring in the house but realized she would disapprove. Things were too unsettled yet. This was the best way.
If I slip out without asking I haven't disobeyed orders. And I will stay in the house, where it's safe.
He heard his mother and Rasputin talking in the other room. The words were indistinct---something about the spice---Seppanens. The conversation rose and fell.
Alexei's attention went to the carved headboard of his bed---a false headboard attached to the wall and hiding the controls for his room's functions. A leaping fish had been shaped on the wood with thick brown waves beneath it. He knew if he pushed the fish's one visible eye that would activate the room's suspensor lamps. One of the waves, when twisted, controlled ventilation. Another altered the temperature.
Quietly, Alexei sat up in bed. A tall bookcase stood against the wall to his left. It could be swung aside to reveal a closet with drawers along one side. The handle on the door into the hall was modeled after an ornimajigger thrust bar.
It was as if the room had been designed to entice him.
The room and this planet---and not necessarily in that order.
He thought of the filmbook Rasputin had shown him---"Dyuna: His Imperial Highness's Desert Botanical Testing Station." It was an old filmbook from before discovery of the spice. Names flitted through Alexei's mind, each with its picture imprinted by the book's mnemonic pulse: tsereusa, oslik bush, date palm, sand verbena, evening primrose, barrel cactus, incense, bush, smoke tree, creosote bush...kit fox, desert hawk, hopper mouse...
Names and pictures, names and pictures from man's terranic past---and many to be found now nowhere else in the universe, save here on Dyuna.
So many new things to learn about the spice.
And the saandwurms.
A door closed in the other room. Alexei heard his mother's footsteps retreating down the hall. Dr. Rasputin, he knew, would find something to read and stay in the other room.
Now was the time to go exploring!
Alexei slipped out of the bed, headed for a bookcase door that opened into the closet. He stopped at a sound behind him, turned. The carved headboard of the bed was folding down onto the spot where he'd been sleeping. Alexei froze.
Immobility saved his life!
From behind the headboard slipped a tiny hunter-seeker no more than 5 centimeters long. Alexei recognized it at once---a common assassination weapon that every child of royal blood learned about at an early age. It was a ravening sliver of metal guided by some nearby hand and eye. It could burrow into moving flesh and chew its way up nerve channels to the nearest vital organ.
The seeker lifted, swung sideways across the room and back.
Through Alexei's mind flashed the related knowledge, the hunter-seeker limitations: its compressed suspensor field distorted the vision of its transmitter eye. With nothing but the dim light of the room to reflect his target, the operator would be relying on motion---anything that moved. A shield could slow a hunter, give time to destroy it, but Alexei had put aside his barrier on the bed. Phasguns would knock them down, but phasguns were expensive and notoriously cranky of maintenance----and there was always the peril of explosive pyrotechnics if the phaser beam intersected a hot shield. The Romanovs relied on their body barriers and their wits.
Now Alexei held himself in near catatonic immobility, knowing he had only his wits to meet this threat.
I must try to grab it, he thought. The suspensor field will make it slippery on the bottom. I must grip it tightly.
The thing dropped a half meter, quartered left, then circled back around the bed. A faint humming emitted from it.
Who could be operating that thing? Alexei wondered. It's got to be someone nearby. I could shout for Rasputin, but it would kill him the instant the door opened.
The hall door behind Alexei creaked. A rap sounded there. The door opened.
The hunter-seeker arrowed past his head towards the motion.
Alexei's right hand shot out and down, gripping the murderous machine. It hummed and twisted in his hand, but his muscles were locked on it in desperation. With a violent turn and thrust, he slammed the thing's nose against the metal doorplate. He felt the crunch of it as the nose's eye smashed and the seeker went dead in his hand.
Still, he held it, just to be sure.
Alexei's eyes came up, met the open stare of the total blue from the Hudtap El-Gaff.
"Your father summons you, boy," she said. "There are men in the hall to escort you."
Alexei nodded, his eyes and awareness focusing on this strange woman in a sacklike dress of bondsman brown. She was looking now at the thing clutched in his hand.
"I've heard of its kind," she said. "It would have killed me, yes?"
He had to swallow before he could speak. "It---was after me."
"But it was coming after me."
"Because you were moving." And he wondered: Who is this creature?
"Then you saved my life," she said.
"I saved both our lives."
"It seems like you could've let it have me and made your escape," she said.
"Who are you?" he asked.
"I am the Hudtap El-Gaff, your housekeeper."
"How did you know where to find me?"
"Your mother told me. I met her at the stairs to the weirding room just down the hall." She pointed to her right. "Your father's men are still waiting."
Those will be Botkin's men, he thought. We must find the operator of this thing.
"Go to my father's men," he said. "Inform them that I've caught a hunter-seeker in the house and they're to spread out and find the operator. Tell them to lock down the house and its grounds at once. They'll know how to go about it. The operator's sure to be a stranger among us."
And he wondered: Could it be this creature? But he knew it wasn't. The seeker had been under control when she entered.
"Before I do your bidding, man-cub," El-Gaff said, "I must cleanse the way between us. You've put a water burden upon me that I'm not sure I care to support. But we Szganys always pay our debts---be they black debts or be they white debts. And it's known to us that you've got a traitor in your midst. Who it is, we cannot say, but we're certain sure of it. Mayhap there's the hand that guided that flesh-cutter."
Alexei absorbed this in silence: a traitor. Before he could speak, the old woman whirled away and ran back towards the entryway.
He'd been of a mind to call her back, but there was an air about her that told him she would resent it. She'd told him what she knew and now she was going to do his bidding. The house would be swarming with Botkin's men in a minute.
His mind traveled to other parts of that bizarre conversation: weirding room. He looked to his left where she had pointed. We Szganys. So that was a Szgany. He paused for the mnemonic blink that would store the pattern of her face in the memory---prune-wrinkled features darkly tanned by the sun, blue-on-blue eyes without any white in them. He attached the label: The Hudtap El-Gaff.
Still gripping the broken seeker, Alexei turned back into his room, scooped up his shield belt from the bed with his left hand, swung it around his waist and buckled it as he ran back out and down the hall to the left.
She'd said his mother was somewhere down here---stairs---a weirding room!
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