I spotted him, after only a tew minutes of searching the crowd milling about fifteen feet below me. He was clear across the large room, talking to a white-haired man-a Venusian or Newtonian by the look of him. I knew the appearance of Eldest Bright, as I knew the appearance of most interstellarly newsworthy people on the sixteen inhabited worlds. Just because I had made my way this far and fast by my own special talents, did not mean I had not also worked to learn my job. But, in spite of my knowledge, my first sight of Eldest Bright was still a shock.
I had not realized how strangely powerful for a churchman he would look in the flesh. Bigger than myself, with shoulders like a barn door and-though he was middle-aged-a waist like a sprinter. He stood, dressed all in black, with his back to me and his legs a little spread, the weight of him on the balls of his feet like a trained fighter. Altogether, there was something about the man, like a black flame of strength, that at the same time chilled me and made me eager to match wits with him.
One thing was certain, he would be no Commandant Frane to dance eagerly at the end of a string of words.
I turned to go down to him-and chance stopped me. If it was chance. I shall never know for sure. Perhaps it was a hypersensitivity planted in me by Padma’s remark that this place and moment was a locus in the human pattern of development to which he had responsibility. I had affected too many people myself by just such subtle but apposite suggestion, to doubt that it might have been done to me, in this case. But I suddenly caught sight of a little knot of people almost below me.
One of the group was William of Ceta, Chief Entrepreneur of that huge, commercial, low-gravity planet under the sun of Tau Ceti. Another was a tall, beautiful, quite good-looking girl named Anea Mar-livana, who was the Select of Kultis for her generation, chief jewel of generations of Exotic breeding. There was also Hendrik Gait, massive in his Marshal’s dress uniform, and his niece Elvine. And there was also another man, who could only be Donal Graeme.
He was a young man in the uniform of a Sub-Patrol Chief, an obvious Dorsai with the black hair and strange efficiency of movement that characterizes those people who are born to war. But he was small for a Dorsai-no taller than I would have been, standing next to him-and slim, almost unobtrusive. Yet he caught my eye out of all that group; and, in the same instant, glancing up, he saw me.
Our eyes met for a second. We were close enough so that I should have been able to see the color of his eyes-and that is what stopped me.
For their color was no color, no one color. They were gray, or green, or blue, depending on what shade you looked for in them. Graeme looked away again, almost in the same instant. But I was held, caught by the strangeness of eyes like that, in a moment of surprise and transferred attention; and the delay of that moment was enough.
When I shook myself out of my trance and looked.back to where I had seen Eldest Bright, I discovered him now drawn away from the white-haired man by the appearance of an aide, a figure strangely familiar-looking to me in its shape and posture, who was talking animatedly to the Eldest of the Friendly Worlds.
And, as I still stood watching, Bright spun about on his heel; and, following the familiar-looking aide, went rapidly from the room through a doorway which I knew led to the front hall and the entrance to Gait’s establishment. He was leaving and I would lose my chance at him. I turned quickly, to rush down the stairs from the balcony and follow him before he could get away.
But my way was blocked. My moment of transfixed staring at Donal Graeme had tripped me up. Just coming up the stairs and reaching the balcony as I turned to leave was Lisa Kant.
CHAPTER 7
‘ ‘Tarn!” she said. ‘ ‘Wait! Don’t go!”
I could not, without crowding past her. She blocked the narrow stairway. I stopped, irresolute, glancing over at the far entrance through which Bright and his aide had already disappeared. At once it became plain to me that I was already too late. The two of them had been moving fast. By the time I could get downstairs and across the crowded room, they would have already reached their transportation outside the establishment and been gone.
Possibly, if I had moved the second I saw Bright turn to leave-But probably, catching him, even then, would have been a lost cause. Not Lisa’s arrival, but my own moment of wandered attention, on seeing the unusual eyes of Donal Graeme, had cost me my chance to obtain Bright’s signature on Dave’s pass.
I looked back at Lisa. Oddly, now that she had actually caught up with me and we were face to face once more, I was glad of it, though I still had that fear which I mentioned earlier, that she would somehow render me ineffective.
“How’d you know I was here?” I demanded.
“Padma said you’d be trying to avoid me,” she said. “You couldn’t very well avoid me down on the main floor there. You had to be out of the way someplace, and there weren’t any out-of-the-way places but these balconies. I saw you standing at the railing of this one just now, looking down.”
She was a little out of breath from hurrying up the stairs, and her words came out hi a rush.
“All right,” I said. “You’ve found me. What do you want?”
She was getting her breath back now, but the flush of effort from her run up the stairs still colored her cheeks. Seen like this, she was beautiful, and I could not ignore the fact. But I was still afraid of her.
“Tarn!” she said. “Mark Torre has to talk to you!”
My fear of her whined sharply upward in me, like the mounting siren of an alarm signal. I saw the source of her darigerousness to me in that moment. Either instinct or knowledge had armed her. Anyone else would have worked up to that demand slowly. But an instinctive wisdom in her knew the danger of giving me time to assess a situation, so that I could twist it to my own ends.
But I could be direct, too. I started to go around her, without answering. She stepped in my way, and I had to stop.
“What about?” I said harshly.
“He didn’t tell me.”
I saw a way of handling her attack then. I started laughing at her. She stared at me for a second, then flushed again and began to look very angry indeed.
“I’m sorry.” I throttled down on the laughter; and at the same time, secretly, I was in fact truly sorry. For all I was forced to fight her off, I liked Lisa Kant too well to laugh so at her. “But what else could we talk about except the old business of my taking over on the Final Encyclopedia again? Don’t you remember? Padma said you couldn’t use me. I was all oriented toward”-I tasted the word, as it went out of my mouth-‘ ‘destruction.”
“We’ll just have to take our chance on that.” She looked stubborn. “Besides, it isn’t Padma who decides for the Encyclopedia. It’s Mark Torre, and he’s getting old. He knows better than anyone else how dangerous it would be if he dropped the reins and there was no one there quickly to pick them up. In a year, in six months, the Project could founder. Or be wrecked by people outside it. Do you think your uncle was the only person on Earth who felt about Earth and the younger worlds’ people the way he did?”
I stiffened, and a cold feeling came into my mind. She had made a mistake, mentioning Mathias. My face must have changed, too; because I saw her own face change, looking at me.
“What’ve you been doing?” Fury burst out in me all of a sudden. “Studying up on me? Putting tracers on my comings and goings?” I took a step forward and she backed instinctively. I caught her by the arm and held her from moving further. “Why chase me down now, after five years? How’d you know I was going to be here anyway?”
She stopped trying to pull away and stood still, with dignity.
“Let go of me,” she said quietly. I did and she stepped back. “Padma told me you’d be here. He said that it was my last chance at you-he calculated it. You remember, he told you about ontogenetics.”
I stared at her for a second, then snorted with harsh laughter.