Phail and Elman and Triss all helped bury Gar, and then took the notebook and left. General Ingor, the top Kemistek executive on Anarchaos, was furious when told what had happened, but chose to do nothing. A Kemistek executive, while acting for Kemistek, represented the company in anything he chose to do, so that the General was forced to support Phail's action at least to the extent of maintaining silence about it. This silence was made easier by the fact that Phail had apparently gotten away with it.
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The only thing that did not appear to resolve itself satisfactorily was Gar's notebook. The code he'd used in it proved to be unbreakable. It was perhaps this as much as anything else that influenced the General to punish his three young executives by extending their stay on Anarchaos indefinitely. (In the normal course of events, all three of them would have been assigned to other and surely more pleasant worlds by now.)
In any event, the whole affair seemed safely and permanently closed, and then I turned up. When I asked Lingo for Lastus' address, Lingo immediately reported to Sledge. Phail was the executive who received the information, and he promptly panicked, afraid I would get the truth from Lastus. It was Phail who sent Malik and Rose to loll me, and incidentally to shut Lastus mouth for good and all.
This time, when the others learned what Phail had done, there was increased displeasure, beginning when General Ingor pointed out that I might have been able to shed light on my brother's personal code. But it seemed too late to do anything about it, and except for the fact that Phail seemed to have assured himself a dim future with Kemistek everything remained unchanged.
It was three years later when they were on the tour of the mine and first ran into me. (Three yearsl I reach back for the time, and my memory seems to fall into a hole. Three years, gone forever.) None of them thought of the implications until much later, when it struck Elman that possibly Gar Malone's brother hadn't been killed, that possibly the man who had looked like Gar Malone had been Gar's brother after all. Phail refused to consider the idea when it was presented to him, and Triss was doubtful, but General Ingor thought it best to follow it up. By then, of course, I had alreay made my escape. Still, they had seen me once, and they had a description of me—including the missing hand—and when the story went around Sledge Tower at Prudence about the crazy bearded horseman who had waved a hand-less arm in fury and chased a helicopter while riding a hair-horse, Phail quickly guessed who the horseman might have been.
Once again, Phail was first. It was he who put feelers out for me everywhere it seemed to him that I might go, includ-
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ing the UC Embassy, and he who sent Malik and Rose to get me and bring me to him.
His initial idea was merely to turn me over to the General, but then he saw a way of regaining lost favor by spiriting me away, putting me to work on the notebook, and eventually going to the General with the code completely broken, the message read, the site of the great lost strike pin-pointed precisely. In having me taken away from Prudence to the Sledge research ship in the Sea of Morning, he was hiding me primarily from his own people.
But not exclusively his own people. Just as Kemistek had spies at Wolmak, so Wolmak had spies at Kemistek, and these spies at last became aware of some corners and edges of what had been going on. Additionally, the UC request for information on a man named Rolf Malone had piqued Wolmak's interest. Colonel Whistler and his people did not yet fully understand what was going on, but they knew that something was afoot and that Phail was involved in it. Wolmak was currently trying everything in its power to learn Phail's whereabouts.
So. The simple facts that I had been seeking were now mine. Gar had been betrayed by Lastus into the hands of Phail, who killed him out of irritation. This murder was aided and condoned by Triss and Elman and General Ingor. The trails back from Gar's murder led one way to the woman on another world who had been abrasive with Phail's emotions, and led another way to the rivalry of two mining and chemical corporations for new caches of raw materials.
No one had gone out to murder Gar Malone for being Gar Malone.
It was with the same impersonality that I snuffed the Me from Triss.
XXXII
I wanted to be angry; it would make it much easier to do what I had to do. I thought about the uselessness and stupidity of Gar's death, about the bungling and panic that had cost me years from my life and led to the loss of my hand, about the lost opportunity that Gar had been offering me. I
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thought about it all and I couldn't be angry. I could only feel a heavy regret, a weighted nostalgia and remorse.
Everything was much more difficult this way. Without the blessed blindness of fury, I had to do everything coldly, impersonally, watching myself every step of the way.
Violence done of duty weighs more heavily than violence done out of passion.
I moved through the ship light and quick and silent and unseen, armed with nothing but my hand. From Triss I had learned the location of Phail's quarters and there I hurried; this first part had to be gotten over with as quickly as possible.
I saw no one. According to the artificial time by which everyone on Anarchaos lived it was now late at night, so that only a few crew members were up and about. These I avoided easily, and soon came to Phail's quarters.
The door wasn't even locked. I entered a darkened room, stool silent in the darkness for a while, and finally determined that I was alone; there was no sound of breathing here. I felt my way around the room, touched furniture which indicated it was a parlor or sitting room, and came at last to another doorway, in which the door stood ajar. I paused here, listening, and heard the sound of regular breathing I'd been hoping for.
I moved through the dark to that sound, and reached my hand out, and promptly found his throat. I closed my hand around it.
How the pulse beat against my palml He woke up at once, thrashing and waving his arms around, but I stood and waited and after a time his struggles weakened. I released him when he was lying limp but the pulse was still beating; I didn't want him to die without being sure who was doing it to him, and why.
I left him, and found a light, and switched it on. His face was so altered by lack of breath that for one bad instant I thought I'd come to the wrong room. But it was him, Phail, with his arrogant face and dry sandy hair. He slept nude, and in his thrashings had kicked the covers off; his body was surprisingly pale and thin.
I brought water from the bath and sloshed it on him, then slapped his face until he returned to consciousness. When his
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eyes opened, and I saw that he recognized me, I put my hand on his throat again.
He didn't move. He lay there unblinking, and stared up at me.
I said, "You murdered Gar Malone. I came to Anarchaos to find you and punish you."
Then I closed my hand.
XXXIII
the best did not require individual attention. What did I have to say to General Ingor or Elman or Davus or Malik and Rose?
From the kitchens I obtained the knife with which I disposed of the crewmen on duty, beginning with the mate on watch at the wheel and ending with the two engineers on duty in the engine room. All told, seven men.
I smashed the radio equipment. There were six lifeboats and I punched holes in all of them. I damaged the engines with pliers and a hammer, then punctured the great fuel tank and led a trail of flammable objects down the flight of stairs into the pool of it at the bottom.
The ship was no longer moving through absolute blackness. Far ahead of us, and a bit to the left, there was a red glow on the horizon. As I moved about the ship, sometimes having to travel along the deck, I glanced at the horizon and from it got a feeling of urgency, as though it indicated an actual dawn coming up. It seemed to me as though I must be finished with what I had to do before that dawn.