“Kensie and Ian are able to make up their own minds.”
“It’s not a matter of making up minds. It’s a matter of impossibilities.”
“Well,” I said, “is there anything you can do about that?”
“I ought to be able to.”
“Ought to, maybe, but can you?”
She breathed shallowly. Slowly she shook her head on the pillow.
“Then let it go. Leave it alone,” I said. “I’ll be back to check on you from time to time. Wait and see what develops.”
“How can I wait?” she said. “I’m afraid of myself. Afraid I might throw everything overboard and do what I want most—and so ruin everyone.”
“You won’t do that.”
“I might.”
“You’re exhausted,” I told her. “You’re in pain.
Stop trying to think. I’ll be back in an hour or two to check on you. Until then, rest!”
I went out.
I took the corridors that led me to the band section. I saw no other bandsmen in the corridors as I approached their section, but an orderly was on duty as usual in Michael’s outer office and Michael himself was in his own office, standing beside his desk with a sheaf of printed records in hand.
“Captain!” he said, when he saw me.
“I’ve got to look in on Amanda from time to time,” I said. “But in between, Ian suggested you might find me useful.”
“I’d always find you useful, sir,” he said, with the ghost of a smile. “Do you want to come along to stores with me? I need to check a few items of supply and we can talk as we go.”
“Of course.”
We left the offices and he led me down other corridors and into a supply section. What he was after, it developed, was not the supplies themselves, but the automated delivery system that would keep feeding them, on command—or at regular intervals, without command, if the communications network was knocked out—to various sections of Gebel Nahar. It was a system of a sort I had never seen before.
“Another of the ways the ranchers who designed this looked ahead to having to hole up here,” Michael explained as we looked at the supply bins for each of the various sections of the fortress, each bin already stocked with the supplies it would deliver as needed. He was going from bin to bin, checking the contents of each and testing each delivery system to make sure it
was working.
The overhead lights were very bright, and their illumination reflected off solid concrete walls painted a utilitarian, flat white. The effect was both blinding and bleak at once; and the feeling of bleakness was reinforced by the stillness of the air. The ventilators must have been working here as in other interior parts of the Gebel Nahar, but with the large open space of the supply section and its high ceilings, the air felt as if there was no movement to it at all.
“Lucky for us,” I said.
Michael nodded.
“Yes, if ever a place was made to be defended by a handful of people, this is it. Only, they didn’t expect the defense to be by such a small handful as we are. They were thinking in terms of a hundred families, with servants and retainers. Still, if it comes to a last stand for us in the inner fort, on the top three levels, they’re going to have to pay one hell of a price to get at us.”
I watched his face as he worked. There was no doubt about it. He looked much more tired, much leaner, and older than he had appeared to me only a few days before when he had met Amanda and me at the spaceport terminal of Nahar City. But the work he had been doing and what he had gone through could not alone have been enough to cut him down so visibly, at his age.
He finished checking the last of the delivery systems and the last of the bins. He turned away.
“Ian tells me you’ve got some concern as to how your bandsmen may stand up to the attack,” I said.
His mouth thinned and straightened.
“Yes,” he said. There was a little pause, and then he added: “You can’t blame them. If they’d been real soldier types they would have been in one of the line companies There’s security, but no chance of promotion to speak of, in a band.”
Then humor came back to him, a tired but real smile.
“Of course, for someone like myself,” he said, “that’s ideal.”
“On the other hand,” I said. “They’re here with us. They stayed.”
“Well. . .” He sat down a little heavily on a short stack of boxes and waved me to another, “so far it hasn’t cost them anything but some hard work. And they’ve been paid off in excitement. I think I said something to you about that when we were flying out from Nahar City. Excitement—drama—is what most Naharese live for; and die for, for that matter, if the drama is big enough.”
“You don’t think they’ll fight when the time comes?”
“I don’t know.” His face was bleak again. “I only know I can’t blame them—I can’t, of all people—if they don’t.”
“Your attitude’s a matter of conviction.”
“Maybe theirs is, too. There’s no way to judge any one person by another. You never know enough to make a real comparison.”
“True,” I said. “But I still think that if they don’t fight, it’ll be for somewhat lesser reasons than yours for not fighting.”
He shook his head slowly.
“Maybe I’m wrong, all wrong.” His tone was
almost bitter. “But I can’t get outside myself to look at it. I only know I’m afraid.”
“Afraid?” I looked at him. “Of fighting?”
“I wish it was of fighting,” he laughed, briefly. “No, I’m afraid that I don’t have the will not to fight. I’m afraid that at the last moment it’ll all come back, all those early dreams and all the growing up and all the training—and I’ll find myself killing, even though I’ll know that it won’t make any difference in the end and that the Naharese will take Gebel Nahar anyway.”
“I don’t think it’d be Gebel Nahar you’d be fighting for,” I said slowly. “I think it’d be out of a natural, normal instinct to stay alive yourself as long as you can —or to help protect those who are fighting alongside you.”
“Yes,” he said. His nostrils flared as he drew in an unhappy breath. “The rest of you. That’s what I won’t be able to stand. It’s too deep in me. I might be able to stand there and let myself be killed. But can I stand there when they start to kill someone else—like Amanda, and she already wounded?”
There was nothing I could say to him. But the irony of it rang in me, just the same. Both he and Amanda, afraid that their instincts would lead them to do what their thinking minds had told them they should not do. He and I walked back to his office in silence. When we arrived, there was a message that had been left with Michael’s orderly, for me, to call Ian.
I did. His face looked out of the phone screen at me, as unchanged as ever.
“The Naharese still haven’t started to move,” he said. “They’re so unprofessional I’m beginning to think that perhaps we can get Padma, at least, away
from here. He can take one of the small units from the vehicle pool and fly out toward Nahar City. My guess is that once they stop him and see he’s an Exotic, they’ll simply wave him on.”
“It could be,” I said.
“I’d like you to go and put that point to him,” said Ian. “He seems to want to stay, for reasons of his own, but he may listen if you make him see that by staying here, he simply increases the load of responsibility on the rest of us. I’d like to order him out of here; but he knows I don’t have the authority for that.”
“What makes you think I’m the one to talk him into going?”
“It’d have to be one of the senior officers here, to get him to listen,” said Ian. “Both Kensie and I are too tied up to take the time. While even if either one was capable, Michael’s a bad choice and Amanda’s flat in bed.”
“All right,” I said. “I’ll go talk to him right now. Where is he?”
“In his quarters, I understand. Michael can tell you how to find them.”
I reached Padma’s suite without trouble. In fact, it was not far from the suite of rooms that had been assigned to me. I found Padma seated at his desk making a recording. He broke off when I stepped into his sitting room in answer to his invitation, which had followed my knock on his door.