Gordon R. Dickson (12 page)

Kil shrugged and went back
to the main topic.

"You
said you might help me. If you do, what kind of price do you charge?"

"That'd depend." Mali looked at
him. "It might be we'd want you to join us." Join
your

Mali nodded. His eyes and face gave
absolutely no clue
to whether he was serious or not.
                          
*

"You
said you were a memnonic engineer somewhere in that story of yours," he
said. "Because memnonic engineers are necessarily Class A's, we seldom get
one in a Society."

Kil scowled at him.

"I thought this O.T.L. of yours was an
organization of the heads of other Societies, only."

"Who told you thai?" countered
Mali. "I just heard it."

"Then
you heard only part of the truth. There's more to it than that."

Kil abandoned his curiosity
in that direction.

"What
about—you haven't told me how you might be able to find my wife," he said.

"Well,"
answered Mali, "we'd do pretty much what your Ace said he could
do,
only we'd do it more efficiently and with a great many
more people. The Societies are a fine instrument in the right hands. I could
have more than two million people keeping their eyes open for your wife inside
of twenty-four hours.
Maybe fifty million in the long
run."

"And I'd pay you for
that by joining this outfit of yours?"

Mali nodded.

"Just what would that
mean?"

"Not a lot,"
answered Mali. "We'd merely want to be sure of you and your loyalty, which
in this case would mean you'd be examied under hypnosis to definitely establish
the facts about you for your dossier. And at the same time you'd be given
loyalty conditioning."

"I'm not sure I like that second."

Mali shrugged.

"We're
like any other outfit today. I don't suppose you've objected to hypno
conditioning when you were working on something involving a trade secret of one
company or another."

Kil frowned.

"That's not the same thing."

"Well—"
Mali got to his feet. "Think it over. Melee will show you a room in the
Lodge here where you can stay for the rest of the night. Consider yourself
under something like house arrest until we find out about you."

Kil rose also.

"I'd like to know just how much truth
there is in what
you
say." he said. Mali smiled.

"A
lot of people say that to me." He nodded. "Good night," he said
and went out the door.

Kil
stood staring after him. The voice of Melee at his elbow made him turn.

"This
way, Kil."

He followed her out by another door. Down a
somewhat longer hallway, this time, they came upon a moving ramp rising to the
second story of the lodge. She led the way up this and along the corridor above
to a door which she opened with her Key.

"Here," she said.

She stood aside to let him enter,
then
followed him in, closing the door behind her. Kil found
himself in a comfortable bedroom, a little larger than its equivalent would
have been in an overnight Class
A
hotel, and somewhat
more luxuriously furnished. He turned about to Melee and found her close to
him, so close indeed that her breasts brushed against him as he turned.

"Well—thanks," he said. "I'll
see you in the morning, I suppose."

She looked up into his
face.

"Kil,"
she said, uncertainly. "Kil, offer me a drink, or something,
will
you? Don't make me go just yet."

"A drink?"
He swung about and saw the transparent door of a liquor cabinet,
recessed in one wall. "Oh well, what would you like?"

He went across to the cabinet. To his secret
relief, instead of following him, she crossed the room in the opposite direction
and sank down on a couch.

"A little cognac," she said.
"Have one with me, Kil."

"All
right."
He
answered with his back still toward her.

He
opened the cabinet, selected a pair of glasses and splashed a little of the
amber cognac into each of them. He closed the cabinet door and carried the
glasses back across the room.

"Here you are," he said, sitting
down in a chair opposite her. She accepted the glass from him, holding it in
slim fingers. Abruptly, she shuddered and drank quickly, emptying it almost at
once.

"Please,
Kil," she said, holding it out at arm's length. "Another."

Kil scowled, but took the glass and getting
up, went back to the cabinet for a refill. He brought it to her and she looked
up at him as she accepted it, almost abjectly.

"Don't
look so angry, please," she said. "Talk to me, Kil. Say
something."

'Talk—about what?" he
asked.

"Tell
me about your wife. What does she look like, Kil?" He rubbed his nose.

"Well, she's small," he said.
"She's got blonde hair. And
blue eyes.
And a soft voice."
                                                    
*

"Is
she pretty?" A momentary shadow passed across Melee's eyes. "Much
prettier than I am?"

Kil shook his head, looking at her.

"No," he said, slowly, "you
know she wouldn't be."

"I
don't," she answered, staring not at him, but away across the room.
"No, I don't. I never do. How would I know?" Her hands twisted on the
glass. "There's millions of women in the world—maybe all of them prettier
than I am." And she shuddered again.

"Drink
the cognac," said Kil, a little more softly. Her eyes came gratefully
around to focus on him.

"Drink
with me, Kil" She extended her glass and, a little self-consciously, he
touched it with his own. And then, seeing that she once more intended to gulp
all her drink at once, he tossed all of his own down. It burned fiercely in his
throat and gullet.

"There,"
he said. "Now—" Abruptly, a tremor passed through him and the room
seemed to cant suddenly to one side.
A wave like
dizziness, but somehow different, rippled his vision and through its
distortion, as the carpeted floor came swooping up to meet him, he could just
see Melee. She was setting down her glass and watching him, with her lips just
beginning to curve, as he fell, in a smile of strange and secret triumph.

CHAPTER
TEN

Kil
awoke suddenly and sat up on the edge of his
bed. Through the unopaqued window of the room to which Melee had brought him
the night before, the morning sunlight streamed and lit up his undressed
condition and the rumpled state of the bed. There was sweat on his forehead
and a clutching, all-obsessive feeling that something was terribly wrong.
What
had
happened?
But nothing came to him, only the empty,
scooped-out feeling of something drastic that had taken place. He jumped to his
feet and took three quick strides to stand in front of a mirror across the
room. His own image looked back at him as lean and uncompromising as ever.
Foolishly, he felt his arms and legs and the nerves in them reacted to his
fingers' pressure in honest fashion. His body reported all well. Only a slight
soreness behind one ear, where he might have hit his head in falling after he
was drugged, and a slight headache, lopsided in that area, interrupted the
general sense of physical well-being. But he felt hollow inside.

He walked over to a closet set in the wall
and, opening it, found clothes—the ones he had worn the night before as well as
several plastic throwaway outfits that looked to be his size. Out of automatic
instincts and habits of cleanliness, he reached for one of these latter, but an
odd repugnance made him draw his hand back and he dressed instead in his tunic
and kilt of the previous day.

Dressed, he tried his door and found it
unlocked. He stepped through it and out into the corridor. Some thirty feet
along this corridor, he came on a door ajar, about where he remembered the
study to have been. He went in.

It
was not the study.after all, but a larger room, a lounge of some sort with a
wall-wide window beside which sat a breakfast table as yet uncleared. Melee
stood by the table, looking out at the trees and the grounds of the lakeward
side of the resort. From this height, the blue windings of the lake could be
seen beyond the tops of the trees. A small breeze blew from it, through the
wall-window, which had been rolled back, and the soft, clean air of morning
came to Kil's nostrils.

At the sight of her, standing with her back
to him, a deep feeling of desire stirred unexpectedly in Kil and he went forward
until he stood at her side.

"Morning," he
said.

She
turned slowly to face him. On her lips was an echo of the triumphant smile of
the night before, but it faded as she regarded him, changing into something
eager and half-
fearful.

"Kiss me," she said.

Kil
put his arms around her and drew her to him. He kissed her, feeling the hot
coal of desire that was new within him burst suddenly into blazing heat. Abruptly,
she wrenched away from him.

"Damn you!" she cried. "Oh,
damn you!"

Her
fists were clenched and her face was screwed up in pain. When he moved toward
her again, she evaded him.

"What is this?" demanded Kil,
sharply.

"It's not you!" She beat with her
fists on the back of a chair. "It's not youl
I
thought
I
wouldn't mind, but
I
do. I do!"

"What do you mean?"

She faced him.

"I
said I'd make you kiss me." Her eyes glittered with tears. "And I
have. But now
I
don't want it that way—that way—"

"What way?
",
said Kil, staring at her.

"Via," said a
soft voice behind him, "the hypno route."

Kil
turned to see Mali standing in an open doorway leading to an adjoining room, a
scanner in his hand. As Kil watched, Mali came all the way into the room, shutting
the door behind him. He put down the reel on a coffee table and pressed a
button. The other door closed and the window slid noiselessly back into
position, sealing the room.

"Melee
jumped the gun," said Mali, coming up to him. In the bright morning light,
the head of the O.T.L. looked young and diffident, like a polite schoolboy.
"She didn't wait for the checks on your story to come through. They have
now, by the way. You're quite a truthful man. But as I say, she saw to it that
you were conditioned last night." He turned to look at Melee, but she
stayed rigid, her back to both men.

"Conditioned!" said Kil.

"
Yes,
and
there's something strange about it, too," continued Mali, in the same
casual tone from which his voice never varied. Almost, he could have been
discussing the weather planned that week for the district. "You took the
commands readily enough. You've probably noticed that your reactions toward
Melee are considerably greater now than any you may have toward your wife.
Or any other woman for that matter.
And you'll also discover
a comparable loyalty to the O.T.L. as a group and to me,
myself
,
as an individual. But the search didn't work out at all well."

"The
search!"

Kil felt the cold fingers of horror crawling
down his spine. Hypnotic search was a highly tricky, rigidly restricted psychiatric
technique used on the dangerously disturbed Unstab, or proved violator of the
world peace. "You had the guts to—illegally—and you
tell
'me about it!"