“How do I get out of here?” I demanded. “I’ve got to leave. Now!”
“Tarn!” she cried.
“IVe got to go, I tell you!” I thrust past her. “Where’s that door out of here? Where-”
She slipped past me as I was pawing at the walls of the room and touched something. The door opened to my right; and I turned swiftly into it.
“Tarn!”
Her voice stopped me for a final time. I checked and looked back over my shoulder at her.
“You’re coming back,” she said. It was not a question. She said it the way he, Mark Tone, had said it. She was not asking me; she was telling me; and for a last time it shook me once more to my deepest depths.
But then the dark and mounting power, that wave which was my longing for my revenge, tore me loose again and sent me hurtling on, through the doorway into the farther room.
“I’ll be back,” I assured her.
It was an easy, simple lie. Then the door I had come through closed behind me and the whole room moved about me, carrying me away.
CHAPTER 22
As I got off the spaceliner on Ste, Marie, the little breeze from the higher pressure of the ship’s atmosphere at my back was like a hand from the darkness behind me, shoving me into the dark day and the rain. My Newsman’s cloak covered me. The wet chill of the day wrapped around me but did not enter me. I was like the naked claymore of my dream, wrapped and hidden in the plaid, sharpened on a stone, and carried now at last to the meeting for which it had been guarded over three years of waiting.
A meeting in the cold rain of spring. I felt it cold as old blood on my hands and tasteless on my lips. Above, the sky was low and clouds were flowing to the east. The rain fell steadily.
The sound of it was like a rolling of drums as I went down the outside landing stairs, the multitude of raindrops sounding their own end against the unyielding concrete all around. The concrete stretched far from the ship in every direction, hiding the earth, as bare and clean as the last page of an account book before the final entry. At its far edge, the spaceport terminal stood like a single gravestone. The curtains of falling water between it and me thinned and thickened like the smoke of batde, but could not hide it entirely from my sight.
It was the same rain that falls in all places and on all worlds. It had fallen like this on Athens on the dark, unhappy house of Mathias, and on the ruins of the Parthenon as I saw it from my bedroom vision screen.
I listened to it now as I went down the landing stairs, drumming on the great ship behind me which had shifted me free between the stars-from Old Earth to this second smallest of the worlds, this small terraformed planet under the Procyon suns-and drumming hollowly upon the Credentials case sliding down the conveyor belt beside me. That case now meant nothing to me-neither my papers nor the Credentials of Impartiality I had carried four years now and worked so hard to earn. Now I thought less of these than of the name of the man I should find dispatching groundcars at the edge of the field. If, that is, he was actually the man my Earth informants had named to me. And if they had not lied.
“Your luggage, sir?”
I woke from my thoughts and the rain. I had reached the concrete. The debarking officer smiled at me. He was older man I, though he looked younger. As he smiled, some beads of moisture broke and spilled like tears from the brown visor-edge of his cap onto the tally sheet he held.
“Send it to the Friendly compound,” I said. “I’ll take the Credentials case.”
I took it up from the conveyor belt and turned to walk off. The man standing in a dispatcher’s uniform by the first groundcar in line did fit the description.
“Name, sir?” he said. “Business on Ste. Marie?”
If he had been described to me, I must have been described to him. But I was prepared to humor him.
“Newsman Tarn Olyn,” I said. “Old Earth resident and Interstellar News Services Guild Representative. I’m here to cover the Friendly-Exotic conflict.” I opened my case and gave him my papers.
“Fine, Mr. Olyn.” He handed them back to me, damp from the rain. He turned away to open the door of the car beside him and set the automatic pilot. “Follow the highway straight to Joseph’s Town. Put it on automatic at the city limits and the car’H take you to the Friendly compound.”
“All right,” I said. “Just a minute.”
He turned back. He had a young, good-looking face with a little mustache and he looked at me with a bright blankness. “Sir?”
“Help me get in the car.”
“Oh, I’m sorry, sir.” He came quickly over to me. “I didn’t realize your leg-”
“Damp stiffens it,” I said. He adjusted the seat and I got my left leg in behind the steering column. He started to turn away.
“Wait a minute,” I said again. I was out of patience. “You’re Walter Imera, aren’t you?”
“Yes, sir,” he said softly.
“Look at me,” I said. “You’ve got some information for me, haven’t you?” ‘ He turned slowly back to face me. His face was still blank.
“No”, sir.”
I waited a long moment, looking at him.
“Ail right,” I said then, reaching for the car door. “I guess you know I’ll get the information anyway. And they’ll believe you told me.”
His little mustache began to look like it was painted on.
“Wait,” he said. “You’ve got to understand. Information like that’s not part of your news, is it? I’ve got a family-”
“And I haven’t,” I said. I felt nothing for him.
“But you don’t understand. They’d kill me. That’s the sort of organization the Blue Front is now, here on Ste. Marie. What d’you want to know about them for? I didn’t understand you meant-”
“All right,” I said. I reached for the car door.
“Wait.” He held out a hand to me in the rain. “How do I know you can make them leave me alone if I tell you?”
“They may be back in power here someday,” I said. “Not even outlawed political groups want to antagonize the Interstellar News Services.” I started to close the door once more.
“All right,” he said quickly. “All right. You go to New San Marcos. The Wallace Street Jewelers there. It’s just beyond Joseph’s Town, where the Friendly compound is you’re going to.” He licked his lips. “You’ll tell them about me?”
“I’ll tell them.” I looked at him. Above the edge of the blue uniform collar on the right side of his neck I could see an inch or two of fine silver chain, bright against winter-pale skin. The crucifix attached to it would be down under his shirt. “The Friendly soldiers have been here two years now. How do people like them?”
He grinned a little. His color was coming back.
“Oh, like anybody,” he said. “You just have to understand them. They’ve got their own ways.”
I felt the ache in my stiff leg where the doctors on New Earth had taken the needle from the spring-rifle out of it three years before.
“Yes, they have,” I said. “Shut the door.”
He shut it. I drove off.
There was some religious medal on the car’s instrument panel. One of the Friendly soldiers would have ripped it off and thrown it away, or refused the car. And so it gave me a particular pleasure to leave it where it was, though it meant no more to me than it would to him. It was not just because of Dave and the other prisoners they had shot down on New Earth. It was simply because there are some duties that have a small element of pleasure. After the illusions of childhood are gone and there is nothing left but duties, such pleasures are welcome. Fanatics, when all is said and done, are no worse than mad dogs.
But mad dogs have to be destroyed; it is simple common sense.
And you return to common sense after a while in life, inevitably. When the wild dreams of justice and progress are all dead and buried, when the painful beatings of feeling inside you are finally stilled, then it becomes best to be still, unliving, and unyielding as-the blade of a sword sharpened on a stone. The rain through which such a blade is carried to its using does not stain it, any more than the blood in which it is bathed at last. Rain and blood are alike to sharpened iron.