Panels slid back, bookcases swung aside and four men stepped into the room. Three were those who had been in the foyer earlier when Ian had entered for the first time. The other was of the same type.
“Out!” screamed Kenebuck at them. “Everybody
out. Outside, and lock the door behind you. I’ll show this Dorsai, this …” almost foaming at the mouth, he lapsed into obscenity again.
Overhead, above the ceiling, Tyburn found himself gripping the edge of the table below the observation screen so hard his fingers ached.
“It’s a trick!” he muttered between his teeth to the unhearing Ian. “He planned it this way! Can’t you see that?”
“Graeme armed?” inquired the police sensor technician at Tyburn’s right. Tyburn jerked his head around momentarily to stare at the technician.
“No,” said Tyburn. “Why?”
“Kenebuck is.” The technician reached over and tapped the screen, just below the left shoulder of Kenebuck’s jacket image. “Slug-thrower.”
Tyburn made a fist of his aching right fingers and softly pounded the table before the screen in frustration.
“All right!” Kenebuck was shouting below, turning back to the still-seated form of Ian, and spreading his arms wide. “Now’s your chance. Jump me! The door’s locked. You think there’s anyone else near to help me? Look!” He turned and took five steps to the wide, knee-high to ceiling window behind him, punched the control button and watched as it swung wide. A few of the whirling sleet-ghosts outside drove from out of ninety stories of vacancy, into the opening—and fell dead in little drops of moisture on the windowsill as the automatic weather shield behind the glass blocked them out.
He stalked back to Ian, who had neither moved nor changed expression through all this. Slowly, Kenebuck sank back down into his chair, his back to the night, the blocked-out cold and the sleet.
“What’s the matter?” he asked, slowly, acidly. “You don’t do anything? Maybe you don’t have the nerve, Graeme?”
“We were talking about Brian,” said Ian.
“Yes, Brian …” Kenebuck said, quite slowly. “He had a big head. He wanted to be like me, but no matter how he tried—how I tried to help him—he couldn’t make it.” He stared at Ian. “That’s just the way, he never could make it—the way he decided to go into enemy lines when there wasn’t a chance in the world. That’s the way he was—a loser.”
“With help,” said Ian.
“What? What’s that you’re saying?” Kenebuck jerked upright in his chair.
“You helped him lose,” Ian’s voice was matter of fact. “From the time he was a young boy, you built him up to want to be like you—to take long chances and win. Only your chances were always safe bets, and his were as unsafe as you could make them.”
Kenebuck drew in an audible, hissing breath.
“You’ve got a big mouth, Graeme!” he said, in a low, slow voice.
“You wanted,” said Ian, almost conversationally, “to have him kill himself off. But he never quite did. And each time he came back for more, because he had it stuck into his mind, carved into his mind, that he wanted to impress you—even though by the lime he was grown, he saw what you were up to. He knew, but he still wanted to make you admit that he wasn’t a loser. You’d twisted him that way while he was growing up, and that was the way he grew.”
“Go on,” hissed Kenebuck. “Go on, big mouth.”
“So, he went off-Earth and became a professional soldier,” went on Ian, steadily and calmly. “Not because he was drafted like someone from Newton or a
born professional from the Dorsai, or hungry like one of the ex-miners from Coby. But to show you you were wrong about him. He found one place where you couldn’t compete with him, and he must have started writing back to you to tell you about it—half rubbing it in, half asking for the pat on the back you never gave him.”
Kenebuck sat in the chair and breathed. His eyes were all one glitter.
“But you didn’t answer his letters,” said Ian. “I suppose you thought that’d make him desperate enough to finally do something fatal. But he didn’t. Instead he succeeded. He went up through the ranks. Finally, he got his commission and made Force-Leader, and you began to be worried. It wouldn’t be long, if he kept on going up, before he’d be above the field officer grades, and out of most of the actual fighting.”
Kenebuck sat perfectly still, a little leaning forward. He looked almost as if he were praying, or putting all the force of his mind to willing that Ian finish what he had started to say.
“And so,” said Ian, “on his twenty-third birthday— which was the day before the night on which he led his men against orders into the enemy area—you saw that he got this birthday card …” He reached into a side pocket of his civilian jacket and took out a white, folded card that showed signs of having been savagely crumpled but was now smoothed out again. Ian opened it and laid it beside the decanter on the table between their chairs, the sketch and legend facing Kenebuck. Kenebuck’s eyes dropped to look at it.
The sketch was a crude outline of a rabbit, with a combat rifle and battle helmet discarded at its feet, engaged in painting a broad yellow stripe down the center of its own back. Underneath this picture was
printed in block letters, the question—“WHY FIGHT IT?”
Kenebuck’s face slowly rose from the sketch to face Ian, and the millionaire’s mouth stretched at the corners, and went on stretching into a ghastly version of a smile.
“Was that all … ?” whispered Kenebuck.
“Not all,” said Ian. “Along with it, glued to the paper by the rabbit, there was this—“
He reached almost casually into his pocket.
“No, you don’t!” screamed Kenebuck triumphantly. Suddenly he was on his feet, jumping behind his chair, backing away toward the darkness of the window behind him. He reached into his jacket and his hand came out holding the slug-thrower, which cracked loudly in the room. Ian had not moved, and his body jerked to the heavy impact of the slug.
Suddenly, Ian had come to life. Incredibly, after being hammered by a slug, the shock of which should have immobilized an ordinary man, Ian was out of the chair on his feet and moving forward. Kenebuck screamed again—this time with pure terror—and began to back away, firing as he went.
“Die, you—! Die!” he screamed. But the towering Dorsai figure came on. Twice it was hit and spun clear around by the heavy slugs, but like a football fullback shaking off the assaults of tacklers, it plunged on, with great strides narrowing the distance between it and the retreating Kenebuck.
Screaming finally, Kenebuck came up with the back of his knees against the low sill of the open window. For a second his face distorted itself out of all human shape in a grimace of its terror. He looked, to right and to left, but there was no place left to run. He had been pulling the trigger of his slugthrower all this time, but
now the firing pin clicked at last upon an empty chamber. Gibbering, he threw the weapon at Ian, and it flew wide of the driving figure of the Dorsai, now almost upon him, great hands outstretched.
Kenebuck jerked his head away from what was rushing toward him. Then, with a howl like a beaten dog, he turned and flung himself through the window before those hands could touch him, into ninety-odd stories of unsupported space. And his howl carried away down into silence.
Ian halted. For a second he stood before the window, his right hand still clenched about whatever it was he had pulled from his pocket. Then, like a toppling tree, he fell.
As Tyburn and the technician with him finished burning through the ceiling above and came dropping through the charred opening into the room. They almost landed on the small object that had come rolling from lan’s now-lax hand. An object that was really two objects glued together. A small paint-brush and a transparent tube of glaringly yellow paint.
“I hope you realize, though,” said Tyburn, two weeks later on an icy, bright December day as he and the recovered Ian stood just inside the Terminal waiting for the boarding signal from the spaceliner about to take off for the Sirian worlds, “what a chance you took with Kenebuck. It was just luck it worked out for you the way it did.”
“No,” said Ian. He was as apparently emotionless as ever; a little more gaunt from his stay in the Manhattan hospital, but he had mended with the swiftness of his Dorsai constitution. “There was no luck. It all happened the way I planned it.”
Tyburn gazed in astonishment.