Magnusson pondered. After a time: “Yes, what harm?”
Dinner was Spartan, as suited the master’s taste. He took a single glass of wine with it, and afterward coffee. Flandry had two glasses, plus a liqueur from the resident’s stock, sufficient to influence his palate and naught else. Nevertheless, that dining room witnessed speech more animated than ever before. In the main it was noncontroversial, reminiscent, verging on the friendly. Both men had had many odd experiences in their lives.
Flandry was practiced at keeping vigilance behind a mask of bonhomie. Magnusson was not; when he felt such a need, he clamped down a poker face. It appeared toward the end of things, after the orderly had cleared the table of everything except a coffeepot and associated ware. The hour was late. A window showed the spiderweb constellations thinning out as their lights died. Warm air rustled from a grille, for the nights here were cold. It wafted the smoke of Flandry’s cigarettes in blue pennons. His brand of tobacco had an odor suggesting leaves on fire in a northern Terran autumn.
He finished his account of a contest on a neutral planet between him and a Merseian secret agent: “Before you object, I agree that poisoning him wasn’t very nice. However, I trust I’ve made it clear that I could not let Gwanthyr go home alive if there was any way of preventing it. He was too able.”
Magnusson scowled, then blanked his visage and said flatly, “You have the wrong attitude. You regard the Merseians as soulless.”
“Well, yes. As I do everybody else, myself included.”
Magnusson showed irritation. “Belay that infernal japing of yours! You know what I mean. You look on them as inevitable foes, natural enemies of humans, like a—a strain of disease bacteria.” He paused. “If it weren’t for your prejudice, I might seriously consider inviting you to join me. We could make a pretext for your wife to come out before you declared yourself. You claim your purpose is to hold off the Long Night—”
“As a prerequisite for continuing to enjoy life. Barbarism is dismal. The rule of self-righteous aliens is worse.”
“I’m not sure but what that’s another of your gibes, or your lies. No matter. Why can’t you see that I’d bring an end to the decadence, give the Empire back strength and hope? I think what’s blinkering you is your sick hatred of Merseians.”
“You’re wrong there,” Flandry said low. “I don’t hate them as a class. Far more humans have earned my malevolence, and the one being whose destruction became an end in itself for me didn’t belong to either race.” He could not totally suppress a wince, and hastened on: “In fact, I’ve been quite fond of a number of individual Merseians, mostly those I encountered in noncritical situations but sometimes those who crossed blades with me. They were honorable by their own standards, which in many respects are more admirable than those of most modern humans. I sincerely regretted having to do Gwanthyr in.”
“But you can’t see, you’re constitutionally unable to see or even imagine, that a real and lasting peace is possible between us and them.”
Flandry shook his head. “It isn’t, unless and until the civilization that dominates them goes under or changes its character completely. The Roidhun could make a personal appearance singing ‘Jesus Loves Me’ and I’d still want us to keep our warheads armed. You haven’t had the chance to study them, interact with them, get to know them from the inside out, that I’ve had.”
Magnusson lifted a fist. “I’ve fought them—done them in, as you so elegantly put it, by the tens of thousands to your measly dozen or two—since I enlisted in the Marines thirty years ago. And you have the gall to say I don’t know them.”
“That’s different, Sir Olaf,” Flandry replied placatingly, “You’ve met them as brave enemies, or as fellow officers, colleagues, when truces were being negotiated and in the intervals of so-called peace that followed. It’s like being a player on one of two meteor ball teams. I am acquainted with the owners of the clubs.”
“I don’t deny hostility and aggressiveness on their part. Who does? I do say it’s not been unprovoked—from the time of first contact, centuries ago, when the Terran rescue mission upset their whole order of things and found ways to get rich off their tragedy—and I do say they have their share of good will and common sense, also in high office—which are utterly lacking in today’s Terran Imperium. It won’t be quick or easy, no. But the two powers can hammer out an accommodation, a peace—an alliance, later on, for going out together through the galaxy.”