Gordon Dickson - Dorsai!

Lee hesitated. His voice, when he answered, had a note of puzzlement in it.

“I don’t know, sir,” he answered. “Something — sour, sort of. I could just barely smell it.”

“That’s the best you can do?” inquired Donal. “Something sour?”

“1 don’t know, sir,” said Lee. “I’ve got a pretty good nose, Force — in fact,” a note of belligerence crept into his voice. “I’ve got a damned good nose. I never smelled anything like this before. I’d remember.”

“Have either of you men ever contracted on this planet before?”

“No,” said Lee.

“No, sir,” answered Morphy.

“I see,” said Donal. They had reached the same log from which they had started a little less than three hours before. “Well, that’ll be all. Thank you, Groupmen.”

He sat down on the log again. The other two hesitated a moment; and then went off together.

Left alone, Donal consulted the map again; and sat thinking for a while. Then he rose, and hunting up Morphy, told him to take over the Force, and stay awake. Donal himself was going to Command HQ. Then he took off.

Command HQ was a blackout shell containing a sleepy orderly, a map viewer and Skuak.

“The commandant around?” asked Donal, as he came in.

“Been asleep three hours,” said Skuak. “What’re you doing up? I wouldn’t be if I didn’t have the duty.”

“Where’s he sleeping?”

“About ten meters off in the bush, at eleven o’clock,” said Skuak. “What’s it all about? You aren’t going to wake him, are you?’

“Maybe he’ll still be awake,” said Donal; and went out.

Outside the shell, and the little cleared space of the HQ area, he cat-footed around to the location Skuak had mentioned. A battle hammock was there, slung between two trees, with a form mounding its climate cover. But when Donal reached in to put his hand on the form’s shoulder, it closed only on the soft material of a rolled-up battle jacket.

Donal breathed out and turned about. He went back the way he had come, past the Command HQ area, and was stopped by a sentry as he approached the village.

“Sorry, Force,” said the sentry. “Commandant’s order. No one to go into the village area. Not even himself, he says. Booby traps.”

“Oh, yes — thank you, sentry,” said Donal; and, turning about, went off into the darkness.

As soon as he was safely out of sight, however, he turned again, and worked his way back past the sentry lines and in among the houses of the village. The small but very bright moon which the Harmonites called The Eye of the Lord was just rising, and throwing, through the ruined walls, alternate patches of tricky silver and black. Slipping in and out of the black places, he began patiently to search the place, house by house, and building by building.

It was a slow and arduous process, carried out the way he was doing it, in complete silence. And the moon mounted in the sky. It was nearly four hours later that he came upon what he was searching for.

In the moonlit center of a small building’s roofless shell stood Hugh Killien, looking very tall and efficient in his chameleon battle-dress. And close to him — almost close enough to be in his arms — was Anea, the Select of Kultis. Beyond them both, blurred by action of the polarizer that had undoubtedly been the means of allowing it to carry her invisibly to this spot, was a small flying platform.

“…Sweet,” Hugh was saying, his resonant voice pitched so low it barely carried to the ears of Donal, shrouded in shadow outside the broken wall, “Sweet, you must trust me. Together we can stop him; but you must let me handle it. His power is tremendous—”

“I know, I know!” she interrupted, fiercely, all but wringing her hands. “But every day we wait makes it more dangerous for you, Hugh. Poor Hugh—” gently she raised her hand to touch his cheek, “what I’ve dragged you into.”

“Dragged? Me?” Hugh laughed, low and confidently. “I went into this with my eyes open.” He reached out for her. “For you—”

But she slipped away from him.

“Now’s not the time for that,” she said. “Anyway, it’s not me you’re doing this for. It’s Kultis. He’s not going to use me,” she said fiercely, “to get my world under his thumb!”

“Of course, it’s for Kultis,” said Hugh. “But you are Kultis, Anea. You’re everything I love about the Exotics. But don’t you see; all we have to work on are your suspicions. You think he’s planning against the Bond, against Sayona, himself. But that’s not enough for us to go to Kultis with.”

“But what can I do?” she cried. “I can’t use his own methods against him. I can’t lie, or cheat, or set agents on him while he still holds my contract. I… I just can’t. That’s what being Select means!” She clenched her fists. “I’m trapped by my own mind, my own body.” She turned on him suddenly. “You said when I first spoke to you, two months ago you said you had evidence!”

“I was mistaken,” Hugh’s tone was soothing. “Something came to my attention — at any rate I was wrong. I have my own built-in moral system, too, Anea. It may not reach the level of psychological blockage like yours,” he drew himself up, looking very martial in the moonlight. “But I know what’s honorable and right.”

“Oh, I know. I know, Hugh—” she was all contrition, “But I get so desperate. You don’t know—”

“If he had only made some move against you personally—”

“Me?” She stiffened. “He wouldn’t dare! A Select of Kultis — and besides,” she added with more of a touch of common sense than Donal had heretofore given her credit for possessing, “that’d be foolish. He’d have nothing to gain; and Kultis would be alerted against him.”

“I don’t know,” Hugh scowled in the moonlight. “He’s a man like anyone else. If I thought—”

“Oh, Hugh!” she giggled suddenly, like any schoolgirl. “Don’t be absolutely ridiculous!”

“Ridiculous!” His tone rang with wounded feelings.

“Oh, now — I didn’t mean that. Hugh, now stop looking like an elephant that just had his trunk stung by a bee. There’s no point in making things up. He’s far too intelligent to—” she giggled again, then sobered. “No, it’s his head we have to worry about; not his heart.”

“Do you worry about my heart?” he asked in a low voice.

She looked down at the ground.

“Hugh — I do like you,” she said. “But you don’t understand. A Select is a… a symbol.”

“If you mean you can’t—”

“No, no, not that—” she looked up quickly. “I’ve no block against love, Hugh. But if I was involved in something… something small, and mean, it’s what it would do to those back on Kultis to whom a Select means something — You do understand?”

“I understand that I’m a soldier,” he said. “And that I never know whether I’ll have a tomorrow or not.”

“I know,” she said. “And they send you out on things like this, dangerous things.”

“My dear little Anea,” he said, tenderly. “How little you understand what it is to be a soldier. I volunteered for this job.”

“Volunteered?” She stared at him.

“To go look for danger — to go look for opportunities to prove myself!” he said, fiercely. “To make myself a name, so that the stars will believe I’m the kind of man a Select of Kultis could want and belong with!”

“Oh, Hugh!” she cried on a note of enthusiasm. “If you only could! If only something would make you famous. Then we could really fight him!”

He checked, staring at her in the moonlight with such a sandbagged expression that Donal, in the shadows, nearly chuckled.

“Must you always be talking about politics?” he cried.