Sam puffed out green smoke1 and looked at the brass arabesques on the ceiling as if they were hieroglyphs that held answers to his questions.
“Now, what could that mean?”
Gwenafra said, “That he was either telling the truth or lying.”
“Right! Give that pretty woman there a big cigar! Either there are two Ethicals who have become renegades or the self-named Odysseus was a liar. If a liar, then he would have to be my Ethical, X. Personally, I think he was mine, yours, too, Cyrano and John, and I think he was lying. Otherwise, why didn’t X tell us that there were two of his kind and that one was a woman? That would have been very important. I know he didn’t have much time to talk to us because the other Ethicals were hot on his trail, breathing down his neck. But surely that item of information was one he wouldn’t have neglected to impart.”
“Why would he lie?” de Marbot said.
“Because…” Here Sam pointed his cigar at the arabesques. “He knew that we might get caught by the other Ethicals. And they might get from us this false information. Then they’d be confused and even more alarmed. What? Two traitors in their midst? Holy smoke! And if they put us to some sort of lie-detector, they’d see that we weren’t lying. After all, we believed what Qdysseus told us. What X told us, I should say. It was just his way of confusing the issue still further! There! What do you think of that?”
There was a short silence, then Cyrano said. “But if that is true, we have seen the Ethical! And we know what he looks like!”
“Not necessarily true,” Gwenafra said. “He surely must have numerous aids for disguise.”
“Undoubtedly,” Cyrano said. “But can he change his height and his physique? Hair and eye color perhaps and some other things. But not…”
“I think we may take it that he’s short and has a very muscular body,” Clemens said. “But so have several billion other men. What we’ve done is to eliminate the possibility that there’s a female Ethical who’s also a renegade. At least, I believe so.”
“Mought be,” Johnston said, “that he was an agent who found out that we’d been contacted by X, and he was trying to confuse us.”
“I don’t think so,” Sam said. “If he was an agent who’d known that much, we’d have had the Ethicals on us faster than a wardman would sell his mother to gain a few votes. No. That Odysseus was Mr. X.”
“But,” Gwenafra said, “that… that takes us deeper than that. What about Gulbirra’s description of Barry Thorn? He resembled Odysseus in some respects. Could he have been X? And what about that so-called German, Stern, who tried to kill Firebrass? What was he? If he was an agent, he would’ve been Firebrass’ colleague. After all, we think Firebrass was an agent, and he was blown up by X so that he couldn’t get into the tower ahead of him. Firebrass lied to us when he told us he was one of X’s recruits. He…”
“No,” Cyrano said. “I mean, yes. He seems to have been an agent of the other Ethicals. But if he knew so much about us, why didn’t he inform the Ethicals and bring them down on our necks?”
“Because,” Sam said, “for some reason, he couldn’t tell the Ethicals. I think that was because about then the big troubles started in the tower. Why or how, I don’t know. But it seems to me that about the time Odysseus disappeared, rather, X vanished, that the whole project of the Ethicals went shebang. We didn’t notice it at the time, but it was shortly thereafter that the resurrections ceased. It wasn’t until the Not For Hire was some distance on its way that we began getting reports that the resurrections had stopped. When we were in Parolando, we noticed it but thought it was just a local phenomenon.”
“Hmm,” Cyrano said, “I wonder if that Hermann Goring fellow, the missionary killed by Hacking’s men, was resurrected? He was a strange one, that.”
“He was a troublemaker, that one,” Sam said. “Anyway, maybe Firebrass did tell the Ethicals that he’d gotten hold of some of X’s recruits. But the Ethicals told him they wouldn’t do anything about it for a while. Firebrass was to learn all he could from us before they moved in. He would also tell them if he saw anybody who looked like X so they could jump him then and there. Who knows? But…I wonder if Firebrass planted any bugs on us so he’d know when X came to visit us again. Only, he never did.”