I saw the slight, dark shadow of Jamethon in my mind’s eye, standing opposed to such a man as this; and the thought of any victory for Jamethon was unthinkable, an impossibility.
But there was always danger.
“All right, I’ll tell you what I came about,” I said to Kensie. “I’ve just found out Black’s been in touch with the Blue Front, a native terrorist political group with its headquarters in Blauvain. Three of them visited him last night. I saw them.”
Kensie picked up his shirt and slid a long arm into one sleeve.
“I know,” he said.
I stared at him.
“Don’t you understand?” I said. “They’re assassins. It’s their stock in trade. And the one man they and Jamethon both could use out of the way is you.”
He put his other arm in a sleeve.
“I know that,” he said. “They want the present government here on Ste. Marie out of the way and themselves in power-which isn’t possible with Exotic money hiring us to keep the peace here.”
“They haven’t had Jamethon’s help.”
“Have they got it now?” he asked, sealing the shirt closure between thumb and forefinger.
“The Friendlies are desperate,” I said. “Even if reinforcements arrived tomorrow, Jamethon knows what his chances are with you ready to move. Assassins may be outlawed by the Conventions of War and the Mercenaries’ Code, but you and I know the Friendlies.”
Kensie looked at me oddly and picked up his jacket.
“Do we?” he said.
I met his eyes. “Don’t we?”
“Tarn.” He put on the jacket and closed it. “I know the men I have to fight. It’s my business to know. But what makes you think you know them?”
“They’re my business, too,” I said. “Maybe youVe forgotten. I’m a Newsman. People are my business, first, last and always.”
“But youVe got no use for the Friendlies.”
“Should I?” I said. “I’ve been on all the worlds. I’ve seen the Cetan entrepreneur-and he wants his margin, but he’s a human being. I’ve seen the Newtonian and the Venusian with their heads in the clouds, but if you yanked on their sleeves hard enough, you could pull them back to reality. IVe seen Exotics like Padma at their mental parlor tricks, and the Frei-lander up to his ears in his own red tape. I Ve seen them from my own world of Old Earth, and Coby, and Venus and even from the Dorsai, like you. And I tell you they Ve all got one thing in common. Underneath it all they’re human. Every one of them’s human-they Ve just specialized in some one, valuable way.”
“And the Friendlies haven’t?”
“Fanaticism,” I said. “Is that valuable? It’s just the opposite. What’s good, what’s even permissible about blind, deaf, dumb, unthinking faith that doesn’t let a man reason for himself?”
“How do you know they don’t reason?” Kensie asked. He was standing facing me now.
“Maybe some of them do,” I said. “Maybe the young ones, before the poison’s had time to work in. What good does that do, as long as the culture exists?”
A sudden silence came into the room.
“What are you talking about?” said Kensie.
“Imeanyou wanttheassassins,” Isaid. “Youdon’t want the Friendly troops. Prove that Jamethon Black has broken the Conventions of War by arranging with them to kill you; and you can win Ste. Marie for the Exotics without firing a shot.”
“And how would I do that?”
“Use me,” I said. “IVe got a pipeline to the political group the assassins represent. Let me go to them as your representative and outbid Jamethon. You can offer them recognition by the present government now. Padma and the present Ste. Marie government heads would have to back you up if you could clean the planet of Friendlies that easily.”
He looked at me with no expression at all.
“And what would I be supposed to buy with this?” he said.
“Sworn testimony they’d been hired to assassinate you. As many of them as needed could testify.”
“No Court of Interplanetary Inquiry would believe people like that,” Kensie said.
“An,” I said, and I could not help smiling. “But they’d believe me as a News Service Representative when I backed up every word that was said.”
There was a new silence. His face had no expression at all.
“I see,” he said.
He walked past me into the salon. I followed him. He went to his phone, put his finger on a stud and spoke into an imageless gray screen.
“Janol,” he said.
He turned away from the screen, crossed the room to an arms cabinet and began putting on his battle harness. He moved deliberately and neither looked nor spoke in my direction. After a few long minutes, the building entrance slid aside and Janol stepped in.
“Sir?” said the officer.
“Mr. Olyn stays here until further orders.”
“Yes, sir,” said Janol.
Graeme went out.
I stood numb, staring at the entrance through which he had left. I could not believe that he would violate the Conventions so far himself as not only to disregard me, but to put me essentially under arrest to keep me from doing anything further about the situation.
I turned to Janol. He was looking at me with a sort of wry sympathy on his long, brown face.
“Is the OutBond here in camp?” I asked him.
“No.” He came up to me. “He’s back in the Exotic Embassy in Blauvain. Be a good fella now and sit down, why don’t you? We might as well kill the next few hours pleasantly.”
We were standing face to face; I hit him in the stomach.
I had done a little boxing as an undergraduate on the college level. I mention this not to make myself out a sort of muscular hero, but to explain why I had sense enough not to try for his jaw, Graeme could probably have found the knockout point there without even thinking, but I was no Dorsai. The area below a man’s breastbone is relatively large, soft, handy and generally just fine for amateurs. And I did know something about how to punch.
For all that, Janol was not knocked out. He went over on the floor and lay there doubled up with his eyes still open. But he was not ready to get up right away. I turned and went quickly out of the building.
The camp was busy. Nobody stopped me. I got back into my car, and five minutes later I was free on the darkening road for Blauvain.
CHAPTER 26
From New San Marcos to Blauvain and Padma’s Embassy was fourteen hundred kilometers. I should have made it in six hours, but a bridge was washed out and I took fourteen.
It was after eight the following morning when I burst into the half-park, half-building that was the embassy.
“Padma,” I said. “Is he still-”
“Yes, Mr. Olyn,” said the girl receptionist. “He’s expecting you.”
She smiled above her blue robe. I did not mind. I was too busy being glad Padma had not already taken off for the fringe areas of the conflict.
She took me down and around a corner and turned me over to a young male Exotic, who introduced himself as one of Padma’s secretaries. He took me a short distance and introduced me to another secretary, a middle-aged man this time, who led me through several rooms and then directed me down a long corridor and around a corner, beyond which he said was the entrance to the office area where Padma worked at the moment. Then he left me.
I followed his direction. But when I stepped through that entrance it was not into a room, but into another short corridor. And I stopped dead. For what I suddenly thought I saw coming at me was Kensie Graeme-Kensie with murder on his mind.
But the man who looked like Kensie merely glanced at me and dismissed me, continuing to come on. Then I knew.
Of course, he was not Kensie. He was Kensie’s twin brother, lan, Commander of Garrison Forces for the Exotics here in Blauvain. He strode toward me; and I began once more to walk toward him, but the shock stayed with me until we had passed one another.
I do not think anyone could have come on him like that, in my position, and not been hit the same way. From Janol, at diiferent times, I had gathered how lan was the converse of Kensie. Not in a military sense-they were both magnificent specimens of Dorsai officers-but in the matter of their individual natures.
Kensie had had a profound effect on me from the first moment, with his cheerful nature and the warmth of being that at times obscured the very fact that he was Dorsai. When the pressure of military affairs was not directly on him he seemed all sunshine; you could warm yourself in his presence as you might in the sun. lan, his physical duplicate, striding toward me like some two-eyed Odin, was all shadow.