Гордон Диксон - Soldier, Ask Not

I smiled inside, for he was coming to the very point I had intended to come to three years ago—only I had planned that he should tell me about it, not I, him.

“Isn’t it?” I said, pretending astonishment.

“No,” said Piers strongly. “Just opposite. Bright and his council intend to leave their expeditionary force to be either captured or slaughtered—preferably slaughtered. The result will be just what you were about to claim in the eyes of the fourteen worlds. The principle that any world can be held ransom for debts incurred by its inhabitants is a vital—if not legally recognized—part of the interstellar financial structure. But the Exotics, in conquering the Friendlies on St. Marie, will be rejecting it. The fact that the Exotics are bound by their treaty to answer St. Marie’s appeal for help won’t alter things. Bright will only need to go hunting for help from Ceta, Newton and all the tight-contract worlds to form a league to bring the Exotics to their knees.”

He broke off and stared at me.

“Do you see what I’m driving at now? Do you understand now why I said you were both right—in your notion of an Exotic-Friendly vendetta—and wrong? Do you see,” he asked, “ now , how you were wrong?”

I deliberately stared back at him for a moment before I answered.

“Yes,” I said. I nodded. “I see now. It’s not the Exotics who are out to get the Friendlies. It’s the Friendlies who’re out to get the Exotics.”

“Exactly!” said Piers. “The wealth and specialized knowledge of the Exotics has been the pivot of the association of the loose-contract worlds that allowed them to balance off against the obvious advantage of trading trained people like sacks of wheat, which gives the tight-contract worlds their strength. If the Exotics are broken, the balance of power between the two groups of worlds is destroyed. And only that balance has let our Old World of Earth stand aloof from both groups. Now, she’ll be drawn into one group or another—and whoever gets her will control our Guild, and the up until now impartiality of our News Services.”

He stopped talking and sat back, as if worn out. Then he straightened up again.

“You know what group’ll get Earth if the Friendlies win,” he said, “the tight-contract group. So—where do we, we in the Guild, stand now, Tam?”

I stared back at him, giving him time to believe that his words were sinking into me. But, in reality, I was tasting at last the first slight flavor of my revenge. Here he was, at last, at the point to which I had set out to bring him, a point at which it seemed the Guild faced either the destruction of its high principle of impartiality, forcing it to take sides against the Friendly worlds; or its eventual capture by that partisan group of worlds to which the tight-contract Friendlies belonged. I let him wait, and think himself helpless for a little while. Then I answered him slowly.

“If the Friendlies can destroy the Exotics,” I said, “then possibly the Exotics can destroy the Friendlies. Any situation like this has to have the possibility of tilting with equal force either way. Now if, without compromising our impartiality, I could go to St. Marie for the spring offensive, it might be that this ability of mine to see a little deeper into the situation than others can, might help that tilt.”

Piers stared at me, his face a little white.

“What do you mean?” he said at last. “You can’t openly side with the Exotics—you don’t mean that?”

“Of course not,” I answered. “But I might easily see something that they could turn to their advantage to get out of the situation. If so, I could make sure that they see it, too. There’s nothing certain of success about this; but, as you said, otherwise, where do we stand now?”

He hesitated. He reached for his glass on the table and, as he picked it up, his hand shook a little. It took little insight to know what he was thinking. What I was suggesting was a violation of the spirit of the law of impartiality in the Guild, if not the letter of it. We would be choosing sides—but Piers was thinking that perhaps for the sake of the Guild we should do just that, while the choice was still in our own hands.

“Do you have any actual evidence that Eldest Bright means to leave his occupation forces cut up as they are?” I asked as he hesitated. “Do we know for sure he won’t reinforce them?”

“I’ve got contacts on Harmony trying to get evidence right now—” he was beginning to answer when his desk phone chimed. He pressed a button and it lit up with the face of Tom Lassiri, his secretary.

“Sir,” said Tom. “Call from the Final Encyclopedia. For Newsman Olyn. From a Miss Lisa Kant. She says it’s a matter of the utmost emergency.”

“I’ll take it,” I said, even as Piers nodded. For my heart had lurched in my chest for some reason which I had no time to examine. The screen cleared and Lisa’s face formed on it.

“Tam!” she said, without any other greeting. “Tam, come quick. Mark Torre’s been shot by an assassin! He’s dying, in spite of anything the doctors can do. And he wants to speak to you—to you, Tam, before it’s too late! Oh, Tam, hurry! Hurry as fast as you can!”

“Coming,” I said.

And I went. There was no time to ask myself why I should answer to her summons. The sound of her voice lifted me out of my chair and headed me out of Piers’s office as if some great hand was laid upon my shoulders. I just—went.

Lisa met me at the lobby entrance to the Final Encyclopedia, where I had first caught sight of her years before. She took me into the quarters of Mark Torre by the strange maze and the moving room by which she had taken me there previously; and on the way she told me what had happened.

It had been the inevitable danger for which the maze and the rest of it had been set up originally—the expected, reasonless, statistically fatal chance that had finally caught up with Mark Torre. The building of the Final Encyclopedia had from its very beginning triggered fears latent in the minds of unstable people on all the sixteen civilized worlds of men. Because the Encyclopedia’s purpose was aimed at a mystery that could be neither defined nor easily expressed, it had induced a terror in psychotics both on Earth and elsewhere.

And one of these had finally gotten to Mark Torre—a poor paranoiac who had kept his illness hidden from even his own family while in his mind he fostered and grew the delusion that the Final Encyclopedia was to be a great Brain, taking over the wills of all humanity. We passed his body lying on the floor of the office, when at last Lisa and I reached it, a stick-thin, white-haired, gentle-faced old man with blood on his forehead.

He had, Lisa told me, been admitted by mistake. A new physician was supposed to have been admitted to see Mark Torre that afternoon. By some mistake, this gentle-looking, elderly, well-dressed man had been admitted instead. He had fired twice at Mark and once at himself, killing himself instantly. Mark, with two spring-gun slivers in his lungs, was still alive, but sinking fast.

Lisa brought me at last to him, lying still on his back on the blood-stained coverlet of a large bed in a bedroom just off the office. The clothing had been taken from his upper body and a large white bandage like a bandolier angled across his chest. His eyes were closed and sunken, so that his jutting nose and hard chin seemed to thrust upward almost as if in furious resentment of the death that was slowly and finally dragging his hard-struggling spirit down under its dark waters.

But it was not his face that I remember best. It was the unexpected width of chest and shoulder, and length of naked arm he showed, lying there. I was reminded suddenly, out of the forgotten past of my boyhood history studies, of the witness to the assassinated Abraham Lincoln, lying wounded and dying on the couch, and how that witness had been startled by the power of muscle and bone revealed in the unclothed upper body of the President.