The Blood Red Game

'Of course,' Roffrey agreed. He looked at Talfryn. 'He was a friend of yours, too. Want to come?'

Talfryn shook his head. 'I'll stay here and try to find out a bit more about what's going on here.' He took a long, almost theatrical look at Willow and then turned away. 'See you.'

Roffrey said: 'Just as you like.' He went to the medical chest and took out a hypodermic and a bottle of sedative, filled the hypo and pumped the stuff into Mary's arm.

Then he and Willow left his launch and, by means of personal power units, made their way to Asquiol's ship.

The airlock was open, ready for them, and it closed behind them as the entered. The inner lock, however, did not open.

Instead, they saw the light of an internal viewer blink on as they waited and they heard a brooding voice - a polite, faraway voice that seemed to carry peculiar echoes which their ears could not quite catch.

'Asquiol speaking. How may I help you?'

Willow, masked in her space suit, remained silent.

'I'm Adam Roffrey, just in from the Shifter system with three passengers.'

'Yes?' Asquiol's acknowledgement bore no trace of interest.

'One of them is my wife - you know her as Mary the Maze. She helped Renark in the Shifter.' Roffrey paused. 'She sent you to Roth.'

'I am grateful to her, though we didn't meet.'

'I've tried to contact a psychiatrist in the fleet. I haven't succeeded.' Roffrey kept his voice level. 'I don't know where they all are, but my wife's condition is desperate. Can you help?'

'They are all playing the Game. I am sorry. Grateful as I am to your wife the first priority is to the race. We cannot release a psychiatrist.'

Roffrey was shocked. He had expected some response at least. 'Not even to give me advice how to help her?'

'No. You must do what you can for her yourself. Perhaps a medical man will be able to give you certain kinds of help.'

Roffrey turned disgustedly back towards the outer lock. He stopped as Asquiol's voice came again: 'I suggest you contact Lord Mordan as soon as you can.'

The voice cut off.

'Willow spoke. She felt as if she had died and the word was the last she would ever utter.

'Asquiol!'

At length, they returned to Roffrey's ship.

Mary was sleeping peacefully under the sedative but Talfryn had disappeared. They did not bother to wonder where he had gone. They sat by Mary's bunk, both of them depressed, their thoughts turned inward.

'He's changed,' Willow said flatly.

Roffrey grunted.

'He doesn't sound human any longer,' she said. 'There's no way of appealing to him. He doesn't seem to care about the approval of the rest of us. His loyalty to these mysterious creatures he contacted seems greater than his loyalty to his friends - or the rest of mankind, for that matter.'

Roffrey stared down at Mary.

'He doesn't care about anything except this "mission" he has. Everything is being sacrificed and subordinated to that one aim. I don't even know how valid it is. If I did I might be able to argue - or even agree with him!'

'Perhaps Paul could talk to him. I got scared. I meant to tell him who I was. I might be able to later.'

'Save it. I'll see what Mordan wants with me first.'

Roffrey moved over to his control panel and operated the screen.

'Lord Mordan?'

'Mordan here.' The Gee-lord's face appeared on the screen. He seemed disconcerted when he saw Roffrey.

'I was just going to contact you. You and Talfryn have been enlisted as Gamblers - subject to preliminary tests.'

'What the hell, Mordan? I'm not interested. Tell Talfryn about it. I've got a sick wife to think about.'

'Talfryn's already here.' Mordan's face was serious. 'This is important - though it may not look like it to you. There's a war to the death on and we're up against it. I'm directly responsible to Asquiol for enlisting any men I think will help us win. You've given us a great deal of trouble already. I'm empowered to kill anyone liable to disrupt our security. Come over to the Game Ship - and come fast! If you refuse we'll bring you over forcibly. Clear?'

Roffrey switched out without answering.

Defiantly, he waited by Mary's bed. She was beginning to show signs of improving, physically, but how her mind would be when she came out of the drugged sleep he didn't know.

Later, two Geepees demanded entry. Their launch was clamped fast against his. They threatened to hole his ship and enter that way if they had to. He opened the airlocks and let them in.

'What can one extra hand do?' he said. One of them replied: 'Any man who can hold off an enemy attack virtually single-handed is needed in the Game Ship. That's all we know.'

'But I didn't…' Roffrey stopped himself. He was losing his grip.

The Geepee said with false impatience: 'You may not have realised it, Captain Roffrey, but you did something a while ago that was impossible. You held out under the combined attack, mental and physical, of ten enemy ships. Most people couldn't have taken an attack from even one!'

The other Geepee drawled: 'That means something. Look at it this way. We're damn near beaten now. We took a hell of a lambasting during the initial alien attacks. We're the last survivors of the human race and we've got to stay together, work for the common good. That's the only way you'll look after your wife in the long run. Don't you see that?'

Roffrey was still not convinced. He was a stubborn man. There was an atavistic impulse in him which had always kept him away from the herd, and outside the law, relying entirely on his own initiative and wits. But he was also an intelligent man so he nodded slightly and said:

'Very well - I'll speak to Lord Mordan, anyway.' Then he turned to Willow. 'Willow, if Mary shows any sign of getting worse, let me know.'

'Of course, Adam.'

'You'll stay with her - make sure she's all right?'

She looked into his face. 'Naturally. But when she's under a sedative there's something else I've got to do.'

'Yes. I understand.'

He shrugged at the Geepees, who turned and led him through the airlock.

FOURTEEN

The Game Ship was bigger than a large battlewagon, even more functional-looking, a little barer of comforts. Yet it did not seem prepared for battle. There was an atmosphere of hushed silence aboard and their boots clanged loudly along the corridor which led to Lord Mordan's cabin. A sign on the door read: Deputy Game Master, Lord Mordan. Strictly Private. The letters were heavy black on the white door.

The Geepee accompanying Roffrey knocked on the door.

'Enter!'

They went through into a cabin cluttered with instruments.

There were some Roffrey recognised - an encephalograph, an optigraph-projector - machines for measuring the power of the brain, equipment for testing visualising capacity, for measuring I.Q. potential, and so on.

Talfryn was sitting in a comfortable chair on the other side of Mordan's desk. Both men had their hands clenched before them - Talfryn's in his lap, Mordan's stretched out across the empty desk.

'Sit down, Roffrey,' said Lord Mordan. He made no reference to Roffrey's defiance of orders. He seemed perfectly controlled. Perhaps over-controlled, thought Roffrey. For a moment he sympathised - wasn't that his own condition?'

He sat down as the Geepee guard left.

'Okay,' he said curtly. 'Get on with it.'

'I've been explaining to Talfryn how important you both are to this project,' Mordan said crisply. 'Are you prepared to go along with us on the first stage of our tests?'

'Yes.' He was almost responding to the decisive mood.

'Good. We've got to find out exactly what qualities you possessed which made defeat of that alien fleet possible. There is a chance, of course, that you were lucky or that being unprepared for the sense-impression attack on you and having no understanding of its origin, you were psychologically better prepared to meet the attack. We'll know the answers later. Let me recap on recent events first.'