“I’ve already met them.” Bolf saluted Jase and Brodth. “What’s the question?”
“My principal opponent,” said Horaag, “wishes to fight with double-blade-and shield. Is this within the honorable canons of combat?”
“I’ll check the records.” Bolf went off. Horaag made polite conversation with Jase and Brodth. He was evidently interested mainly in talking to Brodth, but to devote a majority of his attention to the weapons bearer of his principal opponent would have been discourteous, when Jase was directly in front of him. Horaag made, therefore, general conversation, complimenting Jase on having encountered the artifact and discussing the size of the expedition that would be sent out.
Bolf Paternalnephew came back across the gym floor to them.
“Shields,” he announced, “are archaic and generally out of use, but still permissible. However, if the Nelkosan Champion wishes to enter a demur on the grounds that he is unfamiliar with shields…”
“Not at all,” said Horaag. As Champion he could not honorably demur, although it was his legal right. As Family representative, it was his responsibility not to be unfamiliar with any sort of weapons. “If you can find me a shield, Bolf—I’ll use my own sword, since I’m familiar with it… “
“Certainly,” said the match umpire.
“I’ll get my principal’s weapons,” said Brodth. All three went off. Brodth had been required naturally to check the weapons with the entrance gatekeeper of the Examination Center, while Horaag had a permit to carry his. While Jase waited, he saw Horaag experimenting with the round, target-shaped shield Bolf had found for him. It was a blank circle of metal designed to be held with the left arm through two handles on the inner surface, while the right hand used the sword. Horaag was trying fencing lunges with his long, twin-bladed sword and trying to decide what to do with the shield Honor required him to carry. At arm’s length behind him in normal fencing position, the shield threw him off balance. Held before him, it restricted his movements.
Jase’s weapons came—the same with which he had practiced so assiduously during the clays past. He took them from Brodth. The shield was like the one found for his opponent, but the sword he now grasped was as archaic as the shield. Guardless, wide-bladed, and short, it was one of those Brodth had kept hanging on the wall of the room to which he had taken Jase that first day.
Jase slid his left hand and arm through the handles on the inside of the shield and grasped the forward handle in his fist. He took hold of the hilt of his sword with almost an underhand grip and, instead of adopting the fencing position, took up a position like a boxer—left shoulder and shield forward, instead of right shoulder forward and sword extended.
The members of the board and a dozen or so other spectators who had gathered murmured at the sight of this. A voice commented on the similarity between Jase’s fighting position and that of figures in old carvings depicting ancestral warriors who had used such ancient weapons. Horaag, with the remarkable adaptability of the trained athlete, fell into a duplication of Kator’s stance, but with some clumsiness evident. Bolf Paternalnephew signalled to them both and they approached each other in the center of the gym.
“You are met here,” Bolf Paternalnephew began as they stood facing each other, weaponed and ready, “in the interests of Honor and according to the code of honorable combat to resolve a situation for which other solution cannot be found…” Jase listened with only half an ear. His eyes were wide, and it seemed to him that he could smell every person in the room, and every scent of the room itself. And every sound in it, no matter how tiny, came clearly to his sense of hearing even through the drone of Bolf's voice.
He thought that in a little while, a very short space of time, perhaps a long enough time to listen to the song of the first Brutogas, he would be successful or he would be dead. He repeated again to himself that he would be dead—but he could not seem to believe it. Never had he felt so alive. His heart beat steadily and strongly, but not rapidly. The breath moved smoothly in and out of his nostrils. He was sweating lightly under the fur at his throat, but it v/as not so much the sweat of fear as of exultation.
He looked at the tall, massive figure of Horaag Adoptedson, and the long, twin-bladed sword the other held. He saw them with such clarity that he could pick out little nicks and scars near the cross-piece of the hilt guard and count the scars marking the smooth pelt of Horaag’s fur-like little lines, where the hairs lay all one direction on one side of the line and all the other direction on the other. He could even see the dark lines of the veins just inside the openings of Horaag’s nostrils.
“…and this case is a case of the thirty-ninth case,” Bolf was saying, “in that it is provided that if a man have a thing and it be denied him that he keep it, he may honorably challenge the right of the one who withholds it from him—the right to claim Champion by either party notwithstanding as in the withholding party in this case. Therefore, as match umpire, I declare this combat to be authorized, to be taking place before witnesses, and to be honorable—go!”
The starting word shocked Jase from his thoughts. Had it not been for the days of training, he might have hesitated—but reflexes responded for him.
He and Horaag moved together, and Jase got his shield up just in time to deflect a thrust from Horaag’s long sword. As the impact jarred him backward, a thrill ran through Jase. Suddenly, it seemed that he and Horaag were alone in some far place where not merely the sight but the sound of all that was around them had faded away. They were caught up together in a moment that excluded all else, partners in a dance which only one of them would finish. Over the edge of his shield he could see Horaag’s eyes narrowing as if thoughtfully as their swords clanged on each other and on the opposing shields.
A distant shout penetrated the isolation that surrounded them. For a second Jase almost closed his ears in annoyance. Then he recognized the voice. It was Brodth, shouting at him in warning. Jase had been giving ground. The gray-furred swordsmaster had warned him of this, repeatedly during the days of practice that had led up to this. The advantages of the ancient shield and short, archaic sword lay in the field of attack—going in under the long blade of the opponent. Jase crouched, struck upward with his shield at Horaag’s blade as it came in again, and stepped forward, bringing his sword up from under.
Horaag gave ground. Jase felt sudden exaltation. Then, without warning, the taller man circled to his left. For a moment Jase’s own shield held his vision—and Horaag drove in an attack. Jase, turning hurriedly, tripped and almost went down. Horaag was instantly on top of him. Jase thrust the taller man back with his shield. Horaag, quick to learn, struck back with his own shield, using it as a weapon.
Jase slipped under the blow, took the full force of a second blow from the much stronger man, and was driven to one knee.
Horaag struck down with his sword. Jase caught it with his shield, struck with his own sword upward from the kneeling position, and missed. Horaag shortened his sword for a death thrust downward—and Jase, moving his shorter double blade in a more restricted circle, came up inside the shield and sword-guard of the bigger man and thrust Horaag through the shoulder. Horaag dropped the sword from his nerveless fingers and threw his good arm around his smaller opponent to break his back. Jase, letting go his sword hilt now that there was no longer room to use the weapon, reached up and clawed the throat of his opponent.
They fell together.
When a bloody and breathless Jase was pulled from under the body of Horaag, he saw only an arms length away, the Nelkosan standing, holding in one fist the ring of keys to a ship of the line. The keys to every room and instrument of the ship which would carry the expedition to the planet of the Muffled People.
He handed them to Jase.
Chapter Eleven
Jase slept without dreams.
It was not the sleep in which he was in the body of Kator. It was the dreamless sleep brought on by heavy sedation, which had followed on his waking from the successful con
clusion of the duelling incident, and recognizing, this time, that he was back on earth among friends of his own kind. It was also the sleep of exhaustion. But, drugged as it was, and deep as it was, a feeling of confusion seemed to exist through it, stirring and troubling him so that he seemed to feel dark shapes approaching and threatening him in strange fashion.
At moments he felt that these shapes were the shapes of Ruml. At other moments he was equally sure they were human. —Finally they left him and he slept without dreaming and without stirring…
When he woke, his basement room had no seated in its armchair keeping him under observation. He rose on one elbow and looked at the clock on the bedstand beside his bed. Its yellow, luminescent hands stood at a little after three o’clock. He sat up, shaking the sleep from his head, and swung his legs over the side of the bed.
He thought of coffee. Heavy with the lethargy that follows such deep slumber, he fumbled into his clothes and headed for the door. But the knob jarred against his hand when he tried to turn it, and the door itself stayed closed.
Frowning, he twisted hard on the knob and shoved the door. It quivered but did not open. He began to come awake. He jerked and rattled at the door-and woke at last to the fact that it was not meant for him to open it.
“Locked!” he said out loud, looking over at the empty chair where an observer should have been sitting. So, since there was no one handy to watch him, they had locked him up like a criminal or a maniac?
Rage suddenly boiled up in him. He took hold of the knob, threw his shoulder against the door above it, and—much more easily than he had expected, for he had never broken open a door before—the latch socket tore out of the door frame, and the door swung open. He stumbled into the basement corridor.
His rage had mounted rather than diminished with the breaking of the door. He headed at a fast walk for the basement stairs to the floors above, ignoring the slow and creaky elevator. Turning the corner at the far end of the corridor to reach the foot of the stairs, he ran head on into a young man in army suntans and wearing a gunbelt with a pistol bolstered to it.
“Just a minute,” said the young man, catching his arm. “You can’t go up there. You have to go back to your room—“
Jase, redly angry, tore his arm from the other’s grasp.
“What’re you going to do, shoot me?” he said—and, shouldering roughly past the young man, went up the stairs two at a time.
When he emerged on to the dark green carpet of the ground floor carpeting, he found the hall there full of men and officers in uniform. They stared at him, and some of them moved toward him or tried to speak as if they would stop him, but he charged past them all, down the corridor around toward the back of the building and the library room. The door to the library room was open. A man in plain clothes was standing in the entrance. Jase thrust past him into the room.
Inside, the room was half full. Present were Mele, all the members of the Board, and Bill Goth, the general Tim had introduced to Jase and Mele just a week previously. Today he was wearing his uniform, and with him were a short, bulletheaded middle-aged man in a gray suit of European cut and a bookkeeperish looking man, sum, about fifty, and wearing old-fashioned glasses rather than contact lenses over pale blue eyes, under blond hair and faded eyebrows.
The sound of Jase’s entrance, to say nothing of the shout immediately given by the man he had passed in the doorway, brought all their eyes around.
“What’re you doing up here, Jase?” asked Coth. “—No, let him go, Hobart.” The man in the doorway, who had grabbed Jase from behind, let go just in time to avoid having his instep smashed by Jase’s right shoe heel. Jase stared savagely at Coth.
“Was it your idea to lock me in?” Jase said fiercely. “What’re you doing here with all this gang?”
“I brought him, Jase.”
It was Thornybright, standing a little removed from Coth and the other strangers. The psychologist stood slim and erect in a blue business suit, and his manner was as sharply self-possessed as ever.
“You?” Jase stared at him. “Why?”
“That’s just what Bill and I have been in the process of explaining,” said Thornybright. “Things with this project had reached the point where I felt we couldn’t go any longer without informing the proper authorities and turning control over to them. We held a meeting, and I gave the rest a last chance to vote that the project be turned over. When we split down the middle again, I called Bill in.” He glanced over at the slim, tanned military man. “He’d been waiting outside.”
“Oh?” said Jase. He stalked over to stand looking down at the psychologist. “And what were you doing, calling a meeting when I wasn’t there?”
Thornybright stared back up at him, a thin whip of a man four inches shorter and only two-thirds the weight of Jase. His gaze was as cold and unintimidated as ever.
“Maybe I ought to remind you, Jase,” he said, “you aren’t actually a member of this Board.”
“And maybe I ought to remind you—” said Jase. “If we’re going to start acting on our own, maybe I ought to remind you that I’m the project. Me!” Jase drove his own forefinger against his chest. He felt as though there was fire in his skull. “I’m the one who’s necessary to what we’re doing here—not the rest of you. And I’m an American citizen—” he broke off, looking around at the rest of the board members, seated in their chairs. Dystra sat solidly, looking back at him with no apparent emotion. “That reminds me,” Jase said grimly. “We seem to have been illegally invaded. Why isn’t anyone calling the police—or a lawyer?”
“That’s not necessary—,” Thornybright was beginning, when Coth interrupted him.
“I think Jase will see that, all right,” he said, smiling at Jase. “It’s just that no one’s explained the situation to him, yet. Jase, I’d like you to meet a couple of people.” He turned to the bulletheaded man. “This is—” The name he spoke baffled Jase’s ear with its foreign pronunciation. “He’s here to more or less represent the foreign members of this Foundation of yours, and their governments. You might think of him as the man from the United Nations.”
“How do you do,” said the man from the United Nations, without a trace of accent but with an intonation that rang strangely on Jase’s ear. Jase nodded shortly.
“And,” said Coth, looking over at the tall, spectacled man, “this is Artoy Swanson, from the White House. If you need a lawyer, he can get you the Inspector General.” Coth smiled.
“I’ll take him up on that,” said Jase.
Coth’s smile did not so much fade as become slightly grim.
“You aren’t being particularly reasonable,” he said slowly.
“No,” said Jase. “Why don’t you and the others just get die hell out?”
“No,” said Coth, meeting his eye but still speaking pleasantly.
“Then I will,” said Jase. He turned and headed for the door.
“Hobart,” said the thin, bespectacled Swanson. The man in civilian clothes moved to block the exit. Jase stopped and turned. He looked sardonically at Thornybright.
“Now, wait a minute, Bill,” said Thornybright. “There’s other ways—”
“I’m afraid not,” said Swanson. The spectacled man, for all his air of mildness, was definite. His interruption of Thornybright was a little like stopping a tiger with a feather, but the psychologist stayed stopped. Swanson took off his glasses and began to clean them with a paper tissue he took from a side pocket of his suitcoat. "We’re all volunteers here, Mr. Thornybright. The situation was all talked over this morning—in quarters elsewhere. It was clearly accepted that any legal way of controlling you people would be too slow. We’d have to start out by finding cause for an injunction… all sorts of red tape. And meanwhile, things would be happening to and with Jase here.”
“To and with,” echoed Jase. “I thought that would be the first thing that would come to the top of your minds when you heard about the project—the notion that I’m being controlled by
aliens.” He looked grimly across at Thornybright, who looked back with no change of expression. “So you’re just skipping our legal rights, is that it?”
“Now look here!” said Swanson, with a touch of exasperation. “Be reasonable. You people have gone ahead on your own without any authority from this government, or any government on earth, for that matter, and made contact with an alien race, an alien civilization bigger, better, stronger than ours and evidently containing individuals intent on wiping us out. Did you expect us to subpoena you to a congressional investigation?”
“There wasn’t any particular secrecy about the project!” said Thornybright sharply. “It, and the equipment we were using, has been written up in a dozen technical journals. And from there it got into the newspapers via the science writers.”
“Who reads technical journals, with a million articles a year being published in nearly a thousand different languages?” said Swanson. “And who believes science writers—or if they believe, remember for ten minutes afterward what they’ve read?” He looked at Jase. “No one who knew of what you were doing seriously thought anything would come of it.”
“No,” said Jase, bitterly, “they never do.”
“But you did,” said Swanson. “And for my money you ought to have had more of a sense of responsibility. To your—to the world, and the rest of the people on it. At any rate, as I say, all of us here are volunteers. You can sue us afterward, if you want—and if there’s any courts to sue in. For me, that won’t make much difference. For General Coth it’s a pretty bad finish to twenty-eight years of military service. But none of us are worrying about it. The thing is, we’re in charge here now—and from here on out.”
He looked around at the board members. “We’re going to have to hold you all—at least for the present. We’ll move you all now to an Air Force installation, a small one, not too far from Washington here. When we get this project of yours under control, we’ll turn you loose, and—” He grimaced. “You can try, suing us or getting us sent to jail or whatever you like. But for now—”
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