deprived of Lumian weapons if there is a possibility that Kleippur has acquired
them. We must hope Monnorel is right, and trust the Lumians.”
Eskenderom scowled and moved back to the cavern door. He didn’t know whom to
believe or what to make of the situation. Kleippur had trusted in the Lumians,
and as soon as they found it expedient, they had deserted him and commenced
dealing with Kroaxia—or so Eskenderom had been told. But now that there could be
no further concealing of the fact that some Lumians had continued to deal with
Carthogia all along, the “official” Lumians were asking him to believe that the
ones talking to Kleippur were nothing more than a band of criminals that nobody
had known about. But the Lumians had eyes everywhere and knew everything. So had
they been merely distracting Eskenderom while their king treated with Kleippur,
and deliberately leading him on into launching the invasion so that his army
could be lured out into the Meracasine and destroyed?
The other possibility that Eskenderom had to consider was that the villain
behind everything was not Kleippur at all, but Frennelech, who, as Eskenderom
knew from his spies, had been meeting secretly and treacherously with Lumians in
the forests west of Pergassos. It would not be to Frennelech’s advantage to
allow either Kleippur or Eskenderom to grow too strong by inflicting a crushing
defeat upon the other, and his motives would be compatible both with his
original endorsement of the decision to invade Carthogia—thus sustaining a state
of tension between the two rulers—and with plotting subsequently to make sure
the Kroaxian army was incapacitated to prevent its carrying out the task.
But what could Frennelech have offered the Lumians in return for their
assistance? Presumably only the potential that his office gave him for inducing
the robeing population to tame the forests—which seemed to be the Lumians’ only
objective. Surely, however, Eskenderom told himself, it would be the Lumian king
who would want the forests tamed, not these alleged criminals, which again led
him to the conclusion that no band of criminals existed and that the Lumians
aiding his rival—in this case Frennelech—were therefore the Lumian king’s
official representatives.
So either way, it seemed to Eskenderom—whether the “Enlightener” was the product
of Lumians working with Kleippur or with Frennelech —the aliens were committed
to getting rid of him. He didn’t know why, for he had agreed to everything they
had asked. If he had been put to some test of weakness and failed, the verdict
was unjust, for how could robeings be expected to abide by the intricate rules
of conduct of a remote, incomprehensible, alien world that none of them had ever
seen?
At the makeshift conference table that had been set up in the lander’s open
cargo bay, Sharon Beatty, the transmogrifier operator assigned from Leon
Keyhoe’s staff, was using the lull to tidy up her computer-file notes of the
proceedings to the point where Lang had excused himself to take a call from
Leaherney inside the ship. During the last couple of hours of Terran-Taloid
exchanges, she had learned that Henry was furious because his army had been
turned around and was returning to Padua instead of invading Genoa, and Giraud
was denying official responsibility and blaming Zambendorf and his people, who
for some reason or other were hiding out down on Titan with a stolen surface
lander.
Sharon had never been sure why Zambendorf should have been included in the
mission, and she found it disturbing that so many seemingly intelligent and
rational people should have either the time or the inclination to take his
antics seriously. After traveling one billion miles to Saturn in the largest
spacecraft ever built and sharing the excitement of her fellow scientists at the
staggering discoveries on Titan, she had had more interesting things to do than
pay much attention to Gerold Massey’s concerns about the sociological
implications of the mission’s purpose, or Dave Crookes’ attempts to recruit her
as a political activist. She had seen enough of crusades and causes while she
was at college, and wasted too much of her time and energy on them. Now she had
more worthwhile things to attend to. If more people only felt the same way, all