“But if you could tip the scales, personally, so our boys lost out at Syrax,” said Flandry, “we wouldn’t counter-attack your imperial sphere. You know that. It’d invite counter-counterattack on us. Heavens, Terra itself might be bombed! We’re much too comfortable to risk such an outcome.” He pulled himself up short. Why expose his own bitterness, and perhaps be arrested on Terra for sedition?
“If we possessed Syrax,” said Aycharaych, “it would, with 71 percent probability, hasten the collapse of the Terran hegemony by a hundred years, plus or minus ten. That is the verdict of our military computers—though I myself feel the faith our High Command has in them is naive and rather touching. However, the predicted date of Terra’s fall would still lie 150 years hence. So I wonder why your government cares.”
Flandry shrugged. “A few of us are a bit sentimental about our planet,” he answered sadly. “And then, of course, we ourselves aren’t out there being shot at.”
“That is the human mentality again,” said Aycharaych. “Your instincts are such that you never accept dying. You, personally, down underneath everything, do you not feel death is just a little bit vulgar, not quite a gentleman?”
“Maybe. What would you call it?”
“A completion.”
Their talk drifted to impersonalities. Flandry had never found anyone else whom he could so converse with. Aycharaych could be wise and learned and infinitely kind when he chose: or flick a whetted wit across the pompous face of empire. To speak with him, touching now and then on the immortal questions, was almost like a confessional—for he was not human and did not judge human deeds, yet he seemed to understand the wishes at their root.
At last Flandry made a reluctant excuse to get away. Nu, he told himself, business is business. Since Lady Diana was studiously ignoring him, he enticed a redhaired bit of fluff into an offside room, told her he would be back in ten minutes, and slipped through a rear corridor. Perhaps any Merseian who saw him thus disappear wouldn’t expect him to return for an hour or two; might not recognize the girl when she got bored waiting and found her own way to the ballroom again. One human looked much like another to the untrained non-human eye, and there were at least a thousand guests by now.
It was a flimsy camouflage for his exit, but the best he could think of.
Flandry re-entered the yacht and roused Chives. “Home,” he said. “Full acceleration. Or secondary drive, if you think you can handle it within the System in this clumsy gold-plated hulk.”
“Yes, sir. I can.”
At faster-than-light, he’d be at Terra in minutes, rather than hours. Excellent! It might actually be possible to arrange for Aycharaych’s completion.
More than half of Flandry hoped the attempt would fail.
III
It happened to be day over North America, where Vice Admiral Fenross had his offices. Not that that mattered; they were like as not to work around the clock in Intelligence, or else Flandry could have gotten his superior out of bed. He would, in fact, have preferred to do so.
As matters worked out, however, he created a satisfactory commotion. He saved an hour by having Chives dive the yacht illegally through all traffic lanes above Admiralty Center. With a coverall over his party clothes, he dove from the airlock and rode a grav repulsor down to the 40th flange of the Intelligence tower. While the yacht was being stopped by a sky monitor, Flandry was arguing with a marine on guard duty. He looked down the muzzle of a blaster and said: “You know me, sergeant. Let me by. Urgent.”
“I guess I do know your face, sir,” the marine answered. “But faces can be changed and nobody gets by me without a pass. Just stand there while I buzzes a patrol.”
Flandry considered making a jump for it. But the Imperial Marines were on to every trick of judo he knew. Hell take it, an hour wasted on identification—! Wait. Memory clicked into place. “You’re Mohandas Parkinson,” said Flandry. “You have four darling children, your wife is unreasonably monogamous, and you were playing Go at Madame Cepheid’s last month.”