Kenebuck sat perfectly still, a little leaning forward. He looked almost as if he were praying, or putting all the force of his mind to willing that Ian finish what he had started to say.
"And so," said Ian, "on his twenty-third birthday - which was the day before the night on which he led his men against orders into the enemy area - you saw that he got this birthday card..." He reached into a side pocket of his civilian jacket and took out a white, folded card that showed signs of having been savagely crumpled but was now smoothed out again. Ian opened it and laid it beside the decanter on the table between their chairs, the sketch and legend facing Kenebuck. Kenebuck's eyes dropped to look at it.
The sketch was a crude outline of a rabbit, with a combat rifle and battle helmet discarded at its feet, engaged in painting a broad yellow stripe down the center of its own back. Underneath this picture was printed in block letters, the question - "WHY FIGHT IT?"
Kenebuck's face slowly rose from the sketch to face Ian, and the millionaire's mouth stretched at the corners, and went on stretching into a ghastly version of a smile.
"Was that all... ?" whispered Kenebuck.
"Not all," said Ian. "Along with it, glued to the paper by the rabbit, there was this - "
He reached almost casually into his pocket.
"No, you don't!" screamed Kenebuck triumphantly. Suddenly he was on his feet, jumping behind his chair, backing away toward the darkness of the window behind him. He reached into his jacket and his hand came out holding the slug-thrower, which cracked loudly in the room. Ian had not moved, and his body jerked to the heavy impact of the slug.
Suddenly, Ian had come to life. Incredibly, after being hammered by a slug, the shock of which should have immobilized an ordinary man, Ian was out of the chair on his feet and moving forward. Kenebuck screamed again - this time with pure terror - and began to back away, firing as he went.
"Die, you - ! Die!" he screamed. But the towering Dorsai figure came on. Twice it was hit and spun clear around by the heavy slugs, but like a football fullback shaking off the assaults of tacklers, it plunged on, with great strides narrowing the distance between it and the retreating Kenebuck.
Screaming finally, Kenebuck came up with the back of his knees against the low sill of the open window. For a second his face distorted itself out of all human shape in a grimace of its terror. He looked, to right and to left, but there was no place left to run. He had been pulling the trigger of his slugthrower all this time, but now the firing pin clicked at last upon an empty chamber. Gibbering, he threw the weapon at Ian, and it flew wide of the driving figure of the Dorsai, now almost upon him, great hands outstretched.
Kenebuck jerked his head away from what was rushing toward him. Then, with a howl like a beaten dog, he turned and flung himself through the window before those hands could touch him, into ninety-odd stories of unsupported space. And his howl carried away down into silence.
Ian halted. For a second he stood before the window, his right hand still clenched about whatever it was he had pulled from his pocket. Then, like a toppling tree, he fell.
- As Tyburn and the technician with him finished burning through the ceiling above and came dropping through the charred opening into the room. They almost landed on the small object that had come rolling from Ian's now-lax hand. An object that was really two objects glued together. A small paint-brush and a transparent tube of glaringly yellow paint.
"I hope you realize, though," said Tyburn, two weeks later on an icy, bright December day as he and the recovered Ian stood just inside the Terminal waiting for the boarding signal from the spaceliner about to take off for the Sirian worlds, "what a chance you took with Kenebuck. It was just luck it worked out for you the way it did."
"No," said Ian. He was as apparently emotionless as ever; a little more gaunt from his stay in the Manhattan hospital, but he had mended with the swiftness of his Dorsai constitution. "There was no luck. It all happened the way I planned it."
Tyburn gazed in astonishment.
"Why..." he said, "if Kenebuck hadn't had to send his hoods out of the room to make it seem necessary for him to shoot you himself when you put your hand into your pocket that second time - or if you hadn't had the card in the first place - " He broke off, suddenly thoughtful. "You mean... ?" he stared at Ian. "Having the card, you planned to have Kenebuck get you alone... ?"
"It was a form of personal combat," said Ian. "And personal combat is my business. You assumed that Kenebuck was strongly entrenched, facing my attack. But it was the other way around."
"But you had to come to him - "
"I had to appear to come to him," said Ian, almost coldly. "Otherwise he wouldn't have believed that he had to kill me - before I killed him. By his decision to kill me, he put himself in the attacking position."
"But he had all the advantages!" said Tyburn, his head whirling. "You had to fight on his ground, here where he was strong..."
"No," said Ian. "You're confusing the attack position with the defensive one. By coming here, I put Kenebuck in the position of finding out whether I actually had the birthday card, and the knowledge of why Brian had gone against orders into enemy territory that night. Kenebuck planned to have his men in the foyer shake me down for the card - but they lost their nerve."
"I remember," murmured Tyburn.
"Then, when I handed him the package, he was sure the card was in it. But it wasn't," went on Ian. "He saw his only choice was to give me a situation where I might feel it was safe to admit having the card and the knowledge. He had to know about that, because Brian had called his bluff by going out and risking his neck after getting the card. The fact Brian was tried and executed later made no difference to Kenebuck. That was a matter of law - something apart from hoodlum guts, or lack of guts. If no one knew that Brian was braver than his older brother, that was all right; but if I knew, he could only save face under his own standards by killing me."
"He almost did," said Tyburn. "Any one of those slugs - "
"There was the medical mech," said Ian, calmly. "A man like Kenebuck would be bound to have some thing like that around to play safe - just as he would be bound to set an amateur's trap." The boarding horn of the spaceliner sounded. Ian picked up his lug gage bag. "Good-by," he said, offering his hand to Tyburn.
"Good-by..." he muttered. "So you were just going along with Kenebuck's trap, all of it. I can't believe it..." He released Ian's hand and watched as the big man swung around and took the first two strides away toward the bulk of the ship shining in the winter sunlight. Then, suddenly, the numbness broke clear from Tyburn's mind. He ran after Ian and caught at his arm. Ian stopped and swung half-around, frowning slightly.
"I can't believe it!" cried Tyburn. "You mean you went up there, knowing Kenebuck was going to pump you full of slugs and maybe kill you - all just to square things for thirty-two enlisted soldiers under the command of a man you didn't even like? I don't believe it - you can't be that cold-blooded! I don't care how much of a man of the military you are!"
Ian looked down at him. And it seemed to Tyburn that the Dorsai face had gone away from him, some how become as remote and stony as a face carved high up on some icy mountain's top.
''But I'm not just a man of the military," Ian said. "That was the mistake Kenebuck made, too. That was why he thought that stripped of military elements, I'd be easy to kill."
Tyburn, looking at him, felt a chill run down his spine as icy as wind off a glacier.