Standing in the center of the bedroom, about to change for the meal which would be his first of the day—he had again forgotten to eat during the earlier hours—Donal paused and frowned. He gazed up at the gently domed roof of the room, which reached its highest point some twelve feet above his head. He frowned again and searched about through his writing desk until he found a self-sealing signal-tape capsule. Then, with this in one hand, he turned toward the ceiling and took one rather awkward step off the ground.
His foot caught and held in air. He lifted himself off the floor. Slowly, step by step he walked up through nothingness to the high point of the ceiling. Opening the capsule, he pressed its self-sealing edges against the ceiling, where they clung. He hung there a second in air, staring at them.
“Ridiculous!” he said suddenly—and, just as suddenly, he was falling. He gathered himself with the instinct of long training in the second of drop and, landing on hands and feet, rolled over and came to his feet like a gymnast against a far wall. He got up, brushing himself off, unhurt—and turned to look up at the ceiling. The capsule still clung there.
He lifted the little appliance that was strapped to his wrist and keyed its phone circuit in.
“Lee,” he said.
He dropped his wrist and waited. Less than a minute later, Lee came into the room. Donal pointed toward the capsule on the ceiling. “What’s that?” he asked.
Lee looked.
“Tape capsule,” he said. “Want me to get it down?”
“Never mind,” answered Donal. “How do you suppose it got up there?”
“Some joker with a float,” answered Lee. “Want me to find out who?”
“No—never mind,” said Donal. “That’ll be all.”
Bending his head at the dismissal, Lee went out of the room. Donal took one more look at the capsule, then turned and wandered over to the open wall of his room, and looked out. Below him lay the bright carpet of the city. Overhead hung the stars. For longer than a minute he considered them.
Suddenly he laughed, cheerfully and out loud.
“No, no,” he said to the empty room. “I’m a Dorsai!”
He turned his back on the view and went swiftly to work at dressing for dinner. He was surprised to discover how hungry he actually was.
PROTECTOR
Battle Commander of Field Forces lan Ten Graeme, mat cold, dark man, strode through the outer offices of the Protector of Procyon with a private-and-secret signal in his large fist. In the three outer offices, no one got hi his way. But at the entrance to the Protector’s private office, a private secretary in the green-and-gold of a staff uniform ventured to murmur that the Protector had left orders to be undisturbed. lan merely looked at her, placed one palm flat against the lock of the inner office door—and strode through.
Within, he discovered Dona! standing by an open wall, caught by a full shaft of Procyon’s white-gold sunlight, gazing out over Portsmouth and apparently deep in thought. It was a position in which he was to be discovered often, these later days. He looked up now at the sound of fan’s measured tread approaching.
Six years of military and political successes had laid their inescapable marks upon Donal’s face, marks plain to be seen in the sunlight- At a casual glance he appeared hardly older than the young man who had left the Dorsai half a dozen years before. But a closer inspection showed him to be slightly heavier of build now—even a little taller. Only this extra weight, slight increase as it was, had not served to soften the clear lines of his features. Rather these same features had grown more pronounced, more hard of line. His eyes seemed a little deeper set now; and the habit of command—command extended to the point where it became unconscious—had cast an invisible shadow upon his brows, so that it had become a face men obeyed without thinking, as if it was the natural thing to do.
“Well?” he said, as lan came up.
“They’ve got New Earth,” his uncle answered; and handed over the signal tape. “Private-and-secret to you from Gait.”
Donal took the tape automatically, that deeper, more hidden part of him immediately taking over his mind. If the six years had wrought changes upon his person and manner, they had worked to even greater ends below the surface of his being. Six years of command, six years of estimate and decision had beaten broad the path between his upper mind and that dark, oceanic part of him, the depthless waters of which lapped on all known shores and many yet unknown. He had come—you could not say to terms—but to truce with the source of his odd ness; hiding it well from others, but accepting it to himself for the sake of the tool it placed in his hands. Now, this information lan had just brought him was like one more stirring of the shadowy depths, a rippled vibration spreading out to affect all, integrate with all—and make even more clear the vast and shadowy ballet of purpose and counter-purpose that was behind all living action; and—for himself—a call to action.
As Protector of Procyon, now responsible not only for the defense of the Exotics, but of the two smaller inhabited planets in that system—St. Marie, and Coby—that action was required of him. But even more; as himself, it was required of him. So that what it now implied was not something he was eager to avoid. Rather, it was due, and welcome. Indeed, it was almost too welcome—fortuitous, even.
“I see—” he murmured. Then, lifting his face to his uncle, “Gait’11 need help. Get me some figures on available strength, will you lan?” lan nodded and went out, as coldly and martially as he had entered.
Left alone, Donal did not break open the signal tape immediately. He could not now remember what he had been musing about when lan entered, but the sight of his uncle had initiated a new train of thought. lan seemed well, these days—or at least as well as could be expected. It did not matter that he lived a sdlitary life, had little to do with the other
199* commanders of his own rank, and refused to go home to the Dorsai, even for a trip to see his family. He devoted himself to his duties of training field troops—and did it well. Aside from that, he went his own way.
The Maran psychiatrists had explained to Donal that no more than this could be expected of lan. Gently, they had explained it. A normal mind, gone sick, they could cure. The unfortunate thing was that—at least in so far as his attachment to his twin had been—lan was not normal. Nothing in this universe could replace the part of him that had died with Kensie—had, indeed, been Kensie—for the peculiar psychological make-up of the twins had made them two halves of a whole.
“Your uncle continued to live,” the psychiatrists had explained to Donal, “because of an unconscious desire to punish himself for letting his brother die. He is, in fact, seeking death—but it must be a peculiar sort of death which will include the destruction of all that matters to him. ‘If thy right hand offend thee, cut if off.’ To his unconscious, the lan-Kensie gestalt holds the lan part of it to blame for what happened and is hunting a punishment to fit the crime. That is why he continues to practice the—for him— morbid abnormality of staying alive. The normal thing for such a personality would be to die, or get himself killed.
“And that is why,” they had concluded, “he refuses to see or have anything to do with his wife or children. His unconscious recognizes the danger of pulling them down to destruction with him. We would advise against his being urged to visit them against his will.”
Donal sighed. Thinking about it now, it seemed to him strange that the people who had come to group around him had none of them come—really— because of the fame he had won or the positions he could offer them. There was lan, who had come because the family had sent him. Lee, who had found the supply of that which his own faulty personality lacked—and would have followed if Donal had been Protector of nothing, instead of being Protector of Procyon. There was Lludrow, DonaTs now assistant Chief of Staff, who had come to him not under his own free will, but under the prodding of his wife. For Lludrow had ended up marrying Elvine Rhy, Gait’s niece, who had not let even marriage impose a barrier to her interest in Donal. There was Geneve bar-Colmain, who was on Donal’s staff because Donal had been kind; and because he had no place else to go that was worthy of his abilities. And, lastly, there was Gait, himself, whose friendship was not a military matter, but the rather wistful affection of a man who had never had a son, and saw its image in Donal—though it was not really fair to count Gait, who was apart, as still Marshal of Freiland.