Gordon R. Dickson (11 page)

Very
gently, he produced a cube-shape no larger than a ring box. Gently, he opened
it. By the illumination of some fluorescent pigment in the walls of the box,
Kil saw what seemed to be a sleeping fly with a band of dull black about its
thorax.

"Special
resistant strain," said Dekko. "This area will have been sprayed, but
the looper should be good for about an hour. Now we check—"

His
fingers moved over the box on the three tripod legs. The band of dull black on
the fly seemed to glitter briefly with obsidian lights. And the fly stirred.
With insect drowsiness it fluttered its wings, cleaned its forelegs and
abruptly took off, disappearing in the dark.

Dekko
gestured with one finger to the spectacles and Kil, reaching up, moved the
little built-in lever to its original position. Abruptly, he almost reeled with
something like vertigo as he found himself weaving through the night air some
two feet or so above the ground. The dark mass of the Lodge loomed up over him.
The pinprick of light attracted and he flew toward it.

The
hole in the window grew as he approached. He flew to it, clung to the pane
below it, and squeezed through into brilliance. He found himself only inches
above the floor in a large room filled with a long conference table at which
people sat. Soundlessly, he flew up and clung to the ceiling. The scene reeled,
what was up, now becoming down; and

Kil
found himself gazing down at the heads of those at the table.

The
group seated about did not fill the table. There was space for perhaps as many
more again. Those that were there, therefore, were clustered around one end at
which sat a slim, brown-headed young man with a striking resemblance to Melee.

"—as
of the twenty-third," this young man was saying.
"I
don't like this looseness in the
organization. Rumor of Sub-E has leaked to the Unstabs and whoever leaked it
was from one of our inner group of Societies."

"Question,"
said a short man with a hard, round face above a grey tunic. "You're sure
of that?"

"The
original mention of Sub-E was in the report of a junor codist of the World
Police, who received a reference to it from Files while coding for a solution
on a series of unexplained, supernatural sort of phenomena which has been
coming to Police notice during the last few years. He did not check back
immediately, for some reason and when he did, all information on Sub-E,
including the name itself, had become unavailable under the self-censoring
circuit. His report was copied by one of our agents inside the Police and
handed directly to me."

"I'd say the responsibility might be
yours," said the hard-faced man.

"No you wouldn't," replied the
young man pleasantly. "No you wouldn't, Carson, at all."

There was no change of expression either in
his voice or his face, but a slight pause followed his words, and the
hard-faced man said no more.

"The agent?" suggested somebody
else.

"Perfectly
trustworthy," answered the young man, turning his attention to this new
speaker. "Not conditioned, unfortunately, since he's liable to regular
check as Police Personnel. But I had a cover made on his movements and he
didn't have any chance at all to pass off the information, up until the time I
mentioned it to a meeting of this council, six months ago."

"Question?" said a dark-skinned
woman sitting farther down the table. "What is this self-censoring circuit
business? It's the first I've heard of any such thing."

"Police-restricted
information," said the young man, smiling at her. "As far as we can
gather, it seems to be some sort of ultimate control system whereby Files can
censor itself in the case of information which it computes as having a high
probability index of danger to the public welfare."

"Isn't
there someone in the Police who can throw out that censoring circuit and get
the information?"

The young man shrugged.

"You
know—" he said. "The Police have always insisted that even they don't
know where Files is located. As far as the men we've got in their ranks can
tell, they're telling the truth. W know that the leads from the coding machines
go to a central cable which drops directly down, vertically into the ground,
for fifteen hundred feet before it goes through a completely spy-proof shield
and we lose it completely. Where it comes up, and if it comes up, is anybody's
guess."

"We
ought to be able to find out somehow," murmured a tall, thin man further
up the table.

"We're
working on it." The young man leaned forward a little over the table.
"None of you should forget that while we've got some sympathizers and
adherents among the Police, we're not in possession of all their top men and
all their top secrets, by a long shot. For one thing, the Commissioner
continues to slip through our fingers."

"The Commissioner!"
It was the hard-faced man again. "Are
you even sure there is such a man?"

"Perfectly
sure," replied the young man, coolly. "He handles all the long range
policy planning and has authority even over the official
six-months
heads when each one is in office. But outside of that fact and.the scrap of
information that he's known to the Police themselves as Mc'Elroy—"

—Out
on the hillside, under the stars, Kil started so hard (hat the spectacles
almost slipped off his nose—

"—we
don't know anything about him.
Except, of course, that he's a
fantastically capable man."

"Too
capable for you to handle, maybe," said the hard-faced man, "by
yourself this way. If—"

"No, Carson," said the young man,
gently. "Just because I give credit where credit is due, don't jump to a
false conclusion. You all know my capabilities, I think. And none of you doubt
them, do you?" His glance covered the table, from which there was silence.
"What I was saying was just that this McElroy is a capable opponent. In
fact—" his smile broadening, the young man tilted back his head and
looked up at the ceiling where the fly was. To Kil, it seemed as if his eyes
were staring directly into Kil's own. "In fact," the young man
repeated, "he may be the very person who's spying upon us at this moment.
Take
him,
men!"

Warned
too late, Kil ripped frantically at his spectacles. But they were hardly
halfway off before two heavy bodies landed simultaneously upon him. Fighting
furiously, he was conscious of something tremendously hard that collided with
his head and then—darkness.

CHAPTER
NINE

Kil
came back, to light, and warmth and
consciousness.
The
bright glare of a well-lit room dazzled his eyes and his head was aching
furiously. Even as he awoke, however, this last faded artd disappeared, leaving
only a dull, uncomfortable feeling, as if the ache had not so much been done
away with, as tucked away in the back of his mind somewhere and hidden from
conscious discovery by his nerves.

"That
should do it," said a voice; and Kil, looking up, saw it was the
brown-haired young man who so resembled Melee, speaking. He was putting aside
on a table a small atomizer half-full of colorless liquid. "How do you
feel now?"

"Better,"
muttered Kil.

He
looked around him. He was in the same conference room he had been watching, but
only a few of the people he had seen through the medium of the fly were there.
Among these was Melee, who had not earlier been present at the conference. She
regarded him from a little distance, with no readable expression.

"Where's Dekko?" asked Kil,
thickly.

"Your friend?" said the young man.
"He seems to have got away—for the moment, anyway. We ought to have him in
an hour or so." He looked at Kil, humorously. "You're something new
even among Melee's boy friends. What did you expect to gain by spying on
her?"

Kil,
about to retort in astonishment, caught a particular intensity in the young
man's gaze and checked himself in time from reacting.

"Well,"
went on the young man. "Since this is a family matter, I think maybe the
three of us would be better off talking it over in private. So if you'll come
with me, Melee, and," he turned to Kil again, "you too, we'll go to
my study."

Kil
got somewhat shakily to his feet and followed brother and sister out of the
room.

They
went down a short hallway and into a small, square, comfortable room. The young
man closed the door behind them and made some adjustments in a small,
clock-like mechanism attached to it.

"There,"
he said, coming further into the room and throwing himself loosely into a
chair. "Sit down, Melee.
You too, Kil.
Oh, by the
way, Kil, Mali is my name. As you probably guess, Melee and I are twins. Now,
let's get down to the truth of this. Just what were you after?"

"Kil!" said
Melee, suddenly.

"Hush
now, baby," interrupted Mali, gently, in the tones of a father talking to
a fretful child. "Let him tell me."

"I want to find my
wife," said Kil, bluntly.

Melee's
face suddenly went pale; and Mali's eyebrows went up.

Kil
told him, fully and honestly. After he had finished, Mali stared at him for a
long moment in silence and then turned to his sister.

"Weil,"
he said. "What do you think of this? Or did you know it before?"

With
a sudden furious movement, she whipped her head away from him, and stood
staring into a far corner of the room, without answering.

"Now,"
he said, in that same gentle tone, "I wasn't criticising. You shouldn't
fight me, baby. Come here."

He held out his hand
Slowly
she looked back at him. Slowly she walked over to his chair and he took her
lightly by the wrist.

"My
sister," he said, softly, turning to Kil, "is very insecure. She
needs constant reassurance."

Seeing
her as she stood there, nakedly docile, Kil suddenly realized the terrible
quality of truth in Mali's words. And Dekko's assesment: "She's got tangle
circuits up top," came back to him.

"She
doesn't believe anyone—even me sometimes. But she should," went on Mali,
tenderly. "I've looked out for her since she was a little girl, haven't I,
Melee?"

"Yes,"
she murmured, almost inaudibly, her face downcast toward the carpet and looking
at neither one of them.

"Ever
since our father died; and we were children. I've never let anyone hurt you,
have I Melee?"

She shook her head, still
staring at the carpet.

"No," she
whispered.

"You know you can trust me, then, don't
you?" She nodded.

"Then
you let me handle this in my own way." He let go of her wrist and sat
looking at her. "Go back and sit down, baby. I'll take care of
everything."

She
walked away to a distant chair and sat down apart. She turned back to Kil.

"I
don't know if I believe you or not," he said. "But it's easy enough
to check your story. I can check quite simply with the Acapulco local police,
Marsk, and the Ace you say you talked to. This Dekko—we should have him
shortly. As far as McElroy's concerned—" he paused and looked at Kil, for
a long, calculating moment. "Well, we'll see if your story checks."

"And
if it checks," demanded Kil, "what?" "Why, I'll decide
whether you're telling the truth or not. And if you are, I might help
you."
"You?"

"I. The O.T.L.
That's what you say you were after here, wasn't it? Help from the
O.T.L. to find your wife?"

"Can you speak for the whole
O.T.L.?" said Kil, bluntly.

Mali smiled.

"Yes,"
he said. "Yes, we have a little convention here. We pretend that I'm just
one of a governing board for handling the O.T.L. and the member societies as a
unit. But it's just that—a convention."

Kil considered him, grimly
and a little skeptically.

"You think a lot of
yourself."

"That's right,"
replied Mali, evenly. "I do."