It was something that should have put a slight chip on Bleys' shoulder, child as he was of one of the newer worlds. But curiously, it did not. Instead, it was reassuring.
With his five Hounds in tow he paused in the lobby of the soaring building to call up to Dahno's suite; and heard his half-brother's voice tell them all to come up right away.
They did.
"Come in, come in," boomed Dahno's voice cheerfully from the annunciator over the door, when they pressed the door button. They stepped into a long, large room that seemed to be almost all window; and even had some of its ceiling slanted backwards, with a skylight in it. Either this room projected from the body of the hotel or the hotel narrowed as it got to its higher levels, where they were now. Bleys rather thought the second.
Dahno waved toward a buffet with food and drink on it. "Help yourselves," he said.
He was on his feet to clasp hands with Bleys; and Bleys found a curious pleasure in talking again to somebody whose eyes were on a level with his own. The five Hounds had taken Dahno's invitation at its face value and were busy at the buffet. But Bleys ignored it.
"Let's sit down," said Bleys. "I've got a lot to tell you."
"Oh?" Dahno said. His brown eyes were penetrating on Bleys. "Come over here then. I've got a little side room we can step into."
The side room was not all that little, but it had been built to give an effect of coziness, with the walls covered with a bas-relief tapestry, the carpet deep, mounting partway up the walls of the room; and the chairs, Bleys was interested to see, tailored to his and Dahno's proportions.
Dahno led him to a facing pair of such armchairs by a window, and waved Bleys into one, while he took the other.
"Go ahead," he said, "bring me up to date."
"Norton Brawley is dead," said Bleys, bluntly. "He had plans to take over the organization for his own use."
"Oh?" said Dahno, but his voice did not echo the surprise that the word might have indicated. "Who killed him?"
"I did," said Bleys, "when he came to kill me."
Dahno nodded slowly.
"I'd had my eye on him for a little while, I must admit," said Dahno, thoughtfully. "One of the problems was that while he was a mixed-breed, he wasn't one of our trainees; just someone I got to know after I moved into Ecumeny. He was already in practice as a legalist. But the man was clearly ambitious—in fact if he hadn't been, he wouldn't have been that useful to me. Any danger of his death being traced back to the organization?"
"I don't really think so," said Bleys. Briefly, he told exactly what had happened when Brawley had come to his office that early morning, with the two men.
"Yes," said Dahno, when he had finished listening. He nodded. "Probably better now than later as far as Norton went. But I'm interested in why you thought that the attempt to knock out McKae should be canceled. I don't remember saying anything about your doing that, even if things looked unlikely, before I left."
"No," said Bleys, "of course you didn't. But then you left in rather a hurry. What made up my mind for me was that I infiltrated McKae's own security force—"
He told Dahno about his experiences with the individuals of the McKae camp.
"What it wound up being," Bleys said, "was a lopsided situation in which I didn't see any real chance of the Hounds pulling it off; and it would have been too open a gun battle to keep out of the papers. So ... it was a situation that called for a decision at the moment. I decided."
"Yes," said Dahno, "I can't fault you for making the decision. Also, it sounds like the kind of decision I'd have had to make if I'd been there at the time. I was a little bit concerned about things, which was one reason that I decided to buy your idea of a larger and more ambitious future."
He slapped his knee, as if dismissing everything that had happened.
"Now, about the meeting," he said. "After looking at the situation here, I've come to the conclusion that Earth's security system is so large and fast that we couldn't even rent a place, or use hotel space for our meeting, without having the authorities around asking questions before our chairs were warm. Crazy as it sounds, our best chance to meet undisturbed will be to simply take over a private estate, rather than trying to rent, or even buy, one to meet in. It'll leave fewer tracks for us to be traced by—particularly if we make a swift move in, a quick meeting, a swift move out—and an immediate departure from Earth. That leaves no time for anyone to catch on to us. And if there is any fuss, we'll already be off-planet as well as unidentifiable. So whatever happens here, Earth won't be shut off to us after this. The ship of your new plans can still be launched."
Bleys noted, with an inner interest, that Dahno was already referring to Old Earth simply as Earth. It might mean nothing. On the other hand, it might mean an immediate response on Dahno's part to Old Earth's importance.
"Now, the place I've picked out," said Dahno, "is a bit further west from here, fairly high in the mountains and isolated. It's got a strange reason for existence. It seems about fourteen years ago an empty small spacecraft was found drifting near Earth, with a two-year old boy named Hal Mayne aboard. No adults at all."
'No adults?" echoed Bleys. "But was the boy alive?"
"Yes, and there were instructions left for how he was to be taken care of," said Dahno, "and saying that the ship and its contents could be sold to finance that care. You know what any kind of deep-space craft is worth, even though this was somewhat out of date."
"Much out of date?" asked Bleys.
Dahno smiled.
"They figured that its design went back to the kind of spacecraft they were building eighty years ago," he answered. "A puzzle, eh? At any rate, sold, the craft brought in enough Old Earth currency to buy the land, put up the building and hire three tutors for the boy."
"How old's he now?" asked Bleys.
"Sixteen," said Dahno.
Sixteen, thought Bleys—only three years younger than Will MacLean when he had died on Ceta. But Dahno was going on.
"The isolation's perfect for our use," he was saying. "I'll give you an air map and complete details; and I want you and the five Hounds to go there tomorrow and take it over. I'll come in late tomorrow myself, and I'll expect to find you have the place under control. Don't hurt anyone. Just lock them up in a room where they can't alert the local law, and you and I'll simply persuade them to host us for a couple of days."
He paused to smile at Bleys. "With our talents, we should have no trouble making them glad to have us."
Bleys kept silence, and after a moment Dahno continued, "I've left word for the other Vice-Chairmen, when they get to the hotel here tomorrow, how to find their way out for the meeting. We'll have an afternoon meeting, and either turn the people loose again or make it possible for them to get loose from whatever room we've penned them up in within a few hours. Then we'll head right for Denver spaceport. I already have passage for all the Vice-Chairmen, you, I and the Hounds. So we'll take off, at the latest, the morning after we have our get-together."
"How many people are there at this place?" asked Bleys.
"Just the boy"—Dahno waved one hand to indicate the unimportance of the numbers—"and the three old men who are his tutors, one Dorsai, one from Harmony, I believe, and one Exotic. All very old men. The house itself is completely automated." He grinned at Bleys.
"The boy's an orphan—like you and me, Mr. Vice-Chairman," he said. He got to his feet.
"I'll show you a layout of the house and tell you more about the people there, after we've got the Hounds settled," he said. "I've already got rooms reserved for them. We'll put them in, two to a room here. That should be good enough for them, under campaign conditions; and this is hardly an uncomfortable hotel, even its smallest guest rooms."
Bleys found himself wondering about the boy, Hal Mayne.
CHAPTER 38
As he returned to his own suite in the same hotel, the idea of the orphan boy found in the spaceship continued to nag at Bleys. The coincidences involved were almo
st too much to swallow.
Those with the child would have had to have deserted someone that young only very shortly before the ship was found. How could they be sure the ship would be found, if they deserted it? Secondly, in a small courier ship like that, that would not have been exactly childproofed, how could they possibly be sure that the baby boy, left alone, would not start pulling levers he shouldn't and punching buttons that he was ordinarily not allowed to touch? At almost three years of age, he was just at the point where he would rush for the chance to experiment, the minute Authority was out of the way.
Thirdly, thought Bleys, having floated down on one of the elevator disks and stepped onto his own floor, what had caused them to abandon Hal Mayne in the first place? Presumably, the adult or adults had been perfectly healthy and all right, otherwise they could not have brought the ship into the kind of close proximity with Earth's immediate space, so that its being found was likely.
Most people did not realize the mind-baffling immensity of space. Just as, for hundreds of years, people on Old Earth had not really appreciated the enormous volume of water involved in the seas of that world. So little had they understood it, that he had read once that very often people could not believe, when someone was lost overboard from a ship at sea, why he could not be searched for and found, even if he had sunk below the surface.
Finally, he thought, unlocking the door of his suite and stepping into it and having the lights go on all around him, was the curious upbringing that those with the boy had specified for him. A Dorsai, a Friendly, and an Exotic as tutors. It was quite obviously an intention to have the child brought up exposed to all three of the major Splinter Cultures at once. Why? There must have been some reason why the boy was to grow up knowing those three, very disparate points of view.
It was as if those who had left him had had some special future in mind for the boy, once he had grown up. And if they had such a special future in mind, what could it be? To possibly preach the virtues of those three chief Splinter Cultures to the population of Earth? It was an answer, but Bleys' mind was uncomfortable with it. The arrangements were too elaborate for such a straightforward goal.
Obviously, what he needed was more data on the boy himself, and on everything connected with him.
Bleys sat down in one of the overstuffed floats with armrests, hardly noticing that, like the ones in Dahno's suite, they had been tailored to his size.
If it was information he wanted, nothing was easier. The hotel's communication system would link him with the twenty-four-hour network of libraries and reference sources all over Old Earth. The only place he would not be able to access for information would be The Final Encyclopedia, in orbit somewhere overhead right now.
An odd thought struck him and he sat up straight in his chair.
The Final Encyclopedia was supposed to be in a special fixed orbit, and kept there by its own drive engines, when gravity threatened to change its position. Just exactly where was that spot? It would be interesting to know where it hung in relation to the surface of Earth, below.
He keyed, the library service and asked the question. The answer came back immediately.
He checked the coordinates he was given with the location of the estate that Dahno had told him to take over the next day. It could not be a coincidence. The Final Encyclopedia hung directly over the estate, even though it was miles out from the surface.
This was more than merely interesting, thought Bleys, since to hold a fixed orbital position over Earth this far above the equator, the satellite—which was what The Final Encyclopedia essentially was—would have to have its drive engines working steadily to hold it there. Normal geosynchronous orbits, as such fixed positions were called, had to be over the equator. He called the library again. Yes, the Encyclopedia had been deliberately put in that position ninety-two years before. It was the only case, the voice told him, of a satellite of Earth in a state of "dynamic geosynchronicity."
So, why was that? —Unless someone in the Encyclopedia wanted to keep a viewer steadily fixed on young Hal Mayne as he went through the process of growing up?
That too, was a farfetched supposition.
By this time, Bleys' instinctive curiosity was at full heat. He dived into everything that could be found about the background of the boy's rescue, the selling of the cruiser ship in which he had been found, and his raising since.
His raising since had been curiously un-newsworthy. There had been no information to speak of logged on it at all. The estate sat out by itself, deep in the Rockies, in a place that was neither convenient nor attractive to anyone else, and included a fair amount of territory, ranging widely from mountain lake, through forest, to the bare rock of vertical mountain peaks.
At the end of two hours, he ended up in a state that was unusual for him—extraordinarily frustrated. There was little more information available about the boy or his tutors, who seemed to have simply appeared at the right time to be hired, than he had been given by Dahno, originally.
He was now more than ordinarily interested in the estate he would see tomorrow and the people he would meet. He deliberately forced thought of them to the back of his mind, so he could deal with the more mundane matters of getting the Hounds together, getting a craft to take them in, and getting the maps that would allow them to land a little distance away and slip up on the estate buildings. Thankfully, the one thing that these m'n/a-trained young men did possess was the ability to move quietly and without attracting attention.
He arranged for everything and turned in for the night. They left the following morning, at dawn in a craft that Bloys himself piloted. As he approached the estate—which was indeed isolated—he indulged his curiosity to the point of gaining altitude and reaching a point where he could look at it from a long angle high in the atmosphere. But his viewing screen gave him a closeup picture of the estate and its surrounding territory.
It lay in a shallow bowl-shaped valley in the mountain rock, facing south and slightly east. It was surrounded by lodgepole pines, which went off from it to reach partway up the sides of the neighboring heights and cliffs, for they were completely surrounded by peaks.
It was at least twenty miles, a little over thirty kilometers, from the nearest habitation. But the house itself was large, and looked to be luxurious. It nestled in a flat part of the bowl looking directly southeast, with a little lake before it and a walking path around the lake. Other paths led off into the pines and were lost to sight behind their branches.
Bleys could feel the impatience, almost like a sort of rising heat from the bodies of the five Hounds in the back of the aircraft, behind him. It was, as Dahno had said, an ideal place for the Others to hold the meeting of the heads of their various world organizations; and if there were really only four people there—the three old tutors and the boy—in a completely automated house, it was not likely that anyone would bother them during their meeting.
At the same time, Bleys continued to have an uneasy feeling about the whole thing. He disliked loose ends on general principle; and it was simply the fact that the boy and his tutors had not existed in his mental universe until Dahno had told him about them. There was nothing remarkable in this, since there were uncounted millions of people he did not know. But most of those uncounted millions did not have this kind of a puzzle attached to them.
How could a two-year-old remain alive in a spaceship, adrift in space and from which any adults who had been with him had disappeared? Add to that the remarkable fact that the ship was old-fashioned—although eighty years back, ships were not all that different from the way they were now. Only, when the older ships were phase-shifted, it had been a matter of temporary discomfort to the passengers, which was not true in the present-day spaceships.
And finally, what a curiously fortunate coincidence that the ship with this near-baby aboard had been found adrift almost in Earth orbit. The chances of anything being found in space, even close to Earth, were so small that the odds against finding this on
e while the child was still alive must have been astronomical.
The fact was—he finally admitted to himself—this boy was an exception to the whole pattern for the future with which he had been working; a potential rock down among the cogwheels and gears of his plans.
Why this should be so, he was unsure. But the very existence of Hal Mayne troubled him.
However, these questions were ones he could only pay attention to later on when he had more time. The thing now was to take over the house and its inhabitants.
He turned the ship away until he dipped below the horizon of the valley top, and then came back in at low altitude, stopping about two kilometers from the edge of the bowl and the house itself. Here he set the ship down quietly, and turned to the five Hounds behind him.
"All right," he said, "now we go. Stay with me. Do exactly as I say. Arid under no circumstances shoot anyone unless I tell you to."
They left the ship and headed toward the house, from a direction that would bring them up against the side that faced toward the mountains and away from the lake. From the layout of the windows in the house, it seemed that this side was the one which was least likely to have people looking out and seeing them approach. In spite of this, at Bleys' directions they all took advantage of cover and tried to approach unseen.
When the house itself at last became visible through the trees Bleys called the five Hounds to him and instructed them in a whisper.
"You two and you two," he said, pointing out a pair of them in each case, "come in from behind the bushes at the back and sides of the patio. You two from the left. You other two from the right; and remember you come in, not to the house, but to the patio behind it, overlooking the lake, which is where I could see a couple of people standing just before the trees hid the view, as we landed."
He turned to the one remaining Hound.
"You," he said, "will follow me. I'm going directly in the door on the back side of the house in front of us, here, and you're to follow me at about one room's distance behind me. Stay out of sight, but watch me to see if I'm caught, or trapped in any way. Then it'll be up to you to step out and help me. Have you got that straight?"