He threw it onto the table in their midst and strode out. As he left the lounge behind him, a sudden eruption of voices reached to his ears.
He did not go directly back to his own suite, but turned instead to Gait’s. The doorbot admitted him; and he made his way to the main lounge of the suite, striding in with the confidence of one who expects to find it empty.
It was not, however. He had made half a dozen long strides into the room before he discovered another person seated alone at a chess board on a little table, and looking up at his entrance with startled eyes.
It was Anea.
He checked and inclined his head to her.
“Excuse me,” he said. “I was going to wait for Hendrik. I’ll take one of the other lounges.”
“No,” she had risen to her feet. Her face was a little pale, but controlled. “I’m waiting for him, too. Is the session over?”
“Not yet,” he replied.
“Then let’s wait together.” She sat down at die table again. She waved a hand at the pieces, presently set up in the form of a knights-castles problem. “You play?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Then join me.” It was almost an order the way she said it. Donal showed no reaction, however, but crossed the lounge and took a seat opposite her. She began to set out the pieces.
If she expected to win, she was mistaken. Donal won three swift games; but oddly without showing any particular flair or brilliance. Consistently he seemed able to take advantage of opportunities she had overlooked, but which had been there before her in perfect obviousness all the time. The games seemed more a tribute to her obtuseness, than his perception. She said as much. He shrugged.
“You were playing me,” he said. “And you should rather have been playing my pieces.”
She frowned; but before she had a chance to sort this answer out in her mind, there was the sound of steps outside the lounge, and Gait entered, striding along, fast and excitedly. Donal and she both rose. “What happened?” she cried. “Eh? What?” Gait’s attention had been all for Donal. Now the older man swung on her. “Didn’t he tell you what happened up to the time he left?”
“No!” She flashed a look at Donal, but his face was impassive.
Quickly, Gait told her. Her face paled and became shadowed by bewilderment. Again, she turned to Donal; but before she could frame the question in her mind, Donal was questioning Gait. “And after I left?”
“You should have seen it!” the older man’s voice held a fierce glee. “Each one was at the throat of everybody else in the room before you were out of sight. I swear the last forty years of behind-the-scenes deals, and the crosses and the double-crosses came home to roost in the next five minutes. Nobody trusted anybody, everybody suspected everybody else! What a bombshell to throw in their laps!” Gait chuckled. “I feel forty years younger just for seeing it. Who was it that actually approached you, boy? It was William, wasn’t it?” “I’d rather not say,” said Donal. “Well, well—never mind that. For all practical purposes it could have been any of them. But guess what happened! Guess how it all ended up—”
“They voted me in as commander in chief after all?” said Donal.
“They—” Gait checked suddenly, his face drop- ping into an expression of amazement. “How’d you know?”
Donal smiled a little mirthlessly. But before he could answer, a sharp intake of breath made both men turn their heads. Anea was standing off a little distance from them, her face white and stiff.
“I might have suspected,” she said in a low, hard voice to Donal. “I might have known.”
“Known? Known what?” demanded Gait, staring from one to the other. But her eyes did not waver from Donal.
“So this was what you meant when you told me to bring my opinion to today’s session,” she went on in the same low, hate-filled voice. “Did you think that this … this sort of double-dealing would change it?” For a second pain shadowed Donal’s normally enigmatic eyes.
“I should have known better, I suppose,” he said, quietly. “I assumed you might look beyond the necessities of this present action to—”
“Thank you,” she broke in icily. “Ankle deep into the mud is far enough.” She turned on Gait. “I’ll see you another time, Hendrik.” And she stalked out of the room.
The two men watched her go in silence. Then Gait slowly turned back to look at the younger man. “What’s between you two, boy?” he asked. Donal shook his head.
“Half of heaven and all of hell, I do believe,” he said; and that was the most illuminating answer the marshal was able to get out of him.
COMMANDER IN CHIEF
Under the common market system, controlled by the United Planetary Forces under Commander in Chief Donal Graeme, the civilized worlds rested in a highly unusual state of almost perfect peace for two years, nine months, and three days absolute time. Early on the morning of the fourth day, however, Donal woke to find his shoulder being shaken.
“What?” he said, coming automatically awake.
“Sir—” It was the voice of Lee. “Special Courier here to see you. He says his message won’t wait.”
“Right.” Groggily, but decisively, Donal swung his legs over the edge of his sleeping float and reached for his trunks on the ordinary float beside him. He gathered them in, brushing something to the floor as he did so.
“Light,” he said to Lee. The light went on, revealing that what he had knocked down was his wrist appliance. He picked it up and stared at it with blurry eyes. “March ninth,” he murmured. “That right, LeeT’
“That’s right,” responded the voice of Lee, from across the room. Donal chuckled, a little huskily.
“Not yet the ides of March,” he murmured. “But close. Close.”
“Sir?”
“Nothing. Where’s the courier, Lee?”
“The garden lounge.”
Donal pulled on the trunks and—on a second’s impulse—followed them with trousers, tunic and jacket, complete outerwear. He followed Lee through the pre-dawn darkness of his suite in Tomblecity, Cassida, and into the garden lounge. The courier, a slim, small, middle-aged man in civilian clothes, was waiting for him.
“Commander—” the courier squinted at him. “I’ve got a message for you. I don’t know what it means myself—”
“Never mind,” interrupted Donal. “What is it?”
“I was to say to you ‘the gray rat has come out of the black maze and pressed the white lever.’ ”
“I see,” said Donal. “Thank you.” The courier lingered.
“Any message or orders, commander?”
“None, thank you. Good morning,” said Donal.
“Good morning, sir,” said the courier; and went out, escorted by Lee. When Lee returned, he found Donal already joined by his uncle lan Graeme, fully dressed and armed. Donal was securing a weapons belt around his own waist. In the new glare of the artificial light after the room’s darkness, and beside his dark and giant uncle, the paring-down effect of the last months showed plainly on Donal. He was not so much thinned down as stretched drum-tight over the hard skeleton of his own body. He seemed all harsh angles and tense muscle. And his eyes were hollowed and dark with fatigue.
Looking at him, it would be hard not to assume that here was a man either on the verge of psychological and nervous breakdown, or someone of fanatic purpose who had already pushed himself beyond the bounds of ordinary human endurance. There was something of the fanatic’s translucency about him—in which the light of the consuming will shows through the frailer vessel of the body. Except that Donal was not really translucent, but glowed, body and all, like one fine solid bar of tempered steel with the white, ashy heat of his consuming but all-unconsumable will.
“Arm yourself, Lee,” he said, pointing to a weapons belt. “We’ve got two hours before sun-up and things begin to pop. After that, I’ll be a proscribed criminal on any world but the Dorsai—and you two with me.” It did not occur to him to ask either of the other men whether they wished to throw themselves into the holocaust that was about to kindle about him; and it did not occur to the others to wonder that he did not. “lan, did you make a signal to Lludrow?”
“I did,” said lan. “He’s in deep space with all units, and he’ll hold them there a week if need be, he says—incommunicado.” “Good. Come on.”
As they left the building for the platform awaiting them on the landing pad outside; and later, as the platform slipped them silently through the pre-dawn darkness to a landing field not far from the residence, Donal was silent, calculating what could be done in seven days time, absolute. On the eighth day, Lludrow would have to open his communication channels again, and the orders that would reach him when he did so would be far different from the sealed orders Donal had left him and which he would be opening right now. Seven days—