"One of your officers! He was my brother! That's more than being one of your officers! "
"Not," answered Ian in the same voice, "where justice is concerned."
"Justice?" Kenebuck laughed. "Justice for Brian? Is that it?"
"And for thirty-two enlisted men."
"Oh - " Kenebuck snorted laughingly. "Thirty-two men... those thirty-two men!" He shook his head. "I never knew your thirty-two men, Graeme, so you can't blame me for them. That was Brian's fault; him and his idea - what was the charge they tried him on? Oh, yes, that he and his thirty-two or thirty-six men could raid enemy Headquarters and come back with the enemy Commandant. Come back... covered with glory." Kenebuck laughed again. "But it didn't work. Not my fault."
"Brian did it," said Ian, "to show you. You were what made him do it."
"Me? Could I help it if he never could match up to me?" Kenebuck stared down at his glass and took a quick swallow from it then went back to cuddling it in his hands. He smiled a little to himself. "Never could even catch up to me." He looked whitely across at Ian. "I'm just a better man, Graeme. You better remember that."
Ian said nothing. Kenebuck continued to stare at him; and slowly Kenebuck's face grew more savage.
"Don't believe me, do you?" said Kenebuck, softly. "You better believe me. I'm not Brian, and I'm not bothered by Dorsais. You're here, and I'm facing you - alone."
"Alone?" said Ian. For the first time Tyburn, above the ceiling over the heads of the two men, listening and watching through hidden sensors, thought he heard a hint of emotion - contempt - in Ian's voice. Or had he imagined it?
"Alone - Well!" James Kenebuck laughed again, but a little cautiously. "I'm a civilized man, not a hick frontiersman. But I don't have to be a fool. Yes, I've got men covering you from behind the walls of the room here. I'd be stupid not to. And I've got this..." He whistled, and something about the size of a small dog, but made of smooth, black metal, slipped out from behind a sofa nearby and slid on an aircushion over the carpeting to their feet.
Ian looked down. It was a sort of satchel with an orifice in the top from which two metallic tentacles protruded slightly.
Ian nodded slightly.
"A medical mech," he said.
"Yes," said Kenebuck, "cued to respond to the heartbeats of anyone in the room with it. So you see, it wouldn't do you any good, even if you somehow knew where all my guards were and beat them to the draw. Even if you killed me, this could get to me in time to keep it from being permanent. So, I'm unkillable. Give up!" He laughed and kicked at the mech. "Get back," he said to it. It slid back behind the sofa.
"So you see..." he said. "Just sensible precautions. There's no trick to it. You're a military man - and what's that mean? Superior strength. Superior tactics. That's all. So I outpower your strength, outnumber you, make your tactics useless - and what are you? Nothing." He put his glass carefully aside on the table with the decanter. "But I'm not Brian. I'm not afraid of you. I could do without these things if I wanted to."
Ian sat watching him. On the floor above, Tyburn had stiffened.
"Could you?" asked Ian.
Kenebuck stared at him. The white face of the millionaire contorted. Blood surged up into it, darkening it. His eyes flashed whitely.
"What're you trying to do - test me?" he shouted suddenly. He jumped to his feet and stood over Ian, waving his arms furiously. It was, recognized Tyburn overhead, the calculated, self-induced hysterical rage of the hoodlum world. But how would Ian Graeme below know that? Suddenly, Kenebuck was screaming. "You want to try me out? You think I won't face you? You think I'll back down like that brother of mine, that..." he broke into a flood of obscenity in which the name of Brian was freely mixed. Abruptly, he whirled about to the walls of the room, yelling at them. "Get out of there! All right, out! Do you hear me? All of you! Out - "
Panels slid back, bookcases swung aside and four men stepped into the room. Three were those who had been in the foyer earlier when Ian had entered for the first time. The other was of the same type.
"Out!" screamed Kenebuck at them. "Everybody out. Outside, and lock the door behind you. I'll show this Dorsai, this..." almost foaming at the mouth, he lapsed into obscenity again.
Overhead, above the ceiling, Tyburn found himself gripping the edge of the table below the observation screen so hard his fingers ached.
"It's a trick!" he muttered between his teeth to the unhearing Ian. "He planned it this way! Can't you see that?"
"Graeme armed?" inquired the police sensor technician at Tyburn's right. Tyburn jerked his head around momentarily to stare at the technician.
"No," said Tyburn. "Why?"
"Kenebuck is." The technician reached over and tapped the screen, just below the left shoulder of Kenebuck's jacket image. "Slug-thrower."
Tyburn made a fist of his aching right fingers and softly pounded the table before the screen in frustration.
"All right!" Kenebuck was shouting below, turning back to the still-seated form of Ian, and spreading his arms wide. "Now's your chance. Jump me! The door's locked. You think there's anyone else near to help me? Look!" He turned and took five steps to the wide, knee-high to ceiling window behind him, punched the control button and watched as it swung wide. A few of the whirling sleet-ghosts outside drove from out of ninety stories of vacancy, into the opening - and fell dead in little drops of moisture on the windowsill as the automatic weather shield behind the glass blocked them out.
He stalked back to Ian, who had neither moved nor changed expression through all this. Slowly, Kenebuck sank back down into his chair, his back to the night, the blocked-out cold and the sleet.
"What's the matter?" he asked, slowly, acidly. "You don't do anything? Maybe you don't have the nerve, Graeme?"
"We were talking about Brian," said Ian.
"Yes, Brian..." Kenebuck said, quite slowly. "He had a big head. He wanted to be like me, but no matter how he tried - how I tried to help him - he couldn't make it." He stared at Ian. "That's just the way, he never could make it - the way he decided to go into enemy lines when there wasn't a chance in the world. That's the way he was - a loser."
"With help," said Ian.
"What? What's that you're saying?" Kenebuck jerked upright in his chair.
"You helped him lose," Ian's voice was matter of fact. "From the time he was a young boy, you built him up to want to be like you - to take long chances and win. Only your chances were always safe bets, and his were as unsafe as you could make them."
Kenebuck drew in an audible, hissing breath.
"You've got a big mouth, Graeme!" he said, in a low, slow voice.
"You wanted," said Ian, almost conversationally, "to have him kill himself off. But he never quite did. And each time he came back for more, because he had it stuck into his mind, carved into his mind, that he wanted to impress you - even though by the lime he was grown, he saw what you were up to. He knew, but he still wanted to make you admit that he wasn't a loser. You'd twisted him that way while he was growing up, and that was the way he grew."
"Go on," hissed Kenebuck. "Go on, big mouth."
"So, he went off-Earth and became a professional soldier," went on Ian, steadily and calmly. "Not because he was drafted like someone from Newton or a born professional from the Dorsai, or hungry like one of the ex-miners from Coby. But to show you you were wrong about him. He found one place where you couldn't compete with him, and he must have started writing back to you to tell you about it - half rubbing it in, half asking for the pat on the back you never gave him."
Kenebuck sat in the chair and breathed. His eyes were all one glitter.
"But you didn't answer his letters," said Ian. "I suppose you thought that'd make him desperate enough to finally do something fatal. But he didn't. Instead he succeeded. He went up through the ranks. Finally, he got his commission and made Force-Leader, and you began to be worried. It wouldn't be long, if he kept on going up, before he'd be above the field officer grades, and out of most of the actual fighting."