He turned his chair to face the sinking sun and locked his wheels. The silence pressed down all around him, from horizon to distant horizon, as he turned up his collar, squirmed into a more comfortable position and waited for the appearance of alien constellations.
He had all the time in the world in which to think.
Chapter Fifteen
Lorrest tye Thralen, in spite of his many years on Earth, had never quite shaken off his Mollanian fear of heights. He could recall with amusement his earliest decades in Eyrej province, when he too would never have considered running without first donning an exercise mask to protect his face in the event of a fall. In his opinion that was one of the more ludicrous of his people’s foibles, evidence of their obssessive preoccupation with physical beauty as expressed in the Twenty Rubrics of the Lucent Ideal.
He had often told himself that the acrophobia which was universal on Mollan, making buildings of more than one storey extremely rare, was merely an extension of the same attitude, that the principal reason for it was the dread of what the impact with the ground could do to face and form. That being the case, he—who had scrupulously discarded all that was petty and parochial in his upbringing—should have been able to perch on a high ledge with the same equanimity he showed in, say, driving a car. But it had not worked out that way.
A short distance beyond the window of his fifth-floor hotel room were the rusting beams of an adjoining steel-framed building which had never been completed. At times he would stand for long periods by the window, concentrating all his attention on the reality of the beams, bringing their flanges and cleats and welds into intensely sharp focus against the blurry background of the street, but no matter how he tried he was never able to identify himself with the construction workers who had routinely put the steelwork in place. And as for the men who ventured far higher, the erection crews on skyscrapers, their minds and lives were beyond his comprehension.
A common Mollanian rationalisation was that, with only a few decades of life at stake, the Terrans could be much more casual about the risk of death, but Lorrest was inclined to reverse that reasoning. The shorter the term of life the more precious each day had to be, and the physical courage often displayed by Terrans—as compared to the cautious nature of the average Mollanian—was another indication that they had begun to differ generically from the interstellar human stock. Against all the odds, the savage riptide of lunar forces which played havoc with their initial genetic structuring had created something positive in addition to all the predictable malaises. That vital essence was worth preserving, as far as Lorrest was concerned, no matter how great the cost or effort…
He was standing by the window, watching dust motes march and countermarch in a ray of lemon-coloured sunlight, when his telephone sounded at precisely the arranged hour. He allowed it to bleep eight times, part of the 2H identification code, then picked up the instrument and slipped a scrambler disc into place across the mouthpiece.
“Fair seasons, Haran,” he said, speaking in English. “It looks as though Phase Two has gone off all right.”
“Phases One and Two were the easy parts,” Haran tye Felthan replied stolidly. “Warden Vekrynn couldn’t care less about what we did to the space colony, and until recently he hasn’t had any reason to concern himself with Ceres—but it’s all different now, Lorrest. He’s bound to have heard about the disappearance by this time, and he’s bound to have connected it with us, and with any kind of computer survey of the possibilities he’s bound to…”
“You’re bounding faster than a kangaroo,” Lorrest cut in. “Has there been much public reaction in France?”
“Practically none. Up to the present six different organisations have claimed responsibility for flattening the Eiffel Tower, and the average citizen here finds that more interesting than astronomers losing a ball of rock.”
“They’ll learn,” Lorrest said cheerfully. “It’s been quiet here too. A few stargazers-are-scratching-their-heads stories in the magazine programmes…nothing more…but they’ll learn. Everybody’s going to learn.”
“Lorrest!” There was a brief pause, and when Haran spoke again he sounded edgy and depressed. “I didn’t get the scheduled check call from Orotonth this afternoon.”
“It could be a foul-up in the telephones.”
“Could be, but if the Bureau has picked him up he’ll have told them everything he knows.”
“Which isn’t very much.”
“Except that he knows you’re in Baltimore,” Haran said. “Think about it, Lorrest. If Vekrynn has any inkling of what is happening he’ll think nothing of spending a million, a billion, to pull you in before it’s too late. You’ve got to be careful.”
Lorrest snorted his indignation. “When was I ever not careful?”
“Do you mean within the last week? How about your going off on your own and trying to recruit that woman in Annapolis? We’re not a religious organisation looking for converts, man. We’re up to our necks in a very dangerous…”
“Point taken,” Lorrest said quickly, unwilling to discuss his tactical blunder of a few days earlier. “But you wouldn’t be talking like that if I’d got the location of the north-east node out of her.”
“And I wouldn’t be talking to you at all if she’d turned you in.”
“Let’s not hold a post-mortem,” Lorrest said, using a favourite formula for dismissing any consideration of his impulsiveness. The reminder that one of his personal foibles could have endangered the most important plan ever conceived by 2H left him feeling guilty and nervous, and when he had finished the telephone conversation he prowled around the apartment several times, scowling at the floor and trying to define his position with regard to the outside universe.
One of his most serious problems, as he saw it, was that he tended to regard everything as a kind of game. Haran was justified in sounding so serious, so dire, but at the same time—and knowing perfectly well that his colleague was right—Lorrest was unable to repress a flickering of contempt and amusement. He could remember how in his second decade he had heard for the first time about the doctrine of Preservationism and the role of the Bureau of Wardens. The idea of studying the rise and decline of civilisation on a hundred human worlds for the sole purpose of ensuring that Mollanian culture could continue indefinitely had struck him as being both egocentric and craven. On learning that the observation was done in secret, and that there was never any intervention—even when a civilisation was spiralling down into final extinction—because “the data would have been invalidated”, he had unhesitatingly declared the policy to be criminal, callous and inhuman.
He had become an activist and had published articles stating that Mollan, as the probable fountainhead of mankind, had a moral obligation to unite, guide and where necessary aid the younger human cultures—but always there had been the faint sense of solving an abstract problem or taking part in a college debate. The requirement was to work out what was right or wrong and to cast a vote, to support one’s chosen team and wave its colours. Even when he had joined 2H and had been told to infiltrate the Bureau of Wardens, even when he had undergone the drastic cranial and facial surgery and had been sent to Earth, even when he had been arrested and had escaped to become a fugitive in an alien society—he had retained a sneaking suspicion that his life had not really begun. To use a Terran colloquialism, he had always been waiting for the main feature to start. Now people were assuring him that the main feature was well under way, and he could not quite believe them…