"Posts!" he snapped.
Tension sprang like invisible lightning across the terrace. Of the four gunmen already there, three had left off covering Walter and Malachi to aim at Obadiah, as he snapped his fingers. One only still covered Malachi. Now, at the whip of Ahrens' voice, the errant gunmen pulled their weapons almost in panic back to their original targets.
"Oh, you fools, you young fools!" said Ahrens softly to them. "Look at me!"
Their pale and guilty glances sidled back to his face.
"The Maran—" Ahrens pointed at Walter, "is harmless. His people taught him that violence—and any violence—would cripple his thinking processes. And the Fanatic here is worth perhaps one gun. But you see that old man there?"
He pointed at the unmoved Malachi.
"I wouldn't lock one of you, armed as you are, with him, unarmed, in an unlighted room, and give a second's hope to the chance of seeing you alive again."
He paused, while the gunmen cringed before him.
"Three of you cover the Commandant," he went on at last, quietly. "And the other two watch our religious friend here. I'll—" he smiled softly at them, "undertake to try to defend myself against the Maran."
The aim of the pistols shifted obediently, leaving Walter uncovered. He felt a moment's pang of something like shame. But the fine engine of that mind of his, to which Ahrens had referred, had come to life; and the unprofitable emotion he had briefly felt was washed away by a new train of thought. Meanwhile, Ahrens had looked back at Obadiah.
"You're not exactly a lovable sort of man, you know," he told the Friendly.
Obadiah stood, unawed and unchangeable. Fanatic against fanaticism, apostate to the totalitarian hyper-religiosity of the Splinter Culture that had birthed him, the Friendly loomed almost as tall as Ahrens. But from that point on any comparisons between them went different ways.
Face to face with the obvious necessity now of his own death to protect the boy he had tutored—for Obadiah was no fool and Walter, from fourteen years of living with the Fanatic, saw that the other had already grasped the situation—Obadiah was regarding the terminal point of his life neither with the workmanlike indifference of Malachi, nor with the philosophical acceptance of Walter, but with a fierce, dark, and burning joy.
Grim-countenanced, skull-featured and lath-thin from a life of self-discipline, nothing was left of Obadiah in his eighty-fourth year but a leathery and narrow lantern of gray-black skin and bones. It was a lantern illuminated by an all-consuming inner faith in his individually-conceived God—the God who in gentleness and charity was the direct antithesis of the dark and vengeful Lord of Obadiah's Culture, and the direct, acknowledged antithesis of Obadiah, himself.
Oblivious now to Ahrens' humor, as to all other unimportant things, he folded his arms and looked directly into the taller man's eyes.
"Woe to you," he said, calmly, "to you, Other Man, and all of your breed. And again I say, woe unto you!"
For a second, meeting the deep-sunk, burning eyes in that dark, bony face, Ahrens frowned slightly. His gaze turned and went past Obadiah to the gunman covering him.
"The boy?" Ahrens asked.
"We looked… " the young man's voice was husky, almost whispering. "He's nowhere… nowhere around the house."
Ahrens wheeled sharply to look at Malachi, and Walter.
"If he was off the grounds one of you'd know it?"
"No. He…" Walter hesitated uncertainly, "might have gone for a hike, or a climb in the mountains…"
He saw Ahrens' brown eyes focus upon him. As he looked, without warning the dark pupils of them seemed to grow and swell, as if they would finally fill the whole field of Walter's vision. Again, the emotional effect of the strange voice and commanding presence rang in his memory.
"Now, that's foolish of you," said Walter, quietly, making no effort to withdraw his attention from the compelling gaze of Ahrens. "Hypnotic dominance of any form needs at least the unconscious cooperation of the subject. And I am a Maran Exotic."
The pupils were suddenly normal again. This time, however, Ahrens did not smile.
"There's something going on here…" he began, slowly. But Walter had already recognized the fact that time had run out.
"All that's different," he interrupted, "is that you've been underestimating me. The unexpected, I think some general once said, is worth an army—"
And he launched himself across the few feet of distance separating them, at Ahrens' throat.
It was a clumsy charge, made by a body and mind untrained to even the thought of physical violence; and Ahrens brushed it aside with one hand, the way he might have brushed aside the temper tantrum of a clumsy child. But at the same time the gunman behind Obadiah fired; it felt as if something heavy struck Walter in the side. He found himself tumbling to the terrace.
But, useless as his attack had been, it had distracted at least the one armed guard; and in that split second of distraction, Obadiah hurled himself—not at either of the gunmen guarding him, but at one of those covering Malachi.
Malachi himself had been in movement from the first fractional motion of Walter's charge. He was on one of the two still holding pistols trained on him, before the first man could fire. And the charge from the gun of the other passed harmlessly through the space the old soldier had occupied a second before.
Malachi chopped down the gunman he had reached as someone might chop a flower stalk with one swipe of an open hand. Then he turned, picked up the man who had missed him, and threw that gunman into the fire-path of the discharge from the pistols of the two who had been covering Obadiah—just as the remaining armed man, caught in Obadiah's grasp, managed to fire twice.
In that same moment, Malachi reached him; and they went down together, the gunman rolling on top of the old man.
From the level of the terrace stones, lying half on his side, Walter stared at the ruin his charge had made. Obadiah lay fallen with his head twisted around so that his open and unmoving eyes stared blankly in Walter's direction. He did not move. No more did the man Malachi had chopped down, nor the other gunman the ex-soldier had thrown into the fire from his companions' pistols. One other gunman, knocked down by the thrown man, was twitching and moaning strangely on the terrace.
Of the two guards remaining, one lay still on top of Malachi, who had ceased to move, and the other was still on his feet. He turned to face Ahrens and cringed before the devastating blaze of the Other Man's gaze.
"You fools, you fools!" said Bleys softly. "Didn't I just get through telling you to concentrate on the Dorsai?"
The remaining gunman shrank in on himself in silence.
"All right," said Bleys, sighing. "Pick him up." He indicated the moaning man and turned to the gunman on top of the silent figure of Malachi.
"Wake up." Bleys prodded the man on top with his toe. "It's all over."
The man he had prodded rolled off Malachi's body and sprawled on the stones with his head at an odd angle to his body. His neck was broken. Bleys drew in a slow breath.
"Three dead—and one hurt," he said as if to himself. "Just to destroy three unarmed old teachers. What a waste." He shook his head and turned back to the gunman who was lifting the moaning man.
They think I'm already dead, too, then, thought Walter, lying on the flagstones.
The realization came to him without much surprise. Bleys was already holding open the french window so that the wounded man could be half-carried inside the library by his companion. Bleys followed, his finger still marking a place in the volume of Noyes' poetry Walter had originally been reading. The french window closed. Walter was left alone with the dead, and the dying light of day.
He was aware that the charge from the void pistol had taken him in the side; and a certain feeling of leakage inside him confirmed his belief that the wound was mortal. He lay waiting for his personal end and it grew in him after a moment that it was something of a small victory that neither Ahrens nor the surviving gunman had realized he was still alive.
&
nbsp; He had stolen several minutes more of life. That was a small victory, to add to the large victory that there was now no one from whom the lightning of Bleys' multi-talented mind could deduce the unique value of Hal. A value that, since it was connected to a possible pressure climax of the ontogenetic energies, could be as dangerous to the Other Men as they would he to Hal once they realized he might pose a threat to them.
It was this awareness of Hal as a possible danger that Walter had been so concerned to hide from Ahrens. Now he had done so. Now, they would probably search the grounds for the boy, but not with any particular urgency; and so, perhaps, Hal could escape. Walter felt a modest surge of triumph.
But the sunset was red, and deepening around him as well as around the other silent bodies; and the feeling of triumph faded. His life was leaking fast from him, and he realized now, for the first time, that he had never wanted to die. If only, he thought, I could have lived to think a little longer.
He felt a moment's unutterable and poignant feeling of regret. It seemed to him suddenly that if he had existed only a few more hours, some of the answers he had sought all his life might have come to him. But then that feeling, too, faded; the light seemed to darken swiftly about him, and he died.
* * * *
The sun was now setting. Shortly, its rays left the stone terrace and even the dark slates of the house rooftop. Darkness brimmed in the area below the mountains, and the french windows above the terrace flagstones glowed yellow from the lights in the library. For a little while the sky, too, was light; but this also went, and left only the brilliant pinpoints of gleaming stars in a velvet-black, moonless sky.
Down by the margin of the lake, the tall weeds rising out of the black water by the shore stirred. Nearly without a sound, the tall, sapling-thin, shadowy figure of a sixteen-year-old boy hoisted itself up on the grassy bank and stood erect there, dripping and shivering, staring off at the terrace and the lighted house.
Chapter Two
For a moment only he stood staring. He felt numb, set apart from reality. Something had happened up on the terrace. He had witnessed it, but there was a barrier, a wall in his mind that blocked him off from remembering exactly what had taken place. In any case, there was no time now to examine it. An urgency implanted long since against just such a moment as this was pushing him hard, urging him along a path toward certain rehearsed actions that had been trained in him against this time when even thought would be impossible. Obeying that urging, he slipped back out of sight among the greenery that surrounded the lake.
Here, in the dimness, he went swiftly around the lake until he came to a small building. He opened its door and stepped into its unlighted interior.
It was a toolshed full of equipment for keeping the grounds in order; anyone unfamiliar with it would have tripped over any of several dozen pieces of such equipment within two steps beyond the door. But Hal Mayne, although he turned on no illumination, moved lightly among them without touching anything, as if his eyes could see in this kind of darkness.
It had been, in fact, one small part of his training—finding his way blindfolded about the interior of this shed. Certainly now, by practice and touch alone, he found a shelf against the wall, turned it on a hidden pivot at its midpoint and opened a shallow, secret compartment between two studs of the building's back wall. Five minutes later, he slipped back outdoors with the compartment reclosed behind him. But now he wore dry clothes, gray slacks and blue half-jacket. He carried a small travel bag, and had tucked into an interior pocket of the half-jacket papers that would authorize him to travel to any of the fourteen inhabited worlds, plus the cards and vouchers that would make available to him enough Earth and interplanetary funds to get him to a number of off-world destinations.
He went now, among the night-dark trees and bushes once more, in the direction of the house. He was deliberately not thinking—he had not thought from the moment he had seen the flag dipped and had responded by hiding in the lake. Thought was trying to come back, but training still held it at bay; and for the moment there was no will or urge in him to break through the wall in his mind.
He was not thinking, only moving—but he moved like a wisp of mist over the night ground. His lessons had begun as soon as he could walk, at the hands of three experts who had literally lived for him and had poured into him everything that they had to teach. From his standpoint, it had all seemed merely natural and normal, that he should come to know what he knew and be able to do what he did. It was without effort, almost unconsciously, that he went through the dark woods so easily and silently, where almost anyone else would have blundered and made noise.
He came at last to the terrace, now deep in shadow—too buried in darkness to show what still lay there, even though light shone from the library windows at its inner edge. His training kept him apart from the shadow, he did not look into it, did not investigate. Instead, he went toward the edge of one of the windows of the house, from which he could look down into the library itself.
The floor of the library was nearly two meters below the level of the terrace; so that, from within, the window he looked through was high in an outer wall. The room itself was both long and high, its floor-to-ceiling bookshelves warmly stuffed with some thousands of antique, printed and bound volumes holding works like those poems of Alfred Noyes which Walter the InTeacher had been fond of reading. In the fireplace at one end a fire had just been lit, to throw the ruddy, comforting light of its flames upon the heavy furniture, the books, and the ceiling. The two men in the room stood talking. They were both so tall that their shoulders were almost on a level with Hal's feet. They stood face to face; and there was a certain tenseness about the two of them, like partners who might at any moment become adversaries.
One was the tall man he had seen earlier on the terrace. The other was a man nearly the same height, but outweighing the slim man by half again as much. Not that the other man was fat. He was merely powerfully built, with the sort of round, thick arms and body that, even in lesser proportion on someone of normal height, would have made him seem formidable. His face was round and cheerful under a cap of curly, jet-black hair, and he smiled merrily. Facing the taller, slimmer man, he appeared coarse-bodied, almost untidy, in the soft material of the slacks and cloth jacket that made up the maroon business suit he wore. In contrast, the taller man—in gray slacks and black half-cape—seemed tailored and remote.
Hal moved close to the edge of the pane to see if he could hear their talk; and the words inside came faintly through the insulated glass to his ear.
"… tomorrow, at the latest," the tall man was saying. "They should all be here, then."
"They better be. I hold you responsible, Bleys." It was the big, black-haired man speaking.
"When didn't you, Dahno?"
Distantly, a point of information clicked in the back of Hal's mind, Dahno, or Danno—it was spelled various ways—was the one usually spoken of as the leader of the loose Mafia-sort of organization by which the Other People were said to be increasing their hold upon the inhabited worlds. The Others tended to be known to their people by first names only—like kings. Bleys… that would be Bleys Ahrens, one of the lesser leaders of the Others.
"Always, Bleys. As now. Your dogs made something of a mess taking over here."
"Your dogs, Dahno."
The thick-bodied giant brushed the answer away.
"The dogs I lent you. It was your job to set up for the Conference here, Mr. Vice-Chairman
"Your dogs aren't trained, Mr. Chairman. They like killing because they think it proves their value in our eyes. That makes them unreliable with void pistols."
Dahno chuckled again. His eyes were hard and bright.
"Are you pushing me, Bleys?"
"Pushing back."
"All right—within limits. But there'll be fifty-three of us here by tomorrow. The bodies don't matter as long as they're cleaned up, out of the way. Then we can forget them."
"The boy won't," said Bleys. br />
"Boy?"
"The ward these three were raising and tutoring."
Dahno snorted faintly.
"You're worried about a boy?" he said.
"I thought you were the one who talked about neatness, Dahno. The old men died before they could tell us about him."
Dahno brushed the air again—a little impatiently. Hal watched him, standing in darkness outside the swath of light from the window.
"Why would the dogs think to keep them alive?"
"Because I didn't tell them to kill." Bleys' voice did not seem to have been raised, but it came with peculiar clearness to Hal's ears through the glass. Dahno cocked his head to look at the slim man, his face for a moment not cheerful, but merely watching.
"Aside from that," he said, his own voice unchanged, "what could they tell us?"
"More." Bleys' voice was again as it had been earlier. "Didn't you look at the prospectus on holding our Conference here? This place was set up under a trust established from the sale of an unregistered interstellar courier-class ship, which was found drifting near Earth, with the boy in it as a two-year-old child, or younger. No one else was aboard. I don't like mysteries."
"It's all that Exotic blood in you that doesn't like mysteries," Dahno said. "Where would we be if we took the time to try to understand every mystery we came across? Our game is controlling the machinery, not understanding it. Tell me about another way a few thousand of us can hope to run fourteen worlds."
"You could be right," said Bleys. "But still it's a careless attitude."
"Bleys, my buck," said Dahno. His voice changed only as slightly as Ahrens' had a moment before, but his eyes reflected the red light of the fire. "I'm never careless. You know that."
The night breeze freshened off the lake and a sudden small gust sent the branches of a lilac bush lashing against the pane of another of the library windows. Both of the men inside looked toward the sound at once. Hal stepped back noiselessly from the window, deeper into the shadow.
His training was urging him away, now. It was time to go. He half-swung toward the terrace, still not forming clearly in his mind the true picture of what was there, but with the empty feeling that what he was leaving was something to which he would never have a chance to return. But his training had anticipated that feeling also, and overrode it. He turned away from terrace and house alike, and moved off through the surrounding trees at a silent trot.