He looked off through space at Strada and whispered aloud, “There is the nerve center. There is the real battleground. There is the head of the beast. Neither side will quite dare to destroy it for it is the guarantee of power for both the League and the Center.
“If it were gone the chaos of mismanagement would divide the planets into the island empires — warring empires. If either the Center or the League should attempt to move away from Strada, to move the top leaders of either faction, Strada would cease to exist. Our only security is in each other’s arms. Hardly an embrace of love.”
The decision would have to be made and soon. There were restless lieutenants who would not hesitate at an assassination of their own Chief if they became convinced that he was becoming a burden to the Center. And indecision would start them thinking along that line.
He pushed the button again and the wall slowly took on the look of solidity. He faced the room and said softly, “Awaken me in five hours.”
The substance of the bed folded up around him and the temperature of the room quickly sank to the exact degree which he preferred.
Though Kama of the League had no thought for women, he had slowly and pleasantly grown quite aware of one of the four female guards who gave him the substitution check whenever he left his working area, one of the most carefully guarded of all the League installations on Strada.
For a time he was merely subconsciously aware that one of the guards smiled at him. And later he singled her out. She was not tall, quite rounded, not really pretty in any way. But Kama had a deep mistrust of beauty in any form. This one had a way of looking at him that disturbed him and set his mind working in half-forgotten patterns.
Much to his disgust he found himself thinking of her during the hours when he should have been giving all of his attention to the problem of deduction which the change in Center methods had brought up.
Kama was oddly shy for all of his power as one of the most influential, though anonymous, members of The Three. And so it was another week before he brought himself to request her plate, giving then the somewhat awkward excuse that he was spot-checking defensive operations. He fitted the plate into the desk translator and the tiny magnetized areas were transformed into written information.
Her name was Maen, followed by the usual index number giving the code for the planet of birth, year of induction into the sub-rosa service of the League, intelligence rating. He found to his secret pleasure that she was assigned a small room of her own in the second sublevel under the guard station to which she was attached.
On the next day he called her by name and she flushed with pleasure. And that evening she found a chance to whisper to him her room number and a time.
Two minutes after the time she had mentioned, as Kama entered her room, she held the muzzle of the issue farris over his heart and pulled the trigger. Kama found time, even as his life exploded into nothingness, to wonder professionally how on Strada she had managed to be substituted for the genuine Maen, whose loyalties naturally were beyond question.
She made the routine hopeless attempt to escape and the alerted guard trapped her as was the custom by a judicious use of the wall projectors which froze the main motor nerves. The surgeon on duty studied the exact position of the deadly pellet imbedded deep beside the spinal cord.
She was wheeled behind the shields and the surgeon made the usual hopeless attempt to guide the mechanical hands which performed the operation. The pellet was laid bare but as the attempt was made to deactivate it exploded with a violence that bulged the heavy plates and stunned the surgeon.
Had he permitted her to regain the power to speak she would have exploded the pellet by saying the key word. Had he attempted a mechanical means of tapping memory the pellet would have been activated.
As was expected, no trace was discovered as to the method by which the substitution had been arranged. Her cover had been protected by a false master plate which covered the minute physiological differences that could not be duplicated. All guards, following the incident, were cross-checked so mercilessly that two of them, driven into complete mindlessness, had to be destroyed.
Martha Kaynan looked out of the window at the grey overcast day and wondered what had happened to her. This short vacation had been intended as a gap in her New York activities which of late had become quite flavorless. She had not anticipated much in the way of interest or pleasure. But there was a strange spell on this coast. The known realities had faded and there was an extreme clarity here.
Some of her self-confidence was gone. Yesterday was the day she had planned to leave. And she had sought them out, particularly Quinn, and had planned to be very firm. But she had found herself saying dubiously, “I had — planned to leave today.”
And Quinn had merely said, “I think you will stay.”
She had known of course that she would. And she had not questioned him. She had not even wondered how long she would stay.
They were odd, the three of them, and being near them had in some unaccountable way increased her perceptivity. Almost as though a deep racial knowledge, buried for ten thousand years, was being brought up into the light again. Sometimes she could taste their thoughts on the fringe of her mind. Not the real meaning, of course, but the emotions behind the thoughts.
Jerry Raymond seemed impatient, as though he waited for some great happening, mistrusting delay. Fran Raymond hated her. She could feel that. And Quinn seemed to be lost in some personal problem of his own, a weighing of factors. For the three of them it seemed to Martha to be a time of suspension.
And she knew that on two nights she had been drugged. She wondered why they had found it necessary to do that and she had a desperate curiosity as to what they had done while she was in drugged sleep. But oddly she could feel no resentment. It was as though the rules which pertained to these three were not the common day-by-day rules of social behavior governing the rest of mankind.
She turned quickly as Quinn came into the room. She smiled. “A day like this makes me feel like something out of Jane Eyre.”
“Yes,” he said but not before she had gained the clear and unmistakable impression that the name meant nothing to him. There were odd gaps in Quinn’s memory. Sometimes, though his speech was colloquial, without shade of accent, she had the curious feeling that English was a language he had learned to speak. And that was silly because she knew that Quinn had been born in Philadelphia.
Something tremendous had happened to Quinn during the year they had been apart. And Martha knew that she had to find out what it was or spend the rest of her life wondering. Whatever had happened it had made a deep and basic-change in him. The Quinn she remembered, though selfish and sensuous and egocentric, had a certain amount of sympathetic imagination, and a touch of warmth.
The new Quinn French had a deep ice-cold ruthlessness about him as though he had been refashioned for use as a weapon.
He stood beside her. “What are the three of you waiting for?” she asked.
He started in surprise. “Waiting?”
“Of course you are. Don’t try to lie to me, Quinn.”
“It’s the weather that makes you think crazy things.”
“I thought this yesterday. And the sun shone all day.”
He smiled at her but his eyes were aloof. “Why, we’re waiting for the end of the world. Hadn’t you heard?”
She said soberly, “Maybe you are. Maybe you are.”