Other

by Gordon R. Dickson

  Dahno’s size, of course, helped in making him appear so dangerous. But the face was one that Bleys had seen only once before in his acquaintance with this half-brother of his. That was when Bleys had still been a child. They had met face to face for the first time, and Dahno had defined their relative positions in the known universe by knocking Bleys, half-unconscious, to the ground with a casual backhanded flip of his massive right hand.

  Now that same face, and the almost belligerent way in which Dahno stood—dwarfing all those around him and with his legs placed a little wide, his massive shoulders hunched and body completely motionless—seemed not to signal anything more welcoming as they approached him. His unfriendly appearance was strangely in keeping with the reddish light; so that he could have been some early war god—Thor himself, of the ancient Norse deities, resurrected just before Ragnarok.

  To be fair, Alpha Centauri A was also still to be seen here, adding to the light. But very slightly; a dwarfed, if brighter, disc off to Bleys’ left, only slightly higher overhead than the bloated-appearing Alpha Centauri B, now approaching the western horizon.

  “This way,” Dahno said coldly and briefly, once Bleys was within speaking distance. Dahno turned about and strode off ahead through the entrance of the small building behind him, leading across its narrow center—it was evidently some sort of message center and clearinghouse, because other passengers than themselves were also headed for it—and out a farther doorway to where the customary file of limousines was waiting for them.

  Dahno headed for the first limousine in line, and waved Bleys, Toni and Henry into its ample six-chaired rear chamber before he entered with them and shut the door behind them.

  “Dahno—” Toni began, but immediately Dahno’s hand was held up to stop her.

  “We’ll talk at the hotel,” he said.

  He sat back in his seat and said no more, while the rest of the limousines were filled by the Soldiers of God and the whole entourage took off for the city. Nor did he speak again—nor did any of the others in the limousine—during the ride into town. Toni’s face had become expressionless, with that particular lack of expression that could mean anything; but probably right now, Bleys guessed, meant that she was not pleased.

  Bleys himself was feeling slightly amused, but inwardly examining with some interest the fact that the sight of Dahno, looking like this, had so strongly evoked the past that for a moment he had relived the sudden fierce resentment he had felt as a child when Dahno had hit him, so that for a second there he had once again been small and helpless before the towering bulk of his brother.

  Henry looked as he always looked: detached and waiting.

  Not until the four of them were in Bleys’s private suite in the hotel, in its main lounge, did Dahno speak again, still in the same hard, distant voice.

  “You’d better sit down to listen to this,” he said to Bleys. He looked at Toni and Henry. “All of you.”

  They sat. Dahno cupped one hand for a moment over an ear, almost as if he had reached up casually to scratch the side of his head; but the gesture was enough for the others. They were being overheard, and undoubtedly also observed and recorded. None of them moved or changed expression. Meanwhile, Dahno himself took a chair, pulled it close so that they were all seated as near to each other as Dahno’s own long legs and Bleys’s could be accommodated, and produced a small silver device from a pocket. He held it in the open palm of one hand.

  After a moment, it began to put forth from its top a tiny bubble that swelled rapidly until it expanded, not only about Dahno but about all the rest of them. They found themselves in a lounge which had now become a shimmering blue, seen through the barrier of the almost-transparent globe about them. Then the bubble’s expansion stopped.

  Dahno moved his thumb on the side of the device, which separated itself from a tendril that had connected to the bubble while it was expanding, and put the small device back in his pocket. The tendril disappeared, but the bubble remained in position.

  “This shield”—he circled the tip of one long, thick finger in the air to imitate the bubble about them—“is the only one of its kind outside a certain laboratory here. I won’t go into how I got hold of it, because we’ve more important things to talk about, and don’t ask me how it works. All I know is it uses phase-shift principles to provide a discontinuity that lets everything go back and forth through the bubble except the sight of us or the sound of what we’re saying. Anyone spying is locked out.”

  Toni’s mouth was opening, but Bleys spoke first.

  “How can you be sure?” he asked.

  “Tell you in a minute,” Dahno said brusquely. “You came in on one of the regular passenger spaceliners from Cassida. It’s a good thing I had a watch out for you. Is Favored of God here at all then?”

  “It landed here three days ago,” Toni answered crisply. “It came in under the name of Spacehawk, with false papers that show it as having come in from Ceta on a purely cargo run, even though its holding areas are still configured for passengers. It will be keeping its space on the pad here for an indefinite time, under the excuse that it’s having some kind of overhaul on its drives. Actually, they’ll be able to lift in a couple of hours, once they get word in code that we’re on our way to them. I should call it a onetime signal rather than a code, because it will be an un-traceable single-word phone call.”

  “That’s wise,” said Dahno. “So you didn’t come in as a complete flock of innocents.”

  “Of course not,” Toni said. “There’s no danger of anyone from Newton snooping around and finding they don’t actually have anything wrong with the ship, since any spaceship is sovereign territory of the planet it has its papers from, and can be entered only by invitation of those in charge aboard it.”

  “Good!” Dahno sat back in his chair a little, slightly relaxed. But his face was still hard. He turned to look and speak directly to Bleys.

  “You left Cassida early, didn’t you? You’re here ahead of time. If I hadn’t had a watch being kept for you on incoming passenger lists, I wouldn’t have been notified in time to meet you when you landed. Why’d you do this?”

  Bleys began to feel the first stirrings of a definite annoyance. He was the one who directed matters, and Dahno had not contested his role for years. Yet now he was firing questions like a prosecuting attorney in court. Still, there might be some reason behind all this that would justify it.

  “I thought there were some promising prospects if I left Cassida when I did.” Bleys kept his voice—and temper—under control.

  “Prospects?” said Dahno. “No matter how good they were, you’d be better off getting on Favored right away and lifting off Newton.”

  “Why?” Bleys demanded.

  Dahno chuckled. But it was not his usual chuckle; this time it was as grim as his face.

  “Like you, I’ve got my special abilities,” he said.

  “I’ve never doubted that,” Bleys said.

  “No, but you’ve overlooked it,” said Dahno. “I was never more right than when I said you’d need me on Newton. If I could only have gotten here sooner, I’d have chapter and verse ready now that would turn you around and send you out. I just had a hunch this was going to be a tiger’s den for you, and now I’m sure of it, even though I don’t know the details. You made a mistake when you sent me back to Association to get elected.”

  “I did?” In spite of himself, Bleys heard a faint, but definitely hard edge in his own words.

  “That’s right,” Dahno said. “Because there are some things I do better than you. No one can match you at seeing what’s ahead of you and working out how to take control of it. You do it better than anyone I ever knew or could imagine. But I see the present better than you, Brother. This has been my life—the examining and understanding of what’s around me at the moment, and I see it more clearly than you do because all your attention is forward.”

  Watching him, Bleys nodded slowly.

  “You see,” Dahno went o
n, “what you’ve been ignoring in the present while you forged ahead, winning every point, making everything go the way you wanted it to, building a name for yourself on all the worlds—you overlooked the fact that our human race tends to make use of the same law you find in physics and make use of in human relations—that every action has a equal and opposite reaction. The people you push, so they’ll push others of the race around to suit your purpose, gradually create a counter-force to your push; by people who disagree with what they hear from you. This can vary from out-and-out opposition to simply not wanting to go along with you. But every person you move has an instinct to push back; and it grows in them like mud piling up on a spade—

  “—What I’m saying, Bleys”—Dahno interrupted himself almost harshly—“is that whether you know it or not, you need me to see in the area where you’re blind, or at least don’t see well. I saw opposition building against you back on Association; and in McKae, and in the Chamber on Association. Henry’s parish that elected you once, and that just elected me, doesn’t love you at all now; and most people there disagree with the most reasonable arguments in your speeches—simply because you made them. The same thing is true on Newton. I’ve seen things you probably have missed. I’ve found out things you’d never have known. Because one of my abilities is to slip between the cracks and read what people wouldn’t ordinarily want read by someone else.”

  “Go ahead, then.”

  “To begin with,” said Dahno, “we’ve got a branch of the Others here, nowadays, after all. A good-sized branch, but mostly underground.”

  “That’s interesting,” Bleys said.

  “The organization we had here,” said Dahno, “was made illegal. The powers that be aren’t witch-hunting past and secret members, but those who were or are members aren’t attracting attention to the fact, because that would force the power structure to take notice of them—which could be fatal for every one of them. Just knowing that much should tell you something.”

  “What’s that?” Bleys asked.

  “Simply, if you thought New Earth had a tight social situation and Cassida a tighter one, you’ll find both were wide open compared to this world. Every laboratory from the smallest to the largest here belongs to an Institute. Every Institute, and every lab, is at swords-points with every other one. They go through the motions of alliance and friendship; but it’s always with daggers ready behind their backs, or a plan to take advantage of an alliance for their own profit. The result is, in the whole population, everyone’s at dagger-points with everyone else; and, further, nearly everyone’s an active spy, spying on the rest to survive.”

  “How did you find this out?” asked Toni.

  “I went looking for a Newtonian who plainly was hiding some personal secret he didn’t want known,” Dahno answered flatly. “Then I cultivated him and learned enough to track down what kind of secret it was, and used that much to blackmail him into telling me about his relationship with his lab-mates and the relationship of his laboratory with others. From there I followed a chain upward and inward until I’d located the laboratory that made this secrecy device—meanwhile getting a picture of how this planet is run and by whom.”

  “All this in a couple of weeks, at most?” Toni asked. “You couldn’t have gotten to Association, spent even three or four days there, and been here in time to have more than a little over two weeks on Newton. How could you do so much in such a short time?”

  Dahno looked at her with that grimness that seemed so new.

  “I’ll tell you how. The urge to spy goes nicely hand in glove here with the hunger for shop talk—trade talk, if you prefer—so, there have to be social meetings, which become an open market for the trading of secrets—and everything else that goes on under the surface here.”

  He paused again. “Enough background?”

  “Very useful background,” said Bleys. His own touch of temper was under control now. “Go ahead. Say what you want to say.”

  “All right, then,” said Dahno. “The minute I got off the spaceship for Association, I began to give out the general impression that you and I, Bleys, had had a parting of the ways; and that was why I was going back to our home world, while you continued your tour. Naturally, I refused to go into any detail, but let anyone watching know that I was fuming inside over the way you’d treated me and looking for a way to get back at you.”

  “Considering the way you’ve always presented yourself to people everywhere,” said Bleys, “I’m surprised they’d believe that—after all these years you’ve been so good-natured and easygoing.”

  “I cultivated a different attitude.” Dahno grinned a little. “You saw how I was looking at you when you first stepped off the spaceship? That was my expression for public consumption.”

  “Effective,” said Bleys, “but I’m interrupting. Go on.”

  “I’ll do that. In a few words, I left them all thinking I’d planned to get to Newton before you did and do what I could to make things difficult for you.”

  “You haven’t done that?” asked Toni. “I mean, as part of building your cover here?”

  “I only gave the impression; that’s all. All that was needed. The situation here didn’t need much help from me. You’ve all been not only observed, but controlled, right up to this present moment.”

  “By whom?” Bleys asked.

  “The Laboratories Review Council,” said Dahno. “It controls things here the way the Board controls things on Cassida.”

  “I haven’t seen any signs of control,” said Henry. “Though they could have been recording us from the time we stepped off the spaceship. Antonia Lu made the reservations herself, didn’t you?”

  He looked across at Toni.

  “That’s right,” said Toni. “I picked the limousine service and this hotel as our destination, as the best place for us here in Woolsthorpe.”

  “Woolsthorpe,” Henry echoed. “It’s a strange name for the capital city here.”

  “Woolsthorpe, in England back on Old Earth in the seventeenth century,” said Dahno, “was the birthplace of Isaac Newton. As far as your choosing limousines and hotel, have you ever had a professional magician offer you a deck of cards and make you choose one he wants? It’s called forcing. This hotel and the limousines were offered to you that same way.”

  “So this is not just any hotel,” Bleys said.

  “No,” Dahno said. “Remember the Bastille in Paris, on Old Earth—or the Tower of London in England? Well, this is the same thing. Hotel, fortress, a maximum-security prison for important people. A place under the thumb of the Laboratories Review Council—and that’s a den of tigers for you, especially. Did you realize that you’re on the same floor and probably no more than a hundred meters from where the Council holds its meetings?”

  “No, I didn’t,” Bleys said.

  “Well, that’s where you are,” said Dahno. “Only don’t try to walk over and take a look at it. You could get into a bank vault easier than you could into that part of the building.”

  “There’s still a chance that somebody might use a negative-matter bomb to wipe the whole building and most of the city off the map,” said Bleys. “Someone who didn’t see any farther than the destruction of whoever’s in command here.”

  “They’d have to get into position to launch the bomb,” said Dahno, “and from underground, on top of the earth, above it—or out beyond atmosphere for a good astronomical unit of space—all approaches are under surveillance.”

  “Not if they have this sort of bubble around them,” Bleys said.

  “But that’s just the point,” said Dahno. “No one—even the Council, has it, yet—”

  A bell chiming somewhere in the walls or atmosphere of the lounge interrupted him. A soft, apologetic, but attention-demanding, bell. Dahno reached down to the object at his feet, and put it into one of his suit pockets. The blue bubble vanished from around them. Only then he spoke.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “A messenger
from the Laboratories Review Council begs admittance to the lounge in which you are presently sitting,” said the voice, as apologetically as the bell that had announced itself a moment before.

  Dahno looked at Bleys, and Bleys nodded.

  “The Great Teacher Bleys Ahrens will see him now, then,” said Dahno. “Provided the message is short, since the Great Teacher is occupied at the moment.”

  “It’s only an invitation. It can be delivered briefly,” said the voice. Dahno looked at Bleys, who nodded.

  “Come ahead,” said Dahno.

  A door to the lounge slid open. Not the door from the corridor, nor yet the one to the lift that came directly to this suite from the ground floor; but a door giving entrance from an adjoining room; and there entered, not the apologetic young man that the voice had seemed to indicate, but a tall, thin man in his fifties, with a long face that time had set in lines of severity, and wearing a black suit with a short jacket that was almost a uniform.

  The atmosphere of the room changed with his entrance. Henry had swiveled his float about to face the newcomer. Dahno’s face was back in the lines of grimness and anger that it had worn at the spaceship terminal; while Toni, who had not needed to move to face the door through which the man entered, had apparently not moved at all. But Bleys noticed the slight appearance of white below the iris of her eyes, which signaled her “white face.”

  “I’m Bleys Ahrens,” said Bleys, who had rotated his own float to face the man, as he heard the door opening.

  “Then it’s to you I’m to extend the invitation,” said the thin man in a formal voice. “The Laboratories Review Council would appreciate your seeing them tomorrow in their quarters in this building, at an hour convenient to yourself, preferably mid-afternoon.”

  “Mid-afternoon?” echoed Bleys. “Let me see, then. Suppose we say at sixteen-thirty hours—or four-thirty, P.M.—if you’re using the Old English standard here.”

  “Sixteen-thirty hours will be satisfactory,” said the tall, thin man. “Someone will come tomorrow before that time to conduct you to the meeting place. The Laboratories Review Council appreciates your compliance.”