Gordon R. Dickson - Childe Cycle 05 (18 page)

"Reconstructing what the assassins did when they were here," said the Groupman. "Each of three men on the team takes the track of one of the assassins, and the fourth man -watches them all as coordinator."

I looked at him. He wore the sleeve emblem of a Dorsai, but he was as ordinary-looking as myself or one of my detectives. Plainly, a first-generation immigrant to that world; which explained why he was wearing the patches of a non-commissioned, rather than a commissioned officer along with that emblem.

"But what kind of signs are they tracking?" I asked.

"Little things, mostly." He smiled. "Tiny things-some things you or I wouldn't be able to see if they were pointed out to us. Sometimes there's nothing and they have to go on guess—that's where the coordinator helps." He sobered. "Looks like black magic, doesn't it? It does, even to me, sometimes, and I've been a Dorsai for fourteen years."

I stared at the moving figures.

"You said—three," I said.

"That's right," answered the Groupman. "There were three snipers. We've tracked them from the office in the building they fired from, to here. This was their headquarters—the place they moved from, to the office, just before the killing. There's sign they were here a couple of days, at least, waiting."

"Waiting?" I asked. "How do you know there were three and they were waiting?"

"Lots of repetitive sign. Habitual actions. Signs of camping beds set up. Food signs for a number of meals. Metal lubricant signs showing weapons had been disassembled and worked over here. Signs of a portable, private phone—they must have waited for a phone call from someone telling them the Commander was on his way in from the encampment."

"But how do you know there were only three?"

"There's sign for only three," he said. "Three—all big for your world, all under thirty. The biggest man had black hair and a full beard. He was the one who hadn't changed clothes for a week—" The Groupman sniffed the air. "Smell him?"

I sniffed hard and long.

"I don't smell a thing," I said.

"Hmm," the Groupman looked grimly pleased. "Maybe those fourteen years have done me some good, after all. The stink of him's in the air, all right. It's one of the things our Hunter Teams followed to this place."

I looked aside at Lee Hall, then back at the soldier.

"You don't need my detectives at all, do you?" I said.

"No sir," he looked me in the face. "But we assume you'd want them to stay with us. That's all right."

"Yes." I said. And I left there. If my men were not needed, neither was I; and I had no time to stand around being useless. There was still Padma to talk to.

But it was not easy to locate the Outbond. The Exotic Embassy either could not or would not tell me where he was; and the Expedition Headquarters in Blauvain also claimed not to know. As a matter of ordinary police work, my own department kept track of important outworlders like the Graeme brothers and the Outbond, as they moved around our city. But in this case, there was no record of Padma ever leaving the room in which I had last seen him with Ian Graeme, early in the day. I finally took my determination in both hands and called Ian himself to ask if Padma was with him.

The answer was a blunt 'no'. That settled it. If Padma was with him, A Dorsai like Ian would have refused to answer rather than lied outright. I gave up. I was lightheaded with fatigue and I told myself I would go home, get at least a few hours sleep, and then try again.

So, with one of the professional soldiers in my police car to vouch for me at roadblocks, I returned to my own dark apartment; and when, alone at last, I came into the living room and turned on the light, there was Padma waiting for me in one of my own chair-floats.

The jar of finding him there was solid—more like an emotional explosion than I would have thought. It was like seeing a ghost in reality, the ghost of someone from whose funeral you have just returned. I stood staring at him.

"Sorry to startle you, Tom," he said. "I know, you were going to have a drink and forget about everything for a few hours. Why don't you have the drink, anyway?"

He nodded toward the bar built into a corner of the apartment living room. I never used the thing unless there were guests on hand; but it was always stocked—that was part of the maintenance agreement in the lease. I went over and punched the buttons for a single brandy and water. I knew there was no use offering Padma alcohol.

"How did you get in here?" I said, with back to him.

"I told your supervisor you were looking for me," Padma said. "He let me in. We Exotics aren't so common on your world here that he didn't recognize me."

I swallowed half the glass at a gulp, carried the drink back, and sat down in a chair opposite him. The background lighting in the apartment had gone on automatically when night darkened the windows. It was a soft light, pouring from the corners of the ceiling and from little random apertures and niches in the walls. Under it, in his blue robe, with this ageless face, Padma looked like the image of a buddah, beyond all the human and ordinary storms of life.

"What are you doing here?" I asked. "I've been looking all over for you."

"That's why I'm here," Padma said. "The situation being what it is, you would want to appeal to me to help you with it. So I wanted to see you away from any place where you might blame my refusal to help on outside pressures."

"Refusal?" I said. It was probably my imagination; but the brandy and water I had swallowed seemed to have gone to my head already. I felt light-minded and unreal. "You aren't even going to listen to me first before saying no?"

"My hope," said Padma, "is that you'll listen to me, first, Tom, before rejecting what I've got to tell you.

You're thinking that I could bring pressure to bear on Ian Graeme to move his soldiers half a world away from Blauvain, or otherwise take the situation out of its critical present phase. But the truth is I could not; and even if I could, I would not."

"Would not," I echoed, muzzily.

"Yes. Would not. But not just because of personal choice. For four centuries now, Tom, we students of the Exotic Sciences have been telling other men and women that our human race was committed to a future, to the workings of history as it is. It's true we Exotics have a calculative technique now, called ontogenetics, that helps us to resolve any present or predicted moment into its larger historical factors.

We've made no secret of having such techniques. But that doesn't mean we can control what will happen, particularly while other men still tend to reject the very thing we work with—the concept of a large, shifting pattern of events that involves all of us and our lives."

"I'm a Catholic," I said. "I don't believe in predestination."

"Neither do we on Mara and Kultis," said Pad-ma. "But we do believe in a physics of human action and interaction, which we believe works in a certain direction, toward a certain goal which we now think is less than a hundred years off—
if
, in fact, we haven't already reached it. Movement toward that goal has been building up for at least the last thousand years; and by now the momentum of its forces is massive.

No single individual or group of individuals at the present time have the mass to oppose or turn that movement from its path. Only something greater than a human being as we know a human being might do that."

"Sure," I said. The glass in my hand was empty. I did not remember drinking the rest of its contents; but the alcohol was bringing me a certain easing of weariness and tension. I got up, went back to the bar, and came back with a full glass, while Padma waited silently. "Sure, I understand. You think you've spotted a historical trend here; and you don't want to interfere for fear of spoiling it A fancy excuse to do nothing."

"Not an excuse, Tom," Padma said; and there was something different, like a deep gong-note in his voice, that blew the fumes of the brandy clear from my wits for a second and made me look at him. "I'm not telling you I won't do anything about the situation. I'm telling you that I can't do anything about it.

Even if I tried to do something, it would be no use. It's not for you alone that the situation is too massive; it's that way for everyone."

"How do you know if you don't try?" I said. "Let me see you try, and it not work Then maybe I'd believe you."

"Tom," he said, "can you lift me out of this chair?"

I blinked at him. I am no Dorsai, as I think I have said, but I am large for my world, which meant in this case that I was a head taller than Padma and perhaps a quarter again the weight. Also I was undoubtedly younger; and I had worked all my life to stay in good physical condition. I could have lifted someone my own weight out of that chair with no trouble, and Padma was less than that.

"Unless you're tied down," I said.

"I'm not." He stood up briefly, and then sat again. "Try and lift me, Tom."

I put my glass down, stepped over to his float and stood behind him. I wrapped my arms around his body under his armpits, and lifted—at first easily, then with all my strength.

But not only could I not lift him, I could not budge him. If he had been a lifesized statue of stone I would have expected to feel more reaction and movement in response to my efforts.

I gave up finally, panting, and stood back from him.

"What do you weigh?" I demanded.

"No more than you think Sit down again, Tom—" I did. "Don't let it bother you. It's a trick, of course.

No, not a mechanical trick, a physiological one—but a trick just the same, that's been shown on stage at times, at least during the last four hundred years."

"Stand up," I said. "Let me try again."

He did. I did. He was still immovable.

"Now," he said, when I had given up a second time. "Try once more; and you'll find you can lift me."

I wiped my forehead, put my arms around him, and heaved upward with all my strength. I almost threw him against the ceiling overhead. Numbly I set him down again.

"You see?" he said, reseating himself "Just as I knew you could not lift me until I let you, I know that there is nothing I can do to alter present events here on St. Marie from their present direction. But you can."

"I can?" I stared at him, then exploded. "Then for God's sake tell me how?"

He shook his head, slowly.

"I'm sorry, Tom," he said. "But that's just what I can't do. I only know that, resolved to ontogenetic terms, the situation here shows you as a pivotal character. On you, as a point, the bundle of human forces that were concentrated here and bent toward destruction by another such pivotal character, may be redirected back into the general historical pattern with a minimum of harm. I tell you this so that being aware of it,
you
can be watching for opportunities to redirect. That's all I can do."

Incredibly, with those words, he got up and went toward the door of the apartment.

"Hold on!" I said, and he stopped, turning back momentarily. "This other pivotal character. Who's he?"

Padma shook his head again.

"It would do you no good to know," he said. "I give you my word he is now far away from the situation and will not be coming back to it He is not even on the planet."

"One of the assassins of Kensie!" I said. "And they've gotten away, off-planet!"

"No," said Padma. "No. The men who assassinated Kensie are only tools of events. If none of them had existed, three others would have been there in their place. Forget this other pivotal character, Tom. He was no more in charge of the situation he created than you are in charge of the situation here and now.

He was simply, like you, in a position that gave him freedom of choice. Good night."

With those last words, he was suddenly out the door and gone. To this day I cannot remember if he moved particularly swiftly; or whether for some reason I now can't remember I simply let him go. Just-all at once I was alone.

Fatigue rolled over me like the heavy waves of some ocean of mercury. I stumbled into the bedroom, fell on my sleeping float, and that was all I remembered until—only a second later, it seemed—I woke to the hammering of my telephone's chimes on my ears.

I reached out, fumbled at the bedside table and pushed the on button.

"Velt here," I said, thickly.

"Tom—this is More. Tom? Is that you, Tom?"

I licked my lips, swallowed and spoke more understandably.

"It's me," I said. "What's the call for?"

"Where've you been?"

"Sleeping," I said. "What's the call for?"

"I've got to talk to you. Can you come—"

"You come here," I said. "I've got to get up and dress and get some coffee in me before I go anyplace.

You can talk to me while I'm doing it."

I punched off. He was still saying something at the other end of the line but just then I did not care what it was.

I pushed my dead-heavy body out of bed and began to move. I was dressed and at the coffee when he came.

"Have a cup." I pushed it at him as he sat down at the porch table with me. He took it automatically.

"Tom—" he said. The cup trembled in his hand as he lifted it and he sipped hastily from it before putting it down again. "Tom, you were in the Blue Front once, weren't you?"

"Weren't we all?" I said. "Back when we and it were young together; and it was an idealistic outfit aimed at putting some order and system into our world government?"

"Yes, yes of course," Moro said. "But what I mean is,
if
you were a member once, maybe you know who to contact now—"

I began to laugh. I laughed so hard I had to put my cup down to avoid spilling it.

"Moro, don't you know better than that?" I said. "If I knew who the present leaders of the Blue Front were, they'd be in jail. The Blauvain police commissioner—the head law enforcement man of our capital city—is the last man the Blue Front would be in touch with nowadays. They'd come to you, first. You were a member once, too, back in college days, remember?"

"Yes," he said miserably. "But I don't know anything now, just as you're saying. I thought you might have informers, or suspicions you couldn't prove, or-"