The masked man gave a hollow laugh. “That means nothing. The Titans love drama.”
“Yes, perhaps –” The Chairman turned suddenly as the door opened behind him, a pistol leaping into his hand.
But it was only the guard. “There’s a report of Titan patrols in the area, Chairman. Thought you had better know.”
“Thank you. You’d best get away, and tell the street observers to do the same.”
The door closed behind the guard. “We’ll wind it up now, for safety’s sake,” the Chairman ordered quickly. “Is anyone without a cover?”
Sobrie held up his hand. Being an artist, he was generally obliged to travel without being able to supply any particular reason. The others would all have equipped themselves with business or personal cover-motives for being in Cymbel. Most of them would be attending the World Economic Integration Conference Preliminary Hearings – the reason why Cymbel had been chosen for this meeting.
“Right, you leave first,” the Chairman ordered. “If the guard’s still here ask him to guide you past the patrols, and leave the city right away.” He glanced around the table. “You’ll all be notified of the next meeting.”
Without ceremony Sobrie left the room. The others would follow at ten-minute intervals, the masked man leaving last of all.
The guard had already vanished. Sobrie checked the alley outside, then slipped from the derelict building. He strode quickly, almost running, until he reached the narrow defile that gave out on to a main thoroughfare.
The Titans had probably cottoned on to the fact that planet-wide conventions were a good opportunity for clandestine meetings, he thought. The Chairman would have to think of something else.
He saw one or two uniformed Titans about, but guessed that most of them were in civilian clothes. It was not hard to spot the tall, fair-haired young men by the cold, supercilious way they scanned the faces of passersby. Probably there were some people known to them that they were hoping to find.
He forced himself not to cringe as he walked by them. He was still worried by his obvious association with his own brother. But that had been weeks ago, and there had come no knock in the night. He could only presume that he had covered his tracks well. And the one track he had not covered, Blare had covered for him. With an s-grenade.
He arrived at Cymbel’s large transport field and bought a seat on the next rocket to Sannan. He had over an hour to wait, so he had a drink to calm his nerves, then decided the reception lounge wasn’t the best place to be hanging around. He went into the district adjoining the field, wandered around for a few minutes and went into a public drinking lounge. After a couple more drinks he felt better.
There was really nothing to be afraid of, he told himself. The Chairman was simply being overcautious – a wholly admirable strategy. The Panhumanic League hadn’t gone through over a century of experience without learning how to survive.
Several drinks later the rocket roared off from the transport field with Sobrie aboard. During the two-hour flight, arcing up above the best part of the atmosphere, he tried to sleep; but his head ached and he thought constantly of his brother.
It was an autumn evening when the rocket planed down into his native city of Sannan. It was a beautiful city, untouched by the dev wars. Rows of apartment blocks marched across the skyline, shining with muted colours in the slanting sunlight. Challenging them for prominence were the domes and towers of cathedrals, once centres of the old religions for which Sannan had been famous. These religions had been discouraged and were practically defunct now; the cathedrals were used for Titan pageants and for ceremonies revering the Earth Mother.
He left the transport field, his head clearing slightly in the fresh evening air, and took the tubeway to his own district. With a feeling of sanctuary he walked into his apartment, into the welcoming presence of Layella, the woman he lived with.
There were times when Sobrie felt weary of everything, weary of the cause he lived for, and felt tempted to give way to the persistent social pressure and to think: to hell with it, let’s just live comfortably. What does it matter what happens to those others? That was how everyone else thought. The Titans, after all, are only working for the good of us, of real people. It can’t be helped what happens to those others.
But then he would look again at Layella and renew his faith. She was one reason why he would probably never, not at any price, give up the cause. For Layella was of mixed blood.
Racially impure. Part Amhrak.
The percentage was not large – she herself did not know if it came from a grandparent or a great-grandparent, or even if some recessive genes had happened to come to the top – and because of her skilful use of cosmetics it passed unnoticed by the average citizen. Sobrie, by long loving acquaintance, was familiar with the differences and was eternally fascinated by the off-beat beauty they gave her. She had the small head and rounded cranium of the Amhraks – though not to an exaggerated degree – and the round, soft eyes, which she contrived to flatten a little with eye-paint. One dangerous feature was her ears, and therefore she kept them hidden beneath her hair, which was a soft, neatly cut shell of orange. Her skin shade was wrong, too – tending slightly towards Amhrak red – and for this she used a skin dye.
Other small differences in body proportion and stance she accentuated away by attention to her dress.
Provided life was quiet and uneventful she was safe. They could not marry, of course, since to be legally married both parties were required to obtain racial purity certificates, but otherwise no one of average percipience would know her apart from a True Woman.
But Sobrie knew – they both knew – that she could never pass muster if examined by the anthropometricians, the Titans’ racial experts. They would come along with their tapes and calipers. They would measure her nose, her cranium, a hundred and one bodily measurements. They would apply a chemical to her skin to bleach away any dye and measure the skin-tone with a colouro-meter. They would take some hair to test for disguised crinkliness. They would strip her and observe the configuration of her bones when she walked, when she sat on a chair, and if they wanted to be exhaustive they would take a retinal photograph and run a chromosome test.
But more probably, he thought, they would do scarcely any of those things. They would not have to hunt so far to identify her. Some of these race experts, so he had heard, were real masters who by their own boast could “tell blood at a glance”. They would take one look at her, and tell her to walk across the room, or else put a chair in the middle of the room and make her sit on it, noting the position of her buttocks. And they would know. And they would take her away and give her a painless injection, or perhaps worse, send her to the Amhrak reservation.
He flung himself down on a couch, exhausted by the content of the day, and waited while she brought him a soothing bowl of soup. Then he told her about Blare.
Her sympathy, thankfully, was not embarrassing, as that of his League comrades had been. She knew his moods and his needs, as if by an instinct. She sat beside him, a hand touching his thigh, and said little.
He drank the soup quickly and leaned back with a doleful sigh.
“Layella,” he said with difficulty, “we must part.”
Her eyes widened with alarm. “Why?”
“It’s getting too dangerous.” He sought for words to make her understand. In some ways she was strangely oblivious to the danger that had surrounded her, almost since birth. Just like Blare, he thought with a sudden feeling of surprise.