Gordon R. Dickson (19 page)

"I found out I could get away,"
said Kil, "so I did."' Mali shook his head.

"It
certainly shook things up. I wish I'd known you could do that beforehand."

"You
aren't going to tell me," said Kil, looking straight at him, "that
you'd have acted differently?"

"I
might have. I had to try you out, you know. I can apologize if you want. Not
that it means much in this affair."

"No."
Kil shifted a little impatiently in his chair. "Well, what's this you
wanted to talk to me about?"

"Dekko didn't tell you?"

"Suppose you tell me."

"Of course.
Oh, by the way. I just thought I'd ask you about the conditioning.
The loyalty to me, for example.
How it could
be there one minute and then all gone the next.

It
is—all gone, I suppose?" And Mali's eyes fixed suddenly and unshakablely
on Kil's.

As a
matter of fact, it was not. Kil suddenly recognized the quicksand into which
Mali's casualness had been leading him. At the direct question a remnant of the
conditioned emotion threatened to rise within him, but he thrust it violently
back.

"All gone," he
said.

"And—your
affection for Melee?
All gone?"

In
spite of himself, Kil looked at the girl. She gazed back at him with a look
neither of appeal nor command, but of something like sadness. An odd pity
stirred inside him and he felt the edge of the quicksand crumbling away under
his feet.

"I don't love her," he said coldly;
and Melee's eyes dropped.

"Yes.
Well—" there was now a slight dryness to Mali's tone. "Well, I just
thought I'd try that avenue, though I didn't have any real hopes of it leading
to anything.
Now, to business.
I'm willing to
cooperate, Kil, if you are."

"What kind of
cooperate?"

"I
mean what I say. I want that Project and I think you're the man to help me get
it. Not that I'm convinced it's any real danger to me, but I believe in playing
safe. Help me; I'm willing to make it worthwhile for you."

"Go on," said
Kil.

Mali
put his hands on his knees and leaned forward. The personality of the man came
through to Kil like a compelling force.

"The shift in power from the Police to
me is inevitable, Project or no Project. As I told you, in the combined
Societies, I've got a group of over fifty million adults—that's one out of
every eighty humans on the globe. And they each influence up to a half a dozen
more outside the Societies. That's an overwhelming minority, the way the world
is set up today. So you can take it as a virtual certainty that you and your
wife will eventually be living in a world that I control. Now, I can determine
whether your life in that world will be pleasant or unpleasant; or whether
you'll be allowed to exist in it at all. And I'll guarantee the pleasantness if
you'll cooperate."

He stopped. Kil waited a minute.

"Is that it?" he said.

"Except to be specific.
What I'm offering you will be equal rights
and privileges with any member of the O.T.L., when the time comes. That means
the best possible life, once we're in power. And security."

"And
that's
it?"

"That's it." Mali
sat back.

"All
right," said Kil. He leaned forward in his turn. "You say it's
inevitable that your group takes over. I don't think so."

Mali spread his hands,
wordlessly.

"In
the first place," went on Kil. "You say you've got fifty million
people behind you. I'll take your word on that, though just for the sake of
argument. What makes you sure you're going to hang on to them? What if you didn't?"

"Kil,
what's to stop me?" asked Mali. "It's not just the Societies. People
in general are sick of Files and the Police. Everyone knows that. And I don't
need five million, let alone fifty, to overthrow the Police. Only it's going to
turn out, after I've done it, that those who belong to my Societies are the
favored ones under the new setup. Who won't hop on the bandwagon then?"

"And
what if someone starts building CH bombs with no Police to stop them?"

Mali laughed.

"Kil—"
he said, gently. "You don't think I'm fool enough to do away with Files
and the Police in actuality? No, we just change the names. Put our own
personnel in the Police posts. Relax the residence limits a little and say that
we can't give up our Keys all at once because Society's geared to them."
He laughed again. "You're an amateur at this business, Kil. Don't you know
that real revolutions never work?
Only the fake ones.
Turn the whole world topsy-turvy and everybody gets hurt. But if it's well
planned, you can ^make a minor adjustment up at the top levels without
disturbing the machinery at all."

He smiled at Kil.

"Consider my bandwagon," he said.
"I'm considering the Project's," replied Kil.

Mali sobered all at once.

"What do you mean by
that?" he asked.

"Just
that I think it's pretty sure the Project's got a bandwagon, too," said
Kil. "That name of theirs implies action of some kind. And what I've seen
of them makes it look like an organization—a pretty successful organization,
since you haven't been able to lay your hands on it, with all your fifty
millions. Maybe the Project plans to take over the world. Have you thought of
that?"

"Yes,"
said Mali, slowly. "I thought of it. I was hoping you hadn't."

"I
have," Kil watched him closely. "And as long as there's that
possibility, it strikes me I might be better off with them, especially since my
wife seems already well connected with them."

"Yes,"
Mali's voice was calm. "Maybe you might." He slid a hand into a
pocket of his kilt and lay back. "But I don't believe you, Kil. You aren't
really considering which
is the wisest move
for you.
You've never actually had any idea of joining me, because actually you're a man
of unreasoning prejudices and loyalties, and the fact that your wife belongs to
an opposite side outweighs any logic I could show you. So-"

"A
looped" shouted Dekko, suddenly. "Look out! He must have
rode
in on one of you. Get him!"

He
flung out his arm, indicating a small beetle clinging high on the wall in one
corner of the room. At the same time he swept up an ashtray in his other hand
and threw it. It smashed squarely on the insect and both dropped.

"Come on!" cried Dekko, pulling Kil
from the chair. "Run!" He yanked Kil in the direction of the door to
the hallway of the hotel, through which Mali and Melee were already scrambling.
The four of them tumbled out into the hall.

"There
the$ are!" yelped Dekko, as two heads wearing the riot helmets of a World
Police raiding squad appeared around one end of the corridor. Mali's hand came
out of his tunic pocket with a small gun which spat silver streaks in their
direction. There were several loud explosions at the end of the corridor and
chunks were blown out of the walls. The two heads ducked back.

"This way!" hissed Dekko in Kil's
ear. Kil hesitated.

"The elevator!"

There
was the sound of slow, heavy footsteps in a momentary silence, and slowly
around the end of the corridor, two new figures came into view. They were a
couple of other Police, in laborious movement with guns in their hands and the
glassy sheen of magnetic shield body armor about them. They almost bumped
shoulders as they rounded the corner and blundered hastily apart as the two
shields touched for a fraction of a second and arced viciously.

"Not
the elevator! They can cut power. Come on!" And, taking advantage of the
reeling Policemen's momentary confusion, Dekko pulled Kil down the corridor at
a run in the opposite direction and around the safety of another comer, as Mali
and Melee leaped for the elevator.

They
passed the fire escape tube, an old-fashiond staircase set in a cylinder of
asbestoid concrete and running vertically through the center of the building.
Kil's hand was on the handle of the heavy door that would give entrance to it,
but Dekko still pulled him on.

"Here," he said, a little farther
on. He yanked open a small, waist-high door in the wall, revealing two small
disk elevators, one rising and one falling, side by side.

"Delivery,"
said Dekko. "You take the up. Go up two floors and wait. I'll go down a
floor and draw them off to the street. Wait five minutes and then go down the
fire stair."

Kil
nodded.
He half-jumped, half-wriggled into the next rising
disk.
The space was adequate, but cramped, and a slight claustrophobia
suffocated him as he rose up the dark shaft. A few seconds later a glimmer of
light around the edge of a door warned of the floor above. He let it pass; and
went one floor higher before getting off.

On
the floor where he emerged, the silence was almost shocking. The carpeted
hallway with its softly glowing walls seemed to slumber in a peace unbelievably
remote from the recent violence two flights of stairs down. Hurriedly, Kil went
along the hall back to the door entering on the fire escape tube. He opened it
with caution and stepped through into a different, echoing silence. The slight
scrape of his shoe soles on the concrete seemed to shout the news of his
presence there. He tiptoed to the stairwell and looked down it, straining his
ears.

For
a moment, he saw and heard nothing. And then abruptly—he could not tell whether
it had been above or below him—there was a sudden blast of shots and cries,
cut off as suddenly as they had begun, as if by the momentary opening and
closing of a door. Then silence once more.

Kil
breathed deeply and leaned against the railing overhanging the stairwell. Some
little number of slow seconds went by; and then, slowly, one by one, the sound
of footsteps on the stairs above began to descend toward him.
The par-pause, pat-pause, of someone coming very slowly and
hesitantly down.

He
glanced down the empty spiral of the staircase and then at his Key. The five
minutes Dekko had told him to wait was not yet up. He envisioned one of the men
in body armor coming down to him,
then
changed his
mind. The steps were too light. He backed into a corner of the landing and
stood waiting, staring up the curve of the stair, where it bent out of sight
beyond its own railing and the floor of the curve above him.

Pat-pause, pat-pause, pat-pause.
A head bobbed into sight around the curve of
the railing and turned toward him, continuing down. He stood caught in the
paralysis of shock. It was Melee.

She
did not say anything, or change her pace, but continued to descend toward him
at the same slow rate. Her hands were pressed together at a point just below
her throat and above her breasts. Her slim, white hands were pale against the
soft green of her tunic, and her oval face above them was pale, pale under her
auburn hair. She looked at Kil with wide, shocked eyes.

"Melee—" he said, huskily.

She opened her mouth as if to answer him, but
she said nothing. She stepped carefully down the last two steps and came slowly
to him across the landing. As she reached him, her knees buckled and he caught
her, easing her to the landing and
himself
with her,
so that he sat on the top stair, holding her against him. She lay with her
head against his chest, still holding her hands pressed tightly to her. Her
eyelids fluttered, and she gazed at him with a wondering look.

"Kil—?"
she said. It was more a small whimper than
a
word.

"Melee," he said.
"Are you hurt? Let me see."

He
pulled her hands away. There was a singed hole in the tunic and
a
little spot of red. It was high on her chest and did not look serious,
but when he tried to open the tunic, she stopped him.

"No," she
murmured.
"Ugly now.
I don't want you to
see."

"Melee, we've got to
fix it!"