The ship touched ground; the door beside me opened, I got out with Padma and found Kensie waiting.
I looked from Padma to Kensie, who stood with us and a head taller than I, two heads taller than OutBond. Kensie looked back down at me with no particular expression. His eyes were not the eyes of his twin brother-but just then, for some reason, I could not meet them.
“I’m a Newsman,” I said. “Of course my mind is open.”
Padma turned and began walking toward the headquarters building. Kensie fell in with us and I think Janol and some of the others came along behind, though I didn’t look back to make sure. We went to the inner office where I had first met Graeme-just Kensie, Padma and myself. There was a file folder on Graeme’s desk. He picked it up, extracted a photocopy of something and handed it to me as I came up to him.
I took it. There was no doubting its authenticity.
It was a memo from Eldest Bright, ranking Elder of the joint government of Harmony and Association, to the Friendly War Chief at the Defense X Center, on Harmony. It was dated two months previously. It was on the single-molecule sheet, where the legend cannot be tampered with or removed once it is on.
Be Informed, in God’s Name-
-That since it does seem the Lord’s Will that our Brothers on Ste. Marie make no success, it is ordered that henceforth no more replacements or personnel or supplies be sent them. For if our Captain does intend us the victory, surely we shall conquer without further expenditure. And if it be His will that we conquer not, then surely it would be an impiety to throw away the substance of God’s Churches in an attempt to frustrate that Will.
Be it further ordered that our Brothers on Ste. Marie be spared the knowledge that no further assistance is forthcoming, that they may bear witness to their faith in battle as ever, and God’s Churches be undismayed. Heed this Command, in the Name of the Lord:
By order of him who is called-
Bright Eldest Among The Chosen
I looked up from the memo. Both Graeme and Padma were watching me.
“How’d you get hold of this?” I said. “No, of course you won’t tell me.” The palms of my hands were suddenly sweating so that the slick material of the sheet in my fingers was slippery. I held it tightly, and talked fast to keep their eyes on my face. “But what about it? We already knew this, everybody knew Bright had abandoned them. This just proves it. Why even bother showing it to me?”
“I thought,” said Padma, “it might move you just a little. Perhaps enough to make you take a different view of things.”
I said, “I didn’t say that wasn’t possible. I tell you a Newsman keeps an open mind at all times. Of course”-I picked my words carefully-“if I could study it-”
“I’d hoped you’d take it with you,” said Padma.
“Hoped?”
“If you dig into it and really understand what Bright means there, you might understand all the Friendlies differently. You might change your mind about them.”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “But-”
“Let me ask you to do that much,” said Padma. “Take the memo with you.”
I stood for a moment, with Padma facing me and Kensie looming behind him, then shrugged and put the memo in my pocket.
“All right,” I said. “I’ll take it back to my quarters and think about it. I’ve got a groundcar here somewhere, haven’t I?” And I looked at Kensie.
“Ten kilometers back,” said Kensie. “You wouldn’t get through anyway. We’re moving up for the assault and the Friendlies are maneuvering to meet us.”
“Take my air-car,” said Padma. “The Embassy flags on it will help.”
“All right,” I said.
We went out together toward the air-car. I passed Janol in the outer office and he met my eyes coldly. I did not blame him. We walked to the air-car and I got in.
“You can send the air-car back whenever you’re through with it,” said Padma, as I stepped in through the entrance section of its top. “It’s an Embassy loan to you, Tarn. I won’t worry about it.”
“No,” I said. “You needn’t worry.”
I closed the section and touched the controls.
It was a dream of an air-car. It went up into the air as lightly as thought, and in a second I was two thousand feet up and well away from the spot. I made myself calm down, though, before I reached into my pocket and took the memo out.
I looked at it. My hand still trembled a little as I held it.
Here it was in my grasp at last. Proof of the evidence Piers Leaf had heard of back on Earth, and what I had been after from the start. And Padma himself had insisted I carry it away with me.
It was the lever, the Archimedes pry-bar which would move not one world but two. And push the Friendly peoples over the edge to extinction.
CHAPTER 27
They were waiting for me. They converged on the air-car as I landed it in the interior square of the Friendlies’ compound, all four of them with black rifles at the ready.
They were apparently the only ones left. Jamethon seemed to have turned out every other man of his remnant of a battle unit. And these were all men I recognized, case-hardened veterans. One was the Groupman who had been in the office that first night when I had come back from the Exotic camp and stepped in to speak to Jamethon, asking him if he ever ordered his men to kill prisoners. Another was a forty-year-old Force-Leader, the lowest commissioned rank, but acting Major-just as Jamethon, a Commandant, was acting as Expeditionary Field Commander, a position equivalent to Kensie Graeme’s. The other two soldiers were noncommissioned, but similar. I knew them all. Ultrafanatics. And they knew me.
We understood each other.
“I have to see the Commandant,” I said as I got out, before they could begin to question me.
“On what business?” said the Force-Leader. “This air-car hath no business here. Nor thyself.”
I said, “I must see Commandant Black immediately. I wouldn’t be here in a car flying the flags of the Exotic Embassy if it wasn’t necessary.”
They could not take the chance that my reason for seeing Black wasn’t important, and I knew it. They argued a little, but I kept insisting I had to see the Commandant. Finally, the Force-Leader took me across into the same outer office where I had always waited to see Jamethon.
I faced Jamethon alone in the office.
He was putting on his battle harness, as I had seen Graeme putting on his earlier. On Graeme, the harness and the weapons it carried had looked like toys. On Jamethon’s slight frame they looked almost too heavy to bear.
“Mr. Olyn,” he said.
I walked across the room toward him, drawing the memo from my pocket as I came. He turned a little to face me, his fingers sealing the locks on his harness, jingling slightly with his weapons and his harness as he turned.
“You’re taking the field against the Exotics,” I said.
He nodded. I had never been this close to him before. From across the room I would have believed he was holding his usual stony expression, but standing just a few feet from him now I saw the tired wraith of a smile touch the corners of his straight mouth in that dark, young face for a second.
“That is my duty, Mr. Olyn.”
“Some duty,” I said. “When your superiors back on Harmony have already written you off their books.”
“I’ve already told you,” he said calmly. “The Chosen are not betrayed in the Lord, one by another.”
“You’re sure of that?” I said.
Once more I saw that little ghost of a weary smile.
“It’s a subject, Mr. Olyn, on which I am more expert than you.”
I looked into his eyes. They were exhausted but calm. I glanced aside at the desk where the picture of the church, the older man and woman and the young girl stood still.
“Your family?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said.
“It seems to me you’d think of them in a time like this.”
“I think of them quite often.”
“But you’re going to go out and get yourself killed just the same.”
“Just the same,” he said.
“Sure!” I said. “You would!” I had come in calm and in control of myself. But now it was as if a cork had been pulled on all that had been inside me since Dave’s death. I began to shake. “Because that’s the kind of hypocrites you are-all of you Friendlies. You’re so lying, so rotten clear through with your own lies, if someone took mem away from you there’d be nothing left. Would there? So you’d rather die now than admit committing suicide like this isn’t the most glorious thing in the universe. You’d rather die than admit that you’re just as full of doubts as anyone else, just as afraid.”